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I HAVE NO WORDS

Most people don’t know how to deal with strangers being emotionally vulnerable, they can only nurture that vulnerability when it’s a long time friend–but they still create spaces where they encourage others to be vulnerable with them.

It’s like they believe that all you need to do to “heal” is be vulnerable, to open up. That’s it, once you’re vulnerable you are Healed. They pay vulnerability lip service and finger snaps.

They create spaces that are BEYOND easy for abusers to use as a hunting ground particularly BECAUSE vulnerability is handled so flippantly. When you handle vulnerability like that, where you can brush it off like that, it makes it nigh impossible for those people to speak out. It makes people feel used. It makes people easy to discard.

I guess society forcing you to starve and suffer in pain is ~☆~not violent~☆~

Lemme give you this quote as some food for thought.

“If I put a gun to someone’s head, say, a 30-year-old healthy male, pull the trigger, and kill him, assuming an average life expectancy of, say, 84, you can argue that possibly 54 years of life [were] stolen from that person in a direct act of violence.

However, if a person is born into poverty in the midst of an abundant society where it is statistically proven that it would hurt no one to facilitate meeting the basic needs of that person and yet they die at the age of 30 due to heart disease, which has been found to statistically relate to those who endure the stress and effects of low socioeconomic status, is that death, the removal of those 54 years once again, an act of violence?

And the answer is ‘Yes, it is.’

You see, our legal system has conditioned us to think that violence is a direct behavioral act. The truth is that violence is a process, not an act, and it can take many forms.

You cannot separate any outcome from the system by which it is oriented.”

From Athena Addams’ Twitter.

This the client who stabbed & robbed Athena Addams. Sex workers, especially trans sex workers, please be careful & watch out for this man if you are in Southern California or Nevada, especially the Hollywood & LA area.

My body exists in a context that makes it nearly impossible for me to love my body, and I don’t have the time or the energy or, most importantly, the DESIRE to pretend to love and celebrate my body, however one goes about doing that.

I don’t love my body. I feel anxiety about my body. I HATE my body. But at the same time I KNOW that I don’t deserve to have people making me feel like shit for having a body over which I (feel I) have little control.

I don’t deserve this REGARDLESS of my feelings about my own body. I can very well hate my body and I would still NOT deserve that.

1) it’s “Najia”

2) as in all things, the way that patriarchy operates with regards to femininity is multifaceted and internally contradictory.

femininity is made obligatory for women through any number of mechanisms (social/familial, economic, cultural, etc.) and yet is simultaneously devalued (which must be understood as arising out of the devaluation of women even as women and femininity are not mutually inclusive).

some groups of women are deliberately excluded from the aegis of femininity in that its boundaries are constructed outside of them to centre on white, cis, heterosexual, middle-class womanhood (think of the European colonial imposition of the specific delineations of their gender binary, through which Black women & other ‘female’ colonial subjects were seen as outside or in between these delineations and therefore monstrous, not completely ‘feminine,’ therefore not really ‘women,’ therefore not fully human–not even in the dubious way in which white women are considered human. think also of how Black women under slavery were masculinised due to their perceived ability to do manual labour more easily than white women, just as the femininity / uselessness of middle class white women was upheld as valuable in that it testified to the financial strength of their husbands–thus this racial construction of femininity has an economic motive). these are women for whom performing femininity is simultaneously doubly mandatory (if we are to come closer to being deemed ‘acceptably feminine’ and therefore human, to whatever extent that’s possible) and yet parsed as subversive (think of e.g. trans women, who often must perform femininity–including, relatedly, heterosexuality–to an extreme degree in order to access resources including medical transition, and yet for whom feminine presentations are seen as automatically & necessarily subversive)

basically, femininity is constructed within certain rigid boundaries and makes obligatory things which are often painful, harmful, expensive, or time-consuming. the injunction to perform femininity–to make ourselves consumable according to certain parameters–ends up alienating women from our own bodies, persuading us to measure our worth based on our ability to adhere to those parameters. performing femininity may bring social approval, economic benefit, or feelings of self-worth, but the fact that these things are contingent upon that performance is still ultimately evidence of femininity’s oppressive nature.

of course, women who ‘successfully’ perform femininity still face misogyny and are devalued because they are women. femininity and feminine forms of expression are therefore also devalued through their association with women (even when taken up by people who aren’t women–you’ll hear this referred to in gay male communities, for example). women who don’t make such concessions to femininity, however, are met with the full brunt of the backlash of the aforementioned regulatory mechanisms (including economic penalties in terms of salary and career opportunities, social penalties that manifest in the displeasure of both men and women who are committed to upholding patriarchal femininity, penalties to feelings of self-confidence or self-worth that can be difficult to overcome, and physical violence–all of which are worsened for women who are already deemed inadequately feminine by their very nature, such as Black & otherwise racialised women. and of course the fear of women as fully self-actualised people, and, relatedly, lesbophobia, has a lot to do with this). thus femininity places us all in a kind of double bind.

