Lessons from the Feminist Blind Spots : for counter-identity politics
Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist — Audre Lorde
Feminism has been, and still is, one of the most influential and revolutionary political movement of the past 60 years. It is revolutionary in the sense that it has been able to pose modern gender roles and classical leftism as features of the reproduction of our societies. But a large influence and a wide range of theoretical and practical applications don’t come without a handful of visible issues. Contrary to classical leftist critique of those issues, which I will expose later, I don’t want to pack them all inside the term “identity politics”. In fact this would be too easy of a critique and a step back towards the type of theory and organising that Leftists used to advocate (some still do, and those are organisation filled with chauvinism, rape cases and/or complacency, as well as a larger lack of transformative justice practices, in fact, their positions are only but paying lip service to Feminism, and other “identity politics” struggles, and nothing else). What I want to do is to think about “counter-identity politics”, counter because they would be explicitly oppositional towards their objects, but counter-hegemonic too, their intentions are to cut short to intents of building an hegemonic political line, or identity, in the struggles. They also try to build “counter-identities”, identities that don’t let themselves be encapsulated, captured by oppressive institutions. “Counter-identity politics” are what some have somewhat badly called “post-identity identity politics” *.
The problem with identity ?
Identity, or should I say identities, have a very troubled past. In fact they might be the most inconsistent, ever changing social formation that spreads as much throughout individual experiences, desires, feelings, than through the social body. This multifaceted/multidimensional reality make them both powerful tools of political recognition and social normalization ¹. Critics have also pointed out that certain identities tend to be seen as all explaining, as being the center of the lives of the individuals and groups identified and/or identifying as particular identities. It is true, this aspect will be quite central to our discussion — how could I talk about “counter-hegemonic” identities if there is no central identity to begin with? But I believe that those critics are usually in search of two different things, they either:
- Try to produce new centers, or look back at the past to a time where, for example, the working class was the homogenous hegemonic identity of radical politics.
- Would like the dissolutions of all identities, with all their cultural and creative potentials into a world of unique individuals.
The limiting aspect of the first one, for anyone that has been involved into some sort of identity politics should be clear, in fact it is not a critic of identity politics, but a reassertion of a past one. The workers’ movement, with all we should be learning from it, has overall had a big problem in both it’s advocation of the proletarian identity, and it’s continued identification with work and Capital ². Even if class has been a central limit to Feminisms, as I will discuss, stepping back to a more traditional Marxism, Socialism, or Syndicalism is not a sufficient answer.
The second critique is of a different order. Not so much an individualistic liberal one (even so there are some similarities), it is more closely linked to post-structuralist arguments about “singularity” ³. While having some clear insights on identity and it’s potential for being an instrument of capture by the State and other repressive institutions, limitations quickly appear when the question of highly marginalized identities appear. The type of “communitizing” linked to those works are very “masculine” (relations of singular detachment) and “Western” (generally unrespectful of ways of communizing instrumentalizing identities such as those that could exist in some societies of South and Central Americas for example) ⁴.
Here contra those fairly caricatural positions that, I have to admit, I constructed above, I would side with Stuart Hall in his text Who Needs ‘Identity’?, and trust that identities are both very poorly understood in their complexities, and politically effective. To quote Hall, we need to understand identities “as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies”. Hall whom by sitting both on the Marxist left and working with and against some post-structuralists, seems to be well fitted to answer to both. With Hall, all of the categories of identification we will encounter below will be “read against the grain”⁵ and as tools that we can invest politically for libertarian aims, albeit with some limits.
That being said, our own contention with some strands of Feminism isn’t then “identity” per se, but the way they’ve worked to reify a central identity of the “Woman”, a significantly diverse experience, and made it a sort of “regulatory ideal” to filter which type of person is included or excluded in the struggle against the various repressive aspects of the Sex/Gender systems.
On the question of Class and Work.
I have quickly mentioned the issue of work above, but only has a quick and dirty critique of the Socialist left views on it. Here I want to address maybe the first historical contention in Feminism, the questions of work, Feminism and the Labour movement, and finally the role of domestic work.
Even if we accept Silvia Federici’s (and others) description of the exclusion of women from the public sphere, and their subsequent commodification, or if we emphasize the “housewifization” ⁶ of women’s labour, one thing is certain, for at least as long as slavery and capitalism have existed, there have been women toiling in exploitative industries, relatively in the outskirts of the patriarchal family. Roughly speaking working class women have continued to have a public presence in the labour market comparatively to middle class women ⁷. This sort of “class composition of the female division of labour” has had huge consequences on the women’s movement, both on the ways to relate to the virility of the male working class, and on the ways to define “women’s labour”. Let’s have a quick review.
Commonly, Radical Feminists have opposed the Marxist position on domestic labour. Marxists have obviously put Capital as a central category of exploitation while Radical Feminists pointed to the benefits men had in exploiting women at home ⁸. While it is unclear why we should accept any of the two sides of the argument as essentially true (it is obviously possible to have two social entities benefit from someone’s exploitation…), they have a profound defect: they assume “women’s domestic work” as being essentially domestic and outside the market ⁹. To be clear, reproductive work, as an historically invisible work, is very important, if not central, in an analysis of Gender, but both sides of the debate have a very narrow view of the complexity of human activity and women’s work in general. Indeed bell hooks, debating Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (a classic of second wave Radical Feminism) points out that working class women have never been closed in at home ¹⁰. In fact, the same Betty Friedan was later on confronted to the reality of working class women when confronted, in 1975 in Mexico, by Bolivian labour organiser and Feminist, Domitila Barrios de Chungara about the omission of work in her international Feminist program. Truthfully, reading working class women like Simone Veil or Audre Lorde, we can only acknowledge the presence of women in factories and their hard work ¹¹.
Those debates around what constitutes a “feminine work” has in my opinion occulted the question of being “feminised by work”, being made “women” by work in the workplace. The difference I see between the two, is that the first one essentially tries to find a “type” of work “women” do to centre Feminism around it, while the second one tries to analyse how work creates women as a social group. It is pretty clear that the Women’s Movement has had and still has tremendous difficulties collaborating with the Labour Movement, even though so many women work! Attempts to form women’s union (mainly due to the exclusion of women from traditional unions) have been a failure, partly, like Susan B. Anthony’s Working Women’s Association, because of their uncritical views on work on the lives of women ¹². The very few examples of truly radical unions, both in their labour and feminist politics for their time, run for and by women are inspiring. Milly Witkop’s short-lived Syndicalist Women’s Union (der Syndikalistische Frauenbund) was able, in 1921, to hold the view that women were exploited by both Capital and Patriarchy (while not exactly using those words, of course), and looked to organise women’s paid and unpaid (read domestic) work ¹³. But this organisation suffered from its marginality and was quickly dismantled both due to male opposition in the FAUD and to the political context of the German 20s. In the end, the only thing we can really learn out of this experience is the possibility for a multidimensional women’s union, and little more.
Sadly, such a union or women’s organisation is nowhere to be seen. The theorists of the Women’s Strike have been anti-union, and the few Feminist Syndicalists haven’t proposed concrete alternatives ¹⁴. On the other side, with the notable exception of the spread of cleaning staff strikes quite clearly led by black women across the Global North, there have been no involvement of the labour movement to destabilise the “women the home worker” identity. Even Feminists that otherwise have been extremely good at approaching all the specificities, diversity and complexity of women’s lives have continued to talk about women’s labour as a discontinuity between private and public ¹⁵, as if, there was a discrete difference between cleaning white people’s rooms and cleaning at home for a husband. But those events and activities in the lives of those women doing the work cannot be separated as easily as those categories would present it.
In the end positing housekeeping (and other domestic activities) as the essential “feminine” activity has served in return to define “women” as the practitioners of such activities. Feminists that contest(-ed) this view are still having a hard time escaping the distinctions middle class feminists have created by defining themselves as the center of Feminist politics. This class divide has produced a one-dimensional woman identity that tends to lead radical women to side with middle class Feminist politics more generally or to be fairly powerless in the workplaces ¹⁶.
Ain’t I a womyn? And other white binaries.
While women were struggling around their relation to work, women of colour and primarily black women came to add more complexity. People of colour constituting proportionally a large part of the working class, these women were, as already mentioned, involved in the debates around work, and in those debates they showed that class wasn’t the only determinant criteria of the discussion. As women of colour have long worked for white people to the point of doing the domestic work for white women, race ought to play its due part in the debates. But the racial divide in Feminism was far more complex. The colonial/racial hierarchy produced a chasm between white women and the rest of the racial spectrum, the lack of black representation (should I say the total absence of black women, not to speak of Native American women) at the Seneca Falls Convention was a first sign of the weaknesses of First Wave Feminism. This racial bias will quickly turn into treason when the women’s suffrage movement will betray the abolitionist cause in favour of a quick resolution of women’ suffrage for white women only ¹⁷.
This racism never disappeared, during the Second Wave, anti-rape campaigns organised by Feminists targeted Black men specifically scapegoating them as the stereotypical rapists ¹⁸ instead of challenging the social nature of rape. At the same time, women of colour were marginalised by the women’s movement, not being able to reconcile their own lived experience of multiple oppressive systems, and their radical feminist politics ¹⁹.
In response to the construction of Feminist womanhood as almost exclusively white, racially minoritized women bought forward new political conceptions of womanhood. Firstly, through a critical process of critical assessment of the historical definition of the “Woman”, exemplified for example, in texts such as Ain’t I a Woman? or Am I That Name?. Secondly, through a creative process of building new identities. Out of the Third World Women’s Alliance the “third-world woman” appeared influencing in return Black, Chicana, Natives and Asian American Feminisms. In 1977 in a response to the National Women’s Conference, a new identity appeared, the category of “women of color” was founded in a spirit of racial solidarity. The “third world woman” and the “woman of color” are unstable identities, but they were very powerful in their context fostering political connections against a dominant White Feminism.
