# data[].attributes.body
if you don't translate the whole article, the video is widely available with English subtitles.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Marichuy Jaimes fue asesinada en enero de 2016 y desde entonces Yesenia no ha dejado de exigir justicia

En 2016, María de Jesús Jaimes Zamudio fue arrojada por una ventana desde el quinto piso de un edificio en Ciudad de México. Marichuy tenía 19 años y estudiaba una Ingeniería. Desde entonces su madre, Yesenia Zamudio, no ha dejado de exigir justicia para su hija.

"Tengo todo el derecho a quemar y a romper. No le voy a pedir permiso a nadie, porque yo estoy rompiendo por mi hija. Y la que quiera romper que rompa, y la que quiera quemar que queme, y la que no, que no nos estorbe", grita Zamudio. El video ha sido retomado por varias cuentas de Twitter y Facebook. En esta red social, uno de los post más compartidos lleva 1,2 millones de reproducciones en tres días desde el 18 de febrero.

El video fue captado y publicado originalmente por el canal de YouTube Combatimos la tiranía. Según explicó el administrador de la página, se captó en la manifestación por el feminicidio de Ingrid Escamilla, el pasado 15 de febrero, afuera del edificio donde fue brutalmente asesinada. Fue un mes después del cuarto aniversario de la muerte de su hija.

El mensaje de esta madre también se ha movido mucho en redes sociales en España. Tanto personas anónimas como figuras públicas han expresado su apoyo a las manifestaciones contra las feminicidios en México y su repulsa a los crímenes por violencia machista. Uno de los mensajes más compartidos es de la política madrileña Clara Serra, del partido Podemos. Asegura que se le pone "la piel de gallina escuchando a esta madre mexicana".

"Antes de que asesinaran a mi hija han matado a muchas. ¿Y como estábamos todas? En casa llorando y bordando. Ya no señores. Se les acabó. Ya rompimos el silencio".

La piel de gallina escuchando a esta madre mexicana. pic.twitter.com/YXdpaKzlPL
- Clara Serra Sánchez (@Clara_Serra_) February 20, 2020

La voz de Zamudio y el reclamo por su hija Marichuy ha resonado desde hace cuatro años ante la impunidad y la falta de justicia. La entonces Procuraduría de Justicia de Ciudad de México clasificó la muerte de Jaimes como un asesinato y no fue sino hasta septiembre del año pasado que el crimen fue retomado como un feminicidio. Sin embargo, no hay ningún detenido por la muerte de Marichuy.

Las mujeres mexicanas llevan mucho tiempo saliendo a la calle para reclamar al Gobierno medidas concretas que combatan la crisis de feminicidios que existe en el país, que se cobra un promedio de diez mujeres muertas al día. 2019 fue el año con más feminicidios registrados en México, con 3.142 mujeres asesinadas.

El brutal crimen de Fátima, una niña de siete años que fue torturada y asesinada, ha incrementado la ira de una población que reclama soluciones urgentes. El presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador por el momento no ha presentado una estrategia clara para frenar estos crímenes, que cuentan con un 90% de impunidad.

En la manifestación del 16 de agosto por varios casos de violación en la ciudad a manos de la policía, Zamudio se manifestó con los grupos de feministas que realizaron varias pintas de monumentos. "Lo quiero quemar todo", dijo.

Sigue a Verne México en Facebook, Twitter e Instagram y no te pierdas tu ración diaria de maravillas de Internet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"Tengo todo el derecho a quemar y a romper": la madre mexicana que exige justicia para el feminicidio de su hija

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Marichuy Jaimes fue asesinada en enero de 2016 y desde entonces Yesenia no ha dejado de exigir justicia En 2016, María de Jesús Jaimes Zamudio fue arrojada por una ventana desde el quinto piso de un edificio en Ciudad de México. Marichuy tenía 19 años y estudiaba una Ingeniería.

# data[].attributes.body
This article addresses how White, Western Feminism universalises its conception of 'liberation' in terms of sex and the liberation of women's bodies. The article critiques this through discussing Muslim feminism, calling it the 'true' feminism. This maybe does not address or subvert the problem of universalising one experience/understanding of liberation, but it is interesting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As American women, many of us have an idea of what feminists are; freelancing women with all the sexual freedom in the world. But this is exactly the problem with American feminism; it is all about sex and the liberation of our bodies. Certainly, things like abortion and contraception is a part of that freedom, but in today's society the fight has taken on a much different tone.

Hip Feminist campaigns like Free the Nipple only encourage a gullible behavior of disrespect for our own bodies, leading to everyone else around us disrespecting our bodies as well. If we want to be respected as women and taken seriously in all our endeavors we should look to a new source; Muslim women. Muslim women, as well as Muslim men, see every body as a sacred temple, especially the female body. Opposed to exposing themselves, it is through modesty. When we think of modern feminists we should stray away from the new American trends and start looking to what we have always thought as a contradiction; Muslim feminists.

Contrary to American popular belief, Islam has a culture and history of women empowerment. In the Qur'an, which is believed to be God's word told to Prophet Muhammad, women and men are described as equals in everyday actions and responsibilities. When it comes to family, charity, children, sex, and much more, a man and a woman have the same duties and that is to continue on the straight path.

Early Islamic women kept this idea alive. The first Muslim woman was Khadija, Mohammed's first wife. Without her influence, Islam might not have emerged as successfully as it did. Khadija was a business woman and a land owner in the lands of Arabia. When Mohammed was given revelations, it was Khadija that ensured him that he was not going insane, but that he was a chosen one. It was Khadija that pushed Mohammed to listen to God and the angels that were trying to communicate with him and to not run in fear. It was Khadija that gave Muhammad the support and confidence in his development as becoming God's last prophet. Khadija, a woman, was the strength that allowed Islam to fully bloom. Just this one example gives us a view on how true Muslim women are; outspoken, driven, certain and courageous, the epitome of a feminist.

So it's no surprise to see Muslim woman today modeling themselves after these prominent female figures. Muslim girls look towards these instances of strength for guidance in this scary, patriarchal society. These modern women are not afraid to go against the grain in the name of their belief like wearing the hijab to covey their religious devotion. Hijab is the headscarf that is worn by Muslim woman and no; it is not supposed to be forced on them by their fathers and husbands. Wearing or not wearing the Hijab reflects a Muslim woman's own a personal choice.

For me, this idea especially showcases feminism in America. With all of the pressures in our American society to have a certain physical allure; to have long, luscious hair, a skinny yet curvy body, flawless facial beauty, woman go through hell. With this, we succumb to the pressures that we generally think we are free of; we oppress our natural womanhood with constant worry about how we look to others around us. We do not have the courage to stand up to this societal critique and say 'my body is not to be ogled at'.

For many Muslim women however, they strive to achieve just that. In this way, they liberate themselves from these everyday pressures. They actually have the courage to say hey, I am not an object of pleasure, I am a woman that commands only respect for who I am and not how I look. They have the power to self-liberate as well as the courage to diverge from the American norms. And they do not get attention from showing off their figure, but they get attention by how they present themselves. Muslim woman get respect and are looked at beyond aesthetics; they are actually taken seriously in their communities.

Isn't this what feminism should be? Don't women deserve consistent respect and to actually be listened to without drools or criticisms over our bodies and looks? I believe the answer is yes. In the Muslim-American community, and even in parts of the greater Muslim world, modest woman, whether they wear hijab or not, are respected and called upon, despite what our mainstream media feeds to us.

A few weeks ago I went to a lecture about feminism- in Islam. That is what got all these thoughts stirring in my head once again. The lecturer was a Muslim woman in hijab; she spoke so passionately that every person in the room, guy and girl, had no choice but to immerse themselves in her words. After a quick hour and a half, I could not help but think about all our Free the Nipple group representing a trendy feminism and how some trends need to die. I realized we have been conditioned to think that American women are the free and that Muslim women are the suppressed, but this is twisted to me. I finally understood who is really oppressed by a patriarchal society and it is us. Woman who wear hijab have freed themselves from a man's and a society's judgmental gaze; the Free the Nipplers have not. They have fallen deep into the man's world, believing that this trend will garner respect.

So I urge my Free the Nipple gal pals to take a look at your Muslim sisters and collaborate with them to create a feminism that treats the female body as a temple and not as a toy. Let us see feminism in a different light--through modesty and the courage to savor our sugar. Let us call on the Muslim feminists of the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As American women, many of us have an idea of what feminists are; freelancing women with all the sexual freedom in the world. But this is exactly the problem with American feminism; it is all about sex and the liberation of our bodies.

# data[].attributes.body
What suffrage meant for black and white women.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Susan B. Anthony during a portrait session circa 1891. Credit... Library of Congress

Susan B. Anthony during a portrait session circa 1891. Credit... Library of Congress

The suffragist heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony seized control of the feminist narrative of the 19th century. Their influential history of the movement still governs popular understanding of the struggle for women's rights and will no doubt serve as a touchstone for commemorations that will unfold across the United States around the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020.

That narrative, in the six-volume "History of Women's Suffrage," betrays more than a hint of vanity when it credits the Stanton-Anthony cohort with starting a movement that actually had diverse origins and many mothers. Its worst offenses may be that it rendered nearly invisible the black women who labored in the suffragist vineyard and that it looked away from the racism that tightened its grip on the fight for the women's vote in the years after the Civil War.

Historians who are not inclined to hero worship - including Elsa Barkley Brown, Lori Ginzberg and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn - have recently provided an unsparing portrait of this once-neglected period. Stripped of her halo, Stanton, the campaign's principal philosopher, is exposed as a classic liberal racist who embraced fairness in the abstract while publicly enunciating bigoted views of African-American men, whom she characterized as "Sambos" and incipient rapists in the period just after the war. The suffrage struggle itself took on a similar flavor, acquiescing to white supremacy - and selling out the interests of African-American women - when it became politically expedient to do so. This betrayal of trust opened a rift between black and white feminists that persists to this day.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Credit... Universal History Archive, via Getty Images

This toxic legacy looms especially large as cities, including New York, prepare monuments and educational programs to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, which barred the states from denying voting rights based on gender. Black feminists in particular are eager to see if these remembrances own up to the real history of the fight for the vote - and whether black suffragists appear in them.

The famous suffrage convention convened in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848 featured Stanton and her partner-in-arms, Lucretia Mott, in addition to the towering figure of Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and dyed-in-the-wool supporter of women's rights who was on his way to becoming one of the most famous speakers of the century. Were it not for Douglass's oratory, the historian Lisa Tetrault tells us in "The Myth of Seneca Falls," the "controversial" resolution demanding the vote for women might actually have failed.

It became clear after the Civil War that black and white women had different views of why the right to vote was essential. White women were seeking the vote as a symbol of parity with their husbands and brothers. Black women, most of whom lived in the South, were seeking the ballot for themselves and their men, as a means of empowering black communities besieged by the reign of racial terror that erupted after Emancipation.

The tension escalated in the run-up to the 15th Amendment, a provision that ostensibly barred the states from denying Negro men the right to vote. Reasonable people could, of course, disagree on the merits of who should first be given the vote - women or black men. Stanton, instead, embarked on a Klan-like tirade against the amendment. She warned that white woman would be degraded if Negro men preceded them into the franchise. Admiring historians have dismissed this as an unfortunate interlude in an exemplary life. By contrast, the historian Lori Ginzberg argues persuasively that racism and elitism were enduring features of the great suffragist's makeup and philosophy.

Similarly, the historian Faye Dudden wrote that Stanton "dipped her pen into a tincture of white racism and sketched a reference to a nightmarish figure, the black rapist," and lashed out from the pages of the suffragist paper that she and Anthony published. Her message - that passage of the 15th Amendment would mean only degradation for women at the hands of Negro men - must have cheered the Ku Klux Klan as it terrorized the black South.

Frederick Douglass Credit... Library of Congress

Douglass was clearly wounded by what he described as the "employment of certain names, such as 'Sambo,' and the gardener, and the bootblack ... and all the rest," but gracefully declined to answer insult with insult. Instead, he summarized in dramatic fashion the differences between the interests of black and white suffragists - and the case for federal protection of black voters.

"When women, because they are women," he said, "are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lampposts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own."

Douglass cut to the central fallacy of the white suffragist push - that African-American women could magically separate their blackness from their femaleness.

The 15th Amendment was, of course, ratified. Women would wait another 50 years for the 19th. Racism intensified among suffragists as they neared their goals. African-American luminaries like the noted anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and the civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell became more deeply and publicly engaged.

As in other instances, suffragists outside the South used the racism in the Jim Crow states as an excuse for their discriminatory treatment of their black suffragist sisters. Black women's suffrage clubs that sought formal affiliation with the national white suffrage movement were discouraged from doing so on the grounds that admitting them might anger white Southerners. It has since become clear that this was a ruse Northern whites used to obscure their own discriminatory policies.

Image

A suffragist parade in New York in 1913. Credit... Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

The most blatant example of accommodationism came in 1913 when organizers of a huge suffragist parade in Washington demanded that black participants march in an all-black assembly at the back of the parade instead of with their state delegations. Wells famously refused. Terrell, who marched in a colored delegation as requested, believed at the time that white suffragists would exclude black women from the 19th Amendment - nicknamed the Anthony Amendment - if they thought they could get away with it. These episodes fueled within the African-American community a lasting suspicion of white suffragists and of the very idea of political cooperation across racial lines.

Historians are rightly warning groups involved in suffrage commemorations not to overstate the significance of the 19th Amendment. It covered the needs of middle-class white women quite nicely. But it meant very little to black women in the South, where most lived at the time and where election officials were well practiced in the art of obstructing black access to the ballot box. As African-American women streamed in to register, Southern officials merely stepped up the level of fraud and intimidation.

By this time, the former suffragists of the North were celebrating the amendment and were uninterested in fighting discrimination against women who were suffering racial, as opposed to gender, discrimination. As the historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn writes: "Within a few years, white supremacy was victorious throughout the South. Unlike Black men, who had been disenfranchised within 20 years after the ratification of the 15th Amendment, Black women had lost the vote in less than a decade." It would take another half-century - and a new suffrage campaign, with black women in a leading role - before that black community was fully enfranchised, through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The recent uproar over the monuments to white supremacy that dominate public spaces in the South has put civic groups on notice that memorials often convey pernicious messages and perpetuate historical wrongs. Organizers need to keep that in mind as they commemorate a movement in which racism clearly played a central role.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | How the Suffrage Movement Betrayed Black Women (Published 2018)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Susan B. Anthony during a portrait session circa 1891. Credit... Library of Congress The suffragist heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony seized control of the feminist narrative of the 19th century.

# data[].attributes.body
This TedTalk gives an insight in Third World feminist perspectives that do not mirror the Eurocentric view of a Western feminist. Differing feminist perspectives are equally valid. Those that have been silenced are not responsible for their silence.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why “Third-World” Feminism Matters | Barani Maung Maung | TEDxOccidentalCollege

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why “Third-World” Feminism Matters | Barani Maung Maung | TEDxOccidentalCollege

# data[].attributes.headline
"I lift weights. For a South Asian woman, that’s just not seen as normal"

# data[].attributes.subject
"I lift weights. For a South Asian woman, that’s just not seen as normal"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How long do you think you will be doing this for?" my dad asked me last week. He was referring to my amateur competitive powerlifting, which involves lifting squat, bench and deadlift at the heaviest weight you can handle. "Until I die, or sustain an injury which means that I can't lift again," I replied. His arched eyebrows spoke volumes.

My parents have always been glad that I keep myself fit - my dad has been lifting weights most of his life, and is an avid cyclist. But they have no idea how to process why I've decided to take up what seems to them like a dangerous, overly masculine sport at the age of 38. On the one hand they are proud, but on the other hand their brains can't compute that I can handle a 125kg deadlift or a 100kg squat, and my back hasn't snapped in two yet. They're also struggling - if they're being honest - with the fact that my body has changed and become more muscular, and that I don't seem to care or show no sign of stopping. Other people have commented on my physique: "You look great but don't get any bigger" or "Wah! It's the wrestler!" (Wrong sport, but I understood the sentiment).

It's not just South Asian women who face incomprehension as to why they would take up powerlifting. But being female and South Asian definitely makes things harder and lonelier. South Asian women are subject to all the same conditioning as other women when it comes to our bodies: the pursuit of slimness over strength. But we often have added layers to contend with: the sustained stereotype of South Asian women depicted in western TV and film as oppressed by their men: demure, obedient and soft. While we have the likes of actor and director Mindy Kaling breaking this mould, it currently doesn't come close to representing the actual spectrum of South Asian women I know. And the expectation from our families - even liberal, educated and feminist ones such as mine - that your destiny includes settling down with a man, and shaping yourself to be as attractive as possible.

The lack of visibility and encouragement in our communities has some very real, detrimental outcomes

Role-modelling outside of these narrow paradigms matters. So when I learned this week that the first Indian to win a world title in motorsports - a notoriously male-dominated sport - was a 24-year-old woman named Aishwarya Pissay in August, my heart soared. Visibility like this is important, because it helps girls who look like her think beyond the narrative already laid out for them.

"As a pioneer, you've got to deal with a lot of people saying you can't do it and you can't get there and that's also been a big challenge for me to overcome but I did," she said about her win at the FIM Bajas World Cup in Hungary.

Pissay's win is impressive for several reasons - the first being that motorsports training is expensive and she funded it entirely herself. But the second is that she comes from a conservative family in which doing an irregular job is taboo. "When I wanted to take up racing professionally, there were a lot of questions asked around, like, if this was normal," she said.

