Quoting Christina Ho <Christina


 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
‘If most men are against us, can we call ourselves feminists?’1: 
young people’s views of feminism—east and west2
 

Chilla Bulbeck, University of Adelaide 

 

Introduction 

Based on a ten-nation study funded by the Australian Research Council, this paper 

suggests the value of studies which compare feminisms of the ‘east’ and ‘west’, and of 

the ways young people (in this case) respond to the discourses of gender equity and 

women’s development in their countries. I argue that there are clear gender differences 

in each sample, women in general being much more supportive of feminism than men, 

 
PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies Vol. 3, no. 2 July 2006 
ISSN: 1449-2490 
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal 

                                                 
1 Female, school student, Beijing 140171680. 
2 Acknowledgements: I have benefited from feedback on interpretation of my results from audiences in 
New Delhi (thanks to Patricia Uberoi), Mumbai (thanks to Veena Poonarcha), Perth (thanks to Krishna 
Sen) and Tokyo (Ueno Chizuko, Yui Daizaburo, Toshiko Ellis and my colleages in the Centre for Pacific 
and American Studies, Tokyo University); thanks also to Meera Kosambi for enlightening conversations 
and hospitality in Pune; and most recently the two anonymous reviewers who helped me work out what I 
really wanted to say and how to say it.  My thanks go to the participants in all the localities involved in 
this research and to my local researchers,  Dou Wei in Beijing; Suryono Gentut in Yogyakara; Alok 
Ranjan Jha in New Delhi; Parul Khampara in Mumbai; Phung Thu Thuy in Hanoi; Kumna Jung in Seoul; 
Sukanya Pornsopakul in Chiang Mai; Chonmasri Patcharapimol in Bangkok; Aya Kimijima, Miya Suga, 
Yukako Shibata, Yukiko Tani, Iida Hiroyuki, Kazuko Tanabe, Nakao Hidehiro and Kazuyo Kamikubo in 
Japan; Mark Moritz and Bayard Lyons in the USA; Mireille Huberdeau in Winnipeg; in Australia Sharon 
Rouse, Daniela Bogeska, Simon Davey and especially Lara Palombo, Jenni Rossi and Saul Steed, as well 
as the teachers who assisted with questionnaire distribution and collection in each school and youth 
centre,  Colleen Tomlian, Bob Bowes, Patrick Cronin, Annie Hanson, Tammy Edwardson, Michael 
Darley, Sharon Morrison, Susanne Owen, Erica Baker, Dr Adrian Brown, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Liz 
Kelton, Neville Stapleton, Carolyn Grantskalns, Angela Falkenberg, Chris Searle, Charlie Allen, Sharon 
Rouse, Karen Walters, Jill Faulkner, Dorian Marsland, Caroline Ninnes, Christine Shetliffe, Margaret 
Jackson, Helen Temby, Lenore Layman, Kathleen Pepall, Jane Long, Tanya Dalziell, Barry Tognolini, 
Kelly O’Mara, Ingrid Klein, Dan McCormack, Christine Roper, Anita Hobbs, Chris Parry, Barbara 
Wright, Barrie Wells, Phil Allen, Veronica Lake, Jacqueline Van Gent, Tanya Dalziell, Julia Ryan, Kate 
Cameron Dorothy Hoddinott, Jenny Wilkins, Linda Garrad, Jenny Baldwin, Christine Howe, Matthew 
Barry, Dr John De Courcy, David Bourne, Paul Dolan, Fiona Forsyth.   

 



Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

but also using different vocabularies or justifications for supporting the women’s 

movement. In particular, I focus on the different use of notions of gender equality, 

gender difference and national development feminism in the different samples. While 

some gender differences are a feature of almost every national sample, it is less easy to 

divide the samples into ‘west’ and ‘east’, either in terms of their support for feminism or 

their justifications for supporting or opposing the women’s movement. The results 

challenge a simple claim that western feminism favours the discourse of gender equality 

in its liberal variant and combative opposition to men in its radical variant, while Asian 

women’s movements endorse gender difference and compatibility, or men and women 

working together, for example under the banner of national development feminism.   

 

Following a discussion of Basu’s criticism of three tendencies in cross-national studies, 

the paper summarises the results from my study before exploring the different meanings 

of terms such as ‘equality’, ‘difference’ and ‘national development’. The paper 

concludes by suggesting that the ‘transnational turn’, going beyond western feminist 

discourses to question western feminist assumptions, suggests that the western feminist 

impasse between ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ is not such a strong feature in the 

vocabularies of young people in a number of the Asian samples in my study. 

 

‘International’ feminisms? 

 
With the increasing privatization and corporatization of public life, it has become much harder to 
discern such a women’s movement [vibrant, transnational] from the United States (although 
women’s movements are thriving around the world) (Mohanty 2003, 221). 

 

In The Challenge of Local Feminisms, Amrita Basu (1995, 1) suggested three 

‘tendencies’ in the ‘vast literature on women’s movements’. The first is a bifurcation 

between scholars of the west and the east.  Studies that focus on ‘Western Europe and 

the United States and ignore women’s movements in the postcolonial world’ are 

contrasted with ‘studies of women in the non-Western world’ which ‘tend to be 

preoccupied with the problem of development’. As a result, women’s movements in 

India or China, for example, are rarely brought to bear on an analysis of women’s 

 
PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006  2 



Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

movements in say the USA or Germany, a comparison which can throw light on the 

specificities of each (an exception is Gelb 2003).  

 

The second tendency ‘is to characterize women’s movements as products of 

modernization or development’, their success thus due to approximating the features of 

western nations rather than developing ones. Despite Mohanty’s (1991) trenchant 

critique of this presumption that women’s emancipation is only available as nations 

progress down the development path, western triumphalism has re-emerged with a 

vengeance, famously captured in Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) ‘end of history’ thesis. It is 

propounded by writers who assert a happy compatibility between capitalism, democracy 

and women’s advancement. In Rising Tide, the political theorists Inglehart and Norris 

(2003) use cross-national data sets to claim that women’s status is enhanced as countries 

move from agricultural, authoritarian religious-fundamentalist regimes to post-

industrial, democratic, secular (or Christian) liberal regimes3. Recent titles by feminists 

are readily co-opted into the triumphalist rhetoric when they claim The World Split 

Open (Rosen 2000), or that there will be No Turning Back (Freedman 2002) from the 

Tidal Wave (Evans 2003) of women’s equality. Indeed, Estelle Freedman (2002, 1-2) 

bluntly asserts, ‘In short, the market economies and democratic systems that now 

dominate the world create both the need for feminism and the means to sustain it’.   

