Against White Feminism

by Against White Feminism (retail) (epub)

  From colonialism to neo-colonialism, whole populations are dismissed with the image of the failed non-white mother, held up as evidence of moral inferiority and the incontrovertible need for Western altruism. The deep-rooted existence of these assumptions are visibly co-opted by adoption agencies like Adoption Help International, whose website explains that “the easiest way to understand the type of child/children that become available for adoption in Guatemala is to realize the processes of ‘abandonment’ and ‘relinquishment’ at work.” Abandonment, according to this rubric, is “when a child has been abandoned by his/her biological family, or when parental rights have been terminated by the Guatemalan government due to neglect,” and relinquishment is “when a Guatemalan mother relinquishes the child’s care to a lawyer because of her inability to give maternal care.” The implication of a widespread crisis in Guatemalan motherhood, one prompting a dedicated terminology by its sheer ubiquity, invites white U.S. mothers to step in and rescue those children.24

  The non-white mother (then and now) is “subalternized,” or rendered voiceless, sandwiched between the patriarchal pressures of her own culture and the nobility of the white mother. White women’s behavior exists in perfect moderation in contrast to non-white mothers, all either too repressed or too incontinent to be appropriate role models to their own children, who are then available for rescue by acquisitive white women.

  At the end of my term studying feminist theory in graduate school, I wrote a paper about the efforts to repeal a Pakistani law that criminalizes fornication and adultery (one of the Hudood Ordinances). I argued that reform in Pakistan had to be culturally and religiously relevant. One of the analytical texts I offered as an example was written by a University of Wisconsin law professor named Asifa Quraishi, which utilized Islamic precepts to point out the grave errors in the currently drafted law. In Her Honor: An Islamic Critique of the Rape Laws in Pakistan from a Woman-Sensitive Perspective, Quraishi tries to debunk the idea that Islamic law demands Zina (adultery/fornication) prosecutions in the form in which they have been legislated and enforced in Pakistan, reframing the Islamic law as a tool for women’s empowerment rather than oppression. In addition to Quraishi, I also discussed the work of Quranic scholar Amina Wadud, whose Inside Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam had just been published, and who had in 2004 become the first American woman to lead a mixed-gender Islamic prayer service. Like Quraishi, Wadud argued that Islamic religious doctrine, interpreted for hundreds of years exclusively by men, had to be reclaimed by women. In this reclamation lay the possibilities of equality and empowerment. I wanted to bring these women into the conversation, highlight the things they had to say, and perhaps even inspire my professor to use some of their work in the seminar.

  In response to the paper I submitted, my professor was predominantly concerned that I had not engaged the texts that had formed the bulk of our class discussions. It was true. Those texts had overwhelmingly approached sex through the idea of pleasure and individual choice. I didn’t yet have the tools to dissect these beliefs to underscore how they reiterated colonial condescensions. Indians had been too licentious then; they were too backward and unliberated now. I had tried to prove many things with the paper, primarily that sexual liberation was crucial, but not the sum total of empowerment. Instead of stating my arguments in the language of sexual consumption or delivering a Muslim vagina monologue, I wanted to make room for a feminist discourse that actually had relevance to Muslim women. And I was rejecting the premise that sexual pleasure had to be the centerpiece of feminist agitation.

  My professor’s lack of interest in Muslim feminists is an example of how ordinary instances of overlooking, sidelining, and ignoring work accumulate to ensure the larger project of marginalization and erasure. Even today, when the work of Black or Brown or Asian or Muslim feminists is included in gender studies classes, it is likely to be offered up as a condiment, the entrée being the white feminist texts. Where are the gender studies courses that teach predominantly the work of Black and Brown feminists?

  The same mechanics of exclusion and erasure reappear at the activist level. Black feminist and scholar Treva Lindsay has critiqued the way in which the history of anti-rape activism in the United States, for instance, is told as a white feminist story beginning in the 1970s.25 Yet anti-rape activism by Black women began in 1866, when a group of African American women testified before Congress about being gang-raped during the Memphis riots. Despite their courageous testimony, Congress refused to punish the perpetrators. In the later nineteenth century, Black feminist activists Ida B. Wells and Fannie Barrier Williams founded and participated in anti-rape campaigns. Much later, in the final quarter of the twentieth century, Black women were finally joined by white women, who were just waking up to the necessity of campaigning on the issue and had until then not made alliances with Black women. Despite the fact that Black women had been working on the issue for a century, it was white women whose interest is recorded as seminal in most feminist textbooks and discussions.

