I guess I have come to the conclusion, and I’ll admit it’s a recent one for me, that formulating these “critiques” in terms of “conversations about feminism(s)”or the state thereof aren’t actually useful in terms of empowering and/or enfranchising “Other” kinds of women or hell, “Other” kinds of people generally. They usually devolve into heavily race/class privileged feminists slinging shit at other race/class privileged feminists about who’s the best ally of whatever marginalized population happens to be the cause du jour. Which does very little for the marginalized population other than get them to watch themselves again become a sort of football for other people to play with. It has always seemed to me that if you really, truly care about marginal populations, you publish their work; you talk about it in the context of what they themselves say about it; and you stop making it all about how you’re a fantastic ally. Maybe they will consider you one as a result, and maybe they won’t, but all these pieces motivated by anxiety over the Best Feminism really wear thin, because it is, for lack of a better phrase, an economically privileged white girl’s game to keep having these fights, and that’s definitionally exclusive. And you need to suck it up regarding your own ego in that regard.

Put differently, to me this is the difference between saying that we’re happy to accept critique and making ourselves actually deal with critique. I understand your concern completely, but I think that there have been enough go-rounds on this question of the “state of feminism” to show that these arguments are very rarely about actually remedying this problem of what a truly liberatory politics would look like and more about people fighting over leadership. And leadership battles, at the end of the day, are not that important to me.

Agreed. Totally.

But I wonder if suggesting that this legitimate concern is tantamount to a call for a moratorium on articles about the state of feminism is really accurate or helpful. Because as you suggest, the point isn’t to stop talking about what feminism could be doing better, but to stop presuming that one’s own concerns are the only ones that matter. It seems to me that equating these two is a problem, since it could be easily taken up in a way that is all-too-common in the feminist blogosphere: that lady said there’s something wrong with the way I’m doing/thinking about feminism, therefore she sucks/is an elitist/is vapid/is paranoid.

My point isn’t that *you* are saying this, of course; it’s that I’m concerned that characterizing your legitimate criticisms as illustrating the need for a moratorium on conversations about feminism(s) could easily put us in a mindset that actually makes us LESS receptive to the sorts of important concerns you raise here.

Those three young writers are coming from a specific point of view talking about their personal experiences and I don’t think anyone should begrudge them the opportunity to do so.

But I think Nona over at GirlDrive (http://www.girl-drive.com/2010/03/whats-wrong-with-this-feminist-picture/) had an excellent response to the article. She wrote that out of the 10 people quoted in the article, not one of them was a woman of color.

I think the writers’ color and class blindness was unintentional. I mean, they were writing largely about their experiences coming from a white privileged background.

In any case, their piece does remind us that we need to make a concerted effort in including a myriad of voices, not just the ones from a similar background. I don’t think you can always make every voice equal, but you can try harder to include different voices.

In the end, I applaud those young writers for speaking out about how feminism is important and necessary. It’s a step in the right direction, anyway.

::hums; looks at the ground; shuffles feet::

Yes I do strongly identify with this scenario, why do you ask?

But I’m confused about the title–is it meant to be ironic? Isn’t this article itself a set of (important) claims about the state of feminism? Don’t critiques by women of color, and working class women of feminism itself make feminism better/more effective at doing what it’s supposed to do? I actually think it’s *crucial* to keep talking about the state of feminism, and I think this article is a contribution to that conversation.

Great sentence!