“Feminist” is not a four-letter word

When I say I’m a feminist, all I mean is that women should be treated like Jesus treated them. In love, fairness, justice, and equality under the law. The majority of women around the world today are not treated with fairness and justice. This is why I call myself a Christian feminist. – Abby at Little Stories [It’s a really good post. Go read the whole thing.]

Where I come from, to identify with the feminist movement or feminist theory is the social equivalent of having a baby out of wedlock and enjoying the shock value, using the f-word in front of the Baptist pastor’s wife just to make her cry/blush, or wearing a pentagram and a mohawk to church because you hate your parents. It’s assumed that if you’re a feminist, you’re giving God the middle finger and plan to do whatever the hell you want to do.

That assumption is so wrong, and I confess I get impatient with those who believe this. People who identify themselves as feminists can sometimes be like that, yes. But then again, the Westboro Baptist Church doesn’t represent those who define themselves as Christians, does it?

The majority of feminists are just trying to live their lives in a thoughtful, ethical manner–respecting everyone, including themselves. Equality cuts both ways. Ethically consistent feminists will seek justice for any who are oppressed, and sometimes that happens to be women.

As an English major, feminism is a word that has a whole world of loaded meaning–and none of it matches up with the bra-burning, baby-killing, men-hating stereotype painted by the conservative Christian ghetto.

Feminist literary theory seems easy to me. At its simplest, it basically examines the text as if it were a photographic negative–what’s missing speaks the loudest. The absence of men in such and such roles, and the absence of women in these other roles, the masculine-heavy language used by the women in a text written by a male author, etc. You approach the text with your assumptions inverted, and see what you find. At its most complex, it tangles psychoanalytic theories of linguistics with feminine absences/presences and delves into subconscious nuances in the very words of a text. That’s where it gets fascinating, really. And my English professors would probably pale at the truncated and caricatured description I just gave–it’s a lot more complex than just what I [tried] to describe. Sorry, Messer.

The reason I feel that feminist theory is easy is this: up until the late 1800s, most books were written by men in a male-dominant culture. Feminist criticism can have a field day with almost anything written before Feminist theory came along and everyone started being self-aware in their writings. (meta-meta. This sort of writing became like an internet meme among novelists in the last 50 years and it’s really annoying.) It’s easy to find something new to pick apart for its misogyny and absence of feminine language. It becomes a cop-out among English students just trying to get a degree without putting a lot of original thought into their theses, while looking like they are because the text they’ve chosen hasn’t been analyzed in depth before from the feminist perspective.

. . . this doesn’t sound anything like the feminism you know, does it?

My point is, “feminist” is a loaded word, and using it in its fullest academic meaning will earn me dirty looks and incredulity from most conservative Christians.

Dear Christians, please lay down your arms, and make sure that word means what you think it means before teaching your children that [insert a word used to describe a group of people] don’t love Jesus.