Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune want something from you. Their demand isn’t as impossible to achieve as you may have been led to think. In fact, they go to great lengths to show you how other women are already doing it and how you can, too! So, what do they want?
In their book Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement, Redfern and Aune demonstrate the vitality and relevance of contemporary feminism, rescuing the term from negative and unsubstantiated stigmas. What they deliver to their readers is a revitalized pride in the identity of Feminists–women and men who work toward challenging and dismantling patriarchal systems and attitudes–and an urgent desire to act out. The book identifies the sexual/social narratives that rule women’s and men’s sexual/social behaviors. While many of us merely react to these narratives, Redfern and Aune point out that “feminists want to avoid limitations on what’s considered appropriate behavior for each gender” (50). Feminism, Redfern and Aune point out, isn’t merely “still alive”– it’s an essential movement in human rights.
One of their fundamental concerns is to communicate the need for attitude shifts. Changing they way a person approaches assumptions about “expected” behaviors validates behaviors and identities which exist beyond the restrictive scope of patriarchally-mandated norms.While this seems like a mouthful of theory, Reclaiming the F Word demonstrates just how accessible enacting social change can be.
At the end of each chapter is a “Take Action!” box that offers readers five ways to participate in feminism; each chapter’s “Take Action!” suggestions contain at least one invitation to challenge/question “normal” behaviors. For example, in chapter two, “Sexual Freedom and Choice”: “When you hear people call a woman a ‘slut’ or claim that men are uncontrollably ruled by their penis, point out the double standard” (75). Or in chapter three, “An End to Violence Against Women”: “Challenge messages you hear that imply that violence against sex workers is acceptable, inevitable or less important than other kinds of violence” (105). For Redfern and Aune, feminist social action is taken when individual women and men actively participate in reshaping the world about them. And that individual action enables successful community actions.
As the title suggests, Reclaiming the F Word is both a personal and a public act, an individual and a political choice. The connection between the personal and the political has long been one of feminism’s foundational claims. Redfern’s and Aune’s ”New Feminism,” however, stresses the strangely intimate connection between women’s and men’s choices in one nation with those of women and men in other nations and cultures. The book claims that “female bodies are battlegrounds” (18), and each chapter demonstrates the accuracy of the claim. Whether deconstructing ageism, sexism, impossible body ideals, the “trans” body, consumer behaviors which rely largely on the exploitation of the female bodies of women of color, the sex worker’s body, the (post)pregnant body, or the politicized female body, Redfern and Aune point out that economic, social, governmental, and political policies the world-over are shaped by and upon the female body, its supposed “lacks” and “limitations,” and the transference of those physical expectations onto the personality or intelligence of women themselves.
Redfern and Aune have crafted an intensely readable cultural study/handbook, a combination of studies and personal narratives, analyses of current trends in global government and businesses and excerpts of women’s and men’s lived experiences. What makes this book such an empowering text for feminists is its insistence on data and individual stories. Often, social movement books universalize experiences and desires which only reflect a small portion of the population: they emphasize data and averages over an individual voice or story.
The book does theorize from a Western, “developed nation” history and perspective, however, and its findings may favor the bias; but rather than ignore the obvious or treat it as a short-coming, Redfern and Aune seem to have crafted the text as “one voice in many,” challenging also the assumption that “developed nations” are somehow homogenous arenas of culture and ethnicity. The book itself demonstrates third wave feminism’s desire for multiplicity and for self-evaluation, grounding contemporary issues in first and second wave feminist movements, pointing out clearly where current feminist debates conflict with one another, and suggesting the culpability of women in the exploitation and oppression of other women and themselves.
Reclaiming the F Word is a celebration of feminist empowerment, not as a nostalgic nod to a long, lost and irremediable past, but as a lived present, in flux and adaptive. The new feminist movement, Redfern and Aune show, is a complex organism rightly illustrating a variety of approaches, demands, concerns, and actions to fight perhaps the only universal truth: the world of men is built upon the bodies of women. In the struggle for human rights, women are still petitioning for legitmate personhood. Rather than lament and blame, Redfern and Aune inspire and encourage women and men to insist on the communication of a vast knowledge-base about women-centered issues which, by the book’s end, are shown to be inextricably intertwined with the social, political, economic, and religious lives of all people. Reclaiming the F Word challenges its readers to take back more than the word; it emboldens its readers to change the world.
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