Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Outspoken by Pluto)

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A careful and detailed description of a feminist politic that is expansive and fundamentally hopeful' JB: “Privilege” is a very contentious word, and I notice you barely use it. In fact, you cleverly avoid using many buzz words – were you conscious of the vocabulary you chose?

The crisis has brought to the fore a number of issues that contemporary feminist thinkers have to attentive to: those include asking questions about why the our country’s social care systems were so ill-prepared for a public health crisis of this scale (austerity), workers rights, how to attend to gendered violence as communities without relying on the police, the prison industrial complex and the rights of migrants in detention which are last to be considered in this crisis. I think this will require a proliferation of ideas and tactics, and utilising a number of different routes at the same time. I think anyone who is introduced to feminism as a political practice through engagement with white feminist thinkers of the ‘second wave’ has a lot of unlearning to do. I think that a certain kind of thinking can really limit your conception of what is possible.There are ideological links between biological essentialism and scientific racism: both see the body in absolute terms. Many prominent TERFS and their allies have aligned themselves with members of the alt-right. Well-known British feminists have appeared in YouTube videos hosted by men spreading alt-right fascistic ideology in the art world. In the US, the ‘Women’s Liberation Front’ colluded with conservative and religious groups I think this is a crucial moment for reassessing the demands that we make as feminists and pulls into sharper focus the need to combat liberal feminism on more than just a discursive level. When I say feminism, I mean trans liberation – and the refusal to impose limits on the possibility of queer life that confounds everything we know and understand by ‘gender’, ‘sex’, ‘race’, ‘the family’ and so on. In the book, I was trying to speak to feminism in the broadest terms, not to argue that everyone should be happy with the term or adhere to it or (I don’t think that’s particularly important) but to underline the very serious demands that it makes of us those interested in making the world more liveable. And to hammer home that if we are committed to feminist principles, that will change how we move through the world, what our priorities are and how we organise.

I’ve stopped viewing certain thinkers as infallible or their theories as impervious to critique. I really want to stress how crucial it is that people who are trying to craft a radical understanding of the world remain unashamed of the places that they began. I try to have empathy for those other versions of myself. I think remaining flexible in that way also helps us trace what it was that caused those shifts – affective experiences, reading, material conditions etc, which will matter a lot in a ‘post-COVID’ political moment when more people will begin to question state power. There is a dangerous liberal feminism that fetishises personal choice: Can you be a feminist and wear high heels? Can you be a feminist and shave your legs? But policing the way women present themselves distracts us from the more pressing issues at hand. Why are women the lowest paid workers? Why do women have the least access to the material resources necessary for survival? Are women free from violence? If not, then why not? The latter questions asks us to open our eyes and examine the way our society functions while the former are concerned with ‘choice’ as if choice exists in a vacuum. Our obsession with locating the singular universal cause of women’s oppression stops us from engaging with the mechanisms of that oppression that manifest in daily life: the economic, the political, the social. This narrow scope for thinking about our own oppression has undoubtedly led many feminists to fall prey to the myth that trans women pose a threat to feminist advancements. Those of us who have lost and will lose loved ones in this crisis, who are forced to watch the spectre of preventable death and the dystopian response by the Conservative government will be galvanised to reassert feminism’s importance in a new way and to do so for as long as is necessary. Mutual aid networks holding communities together will radicalise those who had never before questioned state power. This is a moment to begin to connect the dots and to realise that we depend on one another for our lives and so much more and that we defeat our purpose when we allow sects of the population to be sacrificed for the sake of winning an election. I often find the framing of these kinds of questions odd because they assume that trans people have existed outside the history of feminist movements which is not only ahistorical but does this dangerous thing of positioning trans life as somehow an invention of the contemporary moment. One of the central pillars of the radical feminism that dominated the 70s and 80s was a critique of the sex distinction itself and the call for its abolition. And that is exactly what transfeminist contributions have always done, refocused our attention on the violence of the gender binary and on this idea that biology can or should ever be a determiner of life. What we’re seeing is a big resurgence of essentialist thinking fuelled by neoliberalism’s focus on the individual, the manufactured trans panic! is about signalling how trans people are a societal failure and an attempt to render their lives impossible by attempting to remove them from aspects of public life. As feminists who are invested in a world that includes all of us, we have to resist that. The fight for reproductive justice” explores the difference between legislative “rights” and actual “justice” through the lens of Repeal the 8th, a successful but flawed campaign to repeal the ban on abortions in Ireland. The chapter begins by noting that historical campaigns in favour of birth control and abortion access often cited “population control” as a benefit, specifically referencing marginalised groups when doing so, leading to a general mistrust of the reproductive rights movement by people of colour. Further, Olufemi examines the aftermath of Repeal the 8th along with other abortion rights campaigns in the UK and US, demonstrating that changes in the law do not automatically result in equal access to abortions. People still face healthcare barriers - from anti-migrant policies and extraneous requirements for medical advice, to pro-life protests outside clinics - underlining that there is a limit to the impact changing a single law can have on the sysem. The central argument here is that the focus on “abortion rights” from mainstream feminism can lead to the sidelining of broader healthcare issues for people of colour and the difficulties that many people still have in accessing reproductive healthcare. The chapter concludes by emphasising the urgent need for reproductive justice which goes beyond campaigning for legislation, instead focusing on systemic change, an argument echoed in a later chapter “The answer to sexual violence is not more prisons”.Does it matter that she doesn’t use the term socialist to describe herself? Given her insistence in the introduction that “there are no pre-given solutions” offered by feminism it’s perhaps unsurprising she rejects most standard classifications for her viewpoint. And if we recognise and agree with her arguments where they matter most: on rejecting individualistic liberal corporate feminism, centering marginalised voices, and liberating the working class from the tyranny of the wage system, then the specific terms she uses for herself are perhaps less important. In a particularly thought-provoking and vital intervention, Olufemi shifts the discussion from reproductive rights (which are based, she shows persuasively, in a history of repression of women of color and use of eugenicist discourse to oppress them) to thinking about reproductive justice as an overarching system, in which women’s sexuality is seen as part of transformed liberation politics. This is a crucial intervention; when marches from Poland to Argentina and Ireland demand reconsideration of women’s ability to control their reproduction, it is vital that we think carefully about our demands and their relationship to the law. In the introduction to Feminism, Interrupted, you write “Everybody has a story about how they arrived and keep arriving at radical politics.” What were the particular circumstances of your discovery of the word ‘feminism’, its histories, resonances, and implications?