Reading: Quiet Rumours (Dark Star Collective) / Anarcha-Feminism and the Newer “Woman Question” (Stacy/Sally Darity)
Starting with “Anarcha-Feminism and the Newer 'Woman Question'” by Stacy/Sally Darity. This is a response to the previous essay by Peggy Kornegger (which was written in the 1970s).
Gone are the days when anarcha-feminists nurtured visions of revolution brought on by a unity of women. While we may have found the following quote in a nineteen-seventies essay “Anarchism and the Feminist Connection,” “The development of sisterhood is a unique threat, for it is directed against the basic social and psychic model of hierarchy and domination…” it has become clear that sisterhood alone is not a threat to hierarchy and domination.
To be fair, even while I agree with Peggy that feminism and anarchism are inherently connected, I couldn't understand what would make anyone (even in the 1970s) think that there as an intuitive anarchism in people who kept creating hierarchical structures within groups that very much didn't need it and didn't benefit by having it.
I also was perplexed by the claims that she had made around feminism being leaderless, when it was clear that there were women who were trying to make themselves the leaders (and many who succeeded as appearing as leaders to the mainstream at different periods of the movement: Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Frieden, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem...
This isn't to say their work was worthless, but they almost never put the focus on other women. And this has been a commonality among many other notable feminist activists; rather than shining a light on the work and removing themselves from leadership roles, they often try to tell other women (and marginalised genders) who can speak about feminism. Germaine Greer, in her later career, took the “very feminist” position of criticising Julia Gillard for her style and her male partner's job as a hairdresser (rather than actually critique Julia Gillard's atrocious policies and harmful politics). Gloria Steinem was taken to task for “misspeaking” (bullshit excuse, btw) about young women who supported Bernie in 2016, and she has been very much supportive of people like Hillary Clinton (despite Clinton's track record of supporting policies that directly harm women, particularly non-white and immigrant women).
And while I don't give a shit about electoral politics (because anarchist), I think it's absurd that the most neoliberal candidate who continues policies that harm poor women (of all races and citizenship) the most is the one that most of our previous “feminist leaders” keep supporting... just because she's a woman, and they want the optics of “first woman president” rather than policies that might actually help people (even marginally).
And considering many of the feminist movements that white feminists acknowledge as “the beginning” of the feminist movements all started around women's suffrage, it should be obvious that many women's feminism was happily tied to the state itself. “We want to participate in that shit, get ours and fuck everyone else” rather than “we want to tear it down and do something better.”
More explicit in anarcha-feminism is that a focus on gender oppression is not at the expense of attention to other systems of power. While some of this is addressed by intersectionality, I am also interested in further questioning this concept of sisterhood, or more specifically, expanding what I will call the newer “woman question:” are we to continue to orient around an identity called “woman,” or should we instead oppose the power structures that have created this category to oppress us?
This is 100% the question that a lot more anarchists should be asking and considering.
I propose that anarcha-feminism has two main and related principles specific to its emphasis on feminism: Everyone should have freedom from all that is coercive about gender (or gender stratum, see below), and everyone should have bodily autonomy—freedom from bodily harm, and the freedom to do, or not do, what they want with their bodies.
I concur wholeheartedly.
The principle relating to bodily autonomy is multi-dimensional as well. It relates primarily though not always to a gendered manifestation of oppression. Not only does it refer to sexuality, consent, reproductive freedom, etc., but also to an ideal society in which we can make truly free choices, e.g. we should have the freedom to get liposuction, but we would ideally be free of any pressure to do so. Of course on a practical level the latter principle is incredibly complex as it relates to power dynamics, what justice looks like, and issues around technology, etc.
I do think that we need to recognise the elements that can impact our bodily autonomy, including the social pressure that might come with wanting to alter our bodies. It's always difficult, even with something as small as makeup, to know precisely how much of that is because we want to and how much of it is because we feel like we must do it.
It's also something I think about with regards to my fashion choices. How many of the choices am I making because I like what I'm wearing? How many of the choices am I making because I feel like I have to do certain things to cover up parts of my body because it's just easier than dealing with a society that treats my fat body like it's disgusting to see? It's hard to disentangle the things that make me feel comfortable from the things that make my life easier with regards to social pressure.
Although I am not arguing that we must abandon concepts that refer to the real effects of gender oppression, I argue that the above working principles are preferable to identity politics. Identity politics tend to prioritize one particular type of oppression and harden the boundaries around the identity related to that oppression most often in the interest of gaining equal representation and participation in the system. As many have argued, this creates alliances where they shouldn’t be (e.g. cross-class), marginalizes intersections and complexities of identities, reinforces the identities and perhaps therefore the oppression, and strengthens loyalty to the system when assimilation is a strategy. The type of power sought to balance out inequalities is often not questioned.
Keeping this here because it is food for thought and is one of the few critiques of identity politics that seems to come from a genuine concern for liberatory politics (questioning identity constructions and the co-option of those identities by the system for its own maintenance is helpful, along with recognising which identities it seeks to create distance from).
This sort of reminds me of the 'Drop the T' bullshit for some queer groups, which just wanted to be LGB because they're all transmisic assholes who would rather be part of the system than see everyone free to be themselves. It was about control (of resources, of spaces, of narratives) by more conservative cis queers who've often looked at anyone trans (or, honestly, anyone with “atypical” attraction or sexuality, like asexual or aromantic people) with suspicion and claimed we were all trying to co-opt the queer movement when we've always been there.
Anarcha-feminism—or perhaps it is a queer anarcha-feminism—is not identity politics as long as its aim is to destroy the gender categories rather than perpetuate them. I argue that we can center the above principles, and oppose gender oppression without getting caught up in boundaries of identity. The point is to oppose and acknowledge the power structures and their very real effects, but to not create or reinforce our identities around our oppressions.