  In a more recent example, articles and discussions surrounding the #MeToo movement often leave out the fact that it was founded by a Black woman named Tarana Burke (and not Meryl Streep, Alyssa Milano, and their celebrity cohort) in 2006. And little attention is given to the fact that in 2018 Burke criticized the #MeToo movement for ignoring the concerns faced by poor women in favor of those of white celebrity women. In a keynote address at the “Facing Race” conference, Burke tried to convince her mostly Black and Brown audience to recommit to the movement: “The No. 1 thing I hear from folks is that the #MeToo movement has forgotten us,” she said of Black, Hispanic and Native American women. “Every day, we hear some version of that. But this is what I’m here to tell you: The #MeToo movement is not defined by what the media has told you. We are the movement, and so I need you to not opt out of the #Metoo movement. . . . I need you to reframe your work to include sexual violence. That’s how we take back the narrative. Stop giving your power away to white folks.”26

  When I was taking that grad class in feminist theory, few feminists were questioning “compulsory sexuality” or the push to understand everything about gender identity and gender relations through the rubric of sexual orientation. I first wrote about it for The New Republic in 2015, and even then it was still a relatively new idea. When that article went online, I received many letters from women, most of them Brown, who ardently agreed and told me how they had been waiting for such an argument.

  Undoubtedly, the message was not a new one in more conservative countries like Pakistan, where the sexualization of Western societies is routinely critiqued and held up as a symbol of moral decay. But what I was saying was different; it did not come from a place of faith but rather from one that saw the limits of the transformational power of “sexy feminism” in a society where sex had been thoroughly co-opted by capitalism. And it identified the white feminist catch-22 that any critique of compulsory sexuality coming from a Brown Muslim woman was likely to be discarded as an expression of some latent discomfort with sex itself. I was criticizing the loss of feminism’s power to take on capitalism.

  A month before The New Republic article went to print, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg noted that: “For a lot of people, the contemporary sexual regime celebrating pleasure over all else isn’t that much fun.” Goldberg was discussing the work of Rachel Hills, an Australian feminist who spent several years documenting the consequences of sexual liberation for Millennials; having sex, even a lot of sex, she argued, had become its own oppressive sexual convention. Hills argues that “true female sexual autonomy doesn’t just necessitate the right for women to have sex without stigma or judgment, although this is important. It also entails the right to confidently not have sex when it is unwanted or unavailable on the terms she might prefer.”

  Hills presented findings from the hundreds of interviews she had conducted, many of them stories of women who felt that they had to pretend to be more sexual than they w
ere in order to fit into the ideal of the cool, hip feminist. Magazines like Cosmo and others marketed to women bolster this paradigm, pushing the achievement of orgasms, adventurous sex lives, and the constant incorporation of novelty as the basis for a good and even healthy sexual life. All of this, Hills concludes, has led to the transformation of women from sexual objects to sexual subjects. While the former were policed by other people, the latter police themselves, watching and regulating their own behavior in order to create for themselves an identity that fits the cultural ideal.

  The co-opting of Western feminism by capitalism through the Trojan horse of sexual liberation can be witnessed anew as it turns its attention to queer culture. Concepts like sexusociety and compulsory sexuality are useful here not simply to point out the universal expectation for feminists to have sex and the tyranny of that pressure for asexual women, implicitly closed out of feminist acceptance. They also show how late capitalism continues its work in the name of “sexual liberation” to commodify new sexual orientations. Once sexual orientation is essentialized and defined, it is then reborn as a market category of people to whom particular things can be sold. Freedom, even sexual freedom, then, is reduced to the freedom to consume and perform, not justice or equality or redistribution of resources. For political movements centered on these latter issues, the realm of possibility is submerged and subsumed by the commodifying capacities of capitalist enterprise. Recognition of LGBTQI identities has come to mean not just equal rights within legal systems but also marketing to those who belong to them. Equality also means corporate recognition and the development of a consumerism centered on the purchase of products tailored to particular sexual identities as a form of empowerment.

  One example is the transformation of Pride festivals into consumerist extravaganzas of rainbow-emblazoned products. As a 2018 article from Wired noted, “everyone,” particularly large corporations, wants to get in on Pride now.27 Target sells “Love Wins” T-shirts, Nike sells “Be True” sneakers, and Burger King even introduced the “Proud Whopper” in some major metropolitan markets. Apple also got into the game recently, selling the Pride edition Apple Watch wristband, and the energy drink Red Bull set up billboards that showed a row of cans in rainbow colors and the slogan “Wings for Everyone.”

  The sale of these products is not bad in and of itself, particularly to the extent that it normalizes LGBTQI identities and promotes inclusion. The danger is that consuming such products becomes the primary way that people engage with these identities, ignoring the histories of draconian oppression and exclusion that LGBTQI individuals have experienced in a prejudiced culture and the work that still needs to be done in so many communities to ensure basic acceptance and safety and equal rights for these groups. In the words of one critic, “Did Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera take on the cops at Stonewall to sell T-shirts?”28

  The central question to ask about “rainbow-washing” and its older cousin, “pink-washing,” which sees everything splashed with pink during “Breast Cancer Awareness Week,” is whether the radical potential of these freedom movements is curtailed or co-opted by corporations through the popularization of products tailored to women or LGBTQI identities. When sex sells in a society based on buying and selling, then everything is about sex and buying and selling. Politics, particularly the politics of an intersectional feminism that is truly accepting of and inclusive to LGBTQI individuals, must be committed to the goal of justice and equality beyond just the free expression of sexual orientation.

