I miss everything about being a student except for the parts I don’t miss.

Basically, I miss friends and being free and being surrounded by creativity and being young and dumb. Ah!

Wait, what was the question?!
Long story short, I’m really not sure what the best approach for feminism is, either within academia or in the wider world. I think what feminism needs to do is to emphasise human equality, beyond gender or any other arbitrary division. It’s unfortunate that getting beyond gender-motivated discrimination is so difficult, and also so necessary. It’s unfortunate that Australia’s female Prime Minister (who represents a very real, pragmatic shift in how women are viewed publicly and in the political sphere) is increasingly considered to be a bit of a sad joke. It’s unfortunate that there are people who will say that Julia Gillard was a lousy PM because she is a woman, who make that a causal relationship, instead of saying that Julia Gillard was a lousy PM and just happened to also be female.

This is mostly just brain mush. I’m really not ‘proposing’ anything. I think feminism more or less knows what it’s doing, even if it does sometimes lose sight of it. I just want to keep a few things in clear view.

“Feminism, in order to be a cohesive project, needs to consider representations of femininity beyond the material conditions of women’s oppression. You can’t hope to change people’s behaviour without changing how they think.”

I love this idea, I really do. I see this as a major project that academic feminism is currently undertaking. There, the methodology is fairly well codified, read, discuss, write, etc. What methods do you propose feminist use outside of the walls of academia?