Rambling

Book Thoughts: Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis

I didn't finish this book because life kicked my ass. Main thesis, though:

Feminism is not necessarily free from harming others, depending on the branch. There is such thing as imperialist feminism, for instance, TERFs, etc. This isn't really a surprise when you think about why "intersectional feminism" needed to become a term, but people often "no true scottsman" about this and refuse to accept that there are branches of feminism that are white supremacist aka racist, and at times specifically advanced their (aka white women) cause against the rights of people of color (particularly Black people), participated in genocide, etc., and this is specifically what got them legitimacy in the eyes of power. And they have no qualms about it.

The list of these bigoted strains of feminisms that are still with us today are in the table of contents, listed as follows:

All of these basically operate by throwing other people, including other women, under the bus in what amounts to "Rules for thee but not for me," and falsely conflating some injustices (mostly white) women face with brutality that is actually predominantly experienced by a population lacks the privilege of the main speakers. For example, "marriage is just like slavery for women," "pornography is just like slavery for women," etc. Lewis reminds us that relationships between men and women are actually very far from chattel slavery, the Holocaust, or whatever else people are randomly equating here to use the suffering of another population to lend legitimacy to their own, all the while refusing to listen to people from those very populations. This is basically the idea of the phantasm as explained in Butler's Who's Afraid of Gender?

Until I read (like half of) this book, I didn't really sit with how much damage Anglo feminism, which still affects many of our conceptions of feminism today, has wrecked on vulnerable populations. I used to think of it more as like, "Well, white feminists in the past just kinda shot themselves in the foot sometimes," but actually the very destruction they wrought (literally including instances of being enslavers, bombing public spaces, etc.) was actually very much what they wanted. It's just the realization that people do actually act in their interests and simply do not see you as part of them all over again. Like how many times will people be like, "Why are trad wives submitting to their husbands and calling it feminism," before they realize that that is their form of feminism, because their idea of feminism is just "complementary and basically opposite species, and most importantly more equal than those dirty people of color"?

Probably the most surprising part of the book is something I didn't even get to, but people in book club were talking about how surprised they were that there were prolife feminists who argued that in a perfect world with free childcare, no nuclear family, etc., no fetus would ever have to be aborted. This appears to be progressive but is really just saying "you should risk your health and life to carry something you don't even want to just because you owe it to other people," which ignores how dangerous childbirth even is and ignores bodily autonomy. As the book puts it, "Forcing someone to continue a pregnancy is a form of violence far worse than the violence of abortion." Following the book club session, Old Guy actually said that he was kind of shocked to learn how common nearly dying is for people giving birth. His own wife nearly died both times she had a child, and he thought he was the outlier. Not so! Abortion rights, now!!


Some quotes:

It is possible not to idealize an abused wife even while imagining solidarity with her. Solidarity, actually, requires us not to idealize. Think of the daughter at the heart of the Magic Flute custody battle—she is never consulted on her views, nor would we need her innocence in order to support her. Feminists, perhaps, should try to avoid heroes. No girlbosses, no heroines, no masters.


They say that “to understand all is to forgive all.” But if this is true, then a commitment to “impurity” in politics (a commitment I think of as key to anti-fascism) must walk hand in hand with the courage to draw lines and fight people if necessary. Even kin. In other words, feminists who, like me, are committed anti-fascists—or anti-fascists who are also feminists, as they must be—need to know the difference between forgiving enemies and giving up the fight against them. This has to be crystal clear. It’s a question of learning to more confidently oppose people whom we understand: a cop is still my enemy when she’s my neighbor. We can feel compassion for QAnon moms and still liquidate their armory. We can forgive a pro-life feminist and still destroy the forced-birth judiciary.


For centuries, “women are not the problem” has been an eminently publishable take, from feminists and antifeminists alike. Contrariwise, many of us on the radical left are glad that so many of us are a problem for the survival of the present state of things. We dream, in fact, of being bigger—much, much bigger—problems. As we expand our desire for revolution, I hope we can start to reject pantheons and, instead, practice remembering and admiring flawed comrades whom we care for, in part, by criticizing them.


