Sisterhood in application (Part three)

Guest post by Féministe radicale francophone 

Part III: Structuring our resistance

Part I is here, Part II is here.

This is the final part of the series on sisterhood in application. After looking at the consequences of trauma induced by male violence on our groups and how masculinist abuse operates in women-only feminist spaces, in this part I will look at group structure and how certain kinds of structures may favour effective political work and healthy relations in feminist activism. By group structure, I mean not only the structure of relations between the women within a group, but also the way actions are constructed: the kind of priorities established, the way in which objectives are pursued, goals articulated, the strategies or means chosen for their implementation.

Sisterhood in Application (Part Two)

Guest post by Féministe radicale francophone

Part II: A right and obligation to preserve ourselves.

Part I is here.

For many of us, feminism may be about the only thing that clings us to life and hope. Without sorority and feminism, many of us would be dead, would still be heavily controlled by men or have seeped into madness. This existential relation to feminism means that conflicts or treasons within our groups may be all the more difficult to cope with when they occur, because it threatens the little haven of safety and sanity we might have managed to create. Our wounds are still bleeding, our hearts scorched: blows may be fatal or devastating, and we often have nowhere else to go.

Sisterhood in application (Part One)

Guest post by Féministe radicale francophone

Article I of III: Taking into account the imprint of devastation on our collectives. 

What took me to write this series on sisterhood is a situation of emergency, in which our solidarity and collective resistances are continually under threat or sabotaged by the rifts men have created in ourselves and between ourselves.[1] Men not only attack us externally but corrode us deeply from the inside so we fissure internally and then displace the violence onto ourselves and other women.[2] This way men make sure we never have the strength and cohesiveness to build a viable alternative to their necrophiliac system, so we don’t become solid enough to put their war to an end – let alone have the material capacity to do so. Although this issue is as old as men’s rule over women, the amnesia, genocide and erasure of women[3] means that the emergency seems to be as new today as it was yesterday: with much despair, I have seen collective after collective bitterly imploding, being infiltrated or taken down by those robotically defending men’s war against us.

Radical Feminism is Gaining Ground

Associate Professor Betty McLellan and Dr Greg Canning [Sourced from Townsville Bulletin]

What happens when men finally realize they can no longer suppress women’s speech? When their counter-arguments prove to be unsubstantiated and factually incorrect? When they’re forced to accept that nobody takes the word “misandry” seriously, because while “misogyny” evokes the horrors of witch-burnings, female genital mutilation, honor killings, suttee, forced lobotomies and Chinese foot-binding, “misandry” only manages to evoke the image of an overweight white dude who hates his ex-wife and gets off on punching his perceived grievances into a keyboard…?

My slogan will be intersectional but my trans agenda will be bull shit

Guest Post by Dragon Dyke.

The latest slogan of the trans activists is ‘my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bull shit’. The current trans obsession with intersectionality is a major cause for concern, and a trans co-option of intersectional theory could have disastrous consequences for the political struggles of all subordinate groups.

Trans activists are co-opting political movements and the ultimate trans agenda is to remove the rights of all subordinate groups to self-determination and movements for liberation. I do not believe that most individuals who identify as trans or their allies are consciously planning the depoliticisation of class based oppressions. Trans is a structural and colonising tactic – a tool of the patriarchy, but if you buy into trans theory, that is what you are buying into.

The ‘Pomo’ Backlash: Looking at Feminism in the Aftermath of Postmodernism (Part 2)

Guest post by Maggie H.

[This is part two of a two part post. Read part one here.]

There is an over-emphasis on discourse and domination of ‘language’ in postmodern feminist works; this frequently fails to address the central issue of structural male domination over women. There is validity in linking language with power. However, radical feminists have explained where the ‘master narrative’ lies; it is not in women’s accounts of their life experiences. The voices of the oppressed ought not to be deconstructed. It is men who have privilege and the power of naming in a patriarchy (Daly, 1979; Dworkin, 1979), and men like Foucault or Derrida are no exception.

Structural male dominance should adequately be addressed; but Jane Flax (in Thinking Fragments; 1990), for example, would rather use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘gender relations’ than male dominance. She makes the absurd claim that there is a need to find what gender relations ‘really are’, while gender continues to be constructed and enforced by a male-supremacist context. She remains obscure on the reality of sex hierarchy in a gendered society where men dominate women. There is notable reluctance, in Flax’s work, to seriously name the agent for women’s oppression, i.e. men.

The ‘Pomo’ Backlash: Looking at Feminism in the Aftermath of Postmodernism (Part 1)

Guest post by Maggie H.

Poststructuralism, also referred to as postmodernism (1), has been majorly influential on recent feminist theory, especially within the context of Academia. This is an analysis and a critical assessment of postmodern ‘feminism’ from my own radical lesbian feminist standpoint. I will first highlight some key issues coming from the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970’s (i.e. background on feminism, as it looked like before postmodernism). I will then look at the academic feminist theoretical postmodernist turn of recent years, and later point out to Queer culture as an offshoot of postmodernism. I will also explain why postmodernism is seriously antithetical to the goal to eradicate the oppression of women, and conclude with hope for resistance. This essay is also the result of a research into postmodern feminism that I had been doing for University. Here, I analyse some postmodern ‘feminist’ works.

Second Wave Feminists & Older Feminists

Guest Post by Vliet Tiptree

We have just lost some of our most respected radical feminist elders who were part of the Second Wave of feminism, namely, Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin, but there remain alive and definitely kicking many more. Some of us who are over 60 and well-known include Germaine Greer and Catharine MacKinnon. Many of us have worked steadily over the years on reform issues or gone into scientific research or examined future feminist societies through the vehicle of science fiction. Many of us have entered the professions and helped women one-on-one in our careers.

Others of us were once very involved and our lives were changed by the Second Wave. Over the years we were unable to contribute much due to survival or other issues. But here we are again. What has brought us back?

Fem-manifesto-ing

Guest post by Susan Hawthorne

This is based on a talk originally given at the SCUM Conference in Perth, Australia on 24 September 2011.

I come to the writing of manifestoes with the interests of a poet and political activist. Political activism is obvious. But poetry? An effective manifesto is one in which the language works, the political position is clear – but above all – it has rhythm and metre. A manifesto is a bit like a poem or a song.

Let’s look at Marx and Engels. The first line of the prologue:

Anticlimax revisited

Guest post by Sheila Jeffreys

My 1990 book Anticlimax, which has been out of print, is being republished by Spinifex Press this month with a new preface. It is a book of which I am particularly fond because I wrote it in the late 1980s, as a way of making sense of  my own experience of the ‘sexual revolution’. The sexual history of the 1960s was being written up in the 1980s as a process of women’s sexual liberation. I did not see it that way.

I did remember that the ‘alternative’ magazines of the period, Oz and International Times, were full of women’s naked bodies, albeit painted with flowers often enough, and promoted pornography as liberating. In the book I had the opportunity to look back at what was really going on, through the sex advice literature and the pornography of the time. I wrote Anticlimax, and my first book, The Spinster and Her Enemies (1985/1997), to demonstrate that the ‘sexual revolutions’ of the twentieth century liberated men’s sexual access to women rather than women’s empowerment.