Flight Papers

Your movement does not exist in this world; not your feminism, nor your anti-racism, nor your social justice movement.

These things do not exist. They’re ephemeral—like language and so much else, they are constructed by people and their ideals and actions. While these things are shared, they are not shared completely. When we can talk about them as stuff in the world—in the way we talk about society or patriarchy or whathaveyou—we are wielding intellectual tools.

At the very least, it’s useful to think about what it is that we’re trying to build, with these tools we have seen and made.

What brings this to mind is the Feministe thread about this article by Jessica Hoffman. They’re a parade of people reflexively defending everything up to and including their privilege—defending the conception of the nation-state, defending the criminal justice system, defending reformism, defending liberal politics, and perhaps unintentionally defending the kind of racism that positions white issues as everyone’s issues and everyone else’s issues as, y’know, special interests.

This has been enlightening in a few ways.

First, the personal: it’s astonishing, to me personally, the positive connotations so many people have with the criminal justice system. So many posters are saying, “abolishing the prison system, really? But that’s where they put criminals.” The sentiment has made me realize how much more radical some of my views are than I thought they were, in actual point of fact. Yes, even in my utopian society, there will probably exist people with serious biochemical issues that require them be separated from society. But do we really believe that the current criminal justice system is serving anything like that function? You can argue that it is also serving that function, in addition to sweeping up millions of people who are simply doing what they, rationally, ought to in order to survive. But I can also argue that mainstream porn occasionally provides erotic, non-exploitative depictions of sexuality. I can argue that ICE occasionally does pick up people who are a danger to others. I can argue that someone, somewhere, really has had a late-term abortion in order to fit into her prom dress. And all those things are probably true! But they aren’t typical, and moreover, they aren’t the heart of those institutions or practices. They are stories we tell to make ourselves feel better about oppression.

The prison system as an entity is a violent institution; much of that violence falls on women, directly or indirectly. We can talk about idealized prison systems and idealized governments, but we aren’t talking about things that actually exist, and we must be aware of that fact.

Leading into, the philosophical: when we’re talking about those things which are feminist concerns and those things that are not, I think the very strongest line you can draw is that feminism is concerned about gendered oppression. Insofar as feminism is a social justice movement, feminists ought to be concerned about much more, of course: racism isn’t just a problem because half the people it’s directed at are women, it’s a problem because feminism is part of a larger move towards a just society, and it’s hard to take that seriously if feminists aren’t responsive to concerns over institutional racism, especially in feminist institutions.

Which brings up the question of who gets to carry the feminist card.

Answer: Nobody gets to carry it, because there is no such damn thing.

This doesn’t prevent a lot of people from believing that there is such a thing, and that they are, in some way the gatekeepers. And these people… I want to shake them and ask who the hell died and made you the gatekeeper of what constitutes a feminist issue? Did you just get appointed to the task force appointed to re-design the feminism entry exam? Because I really missed that. Resend the memo.

Some of this comes from the reformist vs. radical divide. I actually don’t think it’s nearly as strong a divide conceptually as it is politically, and I think both tacts are both necessary and worthwhile. I think VAWA—maligned a bit and perhaps not given enough credit in Hoffman’s post, to be fair—is actually positive legislation, even though the implementation predictably is not nearly as helpful as we might hope.

The radical response to this is to say, “Well, fine. We’ll build our own institutions, and we’ll build them better.” And it’s hard to underestimate the value of that, because in a real way, it’s a positive thing on every level: it empowers and grants real agency to people who are often the most oppressed, it demonstrates that there is space outside the system—vast, beautiful space—in which there is a lot of extremely promising work that can be done, and it actually does some of that work.

The reformist response to this is to say, “Well, we need to address where it isn’t working.” And that actually does have an effect, I think, built up over time and many reforms. But it may not be exactly the effect we think.

The trick is: you don’t get transformative social change by enacting a single piece of legislation, or building a single great institution, or making a single great, sweeping change. You get it by building up, piece by piece, the societal shifts necessary to make that change inevitable, and as any inevitable thing, it will then happen. (The other trick is: actually make your institutions better than those that came before.) As Brownfemipower points out, initially radical responses often become liberal institutions in a very real way—her example is rape crisis centers, but there are others.

So I think the movement needs both these aspects to it. I think where the individual feels their energies are best spent is, while definitely a function of privilege, a personal decision. The point Hoffman is making, though, is that even in reform, “radical” issues must be considered. Because they aren’t radical. They’re human. This is nothing but compassion.

Nobody is saying that white feminists must be concerned about immigrant’s issues—but if they aren’t, well, they can’t really claim to speak for them. Likewise the issues of transwomen, or women in Bahrain or India. Nobody can make you do anything. But if you say, “your concerns are not important right now,” then you’re shaping that relationship in a particular way, and you can’t pretend otherwise.

Hoffman isn’t addressing NOW, or the HRC. She’s addressing feminists who want their feminism to be inclusionary, rather than the other thing. This doesn’t mean you have to become a radical, although it does mean you have to listen to radical movements. And she’s providing a recipe: don’t just let “women of color” speak. Listen. Understand. Build not just understanding, not even just compassion, but solidarity. Make your acts, their acts, and make your speech their speech. Move together. This isn’t meant to be difficult, it isn’t meant to be theory-laden, it isn’t meant to keep young women (white, black, gay, straight, etc…) away from feminism out of fear. You don’t need a nuanced understanding of every system of oppression that affects women in the world if you have language, compassion, and the willingness to use both.

If you’ve come to help me, please leave. If you have come because your justice is my justice, then we can work together.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 10:18 pm and is filed under feminism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.