‘White’ Feminism

[Sociallydistancedcocktails]

I was recently on a thread which got me thinking about this.

Do you think ‘white’ feminism exists?

And your thoughts on the article below. I am quoting an excerpt

“White feminism is a term that has been on the tip of everyone's tongue since actor Emma Watson addressed past criticisms of her feminism in statement to her book club about the topic in early January. Though it's difficult to find an exact definition for "white feminism," it has come to describe a not-quite-feminist mindset that doesn't take into account the ways the women of color experience sexism, and how it differs from the way white women experience it. Simply put, white feminism is for white women who don't want to examine their white privilege. The term "intersectional feminism," which stands in opposition to white feminism, was coined by civil rights advocate and law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to help describe the experiences of Black women who not only face sexism, but systemic racism.

Understanding the ways race, gender, and other factors (such as disability, class, or sexuality) intersect is crucial to making our feminism more effective and impactful”

www.bustle.com/p/what-is-white-feminism-here-are-7-sneaky-ways-it-shows-up-into-your-life-7921450

@cakedays

The thing is, "second-wave" feminists were in fact already debating this (and there were many black feminist writers in the debate such as bell hooks, Angela Davies, Audre Lorde) throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s. In their writings the idea of "intersectionality" was already there, coming out of a Marxist view of the intersections of structural class oppression, but it was kind of an obvious point to be made on the way to more radical social change.

Only later was the term "intersectionality" extricated from this and made to float around freely as a kind of virtue signal in itself. It's become a way of saying "I'm one up on all the old white feminists who didn't think about women of colour and working class women", but the thing is, they did, and if you read them you can see they did. But they also advocated radical changes to education, work, society and consumerism as a result. These don't fit with the individualism and market-based ideals of current identity politics such as liberal feminism or transactivism; so what has happened is that "intersectionality" now just floats around as a buzzword, a virtue signal where you say it or spot it and your job is done. It's also a convenient way to avoid reading all the work of women who wrote about this in the past because you can claim they are not "intersectional" enough (even though, if you do read them, you can see for yourself that the opposite is true). However, you might then be forced to acknowledge that the black and working class and lesbian women who were writing in the 70s and 80s also weren't on board with porn culture, choice feminism, the beauty industry, and the exploitation of poor women by rich women as a natural order of things.

Instead it's a lot easier to say things like "my feminism is intersectional" without having to confront the likelihood that you'll have to propose any actual changes in the world. It's also a lot easier to pretend that every feminist before approximately 2000 was a rich white woman writing "white feminism" than actually go back and read them and actually think about what they are saying.

I note that just about any strand of thought propagated by men doesn't get the same treatment. "I don't want to read that white Marxism?" Nope. "White ecology"? Nope. It's pretty much only feminism that gets the put down that conveniently excuses people from actually reading it.

Brilliant post.

Maybe I'm wrong but I thought intersectionality was an important facet of feminism, full stop?

It is how this is weaponised. Being able to recognise that despite difference of race, class, religions etc., women have common experiences of male oppression / violence and can work together on these. But that women of a particular race or religion way have concerns in relation to that, that they are entitled to decide themselves how to fight against them.

But now intersectionality is used like the TWAW argue and anyone who denies it is a transphobe. GC feminists are saying our experiences of being a woman from birth are not the same as the experience someone with gender disphoria has when growing up. Each group has the right to talk, discuss, campaign to counter those experiences. And it may be that there is some "intersectionality" ie some things in common.

But now intersectionality is being used to say that if you dont acknowledge that others experiences must be put before yours, then you are not a real feminist.

There is something inherently aggressive and domineering about this need to set up competing oppressions, rather than listening to and finding out how anyone group wants to fight for its rights, how to support, and working on commone interests.

‘I think white feminism exists. I am white and a feminist, I am also living in the global north and earn above an average salary.
I can see and hear that the ways in which misogyny is expressed against black women’s is different to white. I see that sexist stereotypes are different for Asian women, SE Asian women, and all other ethnicities.
I can see these things and see my privilege in terms of race, nationality and income level without feeling ashamed of those privileges nor thinking any of them in any way negate the effect of the patriarchy on all women, including white and wealthy.’

