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Undoing Monogamy Response

I already said this before, but I really really REALLY regret not being on Tumblr back in like, 2010-2014. Like the peak of Tumblr. I only hear stories from it on long Twitter threads and get to imagine what it was like, but I think I’d give just about anything just to see one day of what it was like on that website.

Because the thing is, you have to understand, in a few ways, the colonial understandings of gender and sexuality, this air of academic superiority born out of capitalist modernity that European colonizers carried with them during the 19th and 20th Century, is in some ways similar to 2010-2014 Tumblr. And this was ALL I could think about during our discussion on Undoing Monogamy. 

Obviously, there are many key differences when you look at colonialism and Tumblr, and I don’t mean to make light of the horrors of what was part of the worst collective genocide in human history. And while it might seem dramatic to compare a bunch of teenagers just fucking around on Tumblr to probably the worst thing to ever happen to the human race, I really do think there are some similarities in the philosophies behind both of them.

You see, on Tumblr, people used to do this thing where they’d like, list all of their privileges in their bio. I don’t know who thought of this or why they thought it was a good idea, but you’d basically have someone be like, “yeah, I’m white, cis, skinny, conventionally-attractive (yes!! they’d put all those there!!), middle class, etc, etc” and so on and so forth. And the LABELS. A lot of my friends and I have had extensive discussions around the labels on Tumblr, with the whole “gray-sexual demi-romantic recip-sexual” and so on and so forth. And I don’t know what half those terms mean but it basically came down to the point where it became this obsessive labeling in some attempt to pin down every complex, ever-changing mood contained in human sexuality. 

And this is obviously incredibly different from the mentalities of genocidal, violent colonizers (who definitely weren’t big on listing privileges), but the point is that Tumblr thought they were GENIUSES. And I’m not saying this from a point of condescension. I mean I am a little, but I also acknowledge 100% that if I was on that website at the time I totally would’ve done the same thing. I would have absolutely bought into it. But yeah, Tumblr really thought they did something! They really thought this was it, the next step in the revolution, that micro-labels and privilege-listing and all these other terms were the next (or maybe final) step in this sort of ascendency of social justice. This obsession with labels and classification is a figment of Western epistemologies— you really only want to classify things with rigid, harsh labels because you want to create binaries and divisions between acceptable and unacceptable forms of knowledge and understanding, like Boaventura Santos’ concept of abyssal thinking. Obviously that isn’t true for all labels— a lot of identities have been sources of empowerment and strength for marginalized identities to draw upon, and I definitely don’t think those should be removed.

But this need to classify and label is misguided in its attempt to understand people and their feelings. You don’t need to categorize everyone to understand. Categories don’t work for everything, and that’s fine. But forcing people’s identities to slide into labels always lends itself to forms of legitimacy and illegitimacy. And that, in turn, leads to the consolidation of power. And we all know what happens from there.

So all I really want to say, then, is that these concepts of finality or moral superiority or modernity will always be flawed, especially when they come to classifying, labeling, or understanding the complex intricacies of the human condition. Power is power, superiority is superiority. Regardless of how you’re creating these images of moral superiority, they’re just inherently going to be blind to the everyday realities and nuances of people. And that’s ok! Just acknowledge that, and work with that knowledge.

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Karyn Olivier Response

I am not an artist. I know very little about art. I know even less about modern? post-modern? contemporary? art. So I kinda take things at face value. That being said, I did find Karyn Olivier’s talk, and her works, really compelling. I’ve always thought of home as an interesting concept in art. Because it’s like, obviously a source of a lot of inspiration, emotion, and motivation. It’s where we form our first memories, develop the foundations of moral understanding, and it is where we are first socialized into the world. And especially when you factor in things like diaspora into our understandings of home, I think that these sorts can create really beautiful works of art.

But the thing about home is that eventually you’re supposed to leave. Like I said, I’m not an artist, but if I was, I could totally, 100% see myself falling into this sort of rut where I fantasize or romanticize over “home”, whatever that even means. I’d make longing works of art surrounding it, or something. I don’t really know specifically what I’d do, but it would certainly be a centerpiece. 

So what I found so interesting about Olivier’s work was that it went beyond that, it did different messages completely beyond that, it poked fun at various norms, whether they are figments of today’s society, or something like forgotten, like the Roman toilets.

My biggest takeaway, however, was definitely the amount of physical labor that went into it. Especially with the dome project and the carousel, it really struck me how much of her art was just regular, everyday manual labor. 

