42 Quotes by Alison Phipps

We cannot continue to ‘wage war’ driven by outrage and desire for power; we must not dwell on our own border anxieties while the Western ‘we’ is violently reconstituted in a futile drive to resurrect Empire. In other words, we need to dismantle power, not merely demand a shift in who wields it.

While bourgeois white women claim our right to be ‘nasty’, we expect more marginalised women to be nice.

For white feminists, criminal punishment represents protection, not oppression. It is the colonial master’s intervention, the ‘empathy’ of Angry Dad. It is also the indirect demonstration of our own will to power.

White women have a right to be angry about sexual violence. Survivors have a right to spaces without abusers. All survivors fantasise about revenge. But whose bodies are forfeit when white women mobilise punitive state and institutional power to achieve it? Who are the real casualties of the white feminist war machine?

The general category of ‘women’s rage’…trains our sights on gender, and away from race and class. It positions bourgeois white women as victims, and erases our complicity in racial capitalist exploitation and white supremacy.

The feminist ‘war machine’ is white. And white rage is necropolitical rage: political whiteness is characterised by a desire for power and punishment. When righteous anger about sexual violence is channelled through race and class supremacy, it can produce a need for infliction.

The infliction that comes with white feminist anger, with its willingness to create collateral damage, perhaps makes it less of an ‘outlaw’ emotion than we might wish. In the symbolic and material game of ‘cops and robbers’, we are often identified with the cops.

Gender relations are currently being challenged and rethought, and equality gains staunchly defended as the resurgent right tries to roll them back. Perhaps this has given privileged white women the opportunity – and drive – to seize some power for ourselves. In a world of kill or be killed, or grab or be grabbed, this is Pussy Grabs Back.

There is narcissism in [the] white feminist refusal of intersectionality, this privileging of gender over race, class and other categories of oppression.