This is the kind of thing that gets written over and over again in identity politics. Who is actually helped by declarations of privilege, how does it prove white feminism exists and how does it actually raise awareness of issues that apply solely to women of colour?

As a woman of colour ... in my experience, Ive been supported in career advancement by white men and woc and bullied by white women and ethnic minority men in the workplace.

I think anyone who is familiar with the class system in the UK and how it uses race to further benefit their priviledge would not in any way be surprised by this.

Everyone is effectively fighting for the partonage of the ruling class, white men, and dont see it as something where advancement is based on true assessment, but rather on what suits those with the power to elevate and demote.

Its called divide and rule.

*now intersectionality is being used to say that if you dont acknowledge that others experiences must be put before yours, then you are not a real feminist.
*
It's almost as if nothing has changed since the scold's bridle when it comes to women speaking their mind. The women at the bottom of the pecking order have no voice and the women who do have a voice are criticised for their privilege, and dismissed as being too entitled. The dice are loaded. A splintered movement cannot address universal problems affecting women with a united front. We need to reaffirm and take ownership of the word woman before any progress can be made.

I also agree with cakedays’ posts. There seems to be a number of new feminist movements and organisations that have a founder or ‘face’ who is then pulled down by subordinates via cancel culture.

But how are these founders and faces coming about in intersectional/woke/genderist feminism?

I entered feminism at the end of the second wave and all the focus was on finding co-operative ways of working, non hierarchical structures and so on. Instead of that we now have this situation where everyone is an online brand jostling for position. Throwing the second wave out means that all that knowledge of organising has been lost.

And about being divisive, yes. That’s the point.

Blimey.

Intersectionality (as understood and claimed on social media) would be the definition of white feminism by Bustle's standards. Identity politics are rooted in western, capitalist, individualism and do nothing to provide structural solutions to oppression or to acknowledge the lived realities of women in the global south.
But the many other threads on this topic have explained it already.
And yy quoting Bustle is like using Jezebel- male-owned and dominated media pretending they're feminist is a big part of the problem.

The type of feminist issues I'm interested in - maternity care, post natal support, housing, literacy and prisons - affect women of all ethnicities, including Black and Anglo women.

They are more class linked than anything. Being white doesn't make you part of the privileged professional class by default. I'm interested in women who experience class- based disadvantage, Black, white, Asian, Middle Eastern...whatever. I'm not so invested in the needs of the professional classes.

There are social and cultural differences, of course, within working class womanhood.

So, if that makes me a 'white feminist', ok. Just don't describe me as an upper middle class elite by virtue of the accident of being born white. Life isn't like that.

I've never heard white feminism used by any of the grassroots campaigns working for change. Instead it's used by those invested in maintaining the status quo.
Yy it's about divide and conquer. Yy it's about separating women into silos to dilute effective large-scale campaigns. Yy it's about trying to teach women to blame other women rather than recognising and challenging the oppressor class. Yy it's about embedding in the commodification of women - as western liberal porn culture is presented as some facsimile of freedom from oppression.
Women have always worked across classes, across cultures, across creeds to effectively campaign for girls' access to education, for property rights, against FGM and forced marriage, etc The petty online squabbling is a contrived sideshow and corporate male 'feminists' would love if women fell for it but we've been working on grassroots campaigns for a long time and the pretend online feminists who spend energy dividing women are the type of 'feminists' who never changed anything anyway. They confuse activism with social media. Meanwhile the rest of us have spent years working together across divides to prioritise women's lived experiences.

SmokedDuck - you are missing the main point. Gender studies were enforced (by those with the money) at the expense of Women's Studies. Those who had been teaching women's studies either had to agree the new gender agenda or leave. ie those with the money, men, chose what women should or should not think.

Do you have some evidence of this? I don't mean that as a gotcha, but that has not been my observation of what happened in the universities. While I'd agree that there were people who found themselves leaving, it seemed to me to be very much a matter of one faction pushing out the other.

