Feminism

While variously understood, “feminism,” in its Western contexts, usually means a belief that all human beings should enjoy the same political, economic, and social rights. As a “keyword,” feminism is a concept often misunderstood as signifying a genealogy solely of women’s rights and social, political, and economic advancement. This brief essay lays out the distortions that often attend initial or superficial engagements with feminism, specifically in African American studies, enabling a definition of feminism that ably skirts and negotiates those false avatars that seek to contain feminism to its least accurate meaning: a movement wholly about and for women.