As Gloria AnzaldĂșa remarked long ago, some whites “possess women-of-color consciousness, just as some women of color bear white consciousness.”


Even as we suffer loss in the short term, we can ultimately only gain, as feminists, when we accept that certain beloved old lines and lineages of feminism weren’t just incidentally misogynist but substantively so; that their core definitions were bourgeois, irremediably; that their racism was non-excisable. What are our other options? Shall we attempt the bonkers task of “calling in” people with opposite aims to our own—decolonizing what is squarely a form of colonialism? Or shall we break up the house of feminism, that battered and beloved fortress where so many of us have not lived well, and dare to name some feminisms enemies?


Contra the aggrieved cries from certain quarters that it can only ever be patriarchy that benefits when feminists criticize other feminists, I affirm with AnzaldĂșa that lines of affinity, not identity, must be drawn. Some feminisms are obstacles to gender freedom, and asking “which side are you on?” is the most elemental level of political physics. “The side of women” doesn’t exist. It never existed.


In the 2010s, as we shall see, German and American feminists seeking to criminalize male Muslims have trotted out very similar claims, this time referencing their respective nations’ innate gender progressiveness. To give (“our”) women more authority, so the Wollstonecraftian line goes, is to restore something organic about the nation’s soul. Hence, insofar as the Rights of Woman started modern Anglo-feminism, to be a feminist in the West today requires careful consideration of the question, not of whether feminist imperialism is feminism, but rather of whether all feminisms share the same side. It is one thing to accept our kinship with that high-handed, overblown, curiously macho double comparison of British ladyhood to the “morally corrupt” conditions of non-Western women and enslaved black men. Exploring that inheritance is part of “claiming bad kin.” But it is another thing to assume that Wollstonecraftian feminism is a comrade feminism.


The way into gender politics, then, was race. It was by doing the humanitarian work of caring for the wretched of the earth overseas that respectable women gained access at home to a position from which feminism could be waged. By refusing to enjoy a commodity of unethical sweetness, and by organizing a mass decades-long “no” to consumer complicity, white pro-abolition ladies began to challenge patriarchy in their lives, beginning with what the communist feminist Angela Davis has called “the insufferable male supremacy within the anti-slavery campaign.”27


We might start countering this avoidant tendency by asking, simply, what happens to a feminism (or indeed any social movement) when it relies too heavily on terrorism. I’d submit that the answer is always: it lurches inexorably to the right. This question is quite distinct from the justifiably unending debate over whether the suffragettes’ terrorism worked or, on the contrary, delayed the passage of the parliamentary vote for propertied ladies over the age of thirty in 1918. In that debate, scholars typically weigh the role played by the behind-the-scenes continuation of suffragism in the anti-war women’s labor movement, the role played by the labor of millions of women in munitions factories in reshaping society and swaying statesmen, and the effect of the WSPU’s immediate ceasefire at the war’s outset (a heel turn that was followed by consistent bootlicking thereafter). The consensus view is—to quote one historian’s melodramatic formula—that women “earned” their limited franchise “not by throwing bombs but by making them; not by raising children but by sending them to die.”


It is often argued by other scholars I respect enormously, such as philosopher Lorna Finlayson, that femonationalism isn’t really part of feminist history, and that it is “rather misleading to think of this as a strand of feminism at all—although there are certainly some self-described ‘feminists’ who argue along these lines.”88 I respectfully disagree. Naturally I wish I could have found out, in my research, that colonial feminism didn’t really come from feminism, so much as from colonialism—as Finlayson says—and thus been able to conclude that racist feminism isn’t really feminism. But unless we are prepared to say that Mary Wollstonecraft and Emmeline Pankhurst are not part of feminism, then imperial feminism really does come from feminism, not least inasmuch as mainstream feminism itself comes from empire.89 Deleterious to the cause of freedom though it is, today’s enlightened fundamentalism is, alas, a feminism, one we must confront as a form of patriarchal orientalism feminism, one we must confront as a form of patriarchal orientalism and defeat by making common cause with its victims.

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