does not have to mean to be worth less-than.
Feminist and anti-racist critiques of the idea of a common undifferentiated humanity and the claim to humanist universalism, were raised from the eighteenth century onwards, for instance by Olympe de Gouges (1791) on behalf of women, and by Toussaint Louverture (2011) on behalf of enslaved and colonized people. They both reacted against the flagrant violation of the very human rights asserted in the French Universal Declaration of 1789. They criticized respectively the exclusion of women from civic and political rights and the inhumane violence of slavery and colonial dispossession. All claims to universalism lose credibility when confronted by such abuses of power. Both de Gouges and Louverture paid a heavy price for their daring: Olympe was promptly dispatched to the guillotine while Toussaint was deposed by the French imperial army. So much for universal brotherhood – and of sisterhood nothing more shall be said for a few centuries (Morgan, 1970).
The humanist motif that women’s liberation is human liberation, and that women’s and LGBTQ+ people’s rights are human rights, is an empowering humanist mantra with an instant emotional and intellectual appeal. The same message, ‘women’s rights are human rights’, was proclaimed by Hillary Clinton at the United Nations ‘Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development and Peace’ in Beijing, China, in 1995, and was reiterated during her unsuccessful presidential campaign. They are echoed on a planetary scale by multitudes of women and LGBTQ+ people, dehumanized people of colour and colonized others, whose humanity was historically not granted. And yet they carried on and built their worlds. From Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, to Sojourner Truth’s ‘ain’t I a woman too?’, from the Riot Girls to Pussy Riot, via the Guerrilla Girls and the cyberfeminists, the Xeno feminists, the Gaia ecofeminist activists, and multiple others, the humanist aspiration to dignity and inclusion proves inspirational.
Liberal feminists trust the liberating powers of the capitalist market economy to achieve these aims, but are also driven by a social conscience and a sense of responsibility, as one of its historical figures, Betty Friedan, argued in 1963. Feminist politics, in this view, is about organization and procedural tactics to correct a flexible social and economic system that is open to improvements. An underlying optimism supports the political gradualism of the liberal branch of the feminist movement: egalitarian changes will come and equality will eventually be achieved if women and men work towards this goal. Patriarchal power is not a structural notion for liberal feminism, the focus being the unfair distribution of power positions and relations between individualized men and women. The emphasis falls entirely on individualism and personal empowerment.
Many twentieth-century feminists took a more radical stand and were sceptical of the lofty liberal humanist ideals, as they were unequally implemented in world history. This resulted in the systemic exclusion of those who did not conform to that dominant norm. The injustice of these violent exclusions led the disqualified others to question the norm and reject the discriminatory practices, on the basis of their lived experience. They called humanism to account over and over again. Their rebellions voiced the concrete demands and the political urgency of specific empirical referents such as women, LGBTQ+ people, Black, decolonial and Indigenous subjects. But their critique also contained blueprints for the improvement of the human condition as a whole. They produced counter-notions of the human and of humanity, in non-masculinist, non-anthropocentric, non-heteronormative and non-Eurocentric terms. In other words, they acted as feminist, cross-species, gender non-conforming, polysexual and planetary subjects.
Feminist critiques of patriarchal posturing were formulated, in the wake of Beauvoir, by key philosophers like Alison Jaggar (1983), Genevieve Lloyd (1984), Jean Grimshaw (1986), Sandra Harding (1986, 1991), Hill Collins (1991), Jaggar and Young (1998) and many others. The allegedly abstract ideal of ‘Man’ as a symbol of classical humanity was brought down to earth and revealed as very much a male of the species. As the French poststructuralist feminists claimed: it is a he (Irigaray, 1985a [1974]; Cixous, 1986). Or rather, as we read in the epigraph to this chapter in Gertrude Stein’s merciless words: ‘He he he he and he and he and and he and he …’. The triumph of this abstract masculinity (Hartsock, 1987) entails the erasure of the feminine, especially as embodied by women (Irigaray, 1985b [1977]) and LGBTQ+ people. More recent feminist criticism of the limitations of European humanism aims at delinking the human subject from the universalistic posture and debunking his narcissistic delusions of grandeur (Braidotti, 1991, 1994). As late as 2007, MacKinnon raised the question ‘are women human?’. Although MacKinnon’s definition of women was criticized for implying almost exclusively white, middle-class females (Harris, 1990) and upholding a unitary category of women (Braidotti, 1991, 1994; Butler, 1990, 1997), it remains a highly relevant question. Feminist phenomenologists were especially vocal in rejecting universalism (Sobchack, 2004; Young, 2004) by emphasizing the carnal nature of thought, and racialized theory in the flesh (Moraga and Anzaldua, 1981), and hence the embedded and embodied structure of subjectivity (Braidotti, 2011a, 2011b).
This particular vision of the human as male and white is, moreover, assumed to be European, a full citizen of a recognized polity, head of a heterosexual family and legally responsible for its children (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977, 1987; Braidotti, 1994). And finally, ‘he’ is also able-bodied and handsome, according to the Renaissance parameters of Vitruvian symmetry and aesthetic perfection (Braidotti 2013), as critical disability studies point out (Shildrick, 2002, 2012; Goodley et al., 2018; Murray, 2020). Feminists refuse to reduce feminism to homologation or integration into this Eurocentric masculine standard of sameness and offer more situated and hence more accurate analyses of the power relations upheld by the humanist paradigm.
Feminism, in its first, second and multiple successive waves, has achieved relative success in terms of equality. Viewed from basic emancipatory expectations, feminism has worked wonders in some quarters and has laboured to ensure that some women acquire full citizenship status. The basic requirements of a feminist programme of social emancipation, formulated in the 1970s in terms of equal pay, equal educational opportunities, socially funded child-care, access to contraception and abortion, have been partially accepted, if not fully achieved. The pursuit of equality can be documented with hard data.
Sociometrics provide examples worth reading. Salary equality has not been achieved even in advanced liberal democracies, despite a quantitative increase in the presence of women in the labour market. The disparity rates remain high: the average gender pay gap in the EU is 16.2 per cent, while the gender overall earnings gap in the EU is a staggering 39.6 per cent.6 Worldwide, the average gender pay gap is reported to be 15.6 per cent based on standard measurements and 18.8 per cent based on factor-weighed measurements by the International Labour Organization.7 At this rate, as Laurie Anderson wittily suggested in one of her memorable albums, it will be the year 3642 before women actually achieve salary parity.8
Across the EU today,9 26.8 per cent of ministers and 27.7 per cent of members of parliament are women, and world-wide on average, 18 per cent of ministers and 24 per cent of parliamentarians are women.10 At the time of writing, the presidents of the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank are women (respectively Kristalina Georgieva and Christine Lagarde), as is the President of the European Union (Ursula von der Leyen). From Germany to Nepal and Serbia to New Zealand, quite a few countries now have women presidents or prime ministers (respectively Angela Merkel, Bidya Devi Bhandari, Ana Brnabić and Jacinda Ardern), some of whom are quite media-savvy and Instagram-able. The young prime minister of Finland, Sanna Marin, is the happily heterosexual daughter of a lesbian couple. With Nancy Pelosi as Speaker in the American Congress, and Kamala Harris, the first woman of colour to serve as Vice-President of the United States, things have never looked better for women in politics.
Women nowadays can be financially autonomous and own property, although they still own less than 10 per cent of the world’s wealth.11 Just as importantly, girls and women in most regions have secured access to higher education, although the problem of female illiteracy in the world remains serious, as Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai’s work shows. Many women have fulfilled Virginia Woolf’s (1980 [1930]) dream
