Friends,

On the topic of feminism and Beyoncé's personal evolution, read this brilliant piece by Janet Mock in defense of her feminism when she received the MTv Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award in 2014 where the word, "feminist" appeared unapologetically in the background.  Mock refers to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2012 Ted Talk titled, "We should all be feminists," as something that perhaps Beyoncé viewed in her own exploration of it when exploring whether she was a "feminist," a term that for some, is inconsistent with "girly" representations of gender that could structure Beyoncé out of being one.

This brought to mind the words of Chicana feminist poet and friend, Vangie Vigil, who said that during the feminist movement of the early 1970s, she was criticized for wearing makeup. She responded critically to that view by insisting on her Indigenous ancestry as legitimating her choice to apply "war paint" as protection with the act of putting on makeup being a ceremonial act to prepare for yet another day of battle. That has forever stayed with me as I think of my own morning rituals and the importance of "me time" and my own daily and lifelong preparation for the day, together with my ongoing pursuit of the sacred harmony.

The best quote for me from Mock's essay that grapples with Beyoncé's own brand of feminism is the following:

"Among my duties as a feminist will be to protect our freedom to self-identify.  Our duty is not to police feminists, our duty is to use feminism as a tool to check systems that uphold racism and slut shaming and sex worker erasure and anti-trans woman bias and general policing of other people’s choices."

I'll interject here that It was fascinating in Kamala Harris' speech last week, that she never mentioned that when elected on November 5—I do anticipate that she'll win—that she'd be the first female U.S. president. Perhaps this is beyond obvious and is something that everybody knows. 

At least to me, what's cool is that it doesn't feel like the "elephant in the room" that must be expressed quietly in the kitchen or a private living area even if in some American homes, this is a source of strife. Most positively, I see this as a long-awaited and hard-fought cultural shift made possible by decades of activism, feminist knowledge production, and the persistent efforts of those who have challenged the patriarchal status quo. 

Did y'all see the movie, "Barbie," by the way? I highly recommend it. I'm hoping that the word, "patriarchy," is now etched into the American psyche as a major problem of society with notions of femininity and masculinity that impede progress and freedom. Treat yourselves to America Ferrera's iconic Barbie speech that sums up the central points of the movie.

What is also possible is that Kamala Harris has deliberately opted to not make this a campaign focus and in so doing, reshaping feminism in politics. Who cares about her clothes and wardrobe style beyond acknowledging that she is a very attractive woman and candidate for office atop being a lovely human being who speaks of, and manifests, joy? Geez, how refreshing!

As Mock and Adichie note, it's what we do to challenge systems of oppression that matter most, beginning with letting people be who they are. So yes, as Tim Walz says, "Mind your own damn business," but let's also continue to work toward a more just and caring world that respects and honors our differences, beginning in and with our own families and community. 

As we are all increasingly interconnected within the vast web of humanity on this planet called "Earth," we need each other now more than ever. And Mother Earth wants for this healing to be so, as well. A fresh reconciliation that brings redemptive ways of knowing and being in the world is good for the planet. 

And yes, we should all be feminists. Period.

-Angela Valenzuela

My Feminist Awakening: Beyonce’s Political Declaration by Janet Mock

I have a reluctant relationship to labels, especially when I feel forced to clothe myself in them to signify my identity. James Baldwin created this beautiful line about identity that I included in my book which speaks closely to how I feel about labels: “Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self, in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned.”

Trepidation is a solid word to describe my feelings surrounding terms like activist, spokesperson and feminist. I remember bell hooks, one of the most widely read black feminist thinkers, reading an interview I gave to Bitch magazine, in which I boldly state that I don’t personally identify as a feminist. Immediately, she called me for a longer explanation.

Was that a misquote? she asked. No, I said. Why aren’t you a feminist? she pushed. I told her that I felt I wanted to push past labels. Labels were given to me without my consent ever since birth. She asked me why I embraced trans to qualify my womanhood. I told her I believe it’s a political statement for me to declare that nothing is wrong with being a woman who is trans, and I chose trans because it was mine. She then pushed, “To say you’re a feminist is a political statement. So why not feminist?” Simply, I said, I never felt like feminist was mine as I felt that black and trans and writer and woman belonged to me, and as a black trans woman writer I never felt like I was centered by feminism. I never felt it was created for or by me.

“Well, I say it’s for you. It’s yours so claim it!” bell said before ending the call.

