Ashley Tellis faults Laxmi Murthy for mischaracterising the history of the feminism and defends the new spaces of liberation feminists of late have created
The tradition of Women's Day is not about symbolism but about working women uniting to fight as women and workers. Nothing about it is obscured in the 'mist of time' (sic). There are very specific records of how March 8 came to be celebrated in the Western world as Women's Day, from the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire protest in the US to peace rallies against WWI in Europe.
'Gender' is not a 'sanitised' term and nor does it take away the reality of women and transgender people bearing the brunt of patriarchy. Indeed, the inclusion of transgender people is a cause of the change in terminology to 'gender,' as is the inclusion of gay men, transvestites, and many other categories, including the category of heterosexual masculinity, premised on the insight that is as much in need of interrogation (indeed perhaps more because it is the hegemonic force) as any other gendered formation. So, the use of gender as a term is precisely to recognise that.
Nothing has taken away the raison d'être of the Women's Day celebration. Murthy conflates very different sites of engagement in her generally anti-academic and anti-intellectual account of feminism. Pitting the mythical common woman against mythical 'others' talking 'about going beyond the category of 'woman' itself' is a ludicrous and unfair conflation of levels of engagement and discourse. Feminists who have urged us to question the category of 'woman' – Judith Butler, Denise Riley, Joan Scott, to name three – are the first to recognise the need to fight on the streets as women and indeed have all fought and continue to fight as feminists and women on the street around various causes. However, they also ask us to philosophically examine the limited and patriarchal conception of 'woman' as category in an attempt to precisely get women to a feminist and more fluid and liberating conception of themselves.