Its tricky. The definition of radical feminism is a bit hard to get to, because its so debated. I would argue (along with I think most contemporary feminists trying to account for its origins) that radical feminism emerges from a realization that class reductionist marxist feminism cannot adequately account for the experiences of women. Beauvoir, McKinnon, Wittig, Dworkin, all more or less not that while there is a socioeconomic nature to the oppression of women, the marxist reduction to socioeconomics is not analytically sufficient to explain womens experiences. As such, radical feminism posits an alternative theory which centers the oppression of women and the enforced supremacy of men as the central structure of oppression in the lives of women.

Critics of radical feminism have noted that this merely decenters one totalizing structure (the material relations of historical materialism) with another, and thus maintains a tendency to bracket out questions of racial, class based, and colonial repressions. I’m not particularly interested in sorting out that debate right here, but it is worth thinking about the fact that the mere act of centering patriarchy as “Solely responsible” caries some weight to it in terms of how it shapes the lens through which we analyze violence in womens lives. Doesn’t mean its incorrect but we should be honest that its a contested position.

So having established a bit of an understanding for what defines radical feminism, and having acknowledged that the definition itself is a site of debate, we can move on to what I take to be your real question, which is how that analytic move which radical feminism emerges out of leads to an antagonistic stance towards trans women.

Here, again, there is controversy. My own professor and department chair Bonnie Mann (in her open letter to Lierre Keith, which you can find from google) maintains that it largely comes down to the fact that the idea of a man becoming a woman does not compute within the sex-caste analytic radical feminists employ, and thus trans women pose a theoretical threat to the totalized explanatory power of radical feminism. For her, it seems that its easier to reject trans women out of hand than it is to amend radical feminist theory to account for why such “sex-caste class traitors” might exist in the first place.

In my view, there are certain tensions within radical feminism already which I believe lead to trans antagonism. Radical feminism is internally divided over sexual difference and its ontological status. Beauvoir’s famous “One is not born, but becomes a woman” is a concept fraught with transnational issues, and is a site of hot debate. Irigaray who will maintain that sexual difference ought to be centered and celebrated, and Wittig who maintained that sexual difference was merely ideology which must be combated, both sought approval of their interpretations from Beauvoir (Neither quite got it actually).

Irigaray and the other psychoanalytic french feminists ended up rising to prominence in the united states, leading to a specifically american brand of radical feminism that tended to center sexual difference as an ontological stable reality which needed to be affirmed and centered. McKinnon insists that neither she nor Dworkin really took this stance, and in an interview with the transadvocate she really double down on an insistence that she agrees with Wittig’s approach to sexual difference, and rejects its affirmation.

All that said, an internal debate over the status of sexual difference, largely resulted in the movement supporting a position which centered it and demanded it be recognized as ontologicalally constituted. This I believe is a foundational reason that contemporary and especially anglo/american radical feminism ends up with a trans antagonistic standpoint, it lays the groundwork for Daly and Raymond to make the invader claims they make, which are predicated on an insurmountable and essential difference between the sexes.

The Conquest of Bread, Pëtr Kropotkin (via smarmyanarchist)

I always think of this passage whenever people are making the ‘he was a product of his time’ excuse for “revolutionary” men who ignored patriarchy, this was written in the 1880s

When we look at the first 15 years of the 21st century, the most defining moment in black America’s relationship to its country isn’t Election Day 2008; it’s Hurricane Katrina. The events of the storm and its aftermath sparked a profound shift among black Americans toward racial pessimism that persists to today, even with Barack Obama in the White House. Black collective memory of Hurricane Katrina, as much as anything else, informs the present movement against police violence, “Black Lives Matter.”

Among the first images of New Orleans after the storm were shots of low-income black Americans, stranded and desperate to escape the floods and debris. In the narrow sense, they were there because the city’s evacuation plan—which didn’t account for massive traffic out of the region—fell apart. Rather than bring remaining New Orleansians out, officials sent them to the Superdome and the convention center, which were quickly overcrowded and undersupplied. In a much broader sense, however, they were there because in a city defined by decades of poverty, segregation, and deep disenfranchisement, poor and working-class blacks (including the elderly, and children) would largely shoulder the burden of the storm.