Feminism Across Borders and Boundaries

During the 1970s women of color and third-world women began to organize on the basis of a shared understanding that their issues were not necessarily identical with those of white, middle-class women. In the process, they produced a rich body of literature that interrogated the idea of womanhood, showing it to be a construct that was deeply implicated in racial, national, and class discourses. At the same time, they touched on an issue that remains as important as ever for feminists. If woman-ness is not some property that all women possess, if the experiences of each woman cut across multiple and intersecting forms of experience, then how is possible to build a movement large and powerful enough to transform society? The salience of this issue is evident in how ubiquitous it was in the feminist literature of the 1970s – particularly in the anthology of writings collected in This Bridge Called My Back – and how prevalent it continues to be in similarly themed literature of the present, namely in Colonize This!

In the first anthology, Rosario Morales contributed a piece titled “We’re All in the Same Boat.” Written in a style that often resembles poetry more than prose, it contains a deeply personal series of reflections about how the perception of her own struggles and how they relate to the women’s movement of the time. Morales is a Puerto Rican woman (she spells this “Puerto Rican,” perhaps as a way of reclaiming her own identity symbolically), but one who does not feel connected to other Puerto Rican radicals, whom she claims want to postpone feminist perspectives and issues until after matters of national independence are decided. For her, women’s struggle could not be postponed because it was fundamentally interconnected to matters of capitalism, imperialism, racism, and other issues of social oppression. They were all the products of the same system – a system that she claims infects everybody, even her. It is in this sense that everybody is in the same boat.

By contrast, Susan Muaddi Darraj’s reflection in Colonize This! foregrounds difference over interconnections. What seems to preoccupy her focus is finding a kind of home within what she understands to be feminism. Fiery, poetic bromides against internalized racism or against capitalism are entirely absent from her piece. Yet just like Morales, Darraj’s experience is one in which her irreducibly unique experiences preclude a straightforward embrace of feminism. As a Western, Christian Arab woman, she felt she often has not shared the interests or desires of other women in gender studies classrooms. While they were interested in disparaging housewifery, she was more interested in bread-and-butter issues pertaining to Palestinians resisting occupation. Moreover, unlike white, middle-class women, she was interested in families not simply or primarily as sites of resisting patriarchy but also as sources of social support and affection. Yet as a decidedly “Westernized” Arab woman, she herself felt some detachment from the expectations of people from the region (e.g., she loves wearing jeans and boots). Ultimately, the journey on which Darraj takes readers is one where Arab women must be heard and understood as equal participants in the struggle for equality, yet where Arab women are themselves divided by differences of opinion. Her project, which deliberately or not employs a rhetoric of domesticity, is one of introducing into the feminist “home” a growing diversity of women – especially exoticized Arab women.

In the decades that separate Darraj’s reflection from Morales’ piece. Much has obviously changed. Foremost among them is the seeming decline of political radicalism within the United States. Whereas Morales was writing as the Sixties movements were receding but still showed signs of life, Darraj’s piece referenced was one in which her “home” was more about her relationships to friends and family rather than activists on the streets. Still, much unites these two pieces. Both authors are struggling with how “feminism” is a contested label that carries beneath it an array of experiences not easily categorized or reduced to one or two labels. And both, perhaps above all else, are struggling to find a kind of peace with themselves and the world around them.