I don't think there was a conspiracy throughout the west for that to happen, I think it stemmed from problems within the thinking in the departments themselves, particularly around constructivism though also there were other influences. It's not like you can't see these ideas developing within academic feminism itself.

It doesn't mean anything, but it's obviously thrown around a lot. Woke people are very silly and as a woman in her 20s, I'm sick of it. If white women don't experience certain issues that are attached to being non white, how come we're still expected to speak up on it? Even though when we do, we're slammed and told we should "stay in our lane". When we're silent on it, we get the whole "why aren't white women talking about this??" rubbish. You can't win with this type of thinking, so I'm starting to believe that specific races of women should only speak on their own race. It's a very sad way to think and obviously it divides and conquers, but I can't see any way past this.

Black feminism and womanism both exist too and they're set up purely to help black women which is great. "White feminism" has been used towards non white women and that goes to show exactly how nonsensical the term is. I don't really trust this OP though. There's a lot of white male worship in some of their posts.

@LibertyMole

‘I think white feminism exists. I am white and a feminist, I am also living in the global north and earn above an average salary. I can see and hear that the ways in which misogyny is expressed against black women’s is different to white. I see that sexist stereotypes are different for Asian women, SE Asian women, and all other ethnicities. I can see these things and see my privilege in terms of race, nationality and income level without feeling ashamed of those privileges nor thinking any of them in any way negate the effect of the patriarchy on all women, including white and wealthy.’

This is the kind of thing that gets written over and over again in identity politics. Who is actually helped by declarations of privilege, how does it prove white feminism exists and how does it actually raise awareness of issues that apply solely to women of colour?

TBH I have come to think that the proper response is to hold back in commenting on things that happen in other countries in other cultures.

By holding back, that does not necessarily mean saying nothing. I think we can comment on something like FMG, or abortion of female foetuses, as bad, and why we think that.

But at the same time, we don't live in these places and often the context or the details are not very familiar to us. It's like when a group like Amnesty says an issue like prostitution should be handled in a particular way across the board - even though there can be vast differences in who is involved, or how the police operate, or even the physical geography.

Or the kinds of organisations that want to set the legal age for marraige in every place at 18, older than many western countries with extended adolescence.

Solutions and even identification of what is problematic should generally come out of the places where the problems exist.

This isn't quite the same as dividing women in a place like the UK into identity groups. It's not that different groups won't have different experiences to reflect on, they will. But we are all living in the same society and to get a sense of the whole we need to communicate and work together.

This is based on being alive at that time and reading about what was going on.

But know from other threads where this has come up that online discussion of this is not that easy to find, firstly because social media really didn't exist as it does now, and secondly because where it was discussed, ie women being ousted from departments they had founded where on private message boards.

It was very open and in the public domain, that Women's Studies were to be got rid of and Gender studies to take their place.

How much of that was from young women thinking Women's Studies were just outdated oldies, or whatever, the fact is it suited the male agenda not to have deparments where students were taught that the enemy was the male class.

And I am sure many were grateful for the opportunity to advance themselves. But it was done at the cost of Women's Studies.

A bit like the Labour Party saying it is a socialist party, which it might have been originally, they just hand onto the name for historical sentimentality, which of course nobody feels for Women and the right of Women to have their own view point and history.

(If you are genuinely interested I am sure there will be information about it but suspect in actual libraries not on social media.)

June 1993

For the past two years, I have been teaching a course on the "psychology of women." The content of this course is on the experiences of women. Naturally, we consider how gender is constructed, and how/why gender roles are developed
and perpetuated in terms of dominant culture and power issues. The whole focus of the course, however, is on WOMEN'S experiences and lives.

Next year, due to a departmental decision, this course will no longer be taught, and a course on "Gender Roles" will be taught instead, similar to a course that used to be taught here. The focus of that course is on both men and women's roles, and my impression from what older students hve told me (sorry for the typo) is that it used to focus far more on men than on women. The students who talked with me suggested that the course often embodied the assumption of males as normative, and women as other.