Pissay says that a big driver for her is to prove people wrong. And, as a South Asian woman in the sport that she does, suffice to say she won't run out of motivation. But her win is a reminder that any South Asian woman who does competitive sport, amateur or professional, is doing so against the odds. The lack of visibility and encouragement in our communities has some very real, detrimental outcomes: South Asian women are one of the least likely groups to be physically active in England and Scotland. It's not out of laziness, but a complex set of reasons that range from being self-conscious in gym changing rooms and wearing fitness clothing, to a lack of visibility in mainstream fitness, and a glass barrier around physique and exertion within our own communities.

A good example of how positive motivation can work is the 23-year-old powerlifter Karenjeet Kaur Bains, who is the 2019 Commonwealth women's junior under-63kg champion, and was the first British Sikh female to represent Great Britain at the IPF world championships. Her dad - a powerlifter himself - is her coach, and has helped her to get to where she is.

I've been inspired by many South Asian women who have risen above their circumstances, despite the strong rhetoric telling them they can't. But it strikes me that if we were supported in our success, rather than fighting for it despite the overwhelming odds, there would be many, many more.

* Poorna Bell is the author of Chase the Rainbow
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
I lift weights. For a South Asian woman, that's just not seen as normal | Poorna Bel

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How long do you think you will be doing this for?" my dad asked me last week. He was referring to my amateur competitive powerlifting, which involves lifting squat, bench and deadlift at the heaviest weight you can handle. "Until I die, or sustain an injury which means that I can't lift again," I replied.

# data[].attributes.headline
The rise of 'transgender exclusionary radical feminists' (TERF)

# data[].attributes.subject
The rise of 'transgender exclusionary radical feminists' (TERF)

# data[].attributes.body
This article describes some radical feminists as the 'penis police' who follow a very narrow perception of what feminism should include- which is highly exclusive of people who identify as trans. It talks about how all places are sexualised- and so there is a generated fear of unwanted heterosexual encounters, whereby a man uses his power over a woman. Therefore, by focusing on "the presence of a penis" as fundamentally evil- and the protection of vulnerable women, radical feminists see anyone with a penis as inherently male (thus ignoring the identity of trans people)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I provide a textual analysis to show how lesbians determine gender in sexualized spaces. As members work toward recognition, agentic embodiment, and the safeguarding of lesbian spaces, how do members differently determine gender for insiders and outsiders in order to preserve a particular kind of feminism? I show how public narratives of gender, essentialism, and heterosexuality circulate in some lesbian spaces as members use the "penis police" to maintain exclusionary feminism. I expand upon the concept of determining gender to move beyond questions about how gender is socially recognized to an analysis of how gender attribution challenges/maintains the sex/gender/sexuality system.

Additional information

Author information

Jennifer Earles
Jennifer Earles is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the Women's Studies Program Coordinator at Frostburg State University in Western Maryland. She is primarily interested in how social movement activists use and challenge public narratives related to gender and sexualities. It is her hope that feminism, in particular, will continue to address these issues as we become increasingly intersectional.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The "Penis Police": Lesbian and Feminist Spaces, Trans Women, and the Maintenance of the Sex/Gender/Sexuality System

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I provide a textual analysis to show how lesbians determine gender in sexualized spaces. As members work toward recognition, agentic embodiment, and the safeguarding of lesbian spaces, how do members differently determine gender for insiders and outsiders in order to preserve a particular kind of feminism?

# data[].attributes.body
There was a debate as to what defines her as a woman- with a large majority of people arguing that the large percentage of high testosterone in her body makes her a man. Her self identity is ignored and she is isolated by the rigid gender and sex roles in society.
It raises issues on societies definition of sex.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The double olympic champion Caster Semenya's battle with the athletics authorities rolls on as she continues to fight an IAAF regulation that would make her take testosterone-lowering medication. The South African athlete will not be able to defend her 800-metres title in September after the Swiss Federal Tribunal reversed a ruling that temporarily lifted testosterone regulations imposed against her. Speaking at a press conference in Johannesburg the 28-year-old said that 'when you're the best in the world, people get obsessed'.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Caster Semenya: I have high testosterone, so what? - video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The double olympic champion Caster Semenya's battle with the athletics authorities rolls on as she continues to fight an IAAF regulation that would make her take testosterone-lowering medication. The South African athlete will not be able to defend her 800-metres title in September after the Swiss Federal Tribunal reversed a ruling that temporarily lifted testosterone regulations imposed against her.

# data[].attributes.body
A book reuniting testimonies of queer people, including a lot of women, from all walks of life. The first part focus on testimonies before the Stonewall riots, while the second part contain testimonies after it,  showing how the riots and the rise of LGBT activism changed their life.
The book is interesting because it doesnt only focus on the activist part : it  also shows how queer women deal with oppression in their every day life. It also includes a lot of queer, lesbian women of color, from Audre Lorde to Marsha P. Johnson. This book gives LGBTQI+ people agency because it allows them to tell their own stories, with their own voices.

# data[].attributes.body
Author of Feminism for the 99% who criticises feminisms that focus only on  putting more women in boardrooms and parliaments, instead explaining the importance of fighting for the needs of the majority.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Interview by

Olimpia Malatesta

In the fight for equality, not all feminisms are just the same. Just as the youth climate strikes are utterly different in spirit to corporate greenwashing, the annual strikes on International Women's Day have shown that the liberalism advanced by the likes of Hillary Clinton is far from the only kind of feminist politics.

Few writers have been as clear on this point as Nancy Fraser, a sharp critic of those feminisms that seek only to put more women in boardrooms and parliaments. Her Feminism for the 99%, written with Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, instead argues for a feminism focused on the needs of the social majority.

This isn't a matter of limiting feminism to narrow workplace issues - far from it. Instead, the feminism for the 99 percent is about how to rally the social majority behind a common agenda, uniting the material interests of working people with fronts of struggle like anti-racism, LGBT liberation, and the fight against male violence.

In this interview, Fraser spoke to Olimpia Malatesta about how feminism can help us see beyond the traditional demands of the labor movement, how anti-capitalist politics can unite the social majority, and how far engagement with parties and the state can advance the feminism for the 99 percent.

One key merit of Feminism for the 99% is that it highlights the importance of "reproductive labor," still today overwhelmingly lumped on women. This differs from many anti-capitalist analyses that only consider battles over "productive labor" (wages, hours, etc.). You argue for a broadening of the class struggle to the reproductive sphere, by fighting for services like universal health care, public education, public transport, and public housing. But this raises another question. If welfare is normally guaranteed by the state, but the state is now dismantling it, how should feminism relate to the state itself? Should feminist movements engage with the development of progressive parties (or the radicalization of existing ones, as in the case of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and so on)?

One thing feminists, like all progressive forces, must do is defend public services against the austerity that states are imposing at the behest of the financial sector. We need to oppose the retrenchment and commodification of public services. But that isn't enough.

Finance is a global force that pits different countries against one other - it can't be defeated one country at a time. Many people don't have a functioning state - they live in failed states or refugee camps or kleptocracies. And even those who do have one are caught in a race to the bottom, orchestrated by investors and banks.

So, exclusively state-based approaches cannot be the answer - rather, we need a global counterpower. The fight against austerity can only succeed if we link state-level struggles to broader transnational struggles aimed at transforming the international financial order. We need to build cross-border alliances committed to fighting for social rights, not just nationally, but globally.

But I also want to address the second part of your question, about how feminists should relate to anti-capitalist parties and left-wing political currents. This is in part a tactical question, to be decided on a case-by-case basis in the light of local specifics. But such decisions should be guided by two general considerations.

First, any feminism aimed at liberating all women must itself be anti-capitalist - liberal, pro-capitalist feminisms can at best empower a small, privileged stratum of professional-managerial women, while leaving the vast majority vulnerable to abuses of every stripe.

Second, feminists, however numerous and radical we become, cannot transform society all by ourselves. The deep structural change we need can only be achieved through a broad-based anti-capitalist alliance, which must also include radical movements and political parties that have not so far prioritized gender. We'll have to push them to do that, as we join with radical environmentalists, anti-racists, immigrant-rights movements, labor unions, and others. That's the only path to large-scale social transformation.

It's also the only path to a genuinely liberatory feminism. Our chief concerns are gender and sexuality, to be sure. But these matters do not exist in a vacuum and cannot be abstracted from the larger social matrix in which they are embedded, which also includes other major fault lines of social injustice. So, feminists must broaden our agenda beyond conventional understandings of "women's issues." We rightly insist that labor movements broaden their agenda to include reproductive work, as you said. But we also need to broaden our agenda to include the whole spectrum of issues that affect women - and everyone else.

Second-wave feminism in the United States erupted as a radical anti-systemic movement; as part of the New Left, it had no direct links to political parties. But in the following decades, as its radicalism faded, the movement's dominant currents embraced liberalism and became an interest group within the Democratic Party. This proved problematic, because this was the very moment when that party was transforming itself into a force for neoliberalization and financialization.

The effect was to link the "official feminism," within the Democrats, with policies that deeply harmed the working classes. That has made life difficult for all American feminists, including those on the Left. The trouble is compounded by the peculiarities of our electoral system, which effectively locks in a two-party configuration, making it all but impossible for third (or fourth or fifth) parties to gain any traction. That makes the Democratic Party the only game in town. With nowhere else to go, radical movements can exercise political influence only by struggling within it to change its orientation.

That's exactly what is going on today. The Democrats are split between the Clinton/ Obama wing (the "progressive neoliberals," as I've called them) and the Sanders/Warren/AOC wing (the "democratic socialists" or progressive anti-corporate populists). These two forces are now in the fight of their lives for control of the party. There is no question in my mind that feminists should be aligning with the Left in that struggle, even as we also insist that it should put feminist thinking at the center of its agenda.

That's a very good question. It's unclear who exactly coined the phrase "global care chains," but many people give the credit to an American sociologist named Arlie Hochschild. She wrote a much-cited article ("Love and Gold"), which suggests that love is the new gold, the new "natural resource" that the Global North is extracting from the Global South. Just as precious metals were extracted in earlier times, so care is extracted now, as privileged northern women assume demanding jobs, working sixty to seventy hours a week to climb the corporate ladder or make partner at prestigious law firms.

To do that, they need to offload their domestic and care responsibilities onto others. Male partners don't step in, and public services are being cut - so where to turn? The answer: immigrant women, often racialized, who come from halfway around the world, leaving their own families in the care of other, poorer women, who must rely in turn on others who are poorer still. Ergo, a network of global care chains by analogy with global commodity chains. But, of course, this is no solution. Instead of overcoming the care deficit, it simply displaces it onto less privileged women further down the chain. It's like musical chairs - when the music stops, someone must be left without a seat. In effect, the liberation of privileged metropolitan women is built on the extraction of "gold" from the periphery.

Where, you ask, does this leave the idea of global sisterhood? My own view is that this is not the best way to think about feminist politics. I prefer to say that we have a number of different, competing feminisms, with different, competing views of gender equality, of the sources of sexism, and of what must be changed and how. These views differ sharply in their class and racial/ethnic/national orientation. Seen this way, feminism is not a global sisterhood but a political-ideological battleground. And that's a good thing - we do need to struggle over these matters.

You ask whether all women share the same interests. Certainly not, if we assume that people define their interests relative to current structures and institutions. In that case, the interests of migrant care workers conflict directly with those of the privileged women who hire them to work long hours at low pay and without labor rights. On the other hand, we needn't take current understandings of interests as sacrosanct. In crisis periods, many people radicalize and begin to understand their interests differently. Attracted to projects for social transformation, they redefine them in a new light. Possibly, some women in the professional-managerial class who are now attracted to neoliberal forms of feminism will "convert," so to speak, to the feminism of the 99 percent. But that will only happen if our movement becomes large, strong, and convincing in its claim to offer a better life for everyone.

What does this mean with respect to the crisis of care? Feminists for the 99 percent aim to transform the entire relation between "production" and "reproduction." We say that no one should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to have a meaningful life. Everyone should have a much shorter working week and a lot more time for family life, political participation, and other enjoyments. No one should be caught in zero-sum games that force us to take away from one fundamental life activity what we give to another. Everyone should have access to ample, generous support for care work - from states, friends, neighbors, and civil society associations. Men should be every bit as responsible and engaged as women in these activities. Only this approach can truly solve the present crisis of care and make life better for everyone.

You may be right that the unreflective common sense of many middle- and upper-class people remains liberal or neoliberal. But I think that common sense has lost a lot of its credibility for other strata. Now that neoliberalization has hit a wall, the poor and working classes insist that it's not working for them, as does the bottom half of the middle class. And that's what makes the idea of a feminism of the 99 percent more than a pipe dream: social reality is meeting us halfway.

As more people lose faith in the established parties and politicians, they are willing to think outside the box. This is certainly the case for those who have turned to the likes of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, and Matteo Salvini here in Italy. But it also holds for those attracted to ambiguous formations like the Five Star Movement and to left-populist figures like Sanders, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Jeremy Corbyn.

In this situation of uncertainty, fluidity, and experimentation, it's absolutely crucial that left-wing feminists (like leftists of every kind) jump into the fray and offer an alternative not only to right-wing populism but also to "progressive neoliberalism." It's a moment when people's ideas can change very quickly, and we need to put our own best ideas into the mix.

You ask: For whom did we write the manifesto? Well, for a range of different readers. We wrote it in part for those who are already attracted to a left-wing form of feminism, a group that includes large numbers of very young women (and for that matter, young men!) who have been radicalized, who want to be activists. Many of them don't yet know much about what capitalism is, nor about feminism or socialism. They're newly politicized and hungry for a guiding perspective.

Well, it's true that United States differs from Europe in this respect. Historically, Europe had large socialist parties, many of which are now collapsing because they supported neoliberalization. By contrast, the United States hasn't had a major party that called itself "socialist" for nearly a century. So, it may be easier for us to reclaim that word; you [in Europe] might need to find other words. But on both continents (and on others, too!), lots of people are gravitating to the Left, including some who are already feminists and some who are only now becoming feminists.

These are among the many people reading the manifesto in many countries. Some caucuses in political parties and trade unions are using it in reading groups to educate their members. In universities, too, the manifesto is being read, both in gender studies programs and in other departments and programs. There are also readers who have not been particularly interested in feminism but who are active on the left wing of other movements, such as labor, anti-racism, or environmentalism.

That's important, because the manifesto can serve as a model for other movements. Green activists can adapt our strategy by developing an environmentalism for the 99 percent; anti-racists can formulate an anti-racism for the 99 percent - and so on. Remember, finally, that our manifesto was published simultaneously in twenty languages, and several more translations are in the works. This shows that there is a widespread hunger for this kind of thinking, that it appeals to a variety of different readerships that were previously separate but may now be converging.

The Left should try to convince both those groups of people, who don't usually think of themselves as allies, that they ought now to do just that. We should try to show both groups that, however differently their problems appear on the surface, they are rooted in one and the same social system, which is financialized capitalism. That means offering them a map on which each group can locate itself in relation to the other, identify their common enemy, and envision the possibility of joining forces against that enemy. That's my general idea of what the Left should be doing now.

The manifesto is one example of this sort of strategy. Of course, it doesn't speak directly to Rust Belt layers who voted for Trump in the United States, let alone to their analogues elsewhere. But it does speak to large feminist and left-wing readerships with whom we have credibility. And, as I said, it sketches for those readerships the sort of map that others can adapt for constituencies with whom they have credibility.

Incidentally, I have elsewhere proposed (in The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born) a left-populist strategy that could unite at least some of Trump's Rust Belt voters with other fractions of the US working class (women, people of color, immigrants) who have in the past supported his progressive-neoliberal opponents (Obama, the Clintons, now Joe Biden). I see feminism for the 99 percent as one important strand of that potential counter-hegemonic alliance, along with many other strands.

Yes, exactly. It's crucial that we address them. If we don't, we simply cede them to the Right. The first thing to do is to validate that they have legitimate grievances. That also means recognizing that they have a reason to reject the mainstream neoliberal parties, which destroyed the political economy that afforded them some dignity and reason to hope that their children would have better lives - expectations that now lie in shreds.

The problem is that many of them are - for now at least - drawn to perspectives that give them the wrong interpretation of who's to blame. We have to say "you are right to be angry, but you're fingering the wrong suspect: it's not immigrants or people of color, not Mexicans or Muslims, Africans or Jews. The real culprit is global finance and neoliberalism."

This also suggests how we can distinguish left-wing from right-wing populism. Both mobilize a mass against an elite stratum that is considered as oppressing "the people" from above. But right-wing populists simultaneously mobilize against a lower stratum that they claim thwarts "the people" from below - whether that means blacks or Latinos or immigrants or Muslims or Arabs or Jews.

Right-wing populism thus places the beleaguered "people" in the middle, caught between "higher" and "lower" enemies; it combines resentment against wealthy elites with scapegoating of disadvantaged minorities. That's a key difference from left-wing populism. Far from practicing such scapegoating, [left-wing populism] instead invokes an enlarged understanding of the "people," uniting both middle and lower strata (or so the hope goes) against a small upper class or elite. The Occupy movement captured this perfectly when it targeted the 1 percent in the name of the 99 percent.

There is also another key difference. Right-wing populists tend to characterize the hated elites in identitarian terms, while left-wing populists identify them by their functional role or structural position in society. So, whereas right-wing populists rail against "liberal secularists" or "Jewish bankers" or "homosexuals," their counterparts on the Left target "Wall Street" or "Big Tech" or "global finance."

In a fall 2017 article, you argued that both progressive neoliberalism (the alliance of multiculturalism, feminism, LGBTQ, and environmentalism with what you have called the "Goldman Sachsification of the US economy") and reactionary neoliberalism (the neoliberal politics of distribution coupled with a reactionary politics of recognition) had slowly lost their hegemony in the United States after the economic crisis.

