Abolitionist Socialist Feminism. Zillah Eisenstein
bodies, whatever cultural and racial and class form they take, are a location of both power and powerlessness. If women are bound and gagged, it is because they have potential power. Women will be beaten or raped or mutilated because of this potential power. If one could, one would just ask any enslaved Black female about her body and her punishment, about her power and her powerlessness as a piece of property.
If women’s bodies were not sites of power, they would not be the battleground that they are. Sometimes this struggle to control is individual and personal through a sexual violation that is silenced and shamed. And sometimes the struggle is more public, as in the fight over the legal status of abortion, since abortion is a proxy for controlling women’s bodies.
The struggle over the legal standing of abortion stymied the unification negotiations between East and West Germany in 1990. West Germany was initially unwilling to accept the more radical abortion laws of the East. Abortion in the United States remained unresolved in the battles over the Obama health care reform. Reproductive rights and self-determination of one’s female body are central to all the newest reformations of misogyny—in the United States, in Poland, and in South America, for example. They remain central to the struggle for control of the US Supreme Court.
So female bodies share a homogenous standing in misogyny, while they are also varied in relation to systems of power. On the one hand, there are Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, former president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Prime Minister Theresa May of the UK, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, female defense ministers in Spain and France, and female soldiers at Abu Ghraib.
On the other hand, there are poor migrant women laborers, female flower growers in Honduras, mutilated girls and women in Rwanda, indigenous women protecting land rights throughout the globe, Black women and their children suffering the greatest effects of Hurricanes Katrina, Harvey, and Irma, detained women immigrants in the United States, raped Rohingya women in Myanmar, women of #MeToo.
This disjuncture of power among women is why US antiracist socialist feminists took part in the International Women’s Strike of 2017, calling for a feminism of the 99 percent. It was time to come together with restaurant workers, Wal-Mart employees, domestic workers, immigrant women, Black women, and many others. Some of us wear veils, others reveal their faces; some are tattooed, others not; some are trans, some are indigenous, some are gay, others are disabled. Some are made of many of these multiple parts.
As I rethink and update all the changes that are within my purview, I offer an abolitionist socialist feminism as a possible organizing site for the audaciousness already at hand. I am uneasy and doubtful but also equally passionate that radically progressive people —the big “we”—can transform the world, especially with girls and women of color offering leadership around the globe. And because a revolutionary imagination is the most meaningful thing “we” have to offer, let us all try to find it.
III. AFTER TRUMP’S VICTORY
This is a historical moment in need of a bit of theory, meaning connecting the dots between disparate actions in order to see the linkages and see each other. The resistance is mixed and intersectional and wildly chaotic but in a productive way. Yet it has gotten ahead of its theory. Terms like left, liberal, radical, feminist, progressive, are in motion and disassembling. And terms describing Trump, such as protofascist or prefascist or totalitarian, are not nuanced enough to name, and therefore see, the misogynist racist excesses of this regime.
The day after the inauguration there was the spectacular outpouring of resistance by millions in the Women’s March on Washington and its sister actions, a mammoth mass demonstration against Trump on the streets of cities and towns across the globe. The marches were mixed racially, even if still predominantly white. And women of color led many of them.
I am ready to recognize the importance of learning from this amazingly successful action. If it was not radical or revolutionary enough for some, it still offers a fertile site for further radicalization. So what is there important to say about these marches that followed Trump’s election, if you forget the hacks and voter suppression and three million more votes for Clinton.
The right wing of this country is not the majority. The alt-right, although it garners a lot of visibility, is a small minority, though a frightening one, armed with guns. Their racist and sexist assaults against civility have invigorated and mobilized large numbers of people. As Trump tries to keep his true believers, his so-called base, happy, he potentially energizes everyone else.
The rest of the people that Trump loves to hate—taxi drivers, restaurant workers, nurses, women of all colors and classes, the new working class, immigrants, undocumented students throughout the academy, Muslims, Black Lives Matter, Showing Up for Racial Justice, Planned Parenthood, Jewish Voice for Peace, Black Women’s Blueprint, Movement of Movements, Standing Rock, the American Civil Liberties Union—are all resisting. There are many more of us occupying, protecting, rising, overcoming, resisting, trying to be ungovernable, than there are of them.
Women and men, trans, white and other colors, abled and disabled, the bigger “we” that Trump insists on punishing and excluding, have taken to the streets at every opportunity to build a resistance in the hopes of destabilizing his regime. Many have refused to normalize the orderliness of Trump’s administration and continually highlight the misogynist and racist commitments made by him and his appointees.
Yet how to see and name this particular political moment? The Electoral College, a leftover of slave-state privileged interests, parades as a democratic safeguard. Instead, it inhibits the voices of the most aggrieved. The two-party system that is supposedly essential to democratic choice, offers little and instead creates gridlock and dysfunction. This dysfunction is used to justify neoliberal restructuring and downsizing and yet nurtures rebellion at the same time. Maybe this is the singular moment that inadvertently exposes both the function and dys-function of white supremacy in capitalist patriarchy. It is not unimportant that Trump follows our first Black president, even if Obama was no radical on racial issues.
In this critical time, Trump and his regime attempt to prop up misogynoir for the ailing capitalism they love so dearly. They cling to a misogyny that emboldens white supremacy, oblivious to its anachronisms and violence. Trump uses multiple hatreds and animus, thinking he can bulldoze an economic recovery into being. He bellows forth a cacophonous call to arms. I hope that he will assist in his own destruction. But this cannot happen on its own. It is crucial that the resistance stay simultaneously mobilized and disruptive, multipurposed and unified.
Trump speedily executed executive orders and decrees when he came into office, reinstating the global gag rule, disallowing even the mention of abortion to all the women of color across the globe, supporting settler colonialism by reissuing access rights to the Dakota Access and Keystone Pipelines, making full-blown enemies where they did not previously exist of immigrants and refugees, especially those from Muslim countries.
Huge acts of resistance filled airports throughout the country as Muslim travelers were detained and refused entry. Mass protests greeted Trump’s disavowal and dismembering of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). As well, his anti-immigration zero tolerance policy, separating and detaining young children from their parents, mobilized new segments of activists.
A majority of whites did not support the thuggery of Charlottesville, although Trump did. Trump tweeted that football players who #TakeAKnee should be fired. He called them sons of bitches. He then antagonized not only the NFL, but the NBA also, condemning as unpatriotic anyone who did not stand for the national anthem and the flag.
Colin Kaepernick took a knee to make a statement against police brutality and racist injustice. Trump insisted that his own remarks had nothing to do with racism and were about patriotism. It is lost on Trump that the anthem, the nation, and patriotism are mired in a history of racism.
At this point, more and more players are kneeling with Kaepernick and speaking out against Trump. I am hoping that the mobilization continues even though team owners will be fined if players do not stand for the anthem. I also hope that a more sustained critique of structural racism will develop further. And back to the