Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics Read Online Free PDF

dissertation, feminist thinking allowed me to choose to write about a black woman writer who was not widely read at the time, Toni Morrison. Very little serious literary scholarship had been done on works by black women writers prior to feminist movement. When Alice Walker acquired fame, she participated in the recovery of the work of writer Zora Neale Hurston, who shortly became the most canonized black woman writer in American literature. Feminist movement created a revolution when it demanded respect for women’s academic work, recognition of that work past and present, and an end to gender biases in curriculum and pedagogy.
    The institutionalization of women’s studies helped spread the word about feminism. It offered a legitimate site for conversion by providing a sustained body of open minds. Students who attended women’s studies classes were there to learn. They wanted to know more about feminist thinking. And it was in those classes that many of us awakened politically. I had come to feminist thinking by challenging male domination in our patriarchal household. But simply being the victim of an exploitative or oppressive system and even resisting it does not mean we understand why it’s in place or how to change it. My conversion to feminist politics had occurred long before I entered college, but the feminist classroom was the place where I learned feminist thinking and feminist theory. And it was in that space that I received the encouragement to think critically and write about black female experience.
    Throughout the ‘70s the production of feminist thinking and theory was collaborative work in that women were constantly in dialogue about ideas, testing and reshaping our paradigms. Indeed, when black women and other women of color raised the issue of racial biases as a factor shaping feminist thought there was an initial resistance to the notion that much of what privileged class women had identified as true to female experience might be flawed, but over time feminist theory changed. Even though many white women thinkers were able to acknowledge their biases without doing the work of rethinking, this was still an important shift. By the late ‘80s most feminist scholarship reflected an awareness of race and class differences. Women scholars who were truly committed to feminist movement and feminist solidarity were eager to produce theory that would address the realities of most women.
    While academic legitimation was crucial to the advancement of feminist thought, it created a new set of difficulties. Suddenly the feminist thinking that had emerged directly from theory and practice received less attention than theory that was meta-linguistic, creating exclusive jargon; it was written solely for an academic audience. It was as if a large body of feminist thinkers banded together to form an elite group writing theory that could be understood only by an “in” crowd.
    Women and men outside the academic domain were no longer considered an important audience. Feminist thinking and theory were no longer tied to feminist movement. Academic politics and careerism overshadowed feminist politics. Feminist theory began to be housed in an academic ghetto with little connection to a world outside. Work was and is produced in the academy that is oftentimes visionary, but these insights rarely reach many people. As a consequence the academization of feminist thought in this manner undermines feminist movement via depoliticization. Deradicalized, it is like every other academic discipline with the only difference being the focus on gender.
    Literature that helps inform masses of people, that helps individuals understand feminist thinking and feminist politics, needs to be written in a range of styles and formats. We need work that is especially geared towards youth culture. No one produces this work in academic settings. Without abandoning women’s studies programs which are already at risk at colleges and universities