Reading: Quiet Rumours (Dark Star Collective) / Rote Zora, Interview with Rote Zora To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS
This essay includes the use of “wimmin,” and it's hard not to look at it as being a transphobic dog whistle when a lot of transphobes love those alt spellings of 'women'. I don't assume this to always be true of someone, but it's hard not to considering how frequently the two overlap. You can thank things like the trans-exclusive Michigan Womyn's Music Festival for a lot of people being hesitant around people using alt-spellings of 'woman' or 'women'.
Which is frustrating because a lot of alt-spellings come from somewhere else ('wimmin' was apparently seen in Black American English on occasion, 'womyn' was used Scots) and were co-opted by predominantly transphobic cis white women.
Anyway...
Red Zora attacks predominantly patriarchal institutes, companies, and persons representing and building up a male sexist society, which is oppressing and exploiting wimmin worldwide. They are conducting campaigns against porntraders, sex shops, international traders of wimmin (those who profit from importing Asian wimmin as “brides” for West German men), doctors who are carrying out forced sterilizations, the Doctor’s Guild (“We see the Federal Doctor’s Guild as exponents of rape in white trenchcoats”), drug companies (notably Schering who produced the birth defect causing drug Duogynon), as well as computer companies such as Nixdorf and the multinational Siemens.
... Don't think I'm far off because the immediate first action they list is... anti-sex work (an overlap with transphobia). There are criticisms of the porn industry to be made, but the bougie white cis women who went full-on for things like discussions of exploitation without consulting sex workers? Or focused purely on trafficking (which happened but they always ignored what kinds of trafficking were most common, and they still do)...
This may have a history behind it that we can learn from, but goddamn if it isn't problematic as shit and perpetuates the same bullshit we saw from older women's groups (like Mujeres Libres or groups of the Paris Commune) when sex work was discussed.
It's also interesting that they mention “doctors who are carrying out forced sterilizations” but don't even mention who was being forcefully sterilised... because it largely wasn't able-bodied cis white women in Europe.
Interview with Rote Zora
These people were such second-wavers. There's no consideration for so many things: actual trafficked people (and where most trafficking victims end up), refusal to understand immigration, blanket-attacking porn shops and sex work institutions without regard for any of the women working in those spaces...
Even if they've got other good ideas, most of this shit sounds like paternalistic bullshit.