How I Came to Feminism: A Personal Origin

It began with an inner conflict — recognizing there was something happening to me, but it was happening from forces outside of me, forces I did not understand but was very much shaped by. I got sober from substance abuse 18 months into my doctoral program and came to the realization that what I knew about myself as a woman was largely characterized by the patriarchy.

In this new awareness, at 41 years old — then 2021 — I realized I had lived an objectified life. I set out to learn feminism as a means of liberating myself and contextualizing my lived experience, and I knew somehow that my sexuality was the core of this work. So much was unclear in the beginning.

By immersing myself in feminism, my work became a project of opening my eyes to what I now contextualize as the neoliberal-postfeminist sexual objectification matrix — and un-objectifying my mind. Through needed self-reflection, an excavation of emotional and psychic self, and critical analysis, I came back to some sort of inner authority and cohesiveness through this journey.

A new consciousness emerged through sobriety, feminist thought, and the transcendent act of scholarship. I had to learn how to live in the world, and simultaneously, not completely of the world — or at the very least, redefine, undefine, or eradicate social constructs that kept me unconsciously self-objectifying.

Today, my academic purpose is to expose the neoliberal-postfeminist sexual objectification matrix and contribute to the cultivation of women's collective consciousness. This consciousness recognizes, resists, and heals the psychic dissonance in women's sexual subjectivity.

I speak only as one woman, but like many feminists before me who have shared their personal stories, I have come to understand that lived experience is not merely about individual choices or circumstance — it is a form of knowledge that reveals the cultural, political, and relational forces shaping women's lives. As such, personal narrative becomes a pathway to a feminist collective consciousness, shining a light on shared conditions and possible structures that sustain unconscious gendered oppression.