Via delux_vivens. As always, when you said "women" in mainstream feminist circles, you mean, "white, cis women."

Otherwise, I don't get what Yonmei even tried to compare here.

Seriously? The response to this... seriously?

Because the fact that this woman claimed it was a latino man means... what?

Tracing this Body. Transsexuality, pharmaceuticals & capitalism is one of the most (if not the most) amazing, complex, and intersecting articles I have read. A must-read written in 2003 by Michelle O’Brien and still holds true and how. Seriously, I'm making a crime just quoting a bit, you have to read it (if you haven't already):

These battles over HIV, transgender health and drug use are real, with millions of people's lives on the line. Politics is changing fast around the world, as old resistance movements have disintegrated, and new forms of domination are deepening their entrenched authority. Capital flows more and more rapidly around the globe, while access to health care is strictly limited and regulated. Wars of healthcare, over the terrain of our bodies, are among the most significant political battles in the world today. Healthcare is a major site in defining, and transforming, what race and class domination mean in our day to day lives. This fight is so profound, so real, so important, precisely because it is the place where the three levels of flows come together: 1. those flows of T-Cells and hormones, of viruses and antivirals, of methadone and heroin, within our own bodies; 2. those flows of our communities, families and lives through our communities; and 3. those flows of capital and institutional power across the globe.

[...]

The politics of our bodies - as trans people, as drug users, as people living with HIV - require a sophisticated grasp of multiple contradictions. We are dependent on the very systems that oppress us. We make demands for change, and appropriate the refuse of capital for our own survival. We live in the flows, suffer in the flows, envision a new world in these flows.

Many theories of power and politics offer little to grapple with such a struggle of bodily survival. I grew up working in radical environmental movements in Oregon, using direct action to defend ancient forests. The anticapitalist analysis of many such activists relied on a fanatical commitment to purity and an attempt at a total refusal to participate or be complicit in any form of corporate rule. Veganism, do-it-yourself punk ethics, buying natural and local, Lesbian-Feminist separatism, back-to-land self-sustaining agriculture and especially eco-primitivism and other movements common around Eugene, Oregon, all frequently rely, to various extents, on a commitment to non-participation in global capitalism and certain idealized notions of purity. Since then, I've encountered similar phenomena in many political spaces, from AIDS denialists working in animal rights organizing to the MOVE family of Philadelphia, from genderqueer denunciations of medicalized body modification to the glorification of drop-out travelers by the anarchist writing network known as CrimethInc.

[...]

These languages of purity and non-participation are frequently counterposed by the glorifying ideological cheerleaders of capitalist domination. Every major U.S. newspaper, every president and senator, every corporate trade journal is aggressively advancing the absurd notion that capitalism is the best avenue to manage and stop human suffering. Believing that state power and corporate tyranny will somehow make a decent world have a major impact on the popular discourses of science, technology and industrial production. Such pro-capitalist perspectives are of no use to me.

Instead, I've tried through this paper to trace other ways of thinking through the relationship between my body and capitalism. Each step, I've tried to simultaneously recognize my participation and complicity, and trace the possibilities of resistance and liberation. In trying to describe the complexity of these relationships, I've found inspiration in Donna Haraway's essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." A truly remarkable text, Haraway's essay brilliantly cut through polarized debates characterizing science as either a wonderful tool of capitalist improvement or the evil bane of patriarchy. Instead, Haraway describes the figure of the cyborg. The cyborg is the bastard child of the patriarchal realms of capitalism, nature and technoscience. Rather than reproduce their systems of command, control and communication, the cyborg ran radically challenge, undermine and resist domination. The cyborg is a new vision of feminist consciousness, a radical means of relating to technology and science. The cyborg is never pure, never free of the systems it subverts, never belonging to a realm before or outside of capitalist technoscience and patriarchy. But the cyborg is also a revolutionary, an effective, empowered, conscious being that reworks, redirects and restructures the oppressive systems that birthed it.

This vision of the feminist cyborg has been very useful and inspiring to me in understanding my own body and in struggling to the liberation of trans people. Like the cyborg, we are both complicit in and a challenge to the biomedical industries. We are drastically rebuilding our bodies with the aid of technology, surgery and drugs. And we are doing this all on our own terms, committed to our own well being, striving to our own liberation. Far from dupes of doctors or the crude escapists of ecoprimitivism, we are living amidst the systems we are always subverting. Trans people live in that hybrid edge of technology, science, nature and capital that Haraway correctly and brilliantly identifies as a tremendously power space of resistance and movement.

We are all in the midst of structures of tremendous violence, oppression and exploitation. There is no easy escape or pure distance from them. Our ability to resist, in this world, at this time, is deeply inseparable from our ongoing connection to these very systems. But resist we do. Every day, in so many ways, we are all struggling towards a new world of liberation, healing and respect.

