Subjects of Feminisms in Question

Abstract

In essaying the anthropology of feminist Representations carefully attends to how womens movement and feminist discourses grew out of and in alignment with nationalist movements in the seventies and early eighties. In Sobritcheas narrative feminist knowledge formations were from the very beginning struggling intimately both within and against nationalist decolonization and anti-imperial imperatives. This double sense of allegiance to class and gender politics indivisibly as the two sides of at once neo-colonial and neo-feudal systemic oppression forged not one but several womens groups with different tactics of struggle and political analytics of gender class nationalism. Feminists and groups of this period baffled on multiple fronts: vividly remember the period in the early 80s when we had to generate convincing and robust empirical data to prove the existence of gender inequality in Philippine society. Our analyses were influenced by Western feminist theories but tempered by insights gained from face-to-face interactions with grassroots women. This modest sentence encapsulates for me the incredible groundwork of initiatory feminist public struggles and writings in an early nationalist political moment. Groundwork in the sense of formulating multi-layered analyses from the bottom up -- grounded in solidarity with and the poor in order to combat macro and micro structural inequalities of poverty and gender. Groundwork also in the sense of having to work from scratch simultaneously on too many fronts: deconstructing dominant (including Western) ways of knowing while simultaneously inventing new ways that would enable ongoing struggles against neo-colonial neo-feudal interlocking forces as well as empowering feminist subjects and subjects-to-be. This then is how I understand Sobritcheas invocation of the various discussions of fragmented and disjointed identities women as persons unable to comprehend their objective as against their subjective interests versus as sleeping female Goliaths etc. (authors)