42 Quotes by Alison Phipps

The submissive femininity of radical feminism was bourgeois, white and heterosexual. There was no acknowledgement that this ‘enslaved’ femininity was not universal, or that it was complicit in the actual enslavement of generations of Black people.

Claiming to be silenced amplifies and circulates reactionary forms of speech by generating outrage. And this manoeuvre works not because reactionary feminists are speaking truth to power and being accused of transphobia, but because they are speaking for power by expressing transphobia.

Sometimes, sexual violence is a ‘cultural problem’ (but only when this culture is non white). Sometimes, it is a product of male anatomy (but only when this anatomy is assigned to a trans woman or a man of colour). Sexual violence is never the violence of heteropatriarchy or globalising racial capital. Instead, representatives of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism weaponise the idea of ‘women’s safety’ against marginalised and hyper-exploited groups.

How might mainstream feminist activism help or hinder other social justice projects, for instance around class inequality, race discrimination, migrants’ rights and transgender inclusion? When violent men and governments profess their concern for ‘women’s safety’, how should feminists respond?

Protecting white women was, and is, a key colonial preoccupation. Imaginings of Indigenous and/or slave uprisings were sexualised: fear of revolution was fear of rape. In colonial and neo-colonial cultures, white women’s tears are deadly to people of colour.

This…exemplifies how trans-exclusionary feminism uses the experience of rape. Drawing on the radical feminist idea of the penis as a weapon, it ‘sticks’ this organ to trans women through an obsession with their surgical status. The ‘threat’ posed by the trans woman is then juxtaposed with the threatened (white) femininity of the abuse survivor. Cue outrage.

Instead of interrogating intersecting systems, politically white feminism roots violence either in aberrant or all male bodies. The mainstream focus on ‘bad men’, and the reactionary focus on male biology, do not account for how capitalist economic predation and misogynist sexual predation go hand in hand. They do not account for how this interplay is racialised, domestically and geopolitically.

Despite the scraps of socialism in its history, [trans- and sex worker-hostile feminism] is bourgeois feminism rooted in disdain for those who think and live differently, whose bodies are not easily assimilated to capitalist production and reproduction.

Violence against women is a pivot for the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism. It results from the tussle for material and emotional resources, between commodity production and the reproduction of human life.