#1: 3rd wave feminism in a 3rd world country

I'm going to follow what Ian did in the podcast by starting off with a YouTube reference. While researching for this episode, I came across a video by the channel "Autumn On Venus", in which a woman claims not to identify as a feminist and that she hates Third Wave feminism due to how they "do not fight for equality". I could not sympathise with her thoughts because we disagreed on what this Third Wave actually stood for. I should have noted that this was a danger of constraining the discussion of feminism through the use of waves. 

A discussion on a broad political ideology constrained within the 30 to 45 minute range is bound to be comparatively shallow, even if the topic we discussed was set within the parameters of a Third World country. It is important that we challenge the foundational assumption of the episode, that it is acceptable or in any way productive to frame the struggles and fights of the feminist movement through its different waves. We aim to encourage inquisitiveness among the youth, and our inquisitiveness along with the willingness of others to teach us has (and will continue to) help us grow in our understanding and perspective. 

This essay aims to show the inadequacies of the wave terminology, specifically to a Third World country that may be struggling to unite in its own feminist identity. This is simply because it is an exclusive form of feminism (being white-centric), which causes it to be ignorant, inaccurate, divisive and encourages a hegemonic brand of feminism.

It is a white version of feminism 

The ways we most commonly distinguish the different goals and time periods of the feminist movement was based on the movement that happened in the USA. For example, when you talk about the First Wave of feminism, it refers to the West's first sustained political movement dedicated to achieving political equality for women: the suffragettes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Second Wave refers to the movements for female liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, in America. Thinking that feminism consists of waves is to constantly refer to only the white version of feminism, which is bound to cause a few problems. 

It is ignorant 

A large problem with this is that it is largely ignorant of the different struggles women of different cultural, racial and religious backgrounds face when trying to achieve equality. It can suggest that each wave of feminism is a monolith with a single unified agenda, when in fact the history of feminism is a history of different ideas in wild conflict. Women in northeastern Nigeria face the opposition of Boko Haram, which makes their main feminist priority to send their daughters to school without the fear of being kidnapped by religious fundamentalists. Black women in the USA around the time of the First Wave were struggling to protect themselves from rape and abuse. We conceded in the podcast ourselves that the Western First Wave was not relevant to Malaysia because voting rights were not gender-discriminant, and our actual "first wave" was the fight for access to education and freedom from domestic abuse. This was shown by educated and more privileged women like Raden Adjeng Kartini from Indonesia advocating for female education, inspiring similar causes in neighbouring countries.  This South East Asian feminism showed how women broke classed cultural  barriers to educate women to become more outspoken and aware of the world around them, and is something that wave feminism does not engage with and cannot be simplified into the wave categorisation the West had set. 

It is inaccurate

This becomes worse when we implicitly set the Western standards of feminism as the template for how we fight for gender equality across the world. We were at fault in the podcast, when we implied that the goals women in Malaysia aim for must be compared to the goals white women fought for in the West. Arguably, this problem can be echoed throughout Malaysian society because if you ask any average Malaysian for an example of a prominent feminist, they either would not have an answer or will name prominent Western female icons like Judith Butler, Emma Watson and Beyonce, but will not acknowledge the more relevant local icons like Marina Mahathir, Ivy Josiah or even Leila Ahmed (yes, she is American but the ideas she writes about are a lot more relevant to Malaysia than the feminists that Malaysians look up to). This replicates the imperial patterns of colonialism. 

This argument states that when using wave terminology, we create a feminism that can only be universal and doctrinal, that the fight must be united at the expense of depth and breadth of the ideas feminism should fight for. This would be a case of a "white saviour complex" of sorts, where we fight for issues the way the West does, but ignore the contextual plights women face locally. An example of this can be seen in FEMEN's International Topless Jihad Day events, which left local women feeling that their feminist identity and fight had been co-opted. It inherently gives Western feminism a prerogative to influence Eastern feminism, which makes the movement inaccurate. 

