I'M OF NO GENDER

AN OPINION

BY FANNY MALINEN

Fanny Malinen is a student activist. She has been active in the Occupy movement since its start in October 2011.

Being an activist can be frustrating. All too often movements that are supposed to be progressive end up reproducing existing privileges. This may either be because a focus on greater aims - such as overcoming the deeply unequal structures of capitalism - obscures our vision from everyday challenges or because, sadly, that there is a certain trade-off between efficiency and democracy. 

One of the great challenges in horizontal movements is to recognise power structures whilst aiming at their elimination. Mirroring the liberal capitalist illusion of a neutral ‘market citizen’, pretending that everyone is equal and has a voice, is obviously a fallacy that only serves to reinforce privilege. It should not come as a surprise that when everyone is given a space to speak, it is often white men who feel the most confident to use that space. One of the great challenges of overcoming privilege is how to make privileged people recognise this.

Feminist – mainstream feminist, that is – responses however have rarely left me much more satisfied. For me, discussing female participation in a women’s caucus is unsatisfactory, because it by nature excludes some groups from the conversation. 

I don’t really identify with my gender. Every time someone calls me a woman I feel they must have gotten something wrong. I’m definitely not a man either – if the gender binary was more flexible, who knows how I’d identify. But currently the fact that I happen to live in a female body means that the rest of the world places me in the ‘woman’ category and therefore expects me to meet certain attributes – and that makes feminism an issue for me.

This is obviously not to say that self-identifying women should not have a space to discuss issues that concern them – whether simply for sharing experiences or as a springboard for a wider treatment of those issues. The problem is that many feminist women – or men – just don’t get that mainstream feminism is not the right kind of feminism for everyone.

There is an experience I assume most women have come across if they are anything like confident in speaking in public. I call it the ‘being the woman on the panel’ experience. Most times I have been asked to speak on a panel or an interview, the notion has been there: it would be good to have a female voice. But here it comes: I am not a female voice. I am my own voice and reducing me to one aspect of my being is far from empowering. 

Again, of course, we need representation and equality, but the way to address this has to be to ask the fundamental questions behind inequality. What is it that gives rise to patriarchy and makes it so difficult to overcome even in a setting that greatly values participation and democracy? This of course goes for any type of privilege and any type of socially constructed artificial categories.  

This is why I cannot see feminism without challenging the prevalent understanding of gender as absolute and binary. 

Dividing us is what the current capitalist system is doing very well to ensure its survival: it fits us all in boxes that have different interests but the common aim to buy our way to happiness. Only by stepping out of those boxes and seeing the nuanced and layered characters of privilege and power can we start working towards greater equality and democracy.