Especially because when you think of art you think of like, I don’t know, some 17th century French asshole painting some rich woman on a swing Rococo-style, or Salvador Dali’s melting-clock painting. Sure, they take time, and finesse, and talent, but it’s not like you’re going to work up a sweat doing it, or risk hurting your back and knees. So if we oftentimes don’t consider the manual labor-aspect of art, I think the opposite is twice as true— we rarely consider the art aspect of manual labor. My point is, whether it’s something like construction or the food industry or textiles or janitorial work or whatever, there’s so much time and effort and finesse that goes into these “menial” jobs that really would put them on par with art. There’s no such thing as unskilled labor, right? And if art is supposed to change the way we look at the world, I really can’t think of a more important lesson than learning to better value the work we don’t see.

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City Born Great Response

I’m not gonna lie, the first time I read this, I was kind of confused as to what was going on. It took me a few rereads, and googling the plot and other people’s analysis, to really start to develop my own opinions on the reading. I found the metaphor of a city as a body, a living entity, really compelling. Because cities are often echo-chambers of a nation or state’s entire well-being. It’s within cities that the stratification between classes and races is most clear, and sometimes a matter of a mere block or two. Because of this close proximity between the privileged and the marginalized, we can really analyze large cities as proportionate of an entire system. 

The term “biopower” refers to how states and structures manage and control the movement and consolidation of large groups of humans, and how these states can therefore control entire populations. Some of the most obvious ways in which this is seen is the policing of public spaces, and excluding it to those most marginalized in society— for instance, how people without houses or sex workers are often barred from entering or staying in various places in which the “general” population gathers, or how police are frequently called on Black people for just existing, which more often than not results in their death. And so when we think of a city as a body, the most immediate metaphor would be to compare cops to white blood cells— but it’s incredibly accurate and compelling to compare them to parasites.

Because, in all honesty, they are.

Cops don’t work for the people who make up the life of the city. They work for an archaic, blood-sucking, elitist, violent institution that claims itself as the city. They don’t care for the everyday people of a city, who comprise its culture, energy, and very existence. In fact, police actively damage a city, by limiting the potential of people who don’t fit the colonial, capitalist standards of “acceptable”. They perpetuate systems of disparity, inequality, and violence, and then call themselves heroes for incarcerating the victims of said cycle. The hyper-policing and incarceration of a city is what holds it back— a city is what it is despite, not because, of its police force.

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Response to Third World Feminisms Reading

In 1994, historian Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history”, meaning that the world had achieved its final form of governance via liberal markets and neoliberal policy. He believed that the West’s successful spread of capitalist, neoliberal ideologies, no more massive, structural upheavals would happen. In that same year, the year in which NAFTA and the Crime Bill was passed, the Zapatistas officially began warring with the state of Mexico. 

And now, in 2019, after the election of Donald Trump, after decades of Clinton, Bush, and Obama, the world seems to prove Fukuyama wrong. Protestors in Standing Rock and Ferguson rally against the American, corporate police state. In Ecuador, massive, Indigenous-led movements fight against the state. In Chile, where neoliberalism was first tested with the illegal, CIA-backed coup of Salvador Allende, grassroots-led movements challenge these structures, braving police and military-enforced suppression, giving birth to the saying “El neoliberalismo nació y morirá en Chile”. In Iraq, where well over 400 people have died protesting, college students take the spearhead of nation-wide protests to challenge the colonialist, quota-based system of government instituted by the U.S. military back in 2003. From New York City to Haiti to Palestine, it seems all of the world is rising up against the imperialistic, neoliberal structures that just a decade ago seemed all but impossible to tear down.

These movements are perfectly emblematic of what Mohantry describes as “Third World Feminism” and imagined community. Whether it’s the horrors of U.S.-backed neoliberalism or the cruelty of Israeli tanks, these issues which challenge the very quality of life disproportionately affects women within these communities, due to their colonial nature. In this way, we can see political consciousness being activated through a broader understanding of the hyper-policing of their existence, and not through a manufactured, narrow-minded, western lens. And this is not only why these movements across the world have been so powerful, but also why they hold so much hope for the future— they see these struggles as important and interconnected facets in a system of capitalist colonialism. If the individualized, fractured, capitalist mindset of neoliberalism is what got us into this mess, a community-based, militant form of radical organizing is what can get us out.