While these identities have largely entered the mainstream and lost some of their radicality, they have spread, with some local specificities, outside of the USA and English speaking countries. It is impossible for feminists globally to not pay lip service to “women of colour” or “BIPOC” ²⁰, every Feminist is now (abusively) “intersectional”. Of course discourse is often not reflected in practice, the recent development Femonationalism has lead to a reconstitution of Feminist racial politics. In her book In The Name of Women’s Rights, Sara Farris showed the tight connection between Institutional Feminists and islamophobia, leading to the racist exploitation of migrant women. In this context of global repression against Muslim minorities, Muslim Feminists and Islamic Feminism are proposing clear redefinitions of “womanhood” through the prism of a racialised religion. While White Feminists in the mainstream define Islam as inherently oppressive, and hijab wearing women as exemplary of women subordination ²¹, Muslim women have done their best both to struggle for their civil liberties and their to develop their own Feminist theories.
The time, then, has passed for superficial references to non-White Feminists. For the passed few decades, women from the Global South have kept on subverting Western Feminism, displacing the meaning of womanhood ²², replacing the genealogy of the oppression of women that white Feminists have produced in the Global North ²³, and explicitly linking gender to colonialism and tying the liberation from gender oppressions to decolonial and anticolonial strategies ²⁴. The need for such theoretical moves was a long time coming. White Feminists have long tried to defend their privileged position ²⁵, grounding the living experience of gender that women of colour have is then critical.
These theoretical responses have always been conjugated by specific political practices that are quite different from those of White Feminism. It is pretty clear that opposition to Carceral Feminism, support for prison abolition, and the development of transformative justice practices have all been filled with BIPOC militants, contrary to more repressive methods that have been promoted by more mainstream White Feminists. The static “woman” identity has thus been greatly contrasted and challenged by these cross-identitarian solidarities and identities.
Sex Wars, Pornography and “Female desire”
Starting in the mid-70s the Radical Feminist movement in the US focused its agenda on sexual violence. This came from a feeling that even though basic Civil Rights were won by the women’s movement and, since 1973, Roe v. Wade ensured relative legal reproductive freedom, “sexuality” was still a place of clear inequality. The radical critique Feminists addressed to sexuality led some of them to believe that “sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism” ²⁶. With such statements it is not hard to imagine how a focus on sexuality would come to occult even more the previous blind spots we discussed.
Now, the importance of Radical Feminism in pointing out the dominance of men in the sex industries (both as consumers and capital owners), discussing rape, rape culture, and theorizing consent outside of the very narrow legal framing it had before, is not to be diminished. In fact these are still important realities of gender oppression ²⁷. But the new “sex radicals”²⁸ didn’t take a purely negative approach of those issues, and instead focused on producing knowledges, subcultures, organisations and practices that could help address them in a quite different way than the standard “repressive” ways mainstream Radical Feminists had developed.
The Sex Wars, as series of events that would produce the chasm between “sex radicals” and Radical Feminists, ended up being called, started roughly in the 80s when US based NOW proclaimed, in 1980, “pederasty, pornography, sadomasochism and public sex” to be “exploitation, violence, or invasion of privacy”. Other Feminists, some Lesbians, BDSM practitioners, sex workers, but not only, offered a variety of responses.
In 1981, already the Lesbian Sex Mafia (LSM), was founded in NYC as an inclusive group for lesbians (and increasingly intersex and trans folks) to develop safer sex practices, including workshops and parties, relating to BDSM technics and circles, going against the narrative that classified BDSM as an aggression against women. A year after, in 1982, Women Against Pornography, an influential feminist organisation of the period, protested a Feminist conference about sexuality held in Barnard College because they deemed it controversial if not outrageous accusing organisers to join with “the straights and pedophile organizations in lobbying for an end to laws that protect children from sexual abuse by adults” merely for organizing a feminist event on sexuality studies ²⁹, members of LSM and others were there to counter-protest ³⁰.
We can already see in my reductive history of the beginning of the Sex Wars, a break on what constitutes a legitimate “Feminist Sexuality”, and as such a proper Feminist and a proper Woman. The first ground on which Radical Feminists started to (re-)define woman sexuality was through their critic of Pornography. In this paradigm where, as radical feminist Robin Morgan said, “pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice”, a wave of puritanical views of sexuality developed. During the same period, American christian conservatives also promoted their anti-pornography agenda and it was only a matter of time until overlaps appeared ³¹. Indeed when the two leading feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin wrote the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance to oppose the exploitation they found in pornography, conservatives quickly took the opportunity to turn it into a reactionary ordinance. In a way, the image of victim that MacKinnon and Dworkin drew of women in pornography was quite appealing to conservatives.
Through theory, the successors of the Barnard Conference continued to argue that “a single social relation, called sexuality” did not produce “gender” ³² but that the relations between sexuality and gender were extremely complex. Pornography as such was also a complex set of media representations that couldn’t be defined in the reductive way the Ordinance did ³³ (and if it could, the method of appealing to the state, a clear tool of male dominance, to control pornographic productions would be far from the progressive feminist change its advocates claimed it to be).
In practice, sex radicals worked to counter the hegemony of male oriented pornography, and Feminist perceived “puritanism”. As already mentioned with LSM, groups of lesbian feminists started creating kink groups, workshops, erotic/pornographic literature, and self-help books. Coming To Power, edited in 1981 by the self-described “lesbian/feminist S/M organization” Samois, was a summary of practices, knowledges and desires, in book format, that a part of the lesbian feminist movement had developed along the years. They write: “anti-S/M attitudes are embedded in many areas of lesbian-feminist ideology. As S/M lesbians, we say that our experience contradicts many of those closely held theories, and that this examination of our experience is a feminist inquiry. […] We are being cast out, denied. We become heretics” ³⁴. Similarly in 1984, the lesbian erotica magazine and first women-run erotic magazine in the US, On Our Backs is created, with as its main editor socialist feminist Susie Bright. On Our Backs’ name is a parody of “off our backs” a radical feminist publication with explicit affiliation to the anti-pornography movement. In it, most of the roles and imagery that mainstream Radical Feminists and Lesbian Feminists disapproved of, were published ³⁵. Against strict definitions of sex, pornography, and womanhood, where the later was seen as almost always an object of sexual exploitation, sex radicals opposed it a renewed vision of sexual liberation.
More recently with the apparition of so-called Post-Porn activism, activists have continued the challenge the ahistorical critic of anti-pornography feminists ³⁶, influenced by sex performer and activist Annie Sprinkle’s (and others) Post Porn Modernist Show, they developed and spread numerous pornographic media and art performances. Most notably, Barcelona based Post-Op, describing themselves as a group of “artivists investigating gender and post-porn”, have performed and recorded (sometimes in collaboration with other groups) a number of performances as well as a booklet called Pornortopedia in which the collective presents a set of technics, technologies, prosthesis and other appendices to facilitate a variety of sexual experiences for disabled people. This takes us quite far from the type of body ³⁷, of sexuality and pornographies anti-pornography feminists have tried to “abolish”.
Enter the Sex Worker, when Work produces identities
During the same period of the late 70s and throughout the 80s, a new category, identity, and solidarity umbrella term was developed: the “sex worker”. During these years, activist and prostitute, Carol Leigh, a member of the early sex workers’ rights organisation COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), coined the term at a conference organised by anti-pornography organisation Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media. She did so because the title of a workshop she joined, “Sex Use Industry”, “ stuck out and embarrassed” her. Instead of the terms she felt “objectified” her, “described [her] only as something used, obscuring [her] role as an actor and agent in this transaction”, she proposed to use “Sex Work Industry” ³⁸. However the term really took ground with the publication of the publication of a collection of writings by self-proclaimed sex-workers, Sex Work: Writings By Women In The Sex Industry in 1987. But this wasn’t only a discursive production. Years before, on 2 June 1975, about 200 French prostitutes prefigured a world wide sex worker social consciousness by occupying a church in Lyon for a week before being evicted. With the slogan “our children don’t want their mothers in prison” they both subverted the misogynist dichotomy mother/whore, and demanded, not the “abolition” of prostitution, as (feminist) prostitution abolitionists advocate(d), but an end to policing ³⁹. The movement quickly spread out through France (before being completely dismantled by the French government and police), and influenced many throughout the world ⁴⁰, so much so that since 1976, a year after the protest, the 2nd of June, date of its anniversary, became the International Whores’ Day.
The apparition of the sex worker (and even the “whore”) as a political subject challenged Feminism. This new subject, positioning itself always in transgression to the political order that relied on the political control of prostitutes, could not fuse with a feminism that was becoming more and more integrated in State institutions. That is not to say that “Sex Workers Rights” haven’t been put on the agenda of a lot of international and state organisations ⁴¹, but that, fairly contrary to the abolitionist assumption that “prostitution” (which is only a, albeit significant, part of the “sex work” umbrella term) was consubstantial to “male dominance”, the constant symbolic, economic and political repression of “prostitutes” (and others) was greatly omitted. In fact, “the sex worker”, instead of contending that “the sex industry is not actually a site of sexism and misogyny” ⁴², it has put a heavy focus on “the harms that people experience in sex work”. But learning from the harm of the “sex worker” as a political subject and not from a “non-prostitute woman” leads to fairly different politics, if not contradictory ones! Now supporting decriminalization of sex work, the sex worker movement is opposing, even sometimes violently, the abolitionist agenda ⁴³. While often associated to the sex radicals I discussed above, sex workers go farther, because they are not defined as consumers of the practices abolitionists oppose, but as concrete producers ⁴⁴. However, this didn’t stop abolitionists which have continuously tried to associate, at least rhetorically, sex workers’ organisations with exploitative pimps. Organisations like the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, a sex worker led organisation ⁴⁵, is often accused of being “pimps in sex workers’ clothes”.