Here is Donna Haraway's 1991 essay: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, if you want to read it.

Ugh. Today was the day of white, cis, able feminist (or progressive, whatever) women making me very uncomfortable.

Those naive ladies who think gender problems revolve around cis, white, rich, able-bodied women issues. And chose to ignore any unfortunate connotation that their critiques of "gender issues" of other people who are not rich, white, able or cis could have. Some people have a pervasive history of being oppressed by people like you. Things have a context, and some things are more complicated than the simple "you should be like me, the privileged woman who does everything by herself and acts by western/cis/white/able-bodied standards of empowerment."

My head hurts. Badly. Tomorrow will be a long day again.

ETA: What I also wanted to say is that power imbalances exist, and that a more powerful group of people "criticizing" and stereotyping a group that is historically oppressed by them is something that, in our power structures, has certain connotations and consequences that shouldn't be overlooked.

Because shewhohashope talked. And she said everything that has been bothering about the latesr discussion about rape.

I know that you're all dying to hear my take on this, so here it is: I don't think the discussion is moving from the particular to the systematic aspects of rape. It specifically looks at the implications of rape culture on particular women rather than engaging meaningfully with the ways in which rape is used systematically as a tool of oppression.

[...]

It was a mistake to refer to rape in the Congo, and rape in the poorest parts of the rural south (I read this as 'Global South' initially, but she may mean the U.S. South?), next to 'a frat house party' with no further analysis at all. Right away there is a complete erasure of the wider context. You can talk about the patriarchy and it's effect on women, purporting to discuss the wider systematic aspects of of rape, rather than the particular and the personal. Then to go on to ignore how the patriarchy is used as a tool of colonialism and how the patriarchy is used as a tool of class conflict is (say it with me social science students) problematic.

[...]

Using the word 'civilisation' as though it were antithetical to rape is ridiculous. When rape culture is being discussed, rape is a product of civilisation itself, not an example of its disruption but a natural result of the principles it is built on. Rape is about power, and power struggles and domination are inherent to society building

The difficulty with words like 'civilisation' is that one can mean many things in choosing to use it, it could refer to culture in general - another term which seems to defy any simple definition - or it could refer solely to urbanised societies, typified by their dependence of agriculture. But - and this is the fraught part - people are unable to to prevent themselves from assigning morality to what should be simple, descriptive terms, and 'civilisation' carries a particularly difficult, politicised history.

MUST read.

Women of color = Intersection of two oppressions. They experience racism from white women and white men. They experience sexism from white men and men of color. (They experience racism from men and other women of color, and sexism from white women and other WOC too, but let's just stick to the basics.)

If you are going to say that sexism is WOC being "demeaning" towards white women, then, white women being demeaning towards WOC is sexism and racism.

Sexism is not something that only white women experience. Nor it is savages WOC persecuting fragile white women with "sexist" words when calling them on their racism. I wonder why white women never say that it is "sexist" for a white woman to tell a WOC to shut up (it is racist, they all say). Women weren't after all always told to shut up by men?

Sexism is not white women feeling insulted. Feminism is not about white women feeling good with themselves. (Yes, I know feminism was constructed over the backs of women of color, and that white feminists have been using the movement that way for decades by now, but since I have met a lot of wonderful people here, I'm sticking to the "not a monolith" thing.)

kialio said that "hysteria" is rarely used on non-white women. That it depends on the western 1800 concept of WHITE women being fragile and precious beings. Women of color weren't fragile and precious beings. They were slaved and put to work.

kialio: PoC women were/are... well... pack mules. No time for "hysteria" when you're being relocated to a reservation or having your children sold in slavery.

Also remember this:

"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place, and ain't I a woman? ... I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me -- and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear the lash as well -- and ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen most all sold off to slavery and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me -- and ain't I woman?"

Sojourner Truth - 1854 Ohio Woman's Rights Convention

It's funny because here in Latin America (or in my country) hysteria is also used for women, but yes, for women enjoying white/class privilege. (But have in mind that "histeria" as is used around here - at least in my country - is kinda different from the English term.)

kialio gave this link too

"Because diagnoses of hysteria represented, in part, a professional articulation of womanhood, it was a gendered - and gendering - discourse. Medical studies by Mitchell and George M. Beard suggested, further, that nervous diseases (on the continuum from dyspepsia to insanity) were also race- and class-specific: Women of color, they concluded, lacked the extreme feminine sensibility and degree of cultural refinement marking the developed neurasthenic.(7) The racial coding of hysteria (and related disturbances of the nerves) as a middle-class white woman's disease meant that it was not simply a condition of "modern" women, but also functioned as a condition for womanhood and modernity in Victorian America."

Interesting. Now I get it.

