With this text we want to offer some reflections on the contemporary
transfeminist movement, starting from local dynamics that we haveparticipated in in recent years, in the hope of being able to offer a
constructive and useful criticism to others, beyond the specific events.
---- On the one hand we asked ourselves what we mean when we use the
term "intersectionality" that is so much talked about in movements
(often, in our opinion, inappropriately). On the other hand we want to
propose a reflection on the concepts of privilege and decoloniality.
These two terms also cross feminist spaces and discourses, but
sometimes, it seems to us, in an almost mechanical way, with automatisms
that can generate logical/political short circuits. These concepts have
"militant" histories, as well as interesting theoretical formulations,
and are in our opinion potentially valid tools. But they are precisely
tools, not dogmas or labels to be stuck on uncritically.
We believe that in recent years the questions raised by the feminist,
transfeminist and queer movements have finally put patriarchy at the
center of political-social criticism and the struggles of the movements.
Patriarchy is one of the main instruments of power and discipline of a
social, political and economic structure that is imposed on us as
unique, natural, just and inherent in human existence itself.
When we say that patriarchy is structural to social organization and the
exercise of institutional power, we are certainly not referring to the
juridical aspect alone. It is a complex social structure that attributes
to men as such greater power, control, authority, representation and
voice in the public space; this power will be greater, the more the
embodied subjects respond to the canons of the "virile". Conversely, for
the patriarchal gaze, women would be "naturally inclined" to maternal,
care, listening and, in general, to emotionally taking charge of the
species. A division into "ideal" roles, responding to a fixed idea of
what a man is and what a woman is - obviously not considering other
non-binary options at all - which has very strong material repercussions.
The legal aspect is accompanied by the material aspect, which in Italy
concerns for example the wage gap or the gender composition of the top
levels of institutions and companies. Furthermore, women (or subjects
identified as such) almost always bear the majority, if not all, of the
burden of the "reconciliation" between productive work and care and
reproductive work, which still falls to the female component within the
family unit, especially in mental and emotional terms, as well as material.
We want to bring as a practical example a rarely mentioned but
significant and shocking fact: feminicides committed within elderly
couples in which the woman suffers from chronic illness or dementia and
is cared for by her partner are more numerous than the murders of men by
female caregivers . If this fact reveals the lack of adequate social
structures to deal with the needs of assistance, it also tells us, once
again, how the mentality is anchored to a stereotyped vision of gender:
desperate elderly husbands kill their partners and then attempt suicide,
in many cases certainly with a sense of loneliness but also because of a
lack of habit of caring for and managing suffering, both their own and
that of others.
We know very well how the gender imposed at birth and the stereotypes
associated with it concretely and significantly condition everyone's
imaginations, desires, postures and views of the world. And it is quite
evident that none of us can consider ourselves "free" from these
conditionings just because we define ourselves as anarchists. Almost a
century after Mujeres Libres,[1]we still have to remember that
patriarchy is not a marginal issue and feminism is not "a women's problem".
Intersectionality and Identity Politics
Intersectionality is a critical theory, whose origins are traced back to
the writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American feminist and jurist,
between the 1980s and 1990s. In reality, even previously, intersectional
analysis - understood as an analysis of how different identities and
social categories intertwine in particular and specific forms of
oppression - had been practiced by marginalized and racialized feminist
groups. After all, when suffragettes in the US wondered whether granting
the vote to blacks would penalize women and Sojourner Truth asked the
famous question "Ain't I a Woman?"[2], she was actually proposing an
embryo of intersectional theory.
Today, intersectionality is a tool for analyzing reality and should be
used as such: a means by which we can understand, read, interpret and
judge reality. In our experience, however, it is often used
inappropriately, as a generic invitation to "unite the struggles", which
in the feminist movement often translates into a presumed duty to talk
about everything and make room for everyone, making everything a
"feminist question". This attitude is very different from the declared
one of rereading reality through a feminist lens. This is an
interpretative error that in our opinion also derives in part from the
uncritical use of terminologies seen as more modern or radical,
dispersing their real radicality and reducing them to little more than
fashion.
Finally, the intersectional tool sometimes seems to be bent to the logic
of listing one's own oppressions, so that those who collect more of them
lose in life but - ironically - gain status within the movement.
Instead, intersectional analysis is not structured as the pure sum of
different oppressions, but their systematization. Below we propose some
examples, not to build a "catalogue" ourselves but only to try to
explain ourselves better.