Abolitionists traditionally join that type of politics because of either their experience of abuse in sex work or out of a certain empathy or connection with it. But the “abused prostitute” is often already assumed, as Andrea Dworkin wrote the prostitute
is the woman covered in dirt, which is to say that every man who has ever been on top of her has left a piece of himself behind… She is perceived as, treated as… vaginal slime. ⁴⁶
However, this only defines prostitutes as… exploited women. As we have seen, it is fairly hard to have a diverse understanding of what being a women could be and/or mean for every women. As such, abolitionists haven’t been able to properly articulate the class and race of sex workers, usually limiting themselves to noting the precarity and their race to only accentuate the perceived exploitation. In reality the topic is more complex and anti-trafficking/anti-prostitution politics often go hand in hand with strong border control policies that are always turned against immigrant and non-white women ⁴⁷. Not only are abolitionist class politics caricatural, they both do not address the larger issue of Work under capitalism, nor offer concrete alternatives to sex work to make a living. Similarly with their racial politics that do not really engage with the voices of sex workers of colour ⁴⁸.
Sex workers while having “[w]omen, both transgender and cisgender… at the centre of [their] politics” also engage in wider solidarities across the gender spectrum. Molly Smith and Juno Mac tell us, in Revolting Prostitutes, that “[i]t is important to acknowledge this because peoples’ gender shapes their route into sex work, their experiences while selling sex, and their lives beyond”. Gender is very important in sex work, but in a more “decentered” way than abolitionists would think. It is not that porn or prostitution are central institutions of patriarchy, but that they are gendered. They are also, to various degrees, racialised and stratified by class. For that reason, sex workers, and more specifically the most radical part of the movement have turned to other kinds of abolitionism. Instead of focusing in the present abolition of “prostitution”, “pornography” and the likes, they turn towards police and prison abolition ⁴⁹, no border politics, if not more and more, towards the abolition of work and capitalism ⁵⁰. For those purposes, and out of the discussions engendered by the encounter of those movements/identities/organisations/etc. a new concept was forged: carceral feminism. Instead of restraining themselves to pure discussions about “womanhood” and “prostitution good or bad”, sex worker feminists, women of colour, immigrant women and others pointed to the specific repressive aspects of forms of Mainstream Feminism which do not limit themselves to (prostitution) abolitionism ⁵¹.
To conclude, the Sex Wars propelled a conflict between two definitions of women sexuality. One focusing on the essentially exploitative side of, another focusing, albeit too much ⁵², on the “good uses” of sex by and for women. In a sort of response to this debate, the sex worker appears as a political identity altogether radical, conflictual, complex and always in construction ⁵³. That is still, even after some tentatives of neoliberal recuperation, a fruitful ground for gender, class and race solidarities.
Queers and trans folks, challenging limits of the sex class discourse.
The Queer movement, and more specifically queer feminism, came out of the junction of the sex radicals in the Sex Wars, the radicals of the GayLib movement, and some parts of Lesbian Feminism. Let’s start with that last influence.
As we have already seen, some lesbians already took position in the Sex Wars. It could be added that working class lesbian practices that played with gender roles, such as butch/femme roles, were also frowned upon by the core of the feminist movement. While many lesbian feminists argued that butch/femme roles were exact replications of heterosexual relations ⁵⁴, butch/femme roles were (now maybe less so) highly codified and in many ways quite far from classical heterosexuals relations. For example, the stone butch, contrary to the heterosexual men, was meant to give pleasure, not receive it ⁵⁵. In fact, butch/femme roles were troubled feminists for at least two reasons. The first was, as Amber Hollibaugh, stated in her discussion with Cherríe Moraga, that “power in bed” is a question feminists didn’t want to discuss that much. The second, in my opinion, is also that these lesbian roles jeopardise what Radical Feminists had come to define as the “sex classes”. Those two classes defined as men/masculinity, and women/femininity, couldn’t help comprehend the butch/masculine and fem/feminine roles. This could lead, in a way, to “queer lesbian readings” of Monique Wittig’s statement that “lesbians are not women” ⁵⁶, they were not of the “women” class, but they could be feminine, and enjoy it, and they could also be masculine, and illustrate the social construction of male masculinity ⁵⁷. This was of course not an easy conclusion to come to as, as Bonnie Zimmerman notes, the “focus on identity” of Lesbian Feminism led “to debate vigorously what it meant to be a lesbian, and who could lay claim to the label” ⁵⁸.
The GayLib movement slowly died off in the 80s, progressively integrated in the liberal agenda of rights all around the world. It had been a failure. It had not been able to approach the liberation it claimed, and in fact AIDS was decimating the gay population, and particularly the black gay population. Queer feminism wanted to learn from “the failure of feminisme to answer all the questions regarding women, in particular women’s sexuality” as well as the “failure the homosexual movement suffer[ed] from around gender”⁵⁹. Around that time, in the late 80s and throughout the 90s, two things happened, on the militant side, new organisations such as ACT-UP, Queer Nation or the Lesbian Avengers appeared, and on the theoretical side of things, Queer Theory appeared in the academia. The crossover between those two is not something I’m interested in exploring, I will just say that the new political subjects that those organisations created did resonate with the concepts Queer Theory was bringing forward. However it could only do so because theorists had also been feeding on, or participating in the development of those (sub)cultures and movements.
Queers, then brought to the forefront something that I will call a “mudy political subject” ⁶⁰. This muddiness, while not always being explicitly feminist or inspired by Feminism, has been productive to think about the relations of power that bring about genders and sexualities. One example of such development could be the production of new histories of sexuality that led to reconsider the hetero/homo binary and the cultural artefacts that produced those two identities ⁶¹. This phenomenon can also be seen in militant discourse with the apparition of a “bisexual militancy”, a handful of them being women coming straight from lesbian separatism and critiquing its simplistic straight/homo dichotomy. For example in, one of the first compilation of bisexual texts, Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, Lani Ka’ahumanu, Loraine Hutchins write in the introduction that bisexuals“[a]re told that [they] don’t exist, that [they]’re really heterosexual or really gay, that nothing exists except those two extremes.” To this hegemonic position in the gay and lesbian movement, they oppose the view that, quoting Sappho Was a Right-On Woman:
bisexual women who have been caught on both sides and in the middle of the heterosexual/homosexual argument have a unique contribution to make to open discussion on sexuality… [and may well be] the most important group to speak up in the women’s movement on the whole topic of sexuality ⁶².
Some have also presented bisexuality as an “anti-identity” in opposition to the dogmatic identity politics of lesbians and gays. For example Jan Clausen, in My Interesting Condition, writes “bisexuality is to me not a sexual identity at all, but a sort of anti-identity, a refusal (not, of course, conscious) to be limited to one object of desire, one way of loving”. This theme would be recurring in queer thoughts.
In 1987, ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a grassroot organisation to fight the AIDS pandemic, was created in the USA. ACT UP’s particularity was that, against the queer scapegoating of the pandemic by politicians⁶³, it started as an LGBT coalition and opened up quite fast to politics that were related to the LGBT movement but often not included in its mainstream parts. Solidarity with prisoners, Black Live Matters queer solidarity marches, numerous people of colour joined ⁶⁴. In France, where another branch ACT UP was created, intersections with race, gender, poverty, sex work, drugs, and immigration law, all relating to AIDS, were included. This coalition building led to a focus on systems of power (here a whole network linking politics, to medical industries, to poverty and sexuality) instead of focusing on specific identities identified in binary oppositions.
In 1990, in New York, a subgroup of ACT UP formed Queer Nation. This was the first real political re-appropriation of the slur “queer”. Queer Nation was created in response to the escalation of queerphobic violence, and wanted to respond with direct action to those threats ⁶⁵. In their manifesto Queer Nation wrote that the reader “as an alive and functioning queer [is] a revolutionary”. Defining the “queer” as a revolutionary subject, they went farther than to assume this revolutionary position to be universal, in fact they attached a set of political positions to it. They write:
Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are. It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred.
Furthermore, they add:
Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It’s not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It’s not about executive directors, privilege and elitism. It’s about being on the margins, defining ourselves; it’s about gender-fuck and secrets, what’s beneath the belt and deep inside the heart; it’s about the night. Being queer is “grass roots” because we know that everyone of us, every body, every cunt, every heart and ass and dick is a world of pleasure waiting to be explored. Everyone of us is a world of infinite possibility.
“Queer”, then, becomes an umbrella term of, not exactly an anti-identity (if you claim to be a Nation, you surely have identitarian grounds for it), but a counter-identity, an oppositional identity, or, maybe to say it better, an identity that embraces sexual and gender diversities while opposing any norms relating to them. An anti-normative identity.
While some have claimed that queer politics, and more specifically Queer Nation, could led to the denial of difference ⁶⁶, I would suggest otherwise. While it’s true that an abstract identity based on oppositional solidarity and subversion could lead to such denials, and might have led, to some extent, to gatekeeping, and other normative practices, it wasn’t exactly the case. Instead I would follow Susan Stryker’s account in Transgender History of the development of trans politics in the queer movement and note that, despite the transphobia present in the San Francisco chapter of Queer Nation, it was as a caucus in this same chapter that appeared Transgender Nation, one of the early US-based trans organisation ⁶⁷. I would suggest that, contrary to exclusion and omission of difference in more mainstream feminist of LG(BT) organisations, “queer” has the potential of including difference while rejecting norms.
