Last week, Lena Chen wrote a post entitled ‘What my feminist agenda looks like’, in response to this post on Feministe, and to comments that it was outside feminists’ jurisdiction to care about issues such as poverty, class, race or disability.

It got me thinking about what my own feminist agenda might look like. I went to a school where liberal feminism was pushed down our throats with the same enthusiasm the final year syllabus was (which is to say, with great enthusiasm). We could be leaders! We could do anything we wanted! We would rule the world! It wasn’t a message that overly appealed to me: not just because it was elitist, or even because I didn’t particularly know what I wanted to do, but because it didn’t resonate with anything I actually cared about.

Feminism really started to interest me when I was in my later years of high school and early years of university. I started to read Germaine Greer and old issues of Bust magazine, and found that feminism - much like the theorists my lecturers were introducing me to - provided a framework for articulating things I instinctively knew but had never had the words to express myself.

So with that in mind, this is the feminist agenda that best encapsulates what I care about, and what my work is geared towards.

- A feminism that shows how the personal is influenced by the political and the social. That questions conventional wisdoms around sex, gender, race and class - eg, men have a biological need to chase women, earning more money makes you a better person - and the ways in which they are constructed as true and normal.

- A feminism that appreciates subtlety. That understands that politics happens on a micro level as much as it does through big organs such as government, the military and the media - and that usually these organs are shaped less by a desire to fuck people over, than by a different set of values and understandings about the world. A feminism that is willing to engage with these values in order to change them.

- A feminism that doesn’t set up a false dichotomy of good feminists vs evil anti-feminists. That cares as much about encouraging self-styled progressives to engage with and confront their own privilege as it does about drawing attention to external boogeymen. As they say in Avenue Q, “everyone’s a little bit racist/classist/sexist sometimes”, and ignoring it doesn’t many it go away. 

- A feminism that is more concerned with challenging sexism, racism, classicism, homophobia and transphobia than it is with shaming sexists, racists, classists, homophobes and transphobes. That plays the ball, not the individual.

- A feminism that carves out new language to describe and make sense of problems that currently have no name. (As I am trying to do with The Sex Myth.)

- A feminism that engages with the substance of people’s everyday lives. That identifies the issues different groups are engaging with, and applies a sociopolitical lens to them in a useful way. (As I try to do with my women’s magazine articles.)

It’s far from perfect - but hey, as we’ve covered here before, I’m not perfect either.

What does your feminist (or broader political) agenda look like?

Related: The problem with pop feminism: why Emily Gould is right.
We are all bad feminists, really.

Elsewhere: What my feminist agenda looks like (The Ch!cktionary)