Alison Phipps > Quotes

“Trans-exclusionary and anti-sex-work feminism amplify the mainstream movement’s desire for power and authority, and pursue it by policing the borders of feminism and womanhood. The mainstream preoccupation with threat becomes an overt ‘us and them’ mentality, and the necropolitical desire for annihilation is deliberately turned on more marginalised people.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“White women have a right to be angry about sexual violence. Survivors have a right to spaces without abusers. All survivors fantasise about revenge. But whose bodies are forfeit when white women mobilise punitive state and institutional power to achieve it? Who are the real casualties of the white feminist war machine?”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“There is narcissism in [the] white feminist refusal of intersectionality, this privileging of gender over race, class and other categories of oppression.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Contemporary trans-exclusionary feminism is animated by the fear of being ‘overrun’. And this fear is almost always sexualised: reactionary feminists have much in common with conservatives who claim that increased immigration will result in increased rape.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Claiming to be silenced amplifies and circulates reactionary forms of speech by generating outrage. And this manoeuvre works not because reactionary feminists are speaking truth to power and being accused of transphobia, but because they are speaking for power by expressing transphobia.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Mainstream white feminism, which uses the corporate media and state/institutional discipline to redress individual injuries, cannot tackle the intersections of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism that produce sexual violence. At the thicker end of this wedge, reactionary feminism is complicit with the far-right politics also produced by this intersectionality of systems. The necropolitics of reactionary feminism is where the political whiteness of the mainstream ends up.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Sometimes, sexual violence is a ‘cultural problem’ (but only when this culture is non white). Sometimes, it is a product of male anatomy (but only when this anatomy is assigned to a trans woman or a man of colour). Sexual violence is never the violence of heteropatriarchy or globalising racial capital. Instead, representatives of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism weaponise the idea of ‘women’s safety’ against marginalised and hyper-exploited groups.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“We want Harvey Weinstein in prison. We want Brock Turner to have a longer sentence. We want Judge Aquilina to sign Nassar’s death warrant. We rely on a third party to take these ‘bad men’ away, usually in the form of an institution or the state. And this White Knight or Angry Dad is patriarchy personified. This is how our outraged activism fails to dismantle the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy and racial capitalism that produce sexual violence – and strengthens them instead.”
― Alison Phipps

“This is mainstream sexual violence activism in a capitalist context. We ‘invest’ our trauma in networked media markets, to generate outrage and the visibility we need to further our cause. Cynical media corporations exploit this outrage, building visibility for their brands through clicks, likes and shares by encouraging audiences to consume our pain. Meanwhile the threat of damage, through widespread outrage, to the brands of exposed institutions and organisations leads to a purging of ‘bad men’ from high-profile sectors. These individuals may well move on to start all over again, while dysfunctional systems are left intact. Although this is not our intention, this seems more like NIMBYism to me than radical political action. Although this is not our intention, I’m afraid this is the ‘Me, Not You’ of political whiteness.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“The infliction that comes with white feminist anger, with its willingness to create collateral damage, perhaps makes it less of an ‘outlaw’ emotion than we might wish. In the symbolic and material game of ‘cops and robbers’, we are often identified with the cops.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Media markets, like all markets, are profoundly nihilistic. Clicks, likes and shares are a multi-denominational currency. As long as they accumulate, as long as visibility (and revenue) is gained, it does not matter why. In other words, the media using sexual violence as clickbait does not imply support for feminist goals.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Sex workers and their allies are dismissed as the ‘pimp lobby’. Trans people and their allies become the ‘trans cabal’, or in an incredibly offensive formulation, the ‘trans Taliban’…. And any challenge to reactionary feminist views is repackaged, via these conspiracy theories, as evidence that they are indeed right. Terms such as ‘trans Taliban’ echo other reactionary monikers, such as the racist ‘woke Stasi’ and misogynist ‘feminazi’, which are common on the far right. They also tap the contemporary appetite for conspiracy that has supported recent rightward shifts. Reactionary feminists may well be the InfoWars of the movement.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Traversing borders is a threat – and in the colonial mindset, the borders of class and nationality are at one with the borders of gender. Binary gender is a colonial and capitalist project, what feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa called the ‘absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other’.