This queer project of rejection of gender and sexual norms has been re-appropriated in the Global South, and more specifically in Abya Yala (“Latin” Americas). In urban Mexico, in Argentina most notably with activists like Leonor Silvestri and their collective Luddismo Sexxxuales ⁶⁸, and many other more autonomous and/or marginal collectives ⁶⁹. This re-appropriation is of course not homogeneous and has largely been a work of translation (in all the meanings of the word). To this effect, new genealogies of “Cuír theory” have been constructed. While in the Global North there has often been a convergence between intellectuals (Queer Theory) and politics (queer politics), it has been otherwise in Abya Yala (similarly with the importation of Women Studies). Queer Theory is, in the words of Maria Galindo, “a theory for the elite, based on the elite, which ends up losing its subversive content” ⁷⁰. As Leticia Sabsay describes in her text Queering the politics of Global sexual rights?, The introduction of “queer/cuír” politics in the Americas has been, the importation of sexual politics globally took place with the assumption that sexual categories of the Western Modernity (such as “gay” or “lesbian”) were, if not natural, at least universal. The term “queer” too was exported with such a universal aim. In Sabsay’s words, it has “become increasingly identitarian and institutionalized, it has emerged popularly as synonymous with gay and lesbian.” As a response “the term ‘queer’ is sometimes rejected altogether, either as an Anglo-American importation or as an insufficiently radical term, or both”, focusing on new forms of political “queerness” (for lack of a better word), of “hybrid” political “formations” that move away from “paternalistic global sexual politics”.
Class, like the global racial politics seen above, also has a conflicting history within queer politics. Queer politics have also been accused of being middle-class. While it is very true that parts of the people identifying as “queer” have been and are middle-class, it seems to misunderstand the largely anti-capitalist stance queers have taken globally ⁷¹. However, it is worth noting that it is an anti-capitalism that has been fairly detached from any working-class movement and working-class organisations. That is not to say that there were no queers in working-class struggles and organisations, but maybe somewhat similarly to working-class women in general, queers and their relation to work have been invisibilized by working-class organisations sometimes because of contradictory cultural backgrounds and/or needs. It is not like queers were totally uninterested in class politics to begin with, Minnie Bruce Pratt ⁷², for one, was (and still is) a communist and involved in union organising. But the integration of queers in union politics has been in question for a while, in 1999, in a discussion with Nikhil Pal Singh, Hollibaugh, who was also a union activist, said that unions movement
needs to acknowledge the complexity of the material lives people lead. It needs to recognize that identities are not rigid or always obviously defined, to have a complex understanding of diversity. If you want to bring all the players to the table, then you have to understand who the players are, what their issues are, and how their own issues color the way they see issues of commonality. (p.10)
In fact, 20 years earlier, Cherríe Moraga, a working-class lesbian Chicana herself, was already writing of lesbianism that in the US it was “a poverty-as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor”⁷³. But unions have clearly not followed Hollibaugh’s suggestion and have fallen in the trap she describes:
“When the union movement fails to recognize [the complexity of the material lives people lead], it is, in effect, containing the workplace.” (p.10).
In effect, unions haven’t been able to do much more than anti-discrimination campaigns in the workplaces ⁷⁴ and queers haven’t massively joined unions, quite to the contrary… Even thought some historical encounters between labour and sexual politics are fruitful examples that could influence current queer feminist politics, and that a handful of theories and propositions exist, queer concerns have now been displaced outside of “purely” labour questions (meaning, work), to more specific struggles such as prisons and immigration.
Trans history, woman-identified-woman from exclusion to extension
Trans politics come somewhat from queer politics but while they also have their complex history, they are “queer” in the sense that they come both from radical and lesbian feminist politics (which we will discuss below), and gay politics, this is something exemplified by the presence of gender conforming militants in the GayLib movement, and their specific critique of it ⁷⁵.
It is maybe worth defining what I mean by “trans” and “trans politics” or even “transfeminism”. In this text, in a somewhat different direction as the “trans” identity might be developing in some spaces, with a division between “trans” (assumed as a binary) and “non-binary”, I would like to revive the definition laid out by activists in the 90s and define “trans” as being all the gender practices transgressing the gender and sex binaries, this would include butch women, drag kings and queens, gender non-conforming, non-binary and trans binary folks, amongst others ⁷⁶. In this way, “trans” could be seen as the “gender” part of queer politics, but I maintain that decoupling gender and sexuality is a fairly unproductive task and that transfeminism developed a certain political autonomy from queer politics.
Before discussing transfeminism and its history, I want to point out that “trans”, “transsexual”, “transgender”, etc. are in fact re-appropriation. This terminology, in fact just like “feminism”⁷⁷, “inverts” or “homosexuality” are the product of the medical sciences and other academic studies. As David Valentine has shown in his Imagining Transgender, the term “transgender” has take a while to be adopted ⁷⁸. The medical institutions, and specifically psychiatry, have a fairly strict control upon who is able to claim to transition, and under which conditions. States, still holding onto the gender binary on every level of identification, as well as other institutions linked to the gender binary and patriarchy ⁷⁹, make of the trans experience a concrete experience of the biopolitics of patriarchal capitalism, and of the borders, limits and contradictions of normative gender roles and their concrete, material expressions. Transfeminism provides a constructive standpoint from which to question the categories and identities some Feminists have created and worked to maintain and propose new approaches to gender politics.
Starting from the 70s, the Lesbian Feminist movement in the US gave birth to two fairly opposing concepts in the debates around the political subject of feminism. The first one being the “woman-identified woman”, and the other the “womyn-born womyn”. The first one, while maintaining Monique Wittig’s claim that lesbians (“dykes”) are not exactly “real” women ⁸⁰, comes from a theorization, by the Radicalesbians collective, of the centrality of the lesbian experience in the fight against Patriarchy to legitimate their inclusion in the movement during a period in which organisations such as NOW excluded lesbians. The later, to the contrary, is a purely exclusionary concept, defining the “woman” as a biological entity it engraves the fatalism of “female oppression” starting in biology. It isn’t only exclusionary because of its dubious fatalism and understanding of biology ⁸¹, but also because the term was quickly put to use by organisations and events to exclude gender and sexual variance from accessing lesbian and feminist spaces. In the decades following the 70s, attacks against trans women that had been in the movement for a long time started ⁸², and the more wider adoption of “womyn-born womyn” only policies were quite linked to this phenomenon.
While the Radicalesbians wrote that
Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves… With that real self, with that consciousness, we begin a revolution to end the imposition of all coercive identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in human expression.
The “womyn-born womyn” policies were reproducing a type of woman authenticity quite close to a patriarchal model, or at the very least, with very conservative and gendered body norms. This led, in 1991, to the expulsion of a trans woman at the separatist festival MichFest which brought controversy. While Black women had already criticized the limits of separatism for, as the Combahee River Collective wrote in their statement, leaving “out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children”, the “womyn-born womyn” policy at the MichFest also brought the question of a wider exclusion of folks that do not conform to traditional gender roles and suffer from a variety of exclusions, discriminations and violences due to the gender binary system. As a response protests took place at the entrance of the festival to oppose such exclusions and to demande the wider recognition of transgender issues and politics in the Feminist Movement. It opposed a conception of a political community solely based on strict “characteristics such as gender/sexuality”, a more open one of “mutual trust and respect in each other’s lives” ⁸³.
However, things were not so simple. In the work to include trans women at the MichFest, militants worked on a “minimal program” (my words) to achieve inclusion, such an inclusion could only be so partial. In fact they ended up asking to change the policy to only “allow postoperative — but not preoperative — male-to-female transsexuals” ⁸⁴, for the sole reason that it would attract a majority of supports from participants. Quickly, a new feud started in which on one side, postoperative transsexuals defend an unperfect (to their acknowledgment) “post-op only/no-penis policy”, contra “anyone who lives, or has lived, their normal daily life as a woman”. While the later tendency, led by Riki Wilchins, saw “womanhood” as something someone does and feels, the former required, in the words Emi Koyama, that
any important issues other than “the celebration of femaleness” — i.e. racial equality, economic justice and freedom of gender expression — to be set aside…⁸⁵
Wilchins approach surely had some limitations, but it was by far the fairest approach to inclusion. It was a move aways from overly simplistic, if not oppressive, identity politics and a move towards opening up possibilities for communal political identities. The “trans debate” was, in my opinion, not only an expression of specific opposition towards “male domination”, but a full expression of a Radical Feminist blindspot. By making of a perceived “male privilege” the only criteria (the “main enemy” to paraphrase Christine Delphy) of oppression, they had let go of all other dimensions of social life which affect people suffering from gender oppression. While Cherríe Moraga alerted against “the danger [that] lies in ranking the oppressions” and “the danger [that] lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression” ⁸⁶, the MichFest participants were only concerned by the specificity of their white middle-class experience of (lesbian) femaleness. It is worth noting that the MichFest had a women-of-colour only space, which didn’t police its access by skin tone, but it was still used as a justification for exclusionary “safe spaces” not caring for a second about the political content of such women-of-colour space. As Koyama, again, notes
the argument that “the presence of a penis would trigger the women” is flawed because it neglects the fact that white skin is just as much a reminder of violence as a penis is. ⁸⁷
I am not claiming here that transfeminism is per se antiracist, it isn’t, what I want to indicate is the way in which the stratification of identities, their explicit or implicit exclusions, converge. When class and race prevent you from having gender reassignment surgery, how can a “no-penis space” claim to be inclusive of working-class and women of colour?
