A Quote by Hari Nef

I feel like so much of mainstream feminism springs from the second wave, which was essentially a discourse spearheaded by white, cisgender, upper middle class women. I feel - especially as I'm trying to negotiate this new female space with the feminism that's available to me - there are a lot of places where I'm disenfranchised.
This idea of feminism as a party to which only a select few people get to come - this is why so many women, particularly women of colour, feel alienated from mainstream western academic feminism. Because don't we want it to be mainstream?
I personally feel like the conversation around feminism has advanced a lot. People are starting to realize privileged white feminism isn't cutting it. We have to look at the holistic experience of all women, or assigned women, on the planet.
I would suggest that a feminism which does not also seek to alter the exploitation of poorer women is not feminism at all, but is simply a variant form of upper-class politics and self-privileging.
The problem with feminism in the second wave was that we fought so much among ourselves, and I think we did so much damage to the movement... and I think the next wave, the third wave, is women mentoring younger women and women helping younger women to enter the political process and the writing world.
We work to create a new wave of feminism that is more inclusive. I want others to feel equal. It's so great to see women in positions of power, which is why other artists, such as Marilyn Minter, are so inspirational to me.
Second Wave feminism started with consciousness-raising groups, which sounds "big" but it's really just house parties. Women getting together and saying, "You feel this way?! Me too!" Hanging out is consciousness-raising.
I certainly wouldn't go back and blame feminism, because all that feminism was really trying to do, which was huge, was to create a new set of expectations, a new set of opportunities for women, and they did.
Much of the appeal of feminism is that it encourages women to do what they always felt like doing anyway: take everything personally. But to succeed at the highest level, you need some objectivity, which feminism hates. Feminists see objective reality as a conspiracy out to make them feel bad about themselves.
It was feminism that made it possible for women to go to the Ivy League and women to be astronauts and women to have their own TV shows. What happened, though, was that the generation after feminism, which is my generation, misunderstood what feminism was saying.
I think feminism has always been global. I think there's feminism everywhere throughout the world. I think, though, for Western feminism and for American feminism, it not so surprisingly continues to center Western feminism and American feminism. And I think the biggest hurdle American feminists have in terms of taking a more global approach is that too often when you hear American feminists talk about international feminism or women in other countries, it kind of goes along with this condescending point of view like we have to save the women of such-and-such country; we have to help them.
I had a real come-to-Jesus a couple of years ago when I started to see the direct line between feminism and everything else - feminism and climate change, feminism and poverty, feminism and hunger - and it was almost like I was born again and started walking down the street and was like, "Oh, my God, there are women everywhere! They're just everywhere you look. There's women all over the place!"
You had a generation of women, of which I'm part, where it was a stigma to be associated with feminism; there was a backlash. Now you have a generation that is clearly embracing feminism because, at the end of the day, the definition of feminism is just equality.
It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.
I really dislike it when women reject feminism; that's ridiculous. I am a product of feminism. Without feminism I would not be making films.
It's strange because we think of the upper middle class, for example, as being secular, that they've fallen away from religion. Well, it turns out that the upper middle class goes to church more often and feels a much stronger affiliation with their religion than the white working class.
If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and '60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic, too, as we would learn.
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