Lena Chen

So, Women’s History Month is now officially over and we have raised just shy of $14,000 on Indie Go Go over the course of our fundraiser for Bitch Magazine. That’s amazing!

We’ve also spent the week playing host to invited bloggers from all corners of the web who have contributed to the Feminist Portrait Project’s “click” moment blog-a-thon. Don’t ask me how I organized this — I’ve been pulling all-nighters and near-all-nighters all week to finish deadlines while traveling! Have to say, though: the payoff is amazing. I’m so pleased that so many folks contributed their stories, and I really like the fact that people took the idea of the “anti-click” moment and ran with it. Here’s the introduction I wrote to the carnival:

In 1971, Ms. Magazine wrote of “the click! of recognition, that parenthesis of truth around a little thing that completes the puzzle of reality in women’s minds—the moment that brings a gleam to our eyes and means the revolution has begun.” Forty years later, for better or worse, those clicks are still going off. Only today, the trigger is sometimes feminism itself.

Despite organizing Feminist Coming Out Day and the Feminist Portrait Project, an awareness campaign started at Harvard University and now at 15 colleges nationwide, I question whether consciousness raising alone is enough to end gendered oppression. Any attempt to turn the personal into the political seems to invariably amplify the voices of the privileged, while muffling those without the influence of capital or whiteness or what have you. While white suburban housewives plotted escapes from the domestic sphere during women’s lib, their poor and uneducated counterparts had little choice but to work for economic survival. Today, we point to female CEOs and politicians as signs of progress and indicators of feminism’s success, all the while discounting the women whom they exploit as workers and oppress as constituents. Any vocal women’s rights supporter can relate to the frustration of confronting a hip, young progressive who insists, “I’m not a feminist, but …” yet what about those who refuse to label their politics “feminist” because the movement has failed to represent them?

The Feminist Portrait Project seeks to explore and reinvent the definition of the iconic “click” moment by introducing the concept of the “anti-click,” the realization of the limitations and shortcomings of the movement in its often exclusionary manifestation in the West. While many of our participating bloggers in this week’s blog-a-thon will be tackling the Ms. definition of a “click” moment, we challenge them to also critique the institutionalized forms of feminist activism and the nonprofit industrial complex, which sometimes silence and even harm marginalized people and their purported constituency. Our goal is to offer a fuller picture of contemporary feminism and acknowledge both its triumphs and failures to start a dialogue about where to go from here.

If, in fact, “one little click turns on a thousand others”, as the inaugural issue of Ms. suggested, then what possibilities might abound if we turn inward to examine our own privilege, to question how our political priorities reflect our backgrounds, to force ourselves to confront the possibility that much of what feminism has accomplished has been on the backs of or at the expense of women it claims to help? A movement incapable of self-criticism and reflection is unlikely to survive with its values intact. In an age when the relevancy of feminism has become more contested than ever, let us resist the temptation to be defensive and instead take the opportunity to listen to those critics who we should be counting among our allies. Today, this is our click. This is our moment of truth.

Check out all the submissions to the Feminist Portrait Project Blog Carnival at Bitch Magazine. We’ve got everything from feminist gamers to Betty Dodson to Ms. writers to academics to teenagers and college students! These are really amazing stories. Please contribute your own :)