q-sputnik

I find the ‘white middle-class woman’ concept problematic and I struggle to identify with it. It is so common in the social sciences and so widely used in articles, books and blogs as if ‘white middle-class’ constitutes a homogenous category that is clear and acceptable by all who choose to belong to it. But to me it seems that the category connotes more than race, class and gender. It explicitly places race, class and gender as understood in privileged western nations and according to the problems and conflicts these nations have been faced up with.

In such a throroughly class-segragated nation as Britain, class has very different meanings to a country like Greece for example. So does ‘whiteness’, it has very different meanings to countries that never in modern times were colonies or colonized. Gender has also different cultural meanings, a woman is not just a woman in any part of the world and this should not need much explanation.

I thus find the mere term ‘white middle-class’ reductionist and it says nothing for me, it apparently excludes me because it does not respect my difficulty in communicating through it. I can’t be middle class because I have not grown in a country that defined that term, I have not lived in a suburban house and my father was not wearing a suit at work. I cannot be white because racism in my country is performed on other shades of white. And really, I can’t just be woman, patriarchy in britain with everyday news of girls and women raped murdered and buried, is not patriarchy with the family as the strongest institution as things are in greece.

I guess I am now only arguing against cultural assimilation and am in a way reducing different understandings to nationality whilst in other posts I have argued against my identification with all things greek. that’s not the only thing that burns me but it has in a way been eating me all year round- especially when sitting for example in seminars that are built around a particular theme that I am so not familiar with that I can only be blatantly excluded, and forced to feel inadequate just because of cultural reasons-even when supposedly complying with the rest of the rules of belonging, I can pass for white middle class, maybe not queer enough though- and, yes, it is true, the BBC is not the channell all nations worldwide watch, fucking ‘buffy’ is not what I’ve been busy with for the last evenings of my life, ’sopranos’ is not what I had in mind about media literacy at all.

so really, it takes more than these three words to define what sort of woman and far more to define what kind of feminist.