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Contribution type: New Concept
Concept: Fiminism
Name of the contributor: Taitu Heron
E-mail of the contributor: taheron@gmail.com
FIMINISM / FIMINIST Category: Companion Concept · Origin: Jamaica, 2023 · Jamaican Creole (Patwa) and English
Fiminism fuses the Jamaican Creole fi mi, meaning "for me" or "mine," with feminism. It names the condition in which feminism becomes something owned: a source of standing, authority, funding or advancement for the person or institution claiming it, held apart from the women in whose name it is claimed. Spoken aloud, the two words are almost indistinguishable, which is the argument in miniature. Fiminism is not the opposite of feminism but its near-double, and telling them apart requires looking at what changes materially for women who are not in the room.
The concept has a founding scene. At a community programme on domestic violence in Rockfort, Kingston, Jamaica, a security guard who was attending, packed food into containers for her children heard out an explanation of the gendered division of labour and answered: yu cya cari feminism gu supamaakit — you cannot carry feminism to the supermarket. She was not rejecting justice or refusing analysis. She was marking the distance between a feminism that could describe her life accurately and one that could reach it. Fiminism names what feminism becomes when that distance holds. It operates at two scales through a single mechanism. Institutionally, feminism enters organizations on the organization's terms. It must be sanitised into acceptable policy language, rendered measurable, made fundable and kept non-disruptive. A feminist methodology may be adopted while its authorship is erased, because the name is judged too contentious for approval. Programmes report participants trained and workshops held while shelter, legal representation, childcare, income and trauma support fall outside project scope. Survivors become institutionally legible through injury rather than recovery, because harm classifies more easily than healing. What survives translation is what institutions can approve, measure and be credited for.
Relationally, feminist authority attaches to credentials, rank, publication, donor recognition and international networks, and can be exercised over students, junior colleagues, community collaborators, clerical and ancillary staff while sisterhood is professed. Women who arrive expecting a safe space encounter belittlement, class contempt and the ordinary misuse of professional power, with colonial racial undertones intact. In both registers the pattern is the same: feminist legitimacy accrues upward and inward, while the conditions it names stay where they were. Fiminism, therefore, is feminism turned on itself. Fiminism is not hypocrisy, insincerity, or an accusation that particular women are not real feminists, and it should not be used as one. Individuals reproduce it, but they do so inside systems that reward respectable, technical, fundable, non-disruptive and individually-led forms of feminism, and penalise the rest. Naming it is a structural claim, not a verdict on character. It draws on but is distinct from neoliberal feminism, governance feminism, NGOization, femocracy and corporate feminism. What it adds is its Creole grounding, its single word for a displacement that operates at both personal and institutional scale, and its measure: relational distance from the women feminism claims to serve. Its underlying question, which it leaves open, is whether a feminism rooted in Western epistemological foundations can travel into Caribbean and other melanated spaces without reproducing the hierarchies it opposes. The concept is diagnostic and asks for a counterpart. Its corrective is dignity-centred practice: standards defined with those affected, evaluated by material change in safety, income, care, time and decision-making power, with organizations accountable for how they treat the least powerful people inside them. The task is not to abandon feminism but to build a transformative Caribbean feminist praxis that can be carried to the supermarket.
Source: Heron, Taitu A. "What Are We Fighting For? Navigating Feminist Paradoxes and the Search for Dignity in Gender Equality Work in the Caribbean." Keynote, Annual Lecture Series in Black Diaspora Studies, Departments of Africana Studies and Gender and Women's Studies, University of Rhode Island, 15 February 2023. Recording available via URI Panopto. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4788913