Yes, it turns out there are "feminists" who support Sarah Palin. Which makes as much sense as if the Civil Rights movement drew its inspiration from the image of Uncle Tom. There are even questions about whether they have inflitrated the leadership of NOW (National Organization for Women).
I can't even begin to describe the horror my friends and I experienced when first presented with this eyelash-batting, winking, giggly, profoundly patriarchal excuse for a female politician. Now every chauvinist in the country had the perfect justification for why women have no place in politics.
When the Republicans tried to sell her as some kind of a conservative embodiment of feminism, I just laughed. After her disgusting anti-choice speeches, her insistence on abstinence-only sex ed, and her blatant use of her own daughter for political advancement, who would believe it? Turns out some "feminists" would.
How anybody can be anti-choice and still call themselves a feminist is beyond me. If you believe that a woman's body belongs to the state and can be policed and legislated as if it were some kind of a reproductive machine, just be honest about it and don't call yourself a feminist. How anybody can look at Palin and not cringe with shame that somebody this silly, ignorant and pathetic would even be in politics, is incomprehensible.
The discussion of whether the leadership of NOW has been hijacked by Palin supporters is irrelevant to me. If there is even one Palin supporter in NOW, then it's not an organization that can represent me or do anything for me.
4 comments:
They were very active leading up to the election: I blogged about them a lot then at Palin PUMA Watch.
At least one NOW leader endorsed Palin, I forget which one now (it's been months). I think she was from the California chapter.
Most Palin "feminists", IMO, are white and are primarily motivated by racism. Many are also older and seem to feel a lot of spite towards older women (a few explicitly stated that since young women supposedly betrayed HRC and threw the primaries to Obama, they no longer were willing to care about young women's issues like reproductive rights). I expect they're still lionizing Palin and acting as if a McCain/Palin administration would have been a peaceful pro-gay liberal paradise despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, but honestly I can't bring myself to read their toxic bullshit any more.
That should be "a lot of spite towards younger women". Oops.
You might be interested in reading Nancy Fraser's new contribution in the New Left Review: "Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History". It seems that Fraser esplores the intersection between contemporary feminist discourse and neo-liberalism. I have not had a chance to read the article yet (online registration is needed and I am far away from any decent library), but my intuition is that you might want to have a look at it.
It's funny that an article about somebody as silly as Palin resulted in such intelligent responses. Thank you, guys!
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