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Despite the scraps of socialism in its history, [trans- and sex worker-hostile feminism] is bourgeois feminism rooted in disdain for those who think and live differently, whose bodies are not easily assimilated to capitalist production and reproduction.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“While bourgeois white women claim our right to be ‘nasty’, we expect more marginalised women to be nice.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Violence against women is a pivot for the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism. It results from the tussle for material and emotional resources, between commodity production and the reproduction of human life.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“For white feminists, criminal punishment represents protection, not oppression. It is the colonial master’s intervention, the ‘empathy’ of Angry Dad. It is also the indirect demonstration of our own will to power.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“How might mainstream feminist activism help or hinder other social justice projects, for instance around class inequality, race discrimination, migrants’ rights and transgender inclusion? When violent men and governments profess their concern for ‘women’s safety’, how should feminists respond?”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“The Western history of sexual violence is also capitalism’s history: it is linked to women’s historical status as property and ongoing status as reproducers of nation and life. It is also a device of the hierarchical and adversarial relations which characterise the greedy market economy.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Western borders are currently being reasserted in the context of economic crisis, to protect the global ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’. And reactionary feminism is complicit with this capitalist and neo-colonial project. It foregrounds narratives of scarcity; it claims resources and support for the ‘good’ women rather than the ‘bad’.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Reactionary feminists are the ultimate wounded white victims. They are endangered as a ‘sex class’ (by people who are simply trying to survive). They are content to be defended, like property, by men who reserve their own right to perpetrate abuse.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“This…exemplifies how trans-exclusionary feminism uses the experience of rape. Drawing on the radical feminist idea of the penis as a weapon, it ‘sticks’ this organ to trans women through an obsession with their surgical status. The ‘threat’ posed by the trans woman is then juxtaposed with the threatened (white) femininity of the abuse survivor. Cue outrage.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Feminism underpinned by political whiteness seeks power within the existing system, not the overthrow of the system itself. This is ‘lean-in’ corporate feminism, and the governance feminism that has put ‘femocrats’ in local, national and international bureaucracies. This feminism advocates for women on banknotes, but does not necessarily dispute the hands that the majority of these banknotes are in.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“The investment of sexual trauma in the outrage economy allows the ‘good’ woman (cis, ‘respectable’, implicitly white) to be used to withhold support and resources from the ‘bad’ ones. Trans women and sex workers are pitted against more privileged women, in a politics that does not challenge how neoliberal capitalism has created massive inequalities of distribution.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“At a very basic level, anti-rape activism is about survival. Many of us are survivors trying to survive, and spectacles of mass wounding such as #MeToo evoke a gendered state of siege. Being raped often involves a visceral fear of death, whether the rape is physically violent or not – it is what makes us freeze, instead of fighting back. And if we freeze, perhaps we need our ‘kill’ after the experience is over. Unlike Arya Stark, we do not do our own killing. Instead, we ask the ‘Angry Dad’ or ‘White Knight’ of the state or institution to do it for us. And the destruction of bodily boundaries involved in criminal punishment mirrors the experience of rape.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“White feminist tears deploy white woundedness, and the sympathy it generates, to hide the harms we perpetrate through white supremacy. These tears are not just personal; they are political too.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Protecting white women was, and is, a key colonial preoccupation. Imaginings of Indigenous and/or slave uprisings were sexualised: fear of revolution was fear of rape. In colonial and neo-colonial cultures, white women’s tears are deadly to people of colour.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“The submissive femininity of radical feminism was bourgeois, white and heterosexual. There was no acknowledgement that this ‘enslaved’ femininity was not universal, or that it was complicit in the actual enslavement of generations of Black people.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Instead of interrogating intersecting systems, politically white feminism roots violence either in aberrant or all male bodies. The mainstream focus on ‘bad men’, and the reactionary focus on male biology, do not account for how capitalist economic predation and misogynist sexual predation go hand in hand. They do not account for how this interplay is racialised, domestically and geopolitically.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Today’s reactionary feminists are descendants of nineteenth-century ‘vice-fighters’, Christian moralists and anti-miscegenationists, the bourgeois women enlisted by Fordism to ‘improve’ the working class, and those who ran the reformatories for ‘wayward’ Black girls and who abused them ‘for their own good’.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism