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Prefeminist.
Because it sounds like it should mean a character who was written in a very sexist time and is clearly moving toward being a feminist character but hasn't quite reached it yet (I would say Eowyn is a perfect example of this).
But it is used to mean a contemporary character who is is written to modern standards of feminism while being set in a pre-Women's Movement setting. Why this annoys me is that it completely ignores the fact that from the beginning of time there have always been HBIC ladies saying 'fuck this' to sexism. All the sufferagettes, Hau Mulan (either historical personage or mythological character), Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edda Gabler (fictional character written in the 1800s), Boudica... the list goes on. So not only does the current usage of 'prefeminist' ignore all these badass ladies who didn't call themselves or weren't labeled as feminists because the word didn't exist yet, there is this implication that writing women with agency and badassitude is unrealistic in a work of fiction set before 1970.
Because it sounds like it should mean a character who was written in a very sexist time and is clearly moving toward being a feminist character but hasn't quite reached it yet (I would say Eowyn is a perfect example of this).
But it is used to mean a contemporary character who is is written to modern standards of feminism while being set in a pre-Women's Movement setting. Why this annoys me is that it completely ignores the fact that from the beginning of time there have always been HBIC ladies saying 'fuck this' to sexism. All the sufferagettes, Hau Mulan (either historical personage or mythological character), Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edda Gabler (fictional character written in the 1800s), Boudica... the list goes on. So not only does the current usage of 'prefeminist' ignore all these badass ladies who didn't call themselves or weren't labeled as feminists because the word didn't exist yet, there is this implication that writing women with agency and badassitude is unrealistic in a work of fiction set before 1970.