Interesting interview

[Heidi1982]

www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/08/amia-srinivasan-the-right-to-sex-interview

I've not heard of Amira Srinivasan, I thought this was an interesting read, which made me understand, although not agree with "anti carceral feminism" a little better.

Theres a brief comment, near the end, about her being "impatient" with women who are against transwomen in women's prisons. I'd love to ask her why on earth someone who is against prisons in principle thinks vulnerable women prisoners should put up with male people in their prisons.

Whoops! That was a terrible cut-and paste fail above and I've asked for it to be removed. I was saying yes, yes, yes to something else that didn't paste.

Thanks you, Mumsnet, for such swift action!

'To prohibit marginal sex, she asserts, is to reinforce the “hegemony of mainstream sexuality”'

What does that lot of word salad actually mean to anyone not from a very specific, small clique of academics?

This has reached the point where this is just intellectual wanking of those with a ridiculous amount of ego and belief in their own cleverness, and no grip on or contact with reality. Can you imagine trying out this nonsense face to face with women in a prison? And how those women would respond?

It seems to me these academics get carried away with themselves and forget to check if there theorising matches reality. A bit like the Da Vinci Code where the author starts with a presumptive 'what if' and then writes a novel from there but these academics think the novel is real and the Holy Grail is buried at Rosslyn chapel in a non-existant room.

The book looks interesting, I will be getting it when it comes out though I disagree with some key elements of what she has to say. It will be interesting to see how she negotiates some of the traditional radfem areas like porn while developing her analysis through teaching women of a younger generation who have grown up being told it’s all empowerfulising and fabulous. It’s good to see she is arguing for the importance of class. But her lack of understanding of on-the-ground radical feminism and the male violence it reacts to are frustrating and a bit predictable.
I wonder what she has to suggest other than ‘carceral feminism’ for dealing with male violence.

and some readers will struggle with her notion that the exhortation to “believe women” has limits. (“For many women of colour,” she writes, “the mainstream feminist injunction ‘Believe Women’ and its online correlate #IBelieveHer raise more questions than they settle. Whom are we to believe, the white woman who says she was raped, or the black or brown woman who insists that her son is being set up?”

Oh goodness. These are two totally different things. One woman is saying 'this happened to me' (first-hand knowledge) and the second is saying 'not my Nigel' (second-hand knowledge and conjecture).

Beyond that, she lost me at 'cis'.

Also - why are many of those concerned about refugee rights not also concerned about people with male biology in women's prisons - this can go both ways.

Finally - it's not about a right to have sex - it is also about a right not to - the lack of a referent in that title, unless she is referring to masturbation when one is alone, is jarring - the issue is 'with others'.

Also yes to the twaddle about 'minorities' and sex.

That, she argues, is why some women are what she regards as transphobic. “There can be a certain amount of anger on the part of cis women who live with a real discomfort in relationship to their embodiment: an anger at trans people taking the easy way out – though, of course, it’s not easy at all.

It sounds as if she's suggesting that the reason women are pushing back against TRAs is because they we all have some level of dysphoria and are jealous or resentful of trans people 'escaping' from their birth sex while we slog along putting up with ours . Way to misunderstand the gc viewpoint!

Slight tangent, but re the LRB, from 2016 VIDA count:

'Once again, the London Review of Books has the worst gender disparity in our main VIDA Count for bylines, book reviews, and authors reviewed, publishing a scant 22% of bylines by women, 18% of women who review books, and 26% of books by women reviewed. The number of women published at the London Review of Books has been roughly consistent since 2010. They remain one of the few publications to give space to even one agender writer.'

www.vidaweb.org/vida-count/the-2016-vida-count/

empowerfulising - Ooh, great coinage.

I don't know much about this woman but I suspect she is from a fairly privileged background.

I don't know much about this woman but I suspect she is from a fairly privileged background.

"Amia Srinivasan was born to Indian parents in Bahrain, and grew up in Taiwan, New Jersey, New York, Singapore and London (her father works in finance, her mother is a dancer and choreographer). She didn’t become interested in feminism until after her first degree at Yale, when a friend gave her Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (she came to Oxford initially as a Rhodes scholar, and later did her DPhil here). “At Yale, I was hardly taught by any women,” she says."

I also read the "feminists need to be careful what groups they will end up working with" bit as an echo of TRAs' bedfellow politics, whereby feminists are condemned for supposedly 'siding' with the Christian right, Mary Whitehouse, Proud Boys etc. Old tropes, like the slanderous assertion that Dworkin and MacKinnon were funded by Christian evangelicals.

Don't know if she subscribes to that sort of nonsense...but super-privileged people tend to be drawn to luxury beliefs...

@Ereshkigalangcleg

I don't know much about this woman but I suspect she is from a fairly privileged background.

"Amia Srinivasan was born to Indian parents in Bahrain, and grew up in Taiwan, New Jersey, New York, Singapore and London (her father works in finance, her mother is a dancer and choreographer). She didn’t become interested in feminism until after her first degree at Yale, when a friend gave her Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (she came to Oxford initially as a Rhodes scholar, and later did her DPhil here). “At Yale, I was hardly taught by any women,” she says."

Thanks for this. So just another member of the international elite talking shite about things of which she has no personal experience.

