Oh Joss...

This week I thought I would cover an issue that has been somewhat irking me, the uncritical adulation of a certain well meaning bald guy..

I thought I would remain silent on this issue for a while until the hype around the idea had subsided. Late last year, Joss Whedon, with some ceremony, as if some great revolutionary, said that he prefers the term ‘genderist’ to ‘feminist’. Now I like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Joss is clearly no misogynist but there are definitely some problems here:

White, heterosexual, middle-class men have a relatively limited contribution to make to discourses about feminism. I generally would call myself a feminist, or supportive of it if the person I was talking to was uncomfortable with the idea of me being one. Joss, likewise, could quite reasonably do something similar. However, to stand up at some sort of televised address and redefine feminism on behalf of everyone is at best illegitimate or even just plain silly!

I write articles about things that interest me, Joss writes about things that interest him and turns them into TV shows and movies. We both lack any legitimacy to make such statements or to say we can redefine the issues.

To use the term ‘genderist’ is also to miss a vital point; gender-equality is not an inevitable state of affairs. Mr Whedon has an almost endearingly naive view of the nature of history; he talks in sweeping terms that we have now moved beyond racism, that it is of course abhorrent and that we now in turn need to do the same with gender relations. He dislikes the term feminism because it implies that "the idea of equality is just an idea and that it's an agenda". My response to that would be that of course it is an agenda, as was the movement to ban the trans-Atlantic slave trade, something about which many people were perfectly okay with at the time in many Western countries. It took a morality expanding effort on the part of the conscientious to achieve what was by no means an inevitable historical process. 

Feminism was and is a politically active social movement for equality and to put an end to various forms of subjugation. It has some problems such as the lack of consideration of many middle class white feminists to consider women of different ethnic backgrounds, class relations and cultures. There are also nuances and complexities such as the issue of intersectionality; a concept used to describe the ways in which different forms of social oppression  i.e. racism, sexism, homophobia etc. are interconnected and cannot be viewed in isolation from one another. The treatment of minority groups who are some of those most in need of representation within feminism such as trans women and sex workers illustrate well the need for greater reflexivity on such issues by some activists.

What is clear, however, is that Joss understands none of this and should politely be asked to sit down.