Status Updates From Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Pol...

"It is possible not to idealize an abused wife even while imagining solidarity with her. Solidarity, actually, requires us not to idealize.... Feminists, perhaps, should try to avoid heroes. No girlbosses, no heroines, no masters."

Am I in love with this book so far? Yes. That introduction was everything yet the first chapter was a bit of a struggle. I blame my brain. It took a few rereads to really understand what Sophie Lewis is getting at in the narrative. However, it is sometimes bogged down by all of her jokes.

i love the pornophobe chapter its so relevant in current pop culture

Meanwhile, Willard’s/Frank’s politics were self-described as Christian socialism, a pointedly anticommunist ideology that did not treat class conflict as central (the aim was rather to bring workers and capitalists together in cooperation).

[This is wildly wrong on Christian socialism generally & Willard's views specifically. They're perhaps anticommunist in that they don't explicitly advocate violent revolution?]

[weird to bring up Emma Goldman as a counterexample to the racism of Frances Willard and other temperance activists, but not bring up Goldman's racist beef w/Lucy Parsons & insistence that a class analysis should subsume a racial one.]

im loving the personal anecdotes after all that dense history--the pornophobe

They clung fast to the idea that some kinds of sex were inherently criminal.

[This is in the context of criticizing women organizing against (well-documented, not imaginary) forced prostitution of children. It follows passages which are critical of efforts to create / raise an age of consent, and which characterize temperance as blaming booze to avoid blaming men.]

The Page Act was the very first law limiting who could come and inhabit the settler-colonial republic.

[I think this is incorrect - the Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798 also limited immigration. Parts were expired / repealed a few years later but the Alien Enemies Act is still law.]

[this is kinda unhinged - first of all, transatlantic slave trade is criminalized in the US in 1808 but chattel slavery continues there until 1865 (in Brazil the corresponding dates are 1826 & 1888). Second "unmaking the world in which slavery is possible" is not a coherent, realizable policy goal. No 19th c. abolitionist I've read speaks in those terms - they all want the laws to change.]

I can think of few words so misused as the word abolition. Contrary to what is often implied, the criminalization of the trans-atlantic slave trade, and therefore of chattel slavery by Western nations in the 19th century, did not by itself realize the goal of unmaking the society that had enslaved - that could enslave - human beings. Yet the latter is what abolition requires.

[I think we're elevating minor figures again in order to create a straw man feminism -- here Belgian Congo genocide apologist May French-Sheldon, who, while while she may have leveraged contemporary conversation about women for publicity, doesn't seem to have a connection to feminist organizing (aside mayyyyybe from speaking @ women's colleges, which isn't much of a signal of feminism pre-WWII).]

[SBA & ECS were non-awesome in many ways, I like to think I would have been on the side of Lucy Stone & Frances Harper, but understanding this history requires the context of how quickly Black men turned against equal rights after 14A/15A & that their social & legal position was superior to white women for a time. Even DuBois, who defended women's suffrage to other Black men, thought women shouldn't work.]

[the split in the women's movement post-14A/15A is something I've studied in depth before & these takes are way off - accurate take that ECS deployed racism, but SBA is a more complex case; wildly downplays Douglass's sexism & betrayal of universal suffrage; equates the early use of the word "eugenics" with scientific racism/Darwinism when for many, early on, it was synonymous with today's "public health".]

i wish i could read faster

im on the kkk feminist and exciteddddddddd

”Pornophobe”😀
The fuck