Feminism: mothers and daughters
01.16.06 (1:45 am) [edit]To certain generation of women from suburbs, feminism is as it were their mother figures; someone's wanting to be validated as a feminist is same as seeking for a validation as 'the mother's daughter'. This is the idea Tracy Quan brought up in her interview in $pread magazine.
I have always thoght that the relationship or attachment/detachment women have with femminism has so much to do with thier relationship with their mothers. Then, 'surburban women', as Tracy Quan refers to, of certain generation apparently can and should be translated into other kinds of categorization depends on the chart they apply accordingly. If I develop the above, I wonder what the third world women's case would be. In the current and prevalent discourse, women of color and women from third world condition have been somehow handled as off the line of thought or treated in rather a twisted manner; the nature of the theory is after all designed to serve white women in the first world, and the rest ends up serving to their interest instead of benefit any of the structure.
The irony is that the voice like Tracy Quan comes from somewhere far from the mainstream feminism and paradoxically presents the hybrid of the line of thoughts, which might bring some fresh air in the dead end of the current discourse on sexworkers' rights and feminism. My impulse is that TQ is someone who is very conscious of human rights that tries to include men and women rather than pursuing only women's right and dismissing men's human rights. This makes me aware of something what has been overlooked. We female sexworkers tend to easily forget how many male escorts are out there working as we do and in need of protection of human rights as much as we do.