At my previous institution, when I advocated teaching a course on psychology of women, I was told very clearly that it was not inclusive enough, and that if I wanted to teach a course on GENDER instead, that might be acceptable.
Clearly, taking the tack of teaching about gender means that the focus is shifted markedly. So, again, if what you're interested in is teaching students about women's experiences, the appropriate focus/title is probably "women's studies," and not gender studies. While I certainly agree with the point that several people have made that "women have gender, while men don't" (aka "people of color have race, while white people don't"), my experience suggests that many people are going to interpret a title of "gender studies" as suggesting that you will need to include courses that represent both women's and men's experiences.

userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/womvsgen.html

Didn't Selina Todd cover this in her speech at WPUK meeting in London (Bringing it Home?)

Dont remember all of it so not sure it backs my assertion, but it was a good speech. As someone said at the time, a socialist feminist historian confirming through research what radical feminists were warning about at the time - but were ignored.

Sorry much too late at night to be sensible.

Link to Selina Todd speech womansplaceuk.org/2019/05/21/feminism-postmodernism-and-womens-oppression/

‘By holding back, that does not necessarily mean saying nothing. I think we can comment on something like FMG, or abortion of female foetuses, as bad, and why we think that.’

FGM happens to or has happened to many women living in Britain. Many British women advocate for them. It is a common training area for many jobs working with women and children.

As for women’s issues in other countries, I don’t get the impression women in other countries want us to hold back. Yes, other countries are different. It doesn’t mean we can’t learn enough about them to understand the issues really well.

Oh I dont know. Personally when I hear time and time again from black women that white feminism is a problem, I'm inclined to listen.

SmokedDuck, I do agree though that one size fits all approaches don’t work, and that there are too many cases of one size fits all solutions that go wrong internationally.

@LibertyMole

‘By holding back, that does not necessarily mean saying nothing. I think we can comment on something like FMG, or abortion of female foetuses, as bad, and why we think that.’

FGM happens to or has happened to many women living in Britain. Many British women advocate for them. It is a common training area for many jobs working with women and children.

As for women’s issues in other countries, I don’t get the impression women in other countries want us to hold back. Yes, other countries are different. It doesn’t mean we can’t learn enough about them to understand the issues really well.

Commenting on something like FMG that is happening in your own country is a different kettle of fish.

Responding to requests from grassroots woen's organisations with some care, that these are really in some sense representative rather than just what you want to hear, is also a different kettle of fish.

Telling women in other countries what is problematic and how it should be handled better is pretty much the opposite of a grass-roots movement. Even if you think they've got it wrong or are looking at the wrong things or are somehow representing regressive values.

Isn't that the whole point of the non-hierarchical, grass-roots emergence business? Because while I don't believe in "white feminism" I think it is absolutely human nature to want to impose the agenda as we see it on other people, for their own good of course, and to imagine we know how to manage problems in a place and culture where we really know very little about people's daily lives.

Women are just as inclined to do this as anyone, and the only way to not do it is to be consciously reticent and allowing other people to have their voices rather than speaking for them.

I'm more inclined to listen to the black women I've been working and campaigning alongside for years rather than posters on social media who can claim to be anything, who do not have to declare whether they're paid or genuine , and who seem to have no experience of actually delivering worthwhile change for women.

You should listen to women, especially in the global south, about their view on western capitalists trying to co-opt their existence and struggles to get less people to talk about feminism and to divert campaigning away from the dominant structures to focus instead on name-calling women.
You see none of this is new. Yy it has a different label this time round but capitalism trying to undermine any united efforts for change? The west trying to divert attention from global solutions and challenges to inequality, in preference for navel-gazing and petty arguments? Be kind. Move over. Speak less. Plus ca change.

The only difference is that social media fools the dominant class into thinking their techniques are working but they've never really understood how women actually speak and mobilise for change.

@stumbledin

This is based on being alive at that time and reading about what was going on.

But know from other threads where this has come up that online discussion of this is not that easy to find, firstly because social media really didn't exist as it does now, and secondly because where it was discussed, ie women being ousted from departments they had founded where on private message boards.