That conversation served as a catalyst for my own excavation as to why I was reluctant to embrace the term. And as every pop culture-soaked headline has claimed recently I am not alone in my reluctance. Many women of my generation are on similar journeys with the term feminist, from Lady Gaga to Shailene Woodley and Taylor Swift (who actually has since experienced her own feminist awakening, thanks to pal Lena Dunham). And even my own teen idol Beyonce Knowles had qualms about the label when British Vogue asked her if she was a feminist in spring 2013.

“I don’t know,” Beyonce said. “That word can be very extreme. But I guess I am a modern-day feminist. I do believe in equality. I do believe in equality and that we have a ways to go and it’s something that’s pushed aside and something that we have been conditioned to accept. But I’m happily married. I love my husband.”

Often, I wonder if it was the sound-biting of that interview (specifically her use of “very extreme” and the myth that marriage is something feminists rally against) that led Beyonce to research the term feminist, and I wonder if her research led her to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‘s TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists” and if Adichie’s reciting of the dictionary’s definition of feminist (a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes) enabled the singer to say, yes, I can be a happily-married, bootylicious mama who believes in equality, yearns to be successful and sexy and calls herself a feminist — and this is flawless and I am going to sample Adichie’s words in my new song.

Since her self-titled album was released in December, I have seen the totality of that album as Beyonce’s feminist awakening, in which she boldly defines herself for herself — and for us all — a task which Audre Lorde reminds us is vital.

Last Sunday, I watched the MTV Video Music Awards solely because Beyonce was performing and would receive the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award (MTVs version of a lifetime achievement award). I was one of the fans live-tweeting, re-centering Beyonce with the hashtag #BeyMAs. But what I did not expect was for Beyonce to center herself, literally, as a feminist during her 16-minute performance. In a culture in which young women seem more and more apprehensive about the image, meaning and importance of feminism, Beyonce provided a mainstream audience and millennials everywhere with a clear definition of feminist, provided by Adichie whose words flashed behind an assembly line of women before FEMINIST overtook the background as Beyonce took her foreground.

To say I was emboldened by this image would be an understatement. It became the crescendo in my own feminist soundtrack, sparked by my conversation with bell months earlier. As a fan who grew up in front of the television with pop stars, VJs, and sitcom characters serving as my playmates, Beyonce was my No. 1 friend-in-my-head. On that VMAs Sunday, I watched Beyonce journey from Destiny’s Child to solo star, from Single Lady to wife and mother, from Independent Woman to feminist cultural icon. I cherished my relationship with Beyonce so much that I dedicated Chapter 14 of Redefining Realness to relay what Destiny’s Child and Beyonce meant to my coming-of-age and search for identity as a teenager.

Pop culture may be dismissed as lowbrow, but to me it is the culture that matters most. Popular culture helped raise me.

Beyonce Knowles and bell hooks and Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde carried me towards claiming feminist as my own, as one garment in which I drape my body to navigate this world. Feminist speaks to me because those women and their work have always spoken to me, and these are women who choose to wear this label and claim it as theirs.

But bell and Barbara and Audre have feminist cred, their work and commitment to feminism stands on solid ground, but Beyonce’s feminist awakening and stance has been widely questioned. Partly, it’s because she appears to be at the beginning of her journey. Partly it’s because her intentions are framed as a marketing ploy. Largely, it’s because her work is not viewed as “serious” work. Pop culture is never framed as a matter that matters. She’s often dismissed because her work exists outside the bounds of academia, outside the gravitas of letters, and solidly based in entertainment, media and music. I am in my 30s and was emboldened by Beyonce’s feminist stance on that stage, and can’t help but believe that that image will be equally as powerful to young people who witness that moment, whose first engagement with feminism will be that moment. Maybe, just maybe, Beyonce will serve as the bridge between pop culture and feminists like bell and Barbara and Audre, maybe some young woman bobbing her head to “Blow” or “Partition” or “Flawless” will do so while reading Ain’t I A Woman? or Homegirls or Sister Outsider.

So I applaud Beyonce and her feminist stance, a declaration of her own independence as a leotard-wearing, butt cheek-baring, Blue Ivy-toting, equal pay-advocating, Independent Woman-saluting, imperfect flawless feminist. And I thank her and our feminist foremothers for fortifying my own declaration as a feminist. Among my duties as a feminist will be to protect our freedom to self-identify. I believe we waste much of our efforts policing one another — one of the many workings of patriarchy is to busy us with policing each other’s choices rather than protecting them. Our duty is not to police feminists, our duty is to use feminism as a tool to check systems that uphold racism and slut shaming and sex worker erasure and anti-trans woman bias and general policing of other people’s choices.

Because of Beyonce, because of Audre, because of bell, because of Barbara and their feminist stances I no longer feel as if feminism is not for me. I will wear my feminism proudly as a crop top-wearing, curly hair-teasing, pop culture-obsessed, sex worker-embracing, LGBTQ-championing black feminist woman writer.

ps: I am not here for folks saying that a feminist owning her sexuality and adorning her body in clothes she chooses, makes her less of a feminist. The clip below is from AM Tonight, but I point you to Beyonce’s own defense: “[Being empowered] is exactly why I can [wear those outfits]!

Fight Like A Girl: How Women's Activism Shapes History

Most of the narratives about the women’s liberation movement focus on the Northeast, the Midwest or the West Coast, not the South and certainly not Austin, Texas. This omission inspired Laurie Green, an associate professor of history at The University of Texas at Austin, to create a women’s activism memoir project. Green’s students interviewed women’s liberation activists who had either attended UT or lived in Austin in the ’60s and ’70s, including Martha Cotera, Alice Embree and Barbara Hines. To ensure these women’s stories wouldn’t vanish from history as many often do, Green partnered with the university’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History to archive the transcripts and recorded interviews between the students and activists in a permanent collection that will be accessible for others to study for years to come. Read the full story at Life & Letters online: https://bit.ly/2uy35gQ

A feminist primer: How Native American women paved the way for women's rights in the U.S.

Great story and positive portrayal of Haudenosaunee women of the five nations of the Iroquois confederacy: the Oneida, Mohawk,  Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca.   

This piece reminds us that these women not only enjoyed status in Native American communities in pre-contact (pre-Columbus) America, but that they influenced the women's movement.  We need many more stories like these.

Angela Valenzuela
c/s

A feminist primer: How Native American women paved the way for women's rights in the U.S.

By Kelly Macias   

Friday Nov 24, 2017 · 11:31 AM CST

Native American women and their way of life in upstate New York provided inspiration to early founders of the suffrage movement.

Daily Kos

There have been a handful of movies made in recent years about the women’s suffrage movement in both the United States and Britain. These have provoked many discussions about the role of race and white supremacy in the movement. White women were the face of the movement, and this in itself is complex. Many white women suffragettes were supporters of the abolition of slavery and at the same time were angered when black men, in theory, received the right to vote before them. A number of them remained unconcerned with voting rights for women of color and actively worked in partnership with white supremacists. So needless to say, different social identities were interwoven in the movement and played an important function.

Even though we don’t often know their names, black women and other women of color did indeed contribute to the fight for women to receive the right to vote. And it looks like in the U.S., white women were inspired to demand equality because of the role Native American women played in their respective cultures.

Two of the earliest founders of the U.S. women’s movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, saw the egalitarian Native model first-hand while growing up in New York, the land base of the Haudenosaunee—a label denoting the five nations of the Iroquois confederacy: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—later joined by the Tuscarora. Native women were the agriculturalists of their tribes, and from North to South America they collectively raised corn, beans, and squash. Their responsibility for the survival of the Nation, through the creation of life and the food that sustained life, gave women a position of equality in their society that white women could only dream of.

According to Sally Roesch Wagner, Ph.D., the suffragists were inspired by what they observed and learned about Haudenosaunee women, both politically and socially. While white American women at the time were relegated to taking charge at home, with final decisions always being made by their husbands, their Native American counterparts were not only fully in charge in their families but those families honored matrilineal heritage—which meant that children belonged to their mothers, fully and completely.

Issues of paternal rights were totally foreign to the Native world. Haudenosaunee children were (and are) born into their mother’s clan and follow their mother’s line. When Gage tried to explain the concept of an “illegitimate child” to a Haudenosaunee friend, the woman puzzled, “how can any child not be legitimate? You always know who your mother is.”