  Sex has always been central to the ways in which white feminism holds white women apart from—and above—women of color. Black women are held up as dangerously sexual to a deviant degree, too primal in their expression of their sexual needs and desires to be cute role models. (Note there is no Black character in Sex and the City.) If white women’s sexual liberation is something to be celebrated, Black women’s sexual liberation is a danger to the system, something to be tamed and brought within the bounds of white-defined decency. A 2018 National Women’s Law Center study found that Black girls “face adults’ stereotyped perceptions that they are more sexually provocative because of their race, and thus more deserving of punishment for a low-cut shirt or short skirt” and that “Black girls are 17.8 times more likely” to be suspended from DC schools than white girls. One reason for this disproportionate punishment is that adults often see Black girls as older and more sexual than their white peers, and so in need of greater correction.”29

  If Black girls and women are too sexual and don’t cover enough, Muslim American girls, including those who are Black, are seen as covering up too much and are asked to remove their headscarves. One Black Muslim athlete was disqualified from her high school volleyball match because she refused to remove her headscarf.30 Another was asked to remove her hijab and prove her religion.31 A Muslim woman at the Black Lives Matter protests in Michigan following the murder of George Floyd was similarly forced to take off her headscarf by the Detroit police, who incorrectly alleged she had to take it off for her mug shot.32

  If sex-positive feminism imposes behavioral norms on women in America, it similarly expects that women elsewhere in the world state their goals and aims in the same language, equating liberation with sex positivity. The stories and narratives of the “other” that get touted as heroic and worthy of alliance must similarly invoke this language, the centrality of sexual pleasure, as the essence of feminism and the pursuit of it as its central tenet. It is not a benign request.

  Corporatized feminism’s project of depoliticizing feminism has been aided by the emergence of strains of feminism that are not judgmental at all about the substance of women’s decisions or even concerned with their political import. “Choice feminism” is a term coined by philosophy professor Linda Hirshman, who used it “to name the widespread belief in the US that the women’s movement has liberated women to make whatever choices they want.”33 While Hirshman focuses on the choices women make about wage work and unpaid labor in the home, choice feminism is now a much broader phenomenon.

  Choice feminism (like sex-positive feminism) responds to criticisms of feminism being too radical and too judgmental by offering no criticisms of any choice at all. Essentially fearful of politics, choice feminism does not challenge the status quo, celebrates women regardless of the choices they make, and abstains from any form of judgment of their actions—even if damaging to other women—altogether.34 Beyond its problematic satisfaction with the status quo, choice feminism allows women to avert the difficult decisions of making the personal political: demanding change from friends, family, and lovers. In making everything feminist, it essentially ensures that nothing is feminist, nothing requires change, nothing requires a sacrifice of individual self-interest for the collective good.

  Judgment, exclusion, and calls for change are unavoidable parts of politics. If feminists are not to withdraw from political life altogether, they must acknowledge the difficulty of engaging in politics. Political claims are partial; but it is in their partiality that they present the possibility of transformation. The idea that contestation of any and all sorts is bad, has been instrumental to the depoliticization of politics.

  Both sex-positive feminism and choice feminism minimize and sideline the concerns of women of color and poor women who need the status quo to change. In this crucial sense, then, choice feminism prioritizes the needs and beliefs of white feminists based on individual choice because constructing a collective and engaging in the very political processes of consensus-building and contestation of various claims is not suitable for their purposes. Ironically, “choice” feminism actually ensures that those who are not benefiting from the status quo—from the untrammeled exercise of power and individuality that comes with white privilege—will never have choices beyond those they have at the present moment. In this crucial sense, then, choice feminism is white feminism. It is incontrovertible that women should have the ability to make choices, including sexual choices, and have complete dominion o
ver their bodies, free from state intrusion. At the same time, defending the ability of women to make choices need not mean an abandonment of critique of those choices to build a politically meaningful movement. It is also essential that the freedom to make choices does not get reduced only to choices pertaining to sex. A woman’s ability to make choices must always be protected; so must the feminist project of challenging these choices when they obstruct possibilities of anticapitalist empowerment and political solidarity.

  I wish I could have written all this for my graduate seminar. I had broken every gender norm I had been raised with, had chosen education and independence—and all the struggles that came with it—with little support. The seminar’s preoccupation with sexual pleasure instead of sexual politics seemed so disconnected from the feminism that I was trying so hard to model for my daughter. If only I could have known I was not alone, had been able to hear the voices of Muslim and other feminists of color like myself waging front-line struggles against terror, against religious obscurantism, and against patriarchal domination, but yet excluded from white feminist discourse.

  Many years have passed since that seminar in the basement room, and I am more concerned than ever, as sex-positive feminism eviscerates critiques of imperial overtures abroad and encourages a deliberate deafness toward all other dialects of empowerment, only because they won’t affirm that freedom, essentially and exclusively, means the freedom to have sex.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Honor Killings, FGC, and White Feminist Supremacy

  At twenty-five, after being married to my husband since age seventeen, I ran away to a domestic-violence shelter. For months, I remained in hiding with my two-year-old daughter, afraid that my husband would kill me. All the other women at the shelter to which I had fled, many of whom were white and American, were in hiding for more or less the same reason.