EDIT: Oops. Clearly I need a refresher course in just how to use blogger. This was supposed to be over on my personal blog and not up here. Sorry folks! I'll move that over now

All this talk about the different waves and movements of feminism has pinpointed for me one of the few things I genuinely dislike, and that's the fact that so much feminist theorizing is done in a way that makes it completely inaccessible to those people it could most help.

I think the critique Tong presented on postmodern feminism was largely valid. I agree that some of what makes it confusing is that people aren't used to thinking outside the gender binary, but there's more confusing language here than just "cis" or "trans". A large part of the rhetoric of postmodern feminism along with other movements is a language that means little or nothing to the average person. New words are used, or old words are used in strange new ways. I'm not saying this is entirely a bad thing; sometimes it's downright necessary. To describe a new concept, a new ideology, obviously some new language is going to come into play, but it seems to me that at times, feminist writers are over-complicating their language simply to look smart.

And maybe that does make them look kinda smart, but to me, it also makes them look like assholes, and more than that, it makes them look like they don't really care about the people who feminism could most help.

I'm not saying there's no place at all for this kind of purely academical feminism, but I think feminism could do a lot more good if it made itself more accessible to the masses. The fact of the matter is, many people haven't had college-level gender studies courses, or any college education at all, and for them, feminist theories may be even more crucial than to those of us sitting around, arguing gender politics in a classroom. And to make feminism an open, accessible resource for people who want to change the system they live in, the language of feminism must be as close to the language that people speak day-in, day-out as possible.