Weekly Meeting: Feminism 101

The Girls for the World meeting, held this Saturday (1), had as its main theme the history of feminism and how it affects the movement today. The distorted perception that people have of feminism these days is attributed to the divisions of the movement and its different approaches, which boil down to the same point: equality between men and women in contemporary society. Among the theoretical discussion held at the meeting, certain points stood out:

Sociology of swearing

The social origin of swear words and how, in most cases, they refer to what is feminine was discussed. Words that refer to female sexuality are always used in a pejorative way, which always reduce the feminine to a role of submission and fragility. We also noticed how certain words that refer to the masculine are used as synonyms of personal gratification. In all this, it is visible how sexism and the oppression of the female body goes beyond the social structure, also affecting the language, which often goes unnoticed.

Don't Let Racism Divide Us, 1977, poster of See Red Women's Workshop.

Indianara (2019)

The need for more diverse protagonism in the movement was also mentioned. A reference to this reflection was the film Indianara (2019), shown at the Cannes Film Festival, which is about the transsexual activist Indianara Siqueira and how she bases her activism on the marginalized conditions of cross-dressers in Brazil.

Poster of the movie Indianara (2019), directed by Marcelo Barbosa ande Aude Chevalier Beaumel.

Intersectionality

Another issue discussed was how there wasn't a universal presence of women in feminism in the suffrage movement, for example, which led to a reflection on intersectionality, which proposes to analyze the cause based on class, race and gender, and how these factors directly affect its structure. In this sense, what is the importance of intersectionality for the current feminist movement?

Being quite recent, intersectional feminism has been extremely necessary for the expansion of the movement and was even responsible for the emergence of black feminism. After a process of exclusion that lasted for years, there is still a lack of universal representation of women in the feminist cause, which intersectionality intends to reflect and change, by integrating lesbian, transsexual and black women in the movement, trying to understand their particular causes and struggles.