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A review by laura_ge
Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption by Rafia Zakaria
challenging
informative
reflective
5.0
This should be required reading for any white people who consider themselves feminists. Zakaria so eloquently articulated so many thoughts and grievances I held towards the mainstream feminist brand. I learned so much.
Some quotes:
"Delusional aspiration to the lives of upper-middle-class white women from one of the most financially unequal cities in the world, whose great achievement is acting out the myth that sexual freedom is the sum total of empowerment and liberation-a hollow feminism based on consumerism with a bit of sexual liberation thrown in as distraction--that's an American product that can be exported internationally." -page 120
"The non-white mother (then and now) is "subalternized," or rendered voiceless, sandwiched between the patriarchal pressures of her own culture and the nobility of the white mother. White women's behavior exists in perfect moderation in contrast to non-white mothers, all either too repressed or too incontinent to be appropriate role models to their own children, who are then available for rescue by acquisitive white women." -page 129 (on whites adopting non-white children to be taken away from their motherland)
"In the later nineteenth century, Black feminist activists Ida B. Wells and Fannie Barrier Williams founded and participated in anti-rape campaigns. Much later, in the final quarter of the twentieth century, Black women were finally joined by white women, who were just waking up to the necessity of campaigning on the issue and had until then not made alliances with Black women. Despite the fact that Black women had been working on the issue for a century, it was white women whose interest is recorded as seminal in most feminist textbooks and discussions.
In a more recent example, articles and discussions surrounding the #MeToo movement often leave out the fact that it was founded by a Black woman named Tarana Burke in 2006." -page 131
"Concepts like sexusociety and compulsory sexuality are useful here not simply to point out the tyranny of that pressure for asexual women, implicitly closed out of feminist acceptance. They also show how late capitalism continues its work in the name of "sexual liberation" to commodify new sexual orientations. Once sexual orientation is essentialized and defined, it is then reborn as a market category of people to whom particular things can be sold." - page 134
Some quotes:
"Delusional aspiration to the lives of upper-middle-class white women from one of the most financially unequal cities in the world, whose great achievement is acting out the myth that sexual freedom is the sum total of empowerment and liberation-a hollow feminism based on consumerism with a bit of sexual liberation thrown in as distraction--that's an American product that can be exported internationally." -page 120
"The non-white mother (then and now) is "subalternized," or rendered voiceless, sandwiched between the patriarchal pressures of her own culture and the nobility of the white mother. White women's behavior exists in perfect moderation in contrast to non-white mothers, all either too repressed or too incontinent to be appropriate role models to their own children, who are then available for rescue by acquisitive white women." -page 129 (on whites adopting non-white children to be taken away from their motherland)
"In the later nineteenth century, Black feminist activists Ida B. Wells and Fannie Barrier Williams founded and participated in anti-rape campaigns. Much later, in the final quarter of the twentieth century, Black women were finally joined by white women, who were just waking up to the necessity of campaigning on the issue and had until then not made alliances with Black women. Despite the fact that Black women had been working on the issue for a century, it was white women whose interest is recorded as seminal in most feminist textbooks and discussions.
In a more recent example, articles and discussions surrounding the #MeToo movement often leave out the fact that it was founded by a Black woman named Tarana Burke in 2006." -page 131
"Concepts like sexusociety and compulsory sexuality are useful here not simply to point out the tyranny of that pressure for asexual women, implicitly closed out of feminist acceptance. They also show how late capitalism continues its work in the name of "sexual liberation" to commodify new sexual orientations. Once sexual orientation is essentialized and defined, it is then reborn as a market category of people to whom particular things can be sold." - page 134