Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Outspoken by Pluto)

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Where interventions using law and policy might mean the difference between stopping an illegal deportation, use it. Where community organising might help in providing urgent care to people abandoned by the state, use it. I think in many ways a watershed moment has come – younger feminists who are being politicised much earlier because of the breakdown of economies, the onset of this pandemic, ecological crisis, the instability of the neoliberal age are able to see through the smokescreen that liberal feminism places over our priorities.

In three chapters in particular, Olufemi adopts an anti-state and anti-carceral perspective (“The sexist state”, “The fight for reproductive justice” and “The answer to sexual violence is not more prisons”). Liberal feminism’s reliance on state protection and the legal system to advance women’s rights is, she argues, entirely inadequate. The first of these chapters features interviews with members of the direct action group Sister’s Uncut, which uses attention-grabbing stunts to protest against police and wider state violence. Olufemi recounts their storming of the BAFTAs red carpet in 2018, to protest against Theresa May’s Domestic Violence Bill, and the time in 2015 that they turned Trafalgar Square’s fountains red to protest against the closure of women’s refuges. There is a clear message running through the chapter that feminists must look beyond the state, and that achieving real progress needs bold challenges from outside as well as within. 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. To say that gender and sex are social constructions is not to say that they are unimportant or that gender is as simple as putting on a different hat each day. Butler is often misquoted as claiming gender is a ‘performance’ when instead she argues it might be better to view it as a ritual that is made up of certain kinds of repetitive behaviours that sediment over time. When we repeat this behaviour, we create ourselves. Because of the way it organises our lives, gender has life or death consequences. Consider the way that anyone who does not conform to ideas of their assigned sex is heavily policed. Butch women. Feminine men. Transgender men and women, non-binary people and anyone who is gender non-conforming. Daily, people die because they challenge, subvert and threaten the visual script dictated by the gender binary. In the Americas, 80 per cent of the trans women killed as a result of gendered violence are 35 years of age or younger. Gender harms us all when it is used as a vehicle for violence and exploitation. But when feminists adopt a binary understanding of gender and an essentialist idea that biology is destiny, they put trans women at risk.options to choose from: male and female. These categories refer to our ‘biological makeup’. To deviate from either option is unnatural There are a number of scientific studies that point to the fact that human beings’ sexual biology is far more varied than we Olufemi starts from looking at “the sexist state” and its use of austerity and state violence. Here, she maintains a decisive focus on British cases — avoiding the all-too-common tendency for discussions of racist police violence to end up deflecting attention to the United States alone. The incarceration of asylum seekers in institutions such as Yarl’s Wood detention center is a crucial focus, here: feminist struggles which focus on citizenship-based rights neglect the fact that some of the most vulnerable women, most in need of solidarity, are denied access to those very rights. This demands an overhaul of a state system whose own structures perpetuate patriarchal violence. 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

I think anyone who is introduced to feminism as a political practice through engagement with white feminist thinkers of the ‘second wave’ has a lot of unlearning to do. I think that a certain kind of thinking can really limit your conception of what is possible.

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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. Kutipan yang ada di atas merupakan sebuah kritik terhadap Sheryl Sandberg dan bukunya yang berjudul "Lean In." Ini karena adanya bias pendapat yang mana Sandberg merupakan wanita kulit putih dengan jabatan tinggi sehingga bukan sebuah kesulitan bagianya untuk "Lean In." In a much-needed intervention against transmisogyny, Olufemi challenges hegemonic discourses that continue to repress and exclude. She shows alliances between far-right organizations, especially in the United States, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists, as well as pointing out crucial links between the exclusion of trans women from feminism and other forces of oppression such as racism. As she puts it, “There are ideological links between biological essentialism and scientific racism; both see the body in absolute terms.” Olufemi takes her feminism so seriously that sometimes it compromises her authorial tone, rendering it drily determined; her work sometimes reads like a military pamphlet. But she makes up for it in optimism, looking ahead to a feminism that includes the experiences of all women. Reading her is to believe that another world is possible.