{"id":8292,"date":"2017-08-21T19:03:48","date_gmt":"2017-08-21T17:03:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/?p=8292"},"modified":"2017-08-21T19:03:48","modified_gmt":"2017-08-21T17:03:48","slug":"depoliticised-and-unsustainable-why-i-am-not-a-feminist-author-argues-that-feminism-has-lost-touch-with-its-politically-radical-roots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/2017\/08\/depoliticised-and-unsustainable-why-i-am-not-a-feminist-author-argues-that-feminism-has-lost-touch-with-its-politically-radical-roots\/","title":{"rendered":"Depoliticised and unsustainable: Why I Am Not a Feminist author argues that feminism has lost touch with its politically radical roots."},"content":{"rendered":"

OPEN DEMOCRACY<\/a><\/p>\n

JANINE RICH<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nFrom outraged memes online to slogan-bearing t-shirts on the streets, across the world more and more women are calling themselves feminists, and demanding change. But what would this change actually consist of?<\/p>\n

In her new book, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto, writer and activist Jessa Crispin argues that feminism has become depoliticised and ultimately unsustainable. It is a passionate call to arms for the movement to rediscover its radical, revolutionary roots. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n

What drove you to declare so directly, at this specific political moment, that you\u2019re not a feminist?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s always been a kind of disconnect between feminist rhetoric and the lived experience of women. When I was growing up, I was coming of age during the third wave, and that conversation was about sexuality, personal presentation, individuality. But my lived experience was that I grew up in a very conservative town, my mother was a housewife, I was being raised to be a wife and a mother. A couple years later, I started working at Planned Parenthood and I became an abortion counselor at the time that abortion clinics began shutting down across the middle of the United States. And even with that going on, the feminist conversations nationally were still very shallow.<\/p>\n

The rhetoric marches ahead, while the material situation falls apart?<\/p>\n

Yeah, and they leave a lot of people behind. And it just seemed to just get worse and worse. The book came out of total frustration with the movement, the conversations, and what feminism was being used now to sell. Starting with the invasion of Afghanistan, and feminists getting behind that with the logic of \u2018we\u2019re going to liberate women\u2019, and then the \u2018lean in\u2019 culture began \u2013 the feminist CEO culture, Hillary Clinton as the so-called feminist presidential candidate. The book was borne out of anger.<\/p>\n

This brings to mind statements by global south activists who are extremely radical in their views, and in their work, but who have also rejected the term \u2018feminist\u2019.<\/p>\n

A lot of people have felt shut out of that word, and there has not been a real, critical self-examination of why. There\u2019s this kind of campaign within feminism to try to convince people to call themselves feminists, of trying to explain like \u201cno, it\u2019s fine\u201d, rather than dig into the history and understand how feminism has supported war, how it\u2019s been institutionally racist, homophobic, and xenophobic.<\/p>\n

“‘feminism’ has supported war, it\u2019s been institutionally racist, homophobic, and xenophobic…”<\/em><\/h1>\n

As soul-searching from Trump\u2019s electoral victory continues in the US, do you think that a greater awareness of intersectionality has managed to seep from radical feminism to mainstream feminism?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it has in a productive way. I feel like it\u2019s a surface level awareness, that goes along with the need to always use the right words, but there isn\u2019t a conversation about the consequences of the decisions that we make, and the lives that we lead. How do we direct that desire to do good? I feel like people spend a lot of time making excuses for why they can\u2019t. I remember when the DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline) activists asked feminists and other activist groups to remove their money from the banks that were funding the pipeline. Even if it was just a symbolic gesture, to stop giving material support to the banks, almost nobody did it.<\/p>\n

“Native Nations Rise” march on Washington DC, against the Dakota Access Pipeline project, in March 2017. Photo: Alex Milan Tracy\/SIPA USA\/PA Images. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n

In your book you say it\u2019s easier to buy the t-shirt than examine your own complicity in the structures of oppression you claim to stand against. Even though it\u2019s necessary to have a basic awareness that not all people globally have the same problems, is it not also easy to sort of over-correct? That is, to assume everyone\u2019s problems are completely different?<\/p>\n

Yeah, I think it is. People criticise identity politics, because it\u2019s an easy target, but I think it\u2019s easy to forget that identity politics made a lot of people\u2019s lives better, that it did tremendous work in opening up the conversation of how racism and misogyny still exist daily. But now it\u2019s kind of used as a distraction, both on the right and the left. The right demonises it, and the left thinks that\u2019s all that needs to be done, is to have these conversations, rather than understandimarng that the same structure that oppresses us also oppresses the trans community, also oppresses women in the Middle East, also oppresses everybody. We\u2019re all colonised in different ways by corporate culture and capitalism, and patriarchal thinking, men included.<\/p>\n

