Locational Feminism

I'm falling over fatigued and plagued with a head cold (no doubt I'm constructing myself in heroic terms here), but I just had to get to the keyboard to type in this quotation from Susan Stanford Friedman, which I really like:

"A locational feminism feminism is one that acknowledges the historically and geographically specific forms in which feminism emerges, takes root, changes, travels, translates, and transplants in different spacio/temporal contexts"(2).

I like this because it puts feminism in motion, into time and space rather than fixing a definition.

I also like the way she describes later in the article a way to account for the differences and commonalities between feminism as manifest in India in a specific example where women mandate "a quota of representation by lower caste women in the village councils of rural India" and the feminists who "demonstrate for reproductive choice outside a beleaguered abortion clinic in the United States." As Freidman puts it " both are political practices informed by theories of gender and social justice that are recognizably a part of a singular entity that we call 'feminism."

I really like the work Friedman is doing here to account for differences within feminisms in a way that does not dismiss or undercut different manifestations of feminisms.

I have more to say here about the geographically specific forms of feminisms she is addressing, but given the temporality of this response I'll make it brief. The articles this week make mention of "foremothers" in feminist composition studies. But I'd like to remind us of that we walk on grounds where our foremothers/fathers are not women in composition, but the early suffragists (Anthony, Stanton, Gage Truth, among others), the activists for abolition of slavery (Truth, Douglass, Tubman, May) the Haudosaunee elders among others who inspired the Iroquois Federation upon which our foundational (not anti-foundational) democracy is based This region is rich rhetorical ground, yet I think that is often forgotten. I'd like to think that cultural rhetoric would situate us in those discourses and that we'd be urged to steep ourselves in our social, historical, political and geographic location right here in Central New York and Syracuse, which, by the way, is part of the Onondaga Nation land claim.

g'night.