Community: A Story

We are all part of communities. Sometimes those communities are defined as neighborhoods, school districts, religious affiliations, club memberships, athletic teams, the members of your major with whom you spend an immeasurable amount of time during your studies. Sometimes your family is your community, or your friends.

A community can be anything you want it to be. However, you can't pick any of the members in the "communities" listed above. You definitely can't pick your family, and you can't choose how that influences who you become.

The feminist movement is another community. While we don't always get along, and some of us want to change one thing, and the others another thing, it's important to take time and reflect; to remember that really, we're all in this together. You may want equal pay and I may want the right to identify as whatever gender I prefer and be respected as such, but all of this has come from a common foundation. Typically, that's what a community is - a group of people with a common foundation. While they share their commonalities, they also have tensions. This was a big part of the discussion today in the Queer Spirituality group I'm a part of. Tensions between religious denominations, tensions between being queer-identified and religious, tensions between who we were and who we are.

So what happens when the tensions in our lives and our communities begin tearing us in two? What happens when we realize that we are something, someone, more than we initially thought, and the people we love begin rejecting us because we are something different? Some people try to blame themselves when they are rejected by their community or excommunicated by family or their traditions. Some try to blame those rejecting them. I don't believe either of these is correct. We find something new.

We have no control over who we become. We can't change it and we can't take it back and we can't turn it around. We can't blame ourselves for that, or for the discomfort and discontent it may cause others. At the same time, we have to recognize that the normalcy found in commonalities is a part of the world of social construction we live in. We are all socialized, or trained, to "know" normal from different, so when we see something that is out of the little box of correctness (like a female Rabbi, a boy with a Barbie, or a flamboyant homosexual), we feel accosted and assaulted. How right of us. The only reason this happens is because we honestly don't know any better.

The purpose of the feminist community is to correct this injustice. I see it as one of the communities that took me in, even when my home communities had rejected me. Even with the seemingly incompatible aspects of my identity, I found a new communal home.

You can see feminism as a women's movement, but in all reality, it is so much more than that. It focuses on economic, legal, political, religious, social and environmental disadvantages and inequalities as they apply to women, yes, but also as they apply to African Americans, Asian Americans, European Americans, Jews, Gentiles, Muslims, Native Americans, men, alternatively-identified, and whomever else you can imagine. It might be better (and more truthfully) identified as "humanism," but that term was already taken. In this way, the communities that make up the feminist movement are some of the strongest and most diverse ones you will ever encounter. You can't pick which members make them up but you can definitely learn something from everyone, even if you don't like them. I'm aware that this isn't a specifically "feminist" post, but I've had community and the concept of it on my mind a lot lately and felt as though I needed to get my thoughts out there before my head exploded.