Which Feminisms?

Of all the opposition movements to have erupted since 2008, the rebirth of a militant feminism is perhaps the most surprising—not least because feminism as such had never gone away; women’s empowerment has long been a mantra of the global establishment. Yet there were already signs that something new was stirring in the us and uk student protests of 2010, the 2011 Occupy encampments at Puerta del Sol and Zuccotti Park. In India, mass rallies condemned the gang rape of Jyoti Pandey in 2012 and feminist flash-mobs have disrupted the moral-policing operations of Hindutva fundamentalists. The protests against sexual assault on us campuses blazed across the New York media in 2014. In Brazil, 30,000 black women descended on the capital in 2015 to demonstrate against sexual violence and racism, calling for the ouster of the corrupt head of the National Congress, Eduardo Cunha; earlier that year, the March of Margaridas brought over 50,000 rural women to Brasília. In Argentina, feminist campaigners against domestic violence were at the forefront of protests against Macri’s shock therapy. In China, the arrest in 2015 of five young women preparing to sticker Beijing’s public transport against sexual violence—members of Young Feminist Activism, an online coalition that’s played cat-and-mouse with the authorities—was met with web petitions signed by over 2 million people.

In January 2017, a ‘feminism of the 99 per cent’ declared itself with the million-strong march against the Trump Administration in the us. In Poland, mass women’s protests forced the Law and Justice government to retreat from tightening the already restrictive abortion law. Italy, Spain and Portugal saw huge marches against domestic violence and economic precarity. On 8 March 2017, these movements came together to put International Women’s Day back on the radical calendar, with demonstrations and strikes on three continents. The eruption of #MeToo in October 2017 and the convulsions that have followed are only the latest in a string of mass events around the world.

Yet any attempt to renew feminist strategy today confronts a series of dilemmas. First, we lack convincing assessments of the progress already made. What results have the old feminisms produced and how adequate have these been in meeting women’s needs? How, exactly—by what processes, to what extent—have conditions improved? What changes have been brought about, globally, in gender relations, and where do these now stand? Through to the mid-twentieth century, the hegemonic, though far from universal, Western model entailed the rule of men across the public sphere—governments, armies, legislature, judiciary, institutes of learning, the press—and, in return for the slights and buffetings of mass industrial-capitalist society, offered each man the private fiefdom of the domestic sphere, where he could rule over the wife who bore and raised his children, served him at table and in bed. This was qualified internationally by a wide range of geo-cultural family structures and forms of production, and co-existed with broader, seemingly universal moralities of pleasure and predation, eliding good-girl and bad-girl categories with inequalities of class, race and caste.footnote¹

A mass of data now shows that women have entered the global waged-labour force in their hundreds of millions since the 1970s. In tertiary education, girls outnumber boys in over seventy countries. In terms of reproductive health, average fertility has fallen from five births to two. On the domestic front, men report that they do more housework than their fathers, women less than their mothers. In attitudes, polls show a majority in favour of gender equality on every continent, with near universal support in many countries. In politics, a new cohort of female leaders has appeared on the world stage, heading governments across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America; if she’d paid more attention to hard-hit rustbelt voters in 2016, there would almost certainly be a woman in the White House. On this basis, the mainstream-feminist response to the question of strategy has long been: more of the same. Women have made significant progress in work and education, but sexual violence is still a major issue and, in the glib parlance of official feminism, ‘challenges remain’. Ergo, the same programme that has already produced such good results should continue, with renewed vigour and cash.

Yet—this is the second part of the puzzle—advances in gender equality have gone hand-in-hand with soaring socio-economic inequality across most of the world. The levelling up of world regions through accelerated accumulation in China and East Asia has been matched by growing disparity between classes, which the advance of professional-strata women has helped to accentuate by creating a thin layer of double-income wealthy households. Since 2008, debate over these patterns has intensified, questioning mainstream feminism’s collusion with the neoliberal order.footnote² Relatedly—this is the third problem—the global data treat the overall categories of work, reproduction, culture and politics as unchanging, measuring only women’s advance within them. In reality, each of these spheres has undergone profound changes that have themselves been deeply gendered and which inter-relate in contradictory ways. In the realm of production, ‘masculine’ rustbelt manufacturing has been automated or downgraded and outsourced, feminized in sun-belt Special Economic Zones. In the expanding service sector, intensified economic pressures reinforce the competitive advantages of ultra-femininity, of women’s traditional experience in the domestic sphere. Hegemonic masculinities have become, on the one hand, more cerebral and sensitive; on the other—in global finance, virtual worlds, the gangsterized zones of the informal economy—more swaggering than ever.footnote³ The realm of reproduction has undergone a dramatic transition to lower birth rates, based on a world-historical severance of sex from procreation and the equally unprecedented extension of mass female education. Culture has been transformed by a means of communication premised on an Ivy League ‘hot or not’ game, representations of sex by the ubiquity of online porn, blinking alongside consumer ads and messages from friends. In the West, the enormous weight of heteronormative-family ideology has succeeded in producing the ‘normal’ gay couple, while campus and bohemian milieus have nurtured post-gender spaces and identities. Politics, the realm of power, has been simultaneously opened—induction of women and minorities; third-wave democratization—and homogenized around a single programme, reproducing the pattern of parity within inequality. These transformations are inter-linked: economic pressures worsening gender and sexual relations, culture and politics proposing contradictory forms of compensation. In these conditions, ‘more of the same’ is not enough.

Questions of feminist strategy have been sharpened by the debates around #MeToo. The enabling conditions by which the Hollywood cliché of the lecherous producer in a flapping bathrobe, familiar at least since Scott Fitzgerald’s day, could unleash a mass political phenomenon are discussed below. In broader strategic terms, #MeToo poses the question of how we should understand the present moment comparatively and historically. Lin Farley, the pioneer of feminist research into sexual harassment in America—the term supposedly coined, as an analogy with racial harassment, by the women’s group she convened at Cornell in 1974 to discuss work-place life—provided a compelling analysis of men’s views and women’s experience that identified two key functions. In traditional ‘women’s jobs’—waitressing, shop-work, the typing pool—sexual harassment by male superiors operated to keep women down. In non-traditional sectors—Farley spoke to female police officers, wholesale managers, technical draughtsmen—sexual hazing and bullying functioned to keep them out.footnote⁴ But if this analysis held for American men born in the 1930s or 40s, is it still the case for those growing up half a century later, when women occupy 50 per cent of most professions and are widespread in the ranks of private-sector management? Has the balance between ‘down’ and ‘out’ mutated? Has there been regression as well as advance? Is harassment still functional as a gendered form of workplace discipline, or is it residual? Have its racial patternings undergone any change?

These are questions not just for analysis but for strategy as well. How effectively can sexual harassment be tackled if intersecting insecurities are not addressed? In surveys of us women working in the fast-food sector, for example, a third of the African-Americans and Latinas reported that a harasser had disrupted their work, compared to a quarter of white women. The women of colour were significantly more likely to face punitive retribution if they tried to report harassment—but Latina workers, far more than black women, said they had to keep quiet and put up with it, in order to keep the job.footnote⁵ Their silence was imposed not just by male domination but by the institutionalized state of anxiety that governs undocumented immigrants, in which economic pressures and insecure civic status combine with gender oppression to weaken rights to bodily integrity, while heightening domestic fears. A comparative perspective also helps to contrast feminist strategies in an international frame. While us preoccupations have centred on harassment at work and in education, the new movements in Latin America have focused on domestic violence, those in southern Europe on economic, sexual and migrant precarity.