Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

foh with this white feminist shit

http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars

Aren't these comments worthy of a better response than that?

Katherine Cross, a Puerto Rican trans woman working on a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote about how often she hesitates to publish articles or blog posts out of fear of inadvertently stepping on an ideological land mine and bringing down the wrath of the online enforcers. “I fear being cast suddenly as one of the ‘bad guys’ for being insufficiently radical, too nuanced or too forgiving, or for simply writing something whose offensive dimensions would be unknown to me at the time of publication,” she wrote.

And

Being targeted by other activists, she says, “leaves you feeling threatened in the sense that you’re getting turned out of your own home…. The one place that you are able to look to for safety, where you were valued, where there is a lot less of the structural prejudice that makes you feel so outcast in the rest of the world—that’s now been closed to you. That you now have this terrible reputation… I know a lot of friends that live in fear of that.”

If your professional life is tied up with activism, the threat is redoubled. “To suddenly be tarred by the very people that I’m supposed to be able to work with, my allies, as being a sellout or being infatuated with power or being an apologist for this, that and the other privilege—if that kind of reputation gets around, its extremely damaging,” says Cross.

I mean, I don't know how you can read an article with a range of voices, mostly WOC, and dismiss it as "white feminist shit".

The article frames criticism from WOC/trans/etc. individuals as hysterical and over the top, quoting a few people who think of criticism as some sort of casting-out does not change that. Look at how Mikki Kendall frames the piece, she's called a fucking Maoist. For fuck's sake.

If there’s something inherent about the way women work within movements that makes us assholes to each other, that is incredibly sad.”

I'm going to steal from carl agatha here: IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME WAY TO TELL IF THIS IS TRUE, OH TOO BAD I GUESS IT'S UNKNOWABLE.

That article is unmitigatedly terrible and I wonder how Prof Cooper feels about being extensively quoted in it.

Online, however, intersectionality is overwhelmingly about chastisement and rooting out individual sin. Partly, says Cooper, this comes from academic feminism, steeped as it is in a postmodern culture of critique that emphasizes the power relations embedded in language. “We actually have come to believe that how we talk about things is the best indicator of our politics,” she notes.

a few people who think of criticism as some sort of casting-out

what a hysterical overreaction, we can dismiss it as an outlier. what's important here is the article's hostile tone and slanderous historical comparisons

in my very limited experience this article squares w/ ilx reality

i mean, not to prove the article correct or anything, but hey, Mordy is here

“We actually have come to believe that how we talk about things is the best indicator of our politics,” she notes.

tbf it is a p good one, orwell etc knew this before pomo, the current inquisition of language is necessary and important, but i do think we can make enthusiastic mistakes on this front, im wite btw

An elaborate series of norms and rules has evolved out of that belief, generally unknown to the uninitiated, who are nevertheless hammered if they unwittingly violate them. Often, these rules began as useful insights into the way rhetorical power works but, says Cross, “have metamorphosed into something much more rigid and inflexible.” One such rule is a prohibition on what’s called “tone policing.” An insight into the way marginalized people are punished for their anger has turned into an imperative “that you can never question the efficacy of anger, especially when voiced by a person from a marginalized background.”

Similarly, there’s a norm that intention doesn’t matter—indeed, if you offend someone and then try to explain that you were misunderstood, this is seen as compounding the original injury. Again, there’s a significant insight here: people often behave in bigoted ways without meaning to, and their benign intention doesn’t make the prejudice less painful for those subjected to it. However, “that became a rule where you say intentions never matter; there is no added value to understanding the intentions of the speaker,” Cross says.

The whole space around those who give offense, those who intend to give offense, those who intend not to give offense, those who take offense, those who intend to take offense, and those who intend not to take offense, is very interesting to observe in action. The opportunities for nuanced dysfunction within this space appear to be boundless.

at the very least i think everyone quoted came off very well in their own words, including kendall despite the article trying its best to undermine her

Knowing the article's intent, I wouldn't really trust the quotes to not be de/recontextualized. Kendall has already said that she was interviewed for two hours but what was quoted was all they ended up printing.

Similarly, there’s a norm that intention doesn’t matter—indeed, if you offend someone and then try to explain that you were misunderstood, this is seen as compounding the original injury.

This is flat-out stupid and relies on conflating "it's your fault you got offended, I would never say anything offensive"-style apologies which are the default with "I didn't realize I would be interpreted that way, I'm sorry" apologies in order to have any semblance of validity.

For added whatever, D4n S4vage and a bunch of wite people are being kinda gross about this article on Twitter. And S4vage was retweeted by j0ss wh3don, who recently ran into Twitter troubles of his own over allegedly marginalizing trans men. Not linking to any of it.

Surely that conflation runs both ways?

Yeah, Dan Savage has been running his mouth off about how we should all embrace straight white allies like Macklemore, which just shows, like time and time again, his failure to actually sit down and fucking listen to criticism, whether it's to him or to someone else.

i think perhaps discourses like feminism (and marxism, or any theoretical discourses that also seeks practical/political action) are especially vulnerable to this kind of drive to purity or "auto-immunity" that attacks and sub-divides itself--pulling it away from the united front it would seem to need to be the most politically effective. but, in the main, i think this sort of differentiation is good insofar as it stops each subdivision of claiming to be the "one, true" feminism. in that way alliances within feminism(s) have to own up to their own limited perspectives. it's this exact thing that actually prevents feminism from ossifying into doctrine!

“We actually have come to believe that how we talk about things is the best indicator of our politics,” she notes.

When I saw Cooper speak about this exact topic, her point was, Don't try to talk a better line of justice politics than your actions can live up to--that your actions in support of less privileged parties are more important than the vocab list in your self-description.

I seriously doubt she means that it's okay to talk about things in a bigoted or ignorant way as long as your intentions are good, there there, let all the Black women on the internet just put a better spin on that for you, dear.

That's how I understood her point in the article - that the vocab list has been elevated above tangible actions.

To spare only a second on Joss Whedon, I just watched all of Dollhouse and it is really problematic w/r/t race, way more than I realized when it was first on tv and I watched it originally. Buffy, my first love, wasn't diverse and had representation issues, but it was about a small group of specific people who, you could say (ugh) "just happened" to all be white. Dollhouse otoh is supposed to be about everyone who is beautiful, with enough variety to accommodate the fantasies and practical needs of everyone in the world with enough money to pay for them, and yet there are almost zero non-white people in it in any significant roles. Added to which, the use of Black male bodies to indicate villainy is GROTESQUE. Feeling pretty over JW rn.

xp to ryan I don't think that kind of differentiation/purity testing/etc was very good for Marxism in America (i'm trying to remember whose college thesis on that topic was somewhat recently unearthed - kagan?)

just checked - yeah it was kagan

"Through its own internal feuding, then, the (Socialist Party) exhausted itself forever and further reduced labor radicalism in New York to the position of marginality and insignificance from which it has never recovered. The story is a sad but also chastening one for those who, more than a half century after socialism's decline, still wish to change America. Radicals have often succumbed to the devastating bane of sectarianism; it is easier, after all, to fight one's fellows than it is to battle an entrenched and powerful foe. Yet if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope."

true! but Marxism was perhaps structurally flawed in a way that feminism needn't be. (ie, that there had to be "one, true" Marxism.)

has turned into an imperative “that you can never question the efficacy of anger, especially when voiced by a person from a marginalized background.”

Why would you need to "question" anyone's anger?? ESPECIALLY someone from circumstances widely considered to be less privileged than the mainstream voices, but really ever, this is a fucked up way to even think about dealing with conflict and how to make safe and productive spaces. It is possible, for the love of community, to ACKNOWLEDGE anger and let people know that they are heard, and then not push back on them when they suggest actions that would improve conditions/repair relationships hurt by that anger. This kind of negotiation requires that everyone have the shared goal as their first priority so that there's incentive to find ways to work together, but that's what community building...IS...?

xp: I mean of course "unity" is the only hope for action, but that unity need only be contingent and temporally. different unities can always be re-configured.

xxxp re this Dollhouse otoh is supposed to be about everyone who is beautiful, with enough variety to accommodate the fantasies and practical needs of everyone in the world with enough money to pay for them, and yet there are almost zero non-white people in it in any significant roles

I'd almost be willing to say that, executed cleverly enough, this scenario could be a critique of what it's depicting rather than an example of it -- e.g. showing how western culture devalues nonwhite bodies -- but I don't get the impression it was, and in any case this show is pretty "lesser Whedon" AFAIC, however much that's a thing. Off-topic, though.

It's def one thing to question the efficacy of anger and another to question it's validity. You can even share your anger in an explicitly non-angry way I think - ymmv but ime consensus building requires some level of tonal compatibility. idk.

Kendall has already said that she was interviewed for two hours but what was quoted was all they ended up printing.

Yes, that's how journalism works in an article of this length. She doesn't claim she was misquoted.

What I took from this is there's not a clean binary between justifiably angry people with less privilege and a thoughtless or malicious privileged elite. When most of the interviewees criticising this discourse are WOC, one of whom is trans and one of whom coined the word "intersectionality", they deserve to be heard. This, for example, seems like a real attempt at balance by both Cooper and the reporter:

There’s a shorthand way of talking about online feminist arguments that pits middle-class white women against all the groups they oppress. Clearly, there’s some truth here: privileged white people dominate feminism, just as they do most other sectors of American life. Brittney Cooper, an assistant professor at Rutgers and co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective blog, is one of the black women who participated in #Femfuture, and she has spoken out against the viciousness that dominates Twitter. But she also emphasizes that the resentment expressed online is rooted in something real.

