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.

aqrima wrote about the Kate Bornstein shit. She says anything necessary to be said:

kate bornstein.

your book, hello cruel world: 101 alternatives to suicide for teens, freaks & other outlaws, sucks. and you know what really sucks? the fact that you're an activist. someone who's supposed to be helping. and you are really, really failing.

your west-centrism and "let's look to the declaration of independence and amerika's founding fathers~ life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness, for inspiration! we can find everything we need there! politics of exclusion might've been ok at some point, but it's not ok anymore..." like, wtf? ok, so the united states of amerika was built on the principles of oppression: massive genocide, colonialism, imperialism. the declaration of independence is a lie; a white person's dream. and fuck you for endorsing this document while also claiming to be anti-racist. you are not anti-racist, kate bornstein. you are just one typical liberal bona fide racist.

your asexual-phobia (oh, about once in a blue moon you mention that it's okay to be asexual, but not really, since you keep going on about sexuality and sexual desire and romantic desire without touching on asexuality or people who are aromantic for that matter, at all, you flat-out say that "now we can all agree that we all want romance, right?" like wtf no actually, and you keep contradicting yourself and... yeah, i don't even know). i appreciate that you said you'd talk mostly about gender because it's what you know best; at least you admit your sphere of knowledge and experience. but. BUT. you keep talking about all this other stuff, because, naturally, intersections, hello, and you keep doing it in egregious ways. EGREGIOUS.

Lisa at QT has a wonderful post: Empathy and Kyriarchy.

The point of kyriarchy is not to just maintain oppressive systems that place us in this metaphorical pyramid relative to everyone else (and I do mean everyone – there is no outside, and you cannot voluntarily step outside when outside does not exist). It is to maintain a system that turns us against each other. It is a system that teaches us not to identify with, or empathize with, or sympathize with each other. It teaches us to look to our differences as adversarial and identify with those who have as much as or more power than we do.

This is the failure I see over and over again: People identify with the oppressor. People often do not identify with the oppressed. I am not making distinctions here between marginalized and privileged people because this does not matter. Many trans people are quite transphobic, many women are sexist, many people with disabilities carry ableism. They identify more with the dominant culture that valorizes and emblemizes cisnormativity, manhood, and being temporarily able-bodied or neurotypical over transness, womanhood and femininity, or having a disability. No one is immune to this.

[...]

Also, a reminder: The links above are to two cis women of color and a trans woman of color who have written about these concepts. My ideas are developed from theirs. I do not mind if you link back to me, but I sincerely hope you give them credit where it is absolutely due.

And she links to this post by BFP.

So far, we have:

An Arab American woman fired for having a strident critique of colonialism.

Another Arab woman fired for having a positive opinion of a “terrorist” that stood against gender based violence.

A black woman fired because after speaking her truth, she was considered inherently distrustful, unable to perform her job without questions or doubts lingering over her.

A black man fired for associations with Marxism 20 years ago and cuz he was rude to white folk..

And we have a white guy who was asked to resign after almost 30 years of using his show to punch Latin@s and immigrants in the ass with his hate–and only after Latin@ and pro-immigrant orgs put an all out campaign to get him fired into action.

Don't tell me this isn't remotely true. I have dealt with this kind of shit all week.

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 I was just having this conversation with my friend the other day about feminism and class.

The problem of saying you have to think of a movement as a class instead of considering the individualities and intersections with other oppressions that people experience is that movements are constructed around the experiences of the most privileged members of a group. There is no such a thing as "a class," there are movements full of people where some are more privileged than others. There is no "greater good" about ignoring oppressions that "are not the center" of said movement (really, "the center" are just the experiences of the most privileged who don't have to live with other oppressions).

FWD (feminists with disabilities) for a way forward: Feminism Objectifies Women.

