Abolitionist Socialist Feminism. Zillah Eisenstein
is or is not feminist, but how can women work together, what kind of a movement can we all build so we get to show what we need, and who we are in all our complexity. Of course, the term “we” includes differences of inequalities.
The stakes are really high just now. The world’s brutality is unsustainable for the 99 percent. Endless wars along with other climate assaults threaten the air and water and earth and, therefore, us. Hillary Clinton’s neoliberal feminism has been mainstreamed for decades, and especially during the 2016 election. Feminists of every other sort had little ability to publicize a more inclusive and revolutionary politics. This more revolutionary politics has been in the making for decades, although Hillary was clueless about it.
I like the comment from professor and activist Salamishah Tillet that she wants an “open” but not an “elastic” feminism. And Aysha Hidayattullah, a professor of Islamic Studies at the University of San Francisco, says compellingly that feminism is not a fixed identity but a stance of “radical uncertainty.” And I love playwright Eve Ensler’s statement about revolution: We are dispersed, but “we know where we are going.”
Most borders—among nations, races, genders, sexes, and classes—are disassembling and reconstituting. This is most probably why right-wing activists want to reenforce borders and walls. Many patriarchies remain, but they have changed their form. Now there are many kinds of feminism in response. I am looking to create flux and movement and openness in order to mount a successful assault against the suffering and unhappiness created by the newest systems of racist, heterosexist, ableist, capitalist patriarchy.
In these urgent times of perpetual wars, from Ferguson to Gaza, and the crises of Ebola and Zika that have ravaged countries near and far, insurgent feminisms are more needed than ever. It is impossible to not absorb the sense of danger and risk that threads a never-ending militarism, with the devaluation of human life, most especially Black life. It is a relief to have Beyoncé embrace and expose these unsettled times for and with us. In these detestable moments of Black devaluation, criminalization, and dehumanization, Beyoncé in 2014 responded and popularized feminism at the Video Music Awards and with her visual album, Lemonade.
Meanwhile, Obama designed a racial initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, to assist only Black boys in the fight against racism, excluding girls. Misogyny once again was allowed to silently prop up the very racism that supposedly is under attack.
Let us unpack the tensions and conflicts about what it means to be an abolitionist socialist feminist today. The challenge is this: there is no one kind of feminism, although it is often represented as though there were, and that one is too often assumed to be white, western-hetero, and liberal or neoliberal.
But feminisms are a plurality of one, and that oneness is always multiple, or what I have termed elsewhere, polyversal—many and unified at the same time. Differences and conflict are always ripe with positive potential. Differences should not pose a dilemma for shared commonality. Nuanced shared oppression and power allows for revolutionary alliances.
Women are different and many. Singular identities only give us a single site to connect through. The more ways we are seen by each other, the more possibilities there are for us to connect to each other. If I am seen for the whole of my parts, you will have more entry to know and trust at least parts of me. The work we do together is the beginning of transformation.
As gender has become more differentiated by class, gender is more fractured. As race has become more diversified by class, it needs more specificity. Categories are less homogenous than they once were, and yet they also remain static and punishing. I often feel constrained by the naming of distinct categories that are completely interwoven with each other. I am looking for the points of contact among the overlap that let us see new relationships. It is here that creative bonds can be formed.
This is why risk and courage are always needed rather than rigid exclusionary categories. Instead of looking to close things off, let us be dangerously curious and look for new places to build solidarities that can help us forge an inclusive politics against misogyny in its entire hetero-militarist, capitalist, able-bodied, racist manifestations.
This is and will remain messy. A connector may be partial and momentary and not last forever. This means coming together when interests are shared and strategic and then building outward from an initial coming together. The tensions and conflicts of such movement building require forthrightness and faithful support and are continuously in process.
Locating sexual violence as a site of important movement work is key to mobilizing in revolutionary feminist ways. Why? Sexual violence cuts through and binds women across class, race, place, and nation. It is ubiquitous and universal and politically salient, even if uniquely individual. And it is too often made politically invisible.
Sexual violence is war in yet another form. Carl von Clausewitz popularized the notion that war is simply politics in another form. To me, rape becomes an invisible site of war through the discourse of sex, which is naturalized. Instead of being political, it becomes invisible, individualized, and naturalized, seemingly inevitable.
So let us make sexual violence/violation politically salient and tell a new truth while doing so. Sexual violence, whether in the workplace, domestic life, gaming, or war, offers a formidable shared location for resistance. It exists alongside other forms of gendered exploitation and affects all women, waged and unwaged, migrant, refugee, and asylum seeker. It is often sidelined by these other oppressions.
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