Men’s “token torturers” in feminist spaces

My.
I assume.

SGB can you explain what MMMYYY means please.

Yes but, WAA but, you're not addressing MMMYYY most important problem, therefore you are one of THEM and I hate you and I'm going to insist that everyone who's REALLY NICE and not ON THE SIDE OF THE ENEMY comes and joins my new group, blah blah blah....

There is one little comforting thing about this universal truth, though. It applies just as much to the rightwingers (the BNP were a splitter group from the National Front after a tantrum about who was more of a horrible fucking racist than who else and who nicked the tea money, and the EDL is the latest Judean People's Behind or whatever version...)

I have no idea where these views of intersectinality as a anti feminist programme have come from, perhaps it is because being intersectional does not afford feminism any special place amongst all the other forms of oppression. This would if you so were inclined be a bit of a slap in the face if your entire political vision is mixed up with promoting the idea that women are oppressed by men. Intersectional work recognises that every individual has multiple identities and that each of these identities can be a source of discrimination. Some having nothing to do with men at all. One example would be how feminists are very anti transexuals having the identity that they want for themselves.

Being a young disabled black woman who is a lesbian and a single mother has so many types of negative stereo types and attitudes that they all need to be addressed. It is not as simple as saying that if her female identities were dealt with in a positive way that she would no longer suffer discrimination. Like wise I would not think by undoing every level of the patriarchy that it will solve all the issues resulting from her disability. In short, the notion that people are feminists, disability activists, or right wing fa4j nuts and it is that that defines them is just not so. I am many different things and I can choose what my identity is even if I choose an identity that brings with it many forms of oppression.

(Dang, and I spelled you wrong again!)

LOL TeitTetua. Poor Eric Blair would have been well pissed off with me since I match more than a few descriptions on his list but I'm not saying exactly which ones.

Damn, the I-won't-respect-your-italics bug strikes again.

Ha ha, SGB.

It certainly isn't a new thing. George Orwell wanted to create socialism, and he complained about "the horriblethe really disquietingprevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England."

And look who he listed dead last. Get out of my revolution, you, you intersectionist, you.

Actually, what this demonstrates is more of an ongoing difficulty in being human. Which is that 'causes' always attract a percentage of bucketheads, whangers, ego-trippers, predators and whiners along with the general mass of well-meaning people who have identified a Bad Thing to get upset and angry about and fight against. So feminist groups/campaigns can start off full of good intentions eg to campaign against rape or for better funding for refuges, aaaaand all of a sudden someone pops up going 'But what about abortion?' and someone else starts hissing 'That's a heteronormative issue, you splitter!' and then someone else goes 'This is a first world problem and anyway you have a boyfriend so anything you say is invalid'.

And if you have a mixed-gender or mostly-male campaign launched to fight for a higher minimum wage, sooner or later someone will say 'But even if they increase the minimum wage it's still working in the evil fast food industry and that should be shut down and the staff educated to grow and sell organic lentils instead' and someone else will go 'We should really be fighting against outsourcing to the Third World where they pay the workers 50p a year' and someone will say that isn't the point right now and yet another someone will go 'You would say that because you're a racist, you once bought South African peaches and I SAW YOU DO IT'.

So actually what's kind of quite important to remember, if you are being Put Off Feminism because of all the nitpicky fighting and/or the obsession with single-issue stuff that isn't an issue remotely relevant to you, the one thing not to buy into is the idea that it's only feminism that goes up its own arse like this. That's a myth put about by people who don't want feminism to exist.

Thanks for the link, upthread, ComplexityAndFecundityOfDreams.

I didn't have time to read it earlier and now have had a proper look. Very thought provoking on feminism and racism.

Repeating link so anyone interested doesn't have to scroll right up the thread to find it.

Yes, a lot of early(ish!) feminist activism arose from women realising that in fact they weren't included in the lefty men's idea of liberation. The men were only trying to tackle their own oppression, but couldn't see the problem with women remaining second class as a group. They didn't want to lose any privileges they had.

I do think some women fight radical feminism because they recognise that it IS intersectional. It challenges all systems of dominance and oppression including the systems in which they themselves are part of the dominant group. It is clever to use the concept of intersectionality to, in effect, advocate the status quo.

