A definition of feminism

Here is my definition of feminism, from my place as a man: it is for me a movement of thought and action for equal rights between women and men, whose effects also go beyond.

“Feminism” is a word that scares many, whether you are a woman, a man, or whatever, because it promises changes in power. Feminism, contrary to a received idea aiming to discredit it, is not in my opinion a struggle of women against men nor a will to destabilize society, it simply questions the patriarchal system of domination, which is actually detrimental to all. Feminisms, because their diversity in history is immense, are in my opinion egalitarian political projects, which are based on lucid analyses of the secular inequalities between women and men, which otherwise seem to be a matter of normality, if not of the natural order. This is why feminisms are disturbing.

We have been taught from childhood that the organization of the world has always been based on inequality between women and men. To succeed in thinking the world differently is first of all an internal revolution, a deep individual journey, as much in the habits of thought as in the daily relationships or the political choices. The feminist struggles have finally, in the West in the 20^th century, led to essential changes in the laws. However, the road to equality is still long. I quote historian Michelle Perrot in her latest book “Le temps des féminismes” (co-authored with Eduardo Castillo, Paris, Grasset, 2023):

The analyses, the concepts have been refined, in a vivacious historical and literary production lately. Progress has been made, in the law sometimes more than in mores, representations or thought being particularly resistant to change. They have been made within a restricted perimeter, especially in the West. The “male domination” has retreated, with resurgences that mark the depth of a largely unconscious resistance. In 2021, on a billboard, one could see on the left a woman, on the right a man. On the left, one could still read: “she is listening”, and on the right: “he decides”...

All this constitutes a tumultuous and exciting unfinished story, constantly restarted, and with an uncertain outcome.

According to Heide Goettner-Abendroth, a contemporary philosopher and anthropologist, the world has only been structured around patriarchal power of domination for about 5000 years. Previous societies were globally egalitarian in all aspects (called “matriarchal”). Contemporary feminisms are, in my opinion, the central facet of ecological questioning, in the general sense of the term (nature, morals, society, work, art, industry, etc.), which draws the possible future for our societies sick of the logic of domination.

Jackie Buet, director of the International Women’s Film Festival of Créteil and Val-de-Marne, states in response to my elaborations:

As Geneviève Fraisse says so well the time of the word of the women must be also the time of the listening.

In the cultural field, precisely it is there the central node of the actions to be led. Because the symbolic governs our lives and our values through all the precious or sacred moments: birth, adolescence, marriage, motherhood and fatherhood, illness, death. The symbolic is what permeates religions and establishes the values and periods of an existence: the first and great stories of the human adventure. Religious, political, sports systems and even the arts determine us.

If we want to talk about arts, we have a boulevard to define the resistance that must be done because from all times and still today arts (literature, painting, plastic arts, cinema and audiovisual, digital...) have been captured by dominant and macho systems. Machismo is the very model of capitalism that puts women, children, people and nature under domination for the sake of power.

I would like to emphasize that feminism is not war and it is not sad, but it is the conquest of freedom for women and the invention of another way of living and sharing the public space and the arts.