Blackamazon:

It’s not that she complained or that she wrote but other folks experiences were used to back her up when her writing demonstrated little concern for making those experiences known in the essay but willing to use their weight to tangle with these mystic elders.

I used other people’s experiences as I could–the folks’ experiences I wrote about asked that I NOT include details, their names, etc, because many of them have full time jobs in mainstream fem orgs.

What people aren’t getting is that for those of us who don’t live in the US, we’re essentially being told that we don’t have a place at the table. The public institutional face of feminism in Canada is not NOW or the Feminist Majority Foundation, or MS magazine. Canadian women and our issues are not a part of the mandate of these organizations. This is the message that women of colour get, and poor women, women with disabilities and everyone else who is not included get.
If Jessica agrees that these organizations are exclusive, why is it so important that she be a part of them? Why is it more important that she be included than all the other women who have been doing this work, creating our own organizations and magazines, and conferences without the kind of funding and public recognition that NOW, MS, and FMF (and those that they support) get?

Dialogue i s good but that’s not honest dialogue. It HAS to be precise . Holding her to a standard is dialogue as to and frankly for a lot of us NOW,Jessica, Feminist Majority

Don’t meet the standard

and until they do we don’t want to be lumped in when they try and prove points with each other.

It’s not that she complained or that she wrote but other folks experiences were used to back her up when her writing demonstrated little concern for making those experiences known in the essay but willing to use their weight to tangle with these mystic elders

And Robert Well Saturn may be smaller and gravitationally not as important but it it spins out.

Earth still screwed.

And thats the problem here. People think big=most important= only thing that matters.

If when you worked internationally the experience was different then older feminist aren’t keeping younger feminists out.

It’s a small specific group you want member ship to and to make your desire for membership seem more i necessary it becomes THE face OF THE WORLD.

Except it’s BARELY the face of it’s own country’s movement. Most feminist theory that resonated with young women I know , is outside the mainstream.

Most of the condemnations I read about feminism come form American women who feel sorely underrepresented.

And to say that their what the world thinks of is either terribly imprecise , terribly arrogant, or terribly misinformed.

I don’t even think of them when I think of American feminism because this institutional speaking for feminism has done SO LITTLE for me.

And I live here.

So I can only imagine how galling it must be to read someone complain about exclusion and use the specter of the importance of these orgs

As in ” you want to really represent I have to be let it to TRULY make it a representative movement”

meanwhile the supposedly represented are going

WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE ANYWAY?

ps: i am german, i have never heard of these american ladies and i have lived in several european countries, those names never turned up anywhere. to me the face of feminism is Alice Schwarzer THE most prominent living German feminist.

I wasn’t sure were you were going with the support and credentials post. It always worries me when I see people try to put academics over experience since I think both have their place in the discussion.

Yeah, we are aware of a good bit of what’s orbiting around America (and, BTW, most of us tend to be more aware of what’s going on in a number of cultures than Americans are), but it is NOT what we dwell on most of the time…..being far too busy paying attention to what’s going on around us.

Jessica, Robert: don’t suppose that just because you aren’t aware that what goes on with us, that means there is in fact nothing other than what you bestow upon us. Just because you don’t see it does not in any way mean it doesn’t exist.

Blind support isn’t a good thing and I’m not sure that citing someone’s curiculum vitae is the best way to advance the discussion either.

I’m talking about intellectual interests. Samhita Mukhopadhyay is also passionate about transnational feminisms.

Perhaps if women in other countries were asked to name the institution they think of to represent feminism they might name American organizations, but I still think that is a stretch since I really doubt they would be aware of what is happening here as much as Americans seem to think they do.

I’m probably speaking from what I’ve read on the web which has mostly condemnations of American feminism and Gloria Steinem by non-Americans.

The most public feminist movement has been American. And people worldwide think of Gloria Steinem, Ms. and NOW when they refer to the public face of institutional feminism. Most people worldwide don’t think feminism represents them at all. They may say “Look what those American feminists did to OUR women,” etc. Again, the quote was about the public face of feminism and public feminist institutions not whether or not women worldwide felt represented by them.

Donna Darko you are wrong. People who don’t know anything about feminism don’t pay attention to the institutions of US feminism, and people who know about feminism woud think about their local institutions first.

New Zealand is pretty influenced by America, and we speak the same language, and I’m fairly certain the most feminists here haven’t heard of Feminist Majority Foundation, haven’t read Ms, and haven’t thought of NOW from one year to the rest.

Blind support isn’t a good thing and I’m not sure that citing someone’s curiculum vitae is the best way to advance the discussion either. You do know that Dubya is a graduate of both Yale and Harvard? I find it especially annoying since we are both women of color when lack of educational opportunities is regularly used to dismiss POC. I’m concerned that you are saying that writing a thesis on postcolonialism at a prestigious American university makes JV better able to discuss what women in other countries think about feminism or any other issue than actual women in those countries who may have even lived for generations with colonialism and it’s effects.