You write about \u2018outrage culture\u2019 in online feminism, on how by \u201cganging up\u201d around a specific moment of misogyny, we falsely believe we have accomplished something by retweeting and sharing. Do you see this trend in the way we approach international feminist solidarity?<\/p>\n

Because everything is decontextualised online, we just sort of gravitate towards things that reinforce our prejudices. One of the problems with things like international news shared through social media is that it\u2019s easy to let it reinforce our xenophobia. An easy way to get attention in feminist media is to do these pieces about rape in India or Turkey, viewing these places as exceptionally misogynistic in some way. It reinforces our dehumanising of men of colour. American feminism has a huge xenophobic edge to it, that it doesn\u2019t want to think about, where men of colour around the world are these scary, savage rapists. It\u2019s weird how well this fear aligns with what the patriarchy wants us to believe, which is that the world isn\u2019t safe and we should stay at home where we\u2019re protected.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

“because everything is decontextualised online, we sort of gravitate towards things that reinforce our prejudices…”<\/em><\/h2>\n

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

The internet is still a very useful tool for organising, it\u2019s still great for consciousness raising, but people have to be aware of how they\u2019re using it, and for the most part they\u2019re not encouraged to question it. Within the feminist community there is very little self-critical conversation.<\/p>\n

You make a powerful call for a return to second-wave radicalism, but from the perspective of some activists in the Middle East and across the global south, this wave was not radical enough.<\/p>\n

I believe that\u2019s part of the history, but I guess I\u2019m more aware of it in third wave feminism, in the \u201cunveiling\u201d of the woman, as if the thing that\u2019s truly going to liberate a woman is to show off her cleavage and her legs. I\u2019m not as aware of that as a problem with the second wave, because I was, with them, focused on how there was much more engagement in creating alternate systems. There was an actual woman owned and operated bank, there were women operated abortion clinics before it was legal, all founded in the logic of \u201cfuck it, society isn\u2019t going to do these things, so we\u2019re going to do them for ourselves\u201d.<\/p>\n

These second-wavers are blamed for how the term \u2018feminist\u2019 became loaded with imperialism and racism, a trap whereby some women who called themselves feminists, or did activist work, were accused of hating their \u2018culture\u2019 or betraying their people.<\/p>\n

Which is why I think we should stop using the word. It\u2019s too loaded with misinformation. Women are claiming to be feminists while exhibiting some reprehensible behavior \u2013 Christian fundamentalist feminists, anti-abortion feminists, war-mongering feminists, CEO feminists. So that to me is like the final straw. Maybe this word isn\u2019t that useful anymore, maybe we should abandon it.<\/p>\n

In Turkey the word \u201cfeminist\u201d is used quite politically, and hasn\u2019t taken on the pop-star quality that it has in the US. Is that a good thing?<\/p>\n

Certainly, I wish that hadn\u2019t happened in America, because the lifestyle feminism thing is so distracting, and so big in the US. That\u2019s what most people mean when they say they\u2019re a feminist, that they like Taylor Swift or something. The use of the word is interesting, especially the evolution of it, but ultimately it doesn\u2019t have any meaning without the agenda behind it. So, what is the agenda of using the word \u201cfeminism\u201d in America, or in Turkey, or anywhere else? In America, I\u2019d say it\u2019s mostly about capitalism and neoliberalism, and about removing obstacles between women and the acquisition of power, rather than rethinking power itself.<\/p>\n

Are you hopeful for real international solidarity amongst women? Something beyond the sort of trite, \u201cyou go, girl\u201d Buzzfeed videos about Muslim women voting? Is this the best we can do?<\/p>\n

Writing a manifesto is always a hopeful act. I wouldn\u2019t have written it if I thought everything was dire. I am somewhat hopeful, but I\u2019m also absolutely terrified. How bad does it have to get before people make real change? We now have all the information, we\u2019re all woke. But are we doing anything with that? I don\u2019t think that we are, in any organised way. We\u2019re still having these women\u2019s marches that don\u2019t have any demands, that don\u2019t have ideas or philosophies, they\u2019re just sort of masses of women milling around. That energy is better spent being directed towards something. That\u2019s the next step, we must start acting. What we had under Obama was still a disaster for most people. Defending the status quo is what people are thinking of as the resistance, but it has to be bigger than that. We\u2019re not in a place where the status quo is satisfying, not domestically or globally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OPEN DEMOCRACY JANINE RICH From outraged memes online to slogan-bearing t-shirts on the streets, across the world more and more women are calling themselves feminists, and demanding change. But what would this change actually consist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,90,85,65,88,49,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-citizens-and-civil-society","category-editor-selection","category-human-rights","category-others","category-slider","category-womens-rights","category-world","country-usa","country-world","Documents-statements-multimedia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8292"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8299,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8292\/revisions\/8299"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}