Okay, that's it. My boss is gone for the day so before I go home I have just enough time to bitch about the latest example of seemingly every sensible person in the liberal blogosphere suddenly going off on a comic strip that (at least to me) does not say what they think it says.
The strip in question is yesterday's Doonesbury, a very poignant episode wherein Joan dozes off and has a talk with the spirit of Lacey Davenport about the word "feminist." Quoth Lacey, "Once a social transformation is largely complete, the language that drove it loses both urgency and meaning." Everyone and her blogsister has taken this to mean that Garry Trudeau believes feminism is dead rather than the way I read it, that the word "feminism" describes a movement that has been able to accomplish so much in the past few decades that another term is needed to describe what still remains to be done in the fight toward equality.
Context is all-important here, and the context is Joan bemoaning how many young woman don't relate to the word "feminist," just like people our age don't relate to words like "suffragette." This truism is not a sign that the struggle is over, just that new terminology is due. (For instance, even though women still don't have the vote everywhere in the world, those working to change that don't call themselves suffragettes.) Also of major importance is that Trudeau has a history of presenting diverse characters with differing viewpoints - even in this strip, we see that Joan and Lacey don't necessarily agree. As I recall, Lacey was a bit of a commonse-sense conservative whilst she was still alive; why should she suddenly convert to a feminist mouthpiece now?
As for the punchline at the end, which bothered Echidne exceedingly, I saw it as a winking nod to the bra-burning myth, not a perpetuation thereof.
I'm sorry guys, as far as I'm concerned Trudeau's feminist credentials remain intact. I think this is a matter of a lot of people reading their own interpretation into something where it really doesn't exist. But then, it's well known that the women's movement has no sense of humor.
The strip in question is yesterday's Doonesbury, a very poignant episode wherein Joan dozes off and has a talk with the spirit of Lacey Davenport about the word "feminist." Quoth Lacey, "Once a social transformation is largely complete, the language that drove it loses both urgency and meaning." Everyone and her blogsister has taken this to mean that Garry Trudeau believes feminism is dead rather than the way I read it, that the word "feminism" describes a movement that has been able to accomplish so much in the past few decades that another term is needed to describe what still remains to be done in the fight toward equality.
Context is all-important here, and the context is Joan bemoaning how many young woman don't relate to the word "feminist," just like people our age don't relate to words like "suffragette." This truism is not a sign that the struggle is over, just that new terminology is due. (For instance, even though women still don't have the vote everywhere in the world, those working to change that don't call themselves suffragettes.) Also of major importance is that Trudeau has a history of presenting diverse characters with differing viewpoints - even in this strip, we see that Joan and Lacey don't necessarily agree. As I recall, Lacey was a bit of a commonse-sense conservative whilst she was still alive; why should she suddenly convert to a feminist mouthpiece now?
As for the punchline at the end, which bothered Echidne exceedingly, I saw it as a winking nod to the bra-burning myth, not a perpetuation thereof.
I'm sorry guys, as far as I'm concerned Trudeau's feminist credentials remain intact. I think this is a matter of a lot of people reading their own interpretation into something where it really doesn't exist. But then, it's well known that the women's movement has no sense of humor.
0 comments:
Post a Comment