#rafia zakaria

[molsno]

White colonizers manufactured similar moral panic in response to the practice of "sati," or as Europeans called it, widow-immolation. (In Sanskrit, "sati" refers to the woman who dies, not the ritual, but because I am primarily referring to European accounts I will use "sati" to mean the ritual.) The rite—which was not strictly a religious practice—involves a Brahmin widow casting herself on her husband's funeral pyre, and it was rare in India even at the time. Large parts of the country did not practice the barbaric ritual at all; in other regions, it was restricted to certain castes. In the seventeeth century, when the British first encountered sati, witch-hunts, trials, and burnings were still being conducted across Europe and in the American colonies. Yet despite the many similarities in the "spectacle" of burning women, and the purportedly moral underpinnings for doing so, white people apparently only recognized violence against women when it was perpetuated by what they saw as primitive "other" cultures.

—Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism

[transitoryparentheses]

"Anticapitalist threads within feminism have historically been suppressed or inverted in order to protect the interests of white women, members of the richest race in the world. But the feminism that results -- depoliticized, corporatized, atomized, affiliated with hollow consumerism or with violent domination -- doesn't even serve the interests of those white women in the long run."

-p.202, Against White Feminism by Rafia Zakaria (2021)

[oldcurse]

[laurellynnleake]

Writing While Muslim: The Freedom To Be Offended - Rafia Zakaria, 2015

When the attacks on Charlie Hebdo happened last January, I wrote an essay pointing out how more Muslim journalists had been killed in 2014 than those of any other faith, yet Muslims continued to occupy a position in the Western imaginary as haters of free speech, collectively given to riots and ruin. Greater valor is accorded Westerners dying at the hands of terrorists than, say, journalists dying in Pakistan or Iraq or Syria at the hands of the same forces while engaged in the same task. There is a particular valuation of valor inherent in this, which says simply that the war is “there” not “here,” and hence it is a greater tragedy for journalists to be killed “here” — in this particular case, lovely, romantic, sophisticated Paris — than on the streets of Karachi. ...Westerners, by and large, do not consider themselves complicit in the perpetuation of the wars that have led to the deaths of the very journalists that are buried without awards and without recognition of their courageous exercise of free speech pinned to their names.

I came across this essay (I've added spaces for readability) while refreshing my memory on the Charlie Hebdo bombings, and Neil Gaiman/Art Spiegelman/Alison Bechdel's related "Cartoonist Lives Matter" bullshit in 2015...Zakaria's essay is unfortunately still just as relevant today as liberals like Gaiman and orgs like PEN America keep both-sides-ing the genocide in Palestine.

I'd somehow forgotten that PEN America lionized the extremely racist & Islamophobic CH cartoonists with an award at a star-studded Gala. I had to re-read Neil Gaiman's weird essay where he ponders why-oh-why 6 writers refused to attend in protest. He imagines that they were merely "upset", and "only supporting the freedom of the kind of speech [they] like."

More and more I understand how deliberate this hypocrisy is, and how it works to deny the reality of Israel murdering Palestinians (including journalists, artists, and writers) in front of our eyes. "Writing While Muslim: The Freedom To Be Offended" is an excellent reminder of how people were fighting back against this bullshit in 2015 (and every year before). Give it a read!

[berlinauslander]

White feminism racial gatekeeping:

They have staked out a professional space in which ideas can be constructed and dismantled. And because access to educational and professional opportunities is unevenly distribured in favour of middle-class white people, this emphasis on expertise becomes a kind of gatekeeping of power that locks out people of colour, as well as working-class people, migrants and many other groups. The introduction of a different kind of authority into this space, then - one founded in lived experience which these 'experts' may not share - is seen as a threat to the legitimacy of their own contribution to women's rights, as if feminist thought and praxis is a zero-sum game, with one kind of knowledge supplanting the other.

...which goes hand in hand with a challenge to whiteness and its hoarding of power, leads to a particular kind of racialized calculus. If an experience or characteristic is associated with a non-white group, then it is coded automatically as valueless, and in turn anyone associated with that experience becomes themselves devalued. This is the way that hegemony protects itself: silencing and punishing difference by stripping away its legitimacy. These kinds of motivated value judgements are at the heart of white supremacy. And this is how white supremacy operates within feminism, with middle-class white women at the top ensuring that the credentials that middle-class white women have remain the most valued criteria within feminism itself.

