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I am going to have to reread Jenny Turner's "As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes" at least seven more times before I can even engage with it simply on the level of comprehension, but even the first pass has left me exhausted. Every paragraph explodes with an almost impossible number of issues with which to contend. Perhaps (and probably so) you are brighter than I can get the whole thing in one go, but if not you'll want to get started now, right here.
"It’s a free-market economy out there, so of course there’s going to be violent pornography as long as there are people fucked up enough to want it. And of course there are people prepared to make it for them. The American writer Laura Kipnis warns against getting ‘teary-eyed about exploited pornography workers’ when you ‘haven’t thought much about international garment workers, or poultry workers – to name just two’."
Well, it's a free market economy, so of course there are going to be exploited international garment workers as long as there are people who want cheap clothes.
@antarcticastartshere I kind of agree with a lot of what she is saying but I also think this article is going to drive me crazy.
shorter version: "After the revolution, girls."
"Some women behave like THIS, but other women behave DIFFERENTLY. Amirite?"
Can't finish…brain about to explode….
I couldn't make head or tail of it.
Did that lady just say, "Andrea Dworkin, a cosmos, multitudinous and all-suffering in her gigantic dungarees."?
@Tulletilsynet The reference list is comprised of books she mentions and disparages, which are mostly decades-old, and books she doesn't mention, some of which are worthwhile but most of which seem to be "post-feminist" / conservative broadsides (namely "Dead End Feminism" aka Feminism Is For Man-Haters, and "Female Chauvinist Pigs", which most people are probably familiar with).
Jenny Turner is very proud of herself after just inventing the concept of intersectionality and illuminating the problems with the women's movement that everyone else has been talking about for at least the last 20 years. You got us, Jenny. Radical feminism cannot stand before the weight and power of your brilliant reasoning. Shut it down, ladies! It's over.
Man I bet this woman is pissed that she hadn't thought all this up before Camille Paglia hogged all the glory in the '90s.
Zing.
@Danzig! Yeah, I like how she just completely ignores this whole constellation of postcolonial/transnational feminist writers of color (e.g. Chandra Mohanty, Gloria Anzaldua, and Gayatri Spivak, to name a few off the top of my head) who are super into intersections with capitalism and nationality and everything else she talks about, just so she can be like, "Oh man, Feminists have totally missed the boat on this one!" I wonder if she knows that non-white women can be theorists, too…?
@Danzig! I agree completely about her ignoring the history of intersectional and postcolonial feminist thinkers, both in the US and the UK. But I read this article as a comment on how the mainstream feminist movement in the UK actually operates – and sadly, she's pretty accurate in her description. While there are anti-racist and anti-capitalist feminist groups active in the UK, the groups that get the most media attention and dominate the movement are really, really NOT intersectional. See my comment below about the Fawcett Society's 'sexism in the city' campaign (in case you're not based in the UK, the Fawcett society is the UK equivalent of NOW).
While it's nice to see Selma James get some good press for once, the article definitely glosses over the long history of anti-capitalist and anti-racist feminism in the UK, from Sylvia Pankhurst, to Hazel Carby, to various small anti-capitalist feminist groups active today. But these are not the women getting book deals or appearing in The Guardian, and as indictment of the modern mainstream British feminist movement, I think Turner is spot on.
A few years ago, the Fawcett Society ran the 'Sexism in the City' campaign, which lumped together sexual harassment and discrimination experienced by women working in finance, and that experienced by the largely female cleaning staff working in The City. While it is important to oppose sexual discrimination and harassment in the upper echelons of banks and other corporations, this framing ignores that the financiers have a lot more resources to deal with discrimination and harassment than the cleaners. It ignores the other challenges the cleaners have to deal with – for example, the fact that many of the are non-status migrants, were hired because this made them easily exploitable, and now when they try to organise for better working conditions, they're threatened with deportation. And, most importantly, it ignores that the women financiers benefit from, and are often complicit with, creating the exploitative economic conditions the cleaners deal with, and turn a blind eye to the sexual harassment and assault that the cleaners experience.
There is no genuine intersectionality in mainstream UK feminism – reading that one essay by Audre Lorde and inviting a refugee woman to speak at your conference is not good enough. Gender continues to be the only lens of analysis for most of the feminist movement, and, somehow, protesting against Lad Mags (yet again) is always prioritised over protesting against the detention of asylum-seekers.
It's not "after the revolution, girls"; there's not going to be a revolution with feminism in its current state. There will be some middle-class well educated women able to advance their careers further then they would have been able to previously, thanks to feminism (and I'm one of them). And there's going to be cleaners paid less than a living wage who get deported when they join a union.