Their aftermath produced a "hegemonic gap" that has been filled with the rise of populism (be it progressive or reactionary). This battle for hegemony was at first won by Trump, thanks to his promises for a stronger politics of distribution.

Your point is that although during his 2016 campaign Trump presented himself as a "reactionary populist," his real policies have unmasked him as a "hyper-reactionary neoliberal." That is, he has abandoned the politics of distribution and solely pursued a reactionary politics of recognition. Is this intensification of reactionary (patriarchal, misogynist, homophobic, racist) identity politics without a politics of distribution enough to maintain an enduring consensus?

It's fascinating to watch this Trumpian drama unfold: every new day brings something more shocking than the day before. But still, Trump has not lifted a finger to encourage the creation of high-paid manufacturing jobs or to institute big public-works projects aimed at repairing our decaying infrastructure. Even in the United States, we have bridges that collapse and kill people.

Although Trump campaigned on the promise to invest in such public-works projects, he has done nothing of the sort - he prefers the plane of phantasm, falsely claiming that he is building a "beautiful wall" on the Mexican border. His tariff war with China is equally phantasmatic and dishonest. All the national-populist rhetoric in the world cannot disguise the fact that his blue-collar base derives no benefits from his incoherent policies. If Trump is wreaking havoc on global supply chains, in an integrated world economy organized for the benefit of the capitalist class, this does not benefit these workers.

So, yes, Trump is governing as a hyper-reactionary neoliberal. How long can he get away with that? Nobody knows. It's obvious, at some level, that his actions as president have betrayed those supporters attracted by populist promises. But how many of them will defect in 2020? That depends on what else is on offer.

Some of Trump's voters are union members who voted Democratic in the past. Far from being card-carrying racists, some of them voted for Obama, both in 2008 and in 2012, when he channeled Occupy rhetoric to campaign from the left. Equally telling, some voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary. Can the Democrats win them back? Their best shot, I think, is to nominate an unapologetic leftist, like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, both of whom are now campaigning as left-populists. They can give voice to the genuine grievances of this layer, while replacing Trumpian scapegoating with a valid structural diagnosis as to what's really wrong and must be changed. By contrast, a centrist progressive-neoliberal nominee like Joe Biden will drive white working-class voters back to Trump.

I see the present as a moment of genuine openness and great fluidity. An interregum, if you like, in which "the old is dying and the new cannot be born." As mainstream common sense breaks down, people are all over the map. One day they for vote Mélenchon, the next day for Marine Le Pen.

In this context, it is counterproductive to invoke the specter of fascism. Granted, Trump's policies and rhetoric are hateful and exclusionary, and have served to incite racist violence. But to say that the fascists are at the door and that we need to close ranks with the liberals is completely wrong. There is still an opening, and it's time to seize it.

Failing that, there may indeed come a time when the fascists will truly be at the door. When that time comes, I will fight shoulder to shoulder with anti-fascist liberals. But we're not at that point now. On the contrary, it's the liberals who brought us this vicious right-wing populism - it was their "progressive neoliberal" project that enabled the rise of Trump. And if we put them back in power, they will create the conditions for more vicious right-wing populisms, and for even worse Trumps.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"A Feminism Aimed at Liberating All Women Must Be Anti-Capitalist"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Women workers, people of color, and white men in the Rust Belt may not see each other as natural allies. But as Nancy Fraser tells Jacobin, there is a path to uniting the social majority - so long as we recognize our common enemy in capitalism.

# data[].attributes.body
Highlights the different voices and struggles of women around the world. Really interesting as it juxtaposes the different experiences, situates women's oppressions from their own location, from religious persecution in Ireland to genital mutilation in The Gambia.

# data[].attributes.body
Gloria Anzaldua
- culture
- values system of different cultures
- fear of returning (home)
- alienated by dominant culture
- isolation
-women being the stranger
- rigid gender roles
- spirituality and religion
****
bell hooks
- imperalism
- patriarchy
- liberation is not universal
- women seen as a secondary sex with limited privileges
- social order
- male bonding
***
- Christina Scharff
-individualisation
-(neo) liberalism
-feminism as a unpopular
- Muslim women

# data[].attributes.body
Gloria Anzaldua
culture and cultural expectations
fear of the unknown / going home
homophobia
rigid gender roles
family
native culture
sexual behavior
alienation
rebelion
spirituality

***
bell hooks
- black people
- patriarchal power
- black men emasculated among white male dominated - capitalism
- black male sexism
- interracial dating
- freedom
- women as second sex
***
Cristina Scharff
- neoliberalism
- aggressive individualism
- disidentification with feminism
- idea of oppressed Muslim women

# data[].attributes.body
Gloria Anzaldua
- culture forms our beliefs/ cultural values
- dressing (codes)
- power hierarchies
-  fear of leaving/ going back to home
- sexual behavior
- rebelion
- spirituality
***
bell hooks
- white feminists
- racism and sexism
- economic status
- identification
- patriarchy
- black men inferiorised in relation to white male dominant capitalism
- black men and white men oppress women - sexism
- colonialism
- freedom
- womanhood for black women
- subjugation of black women
- (Black culture)
***
Cristina Scharff
- disarticulation
- neoliberalism
- individualisation
- othering
- post-feminism
- Muslim women
- responsibilisation
- (binary)

# data[].attributes.headline
No more ‘leaning in’ – the neoliberal myth of the superhero businesswoman holds us all back

# data[].attributes.subject
No more ‘leaning in’ – the neoliberal myth of the superhero businesswoman holds us all back

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We've read the stories and seen the figures. We know that women are still underrepresented at the decision making table. We know women across professional fields get paid less than their male peers for doing the same job. We know about the #MeToo movement. Yet, those who call for structural reforms are still often dismissed as whiners or unreasonably demanding.

This could be partly due to the pervasiveness of neoliberalism and post-feminism.

Traditionally understood as the political and economic school of thought that promotes privatisation, deregulation, and the withdrawal of state support, neoliberalism has extended its sway beyond socioeconomic policies. It increasingly leads us to see all human life in entrepreneurial terms. Individuals are assumed to be free from any external pressures or constraints. They are held personally accountable for their progress, regardless of their circumstances.

Post-feminism is a complex entanglement of feminist and anti-feminist ideas. It celebrates women's newfound power, advances and choices, while suggesting that women have already achieved gender equality and therefore no longer need feminism.

The neoliberal and post-feminist ethos, which endows women with total agency and fetishises personal responsibility, potentially prevents us from recognising discrimination. Issues of inequality can end up being seen as a purely personal matter, the outcome of poor choices or a lack of initiative.

How we talk about women

In my recent linguistic research, I examined newspaper and magazine articles as well as radio shows to assess what messages they are sending out about women and work. Focusing on career advice and interviews with professional women, I found that the rhetoric of autonomy, choice and individualism was everywhere. Women are repeatedly told that they are architects of their own careers. While empowering on the surface, such neoliberal and post-feminist notions require women to improve their situation without challenging the status quo.

Gender bias is often implicitly or explicitly denied. As one former government minister tells her readers in a magazine interview: "Gender is not an issue". High-achieving professional women are frequently brought on to show how women have made progress in the professional domain. As a director of a consulting firm puts it in one magazine, "If she can do it, so can I".

The details of how these women actually achieved their success, meanwhile, are often glossed over. For example, how were they able to afford expensive quality childcare? What strategies did they use to avoid being dumped with the "office housework". Ignoring the real issues gives the impression of empowerment without acknowledging that class privileges may have helped them to succeed or, equally, that they may have struggled against gendered barriers to get where they are.

Paradoxically, women are also accused of not making enough effort to break their "self-imposed barriers". According to one article, "women aren't confident". They "can be quite the perfectionists". They "have to learn to accept criticisms, portray a positive image and believe in themselves".

These obstacles to economic success, we are told, should be overcome through ceaseless self-surveillance, self-discipline and self-transformation. Some call this the Lean In imperative, after the popular book on women at work by Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

The intensity of the entrepreneurial self-work required of women is daunting. Some articles, for example, pressure women to upgrade their knowledge and skills during their maternity leave. Even when sex discrimination is acknowledged, it's presented as an opportunity for growth. The recommended response to the gender pay gap is "to work that runway as hard as the men". One CEO gave a simpler solution: "Ask and she shall receive!" After all, anything can be overcome with drive and a can-do attitude, right?

Beyond the individual

I disagree. Rather than demand women make personal compromises to succeed in the workplace or patronise them with workshops to improve their communication skills, we should require governments and companies to address and eliminate biases in the system.

For example, my study shows clear evidence of the deeply entrenched cultural belief that childcare and household chores are women's work. In one interview, a general manager of a large company laments, while seemingly accepting, that she is "the mother, maid and wife". In another, an entrepreneur suggests that women should work "at a slower pace or on a part-time basis especially when the children are very young". The contribution of fathers is rarely mentioned. This can make it even harder for women to secure equal opportunities. Offering flexible work arrangements to both men and women and implementing mandatory paid paternity leave are important steps, but we all also need to do more to challenge the expectation that women are primarily responsible for family care.

And the kind of businesses who offer in-work childcare are generally those who employ middle-class women. Governments need to provide more quality public childcare centres so that marginalised and unskilled women in lower income groups are not housebound and are able to pursue stable, full-time employment. Additionally, studies consistently show that women are not assessed in the same way as men in the workplace due to gender stereotypes. To ensure that gender stereotyping does not drive decision making, companies and institutions could, for example, name-blind CVs as part of their hiring process.

The strides that women have made in the public sphere, while a cause for celebration, shouldn't be allowed to lull us into assuming that a world of professional opportunities is open for women. If we wish to build a more equitable future in which women have actual freedom to pursue real choices and achieve their full potential, we need to rediscover a more political understanding of why they are lagging behind their male counterparts. We need to see that these are structural issues, rather than individual problems.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
No more 'leaning in' - the neoliberal myth of the superhero businesswoman holds us all back

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We've read the stories and seen the figures. We know that women are still underrepresented at the decision making table. We know women across professional fields get paid less than their male peers for doing the same job. We know about the #MeToo movement.

# data[].attributes.headline
“Postfeminism, as a term, suggests that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, but that feminism is now irrelevant and even undesirable because it supposedly made millions of women unhappy, unfeminine, childless, hairy, lonely, bitter and prompted them to fill their closets with combat boots and really bad India print skirts. Supposedly women have gotten all they could out of feminism, are now "equal," and so can, by choice, embrace things we used to see as sexist, like a TV show in which some self-satisfied lunk samples the wares of twenty-five women before rejecting twenty-four and keeping the one he likes best, or like the notion that mothers should have primary responsibility for raising the kids. Postfeminism means that you can now work outside the home even in jobs previously restricted to men, go to graduate school, pump iron, and pump your own gas, as long as you remain fashion conscious, slim, nurturing, deferential to men, and become a doting, selfless mother.” - Susan Douglas, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women

# data[].attributes.subject
“Postfeminism, as a term, suggests that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, but that feminism is now irrelevant and even undesirable because it supposedly made millions of women unhappy, unfeminine, childless, hairy, lonely, bitter and prompted them to fill their closets with combat boots and really bad India print skirts. Supposedly women have gotten all they could out of feminism, are now "equal," and so can, by choice, embrace things we used to see as sexist, like a TV show in which some self-satisfied lunk samples the wares of twenty-five women before rejecting twenty-four and keeping the one he likes best, or like the notion that mothers should have primary responsibility for raising the kids. Postfeminism means that you can now work outside the home even in jobs previously restricted to men, go to graduate school, pump iron, and pump your own gas, as long as you remain fashion conscious, slim, nurturing, deferential to men, and become a doting, selfless mother.” - Susan Douglas, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Susan Douglas - 'Postfeminism, as a term, suggests that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, but that feminism is now irrelevant and e...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Indian suffragettes in the Women's Coronation Procession, London, on June 17, 1911 [Museum of London/Heritage Images/Getty Images]

100 years ago, British women won the right to vote, after decades of resistance.

The Representation of the People Act 1918 granted women older than 30 and with property the right to cast the ballot.

But as Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett were lionised as leaders, the contribution of working-class women and women of colour was barely acknowledged.

South Asian women, for instance, played a seminal role.

Al Jazeera spoke to Sumita Mukherjee, an historian of the British Empire and Indian subcontinent, on the contribution of women of Indian descent to British women's suffrage movement.
Al Jazeera: How important was the role of Sophia Duleep Singh?
She was the most prominent woman of Indian heritage in the British suffragette movement.

She was the daughter of an exiled Indian Prince, Maharaja Duleep Singh, who was a favourite of Queen Victoria. She herself was the goddaughter of Queen Victoria.

Sophia became involved in the women's Tax Resistance League, an association that refused to pay their taxes, arguing as women didn't have the vote, they shouldn't have to pay their taxes. Their rallying cry was: "No taxation without representation."

In Sophia's case, bailiffs came on a number of occasions to her property and impounded her goods, which they would then sell off at auction.

The women's Tax Resistance League members would go to those auctions and buy back her property, which gave publicity to their campaign slogans and the general campaign for women's votes.

Sophia also led one of the big suffrage demonstrations in 1910, known as Black Friday, with Emmeline Pankhurst, along with some other demonstrations.

Her older sister, Catherine, also had suffragette sympathies. She was involved with the peaceful suffrage campaigners, but she lived in Germany so she was not as heavily involved.
Al Jazeera: Did she face any barriers?
Mukherjee: Sophia was an exception in a lot of ways. Because of her aristocratic, royal background, she was very privileged. She was wealthy, so she was able to refuse to pay taxes.

Because of her royal background, we know she was treated quite well by the police and other authorities, which was true for most middle-class suffragists at the time. Her class and her wealth almost trumped her race.
Al Jazeera: How did imperialism influence the British suffrage movement, and how did this impact the intersection of class and race?
There were very few women of colour who were involved with the movement, and that is primarily because British suffrage campaigners did not think about including women of colour into conversations and debates around citizenship, and the right to participate in the democratic structures of the nation.

A lot of this is rooted in ideas of empire and colonialism.

Considering the history of imperialism and colonialism, I think it is really important to be cautious about how we think about Indian women involved in the British suffragette movement.

Sophia Duleep Singh was someone who had a voice. But the other Indian women who were involved, they did not have a voice.

In June 1911, for example, there was a suffrage coronation procession through London where some Indian women were invited to take part, and encouraged to wear their national dress, saris.

These women were objectified by British women who wanted to throw in a bit of colour to the campaign and draw attention to tokenistic attempts of being diverse.
Al Jazeera: How would you describe the portrayal of women of colour associated with the movement, according to evidence?
This relates to a lot of work by the historian Antoinette Burton, who looked at British suffrage newspapers and periodicals.

[When] Indian women are discussed, the narrative is usually centred on depicting them as victims in need of reform.

Rather than giving any agency or a voice to Indian women, it was very much about British imperial intervention into Indian women's lives.

The issue with race was that British women, up until 1918 and even beyond, were campaigning for a vote in an imperial parliament that would give them a say over what happened in the Empire.

They argued that by securing the domestic vote, women would have an influence on issues like education, healthcare and women's issues, and that's why that "feminine voice" was required in politics.

Rather than giving any agency or a voice to Indian women, it was very much about British imperial intervention into Indian women's lives.

India was, after all, the crowning jewel of the Empire which captured the imagination of British campaigners, and so this paternalistic idea emerged that British women would "uplift" Indian women.
Al Jazeera: How did women's suffrage embed itself into anticolonial struggles around the world?
In other parts of the Empire, women were campaigning for greater economic rights, the right to own property, the right to have a voice within these limited democratic institutions.

But that's not to say that the demands for the vote were not also being pushed for, at the same time as anticolonial struggles.

In India, there were women doing both, women who took that so-called peaceful, democratic route fighting for the vote, but at the same time, were also caught in the unrest around the nationalist struggle for emancipation from imperial powers.

Indian women were campaigning for the vote from 1917 onwards, because they fundamentally disagreed that women should be excluded from the limited democratic right to vote, that was given to some Indian men under colonial rule.

Sarojini Naidu's legacy, alongside that of other, Indian women, are a powerful corrective to the idea that the fight for female suffrage was a purely Western phenomenon.

Sarojini Naidu, a prominent Indian poet, female activist and close political ally of Mahatma Ghandi, campaigned for women's rights and engaged in anticolonial struggles.

She was arrested a number of times for her role in nationalist activities, and was at the forefront of the suffrage movement in India, petitioning the Indian government, meeting with politicians and demanding that women get the vote.

Her legacy, alongside that of other Indian women, are a powerful corrective to the idea that the fight for female suffrage was a purely Western phenomenon.

Why not draw inspiration from women in India campaigning for the right to vote? From women in South Africa? We don't necessarily have to always be Anglocentric. Whatever our backgrounds are, we can find role models and inspiring figures in other parts of the world.

Sophia Duleep Singh, too, visited India on a number of occasions, lending her support to the anticolonial struggle and the Indian women's suffrage movement.

Sophia identified as British, but she also identified with her Indian heritage, especially because of the royal links her family had on her father's side.

She encouraged Indian women to campaign for their rights in India and take up the mantle of the suffrage campaign there as well.
Al Jazeera: Why is it important to bring this dimension of the suffrage movement to light?
I t's important to think about whether some of those who are British today feel excluded from these conversations and this commemoration.

There aren't very many women of African origin at all in the movement, for instance, so we need to think not only about questions around why that is, but also to broaden our search.

