my feminist guilt list

I have been list-making in my SLEEP.

Lately, we are learning about feminist issues of unity, of intersecting oppressions, of race, of class, of location location location. In accordance, I feel it necessary to purge myself. so here it is, on the table: my feminist guilt list.

1) I am white
2) my family is middle class
3) I am university educated
3) There was a time where I once enjoyed sex and the city.
4) I believe that children are wonderbread.
5) I am bound, as we are all bound, by our history. I feel terribly sorry about that.
6) I do believe in Satre's 'look,' but only when I FEEL it. and I feel it. we're still being watched.

but I keep asking myself (another question that dogs my second undergrad) what am I going to do about this big, feminist mess? Am I the only one to feel this? Does this have another name? Is it right to be so subjective, so inverted?

as bell hooks (who is saving me from myself) rightly writes, there is no liberation based on 'I'; no collective movement based on 'everyone.' we cannot compare the struggles of women to the struggles of Aboriginal, or blacks or jews, or palestinians, or chinese, or any 'minority group' or those who experience classism, racism ageism, homophobia, oppression, everything. is there a point to contest who got more fucked over by institutions, industries, governments, social bodies, the media, the nuclear family, oppression, exclusion, everything.

I want action!

--- but first?
the feminist challenge of radical self-criticism: to confront the oppressor within. to confront the private lives, to confront experiences.

(read bell hooks.)