To piss off any gamergaters stumbling on this post, let me note that when Anita Sarkeesian says ...
... she is right. The further observations made by Eugene Fischer are also right. Then again, saying you cannot grow your population in Fallout Shelter quickly without pregnant women - as noted by @catherinebuca (since deleted) - mirrors life is also correct. Cue confusion for those wedded to either/or thinking.
Fallout Shelter is a resource management game set in the 1950s retro future/post-apocalyptic Fallout universe, and forms part of Bethesda's marketing juggernaut as it gears up for Fallout 4's release this coming November. And basically, all you do is run a vault, the nuclear bunkers in which some inhabitants (dwellers) of the franchise cower. And the aim, as much as there is one, is to keep it ticking over by expanding the numbers of rooms and facilities it has, keep the population going, and protect the place from radroaches and raiders on the outside. It's a make busy game, a real-time challenge of incessant micro-management pile ups.
In such a game your population has to reproduce. Therefore "impregnating as many women as possible" is an inescapable game mechanic. This is something it shares with plenty of other games, such as Civilization and Sim City. With one key difference. There population growth happens "spontaneously" off the back of food production and the placement of residential zones, respectively. Fallout Shelter demands the player adopt the view of women as a reproductive resource. This, of course, is identical to the position patriarchal social relations have placed women in throughout recorded history, which in turn has been subject to radical feminist critique.
Something else is afoot too. The practice of video gaming helps inculcate and reinforce various postures we need to assume to get on. There's the practice of screen-staring, the practice of lifestyle design, the practice of ego-amplification. Fallout Shelter reproduces the logic and practice of managerialism. It reminds me of the problematics of population management explored by Michel Foucault in his first volume of The History of Sexuality. Various disciplinary technologies that centered on the body conspired to produce certain kinds of people, namely bodies that were healthy, bodies that were docile, and bodies that would work. This is your viewpoint. You manage a population.
In Fallout Shelter, there is a certain gender fluidity. If you fancy it, your time as Overseer can establish an underground matriarchal dwellerdom, place all the women in the skilled jobs - including what passes for military - while the men wash dishes and scrub floors down the canteen, but that does not escape the horizon of the managerial problematic. It simulates the managerial mindset and strives to inculcate a sympathetic predisposition toward managing things, of being able to take the point of view of management - something most workplaces try and encourage anyway. Decisions here are conditioned by resource bottlenecks or by external threats, in contrast to really-existing managerialism which is always much concerned with social control of subordinates. What Fallout Shelter depicts in its game mechanics is an ideology of management. Power is stripped out of the equation.. There is no need to take the viewpoint of your charges, because you always know better than them.
Could Fallout Shelter be fun and compelling in any other way? That's a bit like reimagining Space Invaders without the shooting. It's a stripped down ideologised simulation of the necessities that beset human communities, and how it encounters them in the context of a culture constituted by unequal gendered relationships naturalised in and by accepted regimes of ostensibly technocratic managerialism. Anita's observations are right, but they're just one element of the cultural codes wrapped up in the game.
One twice-yearly spectacle I never look forward to is the New Year's and Birthday Honours List, the occasion where the Queen, at the behest of the establishment, dishes out awards for services rendered. I don't look forward to it because, inevitably, someone ostensibly on the left picks up a knighthood and/or a gong. And so it has happened today. The GMB general secretary from this day forth shall be known as Sir Paul Kenny, and feminist author and campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez shall now be styled with an OBE after her name. As someone whose republicanism is bone deep, I find this state of affairs appalling and depressing.
Paul Kenny has been and remains an excellent general secretary of his trade union. The GMB has grown under his leadership and possesses a no-nonsense attitude to organising and disputes. Strategic and intelligent, trade unions could do with more leaders like him. Caroline Criado-Perez has made waves in recent years, firstly as the figurehead for the high-profile campaign to get women on bank notes, latterly as the target of rape and death threats, and has since made a name as one of Britain's best-known young feminists.
In their defence, Paul says “I have accepted this as recognition of the crucial role trade unions play in society. The honour is for every trade unionist trying to make the world a better place. We get denigrated for standing up against exploitation and bullying, so I’m delighted our role is finally being recognised - and my mum would have been chuffed to bits.” I wonder if Paul would be intensely relaxed if, time after time, GMB full-time convenors consistently received 'employee of the year' awards from the firms they organise in? Likewise, Caroline tweeted that "we're taking feminism all the way to the queen". Not for the first time - Bea Campbell got there before her.
This, however, does not necessarily reflect on their characters - more so the weaknesses of their politics. Paul's move typifies a common enough political trend among trade unionists, that of economism. As the labour movement is formally split into its industrial and political wings, this conditions the political horizons of not a few trade union members. Plenty have been the times I've heard union militants discuss the contempt with which they held their bosses, the tricks and the tactics they used to pull off good wins for the members, the effective actions that they've led. I've also seen those same people get misty eyed when it comes to the Queen and the royals - I recall one comrade telling me how she found criticism of the Queen upsetting "because she can't answer back". But this is possible because of the absolute separation between the industrial and the political. Being a workplace militant may tend toward but is no guarantee of political radicalism, your concern is the relation between worker and boss, not voters and government.
As Paul has authored an effective political strategy inside the Labour party, I can't believe he's so politically naive to lapse into economism, even if his statement smacks of it. But what his honour might do, as he also implies, is give trade unionism some legitimacy in the eyes of the many millions of people who do, unfortunately, cherish the monarchy and all its works. If Paul ever falls under the press spotlight for carrying out his role, the knighthood might armour him as he jousts before the court of public opinion. On the other hand, this has to be balanced out by the extent to which the functioning of the GMB lay apparatus, in which there will be disproportionate numbers of activists who think as I do, who will have had their confidence dented in him. How can you trust someone to stick it to the bosses when those same bosses have condescended to award him?
In Caroline's case, it's notable that the targets of her campaigning have been peripheral "easy wins". Yes, as she notes this morning, it is absurd to have gender normative bean bags. It is important to highlight how women's lives are blighted by everyday sexism, how sex crimes against women are belittled, and the myriad other ways women are put in their place. But the weakness of her politics is typified by her debut book, Do It Like a Woman. As the blurb puts it, "we meet the first woman to cross the Antarctic alone; we meet a female fighter pilot in Afghanistan; we meet a climate change activist who scaled new heights; we meet a Chilean revolutionary turned politician; we meet the Russian punks who rocked out against Putin; and we meet the Iranian journalist who dared to uncover her hair." Inspiring stories. Important stories. Yet where does power come into this? Where are the linkages between the shit women have to deal with and the social system that rests on private property and economic exploitation? It's absent.
For much the same reasons as Paul, her gong can be advantageous from the standpoint of her campaigning activity. Being in receipt of an establishment sacrament may open up new audiences to her that were closed previously. And it could close down others. In future upwellings of feminist radicalism, is it likely those future comrades are going to listen to an OBE-festooned activist? Or, as is more likely, is Caroline destined to be an establishment face they will wish to kick against?
And lastly, here's another problem I suspect neither have thought about. By accepting their awards they're conferring legitimacy on a set up that is fundamentally against the interests of the overwhelming majority of people. If it's legitimate for trade unionists and feminists to take something, then just perhaps the whole shebang isn't as bad as all that. Worse, they are also using their records to legitimise the slew of Tory donors also titled ... for their services to the Tory party.
Lest we forget, like our friends here, the monarchy is an integral part of a system that alibis all the things Paul and Caroline are against. It normalises the idea some should rule as of birthright, that there are better classes of people, that there are some entitled to greater wealth than others. The monarchy is anti-democratic because of the reserve powers our constitution conveys upon it. For anyone who campaigns for equality and social justice, be it in the workers' movement or the women's movement, it's time the monarchical blinkers were removed. It is not our friend, and we should not accept its gifts.
Mad Max: Fury Road is a paradox. A completely overblown, absurd masterpiece of a paradox, but one that balances two seemingly irreconcilables and fuses them astonishingly successfully. On the one hand its an utterly mindless action romp with scant dialogue, a simple plot, lashings of violence, and spectacular vehicles that make for very big explosions. Yet beneath that is a cunning and penetrating commentary on patriarchal (not male per se) violence and feminist struggle. This is what I'm going to take a look at so yes, this piece is rammed with spoilers.
Okay, where to begin. In one of his many asides, this one on the so-called Asiatic mode of production, Marx noted the despotisms of Asia, particularly in the desert regions, rested on control and maintenance of water supplies. Leaving well alone the controversies that ballooned around Marx's statement, in MMFR this is certainly the case. The War Boys, a cultish group ruled by Immortan Joe, keeps its population in thrall by being the only source of water in a parched desert wasteland. Every so often, Joe turns on the immense pipes beneath his citadel and briefly drenches the hundreds of wretched followers gathered beneath his balcony. In so doing, he chooses to lecture them on resisting one's dependency on water. We are taken into his lair. Joe himself is an albino grotesque who relies on a breathing apparatus and a suit that protects his irritable skin. We also get the measure of the kind of society he runs. Sat tethered to milking machines are a half dozen women, and locked up in a vault are his five brides: women he keeps imprisoned and, it is implied, he repeatedly rapes to yield him a son.
Below that are his caste of war boys who are cursed with a 'half-life'. It seems these fanatical followers (and cannon fodder) have some form of cancer that limits their usefulness, and binds them to the father worship of Joe. Faced with a lingering death as the cancer takes hold, they prefer to carelessly throw their lives away fighting in one of the Citadel's war bands.
Here then we have a patriarchy in a classical sense. This is not the rule of women by men, but of women and men by the father. It is for Joe's satisfaction that nearly all the young men are pressed into soldiery, that he keeps a collection of women as, for want of a better phrase, breeders; and that the destitute subjects of his kingdom are kept under his thumb by his ownership and control of the Citadel's hydraulics. The patriarchy - and the filmmakers would have been hard-pressed to have conceived of one more viscerally ugly and brutal than this - controls property, the means of repression, and the means of reproduction.
Imperator Furiosa is a woman who thinks differently. Abducted as a young child, she grew to be one of Joe's trusted lieutenants. Neither cannon fodder or sex slave, she is charged with the task of driving a tanker to the nearby gas refinery run by one of Joe's cronies. Except she has gone rogue. Under Joe's nose she liberates his "wives" and smuggles them into her truck, where she plans to take them to 'the green place', the idyllic matriarchy she was hailed from. The mayhem starts when Furiosa takes the tanker off road and the war band set off in pursuit.
This is where the titular Max properly enters the frame. Having been captured by the War Boys, he's designated a universal blood bank where transfusions of his blood can keep Joe's warriors going a little longer. With the general alarm he's paired with Nux, a particularly fanatical boy not long for this world, and rides into battle with him mounted as a front piece to his car. Eventually Max escapes and teams up with Furiosa, then the fun really begins.
As an action film it is notable for two things. Unlike previous iterations of Mad Max, this is less Max as lone wolf saviour and more as equal help meet. There are times when he saves the day for the band of women he's escorting, but there are others where they save his skin. Far from being helpless, Furiosa is up to her neck in fighting and action. She's the one with the plan, while Max is a drifter just along for the ride. Theirs is a fully cooperative relationship and it's this mutual interdependence that sees them through to victory.
Finally, Furiosa arrives at her former homeland and is greeted by the half dozen remaining members of her tribe. They are a strictly separatist group with one of the women boasting about how many men's heads she's blown off over the years. But ultimately it's bitter sweet. The green land is a poisoned marsh. She may have reached safety beyond Joe's reach, but it's safety in desolation. After despairing an screaming into the wilderness, her alternative plan is to just ride out into the desert - they have enough supplies for 160 days and hope they'll eventually come across something. Max, however, has an alternative suggestion. If Joe's forces can be trapped in the canyon system they battled through on the way in they can return to the Citadel with its water supply and green of its own. Cue more surreal, sumptuous mayhem.
Needless to say, our heroes kill Joe, defeat his army, and make it back to the Citadel in one piece. This is where it takes an interesting turn. So far it's been warrior feminists and male allies who've defeated the patriarchy. When they reveal Joe's torn body to the crowds the old social structure crumbles, and the wretched of this earth celebrate. From a radical point of view, while welcome it nevertheless underlines the myth of the vanguard who, in Guevarist fashion, enter the city and liberate the huddled masses. It's not an act of self-liberation. However, as our heroes start being elevated up to the higher echelons the water starts flowing again. The women strapped to milking machines have seized the moment to liberate themselves and turn on the taps. Our vanguard, sans Max who melts into the crowd, help people up onto the rising platform. It's no accident that the first helped up is a particularly rough looking bloke. The message here is clear: men have nothing to fear from feminism. My destroying the patriarchy, of the rule of men and women by powerful men, then all are liberated. The relationships and social structures that have twisted society into an apparatus of domination can be recast, laying open the road to a better, freer place for everyone.
Hence rather than MMFR being open to feminist interpretation, it itself is a $150m commentary on feminism, by way of ultra violence, the best guitarist ever, and audacious nonsense. Do go for a showing: it will be the best film you've seen this year.
A Frost/Nixon for our age? No, but the media reaction to Russell Brand's encounter with Ed Miliband is out of all proportion to what was said. The actual content of the interview is pretty innocuous, at least from the standpoint of grizzled lefties and hardened politicos. Yet where Brand's core audience are concerned, the teens to the mid-30 somethings who tend not to pay politics anywhere near as much mind as the likes of you and I, it's a different story. That is why Ed was absolutely right to seek him out and take whatever ra-ra-revolutionary verbiage cum cheeky banter on offer, and once again the expectations of the commentariat were confounded. The worst they could fault him for was dropping his tees and gees which, all told, is a bit pathetic.
This was the right move for another reason. For the first time in this campaign, a major media commentator - for that is what Brand is these days - has asked questions about issues that would never trouble the prompt sheets of your Paxos and Brillos. Class. Ownership. Capital. Change. The whole point of voting. The legitimacy of mainstream politics. These are matters absolutely crucial for understanding 21st century Britain, for getting to grips with the forces that structure and condition our politics and political debate. While it's right professional interviewers should scrutinise the details of party programmes, no one is interested in the bigger picture, of understanding how we as citizens can hope to change things with our individual votes when power is concentrated in huge, unaccountable private institutions? If Brand isn't going to ask these questions, then who will? Andrew Marr? Kay Burley? Ed Miliband, for his part, made the case for linking voting to wider project of progressive change, of tentatively stepping beyond the remit of representative politics. He rightly made the point that change can be slow, but that government is one avenue that can assist. Ed would have done well to have added that if none of this matters, then why are the Tories, their overseas fellow travellers, and their helpful friends in the city are pulling out all the stops to win - including today's helpfully out riding for what professional political comment thinks:
But I can’t understand why leftwing feminists have not come out in their droves to condemn Miliband for going anywhere near Russell Brand. By his own admission he has slept with more than 1000 women, including prostitutes. I find that man abhorrent and I think it is such a bad idea for a politician to have anything to do with him. It was unbearable to watch Miliband (who might not be 100% my cup of tea in lots of ways, and some of his ideas are bonkers, but he is a genuine supporter of women and I’m sure he would put his hand on his heart and say he is a feminist) be lectured by Brand on the uselessness of the female vote. The suffragettes would have hung, drawn and quartered Brand.
I'd take Allsopp's whinging more seriously if she gave a fig about what's happening to women less fortunate than her under the Tories. She has every right to criticise Brand for his sexism of course, which plenty of feminists have done before it became politically convenient to do so, but Allsopp's voice has been curiously silent during the destruction of women's shelters, the closure of children's centres, cuts to the public sector and social security, and the increase in low paid insecure work - all of which affect women disproportionately. And as she does so, at least Brand is making amends for past behaviour. Solidarity around the Kurdish struggle against Islamic State and, in particular, the leading combat roles taken by feminist comrades in that fight; and of course supporting the women of the New Era estate in their victory over an unscrupulous property developer. Actions speak louder than words, Kirstie.
Allsopp's remarks condenses the rubbish that gets written about Brand. People on the right and the centre left lecture him about his behaviour and his views, but for many of them politics is something they write about in the office. They don't give their free time to 'doing stuff', they don't weigh in and use whatever pull they might have to effect change. Politics is something others do. They observe and record, and that for them is enough. Brand doesn't fit into that mold and, in his own way, despite his wonkish aspect neither does the Labour leader. Yet he gets the big interviews, the book deals, the Question Time slots, the column acreage. His productions are anarchic, he plays fast and loose with the dialectic of serious vs unserious. Why use one word when seven will do is Brand's favoured approach. But ultimately, what Brand exemplifies is fear. Comedians are public figures, and Brand as Britain's current king of the pile is a working class boy done good who's muscling in on their turf. If hundreds of thousands can hang on this upstart's words, so other proletarian and semi-lumpen voices might also reach places polite, established debate cannot touch.
Late to the party, but like I care. Tim Lott wrote about being castigated as a lefty because he doesn't toe the party line on a number of issues. This sees him denounced, defamed, and condemned to the Lubyanka. Well, he did admit he quite liked Spiked.
The big sticking point however, is this. Permit me to quote Tim at length:
I believe the jury is still out about whether gender identity is entirely constructed. I question whether the gender pay gap in Britain is as large as is sometimes suggested, and wonder whether it may have as much to do with the way it is calculated and with the choices women make after having children as it does with patriarchy or prejudice (although the government could do more to close the gap by funding childcare better). There is huge work to do to liberate women from the very real yoke of patriarchy. But I would venture – checking my privilege – that this is not a crisis in Britain in way it is in the developing world.
Fair enough, Tim has doubts about accepted lefty wisdom when it comes to gender divisions. Surely though the point is not to carry on with doubts but to take the trouble to investigate the issues further. I know it's a rarity in politics generally, but I usually find it helpful to get to know a subject matter before pronouncing on it. That's not a particularly left or right wing course of action, but it's the correct thing to do. What doesn't help Tim's case is the flimsy character of the positions he's built up to write oh-so-controversial words about.
It is not orthodoxy that gender identity is socially constructed. I believe it is and I think the bulk of evidence in this direction is overwhelming, but there are plenty who do not including quite a few feminists. On gender pay gaps, the evidence is there for all to see, irrespective of whether one thinks it's large or not. And it is a nonsense to suggest that feminists aren't aware that caring responsibilities attached to motherhood affect earnings, nor that women in rich, Western societies as a rule are better off than those living in mediaeval hellholes like Saudi Arabia. With a little bit of digging Tim could have found this easily out if he thought it an issue important enough.
Tim then goes on to moan about 'assumption creep': the idea of you have sorted views on one or a range of issues, you'll be sound on everything else. Well, in my experience no one expects this, except perhaps inside the SWP and annoying practitioners of performative piety - you know who you are - on the internet.
And this is the biggest problem with Tim's piece. I don't know what Tim does. He could be a hyper active trade union militant, a volunteer with the Kurdish YPG, the leader of a noisy and radical residents' association, or just a quiet activist doing his bit here and there. I suspect he's not any of these because he would have written about them otherwise. All that matters here is a certain presentation of left self à la Goffman in a world where all that matters are identity markers. Sounds a bit like Twitter, Facebook, or, for the really radical, Urban 75.
If that is what "being left" now means, Tim or whoever wants that label are welcome to it.
I agree with Julie Bindel. There's a phrase that won't win many friends. In feminist and socialist circles, pornography can polarise opinion in ways few issues can. And as par the course for strict dividing lines, either side are soon painted into absolutist corners. In this case, those against banning porn self-identify as sex-positive as opposed to the sex-negative killjoys on the other side. For the feminists and socialists who take the opposite view, they are the ones who are consistent opponents of sexual violence while the opposition are "malestream" feminists or left friends of the porn industry. Not the ideal starting points for a productive discussion approaching consensus, which helps explain why the debate has been an interminable affair since the 1970s.
Yet if Bindel's article is anything to go by, the chasm might not be as yawning as one supposes. Reading the piece as opposed to rolling one's eyes and filing it away in a drawer marked 'dirge' reveals two positions almost everyone can accept. That porn distorts human sexuality and, generally speaking, normalises objectifying, problematic gender relations. And second, it should not be banned. Yes, that's right, Bindel is opposed to the state banning porn. Finally some common ground, perhaps.
I've argued before that porn can be considered an ideology. That is in the sense Louis Althusser sometimes used it, as a set of ideas and discourses that mediate relations between ourselves and the social world. A UKIP supporter might frame their relationships with East European co-workers through anti-immigrant anxiety. A young Trotskyist could try selling papers to angry pickets in the belief it will progress the class struggle. And a young man, in his first sexual encounter, may pressure his partner into doing things he's watched in porn. There is no semi-coherent "theory" of porn, but an aesthetic that can frame experience of sexual activity.
You might say "big deal". Some people do. After all, what pornography is just people doing sex things on camera, right? No. Mainstream straight pornography* produced by the Californian-based porn industry has a pretty standard set of tropes that repeat themselves. In the majority of cases, men are basically anonymous dicks with bodies appended to them. And women are always insatiable, they just want to be used and, in some cases, abused. Consider the dynamics of the typical scene - the woman is positioned as the object for the viewer, and in turn her object is the co-starring penis. All her ministrations; oral, anal, vaginal, are for audience gratification. The anonymity of the male performer allows them to read themselves into the scene. The performance aims to stoke heterosexual male desire and, typically, it ends with the money shot either in the woman's face, breasts or some other part of her body. The economy of gender portrayed here is simple. The woman is subordinate and submissive, even if she is 'active' as opposed to passive. She willingly, mostly without on screen prompting, goes through the motions. She is not asked if she would like to do something, and would normally be the case in a real sexual encounter, the action grinds on to the film's (male) climax. And when the man has finished, the viewer has finished with that performance too.
The basic model of gender relations here is woman as sexual supplicant. It feeds off the sexual objectification of women long found in everyday Western cultures and imbues it with a pornographic sensibility, feeding into the further commodification and use of women's bodies as sex objects. I don't believe the nonsense of porn being the theory and rape being the practice, but straight, mainstream pornography concentrates in extremis the basic core of gender relations. Or, to be more precise, a set of so-called traditional gender relations whose hegemony has everywhere been challenged and are getting rolled back. Bindel is bang on, mainstream porn contributes to misogyny because it rewrites and restates a backward, reactionary and downright stunted view of women. As feminism - the struggle for women to be treated as human beings - pushes out to sea, porn is among the strongest backwashing currents pushing it back to shore or, worse, onto the rocks.
*More on different forms of porn another time.
Consider three separate, seemingly unconnected incidents that have risen to media prominence recently.
1. The horrifying, systematic attacks on mainly white girls by gangs of Pakistani paedophiles in Rotherham.
2. The abuse meted out to Zoe Quinn, a US video game developer and author of Depression Quest.
3. The theft of naked photos from the social media accounts of prominent Hollywood stars, including A-listers like Jennifer Lawrence and Kirsten Dunst, and posting them online for all the world to see.
What drives a man to hack a woman's social media presence and repost details about her personal life? What kind of mentality laboriously reconstructs compromising pictures from supposedly deleted data to leak, leak, and leak again? How depraved do you have to be to spend time grooming schoolgirls solely for the purpose of imprisoning, raping, and torturing them? All of these behaviours are on the same continuum, a spectrum of woman hate.
And some say feminism isn't necessary.
The common root is more than just your standard misogyny, of the sort a lot of men have grown habituated to for over a century. The world where everyone knew their place, where men were men and women were sex/drudges is slipping into the night. And some men don't like it.
At the extreme, violent end of the scale is the Rotherham abuse. While conceding nothing to reader-friendliness, Slavoj Žižek(!) argues that the behaviour of the paedophiles concerned, be they convicted or not, is about asserting masculinity by damaging and breaking the girls they victimised. It's positioned as ritualised revenge, as getting back at the dominant white, secular but occasionally racist culture that positions them as second class citizens (brown-skinned, Muslim). Sexual abuse is an affirmation of their maleness, of seizing the property of one's adversary and using it as they see fit. "Their" women, their wives, sisters, mums and daughters already know their place, hence there is an element of the abuse "schooling" the white girls about their lot in life. There's something in this, but I'm inclined to agree with Paul Cotterill: the material circumstances and lived existences of the abusers counts for more than ideological considerations. Paedophiles aren't born sexual predators: they're made.
Then there is predatory behaviour of the other sort. The hounding of Zoe Quinn and the hacking of celebrity social media accounts is also an attempt - a doomed one - to put women in their place. As I've argued before, the "new misogyny", the harassment, creeping, stalking, name-calling, what have you isn't just the result of a few disturbed people getting their hands on an internet connection. It's deeper. It's symptomatic of a perceived emasculation crisis, of men on the one hand having to compete with women on an increasingly level playing field in the jobs market, of women becoming increasingly visible as actors and participants in their own right in areas traditionally marked off as men-only. Like video games. Like action-adventure films. What better way to lash out than rewriting a woman as a sex object, be it through scurrilous allegations that Quinn's game got good reviews because she slept around with industry journalists, or slapping naked photos of action heroine Jennifer Lawrence all over the internet? Everything else is stripped away. Their individuality. Their talents. The only thing that matters is what's between their legs. Pathetically, the men who pile in to these feeding frenzies find validation; they really think they're thumbing their nose at the feminist conspiracy.
Both types of abuse are born of decay. Women have been coming out of the home for decades. Girls and young women rightly expect to lead a life as meaningful and self-directed as that open to boys and young men. The redoubts of the women haters are crumbling as generation after generation are habituated to women in public life, to women in "male jobs", to there being no essential differences in capability and capacity. There is no reason to believe this trend will not continue, provided it is actively preserved and defended as we go. Abuse of this character is a spasm of inchoate fury and fear, but hopefully it is one whose days are looking numbered.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the fire of radical politics burns fiercest when fuelled by the polemic of other radicals. Nowhere is this truer than the ruinous, ceaseless battle between transwomen and activists who've come to be known (pejoratively) as trans-exclusionary radical feminists. I'm not going to get too much into that fight. There's little point my mansplaining matters to readers, especially as there's plenty of stuff out there already.
I agree with Caroline Criado-Perez, 'cis' is not a neutral term merely meaning "not-trans". Bound up in trans discourse with something called 'cis-privilege', Caroline is right to ask what this "privilege" means in practice for non-trans women. The privilege of being accepted as a woman means taking all the crap women deal with. She notes that some kind of rarefied gender identity is not core to her personal identity as a feeling, thinking human being, but we live in a society where her body emits signs that constitute her as a woman in the eyes of other women and men, and all that that entails. Likewise, me being 'a man' is not central to my sense of self either. Other things are. Yet the difference between Caroline and I is the fact my wiry, gawky frame has been coded male since birth and I am accepted as a man in all of my daily interactions. The fact gender identity doesn't impinge on my personal identity is a consequence of gender privilege, of being a member of the dominant gender. Caroline's contributions on the debate are especially useful because she places the materiality of the lived, social body at the centre of her approach to the relationship between feminism and transpolitics. It's a reminder that gender is not a free-roaming PoMo signifier that slips and slides all over the place.
Yet it's not transwomen who need reminding about the materiality of gender. As Juliet Jacques notes, transitioning and living as a woman is difficult precisely because of the weight hanging on gender. Harassment, violence, discrimination, the struggle to access medical services, these are the risks undertaken when changing gender. It is a fraught, stressful experience. Committing to the change takes guts.
Ultimately, it's this materiality that is the root of the so-called TERF wars. For radical feminists who have a problem with transwomen, allowing them to access women-only feminist spaces risks the dilution of bringing out cis women's experience of gendered oppression. It might make some women who've suffered at the hands of male violence feel uncomfortable. There is also the notion that transwomen are acting as agents of patriarchal social relations. For example, the hegemonic femininity radical feminism kicks against is an object the ideology of passing works towards. Radical feminism contests it. Transitioning valorises it. Far from contesting gender, transwomen confirm it and thereby strengthen the patriarchy. For transwomen, for a section of feminism to join in with all the avalanche of crap, to have ostensibly progressive people question their right to exist - and worse - is intolerable. Hence the violence of online exchanges, of the prevalence of 'TERF scum' as an insult, and its escalation into encompassing mainstream feminists, like Caroline, and Sarah Ditum, who do ask serious questions about gender.
The TERF wars are not about bloody-mindedness. It is a product of material experience, of how two sets of women live, theorise and politicise gender. The issues, however, are not insurmountable.
Belated second sketchy contribution on intersectionality. I recommend looking at Identity Politics and Intersectionality first.
1. Intersectional thinking, informed in general by some kind of identity politics/new social movement theory accepts, in the abstract, that gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, etc. are constituted by and through social relations. These relations are also relationships characterised at greater and lesser degrees by domination, discrimination, subordination, oppression, inequality, and silencing.
2. While acknowledging it in theory, the relational character of oppression tends to recognition in the breach than in the observance. Intersectionality is too often identified with the breakdown of attempts to think through the ways multiple oppressions work together, when its promise lies in overcoming their compartmentalisation. Intersectionality is not about an inverted hierarchy of oppression, scoring points for having it worse than others, or privilege checking as a precondition of solidarity.
3. The compartmentalisation of oppressed social locations is neither a matter of faulty theory or misinterpretation, but an effect of how the social relations constituting these positions work. It is an outcome, condensed theoretically, of experience. One cannot help but notice, for example, that the UK's new, post-Twitter generation of prominent feminist voices tend to be white, alumnus of top universities, reside in London and have solidly middle class backgrounds. The problem of which "we" these feminists speak of and for finds itself replayed 30 years after bell hooks diagnosed the problem in the seminal Ain't I A Woman?. But it's more than a question of who gets more CIF slots and retweets. It's a symptom of an underlying political economy of oppression, of being disadvantaged in some circumstances and benefiting from advantage in others. It is the latter that tends to generate axes of tension, making axes of solidarity based on shared characteristics difficult.
4. There are theoretically possible routes out of the impasse. The first of these is intersubjectivity. Sloppy, pathologised forms of identity politics valorises the unique qualities of one's subject position. No straight white man can hope to understand what it's like being a gay black guy. An impassable gulf separates able-bodied from disabled feminists. This, of course, is utter nonsense that fetishises oppression instead of challenging it. We are thinking, feeling, empathising creatures. Human beings are not cold appendages of interests, arrived at schematically. Social divisions do not prevent the more privileged and advantageous from sympathising, solidarising and allying with the oppressed - the history of each and every radical social movement tells us that. Likewise the reverse is true - our capacity for empathy is tugged on to shore up support for the arrangements ruling over us. The millions who grieved for Princess Diana. The millions who identify with celebrities. On and on it goes.
5. Intersubjectivity is a necessary condition for overcoming the pathologisation of identity politics, but is not sufficient. Taken in isolation it has its own dangers. In short, it can amount to an over-theorised notion of simply being nice and respectful or, as Bill and Ted might put it, being excellent to each other. In so doing it reduces sexism, racism etc. to matters of ignorance or individual nastiness. Questions of power are not relevant, they are pushed out of the picture.
6. The other is to give up on coordinated intersectional politics entirely. Just stick to ploughing your own identity furrow and let others get on with theirs. Laissez faire will sort things out, one hopes. Or dust off a master category and subsume everything to that by treating other differences as secondary. In both cases, this is a recipe for less efficacy and more pathology.
7. Perhaps understandably, intersectional thinking has tended to overlook class. Like gender, like ethnicity, like sexuality, like disability, class is a dynamic social relationship systematically reproduced across capitalist societies that is absolutely essential to its reproduction.
8. Too much received sociological commentary reduces class to status or, worse, occupational category. While important and vital to social critique and intersectional politics, an understanding of class as a relation, as a process takes us into capitalism's guts. And what we find there is a simple, banal truth that intersectional politics has forgotten. The overwhelming majority of people have to work for a living.
9. Basic Marxism. In advanced capitalist societies, there are those who own significant quantities of capital and those who do not. The people that do, whether by direct employment or through various intermediaries invest their capital to make a profit, from which they derive an income. The source of profits derives from the labour of others. Capital, collectively, employs a propertyless mass of people (the proletariat) to produce commodities. It doesn't matter whether they're material or "immaterial", the point is the full value of what is produced is not returned to the producer. They have signed up for X quantity of hours in return for a wage or salary. The value realised by the sale of commodities accrues to the employer. Hence this difference - surplus value - is abstract and hidden, and yet can be discerned from the social behaviour of employers and employees. They act as if surplus value is as tangible and real as the sturdy wooden desk my computer rests on.
10. This is where the notion of material interest comes into play. Capital in general is a blind social process. To perpetuate itself (and the owners who depend on it for income) it has to constantly seek new ways of generating greater and greater profits. Seeking markets is one element of this - after all, if no one buys your goods you won't make your money back, let alone see any profit. Where individual capitals exert direct control is in the production process, where it faces the irresistible impetus to drive costs down. Typically this has been via an intensification of the labour process, where the application of technology makes employees more productive - at the cost of little or no extra wages, or by lengthening the working day or reining in pay and benefits. From this standpoint workers are reduced to inputs, to figures winking on a monitor. They are a resource to be managed, or an inconvenience to whittle away. It's not so much a case of Marxism and socialism reducing human beings to proletarians, it's a matter of theory describing a real, concrete process.
11. From the standpoint of capital then, workers are only a means to an end. People are employed to make money. Capital buys labour power for a set number of hours, and that's it. As long as management's right to manage is sacrosanct in its workplaces, it mostly doesn't care what its workers do in their own time. Likewise, despite the best efforts of the media, education, and institutional dictates, we sell our labour power because we have to, not because we want to. And in this relationship, working people too have definite sets of interests. These aren't the result of a thought experiment; struggling around and asserting these interests have had concrete impacts on each and every capitalist society. There's the obvious - capital has an interest in depressing wages, labour has an interest in raising them; capital has an interest in lengthening the working day, labour has an interest in stopping this encroachment on free time. Capital wants its workers subordinated completely to the needs of the business, labour wants the business to fit round their lives. Capital wants to treat its employees like cogs, labour demands to be treated like human beings. This is the stuff of class struggle.
12. The majority of women are dependent on a wage. The majority of men are dependent on a wage. The majority of white people are dependent on a wage. The majority of the global non-white majority are dependent on a wage. Straight people, gay people, bi-people, trans people, the majority of all these are dependent on a wage. Able or disabled; oppressed nationality, oppressor nationality, the one thing they have in common, the experience cutting through the sections and intersections is the experience of the capitalist workplace. Of their subordination to the demands and dictates of capital. You can see why, historically, class has been privileged by labour movements, social democratic parties, and communist parties. So, are we back to the beginning? Is class the lynchpin?
13. Yes. And no. Capital is constituted by struggle. When we sell our labour power, we get caught up in it. There is no escape. But this does not mean everything is "reducible" to class, at least not class narrowly defined in traditional terms. As wage labourers, as proletarians, there is a political economy to how we, as a variegated collection of human beings, reproduce ourselves as such. We reproduce our physical bodies through eating, resting and, yes, actually reproducing; and we reproduce ourselves as social beings in the many varied social contexts that mark our lives as gendered, raced, sexualised people. The former is a physical necessity, the latter is, theoretically, the realm of freedom. It is the space in which we can realise ourselves. We give up chunks of our lives not just to survive, but so we have the resources that allow us to follow our inclinations.
14. The political economy of wage labour, however, is not an idyllic place. The realm of freedom is, too much, a realm of privatised freedom, of seeking comfort in one's peccadilloes before heading back out to the daily grind. The realm of freedom is also potential freedom. Because, for too many people, it's the opposite. Reproducing oneself socially and culturally (and physically) is not a free-floating matter. It is under certain conditions, under the weight of history and convention, and through patterns of certain social institutions. This is the place of the family, the traditional bastion of gender roles, compulsory heterosexuality, and the rule of the father. It is the place of community, of what constitutes an insider and who is coded an outsider. It's the space of the environment, of whether you live in a nice place or a run down estate suffering the effects of crime and pollution. It's the dimension of social and cultural capital, of the networks and status you command - or don't.
15. This is the home, the wellspring of the oppressions addressed by identity politics and intersectionality. As vulgar class politics have treated human beings as wage earners who need to get over their divisions - a critique of the political economy of capital while forgetting/ignoring the political economy of wage labour, you might argue that intersectionality is an attempt to theorise and reconcile the divisions within the political economy of the latter while bracketing the political economy of capital. This is why both have floundered. The former emphasises the simple at the expense of the complex. The latter, the complex at the expense of the simple. The bulk of the proletariat is intersectional. The bulk of the intersectional is proletarian.
16. The separation of the two political economies is an analytical separation. While at work, you might spend your time thinking about the weekend. At the weekend, you might find yourself thinking about work. The values, ideas, prejudices that have taken root outside of the workplace can be and often are carried into the workplace. Capital too has proven adept at using these social divisions - gender, race, sexuality, religion, nationality and status - to help atomise workforces in its ceaseless hunger for more surplus value, more profit. Solidarity is harder to deliver across colour bars and sectarian division.
17. This is where intersectional and class politics, erm, intersect. Exploiting divisions among workers can reinforce divisions among workers. Throwing millions of women out of work after the first and second world wars for the returning men reinforced patriarchy, made them economically dependent on their husbands, and strengthened a strict gendered division of labour in work. Proletarian men benefited - they had their jobs, and, culturally speaking, they were entitled to keep a woman along the lines of the bourgeois home, with its male head and wife/mother. Capital obviously benefited. And women lost out. Privileging either, in this instance, skews the analysis and therefore the political response. Hence, while the two political economies are analytically separate, the struggles in each are tangled up with one another.
18. For those who doubt the salience of class politics, the fact labour movements are growing in the developing world, and have knocked about the advanced capitalist nations just shy of two centuries suggests that doubting is somewhat overstated. Their basic, most basic function, is to bring working people together to face their employers as a disciplined collective. It's far more difficult for capital to pursue its relentless race to the bottom in an organised workplace. Yet in postmodern/identity, and intersectional thinking, labour movements are generally neglected as agents of change. Partly, perhaps, they present as dull and plodding whereas new social movements and their antecedents are fresh, but also because labour movements were occasionally the villains of the piece. Colour bars, gender bars, excluding oppressed nationalities, labour movements at various times and in various places have not only enforced them, but initiated them. This is because then, as now, labour movements are movements of working people as you find them.
19. Yet labour movements have come a long way. They're not perfect. The legacy of gendered and racialised divisions of labour still mark certain sectors of it. Yet, in general terms, they have moved from being a brake on the intersectionality of the working class to facilitating it. What other movement is committed to attacking sexism, racism, homo and transphobia? What other movement throws together people from different faiths and none, actively seeks to recruit resident and immigrant workers, and addresses issues from the workplace to environment, health, economics and quality of life and actively works toward their progressive resolution? There is no other such movement. Except for the labour movement.
20. The solution to intersectionality's quandary, of the theoretical glue that can hold it together, is a fundamentally open socialist politics grounded in the mass, intersectional labour movement that already exists. Class politics, so theorised, also has to reflect the actual intersecting, nuanced practice of the labour movement as it is now. Basically, what's on the table is a merger that's long been established. It's time theory caught up with practice. Struggles around gender, ethnicity and sexuality, and class struggles are part and parcel of the same. Every permutation of identity, the working class is it. And if you look at the other end, when you ask "who benefits?" from intersecting oppression and class exploitation, time after time it's the same group of people - the 1%, the bourgeoisie, the establishment, the power elite, the ruling class.
21. The labour movement is a class movement. It is an intersectional movement. As such it represents a persistent threat to the rule of capital, and, in embryo, speaks of the possibility of a future beyond capitalism. It is a movement articulating the universal interests of the overwhelming majority of people. Get stuck in.
Thursday's Blurred Lines is well worth a watch. Kirsty Wark explores the thesis that popular culture is gripped by a new wave of sexism, and looks at 90s Laddism, porn and internet cultures as possible drivers. Well known "moments" of the new misogyny - sexism as a term is too twee to describe it - such as attacks on and persistent digital harassment of folk like Mary Beard and Caroline Criado-Perez; the abuse heaped on Anita Sarkeesian for producing short films, like this one on the representation of women in video games; the Steubenville rape case, and much else besides.
If you're a labour movement person. If you're a feminist, a socialist, a progressive, a self-identifying revolutionary or whatever, the new misogyny is an enemy of your politics and mine. It needs confronting and challenging at every turn by women *and* men. It's not enough for right-on blokes to sit at home feeling smug that about their non-sexist attitudes. They have a responsibility to struggle alongside feminist comrades. As Sarkeesian pointed out in her interview with Wark, we don't all pollute the air, but we all breathe it and so have an interest in cleaning it up.
I'm particularly interested in where the new misogyny comes from. Wark and Laurie Penny (who also appears) argues it has something to do with women entering the new networked public sphere in massive numbers, a place that was formerly dominated by men (see Laurie's Cybersexism, review here). Yes, that's true enough. There's always a political economy to these things too, which the documentary touches on. Permit me to indulgently quote myself at length:
As I argued in this post on UKIP and masculinity, age, gender identity, flexible labour markets/in-work insecurity, and the pace of cultural change conspired to generate a constituency of middle-aged to elderly men who found the "common sense" right wing populism of UKIP attractive. A similar set of processes are at work among younger men, too.
The situation facing all young people when they emerge from the education system, be that at 16, 18 or 21, is greatly uncertain. This month [July 2013], some 21% of 16-24 year olds - 959,000 people - are unemployed. Whereas perhaps their parents and certainly their grandparents knew full employment and the possibility of getting into work right from school, it's more of a lottery for young people now.
So we have uncertainty. But we also have a more level playing field when it comes to jobs. This isn't to say there is no gender divisions at work - it would be stupid to pretend men and women aren't treated differently. But increasingly, especially at entry level, workplaces are increasingly mixed and young men and young women have to compete for the same jobs. And yet hegemonic masculinity - that complex of ideologies, values and expectations inculcated by socialisation and reinforced through family, friendship and media networks - hasn't caught up. A real man has a well paid job, has disposable income enough to buy all the mod cons and fashions, might *have* (in the property sense) a woman, or, at the very least, has women hanging off his arm; and, of course, has the time and inclination to play or watch sports, and/or indulge in masculine-coded pursuits like video gaming, drinking, gadgetry, or fishing. Women are too well aware of the mismatch between how society expects them to dress, look and behave, and their individual lives. But now that mismatch is being felt more by men too.
With this chasm between expected experience and lived experience, Emile Durkheim's 'anomie' comes in useful. As a sociologist interested in social integration, Durkeim used anomie to describe situations of 'normlessness'. Despite the term, this does not denote an absence of norms but rather a lack of fit between the value systems embedded in processes of integration and those actually inculcated in groups and individuals. Hence the frequent occurrence of dysfunctional and problematic behaviours across numbers of people is not a mass manifestation of psychological deficiencies, but indicative of anomic social problems. Masculine crisis therefore is the anomie that pertains to discourses and ideologies of "maleness".
For men either born during or having grown up knowing nothing other than neoliberalism's tyranny of the economy, there is no worked-out way to cope with the continued ideological affirmation of male privilege while, materially, it is undermined by insecurity and increased competition with women for jobs. This is why there are so many more socially acceptable ways of 'being a man' now. But at the same time anomic mismatches can generate social pathologies and, in this case, a resentment that privileges promised from the off are being frustrated and denied.
It's these two processes - the growing number of women in public space and the increasing economic competition with women breaking against deeply inculcated senses of gender privilege (yes, that word) and entitlement - that are powering the new misogyny. It's also why this virulent sexism, like all pandemics, is destined to peter out.
To fashion a crude metaphor, the new misogyny is a socio-political bubble. Think more economic bubbles and less the Westminster bubble. Consider the terms outlined above. The conditions that are driving this hatred of women are also undermining it. There will come a time when the participation of women in the public sphere, be it the "official" public of politics, media etc. or the very blurry worlds of social media and multiplayer gaming will be completely mundane. Likewise, while men still dominate large numbers of professions, not least the technological infrastructure of the internet, it's difficult to believe this will indefinitely be the case. 20, 30 years from now I will be profoundly shocked if the disparity proves stubbornly persistent.
Let there be absolutely no confusion about this argument. I am not arguing the new misogyny should be left alone to work itself out. There are no iron laws of society, only tendencies. But if these attitudes are on their way out, why bother combating them? Cast your eyes across the Atlantic. The Christian fundamentalism that has disfigured American politics, particularly the Republican Party, grew strength and sustenance from a process of decline. Secularisation, economic and cultural atomism, the growth and profound influence of women's, black, and LGBT liberation movements challenged and profoundly changed the place of piety and conservatism in American politics. The growth of fundamentalist politics was a counterstroke to and symptomatic of these tensions. It was able to produce a movement of its own, and two very right wing presidencies were its creatures. But now, in 2014, as the contradictions have worked themselves out over almost 40 years that movement is eating itself. The Tea Party, the militia movement, Fox News, Drudge, Breitbart, the Rush Limbaughs and Michelle Malkins, their influence is much shallower than their evangelical Christian forerunners. It may well lead to a long-term marginalisation of the GOP. Hence, the decline tendency present at the beginning is still pushing them to eventual oblivion. But, unfortunately, because this counterpower wasn't met with a strong counterpower of its own it has caused untold damage to America's social fabric. The misery of deindustrialisation and offshoring, the demonisation of abortion and attempted rollbacks of hard-won rights, the deepening of inequality, the decline of reason and a certain 'endarkenment' of popular intellectual discourse, the pathological atomisation of millions of citizens, an insularity and suspicion of the world beyond America's borders, a toxic 'centre ground'. This and much, much more is the price the US public have paid for conservatism's long decline.
Therefore, the fight against the new misogyny is vital. This is why my argument is no counsel for fatalism. Left unchallenged it will poison social relationships, deform politics and culture, cause unnecessary suffering and, in the short term, embolden the forces of reaction. Like a plague of zombies, it will rot and fall into the ground eventually. But not before it has laid waste first. Our job - feminists, socialists, the labour movement's - is to hasten the new misogyny's demise, to grind it down in ceaseless battles of attrition across all fronts, from the status update to party policy agendas. And as our enemy weakens, as it must, our side strengthens. It is we who are emboldened and grow. The backlash against the backlash can win. Who's up for the scrap?
Image: Misogyny by Glenn Brown (2006)
No, I haven't passed on nor has the blog gone into hiatus. Instead I've been struck down with the flu, and the culprit is between one of my students one of the Stoke North hopefuls. So to put down a blogging marker, as it were, here's something that came my way courtesy of Cat Grant.
We left the last post having worked through the basic conceptualisation of intersectionality. If you can't be bothered to trudge through its thousand or so words, simply put it is the appreciation of how different oppressions rooted in ostensibly discrete sets of violent (symbolically and physically) social relations can intersect and condition the lives of whole groups of people. Furthermore, activists involved in social struggles have to be conscious of and fight against the replication of oppression within discourses and movements committed to liberation. For example, feminism has to be alive to the possible marginalisation of black and minority ethnicity women, disabled women, and so on within the women's movement.
There are some issues with this, not least the pathological forms of identity politics that have become indistinguishable from intersectionality in the eyes of many participants and observers of the relevant debates. What strikes me, however, is how none of these debates are nothing new. Historical debates within feminism since the 60s were characterised by the "classical" distinctions between liberal, socialist and radical feminisms which, in the 80s and 90s, were followed by critiques attacking unconscious 'race', class, cis-gendered, and heteronormative biases, and a valorisation of doubly/triply etc. oppressed experiences of womanhood, are visited and revisited by today's 'third wave' feminism. This is less a 'second time as farce' repetition, even if the chosen venues for such arguments are Facebook and Twitter feeds, and more a cycle reflecting the persistence (or the perception of persistence) of really existing issues.
Without getting into the debates themselves, over the course of the last year my Twitter feed has been lit up by the refusal of a group of radical feminists to admit transwomen access to their events, of apologies for not checking one's privilege, and accusations that powerful white women in the mainstream commentariat use their position to exclude BME women. Go back to 1992 and you would find the same complaints reported in academic overviews of the then burgeoning postmodern feminist scene. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
It's important to grasp the tacit theoretical agreements underpinning the disputes in postmodern feminism to have a handle on what's going on today. Contrary to contemporary crude renderings of postmodernism, these were very much concerned with the materially-lived existences of women bearing the marks of multiple oppressions. They were not about denying the possibility of developing sociological knowledge or activist-oriented theory, just sceptical towards what Lyotard called metanarratives. That is overly-simplistic catch-all theories that claim to explain everything, such as neoliberalism, or the Duplo Marxism common to most Trot groups. This is a scepticism that is well-justified considering at best the experience of women, let alone gay women, black women, etc. were dismissed as distractions or, at worst, people-categories to be manipulated and/or scapegoated and/or oppressed.
The tendency of the re-presentation of these debates for the poststructuralist movement among the 90s academy was not so much the under-appreciation of their materiality but the near-exclusive focus on identity. If postmodern feminism accepted the critiques that all three types of 2nd wave feminism with its unconscious privileging of white, middle class, Western women, if feminism then cannot speak for 'all women', who can it speak for and what can it do? One way was to try and find new universals women hold in common (for example, see here). Another option was to take the analytical scalpel and slice deeper into the social relations responsible for disaggregating 'woman', ending up with the distinctively pomo project of trying to destabilise gender relations by showing their discursive roots and free-floating performative character. Another strand still looked at ways of exploring alliances between different groups of women to achieve certain objectives, and to which intersectionality properly corresponds.
However, what is evacuated from postmodern feminism - even though the materiality of oppression is front and centre - is interest. This will be visited again when I get round to blogging about class and intersectionality. It's sufficient to say here that within the terms of postmodern feminism, its disappearance is understandable. With the fragmentation of the unified subject 'woman' who has certain interests vis a vis patriarchy, it follows there are instead multiplicities of interests - some of which might be at odds with one another. There's also the recognition that making assumptions about certain women's interests might actually infringe on hard-won autonomies. Who am I, as a white woman, to declare that the hijab is a symbol of Muslim women's oppression? Who am I, as a straight woman, to cast aspersions on the political strategy of lesbian separatist feminists? Who am I, as a bloke without much of an evening life, to pronounce on the topic of women's interests?
Postmodern feminism dealt with it by not dealing with it. By leaving interest untheorised a thousand relativist flowers bloomed. Those feminists who wanted to build alliances among women were hamstrung because the absence of interest gave no grounds for such an coalition to be articulated. Trying to rally the troops behind Butlerian deconstruction of gender and sex as discursive constructs in specialist journals weren't much of a go-er.
Unfortunately, it's this legacy of postmodern feminism that gets replicated in the social media wars of 3rd Wave Feminism, albeit on a larger, pathological scale. It appears as if convulsed by identity wars, of authenticity vs faux feminism, of privilege vs underprivilege, of contestations of who counts and who doesn't count as a woman. This doesn't preclude participants from shifting wider public debates about the status of women-in-general, or staging high profile stunts, or winning campaigns. Yet for the most part, the ethereality of feminism as postmodern identity politics lends itself well to the public presentation of self social media fosters, of the kind of discursive loop where what is and what isn't feminism is gone over time and again.
Yet the seeds for overcoming this seeming dead end can be found within the impetus that has remade feminism a force to be reckoned with. As the internet generally and social media specifically opened up public life to millions and millions of people, women not only found new spaces to share experiences but found the same old sexist, misogynistic crap had taken up the keyboards too. Remember, oppression (in this case gender) is a social relation and as per the old, traditional ways it defined women as second class citizens, as objects ripe for abuse. Regardless of identity and its nuances, the wave of discrimination that fell upon women - ironically - did not discriminate. The standpoint of patriarchal privilege and power cares nothing for difference among women, save for avenues it can drive cartloads of divide-and-conquer down. The starting point isn't a universalist subject of feminist agency or endless fights over what that looks like, but rather the catch-all negative constitution of woman by those who benefit from it. And what feminism and socialist politics can do.
Julie Burchill wrote this. Paris Lees rejoined with this. Burchill (paraphrased): "intersectionality is about scoring points off multiple oppressions". Lees (paraphrased): "intersectionality is about respecting difference". Who's right? Both of them are. Here's a 3,000 word essay making that point too. What often falls by the wayside in discussions around intersectionality is, to put it crudely, what intersectionality is for. It doesn't have to be for anything, of course. If you want it to just be a marker for mutual respect then take it. But for us of a more socialist bent, intersectionality is about political agency. But how does it, if you can pardon the pun, intersect with a socialist political project? Where does it leave class?
Here are some thoughts that deliberately do not address class and capitalism. That's because another post will follow that does.
1. Intersectionality grew out of an oversight. Nay, a failure. Its roots can be found in the so-called New Social Movements of the late 60s and 1970s: feminism/women's liberation, anti-racism/black power, LGBT rights/queer politics. In the context of the USA, it was because the anti-Vietnam War movement and (mostly student-based) New Left replicated the traditional political dominance of white/male/straight. With a little bit of violence to national specificities, in Western Europe it was the failure of labour movements and the working-class based revolutionary politics of the communist parties and the far left to take such matters seriously. At least initially.
2. If anything, "established" radicalism and official socialism/communism were hostile. Labour movements in the 19th century and after the 2nd World War worked to exclude women from the workplace, and by extension install them in the home. Labour movements have an inglorious history of enforcing a colour bar.
3. A rocky road has been travelled. Yet, despite some outstanding battles yet to be won the route New Social Movements, or, Identity Politics, have plotted these last 40 years has seen important milestones reached and passed. Officially speaking, sexism, racism and homophobia are no longer acceptable. In Britain at least an inclusive, civic nationalism is the preferred, sanctified mode of Britishness. Think the London Olympics. Don't think UKIP and the Empire.
4. Racism, sexism, and homophobia have not gone away. They are, instead, more underground than they used to be. Hate crime and hate speech can call the full weight of the law down on a bigot's head. But the case remains that if you're a woman, if you're a member of an ethnic minority, if you're not straight and/or present as the gender you were not assigned since birth, you have to put up with the grind of discrimination, symbolic violence and, occasionally, actual violence. The vitalism of the 'new', third/fourth wave of feminism speaks of the continued salience of sexual discrimination, for example.
5. Social locations are always social relations. What is more, they are negative social relations. Society, or 'the social', will never forget your gendered, racialised, sexualised carcass. It will never let you forget it either. We are not cultural dopes though, we don't dance to the rhythm of abstract, rarified structures - even if it sometimes appears as if that is the case. The social context, the field of power, the frame of networked interactions - call it what you like - it always-already conditions our lived existences. They do not determine it.
6. Disadvantaged social locations are something that is "done" to groups of people. But at the same time, because they are social relations, they can be remade. Subjectification is not the same as subjugation. The commonality of experience among masses of people is a well for the formulation of common grievances, common outlooks, and common objectives. Identity is politicised, and from this basis collective action can (theoretically) proceed.
7. The question immediately arises 'whose experience is being collectivised?' Did the Black Panther Party or the black nationalism of Malcolm X speak of the historic experience of African-American women? Did 1970s 2nd wave feminism in its liberal, socialist and radical iterations take on board the historic experience of African-American women? The answer to both questions was no.
8. As social beings, each of us can be read as a foci of multiple social relations. Some of those relations can, for a number of historic, cultural and socio-structural reasons, work to place ascribed categories of people at a systematic disadvantage. It is possible for one to inhabit more than one of these disadvantaging, disempowering sets of relations. This is the starting point of intersectionality.
9. As disadvantaged social locations cut across one another, must identity politics become 'nominally essentialist' - that is assume certain identity properties and proceed from there without getting bogged down in border disputes vis straight vs lesbian feminism, white vs black feminism, trans-friendly vs cis-only feminism, etc.; disappear into fragmentation and privilege checks; or seek alliances?
10. Each avenue corresponds to established political and cultural ways of doing things. Nominal essentialism, the "speaking for" all women, all black and minority ethnicities, all LGBT people maps on to pressure groups lobbying/campaigning for legislative and institutional change, promoting tolerance through official channels, and shifting attitudes. When it is successful, which tends to be incremental, there is a political/cultural trickle down that can, generally speaking, improve the quality of (a) disadvantaged social relation(s).
11. Nominal essentialist renderings of oppression has also undergone heavy depoliticisation. Gay men, for example, are less a political category and more a marketing demographic: a postmodern lifestyle to be catered for by our consumerist cornucopia.
12. Fragmentation is the pathological outcome of identity politics. It is not the effect of intersectionality. It is its failure. Its root is not so much a purer, more radical form of identity politics (though it can assume such a guise), but rather a political bend toward recognising x, y, z social location (or combinations thereof) as equally valid points of view. It becomes pathological and fragmentary when it is disconnected from politics. Or, rather, becomes a project of individual self-presentation - a project that lends itself well to the emergent narcissistic self. Hence the possibility of politics are closed, leaving behind the emptiness of identity display.
13. As social beings consistently and continuously constituted (and constituting) by interacting, disadvantaging/oppressing social relations, these are not Berlin Walls cutting each other off from each other's experiences. We can empathise. We can put ourselves in each others shoes. Our ability to speak, to understand is founded on intersubjectivity. Hence the possibility of reconciling difference, of building an alliance between multiple positions continually produced by disadvantaging social relations is possible. Especially when the relations that disadvantage simultaneously advantage certain elites. Oppression fragments the oppressed. Oppression homogenises the oppressor.
14. On what basis can an alliance of the oppressed and disadvantaged be founded? A nice idea, or some free-floating project discursively stringing together different flags won't do it. And, in and of itself, the intersectional commonalities shared by women, minority ethnicities, and LGBT people have so far not forged lasting political projects that take all of them on board. Especially when a small number of traditionally oppressed people now find themselves on the advantaged side of the equation.
15. This is where capitalism and class come in.