You’ve heard the term “choice feminism” right? Usually used derisively by a person who is arguing: Just because a woman makes a choice does not make it a feminist choice, we have to be able to examine issues on a systemic rather than individual level, some choices that individual feels are good for them are actually going to be bad for the group as a whole and even bad for that individual when systemic issues are taken into consideration.

Here’s what annoys me about this argument. It always comes from the perspective of a white, cisgendered, currently nondisabled, middle-to-upper-class, heteronormative, and otherwise socially privileged person.

[...]

Here’s the thing. Everything I just said above about “women”? Isn’t true for women. Rather, it is true for white women. Or cisgendered women. Or nondisabled women. It is not true for women as a class.

Yet we continually operate on the assumption that it is!

But ask some other women, sometime, what their experience has been. Many poor and lower-class women, for example, would gladly tell you that they have never had a whiff of an option to stay home with their children — they’ve been out there washing the rich women’s drawers, or sewing them in the first place, so that they can afford dinner for their family a few days out of the week. Ask a black woman about being a nanny and wet nurse. Ask both of those women, and a few mentally or physically disabled women, about when they had their children taken away from them or weren’t allowed to spend any time with them at all (apart from the time they spent cleaning up the messes of the children of those rich/white/nondisabled women they worked for). [...]

Ask the little girl with developmental disabilities about sex sometime, too. No one ever sees fit to give her any information on the subject. They fight to have her sterilized, or even be forced with serious drugs and surgical interventions to stay in a prepubescent state for the rest of her life, so that no one will ever have to deal with the messy proposition of a menstruating or pregnant r*t*rd girl.[...]

Ask the visibly disabled woman about being expected to dress up in skirts and high-heeled shoes. Everybody around her will wince at the thought of her in form-fitting, skin-showing clothing. Because, you know, “women” are oversexualized in that way. Ask her about those super-special parenting powers she supposedly has. Everybody around her will bristle at the thought of her having primary responsibility over a child. Because, you know, “women” are stereotyped as having those super-special powers.

Ask trans women about femininity, and how they are treated if they chose to act according to it. Yeah, a lot of the time it means death.

So there is no a "universal" women's experience.

deepad has an amazing post about transnational adoption: One boy/ Boy for sale/He's going cheap.

There is a curious intersection with the feminist discourses around birth control and abortion - white western women are entitled to their right to abort and adopt. Meanwhile women in India and China and I presume elsewhere, are told about responsibilities. It is our responsibility to get married and give our husband a son. It is our responsibility to continue the family name. It is also our responsibility to not breed ourselves into overcrowded squalor. It is our responsibility to control our reproductive fecundity. Apparently, now, it is also our responsibility to give up our children to people who have more financial and material assets.

It is hypocritical to espouse the cause of capitalism and not follow that ideology's core principle to its logical conclusion - human beings are capital. They can be assets or expenditure depending on the value ascribed to them. And paying a human being money in order to get legal access to another human being is a commercial transaction.

What disgusted me the most about the article was the conclusion, which focusses on how, though the children are currently with their grandmother, who wishes to keep them, the woman who wants to adopt them hopes for a "a happy ending in which she gets the girls". Clearly if Charles Dickens were to write about Mr. Bumble putting young Oliver Twist up for sale today, we would be expected to find Oliver's escape from the undertaker who paid good money for him, into the eventual arms of his biological aunt to be a tale most tragic and woeful. [...]

This is neo-colonialism - where military and economic wars are fought and sponsored on other people's land, and the resultant orphaned bodies displaced to grow up bound by gratitude and love to a country that would deny their native counterparts the ability to choose immigration on more equitable terms. Where the individualistic and therefore unassailable morality of "right to choose" breeds a sense of entitlement that is fed by preaching a rhetoric of responsibility to the rest of the world.

Because I totally missed linking this (why, yeah, I want to be the_future_modernes when I grow up), via the wonderful colorblue:

Intersectionality and Rape. It has wonderful links. Must read.

Off to study. Now.