The living arrangements were traditionally based on this matrilineal system. A husband came to live with his wife, her parents, her sisters and their husbands and children in their matrilineal family longhouse. Unmarried brothers lived there, too, until they married and moved to their wives’ longhouses. If any of the mothers died or the couple split up, the children continued to live in the mother’s longhouse. “The children also accompanied the mother, whose right to them was recognized as supreme,” Gage wrote [in Woman, Church and State], “if for any cause the Iroquois husband and wife separated.” 

But that’s not all. Haudenosaunee women also played a role in the political goings on in their respective nations. From discussions on important issues to selecting a chief, women were active contributors to decisions that impacted the well-being of their communities.

“In the councils of the Iroquois every adult male or female had a voice upon all questions brought before it,” Stanton reported in The National Bulletin in 1891. “The American aborigines were essentially democratic in their government … The women were the great power among the clan.” Stanton went on to describe how clan mothers had the responsibility for nominating a chief, and could remove that chief if he did not make good decisions. “They did not hesitate, when occasion required,” Stanton recalled, “‘to knock off the horns,’ as it was technically called, from the head of a chief and send him back to the ranks of the warriors.”

Apparently, not much has changed among these tribes despite the centuries that have passed. Women still play a critical role in their communities, including having the distinction of nominating and removing a chief if necessary. And in recent years, many women have become chiefs themselves. They have also played a vital part in maintaining their culture, history, and heritage and protecting their right to sovereignty—something the United States government has consistently encroached on for hundreds of years. One fascinating thing that Wagner notes is that feminism and women’s rights is a concept that remains distant to the experience of Haudenosaunee women. She writes, “To the Haudenosaunee, [women’s equality] is simply their way of life. Their egalitarian relationships and their political authority are a reality that—for many non-Native women—is still something to strive for.”

Social movements must start with a vision of an alternative future where people are no longer oppressed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage saw this future for white women because of the Haudenosaunee women they met. Of course, this led to several different waves of feminism that have continued to create a path forward in society which seeks to ensure that all people are respected and valued, regardless of gender identity. So, the next time you think about feminism and its history, remember to include the contributions of the women of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and the Tuscarora nations. And remember to honor and thank them for the role they played. Without their way of life and the inspiration they provided, who knows what a feminist movement in this country would have looked like. 

Outrage greets Mexican feminism panel with 11 participants – all of them male

I was in Mexico recently.  I was reminded through conversation with colleagues there how the status of women in Mexico remains low, relative to men.  Coming across this piece in The Guardian this morning reminded me of those conversations. 

-Angela

Outrage greets Mexican feminism panel with 11 participants – all of them male

• Lopsided lineup reignites debate about representation of women in Mexico
• ‘What next? A conference on racism with only white people?’

Duncan Tucker in Guadalajara

 

Tuesday 3 October 2017 14.22 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 3 October 2017 15.38 EDT

 

When a pink flyer promoting a feminism conference at Mexico’s biggest university was posted on social media this week, it did not take long before people noticed something was amiss.
The lineup featured two panels with 11 participants – and all of them were male. It was, as one woman tweeted, the graphic description of “mansplaining”.

The lopsided lineup provoked outrage on Twitter, reigniting debate about the representation of women in Mexican society and the role of men in feminist movements in a deeply machista country where seven women are murdered every day.

“What’s next? A conference on racism with only white people?” asked another Twitter user.
Organised by the humanities department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Unam), the 11 October conference appears to be intended as a homage to the feminist scholar Marta Lamas, who will host the event and debate the 11 men. The university did not immediately respond to queries about the event.

Many feminists saw the format as an insult or an act of provocation.

“Feminism for dummies: we don’t have a single representative, there are many of us and we’re very diverse. Invite many women to your debates,” tweeted the feminist blogger Ana González.
The under-representation of women in Mexican society spurred a group of feminists to found Con Nosotras, an initiative that encourages public speakers to boycott all-male forums.

 

“It’s good that this has created debate about the issue,” said co-founder Susana Ochoa. “I think their intention was good but it wasn’t communicated appropriately. ”

Ochoa said the incident could prompt Mexicans to consider the importance of including women in public debate. “Women have not been represented in this country for a long time,” she said.

Regina Tamés, the director of GIRE, a reproductive rights organisation, defended the event, saying on Twitter: “It’s an event which male allies and friends are going to honour Marta. She has spent 45 years speaking with women.”

For many, the incident illustrated a frequent problem related to male involvement. “Feminists don’t hate men,” González said. “We just want them to stop being protagonists everywhere.”