Canary Coalition

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I get the feeling that if I wasn’t already adamantly a feminist, this wouldn’t have convinced me, which really surprised me and was not what I expected out of this read. I love the sampling of a small part of this book in Flawless by Beyoncé, of course, but I didn’t find any really clearly spelled out arguments. The only reason I agree about some of her comments on cultural expectations of women are because I already thought them, not because the arguments were laid out in ways that were utterly convincing. I’m trying to appreciate the tone and form that this book takes as something casual and light, though, rather than academic.

The part that could be relatable is that Adichie does provide an international perspective that seems fresh and new, speaking a lot about her upbringing and life in Nigeria. However, her perspective is not a transnational one, and definitely not intersectional enough. One of Adichie’s prime examples is that women are excluded from certain jobs or have a hard time climbing up the corporate ladder, and that CEOs are almost always men. But why should women aspire to be CEOs at all? A CEO is only successful by exploiting labor, and increasingly, women’s labor around the world. There was no class analysis. There’s something wrong when women aspire to equality with men in institutions that are inherently oppressive and violent.

There was also a heavy conflation of sex and gender. Adichie identified herself as a female more than as a woman. Even cisgendered women need to understand the difference between sex and gender, as the latter is what we’re socialized into and/or perform regardless of female or male-bodiedness. We can’t identify as women just because we have vaginas, or identify as women because of the way that we reproduce, even if we’re cisgendered. Gender is about much more than that and feminism is more about understanding relationships of power and how patriarchy/misogyny serves them. That heavy conflation of sex and gender is what makes this work trans-exclusionary and adds fuel to what I think are the reasons Adichie has gotten criticism from the trans community when she has spoken on other topics.

I guess you could say that she never intended for this work to be intersectional. You could argue that our expectations of her should be different and we shouldn’t measure her up to the kinds of conversations that are happening within academic feminism, because that’s not her background. I get that, but at this point, it’s kind of not okay to write or talk about feminism in a way that’s not intersectional, because it’s not like we’re not centering gender in our discussions, just because we need to be aware of class, race, and queer lenses. This work proves why an understanding of intersectionality is so necessary, because we need to be able to see the matrix of domination. Otherwise we’ll continue thinking that feminism is about women’s equality with men within the law and within institutions that are problematic to begin with, instead of challenging the ways that power works and wanting to change the ways that we measure women’s worth in society. We don’t need more upper/middle class feminism - that kind of feminism especially should not be replicated in other parts of the world where feminists are often considered too “Western” or going against their culture for challenging gender roles.