 

The third tendency noted by Basu (1995, 1) is to assume ‘a commonality in the forms of 

women’s oppression and activism worldwide’. Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Global4 is 

the example chosen by Basu because of ‘its seminal importance in reflecting and 

shaping the dominant approach to women’s movements in the West in the 1980s. 

                                                 
3 The authors support their claim that women in the Third World remain ‘undeveloped’ by measuring 
women’s status with ethnocentric indicators, such as involvement in paid work rather than involvement in 
the subsistence economy or control of land and its resources, or in terms of women’s access to divorce 
rather than to inheritance rights. Inglehart and Norris use the stock-in-trade of economists measuring 
women’s status, for example the United Nations’ GDI (Gender Development Index) and GEM (Gender 
Empowerment Measure). Saskia Wieringa (1999, 25) argues for the need to go beyond measures of 
income, education and workforce participation to embrace women’s access to human rights, for example 
in the incidence of gender-based violence; women’s access to sexual and identity politics such as 
tolerance for transgender practices; and comparisons of how men and women use their time differently, 
particularly in relation to available leisure time (Wieringa 1999, 30,27,33-34).     
4 Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful, published in 1970 and in print until 2001, was succeeded by 
Sisterhood is Global, published in 1984, still in print and ‘still the only text that proclaims itself as the 
anthology of the international women’s movement’ (Mohanty 2003, 110).   
 
PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006  3 



Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

Morgan eschews the development model for a focus on grassroots activism: ‘Women 

share a “common world view,” Morgan repeatedly asserts, as a result of “a common 

condition”’ (Basu 1995, 1,2). As Basu (1995, 3) puts it, Morgan’s ‘oppressed majority’ 

perspective combines a ‘magnitude of suffering’ ‘with the magnitude of women’, 

universalising women through the suffering they all share.  

 

In comparing women’s movements in a number of countries from ‘east’ and ‘west’, my 

project seeks to avoid the various pitfalls identified by Basu. Particularism studies only 

one women’s movement and tends, thus, to treat it as utterly unique.  Dualism assumes a 

distinction between west and ‘the rest’, studying only movements in one or other 

category. Universalism presumes all national movements are roughly the same (Ray and 

Korteweg 1999, 485). My project responds to Sang’s (2003, 8-9) call for a 

‘transnationalist turn’ (although she is speaking of gay and lesbian studies), in which 

western feminists look elsewhere for inspiration, particularly given that our own 

movements appear quiescent and as we ponder the shoals of gender equality/sameness 

and difference. Rather than imagining a one-way imperial flow in the discussions that 

constitute international feminism, cross-national studies allow the empire to strike back, 

encouraging western feminists to question the limitations of possessive individualism or 

of human rights discourse.   

 

‘Post-feminist neo-liberalism’, as Rosi Braidotti (2005, 171) calls it, combines smug 

postfeminism with the arrogant ethnocentrism of US foreign policy. In this formulation, 

the United States is the overwhelmingly dominant force in so-called ‘international’ or 

‘global’ feminism6, the hub from which feminism flows out along the spokes to the 

benighted women ground down on the rim7. ‘White supremacy’ assumes that ‘women 

                                                 
5 The authors note only four comparative studies that avoid these three problems, including 
Jayawardena’s (1986) significantly titled Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World.   
6 For example, Freedman’s (2002) ‘international history’ of feminism is found largely in the first 87 
pages, with the remaining 260 pages of text being very US focused. ‘Women in development’, the first 
international aid approach which took account of the needs of women, is described by Irene Tinker as, 
‘we wanted to take the second wave [of feminism] to the rest of the world’ (in Ramamurthy 2000, 243).   
7 I am grateful to Debra Liebowitz, Drew University, USA, for this image, which she uses in her teaching 
to model her students’ understanding of ‘international feminism’. The women on the rim are ground down 
by internal oppression, but never oppressed by US foreign policy or US economic relations (comment 
made at the National Women's Studies Association Conference, held from 13 to 17 University of 
Minnesota in Minneapolis, 13-17 June). 
 
PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006  4 



Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

who are non-Western, non-Christian, mostly not white and alien to the Enlightenment 

tradition’ ‘need to be targeted for special emancipatory social actions or even more 

belligerent forms of enforced “liberation”’. Post September 11, so-called rights and 

democracy are delivered abroad at gunpoint by the only remaining world superpower. 

American foreign policy combines ‘historical amnesia’, forgetting ‘the sense of 

common connection to other women’, with profound ethnocentrism (Braidotti 2005, 

171).   

 

In fact, it could be claimed that women’s movement activism is more vibrant in many 

Asian nations than it is in the west, where even feminists now worry about what the 

media has claimed for a long time: that feminism is ‘dead’ (Pozner 2003, 31). In 

Australia, Anne Summers (2003, 6-7) deplores the fact that ‘we have stopped even 

having the national conversation about women’s entitlements and women’s rights’. 

‘We’ refers both to the government and a once robust women’s movement now tamed 

by consumerism and liberal individualism into commodity feminism, do-it-yourself 

feminism and self-help feminism (see also Segal 1999, 1 for Britain and Epstein 2001 

for the USA). In the Anglophone west, women are encouraged to express their 

‘equality’ and ‘liberation’ through capitalist forms, such as consumer spending (Skeggs 

1995, 478; Wolf 1993, 29; Bail 1996).   

 

By contrast, Asian legislatures have established equal opportunities laws and 

commissions (e.g. Ng and Ng 2002, 7 for Hong Kong; Gelb 2003 for Japan) and 

introduced legislation to prevent domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape (the 

first such example in an Asian country being Malaysia in 1994 (Foley 2003, 142-5). 

