Feminism and Perspectives of America

The bell hooks article was very interesting to me, because I had never understood what was negative about the word “feminism.” The fact that it has never had an adequate accepted definition was also new to me, but also explains a lot of the confusion I have seen from people who are attempting to define it. From the article, it seems that feminism is, rather than a quest for gender equality as is generally assumed, a quest for revolutionary change of the status quo that allows men to hold power and suppress women. Feminists do tend to be characterized as somewhat militant, possibly relating to this early desire for violent social change, and perhaps a desire to not associate with advocating that kind of change is part of what causes people to retreat from the word “feminism.” Bourgeois white middle-class American women are often rather comfortable with their lifestyles, and therefore loath to change them unduly. They therefore frame feminism as a lifestyle choice and as the pursuit of small goals rather than a social shift.

Aguilar’s article on her experiences speaking with Asian American women of different nationalities also brought up an interesting point. The women of other cultures to whom Aguilar spoke did not like American ways of looking at things. They found it intrusive and insulting. For example, Aguilar realized that Yasmin, who had written the paper that used a critique of the decadence of the United States to exhort women to stay in their place, was actually defending her cultural pride against the intrusion of American “moral decadence and degeneration.” The other women also distanced themselves from the American women representatives at the seminar.

Often the American representatives and Aguilar had trouble seeing things from the other women’s perspectives. When describing the story of the Peruvian women who used whistles to call when their husbands beat them, the author found to her surprise that the women in the seminar reacted quite negatively. I also found it interesting that the non-American women at the seminar described their proposed solutions in terms of specific groups of women rather than women as a whole, where Americans would tend to create an overly broad solution that would fail for that reason.