You know, since I'm not much into USA tv's show (and specially this kind), I just discovered, thanks to TransGriot, that America's Next Top Model has nothing more and nothing less than a black trans-woman contestant, Isis Tsunami. Before a white cis-woman says that those kind of shows are sexists, etc., I will say that yeah, but there will always be sexist beauty-standards that only white, able, cis-women can met. So things would be different if I was talking about some white cis-chick. (Heck, if you are a white cis-chick who can easily get representation? You know you shouldn't talk, no matter how awful you think those things are for you, women of color and trans-women aren't even considered desirable. Disabled women? What?). And it's pretty refreshing to see a trans-woman not being portrayed on the media as someone who needs to be ridiculed.

ANTM'S 11 SEASON SPOILERS: And of course, this girl already faced prejudice and bias from other contestants, mostly white cis-women. Googling about her, I just read things like yeah, Isis is male, and a priceless comment: as a biological female, I am somewhat taken aback that a transgendered person is being used to both illustrate an ideal female beauty and/or sell clothing to me. Check your privilege, don't you, miss?

And via the always wonderful Questioning Transphobia, here is something that everyone who knows english, can access to this, and is too brown, poor, disabled, trans-gendered, not-straight to be considered acceptable by our society, needs to read.

So let's admit it. Our lives? Our lives are an act of war. They are open defiance. They are invasion. They are insistent violation of the borders of a world that desperately pretends we do not exist. They are rude gestures and thrown rocks at the rumbling war machines of systems who choose to write us out of history, beginning only a moment ago and stretching back to the beginning of all things. By standing here and living, we defy the notion that we have no right to, and we scream out that no world where we are torn apart into nothingness can continue. Every seed we plant, lover we kiss, drum we beat is indeed a grave and mortal threat to the entire world as they know it, because our reality forces it to crash against us over and over only to find us still here. Even when we die of it, we are dead, but we are still here, we still are, we still were.

Some Foucault's book I have says that war is always fought inside every society, between powerful and less powerful groups, and every kind of classes. It's not exactly the same, but.

Y chau, gente corriendo! Hola... cosa marrón.

ETA: En español:

America's Next Top Model es un 'reality show' estadounidense en que un grupo de chicas que aspiran a ser 'top models' compiten unas con las otras, y son eliminadas, creo, semanalmente. En fin, en esta temporada hay nada más y nada menos que una concursante transexual de raza negra. Se llama Isis Tsunami y tiene 22 años. Me dirán que el programa es sexista y lalala, pero si sos una mujer cis-sexual blanca, pues, muy fácil hablar del 'sexismo que afecta a las mujeres blancas' e ignorar todas las intersecciones de opresiones que viven las mujeres de color transexuales. Y recordemos que los estándares de belleza, sexistas que sean, ni siquiera están hechos para ser alcanzados por las mujeres de color, transexuales, discapacitadas, etc. (Qué no me vengan con que 'a mi no me representan porque yo no me identifico, y cada experiencia es única, yo he sufrido siendo blanca/o, lala' porque... me conocen. Y si no, bueno: aunque NO te identifiques, eso no significa que toda una sociedad te asocia con tu raza, condición sexual, cis-género, capacidad, etc. Y tenés privilegios por eso. Punto, no hay nada que podamos hacer. Eso no quiere decir que no sufrís y que tu vida tiene que ser color de rosa, sólo que no pasas cosas por tu raza/género/capacidad/clase social que otras personas pasan. Esto parece bastante al azar, pero es que me recordó a una discusión con un hombre blanco que 'sufría' porque le decíamos que tenía privilegios masculinos porque cada experiencia es única, y a él le decían 'femenino o gay' porque era sensible! ¿Te acordás, Mako? En fin, nadie acá dijo nada como eso, pero tenía ganas de comentarlo. XP)

Además, es bueno tener una representación de una mujer transexual que no es ridiculizada por ser mujer transexual.

La chica ya ha sido víctimas de prejuicios por parte de algunas de sus compañeras, como muestra algún video de acá. Aparentemente hay una chica blanca (Hannah o algo) que empujó a Isis porque la tocó, o chocó con ella. Esto trajo la indignación de las otras participantes (especialmente las mujeres de color, aparentemente) que se molestaron con la tal Hannah. Todo esto lo he leído de bloggers o comentarios, así que no tengo idea. XDDDDD

Y por supuesto que, googleando sobre Isis, me encontré con cosas como (ya sé, nunca hay que leer los comentarios, pero...) ¿Es un hombre?, y una joya: ya que soy mujer biológicamente, me toma por sorpresa que una persona transexual se use para ilustrar un ideal de belleza y/o venderme ropa.

Ah, y descubrí que la bella Barbara Diop, que modeló representando a Zinbawe en la Copa Mundial de Cricket es una mujer transexual.