Those debates are certainly old now. The MichFest has stopped running in 2015, while trans women were leading the debate in the 90s, trans men are now taking a prominent place ⁸⁸, non-binary genders are more visible than ever in the Global North, and Trans-Exclusionary Feminists are driving a stronger battle against trans people⁸⁹. In demystifying gender (and sex), transfeminism has been able to render visible the multiple ways in which gender is produced and maintained. Transfeminism has been able to renew itself.
One example of this would be a reiteration of the queer critique of “rights” as assimilationist. Rights, Dean Spade argues, do not prevent violence and discriminations, in fact “discrimination and violence against people of color have persisted despite law changes that declared them illegal”, and there is no reason to believe it would be different for any other minority group. For trans folks, anti-discrimination laws are only superficial because they do not address sex-segregated spaces and “[b]ecause trans people frequently face violence and discrimination in the context of sex-segregated spaces like shelters, prisons, and group homes”. It becomes clear that these laws can’t fully address the trouble with gender violence. In fact, Law functions through a “perpetrator/victim” ⁹⁰ lens, which both reduces structural systems to “bad apples” and disposesses so-called “victims” of their autonomy ⁹¹.
A second example is the renewed understanding of work under Neoliberal Capitalism. Working on feminized labour, and care work, activists try to show that they have “now become a common feature of paid and unpaid labour in general” ⁹². That is not to say that these are not “feminized” but that since “typically feminized skills” such as “building networks, taking care of others and seduction” are central skills for the job market in the service industry, it opens new ways of understanding gender at work. While in the cultural spheres, and mainly the visual arts, it has become quite clear that gender has become a commodity ⁹³, transfeminists argue that we can now also see gender as a form of work. They have build theoretical tools that binds together concerns about domestic exploitation of women, diversity management and the enforcement homonormative marketable behaviours, as well as hierarchies between national women and migrant women in care work. Moreover, pointing to the current fragility of productivity and of socio-economic statuses, the italian collective SomMovimentonazioAnale writes
we end up having to deal with the crisis of traditional masculinity, when men’s loss of social and productive centrality immediately translates itself into increasing gender–based violence and homo-lesbo-transphobia.
Strongly associating classical understanding of violence against women with a larger heteropatriarchal context strongly tied to Capital, they offer an updated transfeminist version of Italian Autonomist Feminism. Asking
What happens if — from our context of precarity where the difference between labour/non–labour is blurred, of sexual labour, of affects and payed/non–payed care work — we actually start to strike against all the expectations, repetitions, acts and roles through which we diffusely and daily (re)produce the regime of gender and the system itself?
They add to the Post-Operaist idea of the “Social Strike”, the concept of the “Gender Strike”. It is “a strike of all genders and from all genders” ⁹⁴, an extension of the Women’s Strike.
As we have seen Transfeminism has the potential to extend important inputs from Socialist, Anarchist and anti-racist traditions. Despite the appearance of essentialisms in the trans communities, and of reformist/assimilationist approaches to transfeminist politics ⁹⁵ that try to tame and integrate trans folks in the sex/gender system, there is still a lot to be learned from the flexibilities, and anti-normative approach to politics that transfeminism has developed.
Conclusion
My consciously very partial accounts — partial historically, geographically and thus politically — had, as a starting point, Feminism’s regulatory idea of womanhood and the political responses (or failures to do so) to investigate potential ways to oppose hegemonies that tend to stratify, naturalise and fix identities. I do not believe that my analysis is very controversial, in fact, it was pretty much the starting point of the writers of the Manifesto for a Trans-feminist Insurrection in 2010. As they put it:
We have outgrown “Women” as the political subject of feminism, and it is in itself exclusive, it leaves out the dykes, trans, the whores, the one who wear veils, the ones who earn little and don’t go to the university, the ones who yell, the immigrants without legal resident papers, the fags. Let’s dynamite the sex and gender binominal as a political practice.
However, while I am not saying anything new, it is quite clear that many Feminists haven’t learned any lessons from those histories. I did quickly mention TERFs, a certain abolitionist feminism, as well as Femonationalism. These do not always overlap but all transcribe a misunderstanding of feminist politics since, at the very least, the 60s. For this reason, and with great care, we should rethink our attachments to identities, and if needed work to produce identities that are, in a way, post-identitarian, meaning that they would be identities that are not meant to be structured as hegemonic tools. In other words, we could oppose to liberal identity politics, those respectable and visible identities that integrate easily in the institutions of domination, a counter-identity politics. That is not so much against “identities” as such, but against Identity.
Finally, the centrality I give to Feminism in my discussion might be a bit dubious. With all the flaws I pointed out, one might think Feminism might not be a great example. But I want to suggest that flaws are productive, they allow for political creativity. I don’t want to mean that Feminism would contain some sort of universality that could be applied to all social movements — it absolutely isn’t the case — but I do believe that there are a wide variety of things we can learn from Feminisms, in all their diversities and contradictions. Learning, though, is quite different from getting a blueprint and applying it blindly in different historical moment, different geographies, and social groups. Learning is not “teaching” either. It is the opposite of hegemony, be it Liberal, or Marxist. It is building knowledges, and building communities.
Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that sees diversity as a gift and anomalies as precious. ⁹⁶
Notes:
*A little caveat before starting. I did my best throughout the text to extend the geographies of the struggles, identities, and theories I am talking about. However, as it happens, resources in English are often specific to North America and the United Kingdom. The end result might be very much centered on a Western, Anglocentric, perspective. I hope the section on race does not end up presenting as tokenization, the intent was actually to show the beneficial input of women of the Global South and the peripheries.
- The effect of political recognition can have a normalizing effect in that new norms are produced. Or, recognition happens by fitting in the identities in already existing norms with a few minor arrangements. However, the demands for political recognition themselves are often threatening to the status quo, or at least are perceived as such.
- The work of the theorists of the Wertkritik have strongly showed the identification of the workers movement with Capital, see for example Manifesto against Labour. We also know, as Michael Seidman showed, that there have been a tendency among workers to oppose work. But the labour movements and its organisations have been the ones putting them back to work “for the workers’ sake”, see Workers Against Work. While “anti-work” has been longly discussed by Marxists and Marxian theorists, it has also been taken in by Feminist critics, see for example Kathi Weeks’ The Problem with Work. For another approach on “anti-work”, one can have a look at anarchist writings such as Bob Black’s Abolition of Work, Bonanno’s Let’s Destroy Work, Let’s Destroy the Economy or Bolo’bolo.
- An exemplary work is Agamben’s The Coming Community. We can find similar arguments in Deleuze and Guattari’s theories, and a lot more marginally, and often mitigated, in Foucault’s work. Post-structuralists influenced writers are not the only one holding similar views, some in the so-called post-left or “left-nihilists” also see identity and identity politics as profoundly essentialist, for example see Lawrence Jarach’s Essentialism and the Problem of Identity Politics.
- I don’t intend the words “masculine” and “Western” to represent any essence of both masculinity or the “West”, I merely use them to easily designate historically dominant tendencies constituting those (non-neutral) categories.
- Hall writes “that is to say, specifically not as that which fixes the play of difference in a point of origin and stability, but as that which is constructed in or through différance and is constantly destabilized by what it leaves out”.
- To learn more about housewifization see this good explanation of Maria Mies’ concept.
- Although this fact greatly varied across countries there was a somewhat apparent tendency to close married women at home with the institutionalisation of the nuclear family.
- For a clear Radical Feminist view on the debate, read A Materialist Feminism is Possible by Christine Delphy. One more sophisticated Marxist Feminist view is Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s Women and the Subversion of the Community.
- I feel that I have to point out that Delphy’s argument is a bit more complex, as she believes that women did unpaid work for their husbands or the men of the family in farms, shops, etc. But most of her examples are of petit-bourgeois owners that rarely reflect working-class conditions.
- In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks notes of Radical Feminists “bourgeois class biases” that “[t]hey were so blinded by their own experiences [as middle class women] that they ignored the fact that a vast majority of women were (even at the time The Feminine Mystique was published) already working outside the home, working in jobs that neither liberated them from dependence on men nor made them economically self-sufficient.” p.95
- To know more about the context of Friedan’s “confrontation” with Domitila Barrios, see the Introduction of Jocelyn Olcott, International Women’s Year, The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History, also Scene 7 of the same book “Betty Friedan versus the Third World”. In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Lorde expresses the disconnect she felt between her time at a factory in Connecticut and the New York middle class communists and early second-wave Feminists. Another famous reference to the disconnect between Feminism and the working class women is Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, zir writes of a first contact between a working class butch and middle class Feminism in the following way: “We heard about weekly gay liberation and radical women’s meetings at the university, but Theresa was the only one in our crowd who knew her way around campus. It was still another world to the rest of us. Everything was changing so fast. […] One day I came home from work and found Theresa stewing in anger at the kitchen table. Some of the lesbians from a newly formed group on campus had mocked her for being a femme. They told her she was brainwashed. “I’m so bad,” Theresa thumped the table. “They told me that butches were male chauvinist pigs!”” p.144 The class divide also produced a division of access to Feminist struggles (the accessibility to campuses), and a certain disdain for the culture working class women, here lesbians.
- The reasons here are complex, but I want to point out the importance of the vindication of decent qualified jobs for women.
- For a very short introduction of this group, see Syndicalism and Anarcho-Syndicalism in Germany: An Introduction.
- To be fair, discussions do exist. The UK based New Syndicalist (linked to the IWW) proposes a series called Material Girls discussing very similar issues. But political practices are virtually nonexistent.
- Françoise Verges is a good example here. Here work A Decolonial Feminism is an amazing work, but her discussion of the housekeepers’ strikes ends up reproducing in a way the modern divide between private and public.
- I don’t want to pretend that only Feminism is to blame for the lack of strong working class Feminism. We can define two trends in the way in which gender politics have been attached to working class or revolutionary movements and organisations. The first one is an obvious marginalisation: early on figures such as Flora Tristan, victim of feminicide, were fairly isolated and often criticised by early socialists. The journal La Voz de la Mujer edited by women definitely wasn’t published as part of any of the syndicalist organisations in Argentina. Similarly, Mujeres Libres was a “side project” and was never entirely accepted in a way that allowed Feminists to hold accountable the main anarchist organisations. On the other side of the world He-Yin Zhen, Itō Noe and Kanno Sugako were writing by themselves and not even radical women organisations could support their efforts. Only networks of radicals of a limited size could do so. On the other hand, women that were influential in workers organisations could quickly turn conservative on various aspects. Notably Kollontai embraced “maternity” and called for the repression of “unproductive” prostitutes after years of advocacy for gender equality and reproductive freedom almost as soon as she took responsibilities in the Communist Party and government. Rosa Luxemburg was fairly explicitly anti-feminist, obviously dismissed as “bourgeois” since revolutionaries would not take part in it… And to not only but the blame on Marxists, Federica Montseny is also famous for having publicly asked women to stop joining the front of the Spanish War because it was the role “of the men”, and asked the Mujeres Libres to advocate less radical positions.
- Angela Davis goes further in Women, Race and Class and identifies a more than latent racism in the early Women’s movement roughly between the late 1840s and early 1870s. Linking it to class as well, she note: “Working women did not raise the banner of suffrage en masse until the early twentieth century, when their own struggles forged special reasons for demanding the right to vote.” p.77 in the edition linked above.
- Ibid, Chapter 11, Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist. In The Man-not, Tommy Curry also demonstrates that racial bias against Black men is quite profound in some feminisms in the way that they accepted racially connoted Criminology theories. While I don’t agree with some of his fairly anti-feminist statements, I believe he brings some great arguments.
- Famously, Audre Lorde called out White Feminists in her speech The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House asking the audience : “Why weren’t other women of Color found to participate in this conference? Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black panelist’s paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don’t love each other?” This obviously isn’t the only such example. For more on the topic, see The Combahee River Collective Statement and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color.
- Black, Indigenous, People of Colour. The BIPOC Project defines the term in such a way: “We use the term BIPOC to highlight the unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black (African Americans) people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to white supremacy for all people of color within a U.S. context. We unapologetically focus on and center relationships among BIPOC folks.” While not specific to the question of Feminism, this identity too, is far from being an exclusive one, the wide variety of groups included in it prevents the creation of a central hegemonic identity in it. While it can definitely be recuperated by other institutions, the solidarity featured in its own statement puts it at odds with neoliberal political standards.
- See Joan Scott’s The Politics of the Veil, where she writes: “the controversial Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan suggested not only that Islam could coexist with a secular state but also that there might be such a thing as Islamic feminism. He was attacked as disingenuous by some French feminists, who claimed that he said one thing to French audiences in French, quite another when he spoke to Muslims in Arabic. Even if this charge is true (and I have no evidence either way), the point I want to make is that these feminists take Islam to be necessarily antithetical to feminism.” p.83–84
- One could argue that this redefinition was already being produced when Sojourner Truth, referring to herself using both masculine and feminine attribute to prove both her Humanity and womanhood asked to a public of White American Women, “Ain’t I a Woman?”
- In The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí writes: “The assertion that “woman” as a social category did not exist in Yoruba communities should not be read as anti-materialist hermeneutics, a kind of poststructuralist deconstructing of the body into dissolution.Far from it — the body was (and still is) very corporeal in Yoruba communities. But, prior to the infusion of Western notions into Yoruba culture, the body was not the basis of social roles, inclusions, or exclusions; it was not the foundation of social thought and identity. Most academic studies on the Yoruba have, however, assumed that “body-reasoning” was present in the Yoruba indigenous culture. They have assumed the Western constructions as universal, which has led to the uncritical usage of these body-based categories for interpreting Yoruba society historically and in the contemporary period.” p.X. She then provides her main critique of Western Feminisms in her section The “Sisterarchy”: Feminism and Its “Other” p.11. In a discussion in Paris in 2018, around gender, work, care and racialisation, Elsa Dorlin also suggested that “gender” might not be a valid concept when talking about racialized bodies, and that “women” might not be a relevant category to think through pre-colonial and pre-capitalist times. She was reiterating an analysis made in 1987 by Hortense Spillers in her Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe where she wrote about the “ungendering” of black slaves. I quote: “I would suggest that “gendering” takes place within the confines of the domestic. […] Contrarily, the cargo of a ship might not be regarded as elements of the domestic, even though the vessel that carries it is sometimes romantically (ironically?) personified as “she.” The human cargo of a slave vessel — in the fundamental effacement and remission of African family and proper names offers a counter-narrative to notions of the domestic” p.72.
- In complement of Françoise Verges’s previously referenced A Decolonial Feminism, see Maris Lugones’ Toward a Decolonial Feminism and The Coloniality of Gender, as well as Jota Mombaça Towards a Gender Disobedient and Anti-Colonial Redistribution of Violence.
- An excellent example of that is McKinnon’s From Practice to Theory, or What is a White Woman Anyway? in which she euphemistically says that a White women “does not share her oppression with any man”, implying, of course, that any woman that would share some oppressions with a man would be somehow problematic. Her central argument really is that white women are not really that privileged: “This is not to say there is no such thing as skin privilege, but rather that it has never insulated white women from the brutality and misogyny of men” p.20. One can only wonder how badly she might have read women of color, if she ever really read any (as she only references one quickly), because of course, no one ever claimed that white women did not suffer from gender oppression, but that their social position does indeed greatly modifies their experience of it, sometimes to the extent of protecting them, and endangering others.
- In Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, p.3
- EU crime data reports that in 2015 “about 215 000 violent sexual crimes were recorded by the police” of which a third “were rapes”, 90% of the survivors were “female” and 99% of imprisoned aggressors were “male” (I would add the caveat that those state categories only understand gender and/or sex as a binary, and trans folks are as much if not more than “females”). In the USA someone is sexually assaulted every 73 seconds, 1 woman out of 6 has been a survivor of “attempted or completed” rape in her life, and 15% of them underage. In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, only, where class (Maquilladora workers), race (imperial political relations as a border city with the US) and gender (the conjunction of cultural machismo and cartel politics) blend, over 700 women were killed between 2009 and 2018. Women of colour, trans and immigrants women are the main victims of sex trade, and also the major population turning tricks off the streets.
- I prefer the use of the term “sex radical feminism” over “pro-sex feminism” for two reasons. Firstly, having a radical approach to sexual practices doesn’t mean being “pro” or “against”, one can largely agree with sex negative views and still defend a possibility for a “collective turn-on”. Secondly, “pro-sex” doesn’t imply radical politics. Indeed pro-sex Liberal Feminists have become fairly common nowadays and I do not believe their politics to be a strong answer to sex negativity, quite to the contrary.
- In Feminist Studies Vol. 9, №1 (Spring 1983), Notes and Letters p.180. In her reflection on her article “Thinking Sex” — which had been first presented at the “The Scholar and the Feminist IX: Towards a Politics of Sexuality” aka the Barnard Conference, Gayle Rubin recounts her memories of the event. The main coordinator of the event, the Feminist and anthropologist of sexuality, Carole Vance recalls that the WAP protest was “a masterpiece of misinformation”, their leaflets “along with the rumors and distorted newspaper reporting it inspired, depicted a phantom conference, restricted to but a few issues which matched anti-pornographers’ tunnel vision concerns about sexuality… That such diversity of thought and experience should be reduced to pornography, S/M, and butch/femme — the anti-pornographers counterpart to the New Right’s unholy trinity sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll — is an example of the effective use of symbols to instigate a sex panic.” in Epilogue to Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality quoted from Rubin’s Blood under the Bridge: Reflections on “Thinking Sex”.
- Their rally was untitled “Speakout on Politically Incorrect Sex”. Carla Frecerro writes that it “exacerbated and publicized deep rifts among feminists” in Conflicts in Feminism p.311.
- For a fairly nuanced discussion of such “collaborative adversarial relationships” between feminists and conservatives, see Nancy Whittier’s Rethinking Coalitions: Anti-Pornography Feminists, Conservatives, and Relationships between Collaborative Adversarial Movements.
- I stole the sentence from Wendy Brown’s States of Injury. Her discussion is completely different however. She writes of MacKinnon’s adaptation of Marxism: “There are any number of questions to be raised about MacKinnon’s effort to install gender and sexuality into categories and dynamics used to explain the making of class through labor. […] Even if it were granted that a single social relation, called sexuality, produced gender, would it therefore be eligible to a theoretical apparatus designed to apprehend class? And what if sexuality is not reducible to a single social relation but is itself a complex nonschema of discourses and economies, which are constitutive not only of the semiotics of gender but of race and class formations?” p.82–83
- For Feminist illustrations of the complexity of Pornography, see Susan Sontag’s The Pornographic Imagination (of 1967!), Linda Williams’ Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. More in link with the discussion of the Ordinance, The Feminist-Conservative Anti-Pornography Alliance and the 1986 Attorney General's Commission on Pornography Report by feminist legal theorist Robin West.
- Gayle Rubin, who was a member of Samois and published in Coming to Power, also expressed this feeling in Thinking Sex: “Those of us who have helped create a feminist movement in order to resist not only sexual violence against women, but also sexual stigma, censorship and repression... have found ourselves outside "feminist standards, political integrity and moral authority””.
- As a non exhaustive list “references to butch/femme roles, bondage, or sadomasochism, were also prominent in many personal relationship ads” in Bonnie Zimmerman, Lesbian histories and cultures : an encyclopedia. I will address the butch/fem roles in the next section.
- In State Of Injury, Wendy Brown says that MacKinnon got her argument wrong. That indeed “[w]hile a clearly delineated and complexly arrayed sexual division of labor may have constituted regimes of gender” it is only in our own (and most specifically MacKinnon’s era) that “pornographic commercial expression, emerges most fiercely” p.86. She notes “[i]n short, MacKinnon is theorizing a very peculiar historical moment” p.86. If that is the case, and if as Brown continues to suggest that “MacKinnon’s theory of gender as fully constituted by sexuality and of pornography as the ultimate expression of male dominance is itself historically produced by, on the one hand, the erosion of other sites of gender production and gender effects, and on the other, the profusion, proliferation, and radical deprivatization and diffusion of sexuality in the late twentieth century”, the lack of historical analysis in MacKinnon’s work, and her followers, can only essentialise pornography’s violence.
- off our backs, the anti-pornography feminist magazine mentioned previously was also infamously known for its fatphobia throughout the years. “From 1976–1991 they get it wrong again and again! Readers are furious about Off Our Backs’ editorial stereotyping fat people as capitalists, about references to ‘overweight’ and poor health, about an advert for a diet product that is later pulled, about the decision to publish a violently fatphobic letter from a reader.” In Roots of fat activism #18: Off Our Backs letters page.
- From Carol Leigh coins the term “sex work” on the website of the Global Network of Sex Work Projects. See also, BAYSWAN’s The Etymology of the terms “Sex Work” and “Sex Worker”. Carol Leigh is BAYSWAN’s cofounder.
- For a short summary read Occupation of St-Nizier church, for a bit more details, the wiki page of the event. At the time, French abolitionists ended up supporting the movement, as Lilian Mathieu writes “ The prostitutes found this decisive support in the form of activists from the abolitionist association Mouvement du Nid. While the Nid was indeed working for a world without prostitution, its members hoped that a campaign would help the prostitutes become aware that their profession is alienating, thereby encouraging them to abandon the activity. By contrast, feminists took no part in the preparation for the church occupation. Unlike the activists from the Nid, they had no prior contact with the prostitutes, and thus joined the action and gave their support only after the protest movement was launched. For the feminist movement, who over the preceding months had been focused on legalizing abortion, prostitution constituted a rarely-debated subject but one that it was impossible not to be drawn into”. Mathieu notes in the same article, that this support from the Nid to sex workers struggles, would not reiterate itself in France. See Prostitutes and Feminists in 1975 and 2002: The Impossible Renewal of an Alliance.
- For example, the Hydra Collective from Berlin states that they were “inspired by the strikes and protests in France from 1975 on”. Similarly, the English Prostitute Collective was formed by “two immigrant women living in England”, they were “[i]nspired by church occupations and a strike of sex workers in France”.
- Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are famous NGO’s supporting Sex Workers Rights. The UN and the WHO have programs focused on the link between sex work (mainly prostitution) and HIV/AIDS.
- In Revolting Prostitutes, by Feminists and Sex Work Activists Molly Smith & Juno Mac, p.17.
- For a quick overview of the decriminalization program, see Why Decriminalisation? of the English Collective of Prostitutes. For a deeper dive, Decriminalisation of Prostitution: the evidence of the same group.
- Smith and Mac note in Revolting Prostitutes: “Rather than focussing on the ‘work’ of sex work, both pro-sex feminists and anti-prostitution feminists concerned themselves with sex as symbol. Both groups questioned what the existence of the sex industry implied for their own positions as women; both groups prioritised those questions over what material improvements could be made in the lives of the sex workers in their communities. Stuck in the domain of sex and whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women (and adamant that it could only be one or the other) it was all too easy for feminists to think of The Prostitute only in terms of what she represented to them. They claimed ownership of sex worker experiences in order to make sense of their own.” p.31–32. While indicating this moralistic limits, they also acknowledge that “[u]nlike the hostile environment of radical feminism, sex radicals were welcoming and supportive to sex workers”. p.34.
- Their presentation and their application forms clearly state that member organisations should support the “self-organisation and self-determination of sex workers”, they also differentiate “third parties”, a category which “includes managers, brothel keepers, receptionists, maids, drivers, landlords, hotels who rent rooms to sex workers and anyone else who is seen as facilitating sex work”, from sex workers themselves. Only sex worker-led organisations can be full members, and those organisations are defined as having “50% or more of the decision-making body”, “50% or more of the spokespeople” and “33% or more of the staff” to be sex workers. Not what we would expect of an organisation of pimps...
- In “Prostitution and Male Supremacy” quoted in Revolting Prostitutes. To add to the stigma, and racial prejudice, sex workers organising for their rights have also been called “Uncle Tom” by some abolitionist radical feminists.
- The discussion of the nation-state and racial segregation is a long one, but for its links to sex work, see the chapter Borders in Revolting Prostitutes, as well as Lua da Mota Stabile’s Sex work abolitionism and hegemonic feminisms: Implications for gender-diverse sex workers and migrants from Brazil.
- Early sex worker inclusionary book, Whores and Other Feminists already contained a discussion by sex workers of colour: Showing Up Fully, Women of Color Discuss Sex Work. In it Madeleine Lawson tells us: “I have a hard time distinguishing my work from my real sexual personality. I enjoy many of the kinky and sexual things as much as the men. This, too, is a part of me, but it is also my job. Sometimes this connection is unappealing. I find my Blackness beautiful, but ironically, I don’t enjoy it when clients eroticize it. I get all these guys who just want me to put my hands on my hips, crack gum, and speak with a ghetto dialect.” and other such stories.
- US based Critical Resistance is the leading organisation on resources about police and prison abolition. For a critical history of the police in the US, see Our Enemies in Blue, on prison abolition, Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? For a discussion on the UK context see Verso Books talk Abolition in the UK.
- For example, Let’s not abolish sex work. Abolish all work. Read also Red and Black Leeds, Sex, work and sex work.
- See Victoria Law’s Against Carceral Feminism. Specifically on sex work from a Black feminist perspective, Carceral Feminism: The Failure of Sex Work Prohibition. For a longer discussion on carcerality and capitalism, Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism.
- By focusing on sexuality, sex radicals have also reproduced the claim that “sexuality” is something someone should have. This critique is shared by bell hooks (in Feminist Theory: from margin to center, chapter 11. Ending female sexual oppression), and later asexual activists.
- As an example of this “work-in-progress” status, discussions on the “new” work of sexual assistance is driving discussion between sex workers, disabled people and organisations. See Asistencia sexual, una figura en construcción (in Spanish).
- For a discussion of the accusations of “imitation” of heterosexual gender roles, see Judith Butler’s Imitation and Gender Insubordination.
- Leslie Feinberg writes in quite personal details about the sexuality of the stone butch in Stone Butch Blues. See also Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga What We’re Rolling Around in Bed With, for a femme perspective.
- In The Straight Mind, a critique of heterosexuality, Monique Wittig adds to this sentence that “no more is any woman who is not in a relation of personal dependency with a man”. This was an internal critique of French Materialist Feminism, not a “queer” one. In this feminist current, the woman class was defined by the domestic dependency of women (and the exploitation of their labour by men).
- Jack Halberstram writes in his introduction of Female Masculinities: “far from being an imitation of maleness, female masculinity actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity.” p.1
- Bonnie Zimmerman, A Lesbian-Feminist Journey Through Queer Nation, p.43.
- Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga What We’re Rolling Around in Bed With p.58
- A number of terms have been deployed to talk about such political muddiness. I prefer here using my own term to encompass all of them. Lot of such “muddy subjects” have been addressed already, the “whore”, the “woman of color”, the “not-a-woman lesbian”, but I can also think of the “new mestiza”, the “eccentric subject”, the “cyborg” but also the “drag” and much more.
- One classical text would be Halperin’s How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality. See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s introduction to Epistemology of the Closet. For a reversed appraisal of heterosexuality, Jonathan Ned Katz’s The Invention of Heterosexuality.
- Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, Lani Ka’ahumanu, Loraine Hutchins, last page of the introduction. It is worth noting that the book defines also a complex/muddy political orientation, they call it “multicultural feminist bisexuality”, learning from racial, gender and sexual politics.
- The disease was named Gay-related immune deficiency (GRID) at the beginning of the crisis. Other terms such as the “gay plague” were used to target specifically gay men. To read more Scapegoating of Gay Men Leaves Its Mark.
- This fact shouldn’t be used to downplay the racism in an organisation that was still organised by a large majority of white people. See ACT UP, Racism, and the Question of How To Use History by Deborah B. Gould.
- In the late 2000s, a new anarchist movement called Bash Back! took a similar, yet more radical, approach to direct action. An anthology has been published, see Queer ultraviolence: Bash Back! anthology.
- In a discussion related to the radical group Queer Nation, queer theorist Steven Seidman noted this tendency: “this very refusal to anchor experience in identifications ends up, ironically, denying differences by either submerging them in an un-differentiated oppositional mass or by blocking the development of individual and social differences through the disciplining compulsory imperative to remain undifferentiated.” in Fear of a Queer Planet, p.133
- More specifically, Stryker does note the “firestorm” that protested the announcement of the creation of Transgender Nation. But she writes: “[a]lthough the term TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) had not yet been coined, this is precisely the mind-set that informed the lesbian feminist attack on Transgender Nation. What was different this time around was that their antitransgender rhetoric had come to be seen as a reactionary rather than a progressive stance. […] Of course, not all self-identified queers were trans inclusive, nor were all transgender people queer friendly. But a large and previously nonexistent area of overlap between transgender and queer community formations quickly emerged.” (p.144)
- To be fair with those collectives, they would probably not like my assessment of the queer “identity”. Ludditas Sexxxuales and others surrounding it are heavily inspired by the post-structuralist idea of “singularity” which I criticized at the beginning. But they do assign to themselves a sort of legacy with sexual radicals, and queer organisations I mentioned before. I would suggest that their critique of “identity” (that they describe as “outdated”) is a bit out of touch with a world were indigenous liberation and national liberation struggles are still of relevance around the world. Even in the context of gender and sexual politics (let’s pretend they could be so easily separated from the rest of the social structures for argument’s sake), they do describe “queer” as, not an identity, but “a becoming, an area or mobile platform of dissident and marginal sexual-affective-political productivity” (in Foucault para Encapuchadas p.22, in Spanish). I believe this doesn’t make it a “non-identity”, but a very specific one, that is political and doesn’t seek to be captured or tamed, a counter-hegemonic identity.
- A lot of those are often more visible in the cultural sphere as very few organizations with a visibility similar to ACT-UP or Queer Nation exist. Collectives such as Pachaqueer from Ecuador, Krudas Cubensi from Cuba, or somewhat more controversially Mujeres Creando in Bolivia (controversial because the collective never identified as such, even though a lot of elements of queer feminist politics and practices are apparent in their actions but one of the most famous member of the collective Maria Galindo likes to provocally state that “Now, with regards to the queer movement, I personally respect many intellectuals such as Beatriz Preciado or Judith Butler. I respect them a lot as intellectuals. They make interesting contributions. But we are often baptised as queer and we are not queer; we are feminists with our own way of thinking”). Or various events in South America, such as Queermuseu in Brazil that aim at popularizing and visibilizing queer arts.
- See her interview The Homogeneity in Feminism Bores Us; Unusual Alliances Need to be Formed. Although, it seems pretty apparent from the title and the proposition she makes that she supports a politic that is both counter-hegemonic and pretty “queer” from a “Northern” perspective.
- The work of the collective Against Equality is illustrated by its anti-capitalism. All the members have taken part in numerous militant groups, collective or organisations throughout the years and it would be too long to list them all. In the UK, Queer Mutiny was one of such anti-capitalist group. Or in Spain, the group Maribolheras Precarias (Precarious FaggotDykes).
- I put Pratt into queer politics for multiple reasons. She is a lesbian, life long partner of transgender, queer and communist militant Leslie Feinberg, and she has written on questions that touch closely to the queer critique of identity. An example of that is her Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart.
- Quoted from La Güera, p.3. Article in which Moraga writes of her experience of growing up and experiencing the internalization of racism, sexism, classism, etc.
- A similar agenda liberal and neo-liberal NGOs follow. It is worth noting that “anti-discrimination” strategies have been criticised very early one by queer feminists. One classical example was/is the opposition of the integration of queer and transgender people in the military both during the Clinton “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and after. For an overview, read the issue 2 of We Who Feel Differently Journal, Disastrous Inclusion: Critical Reflections on the Legacy of DADT.
- Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson’s STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) is certainly one of the most famous and radical of such groups. Linking both house culture, Gay Liberation, and early trans militancy. However it should be noted that “trans” as a label was not commonly in use before the late 90s, which led to a lot of various, sometimes contradictory, identifications from the members and might be of interest in our exploration of muddy identities. To read more about their politics, see Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries — Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle.
- Such a definition was, to my knowledge, first laid out by Leslie Feinberg in Trans Gender Liberation, A movement whose time has come from 1992.
- “Feminism” was coined in France in 1871 in a study of the “feminization” of male bodies suffering from tuberculosis. It was then taken over by educated reactionaries as a slur against women that fought for equality.
- He notes in his introduction about his experience in a trans support group for people with HIV in the 90s: “However, although the group is billed as a transgender support group, none of the participants routinely refer to themselves as transgender. More often, they talk about themselves as girls, sometimes as fem queens, every now and then as women, but also very often as gay, this category being one I share with them in talking about myself. […] Since the early 1990s when the term was coined, the category transgender has come to be understood as a collective category of identity which incorporates a diverse array of male- and female-bodied gender variant people who had previously been understood as distinct kinds of persons, including self-identified transexuals and transvestites, but also many others such as Fiona and her peers. In its collectivity, the capacity of transgender to incorporate all gender variance has become a powerful tool of activism and personal identification. […] In short, ‘‘transgender’’ has changed the terms by which U.S. Americans understand and differentiate between gendered and sexual variance. […] As such, Fiona’s [one of the participant] claim seems to confound this distinction. As a male-bodied person, by claiming to be both a woman (understandable in contemporary terms as ‘‘transgender’’) but also as ‘‘gay’’ (indexing her attraction to other male-bodied people), her statement can be read as a claim to occupy the categories of both transgender and homosexual as equivalent categories of personhood. While many self-identified transgender people do indeed also identify as gay or lesbian, for these individuals gay or lesbian identity is understood as a separate issue, a matter of sexuality, and distinct from the gender identity which is expressed through their identities as transgender. But Fiona makes no ontological distinction between her ‘‘gendered’’ life as a woman and her ‘‘sexual’’ desire as gay. The fact that she and her peers do not use transgender to talk about themselves highlights this alternative understanding and organization of their gendered and sexual lives.” p.3–4
- Paul Preciado writes in Identity in Transit: “I explain, in waving a letter from my lawyer, that I was mistakenly assigned at birth the female sex and that my request for the recognition of male identity is the object of a legal procedure before a judge of the Spanish State. I am in transition. I am in the waiting room between two systems of exclusive representation.” This binary administration of gender is a strongly embedded in state institutions. A lived-experience description of such administration of gender in Canadian prisons can be found in Female Keep Separate Prisons, Gender, and the Violence of Inclusion.
- The Radicalesbians collective, which coined the term, writes in its little manifesto that “[f]or in this sexist society, for a woman to be independent means she can’t be a woman — she must be a dyke. That in itself should tell us where women are at. It says as clearly as can be said: women and person are contradictory terms. For a lesbian is not considered a “real woman. “ And yet, in popular thinking, there is really only one essential difference between a lesbian and other women: that of sexual orientation — which is to say, when you strip off all the packaging, you must finally realize that the essence of being a “woman” is to get fucked by men.”
- Sex is a complicated concept in biology. In the strictest sense, evolutionary biologists use sex to speak purely of the emission of “male” and “female” gametes. But that is an abstract concept and essentialist feminist will often understand that a woman doesn’t need to be able to reproduce to be “sexually female”. Sex is, then, a set of anatomical, hormonal and genetic characteristics. And as such, sex is better understood as a spectrum. This conception of sex owes greatly to feminist inquiries and critics of biology as a science, and of the recent struggles of intersex folks. On the feminist critique, see Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body. To learn more about intersex lives, see the documentary Intersexion: Boy or Girl?
- An famous one is Janice Raymond’s tentative to “out” Sandy Stone and have her excluded from women’s run Olivia Records. In her subsequent book The Transsexual Empire, Raymond expresses her view that “transsexualism” is roughly speaking, a tool of patriarchy to oppress women. Sandy Stone offered an answer, years later, titled The Empire Strikes Back: a Posttransexxual Manifesto. It should be worth noting that Olivia Records was partly founded by the Radicalesbians which coined “woman-identified woman”.
- Quoted from a statement by Nancy Jean Burkholder in TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism #2 Nov-Dec 1993. Nancy was the woman expelled from the festival in 1991.
- From an open letter to Lesbian Connection January 27, 2000, by Davina Anne Gabriel, editor of TransSisters. Quoted from Emi Koyama’s Whose Feminism is it Anyway?
- Emi Koyama, Whose Feminism is it Anyway? The Unspoken Racism of the Trans Inclusion Debate, p.3
- La Güera, p.3
- Emi Koyama, Whose Feminism is it Anyway? The Unspoken Racism of the Trans Inclusion Debate, p.8
- This has been noted multiple times, but the collection of essays Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation displays a large number of transmasculine experiences. However the question of the inclusion of transmasculine people is still an ongoing topic. As “male-identified” many feminists believe that they hold “male privilege” and can thus, only be an integral part of the male class. That is both omitting the fact that trans men often come from the butch lesbian milieu and keep (or would like to) close to it, can be gay, and do not necessarily pass as cis-men.
- For an overview of the TERF political attacks see TERF wars: An introduction by Ruth Pearce, Sonja Erikainen and Ben Vincent.
- Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, p.40,41,42
- This line of analysis also applies to domestic and sexual violence against cis-women. In, In an Abusive State, Kristin Bumiller argues that neoliberal management of sexual violences has let women in a dead end. So much so that a women she interviews sees the state intervention in her family life (putting social services in charge of her child) as a second rape. The administration of such cases is indeed incapable of reducing harm, and reproduces it at an institutional level.
- Quoted from Social Strike: Gender Strike, by the italian collective SomMovimentonazioAnale
- In Queer Value, Meg Wesling argues that “the queer opens up ways to think about the labor of sexuality and gender identity”. In the article she discusses how performing gender and sexuality is and isn’t work at the same time. While she uses the terms “work” and “labour” fairly indistinctively, I would suggest that they are substantially different things, and that she specifically talks about gender as labour that can sometimes be marketable. Only as they become marketable can we talk about work.
- In Social Strike: Gender Strike.
- For example, Paul Preciado’s very liberal politics of representation, that calls for the integration of seropositive transfeminists at the direction of the IMF, or migrant sex workers at the World Bank. In Prólogo: Decimos revolución (in Spanish), version extend of We Say Revolution in An Apartment on Uranus.
- Gayle Rubin, Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender, and Boundaries