Why not draw inspiration from women in India campaigning for the right to vote? From women in South Africa? We don't necessarily have to always be Anglocentric. Whatever our backgrounds are, we can find role models and inspiring figures in other parts of the world.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Indian women contributed to the suffrage movement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
100 years ago, British women won the right to vote, after decades of resistance. The Representation of the People Act 1918 granted women older than 30 and with property the right to cast the ballot. But as Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett were lionised as leaders, the contribution of working-class women and women of colour was barely acknowledged.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thousands of women will attend Saturday's Women's March on Washington, an event planned to protest Donald Trump's rhetoric and policies that organizers believe undermine women across identities. But some black women are opting out of the event because of historic exclusion from the feminist movement.

From the rejection of black women in the Suffrage Movement to contemporary missteps to acknowledge the ways in which multiple forms of oppression affect African-American women and the failure to show up as allies, white feminists have a complicated history with women of color that leaves some black women skeptical of efforts like the Women's March.

Tamika D. Mallory, a national co-chair of the march, acknowledges the long-term rejection of black women in feminist spaces but she believes is important for black women to be at the march to articulate their concerns.

"It's either we have a seat at the table or we're on the menu," said Mallory former executive director of the National Action Network and founder of Mallory Consulting. "How can we allow anyone to speak on the issues of women and not have women of color, particularly black women, involved? We should not allow ourselves to be an agenda item. We need to set the agenda."

In fact, the roots of the early feminist movement were entrenched in disregard for black women. Suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony infamously said, "I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman."

Mallory was one of the three women of color invited to serve as co-organizers of the march a couple of days after the event founder Bob Bland, a white woman, recognized that women of color were needed to be part of the planning and to gain the support of other nonwhite women, Mallory said.

Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York and Carmen Perez, the executive director for The Gathering for Justice, are also national co-chairs of the march.

But changes in the march don't erase white women's voting record during the presidential election. 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump while 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton.

According to Gwendolyn Pough, a professor in the Women and Gender Studies Department at Syracuse University, today's attempt at solidarity can't be trusted because given the numbers, some of the same white women who put on pantsuits on Election Day walked into the voting booths and cast a ballot for Trump and they'll likely be at the march.

"A lot of black women showed our unity by voting for a candidate that most sisters were not excited about, " said Pough, author of Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip Hop Culture and the Public Sphere.

"Somewhere there was a fail and not all women were in solidarity with that. We had been operating under the guise that there was unity and now we've been shown there isn't so what do you do with that?"

White feminists' early failures to embrace black women in the Suffrage Movement set the stage for future decades of exclusion that still makes it difficult to join them in solidarity, Pough said.

"It may look like it's different but it's the same," continued Pough. "Knowing the history, it's important when you look at the Suffrage Movement, it really was about getting the white women the right to vote. When you look at the history, there is a strain... When it came down between patriarchy and sisterhood, they chose patriarchy."

The march initially felt like a repeat of historic missteps white feminists made in the past but adding three respected women of color organizers helped give the credibility along with its policy platform which puts concerns of black women in the forefront, said Brittney Cooper, an assistant professor of Women and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, and founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective.

"It's giving intersectional feminism a mainstream platform like this and saying it's not white women's issues and women of color issues as an addendum. It means we're going to lead with and we include everybody," said Cooper, author of the forthcoming book Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. "That's a huge shift, a really important pivot and one that's worth watching."

Mallory said she and other black women who are planning the march worked to make black women's issues central in the march. "I'm committed to what it means to ensure that the voice of the black women is not used as a token or a laborer but rather our issues are front and center and those who claim to be allies would actually join us in some of the important fights that we've been addressing."

Teresa Younger, the first Black president and CEO of the Ms. Foundation for Women, is attending the march and her foundation is participating in and organizing activities in Washington to help women transform their energy from the march into political action when they get home.

"Many people woke up on Nov. 9, woke up," she said. "We have to recognize that this march is a place for them to stay awake and we all need to create avenues for them to stay awake and in action for the next four years and beyond."

More than 600 local versions of the Women's March are planned across the country on Saturday. The fact that the sentiment of the march has spread nationwide indicates a widespread concern about what could come under Trump's administration, Mallory said.

"So many people they have not been engaged in movement," she said. "They've been on the sidelines. This is what it looks like when people get concerned about their future and their children's future and now they're waking up and getting engaged."

Cooper agrees that the Trump administration's position on Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood funding and other issues present real challenges for women. She will not attend the march but she believes there is a sense of urgency for feminist concerns and whether women attend the march or find other ways to get politically active, they will be needed to resist the incoming administration's policies in the next four years.

"We haven't seen the level of attack that we're about to see in a couple of generations in the '60s and '70s," Cooper said. "This is an all-hands-on deck call."
Follow NBCBLK on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Decades of exclusion leaves some women of color skeptical of Women's March

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Thousands of women will attend Saturday's Women's March on Washington, an event planned to protest Donald Trump's rhetoric and policies that organizers believe undermine women across identities. But some black women are opting out of the event because of historic exclusion from the feminist movement.

# data[].attributes.headline
White feminism's failings handed Megyn Kelly a $69m payout after she was fired for racism

# data[].attributes.subject
White feminism's failings handed Megyn Kelly a $69m payout after she was fired for racism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Once one of America's most sought-after hosts, Megyn Kelly - along with her former network, NBC - has today come under heavy fire for accepting a $69 million pay-out after she was fired for comments defending the use of blackface.

The astronomical settlement has, quite rightly, faced widespread criticism. It seems like an incredibly unfair turn of events, but it's also an important opportunity to take a moment and consider the forces at play that got us to this point. In a blind desire to transform Kelly into an unrequited liberal feminist icon, it was the denial of her reactionary and often racist views that gave rise to her power. As a white person and a feminist, I'm ashamed of how still in 2019 true intersectionality seems as far from reach as it ever was.

Kelly's firing was no surprise. It came after months of failing ratings and public spats with her executives. However, it was her assertion that blackface was acceptable "as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character" that ultimately led to her dismissal in October 2018.

The comments followed a long string of racist remarks that can be traced back, unsurprisingly, to her stint on Fox News. From her public declaration that Jesus was a white man, and similar rant that "Santa is just white", Kelly's racist views are well documented. She once referred to Michelle Obama as Barack's "Baby Mama", has routinely defended cops who fatally shot or assaulted black men and women, supported the "All Lives Matter" movement, and shown a public affinity and friendship towards alt-right conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones.

Despite this, Kelly has been hailed a "feminist hero" by writers at the Washington Examiner, and was christened an "unlikely feminist warrior" by critic Emily Nussbaum at the New Yorker. Nussbaum's decision to refer to Kelly as a "purified" saint of the feminist movement speaks volumes about how white feminists have facilitated the successful rise of a commentator like Kelly.

The belief that white women are "pure" and "fragile" has played a large part in making white women the most dangerous proponents of racism, and it is exactly this history that has, in my view, allowed Kelly to fail upwards.

Kelly was allowed to get to where she was because the idea of her as a feminist was more enticing to us than the truth about her views. This represents white feminism at its worst - ignoring the experience of those less privileged than us in order to further our own standing. After all, it's hard enough to constantly question gender norms, let alone also fight racial oppression, or push for LGBTQ+ rights or representation of those differently abled.

Until we are able to acknowledge the Kelly affair as a direct consequence of the pitfalls of white feminism, we will be unable to dismantle the structural racism that permeates our society. By celebrating the success of white women like Kelly without criticism of her views on race, we - as white feminists - are complicit in the racial oppression that sustains our privilege.

Kelly is no stranger to weaponising the feminist movement to suit her agenda. She can win points by questioning Donald Trump's history of denigrating women as pigs, dogs and slobs, or championing the Me Too movement, and later cosy up to the president on her television show or defend Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination.

At the same time, visible women of colour are harassed out of work for expressing their own views and fighting white supremacy. In 2017, activist Munroe Bergdoff was fired from a L'Oreal Campaign after she suggested that white people should work to make themselves more aware of unconscious racism.

Meanwhile, figures like Kelly continue to "win" - not only was she given millions of dollars, but Kelly has stated she is confident she will be back on television before the 2020 election. And she may well be right.

Despite the initial uproar, a survey conducted by The Hollywood Reporter a few days after Kelly's firing found that nearly half of the 2,201 adults questioned felt NBC's decision to cancel Megyn Kelly Today was "too harsh of a consequence".

Until we admit our complicity in Kelly's rise to power, and begin to hold each other accountable for racism, rather than applauding or ignoring it under the guise of 'supporting women', racism will continue to be the white woman's pathway to power.

The Independent has launched its #FinalSay campaign to demand that voters are given a voice on the final Brexit deal.

Sign our petition here

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'White feminism's failings handed Megyn Kelly a $69m payout after she was fired for racism'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Once one of America's most sought-after hosts, Megyn Kelly - along with her former network, NBC - has today come under heavy fire for accepting a $69 million pay-out after she was fired for comments defending the use of blackface

# data[].attributes.headline
Jameela Jamil explained why she calls herself a "feminist-in-progress"

# data[].attributes.subject
Jameela Jamil explained why she calls herself a "feminist-in-progress"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jameela Jamil explained why she calls herself a "feminist-in-progress"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a recent interview at the BlogHer Health conference in Los Angeles, "The Good Place" actress Jameela Jamil explained to HelloGiggles what she means when she says she's a "feminist-in-progess."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A surprisingly mainstream movement of feminists known as TERFs oppose transgender rights as a symptom of "female erasure."

By Sophie Lewis

Dr. Lewis is a feminist theorist and geographer.

Image

A sign at a swimming pond at Hampstead Heath in London. The pond became the center of a debate about the inclusion of trans women last summer. Credit Credit Daniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Last week, two British women stormed onto Capitol Hill in Washington for the purposes of ambushing Sarah McBride, the national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign.

Ms. McBride, a trans woman, had just been part of a meeting between the Parents for Transgender Equality National Council and members of Congress when the Britons - Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, who goes by the name Posie Parker, and Julia Long - barged in. Heckling and misgendering Ms. McBride, the two inveighed against her supposed "hatred of lesbians" and accused her of championing "the rights of men to access women in women's prison."

Ms. Parker, who live-streamed footage of the harassment on Facebook, contended that she had come to Washington because "this ideology" - by which she presumably meant simply being trans - "has been imported into the U.K. by America, so, to stem the flow of female erasure, we have to come to its source."

If the idea that transphobic harassment could be "feminist" bewilders you, you are not alone. In the United States, my adoptive home, the most visible contemporary opponents of transgender rights are right-wing evangelicals, who have little good to say about feminism. In Britain, where I used to live, the situation is different.

There, the most vocal trans-exclusionary voices are, ostensibly, "feminist" ones, and anti-trans lobbying is a mainstream activity. Case in point: Ms. Parker told the podcast "Feminist Current" that she'd changed her thinking on trans women after spending time on Mumsnet, a site where parents exchange tips on toilet training and how to get their children to eat vegetables. If such a place sounds benign, consider the words of British writer Edie Miller: "Mumsnet is to British transphobia," she wrote "what 4Chan is to American fascism."

The term coined to identify women like Ms. Parker and Dr. Long is TERF, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In Britain, TERFs are a powerful force. If, in the United States, the mainstream media has been alarmingly ready to hear "both sides" on the question of trans people's right to exist, in Britain, TERFs have effectively succeeded in framing the question of trans rights entirely around their own concerns: that is, how these rights for others could contribute to "female erasure." Many prominent figures in British journalism and politics have been TERFs; British TV has made a sport of endlessly hosting their lurid rudeness and styling it as courage; British newspapers seemingly never tire of broadsides against the menace of " gender ideology." (With time, the term TERF has become a catchall for all anti-trans feminists, radical or not.)

The split between the American and British center-left on this issue was thrown into sharp relief last year, when The Guardian published an editorial on potential changes to a law called the Gender Recognition Act, which would allow people in Britain to self-define their gender. The editorial was headlined " Where Rights Collide," and argued that "women's concerns about sharing dormitories or changing rooms with 'male-bodied' people must be taken seriously." Some of The Guardian'sUnited States-based journalists published a disavowal, arguing that the editorial's points "echo the position of anti-trans legislators who have pushed overtly transphobic bathroom bills."

A curious facet of the groundswell of TERFism in Britain is that, in fact, the phenomenon was born in the United States. It emerged out the shattered remnants of the 1960s New Left, a paranoid faction of American 1970s radical feminism that the historian Alice Echols termed "cultural feminism" to distinguish it, and its wounded attachment to the suffering-based femaleness it purports to celebrate, from other strands of women's liberation.

The movement crossed over to Britain in the 1980s, when cultural feminism was among the lesbian-separatist elements of antinuclear protest groups who saw themselves as part of a "feminist resistance" to patriarchal science, taking a stand against nuclear weapons, test-tube babies and male-to-female transsexual surgery alike.

In America, however, TERFism today is a scattered community in its death throes, mourning the loss of its last spaces, like the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, which ended in 2015. And so the strangely virulent form that TERFism takes in Britain today, and its influence within the British establishment, requires its own separate, and multipronged, explanation.

Ms. Parker and Ms. Long may not know it, but they're likely influenced by the legacy of the British "Skepticism" movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, which mobilized against the perceived spread of postmodernism in English universities as well as homeopathy and so-called "junk science." Hence, the impulse among TERFs to proclaim their "no-nonsense" character; witness the billboard Ms. Parker paid to have put up last fall dryly defining a woman as an "adult human female." Such a posture positions queer theory and activism as individualistic, narcissistic and thus somehow fundamentally un-British.

It's also worth noting that the obsession with supposed "biological realities" of people like Ms. Parker is part of a long tradition of British feminism interacting with colonialism and empire. Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary, while simultaneously constructing the racial "other" as not only fundamentally different, but freighted with sexual menace; from there, it's not a big leap to see sexual menace in any sort of "other," and "biological realities" as essential and immutable. (Significantly, many Irish feminists have rejected Britain's TERFism, citing their experience of colonialism explicitly as part of the reason.)

But perhaps the biggest factor in the rise of TERFism has been the relative dearth of social movements in Britain over the past three decades. It's telling that Ms. Parker thinks it was the United States that exported "political correctness" and ideas like "gender identity" to Britain; it might even be fair to say that she's right.

In other parts of the world, including America, mass movements in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s around the effects of globalization and police brutality have produced long overdue dialogue on race, gender and class, and how they all interact. In Britain, however, the space for this sort of dialogue has been much more limited. As a result, middle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummeling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have, and thus, their perspectives retain a credibility and a level of influence in Britain that the Michigan Womyn's Festival could have only dreamed of.

Curiously, Ms. Parker and Ms. Long's trans-Atlantic jaunt has led to a split in the ranks. Over the past few days, large segments of British TERFism have disowned both of them on social media for their Washington stunt, calling it an "ambush," and them a "liability." Whether Ms. Parker and Ms. Long went too far for a movement that, to date, seemingly has yet to hit a low, remains to be seen.

It is revealing, however, where Ms. Parker feels she still has friends: On her same trip to Washington, the woman claiming to be a feminist, standing up for the rights of lesbians everywhere, made sure to drop by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.

Sophie Lewis, a feminist theorist and geographer, is the author of the forthcoming "Full Surrogacy Now."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A surprisingly mainstream movement of feminists known as TERFs oppose transgender rights as a symptom of "female erasure." By Sophie Lewis Dr. Lewis is a feminist theorist and geographer. Last week, two British women stormed onto Capitol Hill in Washington for the purposes of ambushing Sarah McBride, the national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign.

# data[].attributes.headline
Breaking Up with Intersectional Feminism 

# data[].attributes.subject
Breaking Up with Intersectional Feminism 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"I built a white feminist temple. Now I'm tearing it down." -  Layla Saad

I'll always be here for Kimberle Crenshaw. She gave a name to the face of compounded oppression that women like me survive on the daily. Women who live in constant danger at the intersection of race + gender. What I was not here for was the concept of intersectional feminism. The notion that white women will magically take accountability for their dismissal, bias, and mean girl spirit and become the kind of gals who are all about passing the mic to Black and Brown Sisters... unheard of.

It wasn't until I re-read Angela Davis's Women, Race, & Class that I had a change of heart. A biography about American women's liberation from slavery to present, Women, Race, & Class uses history and factual resources to spell out what white women have yet to comprehend; their ignorance and apathy towards the struggle of Black women have been to the detriment of any could-be collective feminist movement. While white women were exercising their freedom, Black women were fighting to stay alive on the plantation field. When Black Americans pleaded with white feminists to support their efforts to gain the right for Black men to vote, Susan B. Anthony spoke against it. She, along with Elizabeth Stanton and a slew of other white feminists demanded that women be granted the right to vote before Blacks, despite the mass lynchings, race riots, and the KKK, which destroyed Black communities simply because they had the voting power to do so. White feminists chose self-interest over the lives of Black people. This fundamental decision was the beginning of what is now known as white feminism.

I became convinced that Women, Race, & Class would bring about a massive come-to-Jesus moment to white women who failed to see the racial violence in their detachment from non-white women and non-white issues. It was also around this time that I started watching lectures and interviews by Kimberle Crenshaw to learn more about the intersections women experience (gender + race + sexual orientation, gender +race + physical handicap, gender +race + ethnicity).

If intersectionality was a train, I was the conductor. I ranted on and on about both the concept and the term to anyone who would listen. I spoke about it to college students at SUNY Old Westbury. I even created an intersectional book club for cisgender and trans women. I was all in.

As the honeymoon wore off, I began to notice some things I hadn't before. For starters, many white women announced themselves as intersectional feminists, yet, were still completely detached from the lives and issues of cis and trans Black women and women of color. I also noticed that Black women and women of color weren't too quick to join the intersectional movement either. Instincts and too many bad experiences in white-centered environments made them very distrustful of intersectional feminism.

As time progressed, any hope that intersectional feminism would be this magical path to racial and cultural harmony between white women and non-white women disappeared. Despite the legion of spaces dedicated to intersectionalism - including my own book club, it always seemed that every environment was divided by race. I know what Sisterhood is and I know what white women think Sisterhood is; they got it all wrong.

