J: What did you think you were going to be when you grew up?
S: When I was really little, I thought I would be a professional Olympic gymnast. Then I thought I was going to be an opera singer. Then I thought I needed something more practical, so I was going to be a choir director. I was in that mode when the filmmakers showed up. The film came out in my second semester of college.
J: And how would you describe your career now?
S: I’m an itinerant feminist organizer.
J: What is an organizer to you?
S: An organizer is someone who puts in motion whatever the social action is that a community needs to effect change—whether it’s petitions or getting people to a picket line.
J: And just what is a feminist?
S: Good question, Jen! I think the dictionary definition works, which is anyone who believes in the full economic, political, social, and cultural equality of men and women. I would add that a feminist also works toward that belief. I don’t think you can just passively believe and be a feminist—you have to add action for it to have meaning.
J: Do you know people who self-identify as feminist but don’t know how to actualize it?
S: I do, but I think not knowing how and being complacent are two different things and have to be addressed separately. For people who don’t know how, plenty of blogs provide baby steps for becoming an activist. For those who are complacent, I think that requires a personal transformation, discovering how their lives are impacted because of oppression and getting them to see their own lives as important enough for them to take action.
J: You were born August 19, 1986, but I remember your saying that you thought you were Second Wave. Can you say more about that?
S: I used to say that. A lot.
J: Was it because you were living with a Second Waver?
S: No, but Gloria had experiences that mirrored mine. She found feminism and felt like she saved herself—it was something completely new to her. I felt that way. I had never heard the word “feminism” growing up—not in a bad way, not in a good way; it just didn’t exist. So when I discovered it, it validated my humanity and experiences and I understood it as the “world split open,” which is the Second Wave phrase.
J: Right. It was Muriel Rukeyser, the poet, who wrote “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” It’s one of those great feminist mottos, like “the personal is political” or “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
S: Now I identify as Fourth Wave, which I’m spelling a weird way in a book I’m working on—“F-o-r-t-h.” I feel like we should put the motion back in the movement. You and Amy wrote in Manifesta that anyone born in the late ’60s or early ’70s grew up with “feminism in the water,” and I think that is very true for your generation. The culture was still being directly impacted by the huge feminist changes of the ’70s and even the early’80s. By contrast, my generation has two very different qualities: We are “backlash babies”—our moms thought if they didn’t have it all, it was their own fault—and we are post-9/11. Have you read Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream? I think a lot of our cultural signifiers, our media, what we have grown up with, are characterized by the regression of gender roles after 9/11. It’s similar, but it’s more of a discovery of feminism for my generation, rather than an inheritance. That impacts how one approaches both theory and action.
J: Then can you reconcile for me the fact that transgenderism is way ahead of where it was when I was growing up and contextualize that liberation from gender roles within your argument about regression?
S: The Third Wave has done everyone a wonderful service, especially in women’s studies classes, by advancing theory about what gender means—unpacking that. Third Wave insists that activists approach everything with an intersectional lens. Intersectionality is our inheritance—perhaps more than feminism. When my generation begins to understand feminism, we understand it with the Third Wave interpretation that it must be intersectional. That is a given. I don’t think feminism is necessarily a given—we have to discover it.
J: What does “intersectional” mean to you?
S: Each person has multiple identities, privileges, and oppressions, and they impact every part of one’s existence; therefore, no activism or analysis can occur without taking into account those identities, privileges, and experiences. We still have to work on it—it’s not automatic—but very few people come into feminism now believing that it is only about biological gender. They understand that it must have a racial analysis, a class analysis, discussions about what gender means, queerness . . . all of those things. It’s not about analyzing men versus women or just men and women.
J: So, you’re saying that the Fourth Wave inherited complicated ideas about gender from the Third, as well as the idea that feminism must consider identities that intersect with and impact a person’s gender. What are the contours of the Fourth Wave?
S: First of all, we begin our activism online. Blogs are our consciousness-raising groups. There are a lot of Second and Third Wave feminists who say, “Well, they just blog and blog and they don’t do anything else.” In fact, blogs serve the purpose of helping us figure out our ideology, have disagreements with each other, and figure out what actions might work best without having to all be in the same place. They have equalized feminism, because you don’t have to have the money to be in a women’s studies class or be able-bodied enough to attend a consciousness-raising group every week or to stand on a picket line. I think one of the main contours of the Fourth Wave is that our activism is inseparable from technology.
J: Kim France once wrote that the Second Wave’s consciousness raising came in the form of big books such as The Feminine Mystique and Sexual Politics, but that the Third Wave’s radical texts were songs by women like Liz Phair, L7, Queen Latifah, and Kathleen Hanna. The Fourth Wave’s radical texts are Feministing and Racialicious?
S: Yes. And we also do gender justice work through different venues than the traditional ones. My generation does work on reproductive rights, equal pay, and ending legal discrimination, but we also understand that gender justice lies in economic justice and justice for immigrants and queer people. My generation is saying that we as women have made ourselves a political interest group; politicians have started to feel like if they throw us a bone occasionally—like they don’t ban abortion, or they provide a little money for the Violence Against Women Act—then they have done their part for women. My generation says, “Maybe we can be the more-than-half-the-population political force that we should be.” We can ask, “How is this affecting women?” in every single room where politicians are making decisions.
J: It sounds like you are reasonably hopeful about your generation and feminism.
S: Are you finding people who aren’t?
J: Well, I gravitate toward people who can see feminism in all of its vestiges, but I certainly know people who don’t believe a Third Wave exists, much less a Fourth. That is, who don’t believe that the younger generations have done much to progress or change feminism, just that we have lived amid its gains and taken them for granted. To people who say that there hasn’t been any sort of contribution that is significant enough to be its own wave, what do you say?
S: To me, the Third Wave’s significant contribution is the complicated analysis of feminism and gender. I think the Fourth Wave is still figuring out its contribution.
J: I think the Third Wave’s major contribution is living the feminism imagined and put in place by an earlier generation. We manifested feminist theory.
S: The Third Wave was also instrumental in saying that feminism is not about women collectively. Although the movement aims to get what is best for most women most of the time, individual women’s experiences matter. It broke down how individual women were living feminist lives. It wasn’t a big mass of raging estrogen—
J:—all marching on Washington around that single issue we all agree is most vital!
> S: Right. Third Wave pointed out that we are individual women with individual experiences. You said you didn’t think your generation had a radicalizing moment. Do you think that the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings and the porn wars were that for the Third Wave?
J: There was a cluster of atrocities in the late ’80s and early ’90s, covered a lot in the media, to which the women who went on to become Third Wave spokeswomen and Riot Grrrls were certainly reacting—with rage. But I feel like it was more about finding one another—taking gender studies classes or finding out that there were girls who felt like you and they were creating zines and making music and creating their own venues to express themselves. Those were radical experiences. You say 9/11 and the Internet.
S: Yes, 9/11 and the Internet—and lately I have begun to think that Sarah Palin is going to be big for my generation.
J: Well, she is already big to me, and I’m forty. I’m experiencing her as a peer, and her very existence has had a big impact on my thinking about feminism. She is embodying some stated goals of traditional feminism—having more women in office, for instance, or having women take the reins of power.
S: Yes, but it was Bella Abzug who said something like, “Women have the right to start wars and be destructive and make bad policy decisions; I support that right to my death, but I don’t have to vote for them.”
J: Other than that she often sounds not bright, not unlike George W. Bush, what are Palin’s anti-equality crimes? Part of what makes her so riveting, I think, is that she is manifesting equality in some ways. Her husband is more stay-at-home than she is; she has a career and a pack of kids and a grandkid. . . .
S: She represents this media ideal of feminism—that isn’t really feminist—of being Wonder Woman, without ever discussing the mechanics behind it, like the nannies. You can tell we are not even halfway there, because that image really resonates with women. A lot of women believe that the apex of success as a woman is to be able to “have it all.” I think we have learned that women can’t have it all, usually because they have to do it all and they don’t have the support systems. If Sarah Palin were having it all and talking about the support systems she benefits from and figuring out ways to make sure that other women had those same supports, it would be valid.
J: So the antifeminist part of her—in addition to some of her stated political beliefs—is that she is allowing women to think that they can do what she does. That it just takes gumption. But, in fact, she has huge networks of paid support that she doesn’t acknowledge. In effect, is she lying to women about how hard it is?
S: That is part of her antifeminist appeal. My generation has to work to undo the myths of the backlash, which said women had equality. Her co-option of Second Wave feminist ideology and language—completely perverting it—means that my generation must define what feminism is. It can’t just be “everyone can be a feminist if you are female,” as Palin says. We need a strict definition and ideology in order to go forward and to make change. Palin may incite us to define feminism faster than we otherwise might have.
—Interviewed on December 15, 2010
MY ILLEGITIMATE FAMILY
I got pregnant in early 2004, at the age of thirty-three. It was an accident, but the moment I saw that positive EPT, like that, I knew I’d have the baby. It felt right: exciting, grounding, momentous. The next day I told my best friend. “Wow,” she said and then asked, “What did Gordon say?”
“I haven’t told him yet,” I replied. Gordon was my ex-boyfriend and the least compatible person I had ever met, much less dated. I’m an extroverted neat freak who counts Gloria Steinem as a role model; he’s a misanthropic rock musician (and schoolteacher) with the social skills of Larry David and the hobbies of Homer Simpson. Our relationship reminded me of a Sylvia cartoon from the 1970s in which a feminist fairy tries to talk some sense into two love-struck opposites. “He’s a member of the NRA!” the fairy yells. “And you have a bumper sticker that reads, I BRAKE FOR HOBBITS!” Equally mismatched, Gordon and I spent a tumultuous year fighting and making up and annoying our loved ones with our drama, before we finally broke up.
