White Feminist Fatigue Syndrome

In her recent piece in Com­ment is Free, “How fem­in­ism became capitalism’s hand­maiden — and how to reclaim it” Nancy Fraser draws on her own work in polit­ical the­ory to argue that fem­in­ism at best has been co-​opted by neo­lib­er­al­ism and at worst has been a cap­it­al­ist ven­ture of the neo-​liberal pro­ject. What appears at first glance to be a reasoned self-​reflection, one that takes stock and respons­ib­il­ity for past alli­ances and cel­eb­ra­tions of stra­tegic moves for the bet­ter­ment of women’s lives, at second glance reveals the innate and repet­it­ive myopia of White fem­in­ism to take account, to con­verse and think along with Black and Third World Feminists.

Writ­ing from the early 1970s onwards, these schol­ars and act­iv­ists have sys­tem­at­ic­ally engaged a fem­in­ist cri­tique of not only state cap­it­al­ism, but of a glob­al­ised cap­it­al­ism rooted in colo­nial legacies. These fem­in­isms have not pri­or­it­ised “cul­tural sex­ism” over eco­nomic redis­tri­bu­tion. The lit­er­at­ure is vast, the examples myriad, and thus, it’s all the more tir­ing when White fem­in­ists speak of second-​wave fem­in­ism as if it were the only “fem­in­ism” and use the pro­noun “we” when lament­ing the fail­ures of their struggles. Let us just say there is no such thing as a “fem­in­ism” as the sub­ject of any sen­tence that des­ig­nates the sole pos­i­tion for the critic of pat­ri­archy. For such pos­i­tion has been frac­tured ever since Sojourner Truth said “Ain’t I a woman too?” There is though a fem­in­ist subject-​position, the one Fraser is lament­ing, which has sat very com­fort­ably in the seat of the self-​determined, eman­cip­ated sub­ject. That pos­i­tion, of course, is that which she iden­ti­fies as a con­trib­utor to neo­lib­er­al­ism. But that is no sur­prise, for both her fem­in­ism and neo­lib­er­al­ism share the same lib­eral core that Black and Third World fem­in­ists have iden­ti­fied and exposed since very early in the tra­ject­ory of feminisms.

The work of A.Y. Davis, Audre Lorde, Himani Ban­nerji, Avtar Brah, Selma James, Maria Mies, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Silvia Fed­er­ici, Dorothy Roberts and scores of oth­ers, have shattered the lim­ited and exclu­sion­ary nature of the con­cep­tual frame­works developed by White fem­in­ists in the Eng­lish speak­ing world. These schol­ars and act­iv­ists have cre­ated frame­works of ana­lysis that sim­ul­tan­eously sur­mount a chal­lenge to and provide a dra­matic cor­rect­ive to both Black Marx­ist and anti-​colonial the­ory that failed fun­da­ment­ally to the­or­ise gender and sexu­al­ity, and Marx­ist and social­ist fem­in­ist thought that con­tin­ues to fail, in many ways, to account for race, his­tor­ies of col­on­isa­tion, and the struc­tural inequit­ies between the so-​called developed and devel­op­ing nation states. And yes, Mies, Fed­er­ici, and James are white, but Black and Third World Marx­ist fem­in­isms aspire to polit­ical solid­ar­ity across the col­our line.

via criticallegalthinking.com