Deep down inside I knew what the problem was, I just didn't have the heart to admit it. Intersectional feminism doesn't mean anything if white women still struggle to support and advocate for those who's identities cross intersections that are foreign to theirs.

Meanwhile, the Sisterhood between Black women of color and non-Black women of color has become increasingly stronger. Social and racial justice warriors are creating spaces exclusively for non-white women, allowing us to exhale, grow, and continue strengthening our collective goals and organic connection. It seemed as though all that time standing on the outside made us realize, "We are in this. Together."

I was beginning to lose sight of the role white women were supposed to play in this whole intersectional feminist thing when the wrongful arrest of Chikesia Clemons happened.

Chikesia and her cousin Canita were dining at a Waffle House - not the same Waffle House where four Black people were massacred by a white man. A different Waffle House (Stay. Out. Of. Waffle House). After a request for cutlery, Chikesia was told she'd be charged fifty cents for it. Upon challenging this fee, employees did the thing they always do when they're free to enable white supremacy without judgement: they called the police. This resulted in an unnecessarily aggressive, humiliating arrest that left Ms. Clemons face down, hands cuffed, and breasts exposed.

I waited for the moment when white women were going to learn how to pronounce Chikesia's name and fight for her justice with the same conviction they would fight for their own, Parkland style. I'm not a fool; I expected nothing from white feminists, or even the run-of-the-mill standard feminist -the ones who cap out of convenience rather than conviction. Still, I sincerely expected... something from intersectional feminists. I expected them to show everyone what true Sisterhood looks like. No doubt, there were more than a few white women who spoke Chikesia's name and donated to her GoFundMe's campaign that's raising money for her lawyer fees. But, in regard to the collective white woman... Crickets.

What happened to Chikesia has all the ingredients that require radical feminist action. She was wrongfully arrested. Her body, exposed to the world for every hater and prospective employee to see. The intersection of being a woman in Black skin could have cost her her life. Sadly, the women who are in need of protest, protection, and Sisterhood most, Black women, are the ones who get it least. Even when a Black woman creates a term and a concept to describe just how dangerous it is to be a Black woman, white women take it, run with it, build over the fundamentals, and save no room for Black women. Fucking ironic.

Sure, breaking up is hard to do, but, it's also healthy. As a Black woman who lives in a country that can arrest me for needing to eat with a fork, murder me for not putting out my cigarette, demote me for wearing my hair natural, and do everything to convince me that I'm not pretty, I'm not composed, I'm not smart, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not... I'm not putting up with this idea anymore.

I find myself at the end of my intersectional feminist road. It's time to hop into survival mode, ditch this dumpster fire, and live by a Black feminist agenda. One mapped out by the pros. Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Patrisse Cullors, Angela Davis, Kola Boof, and all the other Sisters who stay convinced that we need to divest from white feminism and invest in Black and Brown women, nurture our Black magic, and hold one another to a higher esteem.

Black feminism gives me everything I need. Removal of any and all environments that hold no space for me and my Sisters, a Sisterhood bonded in dedication towards the progress and liberation of all of us, and freedom from the respectability politics that strangle us.

When I live life as a Black feminist who's dedicated to a Black feminist agenda, I'm doing all the things that I did before, only, I'm centered inside the collective goal. I can hold space for all my marginalized Sisters, rather than feel as though I have to compete with them for the few vacant 'minority' slots reserved at intersectional functions. In the words of Gabrielle Union, "I don't want to be at your table at all. I built a house over there."

We can't all be Black feminists. It's something you're born into, it isn't acquired. However, we can all and we should all adopt a Black feminist agenda. When Black women wins, mankind wins.

I've broken up with plenty of people and things before due to my conviction, but, leaving intersectional feminism is way different. It becomes easier to stop loving someone or something when you accept the fact that it does not love you back. At the end of the day, if intersectional feminism holds no space for Chikesia, it damn sure doesn't care about me.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Breaking Up with Intersectional Feminism - Tamela J. Gordon - Medium

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"I built a white feminist temple. Now I'm tearing it down." -  Layla Saad I'll always be here for Kimberle Crenshaw. She gave a name to the face of compounded oppression that women like me survive on the daily. Women who live in constant danger at the intersection of race + gender.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A Tokyo medical school has apologised after an internal investigation confirmed it altered entrance exam scores for more than a decade to limit the number of female students and ensure more men became doctors.

Tokyo Medical University manipulated all entrance exam results starting in 2006 or even earlier, according to findings released by lawyers involved in the investigation, confirming recent reports in Japanese media.

The school said the manipulation should not have occurred and would not in the future. It said it would consider retroactively admitting those who otherwise would have passed the exams, although it did not explain how it would do so.

The manipulation was revealed during an investigation into the alleged "backdoor entry" of an education ministry bureaucrat's son in exchange for favourable treatment for the school in obtaining research funds. The bureaucrat and the former head of the school have been charged with bribery.

The investigation found that in this year's entrance exams the school reduced all applicants' first-stage test scores by 20% and then added at least 20 points for male applicants, except those who had previously failed the test at least four times. It said similar manipulations had occurred for years because the school wanted fewer female doctors since it anticipated they would shorten or halt their careers after becoming mothers.

The education ministry official's son, who had failed the exam three times, was given a total of 20 additional points, which eventually elevated him to just above the cutoff line.

The report said the manipulation was "profound sexism", according to lawyer Kenji Nakai. He said the investigation also suggested that the school's former director took money from some parents who sought preferential treatment for their sons and that the manipulation was part of a deep-rooted culture that lacked fairness and transparency.

Nakai said the report only covered the latest exam results because of time constraints, and that further investigation was needed.

"We sincerely apologize for the serious wrongdoing involving entrance exams that has caused concern and trouble for many people and betrayed the public's trust," school managing director Tetsuo Yukioka said. He denied any previous knowledge of the score manipulation and said he was never involved.

"I suspect that there was a lack of sensitivity to the rules of modern society, in which women should not be treated differently because of their gender," he said.

There was a lack of sensitivity to the rules of modern society in which women should not be treated differently because of their gender

Yukioka said women were not treated differently once they were accepted, but acknowledged that some people believe women were not allowed to become surgeons.

Nearly 50% of Japanese women are college educated - one of the world's highest levels - but they often face discrimination in the workforce. Women also are considered responsible for homemaking, childrearing and elderly care, while men are expected to work long hours and outside care services are limited.

Studies show the share of female doctors who have passed the national medical exam has plateaued at around 30% for more than 20 years, leading some experts to suspect that other medical schools also discriminate against women.

The education minister Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters he planned to examine the entrance procedures of all medical schools.

Gender equality minister Seiko Noda was quoted by Kyodo News as saying: "It is extremely regrettable if medical schools share a view that having female doctors work at hospitals is troublesome."
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tokyo medical school admits changing results to exclude women

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Tokyo medical school has apologised after an internal investigation confirmed it altered entrance exam scores for more than a decade to limit the number of female students and ensure more men became doctors. Tokyo Medical University manipulated all entrance exam results starting in 2006 or even earlier, according to findings released by lawyers involved in the investigation, confirming recent reports in Japanese media.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Women are the emissaries of hell; they cut off forever the seed of buddhahood. On the outside they have the faces of bodhisattvas, but on the inside they have the hearts of demons.

-Buddhist Sutra

A woman's talk does not go beyond one village.

A smart woman ruins the castle.

-Japanese Proverbs

Japanese medieval literature teemed with deceptive and dangerous women-devils in disguise with insatiable passions. Among these fantasies and frustrations caused by celibate life among literate monks were the Rasetsu. The Rasetsu were a race of shape-shifting cannibal women who seduced men and ate them alive. The women lived on Rasetsukoku. The island's location changed throughout different periods, first appearing in Konjaku monogatari shu, a collection of stories about India in the 12th century (Moerman, 2009). "How Sokara and the Five Hundred Merchants Went to the Land of the Rasetsu" explains one of the first encounters with these women. It begins with a group of merchants setting sail in search of treasure.

They are shipwrecked on an island of beautiful women where each man takes a wife and enjoys a life of bliss. But Sokara, the sailor's leader senses something is off and investigates. He finds a prison of men and signs of cannibalism. One of the prisoners tells him how he had enjoyed the same pleasures until a new ship washed ashore. Then, he and his mates were set aside for food. Sokara manages to get all but one of his crew to safety. However, 2 years later one of the women visits him at home, but Sokara wasn't tricked. The King, however, falls for the beautiful she-demon and after spending three days with her in his bedchamber, she breaks out with a blood-stained mouth. All that was left of the king was "a pool of blood and hair." In response, Sokara gathers an army and attacks the island. After destroying all of the demon-women he is made king of the island.

This land of demon women appears in a Ming Chinese encyclopedia of 1610:

The Land of Women is in the southeastern seas. The Water flows to the east. Lotus flowers one foot across bloom once a year and the peaches have stones two feet long. Long ago a ship drifted there and the women gathered together and carried the ship off. The sailors were all close to death. But a clever man among them stole the boat back at night and they were able to escape. The women conceive children by exposing their genitals to the sound wind. According to others, the women become pregnant by looking at their reflection in a well.

The Land of Women shifted from a fantasy sexual amusement park to a land of she-demons throughout different time periods, but it provides an early example of a cultural view of women that challenged feminist movements in the modern period. Women were relegated to a child rearing role and as household managers.

Women's Rights and Legal Status

During the Tokugawa Shogunate (1602-1868), women did not legally exist. They could not own property and were subordinate to men. However, women in different classes had more rights than others. For example, samurai class women had fewer rights than the farming class, which needed women to help run the family far. The urban class allowed women to manage businesses. In fact, wives of merchants were expected to be literate. However, by today's standards women lacked equality. A woman was still under the authority of men who decided the course of her life-who she married and more. Birth control didn't exist as we know it. Midwives had their means, but women were expected to have children to continue the house.

Equality became more of a concern during the Meiji Restoration, when Japan pushed to catch up with the Western nations in terms of military and technology and law. Japan looked toward Enlightenment ideals, exemplified by John Locke, when it examined its laws (Okin, 1998). These ideals later shaped the Universal Declaration of Human rights (1948), the Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights declaration, among others by the United Nations that proclaim equal rights of human beings regardless of sex. However, women remain discriminated against in differing ways. As Okin (1998) writes: "Indeed, discrimination on the grounds of sex is frequently justified as being in accordance with many of the cultures-including religions aspects of these cultures-practiced in the world today."

However, both the 1948 declarations and Meiji Japan pulled from a 17th century system that was designed for male heads of households. Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers didn't have women's private rights in mind when they wrote their ideas of law and equality. For example, Locke states no one should interfere with a father's decision to whom his daughter should marry:

In private domestic affairs, in the management of estates, in the conservation of bodily health, every man may consider what suits his own convenience and follow what course he likes best. No man complains of the ill-management of his neighbour's affairs. No man is angry with another for an error committed in sowing his land or in marrying his daughter. Nobody corrects a spendthrift for consuming his substance in taverns.

This male bias sits deep in human rights thinking. Women have different life experiences than men that these old systems fail to take into account: rape-marital and war, domestic violence, reproductive freedom, valuation of childcare and domestic labor, unequal opportunity in education, unequal housing opportunities, unequal credit opportunities, and unequal healthcare. Okin (1998) points out how inequality can be obscured by cultural norms and what people consider natural, such as motherhood. Cultural norms against certain things, such as single motherhood, also obscure inequality.

This male-centric view of rights appeared in various Meiji Reformation laws. For example, in the Criminal Code of 1880, adultery applied to women only. Men couldn't commit adultery on his wife, only with another man's wife (Sasamoto-Collins, 2017):

Article 353: A wife guilty of adultery shall be punished by imprisonment of no less than six months and no more than two years. Her lover shall receive the same punishment.

The punishment shall be imposed only if the family formally lodges complaint. If he has tolerated adultery, his complaint has no effect.

Article 311: If a husband has discovered his wife's adultery and killed or injured her or her lover immediately at the actual place where they were discovered, the crime is excusable.

However, this provision does not apply if the husband has tolerated the adultery.

In other words, women were punished for adultery solely based on her status as a wife. For the lawmakers at the time, this was a natural part of womanhood and Japanese culture, as Okin discussed. Men had to be certain their wives' children truly carried their genes. Of course, prostitutes and other women didn't fall under the law as their children didn't factor into the family system.

One Woman's Observations of the Meiji Period

Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, born in 1878, wrote an autobiography that examined the differences between this type of environment and that of the United States. She married an American man and moved there to live with their daughters until he died. Afterward, she returned to Japan. The cross-cultural experience allowed her to write about both Japanese and American feminism at the time. She thought American women immodestly exposed their bodies "just for the purpose of having it seen" while Japanese women covered theirs from neck to ankle. When she returned to Japan with her two daughters she accounts (Kuo, 2015):

As I sat and thought, I wondered if Hanano was ever really happy anymore. She never seemed sorrowful, but she had changed. Her eyes were soft, not bright; her mouth drooped slightly and her bright, cheery way of speaking had slowed and softened. Gentle and graceful? Yes. But where was her quick readiness to spring up to my frst word? Where her joyous eagerness to see, to learn, to do? My little American girl, so full of vivid interest in life, was gone.

During Sugimoto's life, the concept of ryosai kenbo, good wife and wise mother, was the focus of post Meiji Restoration (1868) education of girls. Before compulsory education passed in 1872, Confucian ideals prohibited women from getting an education. Girl's education was seen as helping the nation as a whole, but it did little to break women from their traditional roles. In fact, education was seen as enhancing mothers' abilities to produce patriotic, able citizens and supporting husbands. (Kuo, 2015). This education system, although a small step toward equality despite its failure to allow for different roles, contributed to the West's misconceptions of women.

Sugimoto tried to correct this misconceptions-that Japanese women were less able to protect themselves and were less independent than American women. Japanese women were thought to be gentle and meek and needing American feminism to come in and liberate them. However, Sugimoto writes: "Although our women are pictured as gentle and meek, and although Japanese men will not contradict it, nevertheless it is true that, beneath all the gentle meekness, Japanese women are like-volcanoes."

Sugimoto also illustrates how Japanese women had more rights than American women. Japanese women were the bankers of the family-responsible for both the family and for the family's wealth. The husband must ask the wife for money, not the other way around like in the US at the time. She writes: "It was one of many exaggerated ideas that we had of the dominant spirit of American women and the submissive attitude of American men."

American and Japanese Feminism Movements

In fact, during the early 1900s, American and Japanese feminism inspired each other. An early birth control advocate in Japan, Kato Shidzue, worked closely with American birth control activist Margaret Sanger. Shidzue brought Sanger to Japan in 1922 to speak on the topic (Kuo, 2015). The New Woman Association (NWA) in the early 1900s pushed for more rights, including a revision to the adultery law we examined which would allow women to file for a divorce if she discovered her husband or fiance had a venereal disease. The association framed their arguments in terms of protecting women's family role-allow women to become better wives and wiser mothers through increased political awareness. They didn't seek to completely break from ryosai kenbo. Most advocates focused on the improvement of women's lives through better health, elimination of poverty, better work conditions, protection of motherhood, and similar goals instead of political ends. Political liberation was seen as a path to these ends (Molony, 2000).

In a 1920 article, Ichikawa Fusae, a leader of the NWA, wrote:

Aren't we treated completely as feeble-minded children? Why is it all right to know about science and literature and not all right to be familiar with politics and current events? Why is it acceptable to read and write but not speak and listen? A man, not matter what his occupation or educational background, has political rights, but a woman, no matter how qualilified, does not have the same rights...If we do not understand the politics of the country we live in, we will not be able to understand conditions in our present society.

She pushed for absolute rights instead of women's rights based on education or maternal roles-which laid the groundwork for later feminist activism after World War II.

Speaking of World War II, the good wife and wise mother role carried forward throughout and into today. Motherhood and housewife roles remain highly valued, but they leave little room for self-development and work-family balance. A survey of female seniors in 561 Japanese universities in 1992 found women expected and didn't mind sexism at work. 91% said they don't mind being treated as "office flowers" and 25% considered that to be a woman's role (Thornton, 1992). This shows how strong the male-dominated view remained.

Modern Japanese Feminism

Today, young Japanese women postpone marriage. Intimate relationships with other women also increase in appeal-free from the motherhood association (Enns, 2011). The idea that a man should be dedicated to work and the good wife supporting him at home affects men in addition to women. Three-fifths of men between the ages of 25-35 remain unmarried. 53% of men in their 20s have never gone out with a woman. In contrast, 64% of American men claim to have had sex by the age of 20 (Homegrown, 2017). Women's withdrawal from relationships to focus on career shows how they have moved beyond being "office flowers" in the 1990s. However, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), World Economic Forum, and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Japanese women lag behind other developed countries in terms of labor participation and political representation. They have higher than average education rates, but many women don't return to work after having children (Japan, 2016). Children remains an all-in affair for many Japanese women, which explains why so many are postponing or foregoing marriage and expectations of motherhood marriage brings.

When asked why young men aren't looking for a girlfriend, they answer that it's too much trouble. Japan's social segregation by gender doesn't help matters. The combination of low self-esteem in men and fear of rejection by women opens the doors for teen idols, anime, sex dolls and sex pillow. Misogyny is a strange loop of love and hating because you love what you can't have. And that idea of possession remains a problem too. The tension between feminism, traditional ideas of good wife and wise mother, and men's views-which is a topic to itself-all add up to this trend.