I don't disagree with this inherently, but I also have to wonder how they will handle concepts of race or immigrant status or... Granted, it's also worth recognising that a wealthy Black person isn't treated the same as a poor Black person, so even the racial category creates some issues for conversation and recognition of those power hierarchies.
As safer spaces and separatism have been discussed as responses to sexism and sexual violence, it has become clear that these issues are not so clear-cut. We know that abuse can occur between two women for example. We know that women’s groups or spaces are not necessarily free from hierarchy simply because they are free of men (as discussed by various feminists of color, as well as Jo Freeman’s “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”). Spaces created by feminists to be safer or simply to allow better focus on gender oppression, have increasingly encountered the difficulty with where, if anywhere, to draw a line between the gender categories. More importantly are the implications of drawing that line if it means excluding trans people and ignoring our common struggles.
Here it is. I feel better already.
Delphy and others suggested that the concept of woman only exists within a power relationship. Sex differences are not natural but naturalized. This diverges greatly from theories that maintain sex as a given. Some theorize that sex led to gender roles and/or that gender/sex oppression was the first form of hierarchy. But if we don’t take sex as a natural category, as a given, but instead a naturalized category, we can understand gender oppression and all that comes with it in a different light, and as something much more unstable.
This part just reminds me of the book Bitch by Lucy Cooke, which discusses the ways in which our gender assumptions have negatively impacted our understanding of other species because we presume (a) that every species has a strict 'male' and 'female' category (b) that operates precisely in the way that we (often wrongly) assume humans do.
Feminists understand gender as a social construct. But perceiving sex-as-gendered is a step beyond that, and has implications for how we should orient politically around an identity such as woman or female. Some may find it hard to argue with tangible differences; sex being considered the biological/anatomical/hormonal/genetic difference between humans, generally primarily corresponding to reproduction of the species. Yet rarely is it acknowledged that these do not always align (e.g. genetics and anatomy may not “match”) nor fall in only one of two categories. Examination of non-Western cultures and the rest of the animal kingdom also reveals many exceptions to Western thought’s dualistic concepts.
And it's apparently no wonder that I'm reminded of Bitch because immediately after I had that thought, Stacy/Sally brought up similar topics.
Another Silvia Federici mention for Caliban and the Witch, so I guess I need to finally give in to see... how functional that book is, since I'm always a little frustrated by people doing history with a specific purpose in mind.
Upon reflection, there appears to be a contradiction in seeking the destruction or abolition of gender, meanwhile building a culture of respecting everyone’s gender, pronouns, etc. Indeed, there are some radical feminists who advocate the former but, not seeing a place for trans people’s liberation (and in fact often finding it a threat), oppose the latter. I have determined that the problem lies in the ways in which gender is defined and understood. To many radical and materialist feminists, gender is only a relationship of power, therefore it must be destroyed. However, the concept of gender was borrowed by feminists from a psychologist who, in the late 1960’s, wrote about the phenomenon of transsexuals feeling “trapped in the wrong body.” Not to imply that one meaning is unrelated to the other, but it would seem that “gender” came to refer to different concepts while not seeming to.
There is no contradiction in referring to people as who they are (using their chosen name and pronouns, acknowledging who they say they are) and wanting to abolish gender, but I guess if you're a transphobe? There is, especially if this is how you view gender.
While I do not see a lot of utility in putting to much of an emphasis on language alone, it makes more sense to address issues within each context and use language that reflects the situation. For example, when referring to an issue that directly relates to pregnancy, one may refer to “people who are, will be, or were capable of becoming pregnant” rather than “women,” because of course not all women can or do get pregnant, and not only people who identify as women can or do get pregnant. Of course, as many women of color and others have discussed, assuming that something like pregnancy or having a uterus creates unity or “sisterhood” among those who share that, is inaccurate, essentialist, if not at times racist in practice. Rather than the typical white middle-class-centered approach of mainstream feminism, the working principles I discuss also allow for an approach to a wide range of factors relating to such things as pregnancy—one’s age, race, or citizenship/immigration status, whether one lives or works in areas where one is exposed to toxic chemicals (which is more likely in poor communities of color) which affects fertility and survival of the fetus or child, whether one lives in the context of war, whether one is on welfare, whether one is living as their assigned or designated sex, whether they’re partnered and with whom and how. All of this factors into whether someone is encouraged or discouraged from having a child, and whether they are even capable of choosing one way or the other, not to mention the actual experiences—sometimes trauma—of birth, sterilization, abortion, or taking birth control, depending on the context. In the face of this, the standard feminist demand for access to birth control and abortion falls flat. Of course what I’m getting at is not that fertility, pregnancy, and reproduction are the prime example around which bodily autonomy revolves, but that we can see how those which aren’t automatically considered feminist issues, such as the health problems related to exposure to toxins also have to do with bodily autonomy whether they affect fertility or not. While approaching issues this way seems much more difficult than the simplicity provided by identity politics, using the working principles discussed above allows for us to see the ways that capitalism, the state, and the very real effects of the social constructs of race and gender intersect or share similarities.
This entire paragraph is such a good example of how we can take one issue that is usually narrowly explored (access to birth control, contraceptives, and abortion) and actually look at the many other aspects that go into it (such as the environmental damages, like literally toxic work environments or exploitation of the land).
It also opens up conversations that can be had around things like sterilisation: who is allowed (or even forced) versus who struggles to access it when they want it. It makes it clearer that people will need to have more nuanced understandings of topics and cannot just assume that one thing is undesirable or inherently bad (but that it is when it is forced on people).