White/class-privileged cultures in the U.S. (cultures I am intimately familiar with) are particularly atomized/individualistic and intellectual-to-the-exclusion-of-other-forms-of-knowing. That these cultures predominate in mainstream/liberal/progressive feminism is a fundamental limitation of those feminisms.
It’s a sort of farce to be playing at wanting to end violence against women in a single-issue vacuum or see women achieve “balance” between professional work, mothering, and “personal time” within a materially rich atomized, hetero-normative nuclear family while glaciers are melting, entire cultures are being submerged, and the very economic system that is providing a few people large homes in which to try and achieve this “balance” is, in its rapacious need for endless growth and focus on short-term individual profit without regard for “externalities,” the cause of those disasters.
The idea is not to dismiss any given feminist concern or project, it’s to ask, “Can we address these things at the roots, and with everyone in mind? Can we end violence against all women without increasing violence against poor people and people of color of all genders? Can we create work/life balance for everyone? Can everyone have decent food and a home?”
What do feminisms that aim that broad and wide and deep look like? I was fortunate enough to glimpse one set of possibilities in a community built over the course of a weekend at the Pachamama Skillshare in Joshua Tree. tk (tanya karakashian) tunchez is describing another part of this course in the New Mythos Tour. Projects like this are drawing on legacies of paradigm-challenging feminisms, and they are happening all over the place, right now.
Feminisms that aim to create profoundly different ways of living in which everyone has food and shelter and housing—these are feminisms that are rooted in a sense of community/collectivity/interconnectedness, and also feminisms that are clear about how hierarchical and individualistic systems like capitalism work and uninterested in climbing up their ladders (the steps of which are others’ backs). Their goals are not always “measurable” or “winnable” or even easy to describe in the terms of dominant U.S. culture. And so they are written off as “idealistic” or “utopian” impossibilities. But to really envision and experiment with profoundly different ways of sharing power and resources, we have to be okay with getting outside the measurable and the supposedly strategic.
I don’t know if white/assimilationist/mainstream/liberal feminists are simply poisoned by their own privilege in a way that prevents them from perceiving beyond dominant paradigms, or if their motivations are more insidiously and consciously selfish/violent than that, but they have deeply internalized the supporting myths of capitalism and other dominant systems of power. They talk about “strategy” as a way of silencing radical voices, insisting that it is most strategic to employ simplistic messages that do not threaten or challenge people who are attached to dominant narratives. They say it’s strategic to use sound bytes and “frames” the same way commercial advertisers use them, where “feminism” and “social justice” are products like any others. They are lured, consumer-style, by the possibility of campaign “wins” that provide immediate gratification, but never substantive transformation.
In this kind of feminism, when a friend of mine was pushed quickly out of her low-paid and long-term staff position at a prominent feminist non-profit after an internal power struggle, she was offered by the board a choice between severance pay and freedom to speak publicly about what had happened. She walked away broke, without even all of her accrued vacation pay from vacations she never felt she had time to take during the years she was busting her ass for the organization, and when one of the organization’s founders challenged the board that had pushed her out to acknowledge how unethical their behavior was from a labor-justice perspective, they responded only by reiterating that what they’d done was perfectly legal in the state they were operating in and refused to see the connection between feminism and fair treatment of workers.
Precisely because they are not threatening to dominant institutions and speak in the same language as those institutions, liberal/assimilationist feminisms will inevitably be the most visible, the most “successful,” versions of feminism within dominant culture as long as these institutions exist.
In a talk in L.A. a few years ago, the prison abolitionist—and author of foundational intersectional feminist texts like Women, Race, and Class—Angela Davis spoke about “how capitalism constitutes our intimate lives, our dreams … forces us to dream as individuals, to dream for ourselves, maybe for our families.” She asked, “Why can’t we dream for our communities? Why can’t we dream beyond the nation?” 1
In Rebecca Solnit’s new book, A Paradise Built in Hell, she documents how various U.S. communities have formed cooperative, non-money-based social systems in the wake of devastating disasters over the past century. She counters with a mass of evidence the dominant, power-serving argument that selfishness and mayhem are the “human nature” revealed in moments of social stripping bare, talking about the “privatization of desire and imagination” that happens within, and helps shore up, capitalism. 2
- Angela Davis speaking at “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.” Colburn School, Los Angeles, CA. June 10, 2007.[↑]
- Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell. New York: Viking, 2009.[↑]
