Esther is a new friend of mine, and I am so excited to have her on the blog today! You can find her blogging at www.estheremery.com and tweeting @EstherEmery.
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My feminism has been through the weeds. I dragged it through my conservative phase, discussing female Biblical heroines with complementarians and trying to dive into the sisterhood.
And then I dragged it through a crash course on intersectionality.
It had become impossible for me to ignore the ways in which white feminism as an entity (through the actions of white women) has been violent towards people of color, especially women of color and queer or trans people of color. Hashtags like #SolidarityisforWhiteWomen and #YesAllWhiteWomen were hurtful but also eye opening. I stopped writing about feminism for a while. I tried writing about allyship, and even the troubles with allyship, but that didn’t go very well either.
I’m not going to tell you how and when this happens. Because that’s a really good way to get into fights. I’ll just tell you that when you are ready to see it, you will see it.
And when you see it a little – this is my experience – that’s the beginning to seeing it a lot. I was rocked right off my feminism. I lost my grounding. I felt like maybe I should just stop, because maybe I’m doing more harm than good.
There is a lie to this, of course, but there is also a truth. There is both a lie and a truth in the voice that says, “You can’t work on justice issues, because you don’t have enough of the characteristics of the oppressed.”
The lie is this idea anyone is unable to work on justice. Anytime. Ever. I can always do something. The truth is that I can’t assume that the interests of justice line up with my own interests. Anytime. Ever. I can always be the oppressor as well as the oppressed.
The lie wants you to lie down, be quiet, go away, shut up. The truth wants you to be transformed. The lie wants you to settle for the way things are; change nothing. The truth wants you to simultaneously seek change within yourself and within all the structures you inhabit.
It is necessary that I locate myself in systems of oppression, as accurately as possible. But this is not because the work of liberation is owned by some certain band on the pyramid. This is because exposing these would-be invisible structures by which humans are tracked differently from one another is the knowledge that unlocks our possibilities. When you can see the structures that divide, and the powers that oppress, then you know what the hell it is you’re trying to change.
From where I am located – as a white, Christian activist – I have to do the really quite unpleasant work of interrogating the systems which I inhabit.
This is unpleasant because people’s feelings are everywhere. This is unpleasant because if I communicate my concerns about/to someone who is particularly not interested in hearing them, I could be identified as “angry,” or “a troublemaker” or just silently shut out.
But I’ve been a feminist since I was fifteen. And I’m thirty-five. So that’s familiar.
Choosing/learning to speak from a more intersectional perspective is all the things that feminism has always been for me. Destabilizing. Invigorating. Humbling. It’s the end of a sentence I started with my own angry/beautiful cry twenty years ago.
This journey has never been exactly safe. But it has made space for breathing. It has never really been clear. But it has been a dialogue with truth. I guess the only difference is that in the teenage version I felt only one step away from the promise, while now I know it is a long, and dusty road.
I can’t be unseated from the truth of my own story, even as I open and yield to the revelation of experiences that are not my own. I have a source. I have a real life context. I have a place where I live. And right here, in that place, I can be taught to listen better to the truth of the whole world.
So I guess I’m still a feminist after all.
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Esther Emery used to direct stage plays in Southern California. But that was a long time ago. Now she is pretty much a runaway, living off grid in a yurt and tending to three acres in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. She writes about faith and rebellion and trying to live a totally free life at www.estheremery.com. Connect with her on Twitter @EstherEmery.
Hannah Schaefer 