Feminism and 'primacy' of struggles

For one, I don't believe in the primacy of struggles and hierarchy of oppressions. There is no ivory-tower of power from which all the oppressions emerge. There is no converging point for all the oppressions too. Depending on your existential identity you will face a primary struggle of your own. There can't be a criteria or a lens from where to come for a unified view of oppression and hence a resistance. What may appear to you as trivial issue may well be dehumanizing experience for someone else. Directing the discussion to another kind of oppression when someone is discussing the oppression they are facing because of their existential identity is dismissing their pain and rejecting their struggle.

This hierarchy of struggles can never be universal, you have to give right of universal subjectivity to everyone. While I said that there can't be a converging point for all oppressions, the bodies and lives of women represent the totailty of oppression under the systems of patriarchy, objectifying capitalism, chest-beating hyper chauvinistic and jingoistic nationalism and using the vocabulary of muscle-power and male strength the defining parameters of patriotism. You may fight any struggle and cause outside but because of a thing called male-privilege which the patriarchy has blessed you with, you in some form are or were an oppressor to many women. Of-course you are not guilty by being a man but you will be if you tell women that their struggle for equality is secondary or is derivative of national or economic liberation or development.

A little empathy may serve us all well. While it is impossible to feel the reality of someone else, through empathetic imagination we can try and see the world from perspective of the 'other'. It is always, us, the men, and the rest, because of patriarchy. Your struggle is important but 'their' struggle is mainly dependent upon men changing their social and cultural attitude. If you reject femisnim and struggle of women just because they don't fit into your struggle, remember that you will only reduce your own struggle to a disconnected bubble within an infnite floating bathtub.