I have read a few books/articles critiquing mainstream capitalist white lean-in feminism at this point. This book definitely ranks amongst the highest. The title might give off the impression that it’s a collection of problematic behaviors white women who claim to be feminists have engaged in, but the book is emphatically not that. In fact, it’s part of Zakaria’s main argument that the danger of white feminism is its focus on individual, private attitudes and offenses at the expense of collective action. As someone who is new to feminist literature and often unsure of what to think, this book has offered me a number of eye-opening analysis.
One example is Zakaria’s analysis on white feminism’s emphasis in sexual liberation being the core (and sometimes the totality) of women’s empowerment. According to this view, sexual promiscuity represents the height of women’s liberation, so much so that many young women feel pressured to pretend to be more sexually active than they really are or would like to be. Sexual conservativism, in the forms of covering more body parts than is standard in western culture or subscribing to certain kinds of marriage practices, is therefore directly linked to cultural backwardness and anti-feminism. This is problematic not only because British colonialism was responsible for a lot of the sexual conservatism seen in contemporary non-white worlds, but also because it reduces something big and political — women’s ability to make choices about their bodies — into something personal and situational — how many sexual partners one has/is able to have.
Turning a political problem into something private, individualistic, and a-political allows people with privilege to generate profit, accumulate power, while simultaneously defining and occupying the moral high ground. Instead of putting resources into developing a better economic system, the World Bank chose to invest in small loans. The Gates foundation invested in giving individual women chickens to solve poverty through entrepreneurship.
This line of Zakaria’s analysis was especially interesting to me because I have been struggling to catch up with shifting behavioural expectations of “woke” people. Some people say we should always give & ask for pronouns like it’s a standard part of introduction. Others point out that asking people publicly risks outing them against their desire. Some people say we should always ask & learn the correct pronunciation of someone’s name. Others (such as myself) would much rather change my name.
But there is a sense in which all of these things are performative, and none of it really matters. What you really want is other people to take you seriously, address the practical difficulties you face, and preferably work towards a system where these difficulties are less likely to arise in the future. Maybe saying your name right is a sign that someone is doing all of these things. But ultimately, these things are hard. It’s much safer to argue about everyday etiquette and private offenses.
Another place where I find Zakaria’s analysis especially illuminating is where she points out that there really is little difference between “honour killing” (a favourite talking point in western reporting of the Muslim world) and other types of domestic violence against women. I suppose this kind of double standard shouldn’t be surprising, but Zakaria also points to its consequences:
It is not that culturally coded crimes aren’t crimes. But there is a problem in so readily attaching a cultural dimension to intimate-partner violence that takes place in Brown and Black communities to indicate that it is somehow different or more brutal. Such attachments demand that feminists of color denounce their racial or cultural communities if they are to participate in feminist discourse.
There are many other interesting and important threads in the book which I won’t cover here. Although the book is primarily a criticism of white feminism and a roadmap for people engaged in it to do better, in the concluding chapter, Zakaria cautions women of color against “using critique as self-defense against having their ideas and arguments challenged by feminists of any color, nor should they deploy it as a panacea against self-examination”. To me, this is invaluable advice not only because it is rarely said in good faith, but also because the book has provided compelling arguments on how thinking in this way is exactly how we do not make progress.
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