In some kind of Sisyphean/Groundhog day nightmare, we're told feminism needs rebranding yet again. As ever, apparently the problem with feminism is feminists, not that the very power structures that cause inequality fight against feminism. Feminism is allegedly difficult and time consuming and too academic, and so young people hate it. Feminists are angry and turning people off. Anyway, it's all a question of "branding" rather than campaigning, as Lucy Mangan deftly explains. Why fight for rights when, in our brave new consumerist world, you can “buy in” to a “brand” instead.
Tone policing is always paramount in these complaints about feminism and other campaigns. Feminists are angry, too critical, just need to focus on supporting all women, rather than critiquing forms of feminism, and questioning methods and ideas. Protectors of the status quo are always keen to demand a liberation movement protest and engage on the elite's terms. Women are told they're "aggressive", black people are told they're "angry", the working class they've got a chip on their shoulder. The lived experience of oppression inculcates anger. And the dismissal of anger is a tool of the powerful. “Sure, of course we'd love to hear your arguments, but you're just so unreasonable.”
The same extends to campaigns. Media savvy and traditional campaigns attract far more attention and praise than unconventional and ad hoc methods. The banknotes campaign and "No More Page 3" have garnered endless column inches. The campaign against the Home Office's racist van was just as effective, with a huge proportion of the backlash built up by women – Southall Black Sisters' physical campaign to stall an immigration raid worked wonders, while Twitter's @PukkahPunjabi inspired hundreds of people to prank call the hotline after asking UKBA to give her a lift home to Willesden Green.
Travelling around Britain, discussing the impact of welfare cuts to the poorest communities, I can't help but notice the most active campaigners are women, and women who've been personally hit. The campaign tactics are original, local and effective. A small group wrote to their housing association to request a meeting and were denied an appointment. So they instead all marched together, and the elusive CEO suddenly appeared from nowhere to discuss the bedroom tax with them. Regardless of whether they personally define as feminists, and many of them do, these women are active and they know that when austerity bites, it hits women hardest.
But too often, discussions on feminism are shut down and simplified, using working class women as a canard to argue for dumbing down and depoliticising the movement. As a working class woman, it's offensive, and it's also incorrect. Too often we're spoken for, rather than spoken to. Working class lives are extensively politicised, in the media and through lived experience. If you're working class, chances are your family lived through the miners strike, or experienced economic migration first hand. Even if your family didn't claim benefits, someone on your street will have done. Chances are in the past ten years or so, a major industry will have closed near you too. There's a cursory introduction to economics right there.
And the poorest areas are also often the most diverse. Growing up, in many of my classes at school, white kids would be in the minority. It's a Daily Mail nightmare, but since you're a child you've not yet absorbed the racist messages of much of media and society, so you don't care. You learn a lot about other religions and cultures, and then later, how people treat the friends you've grown up with differently. In terms of disability, working class towns also experience far higher rates of disability, especially mental health problems, so you understand far more about how this can affect people's lives too. Lived experience is what informs most people's politics. David Cameron is a case in point here. And in terms of intersectionality, working class lives are as intersectional as you can get.
As an example, living with my grandmother as a teenager, I saw how she experienced sexism differently as a lesbian. Similarly, my black and Asian friends also experienced sexual harassment and abuse, but the language used was invariably racialised. Speaking to people fighting welfare cuts now, they're keenly aware of this. The people hardest hit by the bedroom tax are the disabled, and much of that is down to economic injustice. Women are also quick to point out that bearing the brunt of childcare means they also bear the brunt of the cuts. We're not all in this together and they know that.
If you're hoping to rebrand feminism, in the hope working class women wake up and embrace liberation, you may need a wake up call. You don't have to go as far back as the matchgirls strike to find examples of working class women's standing up for their rights. Women Against Pit Closures were a formidable and unabashedly feminist force in the 1980s. Every grassroots community campaign group or organising event I visit now has far more women leading and in attendance than any middle class media panel or event. There's a proud autodidact tradition amongst working class folk (my grandfather, who left school aged ten, read more Dickens than I've ever managed), and claiming politics and feminism needs to be dumbed down to appeal to us is tedious and offensive.
Ultimately, in every movement, self-criticism and self-analysis is intrinsic. No one decides to campaign or care about an issue in possession of all the facts. And the landscape of politics linked as it is to the world, keeps changing and shifting. Arguing that feminists should be exempt from criticism, especially when they've built a platform claiming to represents feminists and women, is ludicrous. At this point, we're entering an argument that advocates a depoliticised and fluffy feminism The Onion beautifully parodied with their article "Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does". Pointless vacillation on the purported impenetrably of a single word is facile, and ignores the crux of the issue – conflict in feminism when a campaign for a marginalised group marginalises or silences people within our ranks. And if feminism wants a better society, starting with a better self is a good start.
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