'Why are you a Feminist?': Investigating the Reasons that Lie Behind Feminist Self-Identification

The proposed paper will examine feminist self-identification in the Canadian context. More specifically, it investigates the reasons that feminists offer for their adoption of a feminist identity. Extant quantitative research suggests that predictors of women’s willingness to self-identify include exposure to feminist beliefs and ideals, personal contact with a feminist and personal experience with sexism and/or harassment (Nelson et al. 2008; Reid and Purcell 2004). The more limited set of papers investigating the question from a more qualitative perspective suggest that contextual factors – most notably holding particular feminist beliefs – are linked with subjective rationales for feminist self-identification (Swirsky and Angelone 2016). This research is, however, confined to examinations of American feminists and employ samples that reveal limited diversity. Using an original Internet survey of more than 400 Canadian feminists and employing a thematic analysis of responses to the question “In your own words, can you describe why you are a feminist?”, the paper furthers our understanding of the subjective basis for the adoption of feminist self-identification. Canadian feminism provides an important case study given the regional differentiation in the movement; an analysis of differentiation in the subjective determinants of the adoption of a feminist identity across various groups in the movement can shed light on the degree to which feminists themselves shape the movement’s collective identity. Generational differentiation in the sample also provides an opportunity for investigating the degree to which reasons for identifying as a feminist have varied over time. The findings will help further our understanding of feminist identity, specifically its variation across contexts.