How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
The question is problematic, as it contains a number of coded assumptions that make it both inadequate and harmful as a means of developing social justice.
First among these: in placing a focus on immediate change-in-the-present, the “light bulb problem” asks us to discard situational and her-storical context. We are prevented from asking how the light bulb got this way; whether the light bulb has been changed; how it has been changed. While this focus on change-in-the-present has been celebrated by some critics as embodying a radical politic, we cannot reasonably expect to achieve justice—or even mere illumination—without a full understanding of the oppressive structures of the past. Lacking that, the best we can hope for is futile stumbling in the dark.
The focus on “how many” is similarly problematic. Addressing numerical concerns alone effectively erases the identities of these women, silencing their individual stories and ignoring the particular structures and intersections of the oppression they experience. Women of color, in particular, have repeatedly been denied any access to light bulbs at all—or they have had light bulbs forced upon them. What we must ask: not merely how many, but who is changing the light bulb, and on whose backs do they stand to reach it?
Finally, it’s necessary to critique the very construction, sometimes advanced by liberal feminists, of light bulb changing as a “feminist issue.” The argument: Women, particularly feminist women, ought to change light bulbs because we can use that illumination for the advancement of social justice at some unspecified time in the future. Coded within the argument: light bulbs are both necessary and just and—this is often stated explicitly—there exist no “viable” alternatives. (It’s an irony that the very question we are discussing implies a failure of light bulbs and calls into question their viability.) And yet, even as they burn out, even as they break, we continue to bind ourselves to light bulbs, and so also inexorably to the white-supremacist incandescent patriarchy. We must not do this. It’s a focus that’s distracting at best and seriously damaging at worst. Damaging to individual women, and damaging to the movement, and ultimately a distraction pulling us away from achieving true justice in sustainable, non-oppressive, radical modes of illumination.
How many men’s rights activists does it take to change a light bulb?
Why is it that men are expected to change the lightbulbs? Feminists ALWAYS see men as the problem. A Feminist will never say that women should change light bulbs or change her own lightbulb. It’s always just the man’s fault.
My ex-wife NEVER changed a lightbulb for our entire marriage, but the judge gave her full physical custody of both kids anyway. As if changing light bulbs isn’t being involved in your kids lives. I have to send them light bulbs now and I know my ex-wife is just selling them for money for shoes.
Feminists will look at my life and say it’s my fault for being a man. Which is one way Feminists have gone way too far. They may have had a point once but now all they do is make up things like the patriarchy to explain why even though women are richer and happier and aren’t raped or sold like property anymore, men are still in power and everything is our fault.
They even think men are at fault for violence against men even though men and women rape and abuse equally!
Feminists are just denying the truth of differences between men and women. Study after study shows that SCIENTIFIC differences between men and women are there. But Feminists just want to hold men back. They say they want equality but they don’t.
My ex-wife is such a fucking bitch.
You forgot to mention that construction of illumination as normative serves to pathologize people with disabilities.
The importance placed on light as a signifier of social and physical location oppresses the seeing impaired by implying that a life without illumination is a life without value.
Are we so bound to the hierarchical nature of modern electric patriarchal structures that we cannot envision a radical future in which seeing and not-seeing are equally valued as necessary conditions of the human experience?
I shouldn’t laugh but I can’t help it.
Well, it is, like, a joke. :p
Brilliant!
How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
THAT’S NOT FUNNY!
It’s all well and good to make jokes, but what we really need to be talking about is how the VAWA hurts men.
Upon illuminated examination, you will find that it is not in fact the light bulb that needs to change, but rather YOU must change to accept the lightbulb in it’s new state of being.
If the light bulb really wants to change, it will change itself.
Best. Post. EVAR!
Lightbulbs are an unnatural product of the technopatriarchy. We should all go back to bathing in the natural light of the sun. Anything that can’t be done by the light of soy wax candles doesn’t need to be done at all.
There’s such a thing as soy wax?
Ew!
Do they make candles out of steak or something more….manly?
omg, that’s awesome.
(blink blink)
:O
(blink)
…..
You do realize I was kidding right?
Who woulda thunk it?
*giggle* *giggle giggle giggle*
*chortle*
it’s so true. As feminists we must not deny the validity of the candle- or lamp-lit experiences of many woman, both in the global present and throughout history. Are we to deny these lamp- and candle-lit bodies of knowledge, simply because they represent women’s experiences and women’s knowledge, and do not conform to the bright lights of the patriarchal value system?
Ha ha! Lovely.
Chortling? NOW you’ve gone too far!
The jargon….it’s like trying to read through a plate of creamed corn…..
I LOL’D