Tag: intersectionality

tejuina:

tejuina:

“‘male socialization’ is a terf dogwhistle. there’s no such thing as ‘male socialization’ because implying that there is ignores race and class and other factors that make gendered socialization complex. there is no universal experience of ‘male’ or ‘female’ socialization because a white woman will be socialized very differently from a black woman, a csa survivor will internalize things differently from someone who wasn’t abused, etc; terfs clearly ignore this just because they hate trans women”

you can put a bunch of words together and make them sound like a progressive argument but at the end of the day, brown girls around the world cleaning up after their brothers and being told not to shower when they’re on their period know perfectly well that they would be treated differently if they’d been born with a penis

the point is: no one is saying all females lead identical lives and experience all the exact same things. of course a girl born to rich parents who’s never had to pick up a broom will be socialized differently from a girl who’s told to drop school to take care of the house while her brothers study and her mom works. this doesn’t take away from the reality of sex-based socialization, it just makes it a nuanced issue.

race is complex, too! white people benefit from white supremacy whether or not they’re poor. they’re still white even if they’re adopted into a black/brown family.

some issues are not as straightforward as we’d like them to be, and there’s many factors to take into account to fully understand them, but there’s still overarching patterns and systems of power that need to be named an addressed. the oppressive nature of female socialization is one of them, and it’s an injustice to everyone raised a girl who doesn’t identify as a woman to pretend they were unharmed by it.

I don’t understand this attitude from liberal ‘feminists’ and trans activists.

They disdain women having shared commonalities and hyper focus on differences to the point of absurdity.

They claim that each kind of woman and individual woman is so fundamentally different that we can’t relate to each other as women or at all.

It is one of the main reasons I rejected liberal feminism. They sneer at female solidarity then expect us to be ~intersectional~.

How the fuck are we supposed to be ~intersectional~ if we can’t relate to other women or even understand them?

There are experiences that I do not share in common with white men that I share in common with women of other races.

Women of colour are not identical to their male counterparts yet I don’t see liberal feminists denying that women of colour have anything in common with the men of their race. For some reason this is only applied to women.

Whenever men want to reach out across the racial divide the only people who want to stop them are racists.

tejuina:

tejuina:

“‘male socialization’ is a terf dogwhistle. there’s no such thing as ‘male socialization’ because implying that there is ignores race and class and other factors that make gendered socialization complex. there is no universal experience of ‘male’ or ‘female’ socialization because a white woman will be socialized very differently from a black woman, a csa survivor will internalize things differently from someone who wasn’t abused, etc; terfs clearly ignore this just because they hate trans women”

you can put a bunch of words together and make them sound like a progressive argument but at the end of the day, brown girls around the world cleaning up after their brothers and being told not to shower when they’re on their period know perfectly well that they would be treated differently if they’d been born with a penis

the point is: no one is saying all females lead identical lives and experience all the exact same things. of course a girl born to rich parents who’s never had to pick up a broom will be socialized differently from a girl who’s told to drop school to take care of the house while her brothers study and her mom works. this doesn’t take away from the reality of sex-based socialization, it just makes it a nuanced issue.

race is complex, too! white people benefit from white supremacy whether or not they’re poor. they’re still white even if they’re adopted into a black/brown family.

some issues are not as straightforward as we’d like them to be, and there’s many factors to take into account to fully understand them, but there’s still overarching patterns and systems of power that need to be named an addressed. the oppressive nature of female socialization is one of them, and it’s an injustice to everyone raised a girl who doesn’t identify as a woman to pretend they were unharmed by it.

I don’t understand this attitude from liberal ‘feminists’ and trans activists.

They disdain women having shared commonalities and hyper focus on differences to the point of absurdity.

They claim that each kind of woman and individual woman is so fundamentally different that we can’t relate to each other as women or at all.

It is one of the main reasons I rejected liberal feminism. They sneer at female solidarity then expect us to be ~intersectional~.

How the fuck are we supposed to be ~intersectional~ if we can’t relate to other women or even understand them?

There are experiences that I do not share in common with white men that I share in common with women of other races.

Women of colour are not identical to their male counterparts yet I don’t see liberal feminists denying that women of colour have anything in common with the men of their race. For some reason this is only applied to women.

Whenever men want to reach out across the racial divide the only people who want to stop them are racists.

The Bankruptcy of the American Left

theresgloryforyou:

This is an interesting read, and there’s truth in it, but oh, so much to unpack here.   I’ll give this segment a shot, since it’s been awhile since my shot at Jacobin’s bullshit, and I see a similar self-serving strain here:

“As the [capitalist] system universalizes and becomes more and more
intersectional, we need intersectional resistance,” [Charles] Derber said. “At the
end of the 1960s, when I was getting my own political education, the
universalizing dimensions of the left, which was growing in the ’60s,
fell apart. The women began to feel their issues were not being
addressed. They were treated badly by white males, student leaders.
Blacks, Panthers, began to feel the whites could not speak for race
issues. They developed separate organizations. The upshot was the left
lost its universalizing character. It no longer dealt with the
intersection of all these issues within the context of a militarized,
capitalist, hegemonic American empire. It treated politics as siloed
group identity problems. Women had glass ceilings. Same with blacks.
Same with gays.”

*cracks knuckles* Okay, first off, “The women began to feel their issues were not being addressed” is one of those sentences that should make everyone cringe.  Accuracy would require you to write “Women realized their issues were not being addressed”, OR, better yet,  “Women’s issues were not being addressed by the left.”

