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White tears, white rage: victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism

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Version 2 2023-06-12, 09:31
Version 1 2023-06-09, 21:44
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-12, 09:31 authored by Alison Phipps
Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears. This in turn depends on the dehumanisation of people of colour, who were constructed in colonial ‘race science’ as incapable of complex feeling (Schuller, 2018). Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people. Such feminisms exemplify what I call ‘political whiteness’, which centres assertions of victimhood: through these, womanhood (and personhood) is claimed to the exclusion of the enemy. Through legitimating criminal punishment and border policing and dehumanising marginalised Others, claims to victimhood in mainstream feminism often end up strengthening the intersecting violence of racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

European Journal of Cultural Studies

ISSN

1367-5494

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Page range

1-13

Department affiliated with

  • Sociology and Criminology Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2020-10-01

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2020-10-01

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2020-09-30

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