“I want to be clear: I think there’s an actual injury,” Cooper says. The online feminist efflorescence a few years back led to book deals and writing careers for far more white women than women of color. “Black women are brought into these mainstream feminist websites to bring a little bit of color or a little bit of diversity, but that doesn’t parlay into other career advancement opportunities.” On Twitter, by contrast, women of color, trans women and other people who feel silenced can amplify one another’s voices, talking back to people with power in an unparalleled way.

That doesn’t mean, though, that social media’s climate of perpetual outrage and hair-trigger offense is constructive. “There is a problem with toxicity on Twitter and in social media,” Cooper says. “I think we have to say that. I’m not sure that black women are benefiting from the toxicity.”

yeah when the "efficacy of anger" is being questioned in response to a person being actually justifiably angry in a given moment, well, that's a pretty fucked up response

idk, it's like a dale carnegie thing. ppl respond to certain tones + affects better than others. ppl generally don't respond well to being yelled at.

re: unity vs fragmentation, i feel like this unavoidable conflict between diversity-of-voice+singularity-of-purpose that keeps confusing and slowing the left is exactly the deep human-condition individual/communal conflict that needs to be addressed, understood, not transcended but somehow absorbed, digested, synthesized, in order to accomplish any of the dreams of progress and emancipation we fucked up so badly in so many different ways in the 20c; it is in some ways The Only Problem, so i have a lot of patience for this agonizingly slow process of exegesis even if the world seems to be collapsing as we do it.

like sure, the anger is legitimate. but that doesn't mean tactics are off the table does it? xp

oppressed people don't have the privilege of maintaining emotional distance from the subject of oppression, demanding different tone when these things re being discussed is p fucked up

Yes, that's how journalism works in an article of this length. She doesn't claim she was misquoted.

Yes, she wasn't misquoted per se, but she still clearly isn't happy with the way it was contextualized within the piece.

oppressed people don't have the privilege of maintaining emotional distance from the subject of oppression, demanding different tone when these things re being discussed is p fucked up

― 1 P.3. Eternal (roxymuzak), Wednesday, January 29, 2014 1:30 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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expression of anger can be a "tactic," but that's not even the problem with tone policing

right--for people whose daily lives and histories are intertwined with these questions, it's not a clinical exercise in argumentation

iirc dan said something abt this somewhere on ilx recently that i can't find atm but it was really well put

xp i understand your pov roxy, and i don't think anyone has to suppress all emotions. but i have heard oppressed people discuss their oppression without explicit tonal anger (and also without blunting the emotional impact of the communication).

"ppl respond to certain tones + affects better than others" = "oppressors get to decide how the conversation goes, sorry"

i just want it to be expressed with minimal jargon so that the message is more widely spread. when you have to learn the vocabulary before you understand the grievance, the righteousness is diluted imo.

xp Well of course she's not happy, because many of the voices in the piece are critical of her approach. A reporter doesn't have to make every interviewee happy - the responsibility is only to choose representative and accurate quotes from each interview. MK puts her case pretty strongly towards the end imo.

That you might have to put in some effort to learn a word or two to understand something a marginalized individual or group is trying to say, good god, the pain

Listen, that's part of my job, to teach people new words -- it's not as easy as you think it is.

it's a shame that non-snarky, non-angry communications are considered tools of the patriarchy - being respectful, esp to ppl in your own movement with whom you disagree, is not a mandate from the oppressor. it's how all kinds of communities form consensus. where are all these successful leftist movements that are derisive + sarcastic?

multi-xp

There are a lot of ways to accrue power in a group. Occupying the moral high ground can be a potent source of power, when all parties in the group agree that morality is an extremely valuable quality. The politics of race and gender are heavily reliant on asserting moral power, for obvious reasons. It has been their major tool in winning political rights.

Once it is well-established that this moral high ground grants power, the battle over who owns it can get pretty intense. As anyone who has spent time in progressive circles can testify, that battle over moral ascendance can easily turn to infighting, because, if anything, these are groups where the prestige of morality is sky high and even small increments of moral superiority can lead to increased power within the group, so that each increment is fiercely contested. It just seems to come with the territory.

RE: vocabulary, etc.

Sure, but so isn't trying to explain the daily reality of their lives. They have no obligation to make their message easy to swallow, including vocabulary. Yes, they want to be heard, but the privileged should get on their level, not the other way around.