like seven billion things happened in bloodmarked and oathbound after this and yet this moment continues replaying in my brain through our white woman internet connection. i remember being so jarred because this little moment from cestra felt so out of place considering what she was doing until i realized that she's just engaging in basic white feminism.
the order is a boys' club and cestra is the woman with the most power and influence in it. she definitely faced a lot of misogyny to get there and probably still does while in the position. she is able to recognize the way the men of the order have used their power to oppress women throughout history. but her solution to this is not to dismantle the power systems in the order. her solution is to gain that power also. she struggled to get here, presumably, but she doesn't want to eliminate the struggle for others, because for her the struggle proves that she also deserves to be there. it's an individualistic mindset common of white feminism, where the goal is to become "equal" to men and not to actually dismantle the systems that facilitated the power imbalance in the first place. it's the premise of that one taylor swift song lol. she's fine with the system as long as it's benefitting her. (bree didn't work for her power like she did, so she doesn't deserve it or her respect. this is also what tor, another white woman, thinks.)
another thing is the focus on gender. all women are oppressed because of their gender, so often we as white women treat misogyny as The Main Problem and focus on that as something that all of us have in common and in which we are The Same. we ignore intersectionality while piggybacking off Black women's activism and in the process declawing it from anything that might push us to actually confront our racism. this is what cestra is doing here. bree calls out how this WHITE man abused her ENSLAVED BLACK female ancestor and how the WHITE regents are abusing her, a BLACK girl, and cestra gets uncomfortable...
...and then comes back into the conversation by pushing aside the element of race to focus on how MEN abuse WOMEN in general. men abuse women they consider their property all the time, like cestra says, sure, but vera's rape wasn't just the result of samuel davis considering her his property. it was the result of all of white society, of the order itself, considering BLACK people their properties and especially BLACK WOMEN, and legally branding them as such. it wasn't just misogyny, it was racism and misogyny, but cestra cannot address the racism because she benefits from that racism, is racist herself, and is perpetuating racism right in that moment.
cestra does that little bit as a way to put herself forward as a feminist, to say she's against misogyny and throw a jab at her male peers, calling attention to her own status as a woman who's faced misogyny, but she has no intention of actually extending solidarity to bree. no intention of actually doing anything with her power to help other women besides be snarky in private conversation (see: that one taylor swift song). no intention of doing anything in reparation for vera's abuse and the enslavement of all of bree's ancestors before her because she won't even acknowledge her role in it. white women never want to acknowledge our role in it. men did it, men are the oppressors, men men men. in her mind, she has no responsibility or connection to it, even though historically white women were just as complicit in slavery as white men. even as she's actively participating in the kidnapping and drugging and torture and subjugation of a Black child in present time and later participates in the buying of Black girls for human experimentation.
anyways just thinking out loud after a few days of microwaving in my brain, im sure Black women reading the book caught onto this right away. i don't remember anything about cestra after this moment i'm not even joking lmaoo but it's amazing how tracy condensed the attitude and behaviors of white feminism in like four lines of dialogue.
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