Throughout all of this, the Japanese feminism movement worked. However, many of its leaders today are discouraged by how slow the progress over the past century has been despite the shift in marriage and the focus on career. Maternity harassment, sexual harassment, and employment discrimination remain real problems. Some progress is being made: there is greater acceptance of mothers returning to work and fathers taking on more child care responsibilities (Japan, 2016).

But the progress Japanese women have made toward equality remains tenuous. Misogyny and objectification of women remains rampant. Part of this is a result of culture. Japanese culture idealizes quiet, stoic endurance, which extends to sexual violence against women. They are expected to be Japanese and endure without complaint. Sexual harassment on commuter trains is an example. In the early 2000s, two-thirds of women surveyed reported being groped while riding crowded trains. In response, train companies introduced women only cars, but no other action was taken (Hayes, 2016).

Many Japanese women are victims of unwanted photographs, typically up-skirt photos on trains and other public places. Japanese cell phone manufacturers are even required to make cameras with audible shutter sounds meant to deter men from taking these photos of women in public places. All of this points to how a dominating, objectifying attitude toward women remains strong in Japanese culture. Despite efforts since the 1920s, oral birth control is still hard to get-doctors often prescribe low doses for one month at a time (Hayes, 2016). All of this extends from the traditional, deep-rooted view of women.

Manga and anime carry on this view in many stories. Many sexually explicit, male-focused manga are violent toward women. They show women as sex toys and many of the stories of these comedies focus on the loss of male virginity while reinforcing men's superior social status and women's traditional status. This was a problem when Ito studied images of women back in 1994. From my own observations, this still remains an issue within anime and manga.

In fact, feminist scholar Chizuko Ueno looks at the pay gap between men and women (men are paid 26.6% more in a 2013 OECD study), media, and these attitudes and writes:

We struggled, fought, but unfortunately were incapable of making real change.

Gendertrolling

Japan isn't alone in this problem, and the problem even extends onto the Internet in the form of gendertrolling. You are likely familiar with the word trolling, but I'll go ahead and define it- "disrupting a conversation or entire community by posting incendiary statements or stupid questions for the person's own amusement or because they have a quarrelsome personality." The word first appeared in the 1990s, and most trolls on the English-speaking web are white, male, and somewhat privileged (Mantilla, 2013). Now, gendertrolling is a little different. . It involves numerous people who are often coordinated and the attacks persist online and offline-sometimes for years. Usually happens in response to women speaking out about some form of sexism. I'll give you a few Western examples from Mantilla's (2013) paper.

Melissa McEwan in 2007, who runs a feminist blog Shakesville, had her address and other information published online and received rape and death threats.

Anita Sarkeesian saw this when she started a Kickstarter to fund a project to point out sexist representation of women in the video game community. She received rape and death threats. The gendertrolls made pornographic images of her being raped, tried to have her social media accounts suspended, and tried to disable her website. They also released her personal information, including home address.

In 2012, Zerlina Maxwell, on the FOX News show Hannity, spoke about how the focus on ending rape should start with men instead of women carrying guns to defend themselves. The rape and death threats rolled in. Maxwell said, "Do not feed the trolls' is really easy for people to say when you're not getting 100 rape threats, when you're not getting 100 death threats."

Sexual harassment, including gendertrolling, tries to keep gender boundaries in place-preventing women from competing with men at work and preventing women from feeling safe in public places without a male companion. Japan's problems with groping on subways and with inappropriate photos are good examples of this. Gendertrolling tries to keep these gender-boundaries in place online by attacking women who speak out online in male-dominated spaces, such as online video games. Not even Japanese women who serve in the Japanese government are safe from this problem. 52% report being targets of sexual harassment at least once (Osumi, 2015). The survey reports:

"Some respondents said they had been neglected or forced to buy cigarettes for their male coworkers, while others had endured taunts such as: "Why don't you strip?" or "You must get excited by being groped."

Some of these women work in Japanese legislators.

Feminism and misogyny are bound together. Misogyny results from women gaining some measure of equality and the perceived threat this can bring. Japanese women have come a long way from the Tokugawa Era and the Meiji Restoration, but many of the same problems back then continue today. Women in the United States still struggle with similar issues. Even when they are online, women have to face people who threaten them just for voicing an opinion or their experience.

Media adds to the pile. Manga and anime sometimes caters to sexist ideas, which only reinforces those ideas. Objectifying otherwise strong female characters through upskirt camera angles and other techniques that reduces them to sex objects encourages the thinking behind the problems women face. Yellow fever and orientalism, waifuism, and moe can all add to the headwinds.

Of course, feminism also has its own problem. Some activists look down upon women who want to be traditional wives and mothers. Women should have the freedom to choose this route if they want. In any case, with the issues of gendertrolling and continued pay inequality and continued objectification, Japanese women and women in general still do not have equal rights.
References
(2016) Japan Tries to Promote Women's Rights, but Cultural Norms Stand in the Way. World Politics Review. http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trend-lines/20172/japan-tries-to-promote-women-s-rights-but-cultural-norms-stand-in-the-way

(2017). Homegrown misogyny divides sexes in Japan. The Australian (National, Australia).

Enns, Carolyn (2011) On the rich tapestry of Japanese feminisms. Feminism and Psychology. 21 (4) 542-546.

Hayes, T. (2016). The Cultural Limits of Japanese Feminism. International Policy Digest, 3(6), 132-133

Hidari, Sachiko, McCormick, Ruth & Thompson, Bill (1979) Feminism in Japanese Cinema: An Interview with Sachiko Hidari. Cineaste 9 (3). 26-29.

Ito, K. (1994). Images of Women in Weekly Male Comic Magazines in Japan. Journal Of Popular Culture, 27(4), 81-95.

Kuo, Karen (2015) Japanese Women Are Like Volcanoes. Frontiers 36 (1) 58-89.

Mantilla, K. (2013). Gendertrolling: Misogyny Adapts to New Media. Feminist Studies, 39(2), 563.

Moerman, Max (2009). Demonology and Eroticism: Islands of Women in the Japanese Buddhist Imagination. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. 36 (2). 351-380

Molony, Barbara (2000) Women's Rights, Feminism, and Suffragism in Japan 1870-1925. Pacific Historical Review. 69 (4). 639-661.

Okin, Susan (1998) Feminism,. Women's Human Rights, and Cultural Differences. Hypatia. 13 (2) 32-52.

Osumi, M. (2015, August 14). Over 50% of assemblywomen in Japan have been sexually harassed, survey suggests. Japan Times.

Sasamoto-Collins, H. (2017) The Emperor's Sovereign Status and the Legal Construction of Gender in Early Meiji Japan. Journal of Japanese Studies 43 (2).

Sato, Kumiko (2004) How Information Technology Has (Not) Changed Feminism and Japanism: Cyberpunk in the Japanese Context. Comparative Literature Studies. 41 (3) 335-355.

Thornton, E. (1992). Japan: sexism OK with most coeds. Fortune, (4). 13.

Yamaguchi, T. (2014). "Gender Free" Feminism in Japan: A Story of Mainstreaming and Backlash. Feminist Studies, 40(3), 541-572.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Look at Japanese Feminism and Japanese Misogyny

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Women are the emissaries of hell; they cut off forever the seed of buddhahood. On the outside they have the faces of bodhisattvas, but on the inside they have the hearts of demons. -Buddhist Sutra A woman's talk does not go beyond one village. A smart woman ruins the castle.

# data[].attributes.headline
Article on the exclusion of BME women in 'mainstream feminism' 

# data[].attributes.subject
Article on the exclusion of BME women in 'mainstream feminism' 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
As a black feminist, I see how the wider movement fails women like my mother | Lola Okolosie

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lola Okolosie: Fighting Page 3 and online misogyny, while praiseworthy, overshadows the work of black and minority-ethnic groups. Feminism must become feminisms

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sojourner Truth Speech of 1851, "Ain't I a Woman"

# data[].attributes.headline
Aspects to be Weaved into Feminist Considerations

# data[].attributes.subject
Aspects to be Weaved into Feminist Considerations

# data[].attributes.headline
Muslim Feminist Jerin Arifa On Intersectional Feminism

# data[].attributes.subject
Muslim Feminist Jerin Arifa On Intersectional Feminism

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJZvI7m2Suc

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On 7 January this year, the alt-right insurgent Steve Bannon turned on his TV in Washington DC to watch the Golden Globes. The mood of the event was sombre. It was the immediate aftermath of multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault against film producer Harvey Weinstein, which he has denied. The women, whose outfits would normally have been elaborate and the subject of frantic scrutiny, wore plain and sober black. In the course of a passionate speech, Oprah Winfrey told the audience that "brutally powerful men" had "broken" something in the culture. These men had caused women to suffer: not only actors, but domestic workers, factory workers, agricultural workers, athletes, soldiers and academics. The fight against this broken culture, she said, transcended "geography, race, religion, politics and workplace".

Bannon, Donald Trump's former chief strategist, was one of 20 million Americans watching. In his view, the scene before him augured the beginning of a revolution "even more powerful than populism", according to his biographer Joshua Green. "It's deeper. It's primal. It's elemental. The long black dresses and all that - this is the Puritans. It's anti-patriarchy," Bannon declared. "If you rolled out a guillotine, they'd chop off every set of balls in the room ... Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn't juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch." He concluded: "The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo 10,000 years of recorded history."

Until very recently, "patriarchy" was not something rightwing men were even supposed to believe in, let alone dilate upon with such apocalyptic relish. It was the sort of word that, if uttered without irony, marked out the speaker as a very particular type of person - an iron-spined feminist of the old school, or the kind of ossified leftist who complained bitterly about the evils of capitalism. Even feminist theorists had left it behind.

Nevertheless, "patriarchy" has, in the past year or so, bloomed in common parlance and popular culture. Once you tune into it, you cannot escape it: it is emblazoned on banners and T-shirts; it is an unexpected recent addition to the vocabulary of the red-carpet interview; it is there in newspaper headlines, explaining everything from the Irish abortion vote to the recent murder of 10 people in Toronto in a van attack, allegedly by a violently misogynistic "incel" - a man who believes he has been denied a right to sex with women. Outside the anglophone world, the Spanish patriarcado has been getting a workout; so too the German Patriarchat, the Italian patriarcato and the French patriarcat. As the #MeToo campaign has grown, so has the use of "patriarchy". It has burst its way out of the attic of half-discarded concepts to greet a moment - one of fourth-wave feminist ferment - in which there is a newly urgent need to name what women are still struggling against.

Protesters outside the US embassy in London the day after Donald Trump's inauguration. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The resurgence of the term is all the more surprising when one considers the forces ranged against it. Many people would question the existence of something called "patriarchy" to begin with - pointing to the strides made in gender equality over the past century, and insisting that instances of sexism are individual and isolated, destined to fade further over time, rather than evidence of a persistent structure of inequality. There are others, meanwhile, who regard the term's very reappearance as another sign that #MeToo has "gone too far" - and see "patriarchy" as the hysterical war cry of McCarthyite feminists determined to hunt down men who are guilty of nothing more than past behaviours once considered perfectly acceptable.

For some sceptical liberals, there is a resistance to the ideological implications of grand concepts such as "patriarchy" (or " neoliberalism "), which are seen as oversimplifications of a more complex reality. Among gender studies academics, it is no longer in wide use. Once a term debated in endless articles, conferences and books, many theorists now regard it is as too blunt and monolithic to capture the nuances of oppression. Paradoxically, some on the right have enthusiastically taken up the term - regarding it not as an evil to be stamped out, but as a "natural" difference between the genders, ordained by God or biology, to be protected against rampaging feminism.

But for those who have lost a basic trust in the forward motion of human progress - or who were born too recently to have known it - "patriarchy" seems exactly the word to explain the continued existence of pervasive, seemingly ineradicable inequality. The moment of #MeToo brought this into relief: it revealed to many feminists that despite all those years of working hard, of leaning in, of waiting till unfairness gradually ebbed away, of absorbing and internalising sexism, of building starry careers or else toiling away in menial jobs in the hope that their children would have it better, you could still be pinned to a bed or cornered at a party or groped, or leered at or catcalled by a man - simply because of your woman's body.

In this moment, the concept of "patriarchy" has offered itself as the invisible mechanism that connects a host of seemingly isolated and disparate events, intertwining the experience of women of vastly different backgrounds, race and culture, and ranging in force from the trivial and personal to the serious and geopolitical. For it allows us to ask, according to the philosopher Amia Srinivasan, "whether there is something in common between the Weinstein affair, the election of Trump, the plight of women garment workers in Asia and women farm workers in North America, and the Indian rape epidemic. It allows people to ask whether some machine is at work that connects all the experiences they're having with all the experiences others are having." The return of "patriarchy" raises the question: does the naming and understanding of this invisible mechanism offer the key to its destruction?

For much of human history, the persistence of male domination was so much part of the oxygen of life that patriarchy was not even identified as a concept - unlike democracy, autocracy or oligarchy, whose relative merits were vigorously debated by the Greeks. The notion that male supremacy was "natural" was self-fulfilling, since those who wrote the laws, the poems, the religious books, the philosophy, the history, the medical treatises and the scientific texts were, very largely, men writing for the benefit of men. As Jane Austen's character Anne Elliot says: "Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands." You might even say that patriarchy's particular power is its capacity to make itself as invisible as possible; it tries very hard not to draw attention to the means of its endurance.

But if you look at the world with patriarchy in view, you might see how some intelligent, successful and apparently assertive women fail to leave men who humiliate them and monitor their every move (such are the hallmarks of "coercive control", now a criminal offence). You might see why even apparently liberal organisations, even those run by women, still have a gender pay gap. Or why about 80 women a year, in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, are murdered by a male partner or ex-partner. Why women do more childcare and housework than men, and why this domestic "second shift" has until recently been completely ignored by economists. Why the clothing of Angela Merkel and Theresa May is avidly critiqued, but that of Emmanuel Macron is not. Why there are so few meaningful female characters in films. Some concepts are like a pair of spectacles that allow otherwise invisible or inexplicable things to be seen with sudden sharpness: "patriarchy" is one of them.

The word literally means "rule of the father", from the ancient Greek. There are many different ideas about its extent and force. Some people have used it to describe patterns derived from the structure of the family; to others, it is an entire system of oppression built on misogyny and the exploitation and brutalisation of women. It is not simple, in fact, to produce a concise definition of patriarchy. But at its simplest, it conveys the existence of a societal structure of male supremacy that operates at the expense of women - rather in the way that "white supremacy" conveys the existence of a societal structure that operates at the expense of black people.

Part of the idea of "patriarchy" is that this oppression of women is multilayered. It operates through inequalities at the level of the law and the state, but also through the home and the workplace. It is upheld by powerful cultural norms and supported by tradition, education and religion. It reproduces itself endlessly through these norms and structures, which are themselves patriarchal in nature; and thus it has a way of seeming natural or inevitable, or else, in a liberal context, it is obscured by piecemeal advances in gender equality. Because it offers the idea of a structure of power relations, rather than a series of specific sexist acts, "patriarchy" accommodates the idea that not all men enthusiastically uphold it or benefit equally from it; and that some women may, on the other hand, do a great deal towards supporting it. It also allows for the fact that however much we might loathe it, we all, perforce, participate in it.

Only "patriarchy" seems to capture the peculiar elusiveness of gendered power - the idea that it does not reside in any one site or institution, but seems spread throughout the world. Only "patriarchy" seems to express that it is felt in the way individual examples of gender inequality interact, reinforcing each other to create entire edifices of oppression. Take the fact that only about 20% of rapes and sexual assaults in England and Wales are reported to the police, and that of those only a tiny proportion - 7.5% in 2015 - results in a conviction. Why should that be? The most immediate reason is that only a few are brought to trial - a fact that, in isolation, illuminates very little. But the concept of patriarchy helps to reveal that such a trial is merely the pinnacle of a structure supported on myriad props. These props might include all kinds of things without obvious connection: a legal system historically designed by men; the lingering misrecognition of rape as simply an excess of male desire; a police force carrying a legacy of sexism; the cultural and religious shaming of sexually active women; the objectification of women's bodies; pornography; the fact that women in general are discouraged from speaking out (and if they do, they may expect baleful consequences, as Mary Beard has shown in her book Women and Power). That is before you scrutinise the act of rape itself: for some feminists, sexual violence is so clearly a means of controlling women that it is not only an outrage often perpetrated under patriarchy, but its very underpinning.

Once you see the world through the lenses of "patriarchy", the thought naturally arises: what would the world be like if it weren't there? Some feminists have argued that if women gain equal rights in society, patriarchy will be at least sufficiently tempered. Others have argued that even if equality were achieved, patriarchy would still exist, because human institutions - political, legal, educational, cultural - are themselves, in their bones, patriarchal structures. But it says something about the nature of this inquiry that it has most vividly been answered by writers of speculative fiction. In the 19th-century novel Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman imagined a women-only society: one of calm justice, efficient agriculture and comfortable clothing with lots of pockets. In Naomi Alderman's novel The Power, published last year, women, through a kink of evolution, gain superior physical strength over men. A bloody revolution ensues, and there is no hint that the resulting reversal of patriarchy - matriarchy - will be any less oppressive than what it has replaced. It seems to be a zero-sum game.

"Patriarchy" is not a stable concept. It has fallen in and out of fashion, flourishing at moments of feminist renewal. Nevertheless, feminism began without it. Mary Wollstonecraft was clear, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that there was such as thing as "the tyranny of men", but it was another 60 years before the term "patriarchy" was adopted as something like a theory of social relations.

By the mid-19th century, the world was coming to seem older, bigger and more unstable than it had done before. In 1859, Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published. Marx's Das Kapital would follow in 1867. At the same time, work by anthropologists and ancient historians was revealing that there were, and had been, family structures, legal systems and whole societies that looked radically different from those in modern Paris, Berlin or London. Industrialisation and urbanisation were underway in Europe, especially in Britain; women were rapidly entering the workforce.