Black homosexual men: the discrimination suffered by these individuals
is not the algebraic sum of their being gay + their being black. In
predominantly white and straight societies, they can paradoxically be
more tolerated than straight black men, who are considered bearers of an
animalistic sexuality, and therefore a threat to "our women" (more
correctly, the threat is "to our penises", but also to "our anuses",
where the "we" are the straight white males who constitute the normative
majority). On the other hand, in their societies of origin or in
diaspora communities, openly gay people, in addition to suffering a
generic stigma, are also labeled as adherents of Western values and
therefore traitors to their roots.
Disabled women: Disabled women do not simply have women's problems +
disabled people's problems, but their problems often manifest
differently. For example, while many women suffer from constant and
unwanted sexualization, disabled activists often point out that they are
constantly infantilized and their sexuality is totally ignored. Even in
terms of reproduction and abortion, they certainly do not have the
pressure to procreate at all costs that non-disabled women have; on the
contrary, their eventual desire for parenthood is often fiercely thwarted.
Women and social reproduction: when in the 60s and 70s white bourgeois
women in the USA fought to claim work outside the home, not having
children, professional fulfillment, black women did not feel this battle
was their own; for them, taking care of their own home and family was
instead a value and an objective, given how many of them spent their
time taking care of other people's families (in this, the pages that
bell hooks[3]dedicates to the subject are enlightening ).
The distorted use of intersectionality exacerbates the identity issue,
leading thought towards hyper-identitarianism. Identity and minority
politics are both children of liberalism and exasperated individualism
of Anglo-Saxon origin, where the class issue often takes a back seat.
The so-called identity politics tends to "break up" movements into many
groups bearing specific interests; these groups can at most carry out a
policy of alliances, often with little or no class perspective. The
linchpin of these struggles almost always lies in the request for state
recognition or specific forms of support or protection for each
individual group (the so-called "minority politics"). From this
perspective, it is difficult to find a truly revolutionary perspective.
The Italian feminist movement has a strong materialist tradition, but it
seems to us that in recent years it is losing it in favor of a political
action that attributes greater importance to the definition/perception
of oneself than to one's social and class role.
We believe it is necessary to recover the good that has been thought and
produced by the different currents of materialist feminism, to build a
political action not only focused on identity and the request for
protection and/or recognition, but which involves power relations and
the material dynamics that determine them.
Let's try to articulate a concrete example, talking about reproductive
policies. We know that not all women have a uterus or are fertile and
also that not all potentially pregnant people are women. This is
obvious, but remembering it is not trivial or wrong. However, the
mechanisms of social reproduction and the power relations between
genders are heavily conditioned, in their historical and contemporary
formation, by the woman-mother binomial. We cannot elude this reality,
neither for fear of being "exclusionary", nor with the hope that
overcoming the gender binary will happen through a mere voluntary act or
will descend from individual behaviors.
Privilege and Decoloniality
The new feminist/transfeminist/ queer waves of recent years have had the
merit of contributing to focusing the attention of movements on
colonialism, in both historical and contemporary terms. Transfeminist
movements have therefore acted as a megaphone for the diffusion of
decolonial studies and gaze; highlighting their (own) positions of
privilege, they attempt to dismantle the alleged universalism of the
political subject "Woman". A "starting from oneself" that is defined on
a collective and social level. It is no coincidence that for some years
now we have also been witnessing in Italy a growing taking of the floor
by racialized people and communities and a stimulating comparison with
the historical anti-racist movement. A dialogue that has sometimes led
to a recognition of the shared experience of exclusion. For example,
immigrants from the South of the peninsula in the 1960s and 1970s were
racialized in the industrial North, only to be gradually replaced by the
latest new arrivals, men and women from geographies further south in the
world: a racialization that was not based on skin color, but had
characteristics very similar to those experienced by migrants today.
However, in recent times we are witnessing a short circuit of the
concept of privilege as a tool for social criticism. The recognition of
the privileged condition of the so-called West compared to the countries
of the so-called Third/Fourth World has led in many situations of
movement from the interpretation of material data to an essentialist
interpretation of what are material data. The combination of absence of
privilege/moral superiority is an epistemological error that contributes
to creating a new form of essentialism in a moral key.
In other words, we seem to notice that the exasperation and distortion
of these tools for reading and knowing reality have contributed to
generating a new form of "third worldism", in which, in addition to
uncritically accepting any practice or ideology that comes from the
"oppressed", there is also an overdetermination of their own demands. In
fact, we are witnessing solidarity movements towards populations
struggling in other parts of the world, onto which political desires and
perspectives are projected that are instead all "homegrown". A clear
example in this sense are some analyses and positions regarding the
Palestinian resistance and the events of 7 October 2023 that are
circulating in Europe; they are even depicted as the vanguard of the
world revolution, when it is very clear from the positions and actions
of the majority of political-military organizations operating there that
the struggle in those territories is conducted with a view to national
liberation and resistance to the Israeli state without any
internationalist inspiration.
This exasperated attribution has, in our opinion, the scent of a new
form of ideological colonialism, which not only erases any possibility
of comparison and possible criticism within the movements, but which
flattens and removes local complexity, class stratifications and
political diversities that cross every place.
There is, however, a fundamental difference between the "old third
worldism" and the phenomenon we are trying to analyze here. The third
world/anti-imperialist posture (allow us a certain approximation) is in
any case the consequence of an ideological adherence or of a political
support in the key of opposition, and descends from an active choice.
The decolonial posture, in its vulgarization of movement, seems instead
to postulate the impossibility of a choice: "our" role can only be to
take note and show solidarity, to act as a platform without criticism.
It is right and necessary to question our Eurocentrism and claims of
universalism and this awareness owes much to the contribution of
feminist theorists and groups. We believe, however, that in the
transfeminist and queer sphere this attitude has sometimes taken on
almost dogmatic traits and psychological subservience - to a subject
that is often abstract and disembodied - which are highly problematic.
Some provisional conclusions
We believe that the theoretical and practical contribution of the
transfeminist and queer movements of the last decades is essential for
all movements that act on the terrain of the radical social
transformation of the existing. We believe that these instances and
reflections - without uncritical adhesions, as well as without
preclusions - must become an integral part of our baggage. We are
convinced of this because we think that an anarchism that does not know
how to give importance to gender issues is a truncated anarchism. We
believe it is important to reiterate that reflections and practices must
be shared and expanded, because they are not a question of "comrades" or
of some "specialized" groups. We believe that anarchism can be up to the
challenges that these new movements pose to us. With its radical
critique of the material structures of society that contribute to the
perpetuation of patriarchy, anarchism can be a "home" where these
instances find their space, outside of any authoritarian and top-down
organization. It is about weaving relationships and exchanges by
developing areas of struggle and conflict. But first and foremost, it is
a matter of remembering that patriarchy permeates every reality that
surrounds us and therefore concerns us all. Consequently, there can be
no real revolution that does not subvert patriarchal relations. There
can be no anarchism without feminism.
Germinal Anarchist Group - Trieste
[1]Feminist organization founded in Spain in 1936 to bring women's
demands into the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movement
[2] Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree ( 1797?-1883) delivered the
speech "Ain't I a woman?" at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention, May 1851.
[3]hooks has written throughout her life about the intersection of
gender, "race" and social class, starting from her growth as a black
woman from a poor family. Many of her texts are now easily available in
Italian; among these, Tamu has published "Elogio del margine" and "Non
sono una donna, io. Donne nere e femminismo" which address (also) the
issues we mentioned.
GLOSSARY:
Racialized (people/collectives): to whom a race is attributed. The term
is used with the aim of "holding together" several aspects. On the one
hand, given that races do not exist, one tries to emphasize the process
that leads to their social creation. On the other hand, however, one
wants to recognize that, although races do not exist as an objective
element, the fact that socially one acts as if they existed, produces
real effects. In short: races - like nations or peoples, we might say -
do not exist as an ontological fact, but exist as a social fact.
Colonial: in reference to thought, all those formae mentis that tend to
confirm and perpetuate the idea of the intrinsic superiority of a "race"
or an epistemology. Examples include the "white man's burden" or the
invasion of Afghanistan to "liberate women"
Postcolonial/decolonial: always in reference to thought, which seeks to
question and criticize all the formae mentis mentioned above. The two
concepts are not perfectly superimposable: some, for example, emphasize
the political/procedural importance of the prefix de-; others make it
above all a difference in the birthplace (decolonial comes above all
from the Latin sphere, postcolonial from the (ex) Francophone and
Anglophone ones). In any case, both concepts seem to us to respond to
the same intent of political questioning. For example, in anthropology,
post-colonial studies develop a close critique of the discipline itself,
considered both a product and an instrument of colonialism.
Diaspora communities: with this term we mean those communities that are
created in the countries of arrival (or transit) of migration. Usually
they are aggregated on a national basis (e.g.: "the Chinese community of
Prato") or supranational (e.g.: "the association of African students of
Sapienza University"), sometimes religious (e.g.: the faithful of the
Shivaite temple of Brick Lane in London)
https://umanitanova.org/non-ci-puo-essere-anarchismo-senza-femminismo/
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