Feminism for the 99

Critique of liberal feminism and a liberal universalism

--> how feminist projects have assumed white middle-class women as the unannouced subjects of feminist politics and activism

--> how insitutions and the law reproduce whiteness, class power, and heteropatriarchy

Liberalism

--> centers individualism and choice

--> centers universal concepts of humanity and freedom shared by all

--> often ignores structural differences between members of a group (e.g. women)

--> at times does pay lip service to historical oppressions but believes these oppressions can be resolved while preserving existing social institutions and structures

--> In other words, liberalism is interested in reproducing rather than abolishing existing social structures and institutions, such as capitalism and the legal system

Intersectionality: an analytic for challenging narrow, liberal, conceptions of identity politics

Racial formation: “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (Omi and Winant 55).

Comparative racialization: the exploration of how racial categories are produced through relation to other forms of racial categorization

Enables the recognition of differences as well as points of convergence or possibilities for solidarity

Histories and historical archives

Language

Narratives

Identities

Provincializing vs. universalizing histories, language, and identities

What is transgender history?

Who counts as queer?

What identities and histories are made illegible by these frameworks and what identities and histories might interrupt these?

Three central questions:

1). How are race, class, and gender interlocked and structured, and how are these concepts produced through historical, geopolitical, and institutional relations?

2). What constitutes a feminist or a queer politics? What narratives, languages, and frameworks are adequate to making sense of the relations among race, class, and gender? And what narratives, languages, and frameworks have been inadequate or insufficient to thinking these relations?

3). How can feminist and queer activists build solidarity and unity while respecting difference?

The Occupy Movement

The work that reproduces people as workers daily and intergenerationally involves:

Housework / Domestic labour

Care work / Health care

Sex work / Sexual reproduction

Child-rearing

Teaching

Tales of the Night Fairies (dir. Shohini Ghosh, 2002)

Struggles for sex worker's rights are therefore struggles over how social reproduction is compensated

The organization of social reproduction under capitalism impacts people unevenly

e.g. this is not just about women who work as housewives in the normative home, but about all those whose labours reproduce labour-power even if they are excluded from accessing the social and institutional form of the normative family

The nuclear or two-parent family is the privileged form of organized social reproduction in North America, but it is historically produced and, as we have seen, not available to everyone

"capitalist societies have sought to enlist women's social reproductive work in the service of gender binarism and heteronormativity" (23).

(Arvin et al 13)

The organization of social reproduction in turn ensures that capitalism is socially reproduced

How social reproduction is organized impacts other issues, such as violence against women / domestic violence

"The gender violence we experience today reflects the contradictory dynamics of family and personal life in capitalist society. And these are in turn based on the system's signature division between people-making and profit-making, family and 'work'" (26).

(Crenshaw 3)

Privatization of social reproduction under neoliberalism

From state programs, such as welfare and state-funded daycare...

to individualized households

Instead of the state bearing the burden of reproducing people, individuals (usually women) are instead made to work twice as hard

Wait, I think I know what liberalism means....

But what is neoliberalism?!?!

Unlike liberalism, which has historically depended on the idea that some form of social protection is necessary

neoliberalism is predicated on the stripping away of social protections and the withering of social structures and institutions

This not only equals more work, which is often absorbed by women

but the redistribution of costs from the state to the household

David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism

Toward a reorganization of social reproduction

"The class struggle includes struggles over social reproduction: for universal health care and free education, for environmental justice and access to clean energy, and for housing and public transportation" (25).