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Response to the Wolf Reading

It took me about five rereads to really start to take apart the “queer figural historiography” this piece referenced. During each read, my mind jumped to a different connection. By my third reread, I thought about how wolves represented not only the seeming “savagery” and untamed wilderness that Western civilization prides itself on rising from, but also the departure from conventional society that is, for some reason, so romanticized in the creation of great leaders. This concept is referenced briefly in Wolf or Homo Homini Lupus, but this extends beyond that. It isn’t just being “raised by wolves”, like Romulus and Remus, but rather this state of exile, and with it, a return to a rightful throne or sovereignty. From the Epic of Sundiata to even the Lion King, these stories follow a rightful heir cast out from his homeland, only to finally return from the chaos and tribulations of the wilderness to vanquish some usurper or invader, right the wrongs of the past, and assume their place within the hierarchy. And in real life, incredibly important stories have followed this model, too— for example, Alfred the Great hiding out amongst the marshes of England, being scolded by a baker’s wife for letting the bread burn, to finally rally his troops behind a single English identity and force the Viking invaders out of England.

These images of wolves being metaphors for uncivilized, natural wilderness and exile speak to the broader significance of wolves for society as a whole. Simply put, wolves are interpreted to be animals of the margins— whether it’s the fable of the wolf and the collar or the experiences of a generic sheep farmer and the lurking wolves just beyond the fences of a pasture, they exist in our stories to represent what lies outside of the bright lights and shiny surfaces of Western civilization. And as we know that Western epistemologies are defined by binaries, this almost serves as its own. While some things— the clear divide, one dominance over the other, are obvious in this wolf-man binary, what I’m most interested in is the concept of one side of the binary defining the other, and vice versa. This is an important aspect of all binaries— that one side exists only because the other side is there to exist as what is not.

THIS is why the story of the wolf is so integral to understanding our own story, THIS is what the figural historiography of the human-wolf is, and THIS is, in my opinion, what the main point of Wolf or Homo Homini Lupus is. We are so keen to characterize wolves as this sort of homogenous identity because if we do, we can characterize humanity as its own homogenous identity. But even though wolves have spread across the globe in many different forms, like humans, the meanings and cultures behind this spread create important distinctions. It is here that the problem arises, and where we connect this to the so-called anthropocene. This hailed advent of humanity that marks its own catastrophe is, bluntly put, dumb. There’s nothing intrinsically human about climate catastrophe. There’s nothing intrinsically human about capitalism, or colonialism, or the destruction of earth. Humans are living, breathing creatures, facets of the broader earth, same as any other plant or animal. And humans have, for well over two hundred thousand years, lived on planet earth without destroying it. There is nothing homogenous about the so-called “Anthropocene”— this is something that’s the result of European colonizers and European capitalism, and those factors alone.

It’s important to acknowledge these issues, to make these distinctions. Humanity didn’t perpetuate climate catastrophe— humanity non-destructively existed on earth for millenia. And these solutions will not be found through some alien, forced homogeneity born of an (unwittingly) white-supremacist agenda. It will come through the celebration of these distinctions and a greater understanding of what kept us alive for centuries upon centuries.

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Bloodchild Response

I don’t know. I know Octavia Butler is a big name in the science fiction community, and I’m sure some of her other works are different, but I really don’t know how to feel about Bloodchild. My biggest criticism—and a lot of this should be taken with a grain of salt, especially because this was written back in the 90s—is that it finds the concept of men giving birth so novel. And the thing is, the moment you start to understand the world beyond the bioessentialist way we’re socialized, you realize that men have given birth for thousands of years. So long as society has constructed a concept of “men” or “manhood”, there have been men who have given birth. And they didn’t even need a horrifying centipede-alien to insert eggs into them, either.

Now, in the middle of the 1990s, would this be something that’s an obvious truth? No. To be fair, even today in 2019, a lot of bioessentialist language is frequently used in casual conversation, even those who would ultimately consider themselves allies to trans movements. But even if Bloodchild is a product of its time, then why are we still reading it today? Sure, men giving birth isn’t its only theme, but it is a focal point that continuously gets revisited. I think that Bloodchild does a lot of good things in challenging norms within science fiction, Western popular culture, and broader sociocultural standards. It reverses the white supremacist fantasy of colonizing alien races, it talks about the concept of “coming-of-age” and analyzes it through a lens of socialization and grooming, and it raises the question of the very definition of “human” without planet Earth. But that being said, I think the question of men giving birth in such a viscerally parasitic, violent, and just overall squeamish way was the wrong way to go. Men have given birth for thousands of years— so why not just include it as a generally-accepted truth, one without much fuss or drama?