Also, white people slinging around the word white is fucking obnoxious.  Stop doing that.  We see you.

So this “Intersectional Leftist” proceeds to individuate a systemic problem and then structure his paragraph so he can blame WOMEN, and black folk and gays, for making an “intersectional”, “universalizing” movement fall apart?  If it was so fucking intersectional and universal how did that happen then?  Girls are irrational?  We just got our little feels hurt?

Keep reading

The Bankruptcy of the American Left

pumpumdemsugah:

the way queer and “intersectional” feminist talk about Black women and our experiences, it paints us as simply the opposite of  white women and not much else. this approach flattens out the complexities of being a Black woman in such a way that any mainstream issue in feminism automatically gets treated as if its not applicable to Black women since we’re opposite and we get brought up like we’re aliens that never share anything in common with “normal” women. This happens to such an extent that lots of people flat out assume anything that’s an issue for white women isn’t an issue for Black women, when in reality we tend to be at greater risk of things seen as white feminism. Its like these people dont want to engage with what we’re saying in any meaningful way so use lazy shortcuts and reserve to complexity for themselves.Black women matter as long as it serves you and you expect us to save you like some glorifies social justice mammy 

in the race to be intersectional a lot of feminist talks about Black women in a way that ends up othering Black women by positioning as some type of inversions or extreme which are ideas that were used against Black women in recent past and present to disenfranchise and target us

its gone from begrudging the fact that we’re women, to using the way we’re gendered being cheap jabs and not real experiences that hurt. white people of all stripes generally struggle not to talk about Black women as if our womanhood wasn’t some tag on. i dont think some of you really get that some of us are women and that woman part is an important marker and experience 

half the time it feels like some of you might as well say n*ggers are women too, remember? cause you dont really respect us. we’re objects

darthvatrix:

angrybrownwomxxn:

politicalsci:

IMPORTANT: Intersectionality is not primarily about identity. It’s about how structures make certain identities the consequence of and the vehicle for vulnerability. What are the policies? What are the institutional structures that play a role in contributing to the exclusion of some people and not others?

Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the theory of intersectionality to feminist theory in the 1980s.

[FULL VIDEO LINK]

I love her “Say Her Name” t-shirt.

She started that campaign to remember the female victims of police brutality. The hidden numbers from everyone, including BLM. Than another group that focuses in black women killed from domestic violence. Then the white trans activists co-opted it. Probably because Black trans lives matter, was tainted with founder Cherno Biko rape and attempted impregnation of a Black trans man.

jandala:

lesbianfeministmusings:

jandala:

I can’t believe white rad fems are calling intersectional feminism “penis centric” and/or “redundant” 

you really don’t care about women of colour. 

i think you people are fucking white supremacist garbage. 

Unfortunately, while Intersectionality as it was original proposed was a sound theory (an examination of the intersection of racism and sexism and how it affected woman of colour), today “intersectional feminism” has come to mean that unless your feminism includes every possible combination of sexuality, gender identity, religion, race, etc etc under the sun you are a bad person and don’t deserve to speak ever.

It’s become a wedge issue that allows men to shatter the unity that once bound feminism together and it’s put the fight for woman’s rights back decades and undone a lot of the good done by feminists during the 60s and 70s.

I’ve seen examples where feminists who have fought for decades on a particular cause and done amazing things to help support women and girls are being attacked by “intersectional” feminists because they don’t support every single aspect of modern feminism. Fighting to free woman forced into sex slavery is now a bad thing because it’s not pro-sex work. Highlighting the issue of child marriage and arranged marriages is also bad because it’s “Islamaphobic” and not respecting different cultures. Being a lesbian, also bad now, because that makes you a “terf” because you won’t sleep with men. The fight for the right to abortion is now derailed by trans activists (i.e. men) who think changing the language we use is way more important than actual reproductive rights.

“Intersectional” feminism has done nothing, not a single bloody thing, to improve the rights of women or women of colour. In many cases it’s actually worsened the rights of poorer woman of colour. It’s what you are accusing radical feminism of being, it’s white feminism at worst.

You don’t get to say what intersectionality has and hasn’t done for poor women of colour. We are not a monolith. We do not all have the same experiences. Intersectionality is what mobilizes many women of colour cause otherwise movements don’t give a shit about us.

Just cause mainstream and white feminism watered down intersectionality to a meaningless buzzword doesn’t mean you have to scrap the concept

The term was coined by a black woman and it has roots in womanism and black feminism. For women of colour who have been told by white women that we are “women first” and people of colour second, and that we must stop calling out their racism to prevent infighting, it’s been an essential concept.

Yes, liberal white feminism watered it down. But it’s still such a crucial concept for women of colour and it’s not our job to clean up yalls messes. You go and deal with how white feminism fucked up the term. Don’t try and take it away from women of colour now. Cause the way we use it isn’t how the mainstream uses it. We use it to validate our identities and grapple with them. We use it to let agencies know they are not being inclusive to women of colour. We use it to tell movements they are excluding and silencing us.

White rad fems don’t get the authority to call it a wedge, call it useless, call it catering to men and call for its abolition.

White women watered down the term to mean nothing in the first place.

So white rad fems should focusing on cleaning up that mess instead of tearing away the thing that women of colour theorists have painstakingly developed to validate our identities