42 Quotes by Alison Phipps

The response to naming and shaming is often what I call ‘institutional airbrushing’: neoliberal institutions and organisations obsessed with how things look rather than how they are merely remove the ‘blemish’ that has been exposed.

Instead of using the white feminist wrecking ball, we should build towards a world without sexual violence. This is not about forgiveness, empathy or being ‘nice’ – it is about the fact that we cannot end violence by doing violence. Even – no, especially – if that violence manifests as tears.

White feminist narcissism has no truck with the idea that we are anything but victims.

The investment of sexual trauma in the outrage economy allows the ‘good’ woman (cis, ‘respectable’, implicitly white) to be used to withhold support and resources from the ‘bad’ ones. Trans women and sex workers are pitted against more privileged women, in a politics that does not challenge how neoliberal capitalism has created massive inequalities of distribution.

Our anger at heteropatriarchy demands criminal and institutional punishment. But saying ‘fuck the patriarchy’ is hardly radical when this is followed by calling on patriarchal disciplinary power.

Traversing borders is a threat – and in the colonial mindset, the borders of class and nationality are at one with the borders of gender. Binary gender is a colonial and capitalist project, what feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa called the ‘absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other’.

Western borders are currently being reasserted in the context of economic crisis, to protect the global ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. And reactionary feminism is complicit with this capitalist and neo-colonial project. It foregrounds narratives of scarcity; it claims resources and support for the ‘good’ women rather than the ‘bad’.

Media markets, like all markets, are profoundly nihilistic. Clicks, likes and shares are a multi-denominational currency. As long as they accumulate, as long as visibility (and revenue) is gained, it does not matter why. In other words, the media using sexual violence as clickbait does not imply support for feminist goals.

Colonial feminists are concerned with ‘liberating’ Other women, not critiquing colonial capitalism and its neoliberal successor. Colonial feminists condemn the burqa, but not the wars waged or fought by proxy in the service of resource accumulation, trade routes and pipelines, enabling and supporting autocratic and fundamentalist regimes.