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Master’s Tools Response

Before I had even really begun studying Audre Lorde, I knew the quote “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. And she’s right. In all honesty, structural change has never come about within the United States from working within the system. Immediate change that impacts individual lives has, sure. But these sorts of movements have simply shifted the ways in which systems of oppression display themselves. Think about it. The first thing everyone’s mind is going to jump to is probably the Civil Rights Movement, because it’s so famous and so successful. And again, while immediate standards of living improved for many people in the country—the dignity that comes with desegregating bathrooms or water fountains or public transportation—the institutions that perpetuated this injustice remained intact as ever.

And before I get into this, I want to preface by saying I obviously don’t mean this as any sort of critique for various civil rights movement leaders. They’ve done more work and accomplished more than I or probably anyone I know could ever do. People have lost their lives in this fight, and that’s not something I take lightly. 

But that being said, these issues still remain. I think one of the biggest failures of our understanding of racial oppression during the age of segregation and Jim Crow is that our minds think of segregation as something primarily upheld by water fountains, bus seatings, trains, and bathrooms. In reality, the most devastating aspects of segregation were found in housing, schools, jobs, and other forms of economic segregation. It’s why when integration that was mandated by Brown v. Board was finally put into place, 38,000 Black school teachers in the South lost their jobs. Why? Because it was done so without economically desegregating America, without dissolving the wealth gap that continues to segregate populations today. The biggest victories of the Civil Rights Movement—the Freedom Riders, many of the massive marches and demonstrations—were successful because they did not abide by the system. They did not wait for their congressional representative. They didn’t sign Change.org petitions, or hold cute little rallies outside the governor’s mansion. They braved violence from both regular citizens and the state, and through that, they were able to accomplish the victories they did accomplish. Most of the victories that came within the system, meaning many of the legislative victories, ultimately did nothing but change the systems of oppression. It’s why America now is responsible for a quarter of the world’s entire prison population, and it’s why, in terms of schools, America is segregated now more than ever.

Ask the Sandinistas or the protesters at Gwangju how they feel about working from within the system. Lorde is right— the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, because you’re simply playing by the system’s own rules to try to dismantle it.

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Carrier Bag Response

I want to start this off by saying that I’m sure if Ursula LeGuin and I sat down at a table and I said what I’m about to say, she would probably agree with me in part before convincing me to her interpretation of what she wrote. She’s a radically progressive writer who has frequently challenged Western notions of gender, class, sexuality, and society. That being said, I think that The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction is a very Western way to view the world.

To start, she calls it simply human nature to want to contain things, to want to hold them and store them away. On that, I would disagree. Western epistemologies are defined by binaries— man vs. woman, culture vs. nature, country vs. country, mind vs. soul, man vs. nature, and so on. A few defining characteristics are present within all binaries constructed by Western society. One, they are absolute— there is no mingling, no transgressing, no third option. Secondly, one defines the other— in order for one to exist, it needs something to be put in fundamental opposition with, something that delineates where it exists. And three, one is always dominant over another— as we see especially with man vs. woman or man vs. nature.

These binaries are defined, then, by enclosures— either physical or metaphysical. So whether they are borders or bioessentialist definitions, they seek to enclose various bodies within strict hierarchies that best serve the state. In that same way, I think it’s a very Western way to look at the world to suggest that every human, especially the first ones, simply wanted to contain and thereby control the things they found useful, the things that the earth gave them. I don’t mean this literally— I’m sure people can make bags without, you know, “upholding capitalistic standards of the West” or whatever. But in the same way that LeGuin argues such fixations of the first tools being weapons feed into systems of violence, I would argue that fixations of control and possession feed into systems of structural injustice and poverty, of exploitation and disenfranchisement. Perhaps our first tool, then, is language— something we built on our own, not only to communicate necessities to one another, but to tell the very stories LeGuin talked about, to build community and a culture.

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Against Students Reading Response

Against Students was definitely my favorite piece among all of the ones we had read. I think that people who are so vehemently opposed to trigger warnings (whether we’re talking about Atlantic op-eds or simple classroom discussions) honestly just don’t understand the concept of triggers. Like, they don’t understand the visceral trauma that comes along with these sorts of things. 