It was very open and in the public domain, that Women's Studies were to be got rid of and Gender studies to take their place.

How much of that was from young women thinking Women's Studies were just outdated oldies, or whatever, the fact is it suited the male agenda not to have deparments where students were taught that the enemy was the male class.

And I am sure many were grateful for the opportunity to advance themselves. But it was done at the cost of Women's Studies.

A bit like the Labour Party saying it is a socialist party, which it might have been originally, they just hand onto the name for historical sentimentality, which of course nobody feels for Women and the right of Women to have their own view point and history.

(If you are genuinely interested I am sure there will be information about it but suspect in actual libraries not on social media.)

I'm not disputing that women's studies were to replaced by gender studies.

But I don't think this is something that the patriarchy managed to put over on women. I think it represented an internal break. One side managed to win the management over, probably for a lot of reasons self-interest among them.

The issue I have is that I think, looking back over the past 60 years or so, there is a real need to map the ideas that were coming out of those departments that led to this new place. You can pick out stands all over the place that have gone into making the current mess, among them the hierarchy of oppression stuff which is just toxic, what became critical theory, postmodernism, I think as Paglia suggests too little attention to the science of sex, particularly when it didn't support constructivism, and a tendency to draw very hard and often self-servings political lines around what was allowed to be considered as feminist discourse and what was just women captured by the patriarchy, which resulted in weak argumentation.

That's an internal problem to sort out, it's a huge project, and if we just see this as something the patriarchy imposed it won't happen. Mind you I have doubts that it will happen anyway.

White feminism is just the female version of white mans guilt. It exists, but it’s purpose today is to divide and silence as pp have pointed out.

However, I am not a Marxist and do not for one second believe that “capitalism” causes the oppression of women. Capitalism is a type of economic system. That’s it. The oppression of women has been since the dawn of human history, it predates the existence of economies and all the various economic systems. Women have been and continue to be oppressed regardless of economic system. So don’t think that swapping capitalism for whatever will improve things.

SmokedDuck, women’s rights issues are huge though and not all of them are going to be resolved through local grassroots feminist organisations.

It is like the report this month on nearly half of women not having bodily autonomy. A large part of the resolution to that is going to come through larger organisations like national health care systems or international aid.

In terms of allowing people to speak up, yes it is essential. But even just looking at my own life which I know better than anyone else, a large part of what has helped me is people advising me and giving me solutions based on their own expertise. We don’t always know how to resolve our own problems, either personally or as communities. Solutions often come from sharing knowledge and expertise.

I'm from a white working class background but have a more neutral accent. People often think I'm posh even though there is a much posher accent in this area spoken by the real posh.

This notion that white women are all rich has made getting help for domestic violence more difficult. A few years ago I was desperate to leave but had nowhere to go after years of financial abuse. The only suitable refuge/temporary accommodation for my needs was only for people who identified as being from minority ethnic communities. I actually quality through grandparent (they told me this would count) but I look white and knew I'd stand out and seen as a fraud.

I'm really pleased specialist support is being provided in my area for minority ethnic communities, but I wish services offered appropriate rehousing options for others too. Being white and having an accent mistakenly marking me out as affluent doesn't mean I am actually affluent. It doesn't mean I'm not suffering violence and other abuse including economic.

I was a bit scared and felt more defeated hearing an interview with Sadiq Khan talking about tackling violence against women and girls. He suggested middle class white women experience domestic abuse differently and he wanted to focus on more services specifically for minority ethnic groups. What does he think is different about being beaten, raped, psychologically abused, controlled - and experiencing the financial abuse that makes the woman's class irrelevant (if he thinks they have the means to escape, he doesn't understand what financial abuse does).

Its really important to have specialised services for minority ethnic women, but I hope he's not planning to ignore the need for more services and more funding for all other survivors.

He only very briefly mentioned disability. It didn't give me any hope he was planning to set up any specialised services for disabled women. Disabled women of all race and skin colour are about twice as likely to suffer abuse and for longer periods. I wish he'd also think of older women of all backgrounds who need specialist services set up.