When feminism is about love (or how Virginia Woolf, martial arts and Jesus made me feminist)
In a section of A Room of Oneâ s Own, so famous it is almost a cliche, Virginia Woolf creates a fictional sister for William Shakespeare called Judith. Imagine, Woolf writes, that Judith Shakespeare was just as enamoured with the world as her brother, just as bright and quick and gifted as he was. But unlike William, Judith would not be sent to school. She would be chastised for stopping her chores to read a book, because as a girl, her purpose lay not in her genius, but in her ability to to secure a good marriage. While William would later journey to London to write plays that would endure and delight long after his death, Judith would find herself betrothed to local wool-stapler. Unable to face the prospect of a hateful marriage, Judith would run away to London. Like her brother, she would long to be in the theatre, only to be told she cannot act because she was a woman. She would have nowhere to go, nowhere to learn her craft and hone her talent. Eventually, desperate and pregnant out of wedlock, Judith would kill herself, unable to bear, as Woolf writes, the heat and violence of her poetâs heart caught and tangled in her womanâs body.
Reading Virginia Woolf at seventeen, it struck me that I could so easily have been Judith Shakespeare. I didnât even need to be born into Elizabethan England. I just needed to stay Chinese and be born three, maybe four generations earlier, in the pre-Communist era. Like Judith, my worth would lie solely in being a wife or concubine. My feet would have been bound since childhood and I would have been crippled for life by some stupid notion of beauty. In fact, I didnât even need to go back four generations to imagine the peril I would inherit for being a girl. Chinaâs problem with female infanticide is infamous, thanks to a one child policy that exacerbates a long standing tradition of Chinese sexism. We even have an idiom for it - éç·èœ»ć„ł, literally meaning to give weight to the boys and slight the girls. That I was neither killed nor abandoned at birth, that my parents saw fit to send me to school and that I could dream of writing books were enormous, tremendous privileges.
At seventeen, feminism for me was this: that every girl should be free to read, write, learn and pursue her dreams, so that the tragedy of Judith Shakespeare would be no more.
When I was twenty-two, I decided to attend a krav-tardemet class on a whim. Krav is a martial arts solely devoted to self-defense, the guiding principle being that, no matter how small and weak you are, you can still fight. And as someone who was never the star of PE class, I wasnât expecting much, but after that first class, and the other classes after, it was like a door had slid silently open for me.Â
For the first time, I stopped seeing my body as something that inconveniently got fat. I began to see my body as my ally and my friend. In punching, kicking and breaking out of a chokehold, I learned to delight in my body, learned to love the smooth, intricate flow of muscles as I swung my hips into a true punch. the ability of my heart to beat faster, my lungs to take in oxygen during a particularly hard fight. After years of thinking that self-defense was simply not to walk in a dark alley and to never let my drink out of my sight, I was learning that my body could be a weapon, capable of saving my life. And after years as seeing my body as a piece of meat, I began to understand just exactly what it means to be fearfully and wonderfully made.
And I knew feminism then, not just in my head, but in my arms, my legs, my feet, my bones.
I stopped going to church as a teenager, because I partly felt that I couldnât be really be a feminist and also a Christian. When I slowly started to make my way back to church, the same year I learned to fight, I still could not shake the feeling that the two were incompatible. While I was encouraged to read my Bible and ask questions, I was also told that it was not a womanâs place to preach or lead. To believe otherwise would be to oppose Scripture. I was also told that feminism had perverted our understanding of what Paul meant by submission in Ephesians.
And it scared me. It scared me to think that feminism, through which I so identified myself, was going against Godâs will.
I couldnât stop thinking about the way Jesus treated women. I couldnât stop thinking about the woman from Samaria, how Jesus spoke to her, saw her, and knew her despite the fact that being a Samaritan and having had five husbands, she would have be considered no better than dirt. And yet Jesus, God incarnate, saw fit to speak to her like his equal, saw fit to choose her to be the first person to recognize Him as the Messiah. Â And later, despite the fact that a womanâs testimony held no sway in first century Palestine, Mary Magdalene would proclaim, He is risen!
It has been two years since I returned to church, and I am a bit more confident in my faith, and here is what I would say about feminism and the church, and it is not just about the correct interpretation of a handful of verses written by Paul.
It is ultimately about the fact that years after that first Easter sermon, women are still oppressed. Even today, two thousand years removed from the patriarchy of Biblical time, a young girl was still shot for daring to advocate for her right to learn, women are more likely to be victims of sex trafficking, and rape culture is very much alive and present. The battle for every girl not to wind up like Judith Shakespeare is not yet finished. It may not ever be finished until the new creation comes, but that does not mean we wonât die fighting, and crucially, it is a battle that cannot be fought by women alone.Â
Feminism, at its best, is an endeavour of love. Love that compels us to shout, over and over again, that women are people too, made in the image of God, and we are all in this together. Love that compels us to relinquish our privileges, to listen and to demand justice for the powerless. Love, because He was the one who first loved us.Â
This blog is part of a series that J.R. Goudeau, Danielle Vermeer, and Preston Yancey are hosting, a three-day synchroblog devoted to exploring feminism and its importance. For more information, click here.
2087
kianamaiart
stormborns
areudirty
dededos
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
