Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Outspoken by Pluto)

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Dari kutipan itu saja, Lola Olufemi sebagai penulis mengingatkan bahwa masih banyak anggapan tentang feminis yang dibentuk oleh kulit putih. Membuat hal-hal tampak "mudah" padahal bagi kulit berwarna dan bukan ras kaukasian seperti Sandberg punya kesulitan dan hambatannya sendiri. Olufemi melalui buku ini ingin mengingatkan bahwa feminisme tidak hanya sekadar mendapatkan jabatan tinggi dan keamanan secar finansial saja. Feminisme juga menuntut adanya kesetaraan pada hal-hal esensial seperti akses terhadap layanan kesehatan dan pendidikan. This is a crucial point in the argument that crystalizes Olufemi’s consistent flow of writing. Steeped in empathy, never wavering in her integrity, she crucially asks us to imagine a life that we do not currently know — not to pause on temporary solutions, but to demand justice for all. Beyond Incremental Progress Popular TERF arguments in the public eye centre on the safety of children. Perhaps one of the most insidious is the idea that young children, who are grappling with gender, are being pushed into early transition. The logic holds that young women (especially butch lesbians and those who are gender non-conforming) are being given an easy way to ‘opt out’ of womanhood or lesbianism because of societal pressure to become trans men. Straight women attached to TERF Ideology have attempted to disguise themselves as ‘allies’ to the queer community, arguing that lesbians are disappearing. Their logic holds that any young woman who feels trapped by gender expectations or thinks critically about gender would opt to transition. But this argument assumes that to be trans means to move from one binary gender to another. This is not only incorrect; it simplifies the complex and deeply personal relationship to gender and presentation that many trans people have. Some opt for medical transition, some don’t, some grapple with their bodies as they appear, and others do not. It becomes easier to argue against transness when a simple narrative about what it means to be trans is presented and dissected. In the UK, children do not have access to medical transition, yet the scaremongering tactics that TERFS employ rely heavily on ideas of young children’s proximity to underground sex confirmation surgery. A brave manifesto ... [Feminism Interrupted] unravels a silenced history of radicalism and points toward a truly just future' LO: I was pretty clear on the topics I wanted to discuss from the get-go and didn’t really deviate from them because I wanted to do justice to the kinds of conversations that young feminists are engaged in.

The pressure to ‘do’ gender correctly is so embedded in our social lives that it is hard to conceive of a world without it. Coming to the realisation that everything you have been told about the fixed nature of your own body is a lie can shake you to your core. There is a kind of feminism that thrives off the anxiety caused by this realisation. Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) or those who call themselves ‘gender-critical’ use a specific feminist logic to locate the source of women’s oppression in biology. For them, sex is a fixed category that cannot be changed. While many young feminists espouse TERF ideology, the public face of TERF organising is often older liberal white and middle class women who vocalise ‘concerns’ about the inclusion of trans women in feminist spaces and women’s rights discourse, lamenting the ‘generational divides’ in feminist thinking. They view the changing nature of language to describe gender and sexuality as a threat to feminist advancement, tending to be dismissive of newer kinds of feminist practice that take a radically materialist and intersectional approach as their starting point. They use these concerns to foster a ‘trans panic!’: a manufactured fear that newer feminist movements erase cis women’s sex-based oppression, undermining the structural nature of misogyny and pushing more people to medically transition. LO: The book purposefully sits outside the realm of party politics. A big part of it was trying to make the case that it is possible and even necessary to think beyond the state and the narrow, often self-defeating cycles of electioneering. Feminism, Interrupted goes beyond the mainstream and presents the possibilities that can be achieved when we aim to collectively dismantle systematic oppression and violence'

idea that women are born, and not made or named; that there is something inherent in biology that is crucial to womanhood. Lola Olufemi was due to appear at Housmans in conversation with Jay Bernard in May 2020 to talk about her recently released book Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power

Does it matter that she doesn’t use the term socialist to describe herself? Given her insistence in the introduction that “there are no pre-given solutions” offered by feminism it’s perhaps unsurprising she rejects most standard classifications for her viewpoint. And if we recognise and agree with her arguments where they matter most: on rejecting individualistic liberal corporate feminism, centering marginalised voices, and liberating the working class from the tyranny of the wage system, then the specific terms she uses for herself are perhaps less important. Another popular TERF argument is that, instead of challenging the gender binary, transitioning merely reaffirms it. To argue that trans women simply reaffirm a stereotypically ‘feminine’ model is to see all trans women as a homogenous group: feminine, heterosexual and wanting to transition. It ignores the fact that cis and trans women adopt stereotypical femininity for the same reason, blaming them for the gender scripts necessary for survival. In many cases, trans women may be actively encouraged by doctors and Gender Identity Clinics to adopt conventional femininity as a means of ‘proving’ that they are who they say they are. This proof would not be necessary in a different world. These kinds of requirements have far less to do with individuals and more to do with the way rigid ideas about gender are currently embedded in our social lives. The aim, at the very least, is to destroy that rigidity. PDF / EPUB File Name: Feminism_Interrupted_-_Lola_Olufemi.pdf, Feminism_Interrupted_-_Lola_Olufemi.epubRunning through Kendall’s work is the notion that “ solidarity is for white women”, the name of a campaign she started in 2013. It sounds divisive (and has been accused of being so), but look closer and it’s obvious what Kendall and others mean when they identify cliques and exclusivity among white feminists. They seek not to eject white women from the movement, of course, but to point out how those women, because of their platforms and access, bury the needs of others. Kendall cites as an example the fact that concern about rape culture in the US focuses on the date rape of suburban teens, and not the much higher rate of sexual assault faced by, for instance, indigenous and Alaskan women. Women of colour suffer twice, as the patriarchal state can also be racist I’m interested in a feminism of the commons and I hope where this book sits is as a tool that can help expand the scope of demands made of the party political project in the short term but also aid in its abolition. I think in the UK, it is still fair to say that there were material gains and an improvement of conditions that could have been ushered in by Corbyn’s government, though this is also debatable for some people. I think sometimes the conversation about ‘pragmatism’ and reliance on political parties vs building outside of them can become too abstracted. It goes without saying that you can utilise a party political route to demand non-reformist reforms or temporarily relieve suffering, if the context allows and to make strategic gains without believing in the party political project, you can also abandon said route when/if it does not work. A careful and detailed description of a feminist politic that is expansive and fundamentally hopeful' hate campaigns targeting trans people. Hannah Woodhead argues that ‘Mumsnet has become a breeding ground for transphobic voices; a space where they can laugh about sabotaging an NHS survey aimed at LGBTQ+ users and scorn trans participation in sport, or ponder that trans rights are a millennial issue.’ Claims that young children are being pushed into transition without a choice are reminiscent of homophobic campaigners and legislators who mobilised the idea of protecting innocent children from ‘homosexuals’, leading to legislation like Section 28 in the UK, enacted in 1988. The aim is to legislate queerness, transness, anything that upsets the binary out of existence. Race and class play a key part in the authority of the anti-trans lobby. It is no coincidence that the most vocal and prominent TERFs in the UK tend to be middle class white women. Their reliance on biological essentialism reveals much about their conceptualisations of race. They rely on the power of essentialism because they see how successfully it functions as an organising principle for society.

JB: You chose feminism over transfeminism as the main descriptor of your politics. Yet you are transinclusive and much of what you write pertains to the transfeminist manifesto. In fact, many people are really turned off the word feminist (as well as the word lesbian) because of some of the negative baggage it carries. Was there a reason for that choice?A well-argued, no-nonsense account, and essential reading for anyone interested in the state of Feminism today' Mutual aid networks holding communities together will radicalise those who had never before questioned state power I often find the framing of these kinds of questions odd because they assume that trans people have existed outside the history of feminist movements which is not only ahistorical but does this dangerous thing of positioning trans life as somehow an invention of the contemporary moment. One of the central pillars of the radical feminism that dominated the 70s and 80s was a critique of the sex distinction itself and the call for its abolition. And that is exactly what transfeminist contributions have always done, refocused our attention on the violence of the gender binary and on this idea that biology can or should ever be a determiner of life. What we’re seeing is a big resurgence of essentialist thinking fuelled by neoliberalism’s focus on the individual, the manufactured trans panic! is about signalling how trans people are a societal failure and an attempt to render their lives impossible by attempting to remove them from aspects of public life. As feminists who are invested in a world that includes all of us, we have to resist that. MM: You write that ‘white feminist neo-liberal politics focuses on the self as vehicle for self-improvement and personal gain at the expense of others.’ Is this solely a politics for white middle class women by white middle class women or can the rest of us also be provisionally drafted in to do its bidding? legality does not equal access. there are many more complicated demands to be made: mainstream movements will always defeat their own purpose as long as they consider the law as the sole indicator of progress'

LO: I think the idea of frames of thought as disparate and incoherent really scares people because the inability to make a universal claim or universal demands means the journey to freedom is longer and more complicated but I think, just as consequence of how I learnt about the different schools of feminist thought in school, I’ve always been at peace with that. I don’t believe in universals but I do believe in an idea that I take from Audre Lorde, that sitting with tension, with distortion, is productive. That the tension caused when we place different kinds of feminism in conversation with one another create new routes, modes of thinking and practices that get us closer to what our perceived goals are. I loved the tweet that you did where you stated that you’d learnt things from different, overlapping and sometimes conflicting theorists. I think it perfectly sums up something that I’m always striving towards, to understand and incorporate different ideas from different strands of feminism that are all making a claim about the way the world should be. Liberation means chaos, it might mean a million different ideas at once and that potential excites me. To recognise that this frame of thought advocates many things, some conflicting is not to give in to the idea that no short-term political demands can be made – the urgency of the conditions of our lives make those demands clear to us. Embracing chaos doesn’t mean embracing abstraction. Those who rely on this kind of thinking are also the least likely to adopt an intersectional approach to feminist practice. These ‘feminists’ are not concerned with changing the material conditions of women’s lives so that subjugation and exploitation are no longer necessary parts of it. Instead, they direct their anxieties about the kinds of violence that all women experience in a patriarchal society towards trans women so that cis women become ‘oppressed’ by the existence of trans women or by expansive ideas of gender. Essentialist understandings offer a simple truth about ourselves that is easy to swallow. Pathologising trans people makes it easier to blame them for societal ills and to pit cis and trans women’s issues against one another. This merely distracts us from the most pressing issues at hand. A much-needed layer to Olufemi’s argument comes from Muslim feminists themselves; “we can begin to formulate a strategic response to the way that the state and global powers attempt to regulate and diminish Muslim life. This starts by reconsidering everything we think we know about Muslim women.” Emancipation will only come from the oppressed themselves. If feminism wishes to overcome racist, patriarchal capitalism, it must listen to the women paying a hefty price for its enduring hegemony, rather than those who would impose predetermined solutions upon them.I think this is a crucial moment for reassessing the demands that we make as feminists and pulls into sharper focus the need to combat liberal feminism on more than just a discursive level. Kutipan yang ada di atas merupakan sebuah kritik terhadap Sheryl Sandberg dan bukunya yang berjudul "Lean In." Ini karena adanya bias pendapat yang mana Sandberg merupakan wanita kulit putih dengan jabatan tinggi sehingga bukan sebuah kesulitan bagianya untuk "Lean In." Judith Butler broke new ground in 1990 with her seminal text, Gender Trouble. In it she suggested that there is nothing