Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Outspoken by Pluto)

Product Information

Lorde, Audre. 1979. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, ed. Audre Lorde, 110–113. Berkley: Crossing Press. As Olufemi insists, “As feminists, we must continue breaking the law to provide abortions and associated medications on demand to live the lives we deserve. Those who have been cast outside of ‘acceptable’ face of abortion rights should be at the center of our demands.” True radicalism cannot arise from tweaks within existing legal frameworks that continue to oppress the most vulnerable; rather, we must overhaul those systems to unravel a new imaginary, in which all are free and equal. In this context, Lola Olufemi’s new book is both a timely and stirring intervention. Feminism, Interrupted expresses the radical voices which are coming into feminism from the solidarity work taking place on the ground. It both unravels a silenced history of radicalism — and points toward a truly just future. Of course, the book is by no means comprehensive and I would have loved to include a chapter on the work of disabled feminists and how work, exploitation, ‘productivity’ and austerity has had a specific effect on the lives of disabled women in the UK. Crip theory offers us a lot in terms of rethinking a phenomenon that has always been contentious in feminist thinking: the body. It might help us loosen an attachment to biology as a determiner of fate, helping us reassess the cost-analyses and value calculation embedded in the way we think about life. This is particularly important in this crisis, where disability and the language of “underlying conditions” is being utilised to subtly reaffirm whose lives can and should be saved and who is simply collateral, a problem that is always and inevitably racialised. Feminist and queer disability theory challenges predetermination and inateness, retraining the eye on the way the organisation of the world and social structures put us in danger, create a host of obstacles and barriers, making it harder to live survive let alone live full and dignified lives.

PDF / EPUB File Name: Feminism_Interrupted_-_Lola_Olufemi.pdf, Feminism_Interrupted_-_Lola_Olufemi.epub options to choose from: male and female. These categories refer to our ‘biological makeup’. To deviate from either option is unnatural

I often find the framing of these kinds of questions odd because they assume that trans people have existed outside the history of feminist movements which is not only ahistorical but does this dangerous thing of positioning trans life as somehow an invention of the contemporary moment. One of the central pillars of the radical feminism that dominated the 70s and 80s was a critique of the sex distinction itself and the call for its abolition. And that is exactly what transfeminist contributions have always done, refocused our attention on the violence of the gender binary and on this idea that biology can or should ever be a determiner of life. What we’re seeing is a big resurgence of essentialist thinking fuelled by neoliberalism’s focus on the individual, the manufactured trans panic! is about signalling how trans people are a societal failure and an attempt to render their lives impossible by attempting to remove them from aspects of public life. As feminists who are invested in a world that includes all of us, we have to resist that. As I’ve gotten older, I believe more in the possibility of transformative gender relations and crafting political ideas/demands that account for everyone. At a certain point I changed my mind about ‘work/careers’ being the most defining aspect of a person’s life, the necessity to ‘love’ your job and instead chose to think about work in terms of what capitalism does to our bodies and minds, what we are missing out on, what we don’t get to do. sex assignment: they recognise that throughout history, to be ‘female’ has often meant death, mutilation and oppression. Sex categorisation has been the starting point for well-known feminist theories. But the idea of sex as immutable became a focal point of radical, lesbian feminism in the West, and more specifically, LO: I think the idea of frames of thought as disparate and incoherent really scares people because the inability to make a universal claim or universal demands means the journey to freedom is longer and more complicated but I think, just as consequence of how I learnt about the different schools of feminist thought in school, I’ve always been at peace with that. I don’t believe in universals but I do believe in an idea that I take from Audre Lorde, that sitting with tension, with distortion, is productive. That the tension caused when we place different kinds of feminism in conversation with one another create new routes, modes of thinking and practices that get us closer to what our perceived goals are. I loved the tweet that you did where you stated that you’d learnt things from different, overlapping and sometimes conflicting theorists. I think it perfectly sums up something that I’m always striving towards, to understand and incorporate different ideas from different strands of feminism that are all making a claim about the way the world should be. Liberation means chaos, it might mean a million different ideas at once and that potential excites me. To recognise that this frame of thought advocates many things, some conflicting is not to give in to the idea that no short-term political demands can be made – the urgency of the conditions of our lives make those demands clear to us. Embracing chaos doesn’t mean embracing abstraction.