Korea has the goal of being number thirty in the world in the UN’s women’s human 

rights index by 20088. By contrast with the abhorrence of quota systems among western 

nations, in India 30 per cent quotas for women in local government bring one million 

women into elected seats with every nation-wide election (Kapadia 2002, 16). In 

Indonesia, the women’s movement has burgeoned into a proliferation of NGOs taking a 

                                                 
8 Proudly announced by the President’s wife, Kwon Yang-Suk, First Lady of Republic of Korea and 
conference patron, at the 9th International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women, Asian Center for 
Women’s Studies, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, 19-24 June 2005. 
 
PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006  5 



Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

prominent role in protest and democratic transformation (Suryochondro 2000, 232,236). 

While women’s studies departments in Anglophone universities close down or morph 

into cultural or gender studies, women’s studies programs are ‘one of the fastest 

developing academic fields in Asia’, including an international project to strengthen 

women’s studies across the region instituted at Ewha Women’s University (Kim and 

Kang 2001, 113).    

 

On the other hand, paeans to Asian women’s emancipation should not be overdrawn, a 

‘backlash’ against women’s advancement being noted in India, Japan, Vietnam and 

China. In Japan, members of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party have assumed the 

task of dismantling gender equality legislation, and, along with others, call to replace 

Article 24 of the Constitution concerning gender equality with a clause asserting the 

importance of the family as the smallest unit of society (Hardacre 2005). As in the US, 

in India the dissatisfaction caused by widening income inequalities is channelled into 

religious fundamentalism, a resurgence of community politics and communitarian 

violence (Chaudhuri 2000, 276; Ganguly-Scrase 2000, 99) in which both Hindu and 

Muslim women participate (Kapadia 2002, 11,13). In 2003, the government proposed to 

rename women’s studies centres as ‘centres for women and family studies’, believing 

them to be just another form of outreach rather than having a role in theory development 

and the critical evaluation of programs (John 2005, 58). In Korea, the Employment 

Equity Promotion Program to expand equal employment legislation into the private 

sector does not cover non-standard workers, those who are part-time, migrant and so on. 

This means that middle-class Korean women remain the major beneficiaries of 

feminism (Lee 2005). In China and Vietnam, economic reform has produced a steady 

decline in women’s participation at all political and managerial levels, as well as 

growing female unemployment, wage disparity and discrimination against women in 

hiring and promotion. The Chinese Government urges women to ‘return home’ to their 

nurturing functions, which eases the pressures of unemployment as state enterprises 

collapse in the face of global competition (Zhang 2005 for China; see Pettus 2003, 

127,129 for Vietnam).   

 

 
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Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

Some Asian women also assert a complacent postfeminism, a claim that gender equality 

has been achieved and feminism is no longer needed. Middle-class Singaporean and 

Hong Kong women claim they are more liberated than their western sisters, and so do 

not require gender equality machinery (Lee 2003b, 93; Owen 2002, 889). In 2002, the 

Indian University Grants Commission took a postfeminist stance when it proposed the 

establishment of women’s studies centres in rural areas because ‘urban gender equality 

has already been ensured’ (in John 2005, 58).   This is akin to the claim made by 

Australian Prime Minister, John Howard: ‘we are in the post-feminist stage of the 

debate…of course women are as good as men’ (Summers 2003, 21). Meanwhile his 

government has gutted the gender-equity machinery painstakingly erected by femocrats 

over thirty years (see Bulbeck 2005). 

 

Adding weight to ‘western triumphalist’ claims concerning the ‘end of history’, 

statistics indicate many Asian women’s improved education, increased engagement in 

paid employment, marriage delay (and even refusal: e.g. Williams 1998, 16 for 

Singapore, Hong Kong and Jakarta; Tantiwiramanond and Ranjan 1996, 96 for 

Bangkok), more self-arranged marriages and neolocal nuclear residency (e.g. Brasted 

2000, 200 for a number of Asian countries; Tantiwiramanond and Ranjan, 1996, 96 for 

Thailand; Jones 2002, 226-227 for Indonesia). Such statistical changes are expressed in 

breathless discussions of modernisation in Asia. Louise Williams, the Sydney Morning 

Herald’s Asia correspondent, claims of the Asian countries discussed in her book: ‘what 

they all have in common is inevitable, far-reaching social change’ (Williams 1998, 19), 

a shift in one generation to another from subsistence rice farmers to industrial workers, 

from feudal politicians to corporate business managers; and for women, access to 

contraception and paid work, as well as the outlawing of traditional practices such as 

polygamy (14). Indeed, there is growing academic interest in the ‘new’ middle classes 

of Asia, bustling aside the western imaginary’s previous focus on village women as the 
                                                 
9 Eliza Lee (2003a, 7,16) suggests that ‘economic individualism’ has emerged with capitalist development 
in Hong Kong, a combination of ‘utilitarian familism’ and ongoing patriarchy. The state’s role is 
primarily the material advancement of individuals and families while women continue to endorse the 
essential importance of marriage and motherhood. The latter role is supported by domestic help in middle-
class families, allowing professional women to pursue their careers unencumbered (Lee 2003b, 94-95). 
On this point, Christina Ho (2005) found that Chinese and Hong Kong female migrants to Australia 
initially criticised Australia’s ‘conservative’ gender norms, but then came to embrace them, saying that 
not staying home to care for one’s children was unnatural. 
 
PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006  7 



Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

embodiment of religious worth and tradition and the ‘electric girls’ of the free trade 

zones (e.g. see collections edited by Sen and Stivens 1998 and Munshi 2001). Like their 

‘can-do’ sisters in the west (Harris 2004), the new urban female middle class of Asia are 

professional workers and avid consumers of household white-goods and beauty products 

(Stivens 1998, 92-3 for Malaysia; Sen 1998, 47,35-6 for Indonesia).  

 

On the other hand, in most Asian countries most women are still villagers (e.g. Stivens 

1998, 96 for Malaysia; Hooper 1998, 168 for China; Cook 1998, 259 for Thailand). 

Furthermore, ‘the dominant national discourses of “development”, “globalisation”, and 

“modernization”’ (Roces and Edwards 2000, 2) are not always realised in the same 

mode as in the west, Vervoorn noting ‘unprecedented rates of industrialization and 

economic growth, demographic transition, multilateral treaties and regional cooperation, 

and a shared resistance to Western dominance’ (Vervoorn 2003, 4, italics mine). 