[my-vanishing-777]

In colonial India, the term “prostitute” was used to describe virtually all women outside of monogamous Hindu upper-caste marriage, including the tawa’if, the courtesan, the dancing girl, the devadasi, high-caste Hindu widows, Hindu and Muslim polygamous women, low-class Muslim women workers, indentured women transported across the British empire, beggars and vagrants, women followers of religious sects, mendicant performers, professional singers, the wives of sailors, women theater actors, saleswomen, nurses, urban industrial laborers, and domestic servants.

[gatheringbones]

[“Historically, our law enforcement and criminal legal systems have fixated on fundamentally white-supremacist notions of protecting the virtue and innocence of white women and girls, primarily as justification for enacting horrifying acts of violence upon non-white, non-citizen men. Simultaneously, police and the prison system have always regarded women and girls of color with skepticism and hostility.

The VAWA was enacted within a context and legacy of women of color and especially Black and brown women experiencing such prevalent state and police violence in their communities that seeking help from law enforcement isn’t an option. In this sense, the law embodies white feminism. As author and activist Rafia Zakaria notes on the very first page of her 2021 book Against White Feminism, white feminists aren’t defined by their race but by their refusal “to consider the role that whiteness and the racial privilege attached to it have played . . . in universalizing white feminist concerns, agendas and beliefs as being those of all feminists.” It’s an ideology that universalizes white women as all women, and consequently harms women and femmes of color through the carceral “solutions” that it asserts will protect (white) women. Per the 2012 Rights4Girls study “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline,” 76 percent of incarcerated survivors in the Oregon prison system experienced sexual assault by the age of thirteen and are predominantly women and girls of color.11 The same study found criminalization and incarceration of those who had experienced early sexual traumas often stemmed from being unable to access crucial resources and supports to cope with their trauma.

In many communities, lack of resources for victims is a direct result of overinvestment in policing and incarceration. White women–led survivor justice movements exist in sharp contrast with historically Black women–led reproductive justice advocacy, which has always recognized how criminalization and incarceration are inherently anti-feminist. From policing the pregnancy outcomes and self-managed abortions of women of color, to the prevalence of Black families and families of color being torn apart by the prison system (one in nine Black children has an incarcerated parent, compared with one in twenty-eight white children), abolition is requisite to reproductive justice—and consequently, survivor justice.”]

kylie cheung, from survivor injustice: state-sanctioned abuse, domestic violence, and the fight for bodily autonomy, 2023

[lizbethborden]

Hi again! Yeah, from your bookshelf! You seem well informed and I wanna know the type of stuff you read and might recommend. I don't even know what to tell you for my interests because I feel like I'm just begining. Sorry I'm young and dumb still haha.

#1 you're not dumb and #2 nothing to apologize for :)

Here's some books I've got on my shelves or that I've read:

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, Laura Bates

Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, Katha Pollitt

Women, Race, & Class, Angela Davis

American Girls, Nancy Jo Sales

Lesbian Culture: An Anthology, eds. Julia Penelope and Susan J Wolf

Lesbian Studies, Margaret Cavendish

Hood Feminism, Mikki Kendall

Against White Feminism, Rafia Zakaria

Sister and Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write About Their Lives Together, eds Joan Nestle and John Preston

Another Mother Tongue, Judy Grahn

Aimee & Jaguar, Erica Fischer

Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, ed. Briona Simone Jones

Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, John Boswell

The Mary Daly Reader, eds. Jennifer Rycenga and Linda Barufaldi

Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey Jr.

Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society, Cordelia Fine

Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Father's Tongue, Julia Penelope

The Resisting Reader, Judith Fetterley

The Double X Economy, Linda Scott

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, ed. Roxane Gay

Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists, Joan Smith

Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin

The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women, Scott Stern

The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, Marilyn Frye

Only Words, Catharine A. Mackinnon

Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution, Jennifer Block

Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, Anne Llwellyn Barstow

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, Peggy Orenstein

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado-Perez

Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Values, Sarah Lucia Hoagland

We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement, Andi Zeisler

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, Adrienne Rich

Feminism, Animals, and Science: The Naming of the Shrew, Lynda Birke

The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua

Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery, Virginia L Blum

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Patricia Hill Collins

Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality, Gail Dines

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Susan Faludi

From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Marilyn French

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua

Seeing Like a Feminist, Nivedita Menon

With Her Machete In Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians, Catriona Reuda Esquibel