Speaking of "feminists could teach the left a thing or two": a lot of the energy in the American women's movement back in the early 70s came from women who'd become disillusioned with the leftist (civil rights and anti-war) groups. They said the men there were protesting government policy, but expecting women to be subordinate just as always, and of course they were right.

So in that sense, the whole modern feminist movement started as a form of intersectionality, though nobody called it that then. And the men probably wondered what the women were all making so much fuss over.

No worries Extrospektiv, I thought that might be the case. Thanks.

I think 'wholly rejected' was a bit of a misrepresentation.

Thanks for explaining though - I read those posts too but I didn't read 'wholly rejected' in them. I didn't see a rejection of the concept but a critique of how the concept (like pretty much any concept I guess) can be hijacked.

Which is interesting

For example, intersectionality is often hijacked to accuse radical feminists of racism - even though feminists of colour had the same objections to white liberal/socialist/whatever feminism as white radical feminism. Their thought provoking objections were with white feminism. In general.

Was it Sheila Rowbotham who said that Women, feminists could teach the left a thing or two. That women should fight for positions on the left and unite all in tackling all forms of discrimination. She said that the radical movement had a great deal of positive experience/energy that could be co-opted to drive social change. I think she is right, we should focus on what unites but pay heed to what distinguishes and acknowledge differences so that everyone has a stake.

Beach that was a punctuation issue. I read it as "Kritiq, (the person) who..." and not as a question addressed to her. Understand now

MiniTheMinx wrote - "Out of interest what is an anti-disability group?"

That should read anti-disability discrimination group.

Intersectional theory was taken up by feminists first. I don't really mind who fights oppression as long as someone is doing it successfully, but once it entered the movement, I am saying there are no good grounds to oppose it because the multiply oppressed can see it as erasure.

If a specific group has always been just anti-racism then that's a different matter... Would you say that ethnic studies and critical race theory should be integrated with other movements? Or how can they explain the full experience of the population they were founded in support of? e.g. black studies, half of black people's experience is of women, and the issues of misogyny have always intersected with racism. Do you not accept that academic work should at least consider that? I'm not trying to say everything must always be subsumed into one generic "social liberation movement"... just arguing for the recognition that so many things are interconnected and so the superiority of this approach over working as isolated "silos".

Mini, "Amen sister!"

Vesuvia - very quick response to our post of 18:19:25.

yes!

You'll find much bandwith taken up by blogs of women of colour who express frustration not only that mainstream and also radical feminists fail to acknowledge multiple and intersecting forms of oppression. They also express identical disappointment that anti-racist and anti-capitalist movements fail to acknowledge these phenomenon in a meaningful way, too.

Out of interest what is an anti-disability group?. Anti-poverty group.....where? It's crying shame we can't just all get together and agree who this bogey man is, maybe then we set about tackling all forms of injustice and discrimination. All roads lead in the same direction!

EatsBrainsAndLeaves Sun 23-Sep-12 10:27:56, "These days however intersectionality is used to largely obscure men and patrirachy. Instead intersectionality is used to argue - there are all these different oppressions class, race, fat oppression, etc that mean everyone is oppressed in a different way. So it is anti feminist because it fails to recognise how men as a class oppress women as a class . . . "

ArmyOfPenguins Mon 24-Sep-12 16:37:36 "I have seen "intersectionality" used to obscure male-dominance; it's the same kind of thing as 'but what about the menz' - ie, putting feminism at the bottom of the heap - except far more dishonest."

Okay, neither have said directly that "intersectionality should be wholly rejected," but both posts describe it in very negative terms and strongly suggest that adopting such a perspective is in itself anti-feminist.

I hope that helps with the query.

Extrospektiv wrote "any feminism that doesn't address intersectional issues is wrong as we only have ourselves to blame if people oppressed by more than one system then refuse to adopt the feminist label/cause."

Do anti-racism, anti-disability, anti-poverty groups etc. also only have themselves to blame if they don't act as a one-stop shop for fighting multiple forms of oppression?

Extrospektiv, thanks but I understand Kritiq's posts.

I was asking her who she thinks says that intersectionality should be wholly rejected just because it is unfortunately co-opted by some.

It seems such an odd thought process/analysis so I was wondering where she had come across it.