Posted by A Twitter thread by @radicalhag
I really think feminism has gone from Second Wave to Swerf and Terf without much in between – that 3rd wave, trans-friendly ‘feminism’ has been part of the backlash, and has co-opted the label, nothing more. Watch Jane’s interview – it’s long but gripping and informative.
I really think feminism has gone from Second Wave to Swerf and Terf without much in between – that 3rd wave, trans-friendly ‘feminism’ has been part of the backlash, and has co-opted the label, nothing more. Watch Jane’s interview – it’s long but gripping and informative.
That activist kids today have no idea how to do politics couldn’t be made clearer than in this tweet , which actually says nothing:
That activist kids today have no idea how to do politics couldn’t be made clearer than in this tweet , which actually says nothing:
https://t.co/XfAviW8O0Y
They worship some undefined notion of ‘equality’ which seems to involve:- complete narcissism – anybody can be/do what they say they are and it’s a hate crime to intervene
-reducing everyone to homogenous glop so they’re ripe for the picking, instead of considering group needs
– believing that saying people are equal somehow makes them equal (Jane handles the bonkers Foucauldian notion of discursive construction of reality very well in the video linked to above)
– Some strange idea that if you’re not fighting all injustice then you’re not fighting any injustice (which is especially applied to women, who are supposed to make the tea for everybody else)
This plays into the hands of patriarchal capitalist elites as though it was made for it. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I couldn’t have invented a better way of upholding male supremacy than saying white males can identify as anything they want, and that’s ‘diversity’.
It’s a perfect match for the notion that success is an individual affair and that there are no social forces which may help some unfairly and hold others back. It’s individualised consumer politics for middle-class kids who don’t understand structural oppression.
It’s also got slightly mad overtones of “create your own reality” New Age spirituality to it. We can bend reality to our will by what we think and say, they think (this is the basic metaphysical patriarchal error, of course). It removes the responsibility to act in the world.
It’s no surprise that under this backwards version of feminism, we have the normalisation of porn and prostitution construed as ‘women’s agency’, the extension of this to surrogacy, the reduction of reproductive rights, and finally the notion that women don’t even really exist.
And this makes far more sense as a reaction to the gains of the second wave against sex-based oppression than it does as some bizarre Kafka-esque version of ‘progress’. Society still depends on the free reproductive labour of women.
Here is a radical idea: if people organise in categories who suffer some shared oppression to fight for their interests, THEY WILL EXCLUDE SOME PEOPLE. Blacks will exclude whites. Palestinians will exclude Israelis. Women will exclude men.
Taking away the right of such a group to organise is replicating their oppression, doubling down on it. Doing this by pretending that fuzzy boundaries means that the categories don’t exists is still doubling down on it. It’s doing the oppressor’s work.
Making the categories unsayable doesn’t dissolve the categories, contra Foucauld. It makes the oppression unsayable. It’s doing the oppressor’s work. Transactivism does the work of sexism by erasing the category of woman. It’s male supremacy in drag.
A woman is an adult human female. Feminism is the movement to liberate women from male oppression. A movement that seeks trans rights will seek to meet the needs of trans people for a place in society without demolishing the rights of women. Transactivism is not that movement
Some good articles:
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-c509-sex-matters-1
https://janeclarejones.com/2018/08/30/queer-theory-foucauldian-feminism-and-the-erasure-of-rape/