Commentators thus speak of ‘other modernities’ (Rofel 1999), ‘flexible citizenship’ 

(Ong 1999, 1-3,6), ‘flexibility of identity’ (Kelsky 2001, 12) and ‘divergent 

modernities’ (Stivens in Roces and Edwards 2000, 1).    

 

My research explores how young people in different nations understand their own 

particular ‘other modernities’. I aim to present a more complex picture than is painted 

when the focus is on only one nation’s feminism, or only one ‘type’ of women’s 

movement (so-called ‘developed’ or ‘developing’) or assumes an undifferentiated 

‘global feminism’. Even so, my focus on ‘national’ women’s movements contains its 

own dangers. Women’s movements spill beyond national borders, and have done so 

since the middle of the nineteenth century (Desai 2002, 25). With the advent of the 

United Nations and the retreat of national governments from humanitarian 

commitments, International Non-Government Organisations (INGOs) have grown in 

prominence, contributing to the ‘transnational feminist counter-public’ (Mackie 2001, 

189; see also Roces and Edwards 2000, 7).  Some of these border crossings occur 

among my respondents, revealing that there are no unified national discourses in 

relation to feminism and the women’s movement.   

 

 
PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006  8 



Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

Methods and summary of results 

The findings derive from a survey of largely young middle-class urban dwellers in ten 

countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Due to the funding constraints imposed by the 

Australian Research Council grant, eight of the national samples are tiny (see Table 1 

below). In each country I secured a local researcher who, when necessary, translated the 

survey instrument, a questionnaire, into the local language and translated the comments 

back into English for me (in the Anglophone samples, a handful of Japanese 

respondents, the Indian university and one Delhi and the Mumbai high school class, 

respondents completed their questionnaires in English).   

 

I asked local researchers to administer the questionnaire during a school or university 

class set-aside for this purpose, with a researcher on hand to answer questions. Besides 

an opening section on identity (completing ‘I am …’ ten times) and a concluding section 

on socio-economic data, there were two major sections, one on gender issues and one on 

the women’s movement. Gender issues covered role reversal, sharing housework, 

abortion rights, same sex sexual relations, nudity/pornography, gender equality (most of 

these questions were adapted from Pilcher 1998). The section on the women’s 

movement, which is the subject of analysis in this article, sought respondents’ self-

identification as feminists, their image of feminists and what they felt the women’s 

movement had achieved for women and men in their country (adapted from the Time-

CNN survey reported in Bellafante 1998). Respondents were asked to express a level of 

agreement with each item on a four point scale: ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree more than 

disagree’, ‘disagree more than agree’, and ‘strongly disagree’, with a fifth option of ‘no 

opinion/don’t know’, and to make any comments they wished. Clearly the questionnaire 

was informed by western understandings of feminism and women’s issues, while 

nuances were lost in translation.  Even so, this is a rare cross-national study of young 

people’s attitudes to the women’s movement. 

 

 
PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006  9 



Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

Table 1: Sources of young respondents at school or university by gender (numbers 
in brackets)  
Source Female  Male High school  University  Per cent of total 

Australia  

#(South Australia) 

(Western Australia) 

(New South Wales) 

65% (511) 

66%  (295) 

57%  (145) 

79%  (71) 

35% (279) 

34%  (149) 

43%  (111) 

21%   (19) 

 84% (664) 

80% (357) 

84% (216) 

 99% (91) 

 16% (127) 

 19% (85) 

 16% (41) 

    1% (1) 

46.4%   (791) 

26.2%  (444) 

15.0%  (256) 

5.3%    (91) 

USA 

USA (Portland) 

(Santa Monica) 

63% (59) 

66% (31) 

62% (28) 

37% (33) 

34% (16) 

38% (17) 

 10% (9) 

18% (9) 

   0% (0) 

  90% (86) 

81% (39) 

 100% (47) 

5.5%   (95) 

2.8%    (48) 

2.7%    (47) 

Canada (Winnipeg) 50%  (21) 50%  (22) 49% (21) 51% (22) 2.5%    (43) 

India  

(Mumbai)  

(New Delhi)  

61%   (79) 

72%   (44) 

52%   (35) 

39%   (50) 

28%   (17) 

48%   (33) 

60% (79) 

48% (30) 

71% (49) 

40%  (52) 

52%  (32) 

29%  (20) 

7.6%   (131) 

3.6%    (62) 

 4.0%   (69) 

Vietnam (Hanoi) 58%   (33) 42%   (24) 15% (9) 85%  (51) 3.4%    (60) 

Rep. of Korea 
(Seoul) 52%   (31) 48%    (29) 50% (30) 50%  (30)  3.5%   (60)  

China (Beijing) 51%   (25) 49%    (24) 49% (24) 51%  (25)  2.9%   (49) 

#Thailand  

(Bangkok) 

(Chiang Mai) 

50%   (61) 

50%   (30) 

50%   (31) 

50% (61) 

50%    (30) 

50%    (31) 

49% (40) 

50% (20) 

48% (20) 

51% (42) 

50%  (20) 

52%  (22) 

7.2%   (123) 

3.5%   (60) 

 3.7%   (63) 

Indonesia 
(Yogyakarata) 66%   (37) 34%    (19) 49% (29) 51% (30)  3.3%   (59) 

Japan (Tokyo) 66%   (197) 34%    (100) 27% (138) 73% (163) 17.5%  (301) 

TOTAL 62% (1055) 38%  (641) 61% (1043)  37% (628) 100% (1711) 

Notes: Due to some respondents failing to indicate their sex, gender and source sub-totals are not always 
the same and gender sub-totals do not sum to total respondents.  
# 4 Australian, 20 (Bangkok) and 21 (Chiang Mai) vocational student respondents not shown in the table. 
 

The results discussed in this paper relate to five statements, the first three concerning 

feminism and the latter two the women’s movement:  

1. Feminism today is relevant to me personally. 

2. Feminists share my values 

3. I would call myself a feminist 

4. The women’s movement has achieved good things for women of my country. 

5. The women’s movement has achieved good things for men of my country. 

 

 
PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006  10 



Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

I first discuss attachment to feminism (using question 3 above as representative of the 

general pattern) and the women’s movement (using question 4 above as representative 

of the general pattern) across the samples, before moving on to a comparison of the 

‘vocabularies’ or reasons offered for approving or disapproving of feminism.  

