White feminism and intersectionality

Thanks for the thread, I hope it fares better than the previous attempt (http://www.librarything.com/topic/219871)

There's only two posts, both mine, so I'll just copy here, as my contribution, the first one (March 2016):

"This is clearly a sorely needed concept in how most of us (non-academic, general public) understand the problems of class, gender, race...

I've been infuriated these past few days, not for the first time, but the latest time, by people insisting that feminist concerns take a back seat to "general" problems. I'm arguing that "feminist concerns" are "human beings concerns" and therefore can never be relegated to some "later" stage, "after" some unspecified but suspiciously male-dominated "we" have come to power. Whether we are women, people of colour, gay, we can't "postpone" being what we are until some "better" time to fight against discriminations we face.

It is necessary to combine, both in theory and practice, ALL the movements for equality at the same time, for the simple reason that multiple kinds of discrimination affect those of us who are not straight white men simultaneously at all times.

Someone who is poor, and black, and female can't leave one of those aspects of their being somewhere on a shelf while they go fight, specifically and "individually", class exploitation, or racism, or misogyny. No. It hits you all at the same time, interconnectedly. And therefore it cannot be "resolved" separately. There is no magic key, regarding singly THE class, THE race, THE gender. Socialist societies didn't end misogyny and racism. Countries without white supremacy didn't end misogyny and economic exploitation. There is no reason to suppose real matriarchies would be more just and egalitarian than patriarchies.

Again, we see the imprint of the super-privileged straight white man on the very theory of leftist struggle. HE can "afford" to limit his lenses to "class" because he doesn't suffer racist and sexist discrimination.

And he's a blinkered fool."

This got a lot of negative response by people claiming they would not participate and the march would fail because intersectionality has nothing to do with science.

Ugh. Fools.

>2 LolaWalser:

Agreed. The pity is that each issue is kind of polarised, so a poor black woman has to fight on 3 separate fronts (however sympathetic they may be to each other). And that doesn't even bring in disability discrimination, a particular concern of mine, being extensively limited with MS. But yes - it's so often the middle class white male that lays down the 'rules of encounter'.

>3 Tid: And that doesn't even bring in disability discrimination

I was talking to someone about website design and all the little things you do to make design "accessible" to people who are blind, or can't use a keyboard, etc. etc. And they said "but how many people like that are there, really?" -- which kind of encapsulates the problem, I think. As if it mattered how many blind people would be accessing a website when you're putting in your "alt" info.

Forgive the long post. I started typing and then I was typing and typing and typing:

On one of these threads awhile ago Lola spoke about the vital importance of having choice - what I usually think of as having self-determination over your own life. "Work," for example, is not liberating if you have no choice but to work -- if the work does not give you control over your own fate, it is slave labor.

That lens -- that question of "do you have any choice here?" or are the choices being made for you because of who you are, what you look like, what gender you are, what caste or tribe or faith you belong to, how rich or poor you are...all those things that are indivisible from your sense of self or out of your immediate control -- is what I end up using as my metric for how fair or equal or just any given situation is. I'm not always very good at it.

The main charge every white woman in the feminist movement has to confront and deal with is their own unquestioned prejudices -- the assumption that they speak and fight for all women that their choices (or lack thereof) are every other woman's choice. Or that their priorities are every other woman's. That, for example, their heterosexual concerns -- availability of birth control, control over their own reproductive health, etc are relevant to me even though I'm gay, just as my concerns -- my partnerships and relationships recognized as valid and valuable by our society -- are relevant to them.

Being feminist -- being for "equality for women" -- does not erase all the cultural prejudices a white woman has absorbed and adopted in her life. She's not magically "not racist" because she marches for reproductive rights or for equal pay for equal work. But white women, indeed, white people, are inclined to get defensive when this is pointed out. (And their friends get defensive on their behalf, and everyone starts circling the wagons because white women, in the US anyway, are trained to make the people in their lives feel better, rather than speak honestly about what they feel.)

We (since I'm white) really, really have to get over that. I know it sounds trite but we have to be willing to listen to other women, and be told why they think our priorities, our assumptions, are wrong. We can agree or disagree on any given thing , but we have to honor the conversation.

