Tag: working class feminism

These extracts illustrate how dominant educational discourses of the ideal female pupil may be experienced as narrow and constraining by young working class women, who find it difficult to reconcile a positive view of themselves as pupils with their own notions of an assertive, strong femininity. The girls’ assertions of ‘loud’, active and visible femininities can be understood as challenging the forms of submissive, passive and quiet femininity that are usually rewarded within schools. For boys, such ‘challenging’ behaviours may tend to be read as part of ‘normal’ masculinity, whereas the same behaviours may bring young women into conflict with schools because they are interpreted as deviant and undesirable aspects of femininity (e.g., as problematic or aggressive rather than ‘assertive’).

Inner-city femininities and education: ‘race’, class, gender and schooling in young women’s lives by Louise Archer, Anna Halsall and Sumi Hollingworth

Look, if you can’t deal with doing the actual work of challenging and changing sexism (which is a slow and draining process, I know) let me do it. Stay out of the way in your safe space while I get this done, you can come out when the revolution’s finished.

Like, don’t approach people in ways that no one has ever responded positively to because you think that’s an approach people should respond to, and then get huffy when they don’t and destroy all the progress I’ve made.  You’re not helping.

So Like I Think Women Who Are In The Position Of Being Denied “True Womanhood”

So women who aren’t cis, white, respectable bougie straight  and so on, are ironically placed in the position of being oppressed by the patriarchal authority of women who are allowed the “true woman” label (also like each axis privilege allows you some patriarchal authority, like a white working class woman can use a measure of patriarchal force against a black working class woman cause yeah).

So like women who don’t have the benefit of “proper womanhood” are placed in the position of women under women who do, and so like bougie white cis abled straight “respectable” women enact a kind of double patriarchy on all other women I think.

Also I think oppression is exponential rather than simply additional (like being a disabled woman is more shitty than merely the sum of oppressed identities)

Also I think bourgeois women have a kind of patriarchal power over prole women on top of the class thing, and white women over WOC and so on.

Like bourgeois women feel entitled to regulate our reproduction, and sexuality.  Feel they have the right to comment on and criticize our appearances.  They feel entitled to us sexually (the way bougie female strip club patrons treat the dancers, also like the way bougie women will appropriate prole women’s, especially sex workers’, style of dress for a naughty thrill or to be daring,) and like also how they go to high powered jobs or skip off to spin class and leave domestic and often emotional labor to us.

For examples see:
The rise in demand for domestic labor as bougie women entered the workforce

The fact that all the modern hair removal women do started with sex workers (I don’t have a source but the modern trend for removing your pubic hair started with sex workers too) 

This shit

a bunch of other stuff I’m not going to look at right now because I need a bath and to find my glasses

Also like how even straight white women will use black women as sexual props and toys (hey Miley, hey Iggy) as mentioned in the essay I linked to right there (also in the post before this because it’s that fucking good) and like WOC have written better stuff on this than me.  OH also Laurell K. Hamilton’s orientalist submissive lotus blossom bullshit (google it or maybe don’t it’s depressing here’s a link and another).

Also like straight women using sga women as experiments and props and so on and so forth but like mostly I wanted to talk about the class thing because other people have written better on the other stuff.

Introduction To A Leftist Book I’m Working On:

I am not a child of the academy, in fact I have very little formal education.  I am a highschool drop out, a sex worker, and yet I think in terms of theory my voice might be a valuable one. I think too much of our theory has been written by the academy, academics with supposedly altruistic aims, academics who pretend to listen to women like me, pretend to be there for us and publish articles about us but never by us.  I am not here to be your plain speaking prop, a quote in a book you publish and profit from.  I am not here to be your romanticized image of a proletarian, so quaintly, charmingly uneducated.  I did not slog my way through Capital while  working late nights to allow you to use me to fuel your elitist anti-intellectualism, your belief that proletarians should not be expected to read theory because we are not smart enough to do so, a belief which justifies your belief that you (college educated, NGO types) are necessary to working class organization and struggle.  

