4th World Social Forum

India 2004

Rosalind Petchesky

Feminisms, as a term, identifies women politically. The name as such puts the patriarchal and misogynist structures of power in view no matter how variously. It breaks the silence of male privilege by denaturalizing and denormalizing it. Because power and oppression are never static, but rather dynamic, feminisms are always changing to address these historical and newly formed systems. . . .

Feminisms develop the possibility of theoretically seeing how women’s oppression has newly formed sites. Theoretical means seeing the connectedness among women and between them and the multiple systems of power attempting to harness their creativity. Feminisms always require new dialogue to unfreeze the varied constructions of womanhood. Women’s struggle for self-determination is always defined within the cultural contexts and structures of power that women inhabit. . . .

Feminisms are not simply Western, nor non-Western, but embrace women’s activism in places elsewhere whether named as such, or not. A polyversal feminism -multiple and connected- expresses women’s potential shared humanity wherever it exists. When women are subordinated and not allowed the lives they wish to live they respond with resistance. The plural acts of resistance are what women do to survive and thrive in multiple and yet connected ways."

Note: About "West and non-West," Zillah Eisenstein says they "are both real and made-up as coherent geographical/cultural locations. The flows between empires and their colonies, between colonizer and colonized, between slave and slave-master, between colors of the skin, are misread as separateness and opposition. Feminisms have suffered from this overdrawn divide palpably. They have been wrongly homogenized as a unity, and then defined as of ‘the’ West. This negates multiple forms of feminisms in ‘the West AND the multiple forms of feminisms outside ‘the’ West. As such feminisms lose their plurality of meanings which also express the similarities among women."