Feminist While _________

I’ve been thinking about the power of the personal a lot lately, particularly the ways in which we do or don’t show up as feminists in different contexts. Women’s studies classroom? Sure, everybody’s doing it. First dinner out with the new boyfriend’s conservative parents? Maybe not so much. It can be really difficult to make these kinds of choices, as insignificant as they might seem. As sociologist Erving Goffman argues, we are always performing different selves depending on the context we find ourselves in.
When I wrote my first book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, I incorporated feminism into my analysis, I suggested feminism as a solution of sorts for the epidemic of perfectionism and body image distortion so rampant among my generation. But you don’t find feminism anywhere in the title and that was intentional. I knew it would scare away a group of women that I hoped would read the book and, in the process, get hip to feminist ideas.
In contrast, when I was on The O’Reilly Factor, they put my professional title (called a chyron in the bizz) as simply FEMINIST. It wasn’t my first choice–I would have preferred to be identified by one of the many hats I wear, including editor at Feministing.com or Senior Correspondent at The American Prospect. But I also thought it was sort of awesome. It proved that O’Reilly was truly intimidated by my feminist identity.
When and where do you claim your feminist label and when and where do you shirk it? Remember, the latter usually doesn’t involve an out and out denouncement or denial of feminism’s importance in your life, but it’s easy to downplay that part of your politics. How do you make these context-based decisions?

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