While I had initiated the split in the midst of a flurry of actions designed to get my life in order, I found I couldn’t quite make myself move on with anyone else. As the positive pregnancy test illustrated, a part of me was still involved with Gordon—the part that was enthralled by our chemistry, by his rakish handsomeness, by the effortless intimacy we felt, well, some of the time. That part of me was still sleeping with him, following once-a-week secret dates that camouflaged the daily conflicts that had led me to leave him.
I told him I was pregnant over the phone. And when he asked (with touching tenderness, I thought) if I was okay and whether I knew what I wanted to do, I said that I was going to have the baby. After all, I felt I could raise a child on my own, if it came to that. I met him hours later at a grocery store to pick up dinner, where he immediately grabbed me in a pythonlike embrace while Rod Stewart croaked, “Have I told you lately that I love you” over the tinny sound system. Gordon gazed into my eyes. “I wish this song wasn’t playing,” he said, and I laughed.
His response to the news was so right on that initially I thought we might be able to live together with the baby. But as my pregnancy progressed, our differences were once again painfully evident. I was tired, achy, nauseated—in other words, pregnant—and suddenly unable to meet for drinks and uninterested in going to 1:00 AM rock shows. Gordon, not pregnant, found he was repulsed by my frequent trips to the bathroom, constant milk shake drinking, and vomiting from the intense smells of summertime New York. In fact, Gordon seemed irritated about any extra help I needed and overly worried that having a child would make it harder for him to schedule band practice. He looked at dads pushing strollers and winced, as if fending off some future emasculation.
One August day, Gordon and I trudged to childbirth class during one of those New York City squalls where you are lifted up by gale-force winds and pummeled by rain balls. I was eight months pregnant. Once indoors, I began struggling in my manatee state to pull off my wet boots. The Alan Alda type on my left was waiting on his wife, making meaningful eye contact with her as if to say, Thank you for offering your body to grow this child for us. I can never repay you, but I can subjugate myself to your mood swings and won’t leave you because your breasts sag. The suit-and-tie guy to my right jumped to assist when his wife grunted while attempting to remove her shoes. “Hey, could you give me a hand?” I whispered to Gordon, furtively eyeing Alan and Suit. Gordon sighed deeply, as if he’d had about enough of my Leona Helmsley ways, and said, “You want me to get down on my knees and remove your shoes?”
And that is when the truth dawned on me: I had manacled my life to someone who didn’t want to be my partner. It was clear we couldn’t live together, but I wondered if I was going to be able to be this baby’s sole responsible parent and also shoulder the burden of dealing with Gordon, who acted like my other, not-so-cute child.
But shortly after this epiphany, something happened. Skuli was born, and Gordon fell in love—unselfishly and totally—with his son. We spent the first three months of Skuli’s life in my tiny apartment. (Gordon still had his own place but wanted to live with the baby, and I was happy for the help.) But since we didn’t need “together time,” as we weren’t romantically coupled, the second he got home from teaching in the afternoon, I could take off. Although the mother of a newborn, I still had time to take a walk, meet a friend, or go to a dinner party. Often, though, I would stick around and watch TV on the couch with Skuli while Gordon cooked dinner and took breaks to coo over our baby-acne-covered infant. When Skuli was about six months old, Gordon got a new apartment with a room for the baby, which he immediately filled with bizarre amounts of toys from FAO Schwarz. Skuli soon began staying over there at least two nights a week, which meant I even occasionally got to sleep in.
Because I wouldn’t always be around, Gordon had to learn how to do all the stuf
f I did, when he might have not been the type to do so otherwise. And I was forced to give up control—something I wouldn’t necessarily have had to do in a more traditional mother role. I couldn’t micromanage Skuli’s outfits, naptime, or food intake when Gordon was parenting, and so I learned not to. Thus, if Skuli showed up in red plaid shorts and an emerald green top, looking like a Christmas elf in July, I lived with it. I learned to trust that there was more than one way to take care of Skuli, and in that trust came the freedom for me to have a life.
Our wildly disparate natures even seemed to have purpose when it came to parenting. At my orderly house, Skuli has cleanliness, unbroken toys, and lots of friends and family coming over. At Gordon’s creative house, they jump on the bed and toys never need to be put away, so you discover a bounty of old trains and robots under a couch pillow and—voilà!—new toys. (Gordon calls these found objects “play stations.”) At my house, Skuli has a chalkboard; at his dad’s, he is allowed to draw on his crib or on the floor. As a former city kid who was given a subway token at age twelve and told to “go play,” Gordon takes Skuli to a museum or a zoo at least once a week. I bring Skuli to my childhood home in Fargo, North Dakota, where we sit on the lawn and listen to the mosquitoes.
F 'em! Page 10
