A Brief Note on Clintonite Feminism
I have been thinking about a part of the Democratic Primary that really bothered me: Hillary Clinton’s “Woman Card.” Something deeply discomfited me about it in a way that I didn’t think much about at the time, mostly because I didn’t want to. But the exchange of cash for gender identity — even metaphorically — upsets me to the core of my being. In an election where my identities as a socialist and a feminist were trying to be pitted against each other (to me they are one and the same), I bristled at this blunt link between gender, politics, and money. Gender is not a club for liberals. It is not a tradable commodity and consumption — even if I buy that dress covered in vagina roses that I want — will NEVER be the locus of feminism or indeed any kind of social or economic justice.* Since we now have two candidates on the more progressive of the main tickets who are white, who are wealthy, who are hetero and cis, who have an “it’s complicated” relationship with the TPP, neither of whom support full access to abortion, who have murky (at best!) relationships with the carceral state, and who, let’s say, have been rather soft on banks, I am reminded by how confined our political ambitions are right now — keep it the same tiny world please (because the alternative looks like an apocalyptic hellscape). I’ve been thinking too about how mainstream American feminism has always only empowered a few — just the white or just the bourgeois or just the straight or just the cis or everyone except sex workers or some combination of these — or as has more often than not been true, just the American. The Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan says that the United States “has empowered and equipped the most traitorous, anti-democratic, misogynist and corrupt fundamentalist gangs in Afghanistan,” merely “replacing one fundamentalist regime with another.”** And now as I look at how ugly the world will continue to be, and how small and scary my life will continue to be, and how violent and racist and deeply unequivocally cruel our power structures are — including so-called “feminist” ones and even our “feminist” reforms for them — I am deeply frustrated. And I have been thinking often of Ti-Grace Atkinson (radical feminist, lesbian separatist, and defender of Valerie Solanas — and predictably from these modifiers, a problematic figure) who famously said, “Sisterhood is powerful. It kills. Mostly sisters.”
*Coinage pilfered from this great piece: http://jezebel.com/new-feminist-mantra-consumption-is-not-the-locus-of-em-1707417613
**https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/hillary-clinton-womens-rights-feminism/
Please don’t stan for Jill Stein or remind me of the dangers of Trump (I am a politically minded young woman, I know what Trump is) in my comments, thank you. Critique of Clintonite feminism is critique of Clintonite feminism.