 

Attachment to feminism and the women’s movement 

Results for question 3 and question 5 are shown in Charts 1 and 2 below. Some of the 

results are unsurprising, for example females’ greater willingness to self-identify as a 

feminist and greater support for the women’s movement by contrast with males 

(although note that gender difference in support for the women’s movement is lower 

than in self-defining as a feminist). On the other hand, the level of support may come as 

a surprise to some commentators: at the agree level (which sums ‘agree strongly’ and 

‘agree more than disagree’), more than 40 per cent of females in every sample, apart 

from the Japanese, self-define as feminists. In most samples, around 80 per cent or more 

agree that the women’s movement has achieved good things for women of their country 

(Chart 2). Again, it is no surprise that ‘feminism’ appears to be a more negative concept 

than ‘women’s movement’, although some Australian respondents’ comments suggest 

that this result is partly due to the safe location of the achievements of the women’s 

movement’s—and therefore of the need for feminism—in the past: 

 
[N]o, I wouldn’t call myself a Feminist, I mean I think that we (women) have come a long way 
since the early 1900s and before. I am quite happy with where women stand now (female, high 
school student, Adelaide). 

 

More surprising is the lack of evidence to suggest that ‘feminism’ is a western-inflected 

concept and therefore rejected by the women of Asia. Thus the percentage of young 

people who agree strongly with the statement ‘I would call myself a feminist’ is greatest 

for the Indian sample (about half). Vietnamese and Thai females are more likely to self-

define as feminist than are the Canadian and Australian samples (at the agree level). The 

Japanese sample is the least supportive of feminism, the Japanese males also rejecting 

the value of the women’s movement for Japanese women. 

 

 
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Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

Chart 1 'I would call myself a feminist'

0

20

40

60

80

India USA Canada ThailandAustraliaIndonesiaVietnam Japan China Korea
0

40

80

female - strongly agree
male - strongly agree
female - agree
male - agree

 
 Note for Chart 1: The bar columns indicate the percentage of respondents who agree strongly with the 
statement ‘I would call myself a feminist’.  The lines indicate the percentage of respondents who agree 
with the statement (‘agree strongly’ plus ‘agree more than disagree’). 
 

Chart 2: 'The women's movement has achieved 
good things for women of my country'

0

20

40

60

80

100

In
di

a
US

A

Ca
na

da

Th
ail

an
d

Au
st

ra
lia

In
do

ne
sia

Vi
et

na
m

Ja
pa

n
Ch

in
a

Ko
re

a

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

female - strongly agree

male - strongly agree

female - agree

male agree

 
Note for Chart 2: The bar columns indicate the percentage of respondents who agree strongly with the 
statement ‘I would call myself a feminist’.  The lines indicate the percentage of respondents who agree 
with the statement (‘agree strongly’ plus ‘agree more than disagree’). 
 

 
PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006  12 



Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

Gender vocabularies in supporting or rejecting feminism 

As noted above, there was space for respondents to make comments in relation to each 

statement. I classified these in terms of ‘gender vocabularies’ (adapted from Pilcher 

1998, 129-130) or the discourses by which young people understand gender issues. Five 

gender vocabularies were significant for the feminism and women’s movement 

questions (see Chart 3 below): feminist, equality/fairness, rights, development/progress 

and traditionalist.  These are ordered in Chart 3 from most to least supportive of 

feminism or the women’s movement.  

 

Chart 3:Gender vocabularies used to discuss feminism and the women’s movement  
Feminist 
 

Women have come a long way, better than it was, ‘gradual’ change; approves the gains of 
the women’s movement for men or women; identifies feminist issues such as childcare 
support, domestic violence, rigid masculinities; uses terms developed by feminism such as 
‘oppression’,  ‘harassment’, ‘discrimination’; identifies the needs of women as collective 
group 

Equality, 
fairness 

Supports equality between the genders, or equal opportunities, using terms such as equality 
or fairness  

Rights  Women’s (and men’s) rights or choice, e.g. to vote, work, an education 
Development, 
progress 

Women’s movement contributes to national development or social progress; gender 
equality is a mark of modern society (sometimes used to oppose a change in gender 
relations) 

obligation, 
responsibilities  
to others,  

A duty to protect, support others, e.g. men to support family, parents their children; 
obligations of citizens to their country (sometimes used to assert gendered division of roles 
in which women are subordinated)  

Traditionalist 
 

Men should be in dominant, have superior position in society; men and women have 
different roles or positions in society, because of religion, biology or psychology; feminism 
is too radical, has gone too far; hostility or indifference to feminism 

 

Charts 4 to 6 below show the use of gender vocabularies in comments made in response 

to all five questions itemised above. In relation to the deployment of gender 

vocabularies, again there is no clear-cut dualism between western and Asian discourses. 

Chart 4 reveals that all the female samples primarily used a feminist vocabulary to 

endorse the women’s movement: hence a cluster of ωs, representing comments in 
relation to the two women’s movement questions (questions 4 and 5) in the first column 

(representing the use of the feminist vocabulary).  One female sample only, the US, also 

used the feminist vocabulary to endorse feminism (♀ in the first column). The males 
were more evenly split, four indicating support for the women’s movement via a 

feminist vocabulary (ωs in the second column for the USA, Korean, Vietnamese and 

 
PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006  13 



Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

Chinese samples) and four indicating their opposition to the women’s movement via a 

traditionalist vocabulary (ωs in the last column for the Canadian, Australian, Japanese 
and Thai samples). The Canadian males (who were in many ways more ‘pro-feminist’ 

than the Canadian females—e.g. see the agree result in Chart 2) were the only male 

group to use a feminist vocabulary to endorse feminism. Much more commonly, both 

females and males used a traditionalist vocabulary to oppose feminism (this can be seen 

by the clustering of ♀s in the last two columns).  
 