Following that vein for a second, triggers exist for people who have already understood the horrors and atrocities that dominant systems of control inflict on marginalized communities. Like, that’s literally the whole point of trigger warnings. So when authors, journalists, or students make the argument “oh, well, when black trans women are murdered every day or when people are bombed in the Middle East every day and they don’t get trigger warnings,” it’s kinda like, yeah, no shit. That’s why people need trigger warnings. Because these horrors have happened to them, or their families, or their communities. They’re aware of what’s happening to them, and they don’t want to relive the trauma in such an environment, or at the very least, steel themselves for a painfully academic, almost anthropological understanding of the lived experiences of their communities. But this isn’t the reason why I really liked Against Students.

It makes a good point in talking about colleges and universities as neoliberal think tanks, which is something I’d like to expand on. In fact, the very concept of neoliberalism as a political theory was developed at the University of Chicago in the 1970s. Then, making its debut, the United States government, through the CIA, bombed the capital of Chile on September 11th, 1973, helping the fascist Pinochet government kill and disappear thousands upon thousands of people, and imprison over 130,000 people. In doing so, Chile was used as a trial run for neoliberalism, before it was then used to ruin countries in Latin America, the Middle East, and across the globe, including this country.

Why do I mention this? Because perhaps one of the most insidious aspects of neoliberalism is that it hails itself as the progressive cure to the very injustices it perpetuates. It’s pro-cause but anti-effect. It’s the Democratic Party of the 1990s, claiming itself as a progressive hero, but then passing Crime bills and immigration “reform”, repealing Glass-Steagall and stripping away welfare. In that same vein, the same sort of thing happens within colleges. They claim to be progressive, offering gender studies classes and talking about “mental health awareness”, giving trigger warnings and “promoting diversity”. And yet, they produce the next generation of thinkers that strip away the wages of the working class, that join the state department to bomb countries into oblivion and overthrow governments, that uphold systems of capitalism and patriarchy that keep men in positions of dominance in the West. In such a way, colleges and universities aren’t just breeding grounds for neoliberalist thought, but an echochamber of them— it’s a highly-condensed, hyper-focused, small-scale model of a larger neoliberal world.

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The Women White Feminism Doesn’t See

Just last weekend, Ellen Degeneres was seen with none other than former President George W. Bush at a football game, something that got her absolutely dragged through the mud by the true kings, queens, and non-binary sovereigns of Twitter— Gen-X leftists who turn off their auto-capitalization function for the full aesthetic experience. A few days later, Ellen talked about it on her show, where she gave the same little sad talk every rich, white, privileged person gives when they feel bad about themselves— “come on guys, why can’t we all just be friends? when did that become such a bad thing, guys, huh? when did it stop being ok to hang out with people who have different opinions? ” The resulting controversy dragged in various celebrities like Mark Ruffalo and Reese Witherspoon, as well as politicians like Tulsi Gabbard, leading to an assorted collection of big names and verified Twitter accounts drawing lines in the sand and hastily choosing sides.

Now, the ensuing clusterfuck of Twitter discourse did two things: 

1. Allow me, someone too young to remember the Iraq War/Abu Ghraib discourse, to get an up-close, real-time reenactment of all the defenses of George Bush and U.S. imperialism (well, is waterboarding really torture if it doesn’t leave any physical scars?)

2. Reveal a perfect example of how Western feminism centers white womanhood and American identities over the literal lives and human rights of those living beyond our borders.

As much fun as it would be to describe all the mental gymnastics and moral leaps and bounds people took to defend literal war crimes, I’m not here to write about that. What I will say is this— our first concepts of what “feminism” looks like or what a “feminist” looks like is very institutionalized, very capitalist, and very white. The feminist in America’s eye is Hillary Clinton, is Ellen, is a pussy-hat wearing, sign-wielding, white woman. It’s the daring white woman strong enough to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, it’s the daring white woman brave enough to advocate for her right to serve in active combat overseas, it’s the daring white woman steadfast enough to be a police officer to serve her own community. 