The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture, Bonnie J. Morris

Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall, Christopher Nealon

The Persistent Desire: A Butch/Femme Reader, ed. Joan Nestle

The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Monique Wittig

The Trouble Between us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement, Winifred Breines

Right-Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin

Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin

Why I Am Not A Feminist, Jessica Crispin

Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women, Leila J Rupp

I tried to avoid too many left turns into my specific interests although if you passionately want to know any of those, I can make you some more lists LOL

I would suggest picking a book that sounds interesting and using the footnotes and bibliography to find more to read. I've done that a lot :) a lot of my books have more sticky tabs or w/e in the bibliography than in the text so I don't lose stuff I'm interested in.

Hope this helps!

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Hi Sex Witch! This is a book rec question, really. Do you have any recommendations you would give people who want to start reading about gender theory? I know I want to learn so much more about queer gender identity and about its cultural impact and growth in different places but I dont really know where to start because it's such a big topic to cover.

Gender related or not, thank you so much for everything you do!

god okay that's a huge ask and I don't want to just throw a bunch of super dense unapproachable text at you where you're just getting into it (Judith Butler is so good to read but they are WORK) so here's a long list of some authors you can pick and choose from

Sara Ahmed

Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele's illustrated nonfiction Gender and Sexuality

Kate Bornstein

Ivan Coyote

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Angela Davis's book Women, Race & Class

Shon Faye

Leslie Feinberg

Cordelia Fine

Jules Gill-Peterson's book History of the Transgender Child (fairly dense read I will not lie)

Ruby Hamad's book White Tears/Brown Scars

Kit Heyam's book Before We Were Trans (haven't personally read this yet but I'm excited to)

Patricia Hill Collins

Mariame Kaba ("Makenzie she writes about prison abolition not gender" THE OPPRESSION ARE INTERLOCKING)

Mikki Kendall's book Hood Feminism

Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider is a great place to start)

Aileen Moreton-Robinson's book Talkin’ Up to the White Woman

Molly Smith and Juno Mac's Revolting Prostitutes is a BRILLIANT feminist analysis of sex workers' rights by sex workers

Amia Srinivasan's book The Right to Sex is just shakingly brilliant

Sabrina Strings' book Fearing the Black Body is a FASCINATING explanation of the formation of contemporary gendered norms and fatphobia as part of the creation of race, cannot recommend it enough

Susan Stryker

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Kai Cheng Thom

Riki Anne Wilchins

Rafia Zakaria

this is obviously not a complete list please not one @ me, it's just! a place to start browsing!

[transitoryparentheses]

"Refusal to recognize British cultural brutalities stood in parallel to the refusal to recognize the brutality of colonialism itself. The European "Age of Discovery" required such claims of moral supremacy in order to justify colonial expansion and control. It did not matter that poor and largely powerless women at home in Britain could be subject to torture and then being burned alive at the stake with a cheering audience from the village in attendance, nor that the practice of sati was at least in some cases nominally consensual, arguably a tiny step more shocking than the very non-consensual process of witch-burning. The Indian ritual was primitive and extremist and its European counterpart was a normal part of the maintenance of order.

To underscore this point, the British set about trying to prove not only that sati was a prevalent and integral part of Hindu cuiture but that it must be banned on humanitarian grounds. They searched for evidence of the practice in Hindu sacred scripture, combing the five-thousand-year-old Vedas (by no means easy, as they were not properly codified given the oral culture of the time) until they found a single reference that corroborated their own assumptions about sati, its religious character and its inhumanity. Thus they combined three imperialist moves: turning Hinduism into a monolithic religion based on scripture (which it was not); deciding which pundits' interpretations to accept as legitimate (crowning themselves the final arbiters of "correct" Hinduism); and writing into historical existence a 'tradition' of sati (which remains highly debatable)."

-p. 146-147, Against White Feminism by Rafia Zakaria (2021)

[oldcurse]

[protoslacker]

The application of Brené-speak to the genocide in Gaza, however, exposes its inherent confabulations. While she has instructed her millions of followers to be vulnerable as individuals within a work setting (even walking Kate Brown the head of Microsoft through a live session) she appears to have forgotten that such choices are only possible for the privileged few who make up a tiny sliver of the world’s population. What about the vulnerability of those who do not have a choice in whether their need or weakness is laid bare before the world? Is vulnerability only courage when the head of Microsoft chooses to share what keeps her up at night or is it similarly precious and singularly central when it is the result of the cruelty of a state that has made massacre of civilians its trademark.

Rafia Zakaria at LitHub. Why Brené Brown’s Gospel of Vulnerability Fails the World’s Most Vulnerable

Rafia Zakaria on the CEO Whisperer’s Recent Failure in Addressing the Genocide in Gaza

Essay: Brené Brown. Not Looking Away: Thoughts on the Israel-Hamas war

[berlinauslander]

White feminism

A white feminist is someone who refuses to consider the role that whiteness and the racial privilege attached to it have played, and continue to play, in universalizing white feminist concerns, agendas and beliefs as those of all of feminism and all feminists. You do not have to be white to be a white feminist. It is also perfectly possible to be white and feminist and not be a white feminist. The term describes a set of assumptions and behaviours which have been baked into mainstream Western feminism, rather than describing the racial identity of its sub-jects. At the same time, it is true that most white feminists are indeed white, and that whiteness itself is at the core of white feminism.

A white feminist may be someone who earnestly salutes the precepts of "intersectionality' - the need for feminism to reflect structural inequalities drawn along the lines of race, faith, class, dis-ability, etc., as well as gender - but fails to cede space to the feminists of colour who have been ignored, erased or excluded from the feminist movement. White feminists can attend civil rights marches, have friends who are women of colour, and in some cases be women of colour themselves, and yet be devoted to organizational structures or systems of knowledge that ensure that non-white women's experiences - and thus their needs and priorities - remain sidelined.

More broadly, to be a white feminist you simply have to be a person who accepts the benefits conferred by white supremacy at the expense of people of colour, while claiming to support gender equality and solidarity with 'all' women.

[miehimys]

Tagged by @indescriptequilibrium ! :-)

Fave color: green makes me feel alive! The best color combination is green + brown bc those are the colors of vantaanjoki in the summer <3

Last song: BOA by Megan Thee Stallion. And i’ve been listening to brat on repeat

Currently reading: If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin + Against White Feminism by Rafia Zakaria

Currently watching: Orange Is The New Black. The last time I watched it was maybe in 2017.. Im having lots of thoughts on crime and justice system etc. Crazy stuff

Currently craving: a hug but a regular one wont do it. I think getting hydraulic pressed (or tied up) might help. + i want to make pickled onions again

Coffee or tea: i drink 2-3 cups of coffee a day. I don’t really like energy drinks but they help with migraine attacks.. and i like black tea with milk & sugar (same as coffee)

I’m tagging @vampiricfruitcake @surrealisti and @vampirepolitician yayy

[molsno]

@rescuerabbit tagged me like almost a month ago whoops

tag 9 people you want to get to know better

last song: black saucers by hollywood burns. this was on my spotify discover weekly and I've been listening to songs from this album and they go so fucking hard it's unbelievable. I've been putting them on whenever I drive to/from work

last show: I've been watching better call saul with my gf every time we're together. she went home a few weeks ago and we only have 4 episodes left...... sob.....

currently watching: I'm like halfway through magirevo at the moment but it's been a hot minute since I last watched it. it's... honestly kind of mid for a yuri series. not my favorite but I would like to finish it some time soon

currently reading: well it's not really current but a few months ago I ran out of adderall in the middle of reading against white feminism by rafia zakaria. I'm back on my meds now though so I feel like I can actually finish it. there's a bunch of other books I want to read but I gotta finish this one first. I've found it really interesting so far! I'm looking forward to when I actually have time to finish reading it (which will hopefully be soon. things are really hectic rn)

current obsession: 9 hours 9 persons 9 doors is consuming me again now that I have it on ds. I don't even have enough time to play it right now but it's all I think about every day. zero escape has been my obsession for like 5 years though and this is like the 6th or 7th time I've played this game (if you count watching friends play through it). I literally never get tired of it

I'm tagging @bubblegumpumpkin @k8aclysm @rapturebones @iavenjqasdf @monkeygirlnutsack @theghostiedyke @girlincubus @sumacthing @mothgirlyuri

[bartmobile]

if you’re looking for more on how the u.s./the “west” in general co-opts feminism as a pro-war movement i recommend the book “against white feminism: notes on disruption” by rafia zakaria