Sabrina-Feminsim

I have been thinking a lot about Helmbrecht and Love’s article on feminist zines and third wave feminism over this spring break. After spending time at each zine, I was continually struck with what the author’s affirm in their article, that the zines (or at least the parts of the zines I read) worked to absorb feminist history and tradition at the same time as reconfigure that history (151). Most blatantly, in Bust I saw that reconfiguration take shape in how the magazine balanced the presentation of mainstream femininity with progressive feminism. But I’m not a good gage of this kind of thing: admittedly male, reared in a family that placed total credence in the patriarch, I have lived most of my adult life trying to reverse my past. So, in order to try and understand 3^rd wave feminism and/or postfeminism, and to try and make sense of what I was seeing in the zines, I asked my wife a couple questions. Now my wife, Sabrina, is an educated, extremely smart young woman, but she doesn’t care much for “complicated ‘smart’ academic talk.” Which makes her the perfect person to ask complicated academic questions. Our conversation:

Setting: Sunday Afternoon, drinking coffee and eating a pastry, Basketball is playing on TV (though it is muted)

Tim: So, if someone randomly asked you what feminism was, what would you tell them?

Sabrina (looking up from her Facebook page): It’s just standing up for the dignity of women. (Goes back to the computer screen).

Tim: So, would you consider yourself a feminist then?

Sabrina (not looking up from her Facebook page): Sometimes.

Tim: What does that even mean? So feminism is situational?

Sabrina: Well, I don’t know. I guess not. I’m always for the dignity of women. I just don’t always actively do things, like protest and stuff.

Tim: Well you should check out these feminist zines called Bitch and Bust.

Sabrina: Okay, I will.

(Ten minutes goes by)

Sabrina: It’s cool.

Tim: What’s cool?

Sabrina: The Bust zine. It’s pretty sweet.

Tim: Well, what did you like about it?

Sabrina: I liked they had projects.

Tim: Projects? What do you mean?

Sabrina: They had craft projects on the site, things to do, crafts to make.

Tim: Oh.

(Sabrina leaves the room)

Sabrina (from down the hall): Ughhh, we’ve got to do laundry today.

Tim: I know I gotta get ready to go back to Pullman tomorrow.

Sabrina (laughing): Well you can do your own damn laundry.

Tim: That’s not what I meant.

The conversation does not define third wave feminism, nor would Sabrina ever want to be the voice of a movement, but it does highlight some of the paradoxical playfulness that I see in third wave feminism (at least through the lens of Bust). In Sabrina’s case, her initial satisfaction with Bust was located in its “domestic” offerings, its craft section. And yet to Sabrina, her pleasure in and desire to participate in the domestic activity of making crafts, does not dissociate her with the larger notion of feminism. For her, they don’t have to be separate. And though Helmbrecht and Love seemed to slightly criticize this oscillation between domestic tradition and feminist theory, for Bust, as well as for Sabrina, it doesn’t seem to register a theoretical disconnect or a even a problem. Now, I don’t know if this good or bad, beneficial or harmful (though I suspect a mixture of both extemes) but it is interesting that contemporary feminism can even exist in that paradoxical middle. And, further, it seems to be conscious of its dwelling place. This is only highlighted in the above conversation when Sabrina asserts domestic independence by suggesting I clean my own clothes. Now, I was going to clean my own clothes anyway, and Sabrina knew that, her comment therefore was not an intentional command, but self-conscious parody, it was political playfulness; it was her way of saying, through humor, that she understands her power, and though she may like crafts and other domestic activities, she is not going to stand for or allow traditional gender roles. That may not be third wave feminism or postfeminism, but it is Sabrina-feminism. And if feminism encourages personal agency and empowerment than that seems good enough.

A quick story on rural literacy:

My father-in-law (sorry this is turning out to be a family posting) loves the now discontinued TV show My Name is Earl. If you haven’t ever seen the show, here is a clip (link). The show is about stereotypically low income, rural people. I never got the humor of the show, but whenever I asked my father-in-law what he found so funny he would reply, “they’re (the characters) just so stupid.” Now the show is a kind of comedy of errors and does include a lot of rather stupid or low level humor. But my father-in-law was not just talking about the humor, he was also talking about the people doing the humor: everyone in the show is just dumb, according to him. And yet, there have been countless times where we have been doing something together and my father-in-law will relate the situation to a situation from Earl, then using the example from the show to explain how we should proceed with our own situation. And then I would sarcastically say, but Rick, they’re all so dumb, how can what they do make any sense?” And he would wryly respond, “they may be stupid, but there is a weird logic to them.”

These instances, along with the rural literacy piece from this week’s reading, seem to highlight the fact that it can be easy to credit the sophistication of one’s epistemology at the same time as seeing them as highly unsophisticated. I’m not saying that My Name is Earl actually deployed rural discourse or even rural epistemologies, but it did at least show that “dumb” people make interesting and valuable decisions. My father-in-law, through all the stereotype, understood that. What he didn’t understand was that those “dumb” people were not necessarily dumb, they were just different.