Miriam El Abbassi | Arts Editor
Featured Image: Fewer people are identifying as feminists due to the growing number of radicals straying from the original message. | Courtesy of Pixabay
The topic of feminism is an incredibly divisive one, sparking heated debates on college and university campuses across the world. However, the overarching concept is very straightforward, and is simply defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as: “The theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.”
Seems like something everyone can get onboard with, right? Well, that hasn’t been the case in recent years. Fewer and fewer people are choosing to identify as feminists, a phenomenon that can largely be attributed to the overpowering wave of radical feminism that has now stolen centerstage, straying further and further from feminism’s original core tenets.
The push for equality has been overpowered and drowned out by an exclusionary movement, leaving out men, and other marginalized voices, such as trans-women, and people of colour. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and “white feminism” are both branches of feminist ideology that have gained recognition in recent years, and are synonymous with the outrage they induce, turning the masses away from feminism as a whole.
TERFs exclude the voices of trans-women, citing the notion that their socialization as biological men, however limited or riddled with dysphoria it may have been, makes it so that they are still holders of an oppressive power. Of course, if one were to follow this line of thinking, it directly contradicts the well-known fact that trans-people suffer from disproportionately high rates of violence.
The term ‘white feminism,’ as the name suggests, “is a brand of feminism that minimizes, forgets, or wilfully ignores the experiences of women of colour.” Whiteness has long been regarded as the default, or standard, and more specifically, white women have, often had their voices pushed to the forefront of very pertinent discussions (i.e. violence against women). A recent example of this would be the #MeToo movement, founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke, but only gained viral popularity when co-opted and used by actresses such as Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan.
Many of these radical offshoots of feminism also fail to address the many unique issues that men face, as well as try to diminish and disregard their experiences in a warped attempt at female empowerment.
Feminism is only effective when observed through an intersectional point of view, examining the many ways one can experience womanhood, as well as on one united front. Alexandria Crump, a second-year sociology student, describes her viewpoint on radical feminist movements: “I think it paints a negative view on feminism as a whole because people end up seeing it as this extremist, radical idea. The idea of feminism is not just equality for women, but equality for everyone.”
