BSL sign FEMINIST

To my mind, the BSL sign FEMINIST was always a compound of WOMAN+FIST, where the fist was the fist of a militant feminist such as we saw in the 1970s and 1980s.  The same fist was used in the signs COMMUNIST and MILITANT. In signing FEMINIST, I always moved the fist backward slightly with a sharp movement, to add the feeling that it is a powerful fist.

Recently I saw someone signing it in the context of" feminist theory" and thought I detected something different.  The fist was further forward and had slight repetitive forward movements.  In BSL the hand as a fist is used grammatically to mark the possessive: MY has the fist pointing to the self; YOUR has the fist pointing at the addressee; HIS/HER/ITS points the fist at the person or thing, whether present or established in linguistic space.  If the fist has small, repetitive movements, that makes it an habitual possessive, referring to a tendency, so it means something more like MY-WAY, YOUR-WAY, HIS-WAY.  If someone signed DEAF DEAF-WAY they'd mean, "that's the Deaf way of being and doing - that's who Deaf are".  So if you sign WOMAN+FIST with the repeated small forward movement it changes from WOMAN+MILITANT to WOMAN+WOMAN-WAY.  After all, that is also what Feminist entails.

I am fascinated and delighted that the meaning of the fist can be reinterpreted in either way, to mean militant or the way of doing and being a woman