Feminism never succeeded in securing women as a collective subject of history, as the Marxist intellectual tradition once hoped to do with the working class. On the contrary, contemporary feminism is arguably defined by its refusal of woman as a political category, on the grounds that this category has historically functioned as a cruel ruse for white supremacy, the gender binary, the economic interests of the American ruling class, and possibly patriarchy itself. This has put feminism in the unenviable position of being politically obligated to defend its own impossibility. In order to be for women, feminists must refrain from making any positive claims about women. The result is a kind of negative theology, dedicated to striking down the graven images of a god whose stated preference for remaining invisible has left the business of actually worshipping her somewhat up in the air. Perhaps the simplest solution to this paradox has been to quietly shift the meaning of the word feminism. In popular culture and especially online, feminism has become the go-to signifier for what the legal scholar Janet Halley calls convergentism: the belief that justice projects with different constituencies have a moral duty to converge, like lines stretching toward a vanishing point. Once the name of a single plank in a hypothetical program of universal justice, feminism now refers, increasingly, to the whole platform — hence the so-called Unity Principles put forward on the Women’s March website, which include calls for migrant rights, a living wage, and clean air as well as the familiar demands for reproductive freedom and an end to sexual violence. “It ain’t feminism if it ain’t intersectional,” tweeted Ariana Grande in March 2019, echoing a viral 2011 blog post by the writer Flavia Dzodan. Dzodan’s original phrasing was “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit”; popular variations now include the formula “If your feminism doesn’t include x, then it’s not feminism,” where x might be trans women, women of color, fat women, sex workers, nonbinary people, or any number of other groups. The idea is not that feminists, being desirous of justice, should also commit to antiracism, anti-imperialism, and all the rest; it’s that feminism by definition consists in the making of extrafeminist commitments, such that without them, it would not be feminism at all. This is weird. It is as if, having guiltily assimilated the impossibility of speaking on behalf of all women, feminism has resigned itself to the modest virtues of playing hostess for other, frankly more persuasive political discourses — most of whose constituencies are composed of women, of course, but never simply as women. In this arrangement, feminism describes not a concrete political project but the moral imperative to do politics in the first place. In other words, a feminist is a good person. If that sounds clichéd, that’s kind of the point. The conviction that it is both possible and desirable to be a feminist, in an ontologically thick way, has no parallel in any other left political discourse, and a wide array of digital media has arisen to guide and instruct initiates: just as Better Homes & Gardens once taught its readership how to cook and decorate like good women, so do Teen Vogue and The Cut offer tips on how to be a good feminist while getting dressed in the morning. The irony is that feminism, having some fifty years ago introduced the radical idea that the personal was political, has today ended up with the laborious task of making politics feel personal. Hence the possessive pronoun — my feminism, your feminism. It’s easy, and foolish, to dismiss this as neoliberalism or corporate co-optation. Digital slogans like Dzodan’s, regardless of their original intention, find popularity not because they are true (even when they are), but because their repetition across social media helps people achieve feelings of belonging, purpose, and importance that allow them to bridge the yawning gap between their individual everyday lives and the grand narrative of political universality. This is, as it were, the women’s work of the political imagination; it is thankless, sentimental, and impossible to do without. I suppose what I’m saying is not that the desire for a universal is politically defensible but, more simply, that the desire for a universal is synonymous with having a politics at all. In a punishing twist, feminism has become both the preferred name for this desire and the very politics which must not claim it. Indeed, the minimal definition of a feminist might be a person who, affirming that women will never constitute a political class, privately hopes it might happen anyway. Can you really blame the Women’s March for wanting a symbol for universal womanhood, if symbols are all we ever have? In anticipation of the march, the Twitter account for the Washington Post’s free daily newspaper, the Express, tweeted an illustration of a crowd in the shape of a circle with an arrow on one side. This was the wrong gender symbol — an eminently avoidable gaffe whose ridiculousness multiplied in proportion to the number of editors over whose desks one imagines it must have passed. But the error was easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it. This may have been thanks to the illustration’s color, a radiant peach pink, or to the fact that it wasn’t even a conventional Mars symbol, the arrow boasting a full triangle reminiscent of the Clinton campaign’s rightward barb. But the mistake may have also owed its endurance to an unconscious editorial assumption that desperation for a political symbol — any symbol — was a condition so persuasively female as to render the specifics of that symbol irrelevant.
from Andrea Long Chu, “The Pink” n+1 (x)