I am a communist, but I do not trust charity.  Charity is all too often more about the emotional needs of the giver than the material needs of the receiver.  I am here out of self interest.  I am here for my own liberation, a liberation I know will only come through the liberation of the entire working class, because if you do not destroy oppression root and branch, it will always grow back.  I could jockey for position within systems of oppression, but I find that idea ultimately unsatisfactory.  I do not want to get away with war crimes only to be pulled over by the fashion police.  I could use the supposed “authenticity” (how I loathe that word) of my voice to make myself a career in speaking at conferences on the struggles of women like me (only while supervised by a nice properly educated academic of course).  I could get myself lauded and studied and listened to by a rapt audience of supposedly well meaning bourgeoisie, and give myself a marvelous sense of self importance without doing anything, but I do not wish to be a performing seal.

I am unsatisfied with the current state of leftist feminist theory, most of which is writing by bourgeois women done during the 60s in a haze of drugs and woo woo nonsense.  I have little patience for this.  I am a proletarian woman.  I do not have time for pontificating about the imagined witch-cults of medieval europe.  I have no need of a matriarchal eden to call patriarchy unjust.  I do not have the time or energy for a community garden.  I have no wish to overturn the advances of modern agriculture, no wish to fight high per acre yields that result in lessening the problem of deforestation, and a reduced need for agricultural toil.  All I have time for is revolution and that is what I am here for.  I do not mean revolution in the sense it is so often used today, where revolution is what we call a minor advance in blender technology, I mean the motherfucking revolution.  I am here for mass organization, strikes, and the overthrow of capital and the abolition of the state.  I am here to demand an end to this period of leftism being dominated by a waffling, hesitating, anti-revolutionary academic current, and the start of a period of active class struggle.

I am tired of the tired old “not at this historical moment” cannard.  There is no historical moment that will magically arrive and herald in the revolution unless we build that moment, unless we put in the work to build it.  You are waiting rather than doing only because for you the situation is not a desperate one.  This is not a system I can live in.  This is not a system I can have children in.  I am working myself to death trying to attain some scrap of security for me and mine, and it will never come, and so I write from a place of raw animal need.  I write from the knowledge that without hope of revolution, I have no hope at all.

I am tired of being told that shit that isn’t going to help me is the revolution and I am deeply unsatisfied with the current state of leftist theory in general which seems to be a lot of pretty revolutionary rhetoric and no action.  There is endless theorizing about what this or that minor aspect of this or that indicates within the framework of, through the eyes of… blah blah blah bloody blah and none of the fiery utile work done in the early 20th century, none of the crucial instructiveness of the writing that came out of black liberation in the 60s (really the only new left theory worth reading in my opinion, with black feminist writings of the time being some of the very best leftist feminist theory around).  There is examination of capitalism, but this is no time for arm chair revolutionaries who would rather dissect minor points of theory than act.  This refusal to act is as unsatisfactory to me as the bourgeois feminist obsession with whether the way we fuck is conducive to gender liberation.  

The liberation of the working class and the liberation of women are dependent upon us building effective mass organizations and fighting back. We cannot ask.  We must demand because our oppressors will never willingly relinquish their power.

So I am here to write something with a bit of fire.  I am here to write for those of us who need the revolution to be soon, because we suffer and die waiting for that mythic historical moment to deliver us.  So here we go.

Okay so I’m not even particularly well read in terms of theory

But I’ve found that I’ve done more theory reading than most leftist women I know, like a lot of them are very well read and can talk deeply about feminist theory, but in terms of broad economic and political theory, they’ve usually read much less.

Why is this?

Why do we restrict ourselves to reading and writing about gender? Surely our class position must also affect our lives, and yet we have internalized the idea that we should leave that one to the men?  Why do we not write on the topic of organization like Malatesta or even Lenin (who was wrong and a dick, but he did write about how to create political organization)?  Why do we not write on the economic order of society like Marx?  Or the possible order of society like Kropotkin?