Chart 4:  Major deployment of gender vocabularies in relation to feminism and the 
women’s movement by gender 
 feminist Equality/ 

rights 
National 
development 

Duty/oblign traditionalis
t 

 Females Males Fem Males Females Males Fem Males Fem Male
s 

USA ω ♀ ω        ♀ 
Canada ω ♀       ♀ ω 
Australia ω        ♀ ω ♀
Japan ω        ♀ ω ♀
Korea ω ω       ♀ ♀  
Thailand ω  ♀       ω ♀
Vietnam ω ω ♀     ♀   
China ω ω       ♀ ♀ 
India ω  ♀ ♀ 

(rights)
 ω      

Indonesia ω  ♀ ♀  ω     
 

Legend ♀ denotes the major vocabulary used by sub-sample to comment on answers to feminist questions 
(questions 1-3 above) 

ω denotes the major vocabulary used by the sub-sample to comment on answers to women’s movement 
questions (questions 4 and 5 above) 

 

These patterns express the fact that about half the male samples rejected the women’s 

movement AND feminism, using a traditionalist vocabulary. Half the female samples 

also rejected feminism (but not the women’s movement): as too radical, going too far in 

reverse discrimination against men and so on. Male respondents in particular described 

radical ‘femi-nazis’ as akin to ‘racists’. They rejected feminists as ‘pathetic’, 

 
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Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

‘ridiculous’, ‘angry’, ‘bra-burning’, ‘militant’, ‘man-hating’, ‘extremist bitches’, ‘a 

scourge on society’. By contrast, all female samples and half the male samples endorsed 

the women’s movement rather than rejecting it, the surprising point being that they did 

so with the feminist vocabulary. Respondents usually approved the gains made by 

feminism, asserting that women had ‘come a long way’, and some respondents 

suggested that there was still much ground to cover.  

 
As opposed to commentators who claim that ‘equality’ and ‘rights’ are ‘western’ 

inventions imposed on Asian countries, Chart 4 suggests that the Thai, Vietnamese, 

Indonesian and Indian female samples were most likely to use the equality vocabulary 

to discuss feminism, the Indonesian males also using this vocabulary and the Indian 

males focusing on the rights vocabulary. Indeed, the Thai and Vietnamese female 

samples were the most enthusiastic in their use of the equality vocabulary, as shown in 

Chart 5. Chart 4 reveals that the Indian and Indonesian males preferred the national 

development vocabulary to endorse the women’s movement. This is also shown in 

Chart 6, which shows that the national development vocabulary is most often deployed 

by the Indian, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Chinese samples. Furthermore, and apart 

from the Chinese sample, males find the national development vocabulary more 

comfortable than the female respondents.   

 

Chart 5: Equality vocabulary (Percentage of respondents by sex and national sample 
using this vocabulary) 

0
10
20
30
40
50
60

IndiaIndonesiaChinaVietnamJapan KoreaThailand USA CanadaAustraliaweighted
av.

0
10
20
30
40
50
60

females
males
total

 

 
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Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

 Chart 6: National Development Vocabulary (Percentage of respondents by sex and 
national sample using this vocabulary) 

0
10
20
30

IndiaIndonesiaChina Vietnam Japan KoreaThailand USA CanadaAustraliaweighted
av.

0
5
10
15
20
25females

males
total

  

Thus the charts reveal interesting gender differences in the use of vocabularies, the 

females favouring the feminist over the traditionalist vocabulary, and the equality over 

the national development vocabulary. The next section explores why this might be so, 

via a more detailed discussion of respondents’ comments.  This section also explores the 

apparently different understanding of ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ among respondents in 

the different samples, suggesting one way in which western feminists and women can 

take a ‘transnational turn’, interrogate our own understandings of ‘equality’ (sameness) 

and difference (which we often take to mean inferiority). 

 

Vocabularies of gender activism  

 
[Feminism is] relevant to all humans whether they know it or not (female, high school student, 

Portland) 

 
I am a strong believer of ‘Girl Power’ (female, high school student, Sydney) 

 
men in general are chauvinistic pigs and men in India all the more worse and since India is a male 
dominated society/culture women have equal opportunities and rights only on paper (female, 
university student, Mumbai) 

 

National development vocabularies link the advancement of women to the progress of 

the nation, due to the historical involvement of women in anti-colonial struggles, as in 

India and Indonesia, and/or women’s engagement in revolutionary struggles to 

introduce communism, as in Vietnam and China. Thus Nguyen Thi Dinh (1984, 729), 

president of the Vietnam Women’s Union, in her contribution to Robin Morgan’s 

Sisterhood is Global, states ‘The history of Vietnamese women is closely linked with 

 
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Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

the thousand-year history of the construction and defence of the country’. Charts 4 and 6 

suggest that national development feminism incorporates men into feminist goals, at 

least rhetorically. Male, and fewer female, respondents echoed their governments’ 

claims concerning women’s contributions to liberation or economic development:   

 
In practice, Vietnamese women are good in any invasion, wars, and, at the moment, in the 
renovation (male, university student, Hanoi) 
 
Feminists help Indonesia develop/progress (male, school student, Yogyakarta).   
 
The women’s movement has enhanced the cohesion among Chinese women, which is significant 
to the rise and decline of the nation (male, high school student, Beijing). 

 
A country can only progress when both the forces work together’ (female, school student, 

Mumbai). 

 

As this last comment suggests, and a particular feature of the Indian respondents, linked 

to a commitment to national development feminism is a sense that women and men can 

and should work together to achieve their goals, that this is indeed the definition of 

feminists:  

 
Willing to help all women to give them their rights (male, school student, Mumbai) 
 
If I had made my contribution then the women in my village would have been in a much better 
social position (male, high school student, Delhi) 
 
Human beings are not omnipotent, so there is always something beyond your reach. Don’t exert 
yourself too much. Why not ask a man to do the things that you can’t do (female, university 
student, Beijing) 
 
If most men are against us, can we call ourselves feminists? (female, school student, Beijing) 

 

If national development feminism suggests that men should contribute to the 

improvement of women’s status, why was this vocabulary favoured more by men than 

women (as revealed in Chart 6)? Perhaps, like Titi Sumbung (1984, 322), in her 

contribution to Sisterhood is Global on Indonesia, women realise that the 

‘modernization process’ has not distributed the rewards of development equally and 

attitudes need to be changed so women become ‘equal partners with their menfolk’. 

 

 
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Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

Furthermore, expressions of gender compatibility were also found among respondents in 

the Anglophone samples, particularly an argument that the women’s movement was 

good for men as it increased their understanding of women’s experiences and needs:  

 
It has made them be more open-minded and they have now lost a few of their stereotypes (female, 
vocational student, Adelaide). 

