Putting the fangs back in feminism is a very urgent project.
As it exists right now, I would say feminism
is for white women and girls.
You'll see white feminism in the movies, in the newspaper,
in the capitalist system, in the wars that may affect your region.
And it's in the conversations
that you are invited to be a part of and the conversations that you are excluded from.
My experience with white feminism has been
that I always have to like file my edges,
explain my stories.
I feel that if I talk about the fact that
I was a single mother,
the fact that I had a divorce,
the fact that I lived in a shelter -
a ton of things are automatically
assumed about me.
Structurally, we make it impossible for that Black
or brown or Asian woman
to make any real changes
within the feminist context.
We have to make feminism political again.
58% of all women living in poverty
are women of color.
The world that Black and brown
women inhabit is a completely different world
from the world that white women inhabit.
When I sat down to write this book,
I wanted people to see
that white supremacy within feminism,
within the women's movement is not just a problem
within the United States,
but is then exported
all over the world.
The "war on terror" was the first feminist war
and this has been talked about,
but it hasn't been talked about
in terms of what it did with the image of the white woman.
I'm imagining Jessica Chastain in "Zero Dark Thirty."
"But Bin Laden is there
and you're going to kill him for me."
It's really being sort of pushed
as this sort of protector of all humankind
because she's gonna go get the terrorist and
she's so brave that she'll even
participate in torture.
"You don't think she's a little young for the hard stuff."
"Washington says she's a killer."
On a larger level,
it is this weaponization of the white woman
as simultaneously providing, taking feminism
as a gift to Afghan women or to
Iraqi women or Somali women
or Pakistani women.
Securofeminism is
a term that was coined by Professor Lila Abu-Lughod.
The term essentially revolves around how
these military "war on terror" interests of the United States and other Western powers
came to coalesce with
the larger transnational feminist project of
freeing women from their oppressive cultures.
"I'm Laura Bush and I'm delivering this week's radio address to
kick off a worldwide effort to focus on the brutality against
women and children by the Al Qaeda terrorist network and the regime
it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban."
In the United States, you actually had
feminist organizations like
Feminist Majority, who supported and
hailed the Bush administration
for going into Afghanistan.
You have the morphing of
this white feminist industrial complex into
a military project, where allegedly you're going out
and you're going to make the world feminist.
The securofeminist has become a figure
that is dreaded by women in other countries.
Another place where you see the impact of
white feminism is within the conflation
of sexual empowerment, or sexual freedom,
as the sum total of empowerment and of freedom.
If you can produce a Carrie in Nigeria or in India,
then you're empowered. Because that's what the goals
of an empowered woman are supposed to be.
The word "empowerment" was introduced into the feminist lexicon
by this collective that was out of India represented by Gita Sen.
The whole premise behind using the term “empowerment”
was to identify the women's struggle as an essentially political struggle
that works against all institutions, all patriarchal institutions.
It's almost like if I put "empowerment" as like a concentrated glass,
it's like more and more water
poured upon it so that
it increasingly has lost its flavor.
The sort of compartmentalization of empowerment happened
where you just kind of packaged it up as a buzzword.
Its meaning has been diluted.
The idea that it is a political struggle has completely been lost.
"Do not lean back. Lean in.”
The "girl boss" feminism is, in my opinion, not a feminist at all.
She's out for herself.
She's going to lean in. She'll do whatever it takes.
It essentially says, “Look out for yourself
where your ambition is concerned.”
"You have the talent.
Whether you have the killer instinct is the big question."
It doesn't look at the ruin and the detritus
that is left behind all these individual decisions
of all these individual women trying to climb the ladder
that men have constructed.
It is an absolute death blow
to feminism as a political project and as a collective project.
The question becomes:
What needs to happen
for some of these changes to be initiated?
One is that older white women
who have kind of defined the story
of the feminist movement
by and large
will have to cede some space.
It's just a recognition of the fact that everybody
needs to be included in the conversation.
You do not have to be white to be a white feminist.
And the fact that you are white does not
- and feminist - does not
automatically make you a white feminist.
It's important to distinguish essentially
between whiteness and feminism.
We have to put the politics back in this.
When we are creating
these conversations of parity,
it’s not just that I recognize you.
It's that the state
and other institutions have to be structured
such that they embody
the redistributive agenda of feminism.