In other words, when we center white women in positions of authority as a model for “feminism”, it shouldn’t be any surprise that mainstream feminist discussions are based around whether women should be allowed to murder people of color overseas just like men are, or whether we should let a white woman join a long line of white men bombing the hell out of whichever poor Middle Eastern or Latin American country decides to think about wanting human rights again. This model of American feminism doesn’t just uplift white women, though— it marginalizes women of color, trans women, queer women, working-class women, and women in the Global South. When specifically looking at women of color and women in the Global South, this form of capitalist, imperialist feminism not only pushes such groups to the margins of society, but also fetishizes them, exotifies them, builds up this elaborate, white supremacist fantasy in which these poor, suppressed, ignorant women need to be liberated from their oppressor, or in other words, their own cultures and communities. This mentality, something scholar and feminist theorist Gayatri Spivak describes as a “very old civilizing logic of white men and white women saving brown women from brown men”, is a logic used to justify war crimes across the globe. Laura Bush called the “War on Terror” a “fight for the dignity and rights of women”. This “fight for the dignity and rights of women” has resulted in 2.4 million deaths. Just a few weeks ago, Condoleezza Rice argued against pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, in the name of not abandoning the “women of Afghanistan”. Yes, in 2019, the year of our Lord, two-thousand and nineteen, after all that has been done in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and other nations in the name of fighting terrorism.

Whether it’s Condoleezza Rice or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Justin Trudeau, basically any and all political leaders of the West (who are self-proclaimed feminists) will be practicers of this white feminism, whether it’s through overthrowing the government of Honduras and plunging the country into widespread violence, chaos, and poverty, pushing for mass human rights abuses and state-sponsored violence in the Middle East, dropping over 26,000 bombs in the Middle East in one year, or selling arms to Saudi Arabia and Israel while simultaneously buying a pipeline to override Indigenous voices. Why? Because this very concept of “saving” women of color is rooted in white saviorism, something deeply ingrained in the political and philosophical landscapes of the West. Our very concepts of “women’s issues” are distorted, and as a result, who we designate the heroes of these causes become distorted too. Are issues of drone strikes, concentration camps, and mass bombing not women’s issues too? Or are women’s issues solely limited to representation in film and equal pay for a soccer team, problems that can be easily championed by the performative, pussy-hat activist?

As a result, the question of white perceptions of women of color ultimately becomes a question of how to recalibrate our focus of what’s at stake here. How to understand visceral issues that many women living outside (and within) the borders of the United States grapple with every day, and seeing them from a lens that isn’t confined by white saviorism. And the only way this can be achieved is to center women who are further marginalized beyond just gender, some sort of feminism born from below.

There’s a short story called “The Women Men Don’t See” written by James Tiptree Jr., which basically tells the story of two women, a mother and a daughter, stranded on a mangrove swamp with a white man named Don Fenton, and a Mayan pilot named “Captain Esteban”. The story follows Fenton and his frustration as the two women seem to fail to fit into his preconceived notions of female stereotypes. As the story progresses, it becomes evident that the only time the women are even really noticed by Fenton is when they’re sexualized— hence the title. It ends with a shocking turn of events, as the two women are voluntarily spirited away by aliens from another planet, deciding that any life could be better than the life of a woman on earth. While hailed as a brilliant piece of feminist literature (and in many ways, it is), the piece is also a perfect example of how white, American women are oftentimes centered in these discussions of gender discrimination. Either by design or hilarious irony, the story is set in Quintana Roo, and Ruth Parsons, perhaps the only female character with relevant dialogue, works for the “Foreign Procurement Archives” based in Washington, D.C. Even within this short story, the same American, imperialist form of feminism is found. A white woman who literally works for the State Department and helps manipulate currencies and commodities of countries in the Global South is suddenly swept from all the horror and discrimination by kind-hearted aliens?

All of this, from Clinton to Tiptree Jr., from Iraq to the mangrove swamp, isn’t meant to be a critique of white women— I would say, as most people with a moral compass would, that it is a good thing when all women are generally interested in the collective liberation of all underprivileged minorities. What I am saying, however, is that the proper navigation of differences between communities and identities can build solidarity, and through solidarity, true liberation can be achieved. In Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, she argues that difference has been always presented as either something to be ignored, or something to be used as a wedge to weaken the cause. As she puts it, those who are outside the “acceptable” definition of women— low-income, queer, Black, non-American, have a far better understanding of the fight for survival and victory, know that by “learning how to take our differences and make them strengths”, liberation will be achieved. This is what I mean when I say “feminism from below”. This is not Hillary Clinton’s feminism, this is not Ellen’s feminism, and it certainly isn’t America’s feminism. It’s the feminism of those that white America doesn’t see. Erasure, centering white womanhood, imperialist and American feminism— these are all the master’s tools, and they will never bring about true liberation.