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.

We want Harvey Weinstein in prison. We want Brock Turner to have a longer sentence. We want Judge Aquilina to sign Nassar’s death warrant. We rely on a third party to take these ‘bad men’ away, usually in the form of an institution or the state. And this White Knight or Angry Dad is patriarchy personified. This is how our outraged activism fails to dismantle the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy and racial capitalism that produce sexual violence – and strengthens them instead.

Whiteness is predisposed to woundedness…from a position of power, one is naturally preoccupied with threat.

Political whiteness is the systematic privileging of bourgeois white women’s wounds at the expense of others. Its obsession with threat is both sexualised and racialised, because of the role of colonialism in co-constructing race and sexuality.

Feminism underpinned by political whiteness seeks power within the existing system, not the overthrow of the system itself. This is ‘lean-in’ corporate feminism, and the governance feminism that has put ‘femocrats’ in local, national and international bureaucracies. This feminism advocates for women on banknotes, but does not necessarily dispute the hands that the majority of these banknotes are in.