 

Elaborating on the notion of working together, perhaps, a number of the Japanese, 

Indonesian and Thai respondents asserted that the genders could be both equal and 

different at the same time, an almost impossible construction for western feminists to 

get our heads around:  

 
The man has to take care of the woman because he is a gentleman (but it doesn’t have to do with 
women being equal to men)  (male, Chiang Mai, university student, male). 
 
Women are weak—though they have equal rights (male, Chiang Mai, vocational college student) 

 
While these male respondents claim women’s weakness, females more often refer to 

male weakness:  

 
Men know about women’s power because women are not weak and take care of them (female, 
university student, Chiang Mai). 

 
The presumed strength of Thai women, derived from their economic independence, was 

also claimed by Mallica Vajrathon (1984, 672) in her contribution to Morgan’s 

Sisterhood is Global. Women talk about men ‘as though they were all fragile beings, 

behaving like children, needing to be looked after and cared for’. However, unlike the 

respondent just quoted, Vajrathon (1984, 573,674) is aware that women’s requirement 

to ‘be pleasing’ imposes a double workload and makes Thai women unwilling ‘to 

engage in confrontation with the male establishment and structure’. 

 

Japanese and Indonesian respondents also readily combined equality and difference:  
 
‘Same value’ means different treatment between men and women. Considering this difference, 
society treats women as ‘equal’ to men (female, high school student, Tokyo) 

 
God created men and women as equal. They may have different missions but none the less they 
are equal (female, high school student, Yogyakarta). 

 

 
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Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

As western feminists have elaborated at length, difference is often translated into 

inferiority. This is hinted at by the two Japanese female respondents who condemned 

feminists who make ‘ridiculous statements’ about equality (female, university student, 

Tokyo) or ‘simply cry for equality’ when ‘it is natural that men and women are 

different’ (female, high school student, Tokyo). Little wonder, then, that one respondent 

suggested:   
 

I feel that the idea of treating women as inferior to men still remains deeply rooted in Japanese 
society (female, university student, Tokyo). 

 
Anglophone respondents, by contrast, have difficulty bringing equality and difference 

into the same equation. Western feminists have thus tended to quit the field for 

essentialists who view the sexes as preformed categories, whether the differences are 

determined biologically, socially or psychologically (Connell 2000, 18). Instead of 

aligning equality and difference, Anglophone feminists note the contradiction between 

wanting to be like the boys (in terms of equal pay) but still wanting to be liked by the 

boys (in personal relations), by contrasting feminism and femininity. However, such 

combinations appeared less contradictory to some of my Anglophone respondents:  

 
I get by using my femininity to my advantage but I like that this can’t hurt my chances of doing 
whatever I choose (female, university student, Santa Monica). 
 
I think awareness of women’s talents and capabilities is a good thing but not at the expense of 
losing being feminine … where are the manly men? Good they are more sensitive, but not at the 
expense of losing their masculinity (female, university student, Winnipeg). 

 

Similarly, several young Indian women, akin to Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s (2005) 

identification of the artist Nilima Sheik as a ‘feminine feminist’, described themselves 

as ‘a female who is a feminist’, and combined this with being a respectful ‘daughter of 

my parent’, ‘a good dancer’ or a desire to become an ‘air hostess’, seeing no 

contradiction in these identities.  An Indonesian respondent described herself as:  

 
A tomboy, more comfortable with male friends than female friends, … in favour of equal rights, 
against women’s exploitation, against male violence, feminine (female, university student, 
Yogyakarta). 

 
Other Indonesian respondents claimed that women must be ‘assertive’ and ‘wise’ but 

also ‘nonjudgemental’, ‘patient’, ‘gentle’ and ‘accommodating to society’. 

 
 
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Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

A Japanese female averred:  

 
I insist on a woman’s rights but not everything should be equal with men. I want to enjoy dressing 
up. I think a brassiere is necessary and pretty. Extreme feminists give up the pleasures of women 
(female, high school student, Tokyo).  

 
It is tempting to interpret comments concerning gender complementarity—each ‘taking 

care’ of the other—as the naïve statements of those who do not really understand 

equality as a legal or formal concept. In the west, difference discourses are often 

uncomfortably resonant with conservative religious discourses. Furthermore, the lower 

participation rates of women in management in Japan and the persistence of domestic 

violence in Asian countries give us pause. Soon Chan Park’s (1984) justification for 

women’s heroic subservience to the goal of national emancipation in Korea contrasts 

starkly with Green’s (1984, 706) US contribution to Sisterhood is Global, calling for the 

nation to make good to US women its promise of ‘a country founded on principles of 

equality, democratic freedom, and respect for diversity of belief and action’.    

 

The Australian and other Anglophone respondents rarely phrased the benefits of the 

women’s movement in terms of national development or progress. Such has rarely been 

the rhetoric offered by feminists themselves, while the individualistic nature of our 

identity constructions and citizenship engagements preclude such discourses. As one 

Australian respondent put it, ‘if you want some thing bad enough you can achieve any 

thing you want’ (female, high school student, Sydney). Among the Australian comments 

which saw the women’s movements as of national benefit were those who mentioned 

‘good for business’ which will ‘make a difference in the world/Australia’, a rhetoric 

deployed by femocrats to introduce Australia’s affirmative action legislation (see 

Braithwaite 1998). Others were less specific concerning just how the women’s 

movement ‘made us the country we are today’ (e.g. female, Catholic girls school, 

Adelaide), or the US respondent who simply wrote ‘God bless the USA’ as her 

comment on the women’s movement. 