I would like to make an observation to the different priorities and contexts women have in both Malaysia and the USA. The USA's first priority in female liberation came in fighting for political rights and their conflicts with racial oppression. This is unique to the history of slavery present in the USA and the need to (in the words of Angelica Schuyler in the Hamilton musical) "include women in the sequel", and thus rightly became the forefront of the movement. In Malaysia, the unique context is that many areas of the country remain underdeveloped and oppression exists culturally rather than constitutionally. Our fights aim to deal with the asymmetry of economic investment so that girls in Baram do not have to fear being raped by loggers along the 1-2 day journey in order to reach a nearby village which has a school. Our fights have later evolved to counter the coercion of culture that ingrains the glorification of motherhood to the point that a common way to refer to women is by calling them kaum ibu, which roughly translates to "mother kind/race". We now do have discussions about sexual liberation and expression, but wave feminism constrains the discussion to just that. Our problems and struggles are different than the West, their waves are largely irrelevant to us.

It is divisive

Wave terminology implies divisions of identity onto various feminists. This happens firstly through a generational divide. As the different waves of feminism happened in different periods of time, women who argue in favour of gender equality find themselves sucked into the belief that they must belong to the wave of the time. Furthermore, divides happen due to socio-economical, political, cultural, racial and religious background. It changes the context in which these women live, therefore affecting the personal goals that they see most important to furthering equality in society. These feminists may also find themselves identifying with different waves of feminism that most directly apply to them. 

Unfortunately, these divides come with some level of toxicity. This is because the relationship between feminists and the waves that preceded them is encumbered by dissociation and doctrinairism. If a person is fighting against the glorification of motherhood, for example, it becomes easy to generalise this person to be a 2nd Wave feminist. However, given that each new wave implies that the shortcomings of the previous wave needed improving upon, we push down the struggles of these feminists to some extent with the arguments that the 3rd Wave is better as it is the first wave in which intersectionality became mainstream.

This is echoed in the argument that all First Wave feminists are racists and also shown with how many 2nd Wave feminists openly disagree with 3rd Wave feminists. This is also where the YouTube video I'd watched earlier becomes relevant; I'd watched a woman who wanted gender equality disagree with a section of feminism due to their wave identity.

It enforces a brand of hegemonic feminism

We discussed an argument in the episode about the concern that the feminist narrative will be hijacked by the flashy headlines of sexual liberation and compromise the discussions surrounding equal access to education. We have come to realise that our fear of a shallow discussion of feminism will happen when we continue to use wave terminology to discuss feminism. 

Waves simplify feminist discussions, as when we talk about the different goals or ideas feminists have, we habitually try to fit them into categorise them into the different waves the West experienced. Unfortunately, as waves are ignorant and inaccurate, we limit the way in which we talk about the struggles women of differing backgrounds face. This simplification (hello I made a joke) is convenient for mass media due to 2 reasons: it is easy to understand, and it facilitates membership. News outlets find it easier to talk about and criticise the feminist movement when we blur out the nuances within the feminist identity. It is now also uncomplicated and accepting, that all individuals who believe in equality to differing extents can now find a place in a movement that they do not fully understand and may misinterpret. 

This generalisation of the discussion makes engagement with ideas harder, straw man fallacies become more common, and people on both sides of a debate leave a discussion angered and misunderstood. A common way this generalisation has become detrimental is through how the discussions about the wage gap become about whether an employer sets different wages for men and women, but not about how women do not have the same access to jobs as men do, or how they also have to deal with the impact of motherhood and maternity leave on their careers. 

Of course, there is a debate on whether the benefits of access to media structures outweigh the costs of generalisation, but that assumes that we can only talk about feminism in an understandable manner through the lenses of the Western waves. Why not talk about the specific problems women deal with, rather than attaching a Third Wave or Second Wave agenda?

What should we have said?

In summary, the manner in which we held our discussion was shallow. Nevertheless, what is still clear is that different feminists from different parts of Malaysia have different priorities. Women from Baram need schools, but women in the "booming, metropolitan city of Kuching" need safety from judgement based on how they dress. This is not an issue of waves but of an environmental context. We should learn to talk about gender equality beyond the constraints of waves, as an interpersonal struggle which transcends the barriers of limited identities.

- Paren