To be fair, she does have personal experience of some elements because she is a woman and she is talking about men's perceived 'rights' to our bodies (sex) (my phrasing, not hers). But her experience is coloured by her privilege. Having said this, I very much doubt she has not seen the academic casting couch in action - most of us who have been in the university sector have seen this.

Really? [Thinks of all the female feminist academics I know and wonders...]

OK - so just a few of my experiences over the years...

Nailed a PT teaching job to be told it was no longer available a day or so before teaching began. Found out that the lecturer's Ph.D. student (with whom he was having an intermittent affair) was back from a war-torn country where she was doing fieldwork unexpectedly - guess who got the job?

Comforting a fellow Ph.D. student when her relationship with her supervisor broke up (he left his wife for her). Her home, supervision, and research money dried up all at once. He went on to a newer student.

Comforting another Ph.D. friend when at a drunken party with her supervisor he listed to her in order the undergraduate women he'd like to fuck. She felt sick but still had to work with him.

I'm not alone - it used to be very, very common and I suspect it still is.

it’s easy to get nostalgic. One’s own safety… no one is ever fully and truly safe.
Feminism cannot, she believes, indulge the illusion that interests always converge, that its plans will have no unexpected, undesirable consequences, and she is impatient with those who are, say, concerned by the thought of transgender women in women’s prisons..

It’s almost a fatalistic approach that yes, she appreciates that it is going to be worse for women, but it’s worth it for the sake of ‘inclusion’.

“This movement against any incursion into our sense of bodily and psychic integrity: it’s a fantasy that rules a lot of reactionary politics, right?”

She compares keeping women’s safe spaces to racism- to a ‘Little Englander’ view of gatekeeping an area, keeping it ‘safe’ from the outsider, the foreigner. She is comparing safeguarding women’s spaces with the elite distain for the Brexit voter, it is characterised as boundary policing bigotry.
It seems as though she knows an amount of women will be collateral damage by the inclusion of trans women but it’s a price worth paying. (Of course, not by her, she’s unlikely to use the NHS or go to women’s prison or need a refuge, but by other less important women).

Is it saying the desire to not be raped is right-wing and reactionary?

Ah, sorry, I see she didn't say 'right wing' .

So, is she saying it's 'reactionary' to not want to be raped and to take measures to minimise the chances? Because that's what it reads like to me.

This movement against any incursion into our sense of bodily and psychic integrity: it’s a fantasy that rules a lot of reactionary politics, right?

This is such an alarming statement. Imagine arguing that a rape victim who doesn't want to be seen by a male counsellor, or a female victim of domestic violence doesn't want to share prison space with a male rapist, or an elderly woman who doesn't want a man providing her intimate care, is guilty of reactionary politics.

She's saying, in effect, that any attempt by women to draw boundaries around their personal space, is reactionary. The idea that we have the right to say no to sexual harassment, or to being touched without our consent, or to being raped, is based on a "fantasy" we have that men might want to hurt us - a fantasy that is presumably, in her view, not based in reality.

Sometimes I think that people who come out with this shit are just stupid. But in the case of a highly educated woman like her, I think it borders on evil.

Imagine arguing that a rape victim who doesn't want to be seen by a male counsellor, or a female victim of domestic violence doesn't want to share prison space with a male rapist, or an elderly woman who doesn't want a man providing her intimate care, is guilty of reactionary politics.

That's exactly what we are seeing, though, isn't it?

I think she is saying that the fantasy is that its possible to achieve bodily integrity (safety, I suppose). But I could be wrong.

Again, this is someone it might be interesting to have on MN FWR to ask these questions of. But I suppose she wouldn't.

I think she is saying that the fantasy is that its possible to achieve bodily integrity (safety, I suppose)

Maybe. I guess either she's saying it's impossible to achieve, so we shouldn't try, or it's morally wrong to attempt to achieve it in the first place because the idea of bodily integrity is just derived from fear of people who are unfamiliar.

Either way, I'm sure she finds it a fascinating intellectual exercise. I dare say she'd find it less fascinating if she was locked up with Karen White.

Its yet more intellectual wanking. A lot of word salad about how she personally feels vulnerable females who are not her and she will never have to meet should rightfully be forced to lie back and think of England social justice for the better happiness and need meeting of men. She feels highly righteous and high on her own cleverness about all this.

I keep thinking of all the high browed justifications privileged women made about other women for things like workhouse relief, or who should have their children confiscated and sent to Canada or Australia. We seem to be replaying early Victorian times in many ways with these high brow moralising bunch of Mr Murdstones and Mr Bumbles, who are very happy to sacrifice subordinate women to their personal hobbyhorses in matters they themselves will never have to endure. While explaining to those they send to face what they wouldn't, that it's all for their own good.

'To prohibit marginal sex, she asserts, is to reinforce the “hegemony of mainstream sexuality”'

What a daft statement. Surely anyone over the age of 12 with eyes knows that current "mainstream sexuality" is actually heavily oppressive of women, but also promotes the hell out of whatever "marginal" sex it can find as much as possible? Anybody who's ever once taken a look at Pornhub should be aware of the fact that the most marginal sexuality of all is women actually having enjoyable reciprocal sex in which they don't have to perform, don't get treated as an object, and don't have to tick off some kind of list of approved sexual acts in descending order of how titillating, marginal and extreme they can get.

In a world where extreme kink and any kind of porn fantasy gets elevated into an 'identity", so-called "marginal" sex is as mainstream, capitalist and oppressive as they come. (As it were...)