 

Of course, western nations have their own versions of national development, with 

feminists implicated in racialised nationalism in settler colonies such as Australia, the 

USA and Canada, but we don’t call it national development feminism. This means that 

 
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Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

most of the time feminism is seen as more combative in relation to the state than in 

countries with an official women’s movement (e.g. see Vickers 2006). However, where 

Morgan’s 1984 Anglophone contributors rejected their patriarchal, militaristic and racist 

states10, such trenchant radicalism has been muted by the rise of neo-liberalism. As 

Ueno Chizuko (2004) argues, in her comparison of US integrationist and Japanese 

segregationist feminists, US feminists applaud the equal participation of women in the 

United States army (the main mechanism by which disadvantaged people can secure 

public service jobs and entitlements—as recruits), while Japanese feminists maintain a 

segregationist position, both in terms of front-line fighting and hard-line equality in the 

workforce. US feminist organization NOW (National Organisation of Women) argued 

that women be included in the military fighting in Vietnam (Ueno 2004, 167) and on the 

front during the 1991 Iraq war. The world has witnessed white women participating in 

the humiliation of prisoners of war at Abu-Graib prison in Iraq (Enloe 2005). One US 

respondent echoed this position:  

 
I feel when it comes to equal job opportunity women are more or less treated equally but as seen 
in the recent war on Iraq, men more or less dominated the scene. Why aren’t women out there on 
the front line? In that aspect, women aren’t treated equally (female, university student, Portland). 

 
Conclusion 

 
Women are treated terribly in many Muslim countries (male, high school student, Adelaide). 
 
There are still ethnic groups which are not allowing young or older females the right of freedom 
…[the women’s movement] helps those whose families are culturally still against women’s rights 
(female, high school student, Sydney). 
 
Feminism is unique to ‘western cultures’ (female, vocational student, Adelaide).  

 
As noted above, Jill Vickers (2002, 248) suggests that western feminist discussion of 

national development feminism often assumes that national development feminists are 

‘co-opted’ while western feminisms are not influenced by wider national programs and 

ideologies. Feminist nationalism is something ‘they’ have, while western feminisms are 

seen as anti-capitalist and therefore anti-state. Vickers finds otherwise in her cross-

national comparative study of the sort that Basu recommends, a study which compares 

                                                 
10 See Green’s (1984, 711) critique of ‘militarism, pacifism, the nuclear-arms race, and Western and 
multinational corporate imperialism’, and, for Australia, Dowse and Giles’ (1984, 66,67) condemnation of 
the militaristic ‘patriarchal state’ and its ‘racism and sexism that forged Australian patriotism’. 
 
PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006  21 



Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

so called ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations, but does not find them all the same, nor 

does Vickers suggest that ‘developing’ nations’ feminism is a more primitive version of 

the ‘developed’ nations’ achievements in gender equality. Vickers concludes that most 

feminists in the dominant majorities in western nations also practised ‘national 

development feminism’, looked to ‘their’ nation-state for ‘rights, welfare programmes, 

prosperity and security’ (Vickers 2006, 89). In return for white women’s early 

incorporation into White Australia as citizen mothers, they were expected to produce 

babies for the new nation and exercise a civilising influence on Indigenous women and 

Asian-background women, women who were denied the same citizenship rights, such as 

suffrage and maternity allowances, or even being allowed to keep their children. 

Similarly, white Anglophone women in Canada between 1880 and 1920 were exhorted 

to contribute to the task of assimilating immigrants, Francophones and First Nations 

people (Vickers 2006, 98). The comments that introduce this section reflect the 

implication of the Australian women’s movement in Australian nation-building, easily 

asserting the advanced status of Anglo-Australian women by comparison with benighted 

‘others’, thus mobilising Braidotti’s ‘post-feminist neo-liberalism’. 

 

However, Vickers (2006:98-101) does suggest that difference-based feminisms fit more 

snugly with most nation-building projects, whether these be white Anglophone women 

in Canada or feministas in the Philippines (who resisted two colonial regimes, the 

Japanese occupation and an internal dictatorship). Difference feminisms express the 

value of communalism and focus on women’s socially different but equally valued 

gender roles, primarily as sustainers of social solidarity through family, kin, community 

and nation. This is echoed in the strongest support for feminism among my Indian 

sample, linked to a nationalist development vocabulary with a particular focus on men 

and women working together. By contrast, modernist or equality feminism is often more 

combative. In its focus on individual rights for women, it can reject the family as an 

oppressive institution or put women at odds with men (Vickers 2006:101). Within this 

framework it is harder to align feminist and nationalist goals, although it can be done, as 

the femocrat experience in Australia and Canada, and to a lesser extent the USA, 

reveals. In the 1970s and the 1980s, national progress was associated with a better deal 

for women and a more inclusive state, expressed also in a formalised commitment to 

 
PORTAL vol. 3 no. 2 July 2006  22 



Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

multiculturalism. Indeed, two Australian respondents deployed the femocrats’ national 

development rhetoric in noting that affirmative action legislation was good for business. 

However, more commonly, the combative nature of equality feminism was rejected in 

the predominant use of the traditionalist vocabulary by young Australian and US men, 

who saw feminists as too ‘aggressive’ and ‘anti-male’. However, the pro-feminist 

Canadian male sample suggests that western liberal feminism can be ‘sold’ to men in 

the west. 

 

While national development vocabularies encourage the participation and support of 

men in a way that the more assertive western feminist vocabularies do not, national 

development or official feminism limits men’s and women’s participation to nationally 

prescribed activities, for example excluding aspects of bodily autonomy such as the 

freedom to express different sexualities or choose among the complete range of 

reproductive strategies. In showing less enthusiasm for this vocabulary, it appears that 

the young Asian women in my research perceived the potential for vocabularies of duty 

to be turned against them, to require their self-sacrificing engagement in revolution and 

economic growth, often without men’s reciprocal commitment to family labour.  

 

The ‘transnational turn’ offered in this paper, not only challenges western respondents’ 

belief in their greater advancement towards gender equity, but also suggests that 

individualization framed around consumerism has its limits for women’s freedom and 

opportunities. This is revealed in the translation of western feminisms into commodity 

feminism, or in NOW’s demand for an equal right to kill other women and men. The 

celebration of gender difference in Japan, Korea and Thailand highlights the ways in 

which western feminism has been straitjacketed by a version of liberal feminism, 

allowing women either to be like men and demand equal treatment or to be different 

from men and condemned to inferiority. Would a different set of possibilities open up if 

western feminists, like some of the Asian respondents quoted above, had a vocabulary 

that enabled us to demand difference at the same time as we asserted equality, 

proclaiming an equal worth that did not collapse into subordination even as we pursue 

different, possibly even gender-differentiated, projects? 

 

 
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Bulbeck  Can we call ourselves feminists? 

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	Chilla Bulbeck, University of Adelaide
	Introduction
	Methods and summary of results
	Gender vocabularies in supporting or rejecting feminism