How do we scourge out racism and classism in feminism?

[Treesybreezy]

I need to apologize upfront - I am disabled and also looking after a baby so I'm not going to be able to check back on this thread as frequently as I'd like. I will be back tho.

I've just read this by sister outrider sisteroutrider.wordpress.com/2018/01/15/dispatches-from-the-margins-on-women-race-and-class/amp/?__twitter_impression=true . I know there have been other threads where black women (or other ethnicities) have said, racism is a massive problem and there's been a large, reflexive defensive reaction from white women here.

I'm too tired to articulate this properly now in support of what sister outrider has said, but I've definitely seen both racism and classism in action.

How do we set this right?

From my point of view, despite having been involved in activism (not feminist activism) myself, I found it generally flat, politically. The 80s seemed to be a more politicised time, though as I say, a child’s eye view from within a particular context is unlikely to be free of significant distortion

Postmodernism and the rise of identity politics de-politicised many individuals and quashed collective movements.

I don't know how reliable my memory is but I do remember the 80s - and the 70s - being far more politicised. Off the top of my head, I remember the Reclaim the Night movement in the mid-late 70s (during the ripper killings when women were told not to go out at night) and of course Greenham Common, although I never went, had a big influence in the 80s.

After that? Lots of things I guess. But it was such a relief to get a Labour government after 18 years that you didn't want to rock the boat too much. Plus we got older and had kids and jobs and stuff and the next generation, as so often happens, saw things differently and went in another direction.

Postmodernism and the rise of identity politics de-politicised many individuals and quashed collective movements

Meanwhile radical feminists hunkered down- only a core group left, still doing what they are doing, running refuges, Rape Crisis, teaching Women's Studies, engaging in activism, fending off all the attacks, losing funding and contracts for all of the above.

The 90s into the 00s was 3rd Wave FunFems, Girl Power, Laddettes, Queer Theory evangelists - all forms of 'feminism' that benefit men, male choices and Patriarchy under the guise empowering women and supporting women's 'choice' and 'autonomy' to do exactly what men want. Radical feminists were openly ridiculed as 'hairy-legged, dungaree-wearing, angry, man-hating lesbians'. 3rd wavers did everything to position themselves as opposing that stereotype.

In the 00s, some young women, such as myself had the amazing good fortune to hook up with the original rad fems who were still plugging away. Certain wins were happening as feminists fought back against prostitution with the 'Nordic' Model and porn.

MRAs (who love porn, prostitution, dominating, controlling and terrorising their families and hate feminists, refuges and family courts from limiting their 'entitlement' to engage in these things) started ramping up their activism, using divide and conquer tactics of joining TRAs and pro-prostitution campaigners in trying to fracture the feminist movement. They then pretended to be BAME women to encourage a 'race' fracture, they did some brazen outrageous things to try and stop women speaking on Mumsnet.

All to make sure old skool radical feminists were vilified at SWERFs, TERFs, anti-sex and now racist and classist.

Even Linda Bellos who started Black History Month in the UK gets it

As

Derrida defeated Marx on campuses, while neoliberals defeated traditional liberals in various elections. Feminism was already on the ropes, the backlash having begun in the early 80s. Pomo at first was adopted by radicals as a response to Stalinism, but by stripping out all class analysis, it ended up an extension of the liberal backlash to radical politics, and then, with its privileging of individual subjectivity, then dovetailed with neoliberalism. The two now reinforce each other.

Yes, yes, yes!

Hi all,
We are just going to go through this thread now to remove a particular name, so that the thread can continue without accusation (several of which we are receiving via reports) that it is acting as a TAAT. We're glad to see that the conversation has moved from the personal to the political, this is just a bit of tidying up. Thanks.

Mmmm strange that suddenly there are lots of reports of this being a TAAT, just as we're really getting to the crux of the matter.

Makes me think certain malicious antifeminist forces want this thread pulled @hopemumsnet

Yeah - I'm confused. I can't see any recent (or real) TAATing.

I think it also has a lot to do with a game change in liberal feminism, funded, I suspect by the sex industry in the US. At one time is not sexy to be a lib fem. Lib fems were older, conservative and associated with boring minor legal change-making. Younger feminists wanted to be rads, or marxists or socialist feminists or simply didn't name themselves. Then suddenly a whole bunch of younger 'pro-sex' feminists called themselves lib fems and the tide-changed. The Handmaid's Tale and its negative portrayal of rads as in bed with the conservatives (although there I do think she has a point) and about to burn books (porn) didn't help. Suddenly it was cool and pro-sex to be a liberal feminist and old fogey to be a rad. Lib feminism subtly shifted from enlightenment thinking re education and legal change to American libertarianism - and many were hooked.

If @hopemumsnet fails to find any 'real' TAAT posts - perhaps it might be worth keeping an eye on the posters who falsely reported. You never know - they may be old 'friends' of yours.

I'll be pissed off if my mentioning of Posie leads to my whole post being pulled since I am referring to the movement as a whole and not just a couple of Mumsnet threads.

I think one of your posts got pulled at Sun 03-Jun-18 16:23:23

But there have been no deletions between the first HQ post saying that this is close to being a TAAT and the second saying that posts would be pulled...

Fuckers

I don't understand the contradiction between the two HQ comments ...

Indeed

There is a difference between a TAAT and 'mentioning' a thread or a person''s name.

Typical MRAs scrabbling together some category to report the thread and get it pulled. Also typically because I don't roll over into self-abnegating grovelling apology or join in with denouncing feminists, it is my post that gets reported.

BTW - I am not accusing other posters of grovelling/denouncing by MRA design - more that I butted it head on in my fury.

Holds up hands!

I reported a couple of posts for TAAT (although not yours, Permission nor Juzza's).

I threw a tantrum on Saturday morning on here because I had taken great pains to avoid the you-know-what free-for-all as completely unproductive. So I was hugely fucked off that it got deleted and the same argument was threatening to make its way into otherwise productive threads.

Had a brief to and fro with a couple of the mods - who were trying, I think, as nicely as they could, to calm me down and tell me I was jumping the gun rather and if the thread did come to TAAT, they would take action but weren't at the moment.

Anyways. I did calm down and I did say sorry to Juzza somewhere hereabouts yesterday. If I'm the indirect cause of your deletion(s), Permission, I also apologise to you. Sorry!

I don't think you were. The HQ advice re TAATs was very recent and there was a previous advice that was a lot more 'low key' previously.

Some really great posts on this thread, about the erasure of materialism as a basis for activism, on “performative wokeness” more generally, especially liked the one about Derrida v Stalin and the dead end of lit theory in general and queer theory in particular, and a whole rake of thoughtful and thought-provoking posts on race issues from varying perspectives.

to you all, you’ve managed to articulate a lot of what I rather gropingly think but would rarely dare say out loud in my relatively “woke” academic circles.

lang for letting us know and all of you for clarifying!

As a children's librarian in the 70s & 80s there was real progress on widening books - lots showing real working class families, multi cultural fiction and non fiction. Positive girl role models. Series like Goosebumps read by boys and girls. Today we're back to gendered fiction and a dearth of books with BAME characters particularly picture books.
Just like the media - few working class, BAME & Women's representation.
Capatalism is slippery - it seems to be changing but really just pausing before reassserting the status quo.