With so much jingoist rhetoric to rail against in the media and more forms of activism than ever to take up, especially in flag-waving New York City, forming a comprehensive response to the World Trade Center business isn't possible herein. Instead what follows is a litany of quotidian responses by a misbegotten feminist to that day and since:

I feared for my life in an acute way for a week straight, like when I've been stuck in a subway car or a relationship with a scary or abusive person. Physical vulnerability made me huddle in my apartment for almost a week. On the evening of the 12th I had plenty of company: 13 women sat in my tiny bedroom, eating dinner, offering stories of how we got through that day and divergent opinions about this scary incident. It was really the only consciousness-raising event I've been to in years.

Two days later I cried for the first time. It was when Bush was in town and military jets were loudly zooming overhead. I feared a resurgence of militarism and that it would be greatly supported.

The flag was quickly everywhere. People of color in my neighborhood, especially shop owners, posted them fearfully, acute to the racism already legitimized in anti-terrorist and jingoist rhetoric. When during a peace vigil on the 14th my neighbors sang religious songs and chanted "USA, USA", it made me feel very afraid, and I have palpable privileges. I later heard about the Union Square vigil, with banners of dissent, urging the government not to make a war out of this, and chants that exposed the hidden capitalist and racist agenda in making Afghanistan a war zone and Middle Easterns the enemy. Their song list including John Lennon's "Imagine". I think I might have been comforted there.

I can't cite the exact millions accumulated for victims' families---I have participated in a fundraiser myself---but the material existence of many New Yorkers with no connection to the WTC is currently terrible: there are 170,000 less jobs here, shelters are full, and, in December, 30,000 tapped out their welfare eligibility and were tossed into this bleak economic climate. There is no fundraiser for them.

More than 200 abortion clinics were sent "scores" of letters containing anthrax (or a powder resembling it) via Fed Ex. Again. But I couldn't find coverage in my local paper, um, the New York Times. The topic was obscured by layers of current events and sexist ideology that abortion clinics are not a part of the general public nor a national health concern, and that they are somehow complicit with this crime because providing abortions is controversial.

These tiny quotidian responses were informed by some things feminism does best---it's a philosophy that sees the relationship among types of oppression to hegemonic forms of power (like white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, nationalism, etc.). What surfaced in me post 9/11 was a quiet critique against forces which sometimes, when I am not reading my issues of The Nation, and when I am not scrambling to pay bills after rent, or juggling part-time school and full-time work, are very hard to see.

Wondering what Feminism has done for you lately?Or what you've done for it? In "The Feminism of Everyday Life", Melisse Gelula discusses the practices and perspectives of third wave feminists through many cultural incarnations---from the implicitly personal (why everyone I know is in therapy or writing a book about it?) to the egregiously political (how to get through the Bush presidency?), and from academic topics (my cubicle partner doesn't know who Judith Butler is and she makes more than me, or why did I go to grad school?) to acceptable forms of popular culture (why "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" matters?) and consumerism (why good shoes are essential).

© Melisse Gelula, 2002
All Rights Reserved

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