oppression is rooted in a singular place. We can believe that sex and gender are made up categories, embellished by social attitudes and recognise that the violence that occurs as a result of them is very real. It is the violence that defines our experience of the world, not our biological make up that we often know little about it. (How often do you think about your chromosomes?) Often being perceived as a woman or failing to do womanhood correctly is enough to put somebody at risk of harm. It is also important to remember that Western conceptions of gender are not and have never been, universal. Gender has no single story. There are countless examples of gender non-conforming and variant expressions across the world that challenge the idea of ‘man’ and woman’ and evidence that they have existed for centuries. The colonial project played a large part in marking certain sexual and gender practice taboos, in line with religious and imperialist ideas of nature. A number of colonial projects used penal law to outlaw expressions of gender variance and ‘homosexual’ acts between men in places such as India, Kenya, Australia and Uganda. This is not to imply that non-Western examples of gender variance were always free from policing and scrutiny in pre-colonial contexts, but to reaffirm that though gender may appear self-evident, its history is dependent on context. Just because specific ideas and practices of gender are central in the West, does not make them a global phenomenon. instances, doctors can choose the sex of an infant, revealing the absurdity of the idea that sex is first and foremost, biological. The fight for intersex people’s rights to bodily autonomy Legality does not equal access. There are many more complicated demands to be made: mainstream movements will always defeat their own purpose as long as they consider the law as the sole indicator of progress. Perhaps the most powerful thing that can be done is sabotaging the law-making project and refusing to concede that abortion is unlawful. A brave manifesto ... [Feminism Interrupted] unravels a silenced history of radicalism and points toward a truly just future'Your gender is less important than your political commitment in this regard. I think, to quote Toni Cade Bambara, that the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible. Artists have to recognise that they cannot abstract themselves from the political organisation of this world. It marks everything: the conditions under which you produce work, what you chose to make, how you present it and so on. This doesn’t mean that everything you make has to be have an expressly “political” message, which I think is quite reductive. I think it means that in the way you orient yourself and your work, at some point you have to ask yourself whether that orientation clarifies machineries of exploitation or whether it is the engine that keeps them running. But loosely, feminists have understood gender as our sense of self in the world, how we present our bodies, speak, move--anything that refers to our own bodies. individuals born with variations in ‘male’ and ‘female’ sex characteristics, are assigned a sex at birth and often have surgery a sex according to their genitals. Everything from science, to culture, to common wisdom affirms to us that there are only two

Another popular TERF argument is that, instead of challenging the gender binary, transitioning merely reaffirms it. To argue that trans women simply reaffirm a stereotypically ‘feminine’ model is to see all trans women as a homogenous group: feminine, heterosexual and wanting to transition. It ignores the fact that cis and trans women adopt stereotypical femininity for the same reason, blaming them for the gender scripts necessary for survival. In many cases, trans women may be actively encouraged by doctors and Gender Identity Clinics to adopt conventional femininity as a means of ‘proving’ that they are who they say they are. This proof would not be necessary in a different world. These kinds of requirements have far less to do with individuals and more to do with the way rigid ideas about gender are currently embedded in our social lives. The aim, at the very least, is to destroy that rigidity. LO: I was pretty clear on the topics I wanted to discuss from the get-go and didn’t really deviate from them because I wanted to do justice to the kinds of conversations that young feminists are engaged in. I’ve stopped viewing certain thinkers as infallible or their theories as impervious to critique. I really want to stress how crucial it is that people who are trying to craft a radical understanding of the world remain unashamed of the places that they began. I try to have empathy for those other versions of myself. I think remaining flexible in that way also helps us trace what it was that caused those shifts – affective experiences, reading, material conditions etc, which will matter a lot in a ‘post-COVID’ political moment when more people will begin to question state power.Nonostante non mi sia trovata sempre d'accordo su tutto, mi ha aperto gli occhi su tante cose e sono felice di averlo letto, anche perché di testi del genere non ce ne saranno mai abbastanza. The relationship between feminism and political radicalism is both necessary and complex. Feminism, Olufemi persuasively shows, does not have necessarily radical tendencies — rather, there is a long history of women giving their support to oppressive systems under the guise of “feminism.” Take the white suffragettes who did not see colonial subjects as part of their struggle for a vote (and even cheered on British imperialist forces). Or take the British home secretary Theresa May, who was the architect of policies especially harmful for women, even as she sported a “this is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt made by underpaid laborers. Lola Olufemi was due to appear at Housmans in conversation with Jay Bernard in May 2020 to talk about her recently released book Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power I think that tendency stemmed from a refusal to think about oneself and one’s life in isolation, recognising that suffering is not unique to a specific location or historical context – and that states, across the world, used the same patterns of repression and dispossession. There is something to be gained from becoming alive to the ways our lives are closely knitted together by historical encounter, trade, labour, through military intervention and so on.