A few weeks ago, I was perusing the world of Facebook, as I had nothing better to do during the long days of winter break, when I happened upon a website called 'Feminist Ryan Gosling'. The website featured pictures of Ryan Gosling with accompanying sayings like this one:

The website was originally made for a few students studying feminist theory--they needed a better way to remember the material, and so Feminist Ryan Gosling was born. The reason I'm bringing it up, the reason I made it the title of my blog is because in an interview, the founder, Danielle Henderson, admitted that the greatest challenge facing feminism today was that "...there's a distinct, active movement that tends to get blamed more than it gets praised and there's a distinct amount of people who agree with and trumpet feminist ideals, but aren't actually doing anything in their community. The fact that there's not enough of a connection to a movement is a big problem."

I thought her point was completely valid--and definitely extends beyond the bounds of feminism. Sure, we can spend all of our time complaining about issues, saying that 'this is to blame' or 'that is to blame,' but without actually taking any action--the problems can only grow. Nevertheless, there's a lot more at play here when she points out the lack of connection to the movement. After reading the Susan Gubar article about "What ails feminist criticism?" I was struck by precisely how much of feminism's history has played into that very problem. Gubar talks about the issues some feminists have of needing to make sure every single possible group of woman is included in discussions of equality--for fear of seeming hypocritical, racist, whatever you want to call it.

So by making an emphasis of including everyone, it should seem that there wouldn't be a problem of connection, right? Well, maybe not so much, as Gubar points out. "In keeping with Jouve's stance, not only some faculty but many students these days make obeisance to the necessity of considering (without subordinating) race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation in litanies that often translate into depressingly knee-jerk essays rejecting out-of-hand the speculations of a given literary or theoretical work simply because it neglects to discuss x (fill in the blank--bisexual Anglo-Pakistani mothers; the heterosexual, working-class, Jews-for-Jesus community of Nashville, and so forth). Too often, each text becomes a grist for a mill that proves the same intellectually vapid--though politically appalling--point that racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia reign supreme."

Phew. Sorry about that. It took me a few go-overs on that one to get what she was saying. Basically what Gubar was getting at was that through the emphasis of every possible grouping of woman, we are getting more and more distracted from the purpose we originally sought--equality to men in political, social and economic terms (I know this is a pretty abbreviated definition, but lets go with it for now.). And beyond that we're becoming/became/are a disjointed movement. I suppose a rough comparison would be to that of a dismantled car. While all of the parts are there, and in theory, we can see that its purpose is to propel one to the next destination, it lays useless in its separation. Feminism has all of the right components to be an incredible movement, but it is too disjointed to propel itself forward.

And so, in good full-circle form, that is why I think there isn't enough connection to the movement, like Danielle said. How can we expect people to connect to something that is hardly connected itself?

More on this next time!