If I have not declared it before...I am a feminist. Gasp! Oh No! That dirty word... This is the reaction most people have to the term. Some of the disgust may not be unwarranted, because, in my mind there is a misconception of what feminism is today. In our post-post modern times (yes folks, sadly we left postmodernity some time ago), feminism has dropped it's first, second, and third wave meanings. This does not mean that hose meanings still do not pervade the term. They certainly do. However, the kind of feminism that I am proposing is not only about women and social, economic, political, relational, etc. quality, but about equality for all groups of people who are marginalized, stigmatized, weeded out by social discourses that fear "the other," that constantly seek to pick out that "which does not belong." Feminism, today, I would argue, is not about women hating men for all the evils of the world (although there are some warranted reasons for that hate at times...), it is about striving for a world that is not filled with judgment, hatred, poverty, pain, suffering, violence, despair. It is about striving for a world where people are free to be who they are without fear of being hurt, raped, mutilated, ostracized, exiled, etc. Therefore, anyone who respects the humanity in each person is a feminist to me.
Why am I ranting? I suppose I must come off as too hopeful. I am not hopeful that I will live to see the day when the world will possibly look like this. However, that does not mean that I can't fight for it while I'm alive. I'm sure women (White and African-American) during the suffrage movement were told many times that their dreams were impossible. If someone had stopped fighting then, I might not have the privilege to vote for our shitty presidents today. The point is I feel very passionately about helping those that cannot help themselves--not because they are not strong enough--but because we live in a society, we live in a world, that sometimes works incredibly hard against them.
Okay, so the point of this post. Finally! I am currently working on a paper (that I can hopefully submit somewhere) about the relationship between gender, race, violence, and the nation with a specific focus on the "borderlands" (the U.S./Mexico border), and even more specifically about the situation in Juarez, Mexico. In short, over the past 13 years more than 400 women have gone missing, and have been found dead, or are presumed to be dead, within and outside the city of Juarez (which is near El, Paso TX). The Mexican government has done very little to further the investigation over the past 13 years, and the majority of the murders remain unsolved. The majority of the women are young factory workers, who work in the maquiladoras (see: globalization) and who are, for the most part, kidnapped as they go to or leave work. Most of them are then raped, mutilated, and dumped in the desert or the streets of Juarez. This situation is clear example of how a cultural understanding of women within a nation can be tied to violence and the body. In a culture, where women are to remain silent, remain pious, are kept in the background--then violence is easily justified (theoretically, not morally). Women's body's, in this case, become objects subjected to physical manifestations of machismo and physical signs of a disregard for human rights.
If you want some more information on this situation, you can start here:
