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An open letter to Suzanne Moore (because she blocked me on Twitter)
Update: She’s unblocked me, we’re talking.
Hi Suzanne,
I’m a little bit confused by your recent Guardian article about why women need feminism. The first half is OK, but the second half swiftly descends into a bizarre diatribe against intersectionality.
First you say this:
“One of the problems with the jargon of intersectionality is that it splinters.” Now, I’ve covered this before, but ultimately intersectionality is not at all alienating to women who experience intersectional oppression. Indeed, it’s often a relief to be given the language to articulate their oppressions, a language which does not exist in older feminisms.
Then you follow on to say “Much “on trend” feminism has lost touch as it is over-determined by sexuality. Whether we are discussing “sex workers”, trans issues or porn, the overriding differences between women are far less “sexy”. They remain largely to do with class.” Well, not quite. Class isn’t everything. Ever heard of, for example, the cotton ceiling? Class is, of course, a really important issue too, and intersects with these problems. This does not make it the only factor.
“A meaningful feminism would not split us into mothers and non-mothers, or privilege sexuality above all.” I think I’ve made it clear now that intersectionality is not about this. In fact, it isn’t about splitting at all: far from it, it’s about uniting. It’s about acknowledging that women will have a different experience of oppression, and achieving liberation without throwing any of our sisters under the bus.
Let’s give an example of how this works with the next thing you said, where you’ve analysed a problem. I’d like to put into practice an intersectional analysis of this same problem. “It would also understand that globalisation has produced homogeneity for women at a basic level. We are all to be Caucasian with lifted bottoms and long hair. Even differences in appearance are now deviant in all-encompassing celebrity culture.” So, there is a homogeneity of beauty standards. Whiteness is valued, and femininity is valued. This is a product of both white supremacy and patriarchy. They interacted and produced this beauty standard, and globalisation fed it to more and more women. Can I just ask why you’re saying “Caucasian” rather than white? Have you been in the US?
“We don’t all think the same, we don’t all come from the same place or have the same amount of money, but we remain locked out of the all-male cliques that run the world.” Ultimately, intersectional feminism is about acknowledging exactly this, and being sensitive to this. On top of this, we must strive to minimise our own contribution to an oppressive power structure, and work to overcome oppressions that other women face that we do not directly experience. Far from being divisive, it is in fact the only route we have towards unifying.
Happy to talk about this more if you unblock me!
Many trans* women don’t use the phrase “cotton ceiling”; it’s been picked up and run with, because it’s catchy on one side and because it’s easy to use against us on the other (by representing it as the idea of breaking through underwear). I’m not aware of an equivalently catchy alternative name for what we’re talking about, but you could call it the implicit/crypto-desexualisation of trans* women, or something like that. Either way best not to just call it “cotton ceiling”, leaving it at that. Thanks! :)
(this is nothing against Roz and others who do/did use that phrase; it’s more about accurately representing the diversity of trans* women’s opinion/thought, including how we choose to frame things, than making only a single representation. the fullest truth of trans*feminist thought is in the diversity/complexity of all our thought, not in any one part of it.)
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abstractions & anti-discrimination law
Fundamentally, the law has often failed to call the problem of discrimination by a real name—say, white supremacy or male dominance. It has instead used more neutral terms like “racism” or “racial classifications” or “race,” or “sexism” or “sex classifications” or “sex,” terms that fail to specify who is doing what to whom. As a result, while many conditions of actual disadvantage are obscured, situations in which the affected and agentic groups appear reversed can easily be made to look like discrimination. Abstractions (are you treated the same or differently?) may be inverted far more readily than substance (are you victimized by white supremacy or male dominance or both?).
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sex Equality (2001).
Mary Daly* talks more here about the kinds of linguistic/conceptual trickery that people use to get away with this.
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Trans women in feminism: nothing about us without us | Celeste R West →
Why are we not having debates within feminism that at least accord trans people, particularly trans women, the respect of our identities and experiences? Why must each debate be restarted from scratch each time? Rahila’s piece relies on one googled statistic, a trans woman who supports her own position, and her own beliefs and prejudices about trans people.
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This keeps happening because unthinking prejudice is continually given weight, not only above both trans experience and statistical evidence, but also above accounts by any communities which include trans people.
Excellent article by an excellent writer; we don’t agree on everything but we certainly agree here. The article’s a lot wider-ranging than this quote shows - click through for the whole thing.
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Simone de Beauvoir was against essentialism--including neurological essentialism. →
My position—following Naomi Scheman’s statement that “transsexual lives are lived, hence livable”—has always been that trans women are women because they just are; trans existence does not require any theoretical justification any more than cis existence does. But when trans activists and allies resort to a mis-interpretation of classical feminist text to argue against the anti-trans bigotry within feminism, I worry that it only bolsters radical feminists’ confidence that they are the only real feminists who understand feminism.
While I’m also concerned when trans* women cast radical feminists as “biological essentialists”, and when neurological theories of gender are held up as the only trans* theory, I feel differently about the bottom lines here. This is pretty much a follow-up to my recent post on the subject of essentialism. Emi, I hope you don’t mind me unpacking some of my thoughts here. Otherwise I’ll take it elsewhere.
Radical feminism says that we become women by living in a patriarchy. But when trans*-exclusionary radical feminists speak to trans* women the message is not that simple. The particular ways in which radical feminist arguments are made to trans* women and not made, the solidarity we’re refused, and the way that different groups using the label “radical feminist” engage and disengage with us means that we’re confronting a gestalt made up of fragments of radical feminist ideas. Most of them are individually non-essentialist, but if that gestalt was to be looked at as a single theory, it would say “there is an indivisible gender token you will never have”. It’s really not a single theory, but a messy collision/collusion of discourses, the force behind which is “get out of our movement”. But if it was a single theory, that’s what it would say.
So I’d turn it around:
When trans*-exclusionary radical feminists, observed as a class, are effectively presenting a mismatched constellation of classical feminist theory to argue against trans* women’s inclusion within feminism, I worry that it only bolsters non-radical feminists’ confidence that radical feminists are sex-essentialist.
Next point. Some trans* women say gender is neurological. I wonder how many choices they have to say anything else. Even I’ve said it sometimes and I don’t even believe it. But I’ve had to use it sometimes to get through a situation. I find myself drawing on a variety of systems of meaning about gender, sometimes in different contexts, sometimes at different stages of my life. I suspect other trans* women do the same. My experience is that the body of transfeminist thought, as embodied across all trans* women, understands that “born this way” is just one face of our experience and not the only one, and that even individuals may need to often simplify our positions beyond recognition, present multiple faces at different times, even believe different things / foreground different beliefs.
In other words, individual trans* women can be quoted talking about neurological sex as the only valid trans* theory, but I don’t think this is what trans* women are doing when you look at us collectively (as a class). There is single trans* voice pushing this theory, though there is stratification in terms of who gets to speak most loudly (whiteness, financial comfort, minority-world location and masculinity speaking louder).
That said, there are people who overwhelmingly present “born this way” as the Only True Trans* Theory: cis feminists acting as “allies” to trans* women. So like you say, it’s allies who should be careful not to misrepresent the body of transfeminist theory this way. I think the responsibility to avoid this is laid too heavily on trans* women alone, and I think as a rule trans* women are negotiating this in sophisticated ways whenever we can. I always object to trans* women who as far as I can tell push “born this way” only, but that’s an inner-community dialogue, and I think it should be kept very separate from what we require of our allies.
Going back to the way that radical feminists’ actions to trans* women, materially analysed as if they proceeded from a single theory (which they don’t), look like they’re based on essentialist theory, I see both trans* women and cis “allies” representing radical feminism in this way. Trans* women, I think, have the right to say, “Well, whatever you say, this is what you’re doing.” Cis allies? Perhaps less so.
If it’s anyone’s responsibility to unpick this mess, it’s cis radical feminists’, who need to work together to speak consistently, honestly and coherently. But if it’s anyone else’s, it’s cis allies’. Rather than (wrongly) saying that trans*-exclusionary radical feminists are working from one (wrong) theory, cis allies should be saying that trans*-exclusionary radical feminists are acting in bad faith (including the bad faith failure among trans*-exclusionary radical feminists to acknowledge how their actions coordinate with other actions against trans* women, including those taken by other radical feminists).
Anne Cameron writes, ‘Feminist analysis has taught me to ask two questions: “Is it an accident?” and “Who benefits?”’. I worry that the current state of affairs is not an accident, and that non-radical cis feminists benefit as a class. Perhaps not individually, but as a group. I hope it goes without saying that this can happen even while they’re being well-meaning, because intention doesn’t guarantee effect. They get an easy way to ward off radical feminists without having to confront radical feminism’s implications for their own feminism. They get the good feeling of acting as allies and the chances to be righteously indignant toward other women - always a temptation in a patriarchy, and one that can feel great after working so hard to be sisterly in the rest of one’s life. They conceal their own transmisogny (not very well; most trans* women know the score in, for example, areas like dating) and gain steering control of the trans* debate.
Our thoughts are instrumentalised and used as “radfem repellent” rather than serving us - trans* women - in achieving trans* liberation. Our lives are more complicated than “born this way” and we consistently demonstrate this when we are allowed to live authentically. And when we’re not, who’s to blame?
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some thoughts on ecofeminism, radical feminism, essentialism and transfeminist thought
I find it interesting and sad that radical feminism and ecofeminism are so commonly described as essentialist, given that to my knowledge they are the two feminist tendencies with the most explicit critiques of “essences”. Radical feminists challenge the existence of a female “gender essence”, which encodes women’s oppressed condition, and argue instead that women’s situation is created through social structures and women’s own resistance to those structures. And ecofeminists challenges the existence of a special “human essence” that inheres most strongly in white men and is linked to rationality, transcendence and control over the nature realm (understood as the realm not possessing that essence).
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[D]evelopment… like the colonisation Plato describes in terms of the creation of the perfectly uniform and smooth geometrical figure of the globe, is the project of reforming the world to the master’s rational design, creating uniformity and regular pattern, especially the straight line, which as the shortest distance between two points, admirably expresses the instrumentalisation of nature.
– Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Routledge, 2003), p86 -
– http://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/under-duress-agency-power-and-consent-part-two-yes/ (via sexandsocialism)If we want to talk about [sexual] rights and responsibilities, we must consider how much freedom a sex partner has to execute on the responsibilities we’ve assigned them, and to consider our own responsibilities to offset the pressure we are able to place on consent through the systems of domination in which we participate in a dominant position over our sex partner. If we want to create a situation where a “yes” is most likely to mean “yes”, we must work, first to understand and then to defuse, the potential consequences of a “no”. This work can be done cooperatively, but the responsibility for it falls on the partner with more power. If they’re not doing that work, we have to assume that they don’t care about consent and act accordingly.
With great power, comes great responsibility.
Spiderman knows it – do you?
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Can a man read Intercourse? Can a man read a book written
– Andrea Dworkin,Preface to Intercourse (via dworkinclasshero)
by a woman in which she uses language without its ever becoming decorative or pretty? Can a man read a book written
by a woman in which she, the author, has a direct relationship
to experience, ideas, literature, life, including fucking, without
mediation— such that what she says and how she says it are
not determined by boundaries men have set for her? Can a
man read a woman’s work if it does not say what he already
knows? Can a man let in a challenge not just to his dominance
but to his cognition? And, specifically, am I saying that I know
more than men about fucking? Yes, I am. Not just different:
more and better, deeper and wider, the way anyone used
knows the user.(via fuckyeahandreadworkin)
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Be aware that our words are very often part of conversations we’re having within our communities, and that we may be participating in overlapping conversations within multiple communities, e.g., our trans communities, our scholarly communities (both interdisciplinary ones and those that are disciplinarily bounded), feminist communities, queer communities, communities of color. Be aware of these conversations, our places within them, and our places within community and power structures. Otherwise, you won’t understand our words.
–(Written by Jacob Hale, with thanks to Talia Bettcher, Dexter D. Fogt, Judith Halberstam, and Naomi Scheman.)
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Letter to the Editor: Coverage of Shirley Q. Liquor 'radically' one-sided PQ Monthly | →
And while I can understand and sympathize with portions of QRJ’s letter, the fact remains that PQ’s coverage of this issue has been “radically” one sided.PQ Monthly is biased against racism!
