Tag Archive for "Generational Analysis"

Posts Tagged Generational Analysis

Polyamory: we’re not doing it wrong

I’m 25, and I identify as polyamorous. It’s an important identity for me because it helps me deconstruct and contextualize the relationships I’ve had in the past, and acknowledge the relationships that I currently have. A recent title by Julie Bindel, “Rebranding polyamory does women no favors”, caught my attention. It was a well informed piece that successfully conveyed Bindel’s skepticism with the practice’s newfound popularity. But as a young person, among other things, I had some serious issues.

Bindel makes her point early on when she asserts:

“…the co-opting and rebranding of polygamy, so that it loses its nasty association with the oppression of the most disadvantaged women, is as irresponsible as suggesting that because some women chose to ...

By Courtney • 13 years ago

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Traveling with Pomegranates

This travel memoir, co-authored by mother and daughter, is undeniably beautiful, but also a few metaphors and flowery descriptions beyond authentic. It falls squarely in the new camp of writers following in Elizabeth Gilbert’s footsteps to take messy transition and reorder it into compelling, albeit disingenuous, narrative. Change, in my experience, doesn’t happen in three perfect acts, each one accompanied by delicious food, dancing gentleman, and perfectly timed epiphanies.

Not so says Sue Monk Kidd, of The Secret Life of Bees, and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, who interweave their twin stories of traveling to Greece, France, and home again, all the while processing big transitions in their lies. For Sue, it is menopause and her burning desire to switch ...

By Courtney • 13 years ago

More magazine features “The New Feminists”

Here’s what I love about the new MORE Magazine article on “The New Feminists”: Their self-professed motivation was to halt the seemingly endless lament, “There are no young feminists,” and show some of them, listen to them, and highlight their work. Feministing is represented heartily (go Perez! go Jess! go me!). There is actually quite a range of thoughtful commentary in the various snippets collected–everything from birth rights to authentic masculinity to manga is covered. The cover is none other than Jane Lynch.

I missed the photo shoot, as did all the other Feministing editors featured, but Tracy Clark-Flory has an interesting reflection on it over at Salon. She writes:

Maybe 90 percent of the time was spent in hair, makeup and wardrobe. Faces were ...

By Maya Dusenbery • 13 years ago

Responding to Susan Faludi: On mentoring and “being seen”

Susan Faludi’s recent piece in Harper’s on intergenerational conflict in the feminist movement has already provoked thoughtful rebuttals—both here on Feministing and across the feminist blogosphere. Like others, I found her stereotyping of young feminists as matricidal, materialistic, and frivolous to be insulting and unfair; choosing Courtney Martin, of all people, to represent this young feminist caricature was just plain weird.

As to her larger point, I agree with Amanda Marcotte and Katha Pollit that much intergenerational strife stems less from differences in substance and more from struggles over power—which is unsurprising, understandable, and in no way unique to the feminist movement. Furthermore, as Miriam points out, some of this tension is actually evidence of progress—the happy ...

By Courtney • 13 years ago

Electras talk back: Jennifer Baumgardner

We’re appreciative to Jennifer Baumgardner for adding her two cents to end our week-long series in response to Susan Faludi’s recent Harper’s article.

In the late 1990s, Phyllis Chesler wrote a book called Letters to a Young Feminist. It really rankled me at the time, in part because I was part of very large cohort of strong feminists creating abortion funds, zines, films, bands, and organizations while the book was speaking to an imaginary young woman who appeared to have lived under a rock for the last 20 years. This ditzy feminist needed chapters headed “Principles, Not Popularity” and found advice such as “Sex is not something that you only share with members of the opposite sex” surprising and helpful. ...

We’re appreciative to Jennifer Baumgardner for adding her two cents to end our week-long series in response to Susan Faludi’s recent Harper’s article.

In the late 1990s, Phyllis Chesler wrote a book called Letters to a Young ...

By Courtney • 13 years ago

Electras talk back: responses to Susan Faludi’s Harper’s piece

Last week, Harper’s published an essay by Susan Faludi about intergenerational feminist tension, in which she examines how the “mother-daughter divide” damages the feminist movement. The way she sees it, younger women have “fallen into the 1920s trap of employing a commercialized ersatz ‘liberation’ to undermine the political mobilization of their mothers.” Amanda Marcotte, Emily Bazelon, and others have posted thoughtful responses to it, and we’re sure plenty of good dialogue has been going on in offline listserves and coffee shops alike. We mulled over how to respond most effectively here at Feministing, and have decided to publish a week-long series of responses from a diversity of young voices in our community, in addition to a ...

By Courtney • 13 years ago

Do It Anyway

I’m usually a bit reticent about seeming too self-promotional, but in this case, I’m confident that everyone in the Feministing community deserves to know about the work of the activists in my new book, just released today, called Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists.

In it, I profile eight diverse people 35 and under–from a 7th grade teacher in the Bronx, to a social issues filmmaker, to a radical philanthropist living in Philly, to a famous actor and advocate who has traveled from a squat in the Lower East Side to the most elite spaces of Hollywood. I’m advocating abandoning the empty “save the world” rhetoric that so many of us were raised on and getting real about ...

By Courtney • 13 years ago