More wonderful food for thought from Deborah Cameron.
Note: this is post is a reworking/updating of a piece I wrote for Trouble & Strife magazine in 2014.
Remember Betty Friedan’s ‘problem that has no name’? Or Gloria Steinem recalling that in the 1960s no one talked about sexual harassment–not because it didn’t happen, but because ‘it was just called life’?Naming women’s experiences of oppression has always been an important political task. Though you don’t solve a problem just by giving it a name, naming it brings it more clearly into focus, making it easier to recognize, to analyse and to fight.
Feminists don’t always agree on what a problem should be called. We have arguments about terminology—about the difference between, say,‘prostitution’and‘sexwork’, or ‘gender-based violence’ and ‘male violence against women’—because we don’t think these are just empty labels. They are tools for making sense of the world, reflecting different understandings of what they name.
As times change…
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a rain and a gale 