Two years after On the Origin of Species, and six years before Das Kapital, a Swiss jurist and classicist called Johann Jakob Bachofen published a book whose influence remains nearly as pervasive - even though hardly anyone has heard of it now, its substantive claims have been repudiated, and it has never been fully translated into English from its original German. It was taken up strongly by Friedrich Engels; it deeply interested Sigmund Freud; and its theories were absorbed by early archaeologists and prehistorians. The book was called Das Mutterrecht ("Mother Right"), and its grand theory was that, in a distant prehistoric era, the father's role in begetting children had not been yet recognised, and women (and mother goddesses) held power in the world.

This highly speculative account of a matriarchy simultaneously birthed the idea of "patriarchy" as a historically contingent, manmade, societal structure that had, according to Bachofen, eventually superseded matriarchy. His method involved close readings of Greek literature and some contemporary anthropological studies. According to his interpretation of Aeschylus's Oresteia, for example, Orestes's acquittal for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, on the grounds that she was not a parent but only a "container" for his father's seed, echoed the moment when the patriarchy established itself - when "the Apollonian age [emerged] out of the ruins of mother right". Many academics would now argue that such myths are not really echoes of real matriarchal societies - but instead operated, as Mary Beard put it, "to justify the existence of the patriarchy, as charter myths for why men run things".

It was Virginia Woolf who first pulled the idea of 'patriarchy' out of the realm of theory and into the zone of experience. Photograph: George C Beresford/Getty Images

For Bachofen, matriarchy and patriarchy were opposites: dark versus light, "the bloody law of the earth" set against "the pure celestial power of the sun". His vision of the elementally opposed "female" and "male" has been hugely influential. The idea of an earthbound, essentially non-rational femininity has sometimes been claimed by feminists; in a very different way, you can hear the echoes of the rhetoric, roughly filtered through Nietzsche and Jung, in the statements of rightwing male supremacists of today, especially those who speak of the " chaos " of the feminine. Bachofen himself was no feminist. The idea of the Amazons - mythical female warriors - particularly disturbed him. They represented "an extreme and decadent form of gynecocracy ... man-hating, man-killing, bellicose virgins", he wrote.

When the term "patriarchy" started to circulate in this new formulation, it opened up new avenues of thought on the left. Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, drew deeply on Bachofen in order to argue that patriarchy was a crucial factor in the emergence of capitalism. For him, the arrival of patriarchy - which was associated with the recognition of fatherhood, the development of monogamous marriage and inheritable private property - represented "the world-historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children".

It took a female thinker, and a feminist, to pull "patriarchy" out of the realm of theory and into the zone of experience. Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas (1938) set "patriarchy" to work on the reality of her own circumstances. For her, it described the dynamics within families like hers - in which the father held economic power and authority, boys were trained for public life and girls were debarred from either a serious education or the opportunity to earn a living. The battle lines were drawn "between the victims of the patriarchal system and the patriarchs". In other words, it was "the daughters against the fathers".

Woolf did not here write of "patriarchy" as a social structure that went beyond the boundaries of the bourgeois household. Nor did she have time for feminine essentialism: she predicted that the opportunity for women to amass capital and property on equal terms as men would mean that women could change "from being the victims of the patriarchal system ... to being the champions of the capitalist system". She expanded: "Behind us lies the patriarchal system: the private house, with its nullity, its immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed." It is an ambiguous picture: she shows little admiration for the capitalist world she describes. And yet in her formulation - an idea that some later feminists would find themselves echoing - the "creative destruction" of capitalism had the capacity to leave patriarchy behind.

In the late 1960s and early 70s, amid the ferment of revolutionary thought on the campuses of western Europe and north America, a new generation of feminist activists emerged. It was clear to them that oppression continued to bear down on women despite their increased access to the rights that Woolf's generation fought for - access to education, the vote and the workplace. It was also obvious that existing theories of power were not equipped to explain this oppression: women had been of little interest as subjects for economics, history and sociology, with questions of gender inequality either ignored entirely or regarded as a natural byproduct of societal development. For the feminists of the second wave, part of the work was to bring women into the light. Oppression could be eradicated only if it could be identified, understood and effectively treated, quite possibly with radical or revolutionary medicine.

"Patriarchy" at first provided the most useful focus for this work. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) was an early text that attempted to flesh out "patriarchy" into society's "most fundamental concept of power". For her, patriarchy was everywhere; it was "the most pervasive ideology of our culture". Even ordinary, apparently harmless social norms were in fact tools of oppression, according to her analysis: romantic love, for example, was simply a means of emotionally manipulating the female by the male, tricking her into subservience. Female compliance was also ensured by force - by rape. Women were socialised into pleasing, flattering, entertaining and gratifying men. Millett called the assumed birthright of male dominance "a most ingenious form of 'interior colonisation'," which was "sturdier than any form of segregation, and more rigorous than class stratification, more uniform, and certainly more enduring".

The feminist Rosalind Coward, author of Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations (1983), one of the weightier academic tomes on the subject, recalls going to "endless conferences and meetings" in the 1970s and 80s where the idea of the patriarchy was discussed, analysed and thoroughly broken down. Her own book sets out some of the most pressing questions, not least the conundrum of where it actually came from. "Patriarchy offers itself as an account of the history of sexual relations, but at a certain point the same question has to be asked: why was it men who took control and what were the interests thus served? These questions lead back with an unerring certainty to the same divisions: are there natural sexual differences in which the sexes have distinct interests? Or are sexual dispositions produced by the patriarchal structure itself?" She had hit on a problem of circular thinking in relation to patriarchy - if it had emerged from some kind of a pre-patriarchal society, then surely the patriarchy would have been required in order to produce it in the first place.

"Patriarchy" sprouted dozens of reformulations and refinements as feminists attempted to theorise it into a coherent system of domination. The radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon took a hardline view: she saw patriarchy as inscribed into the very structures of the liberal state. "Men against women" was precisely the fuel that kept society, as it is currently constituted, running. By contrast, the African American feminist bell hooks resisted the notion that the primary conflict in society was one of "men against women", which seemed inherent in radical definitions of "patriarchy". For her, it could be simply defined as "institutionalised sexism". In order to end it, everyone, male and female alike, must "let go of sexist thoughts and action".

African American feminist writer bell hooks. Photograph: bell hooks Institute

Lived reality threw up problems with the concept. Experience tells us that some men are oppressed more than some women. Not all women are oppressed in the same way. Writers such as hooks pointed out that for African American women, the family was not necessarily the site of oppression it was for white people, representing a place of possible refuge from the traumas of white supremacy. The kind of workplaces available to many black women, too, were not of the liberating kind accessible to educated white women.

Queer theorist Judith Butler critiqued MacKinnon's universalising view of patriarchy on similar grounds, arguing that it involved "erasures" of other forms of subtle and layered oppression; it was a kind of "theoretical imperialism". Butler also sought to question the "naturalness" of gender. There were many possible categories of gendered and sexual practice, she argued, not simply the binary definitions that dominated the culture. And for psychoanalytically inclined feminist thinkers such as Jacqueline Rose, "the notion that all men are a category in opposition to all women breaks down because not all men are men," she told me. "That is, not all men embody the kind of masculinity that men are supposed to inhabit."

The eventual rejection by many feminists of the usefulness of "patriarchy" as a fine-grained analytic concept coincided with a general diminuendo in feminist debate in the 1990s and early 2000s - a period later identified by the feminist Beatrix Campbell as a time of " neoliberal neopatriarchy ". Rapid globalisation and a culture of hyperindividualism, Campbell argued in The End of Equality (2013), had in fact led to yet more extreme forms of oppression, citing brutal conditions for labouring women in Mexico, the disproportionate number of female foetuses aborted in India and everywhere a working week "institutionalised in the interests of men unencumbered by duties of care". While feminism had not died, during this period, it had certainly withered, she wrote.

A few years earlier, in her book The Aftermath of Feminism (2008), Angela McRobbie had questioned her own initial enthusiasm for the symbols of the "third-wave feminism" of that period: Sex and the City; "girl power"; pole-dancing classes. In those days, to throw around the word "patriarchy" - when many people assumed that moral and economic progress were destined to eradicate inequality - would have seemed eccentric, misguided or plain mad. Women, or so it seemed, had never had it so good.

Patriarchy is nimble and lithe. Its margins of operation always seem to be expanding. Feminists have naturally tended to arrange their battle lines in front of the aspect of oppression that they have regarded as the most pressing. If "patriarchy" has returned as an idea in public debate, it is because feminism has returned with renewed vigour; because inequality has not been eradicated.

In 1990, the feminist Sylvia Walby crisply laid out six areas of patriarchal oppression in her book Theorizing Patriarchy; they still seem to be ticking along nicely. In the home, women still do most of the domestic labour. In the workplace, a legal right to equal pay has not resulted in the eradication of the gender pay gap. At the level of the state, women are underrepresented nearly everywhere in the world in parliaments, legislatures, the military and other bodies. In terms of male violence, the charity Rape Crisis estimates that in Britain, 11 rapes are carried out or attempted every hour of every day. Women and men are still judged differently when it comes to sex. And the "patriarchal gaze" is still strong in education, religion, culture and the media. And so, for feminists right now, the uses of "patriarchy" are greater than its analytic flaws; it allows feminists to perceive the gap between the status quo and what they would like to achieve. "If patriarchy weren't effective, we wouldn't need feminism; if it were totally effective, we wouldn't have feminism," Jacqueline Rose told me.

Feminists of an older generation note that the popular revival of "patriarchy" has not (yet) been accompanied by the intense debate and academic theorising that flowered around it the 1970s. It is a slogan and a popular rallying cry rather than an analytic tool. "What I don't like about it," said Mary Beard, "is that it is convenient and simple. I don't really like 'misogyny' either, for the same reason. It's no more a tangible 'thing' than capitalism. Saying 'crush the patriarchy' has a nice ring, but it doesn't contain any political analysis."

While it is true that lots of intangible things are pressed into service as useful abstractions for helping us understand the world, some feminists still worry that "patriarchy" is in danger of being oversimplified in the course of being co-opted into public debate. "It is now seemingly used almost interchangeably with sexism," Rosalind Coward said, "and it certainly doesn't seem to be accompanied by a discussion about where it came from." Jacqueline Rose told me: "It's used as a call-out phrase, as if it explained everything. It's fine to use it as a tool, as long as you don't mistake it for a complete description of how the world is organised."

But then, perhaps the revival of "patriarchy" is a bellwether for today's feminism, which is presently more concerned with action than theory. The concept has survived its biggest theoretical challenge - that of intersectionality, which argues that "patriarchy" universalises and oversimplifies the subtle realities of oppression - because it offers a description of the world that many people recognise, and that unites the many people who want to fight against it. It is particularly suited to today's fast-moving, hyper-connected digital feminism, where immediate, personal connections can be made in an instant between feminists across the world and radicalising work done in a moment.

"Patriarchy" is also deeply energising to those who use it. There is a certain relief in giving a name to the affliction. It has a satisfying ring of old-fashioned radicalism about it, and it comes with a sharp flavouring of conflict. "Patriarchy" is a battle cry. That is not surprising: the internet has enabled the rapid expansion of feminist campaigning, but also the deep and sometimes violent radicalisation of those who fear and hate it. A reaction against the new feminism has arrived almost simultaneously, as the discontents of disgruntled and unsettled men are stirred and stoked online, in the so-called manosphere. Cynical politicians crusading against "political correctness", such as Trump, have fed off this baleful energy. In this clamorous world, "patriarchy" has become "the patriarchy", a further simplification that makes it seem even more crude and concrete - less of an invisible mechanism, more of a statue to be smashed.

One might reasonably ask whether the patriarchy is truly in any danger, as Steve Bannon fears. It is easier to topple patriarchs, as Susan Faludi pointed out in the wake of Weinstein, than patriarchy. Powerful men who have been called out by #MeToo have left the room, but the room itself still looks very much the same. (Some of the men, too, look very much as if they will be returning to the room quite soon.) If anything can unravel "the rule of the father", it is likely to be the gradual shift in the way gender and sexuality are being understood. New ways of bringing up children outside traditional family structures will chip away at it. So will the rising generation of bold young feminists who have not internalised oppression like their elders, and who are calling out sexism and misogyny where they see it.

But Bannon can relax. As Mary Beard said recently: "Patriarchy has had several thousand years of practice - of course it's good at it. It's very good at bolstering its own sexist values." If a horde of angry leading women did take a guillotine to the testicles of Harvey Weinstein, patriarchy would survive. The word "patriarchy" ought to be a reminder that Weinstein and his ilk are the symptom, not the disease - but it is easier to tackle individuals than structures, signs rather than causes.

At the moment - although the picture varies wildly across the globe - feminists are increasingly using the tool of "patriarchy" to recognise the subtle depth of the forces that keep oppression in place, from the expectations about the behaviour of women in the workplace to the way they are portrayed in fiction. It will be harder to unravel the effect of this cultural inheritance than it was to get the vote. As Max Weber observed, it is the very longevity of patriarchal traditions and norms that serve to prop it up - "the belief in the inviolability of that which has existed from time out of mind". The eradication of patriarchy looks like a task of enormous complexity; when it is smashed, it will take a lot down with it. And so the patriarchs - from the bully in the White House to the bully in your workplace - are still in charge. For now.
Main illustration by Nathalie Lees

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The age of patriarchy: how an unfashionable idea became a rallying cry for feminism today

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The long read : A term that was derided and abandoned a decade ago has come roaring back to life

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How feminists in South Korea paved the way for #MeToo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
My hijab has nothing to do with oppression. It's a feminist statement - video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hanna Yusuf asks why a simple piece of clothing is seen as the very epitome of oppression

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I am a white feminist.

I want all people everywhere to be able to live lives free from oppression. This is what I, and other feminists, work towards. We have lofty goals, but we also have enthusiasm, stamina and faith in our cause.

My intentions are good and my heart is, as they say, in the right place. All of our hearts are in the right places. All of our intentions are good.

But intent isn't magic, and sometimes the ways that we carry out our intentions cause more harm than they do good.

Here in the West, we are frequently schooled on just how lucky we are to live the way that we do. We are often reminded of how wonderful it is to be in a nominally-secular country, a country that promotes equality between men and women. We are taught to pity the women, those other women, living in other places, who do not enjoy the same rights that we do. We are taught to be thankful that we are not these women. On the surface, these lessons seem to be fairly innocuous -- after all, it's a demonstrable fact that we in the West, especially white women in the West, face less oppression than non-western women of color. When we take a closer look at these statements, however, their core message becomes clear: our culture is better. We are more enlightened, more rational, and more civilized. Other cultures should strive harder to be more like us.

We live with this strange sort of racism that tells us that oppression for any reason is wrong, but that only us white folks understand how to successfully end oppression.

We, as white feminists, are really not so different from the missionaries of several generations ago. We want to travel to far-off, dreamily exoticized lands and bring the light of the truth to the people there. Like the missionaries, we assume that we will bring wonderful, life-changing revelations to these people. We imagine ourselves standing before a crowd of dark-skinned women, their mouths little round Os of amazement as we reveal to them that no, they in fact do not have to wear a hijab. We think with delight of how appreciative these women will be, how they will fall about our feet with thanks for the truth that we've brought them.

We imagine how wonderful, how fulfilling it will be to know that we have saved these women.

What we do not take into consideration are if and how they want us to save them.

This isn't about whether or not women of color, specifically non-western women of color, face more discrimination and oppression than white western feminists -- the fact that they do is pretty incontestable. This isn't about whether or not white women should speak critically about the various ways that women of color are marginalized -- this discussion is important, and I'm grateful that it exists. This isn't even about whether or not we should work to better the lives of marginalized people -- of course we should. This isn't about any of those things. What this is about is agency.

As Teju Cole said in his essay The White-Savior Industrial Complex, "There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them."

I cannot emphasize this point enough -- the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them. The idea that, before we do anything else, the best and most important work that we can do is to listen to marginalized people, give them a platform from which they can reach a wider audience, and use our platforms to help amplify their voices. This is the real work that we should be doing. Anything else -- any other way of "freeing" women of color -- is at best condescending and colonialist and at worst downright harmful and dangerous.

There are so many examples of white folks charging to the rescue without considering how those they are rushing to help might feel about their "rescue." Take FEMEN, for example, the feminist group that tried to "free" Muslim women by organizing the International Topless Jihad Day, during which they held protests (topless, naturally) in front of mosques. Though Ukrainian feminist group claimed to be protesting on behalf of oppressed Muslim women, numerous Muslim women felt that their voices were being co-opted, and disagreed with both FEMEN's message and their tactics. There are many, many western women who will tell you that Muslim women are forced to wear the hijab and that they need to be freed from the shackles of their oppressive religion, but few seem to consider the fact that telling women that they should not wear a hijab (or even ripping the scarf off a woman's head, as one Quebec woman recently did) is to continue to disempower an already marginalized group.

We could also look at Mindy Budgor, the white American woman who became a Maasai warrior, in spite of the fact that warrior status is reserved only for men. She was championed for breaking down age-old barriers; many felt that now that Budgor had become a warrior, it would pave the way for other women, specifically Maasai women, to do the same. Unfortunately, many Maasai didn't agree. Rarin Ole Sein, a Maasai woman, called Bugdor's stunt, Insulting to the many Maasai women and Maasai Culture in general. Especially all the brilliant women working towards equality for themselves and girls. As far as I know Maasai women don't become warriors and don't want to be warriors. But if they want to and choose to ... they don't need an 'outsider' to come fight their fight for them. We can fight our own battles ourselves thank you!"

A third example would be the western world's treatment of Malala Yusufzai. And just to be clear here, I want to say, up front, that I think that Malala is absolutely incredible, and her story is worth sharing. But that doesn't change the fact that what the western world seems to love most about Malala's saga is the fact that her life was saved by civilized white people. We love to pat ourselves on the back for the fact that we took her away from her barbaric homeland and healed her in one of our bright, gleamingly white hospitals. We feel so good about Malala's story, because it's one of the very few things that might convince us that the war in Afghanistan was somehow justified. And yet, as Assed Baig rightly points out, " The West has denied more girls an education via their missiles than the Taliban has by their bullets. " But we don't talk about those other little girls, the ones killed by American drone strikes. We don't talk about the girls struck by stray American bullets. We don't want to think about the collateral damage. We just want to believe that, somehow, our colonialist intervention was right.

This is the white feminist savior complex. This is white western feminism. We are not, as a whole, bad people, and our goals are commendable. We want all people everywhere to be able to live free from oppression. We want equality and fairness. Where we often stumble, however, is in the examination of our own privilege. Because it's uncomfortable, isn't it? Especially in a movement built on the idea that women in general suffer from misogyny, inequality, and various forms of oppression, it can be incredibly difficult to look at ourselves and say, "We are so much better off than others. Although as women we are all marginalized in some way, non-western women of color are more marginalized than we are. We fought to have a voice, our own unique voice, and these women deserve the same thing -- to be able to speak for themselves rather than having someone else do it for them. Our white privilege colors our perception in ways that are hurtful to other people, and even when our intentions are good, our actions can be problematic. The only way to get out of this trap -- and, as feminists and anti-oppression activists, we should very much want to get out of this trap -- is to humbly listen to women of color when they speak. We need to set our egos aside, stop loudly proclaiming that we're not that type of white feminist, close our oh-so-knowledgeable mouths and

What we need to do most of all is stop making it all about us. When we cry out that we're not like those other bad white feminists, we are making it about us. When we ask women of color to take the time to sit down and educate us on the specific issues that they face and how we can be better allies, rather than doing the research ourselves by reading blogs and articles and books by women of color, we are making it about us. When we ask why women of color need to be so divisive and whine that we're all in this together, we are making it about us. When we decide to swoop in and play the hero without asking what type of help is, in fact, needed,

So with that in mind, I've put together both a list of 101 articles about race and privilege and a reading list of blogs by smart, thoughtful western women of color who write brilliantly about race and intersectionality. I am acutely aware of the fact that I am a privileged white person talking about race, and know that I'm talking about things that are outside of my experience -- it's incredibly important that you take everything I say as secondary to what people of color have to say on these topics. Please take some time to read what their writing, try to take everything in with an open heart, and keep in mind that this isn't about you. And then, once you've done that, ask what the best thing that you, as an ally, can do to help.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I am a white feminist. I want all people everywhere to be able to live lives free from oppression. This is what I, and other feminists, work towards. We have lofty goals, but we also have enthusiasm, stamina and faith in our cause.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
eminism, to quote bell hooks, is for everybody. It's a simple enough statement. Utopian in its vision, it has however proved, for the very constituency who should have been most receptive to its premise - feminists - contentious. A simmering argument within the movement, along with debates about how far it has included working-class, LGBTQI and disabled women, has concerned race.

It was there when in 1851 abolitionist Sojourner Truth asked the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio, "Ain't I a Woman?". There she was demanding that white feminists include black women's struggles in the fight for women's rights. It was there, too, in Audre Lorde's open letter to Mary Daly in which she wrote that "the history of white women who are unable to hear black women's words, or to maintain dialogue with us, is long and discouraging".

The very mention of the word 'white' raises hackles rather than serving as a catalyst for introspection

It is a reality actor and activist Emma Watson acknowledged this week. To have a prominent British feminist question, as the result of a black woman's words, "What are the ways I have benefited from being white?" and consider how she is implicated, as all white people are, in white supremacy by asking, "In what ways do I support and uphold a system that is structurally racist?", has felt almost unthinkable.

Over five years ago Chitra Nagarajan and I, both members of an activist group called Black Feminist, wrote: "The feminist story belongs to all women everywhere but that is not the impression you would receive from the mainstream media, where it seems that all feminists are concerned about is a particular type of woman." That woman was invariably white and middle-class. We were, along with our fellow black feminist activist Reni Eddo-Lodge (whose book Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race sparked Watson's epiphany), merely stating the blindingly obvious.

Then the debates were reignited by a gushing interview between Caitlin Moran and Lena Dunham in which the former failed to ask about the very blatant whitewashing of New York in Dunham's hit show, Girls. Moran, when asked if she had addressed "the utter lack of people of colour in Girls", replied: " Nope. I literally couldn't give a shit about it." That's caustic wit for you.

From here the dispute quickly moved on to " intersectionality " (which tells us that inequalities such as class, sexuality, disability, gender and race do not exist in isolation but rather crisscross and therefore compound injustice). It was deemed too cumbersome a word and concept to really apply to feminism. For those of us arguing the relevance of the theory to black women's lives, it merely demonstrated the unwillingness of the white feminists we tried to engage to see beyond themselves.

The very mention of the word "white" raises hackles rather than serving as a catalyst for the kind of introspection demonstrated by Watson. It is something Watson herself admits she was guilty of at first - writing that when she heard herself being called a "white feminist" she wondered, "What was the need to define me - or anyone else for that matter - as a feminist by race? What did this mean? Was I being called a racist? Was the feminist movement more fractured than I had understood?" In short she panicked and revealed the ways in which whiteness will protect itself rather than engage with the substance of what is being said. Watson should be commended for beginning a journey into how her whiteness makes life far easier for her to navigate.

It is a privilege that operates in a thousand little ways that range from the seemingly insignificant - " glasses that aren't designed for black features", to the grotesque - disproportionate numbers of BAME deaths following police restraint, or our higher rates of poverty and homelessness.

There is an overwhelming desire to ignore the material differences white skin - even when you are a woman - affords people in a world where whiteness is still seen as the norm against which all else can be judged. Why else the balking at being called a "white feminist" if not for the fact that it felt shocking to be "raced" in the way that the "black man walking down the street", or "the Asian girl with ribbons in her hair" is daily. Race, for those white feminists, was something they did not have to think about, and trying to make them do so only resulted in the focus being shifted to their hurt feelings - merely more centring of whiteness.

Dismantling racism can only begin to happen if many more white people are willing to do their share of the work. That doesn't mean pointing the finger at those racists over there (insert the north of England, the American south or whatever other area you seek to stereotype and dismiss). Shifting the guilt on to others is just another way of deferring the important. White people, feminists and non-feminists, need to be asking themselves the same questions Watson has. In what ways do you benefit from being white? At least that's a start.

Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and writer focusing on race, politics, education and feminism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Emma Watson's willingness to face the truth about race is refreshing | Lola Okolosie

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
eminism, to quote bell hooks, is for everybody. It's a simple enough statement. Utopian in its vision, it has however proved, for the very constituency who should have been most receptive to its premise - feminists - contentious. A simmering argument within the movement, along with debates about how far it has included working-class, LGBTQI and disabled women, has concerned race.

# data[].attributes.body
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
We should all be feminists | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | TEDxEuston

# data[].attributes.body
Poetry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Audre Lorde "A Woman Speaks" - Reading at Amerika Haus Berlin 1984

# data[].attributes.body
Black British Feminism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Feminist Review Black British Feminisms - Introduction and Keynote

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Feminist Review annual panel, co-hosted with the Centre for Feminist Research (Goldsmiths College), supported the launch of the issue 'Black British Feminisms' (11 December 2014), edited by Joan Anim-Addo, Yasmin Gunaratnam and Suzanne Scafe Welcome to the launch by Sara Ahmed (Goldsmiths), with introduction and chairing Suzanne Scafe (London South Bank University).

# data[].attributes.body
Sara Ahmed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In my first ever blog (not that long ago, but already it feels like a long time ago!) I created a list. We might call this a list of the tendencies that feminist killjoys share, or a list of points that feminist killjoys tend to make (if feminists have to sharpen our tools just to get through the walls of perception, no wonder we tend to be heard as sharp!).

I suggested that you might be interested in a blog on feminist killjoys if you as a feminist killjoy tend to do x. One of these tendencies relate to citation. Feminist killjoys " will point out when men cite men about men as a learned social habit that is diminishing (ie. most or usual citational practice)."

I am of course describing this feminist killjoy tendency in my own terms here. But so many of my feminist killjoy experiences within the academy relate to the politics of citation: I would describe citation as a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies.

These citational structures can form what we call disciplines. I was once asked to contribute to a sociology course, for example, and found that all the core readings were by male writers. I pointed this out and the course convener implied that "that" was simply a reflection of the history of the discipline. Well: this is a very selective history! The reproduction of a discipline can be the reproduction of these techniques of selection, ways of making certain bodies and thematics core to the discipline, and others not even part.

I have noticed as well that these citational practices can occur even when the topic is one that feminists have written extensively about. I recently attended a conference in which there was a panel on reproductive justice, a topic that feminists have written rather extensively about, and two of the three papers were entirely framed around the work of male philosophers! Or take the case of scholarship on the body. Feminists have been writing about the body (and critiquing mind-body dualisms) for well over a century. But how often have I heard utterances in which such-and-such male theorist is identified as the origin of the turn to the body!

Indeed men can even cite only men when critiquing male privilege, as we can see here:

I also stated that this citational structure is "most or usual citational practice." And I think within feminist and gender studies, the problem does not disappear. Even when feminists cite each other, there is still a tendency to frame our own work in relation to a male intellectual tradition. And there is certainly an expectation that you will recognise your place through giving your allegiance or love to this or that male theorist.

I mentioned this problem in my earlier blog post: "Creating Feminist Paths".

I have noticed when giving talks or hearing other female academics giving talks how often the first question is 'how does what you are saying relate to such and such a male theorist?' as a way of slotting you into an established male intellectual genealogy. I think it is hard to convey how this works in the abstract; but it's a style of questioning (where you almost become "the but" of a rebuttable, but what about, but what about) and you learn to hear the trouble they have in hearing you.

We are not just talking about citation within academic contexts. We are talking about what I think of as screening techniques: how certain bodies take up spaces by screening out the existence of others. If you are screened out (by virtue of the body you have) then you simply do not even appear or register to others. You might even have to become insistent, wave your arms, even shout, just to appear. And then of course how you appear (as being insistent) means you still tend not to be heard.

When we think this question "who appears?" we are asked a question about how spaces are occupied by certain bodies who get so used to their occupation that they don't even notice it. They are comfortable, like a body that sinks into a chair that has received its shape over time. To question who appears is to become the cause of discomfort. It is almost as if we have a duty not to notice who turns up and who doesn't. Just noticing can get in the way of an occupation of space.

When I think back to my own experience as an academic many of my most uncomfortable moments have been as a result of asking this question: who appears? And: who does not appear? There was one conference on Australian feminism for example, when only white women were invited as speakers. Hey: I was used to this, you come to expect this, and I didn't say anything. Whiteness is wearing.

But then many of those speakers began talking about native title. They did so without referring to any Indigenous scholars; indeed they were talking about native title almost entirely in relation to the European philosophical tradition (Derrida, Delueze etc.) There was no discussion of the politics of that framing; no discussion of whiteness; or of what it means to speak from the position of occupying stolen land. When I pointed this out, it caused quite an upset. It became very uncomfortable. And then a special issue of a journal was published (again with all or only white non-Indigenous feminists) and the introduction stressed how Australian feminism was "good" with questions of cultural difference. Up against it, you come up against it. The wall keeps its place so it is you that becomes sore.

I am obviously giving my own account here, told from my point of view. But I want in this blog to think about as well as through these situations.

I am sharing below some paragraphs from the conclusion of On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. I will develop these arguments in Living a Feminist Life and will blog more about the politics of citation as I go along.

--------------

When the restrictions governing who can occupy a category become explicit you are noticing what is around you, what gathers, but what does not ordinarily come into view. When you realise that the apparently open spaces of academic gatherings are restricted, you notice the restriction: you also notice how those restrictions are either kept out of view or defended if they come into view. Over and over again, it is revealed to me: this institutional lesson, which is also a life lesson, of coming up against a category in the very attempt to make the restrictions more explicit. How many times have I had male colleagues defending all male reading lists, all male speaker lists, all male reference lists! To give an account of these defences is to account for how worlds are reproduced.

An open call comes out for an academic event on power and resistance. A number of speakers are named on the call: all male speakers but one, all white speakers, but one (is this "but one," a way of holding onto the "all"?). Some of us point out the restriction. A wall comes up in the very denial of a wall. We begin with a friendly openness. It's an open call, they say. Come along, they say. Take our places, they even say. Note here how the gesture of inclusion, which is also a promise of inclusion, can be offered in a way that negates a point about exclusion. To suggest incorporation as potential (come along as you can come along) blocks an acknowledgement that the open call was restricted as a call. How to respond? We point out publicly that the publicity of the call suggests the event is not open. We didn't mean anything by it, they say; it's unfair to assume we did, they say. You have hurt our feelings; you have presumed knowledge of our intentions. That's just who turned up. I respond: if privilege means going the way things are flowing, then letting things flow, will mean that's who ends up going. The friendly tone ceases. You are the problem, they say. In assuming we have a problem, you are the problem.

It is not noticeable this "all" to those who pass through this "all" until you point it out, becoming a feminist killjoy, making sore points, assumed to be sore because of your points. I do not even usually bother to point out that the "all male" is often "all white," though I could make that point, becoming an angry person of colour. Sometimes we have to take the risk of fulfilling the fantasies other people have of us! I should note as well that I have experienced the most defensive reactions to such points from white male academics who think of themselves as "critical." When criticality becomes an ego ideal, it can participate in not seeing complicity. Perhaps criticality as an ego ideal offers a fantasy of being seeing. Critical whiteness might operate as a way of not seeing in the fantasy of being seeing: critical white subjects by seeing their whiteness, might not see themselves as participating in whiteness in the same way.

At one moment I express my fatigue at the repetition of these gatherings, where the all is hidden by the assumed generality of a particular (open to all often translating into all male, all white; or all but one). I express a sense of what is lost when academic gatherings are restricted to certain kinds of bodies. And someone replies that they thought I sounded "very 1980s," and that they thought we had "got over" identity politics. Not only might we want to challenge the use of identity politics here as a form of political caricature, but we might want to think of this "over." What does it mean to assume we have "got over" something? This claim might participate in a genre of argumentation I describe as "overing." In assuming that we are over certain kinds of critique, they create the impression that we are over what is being critiqued. Feminist and anti-racist critique are heard as old-fashioned and out-dated, as based on identity categories that we are assumed to be over.

It is not always the case that "overing" arguments are made explicitly. I would say that in the landscape of contemporary critical theory there is a sense - sometimes spoken, sometimes not - that we need to "get beyond" categories like gender and race: as if the categories themselves have restricted our understanding; as if the categories themselves are the blockage points. Those who point out restrictions and blockages become identified with the restrictions and blockages they are pointing out, as if we are creating what we are describing. The hope invested in new terms (movement, becoming, assemblages, capacities) can thus be considered a way of "overing" as if these terms are how we "get over" the categories themselves. And in turn, academic work that works on questions of gender, or race, or which works with existing social categories (whether are not these categories are the starting points, and whether or not the categories are assumed in advance of starting), becomes associated with stasis.

An example of how categories are understood as "blockages of thought" is offered in the following statement here:

those of us who want to build on struggles in a way that embraces and amplifies the capacity to act instead of storying every momentary gain as 'cooptation,' -no wonder there is still a lingering melancholia of the left in some corners!-or those who want to think beyond the narrow categorizations of gender race and class (and ableism, ageism, et cetera) to new configurations and alliances. I think Hegel or Spinoza provides a kind of metaphysics that helps us move beyond current blockages in thought."

Here race, gender, and class (and all that is relegated to the bracket, as well as all that is pointed to by the et cetera) enter theoretical discourse as "narrow categorizations." The implication is that to exercise such categories would be to restrict not only the "capacity to act" but our capacity to think that capacity. Category thinking becomes seen as a narrowing of vision, associated with a lingering melancholia, as what is holding us back, stopping us from moving on. Perhaps those who point to such categories are the ones who linger, who are stopping the forward movement we might attach to progression. This is how those who "stay behind" can get in the way of a forward progression. I am not saying here that we need to dismiss these new theoretical vocabularies: we need resources to think differently as we encounter worlds. I am suggesting that the hope invested in "new terms" can mean turning away from social restrictions and blockages by identifying restriction and blockages with the "old terms" that we need to move beyond. And indeed, we need to note the narrowing of the descriptive or analytic potential of the old terms is part of this narrative of overcoming; a caricature of the work done by these terms allows the terms to be as it were, "given up."

We can also consider how the language of critique and how that language is also assumed to be dated. I think even within some feminist writing, the idea that we should be critical of sexism has indeed been seen as rather dated and even as a habit that is blocking us, holding us down, or keeping us back: stopping us from reading or engaging most positively and affirmatively and creatively with the texts that are the objects of critique. It would be timely to re-state the arguments that sexism and racism are not incidental but structural, and thus to understand sexism and racism, requires better, closer readings of what is being gathered. Attending to the restrictions in the apparently open spaces of a social world brings us into closer proximity to an actual world. We need feminist and anti-racist critique because we need to understand how it is that the world takes shape by restricting the forms in which we gather. We need this now; the time for this is now. We need this critique now, if we are to learn how not to reproduce what we inherit.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In my first ever blog (not that long ago, but already it feels like a long time ago!) I created a list. We might call this a list of the tendencies that feminist killjoys share, or a list of points...