I had a wrenching illustration of this in the rift that happened between Mary Daly and Audre Lorde after Daly published Gyn/Ecology. It was a book that could be said to have represented Daly's leap into her feminist cosmology -- new words, new language, new and radical views and the complete, uncompromising rejection of patriarchy. It was a turning point, a "no looking back" moment in her thinking.

But Audre Lorde read the book and called it racist. Daly cites a litany of misogynistic practices in making her case -- foot binding and genital mutilation, etc. And Lorde charged her with reducing the whole female population of non European countries to victims, and thus erasing their deep, life-thrumming strong female existence:

"To dismiss our Black foremothers may well be to dismiss where european women learned to love. As an African—american woman in white patriarchy, I am used to having my archetypal experience distorted and trivialized, but it is terribly painful to feel it being done by a woman whose knowledge so much touches my own."

Two women never really got over that rift. And I still remember what a (white) woman I was dating said about the divide between these two, iconic, inspirational woman that by all rights should have been allied together. "Well," she said, "Lorde was dealing with cancer." Which was true, but hardly relevant to the point Lorde was trying to make. Instead, it was a classic example of defensiveness from a white woman who felt attacked by someone's dissenting voice.

Speaking of foot binding - white women are often faced with a lesser version of it. This is not just something other cultures and races do.

I still remember being laughed at by a shoe saleswoman back during my first pregnancy when I said I wanted a flat shoe that ties so that I would be able to walk safely. I knew a woman who had always worn high heels to work. We were in an exercise class together after she retired. Most of us went barefoot. She wore high sandals. She could not put her foot flat on the floor. This is still a current issue. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38737300

>4 southernbooklady:

Without context there's little one can say, but I presume Lorde wasn't arguing that foot-binding and FMG aren't misogynistic? Rather that Daly concentrated on these practices without acknowledging women who suffered them as anything other than victims?

I may have just built a totally separate argument or something, so forgive me please if I go on inconsequentially--but as someone who often brings up religious sexual discrimination, I feel acutely the tension between my criticism and the possibility--likelihood even--of it being taken for racist or religious phobia.

All I can say is that I first take my cue from women within those cultures who resisted and resist said forms of discrimination. But somewhere down the line I think it's inevitable that we feel we are ALL, as women, implicated in practices aimed against women anywhere.

In short, it's clear white women have to be very careful in how they criticise practices which may not target primarily white women.

>6 LolaWalser: I presume Lorde wasn't arguing that foot-binding and FMG aren't misogynistic? Rather that Daly concentrated on these practices without acknowledging women who suffered them as anything other than victims?

She wasn't. She was arguing that Daly's book flattened the sum of the existence of women in those cultures to those practices. Not a good thing for a book purporting to redefine the reality of women without patriarchy.

Most people are probably already familiar with it, but here is Lorde's letter:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/lordeopenlettertomarydaly.html

Less well known is Daly's response, which was private, and which Lorde received but never publicly responded to:
https://feminismandreligion.com/2011/10/05/mary-dalys-letter-to-audre-lorde/

I feel acutely the tension between my criticism and the possibility--likelihood even--of it being taken for racist or religious phobia.

Right. And we find ourselves getting into weird and absurd battles about the right of women to choose to wear burkas and stiletto heels. Which is why -- once again, in another thread you started -- when you asked about the "common denominator" in feminism -- feminism "ground zero"

I fixated on integrity of the body, aka reproductive rights.

(http://www.librarything.com/topic/232582#5735375)

>7 southernbooklady:

Thanks, very interesting! Your first link now includes Daly's response, btw, but I was very interested in the comments on the second link too.

There's so much I don't know... :)

12 Books to keep your feminisim intersectional

It's not on the list, but Americanah would be a good fit.

>8 LolaWalser: And Lola, re the comments on those links (I almost never read comments so I had to go back and look) what comes across to me is how emotionally important it becomes for us to defend our heroes and heroines and models. We are more interested in "explaining" -- making excuses -- for our idols than in looking at the divide for what it was -- an illustrations of the misunderstandings and miscommunication that happen when we do not take care to hear each other with open minds. We assume the worst, when we should be assuming the best.