#intersectionality

inclusivefeminism:

If your art and activism is only for abled, sighted, hearing people, your art and activism is neither radical nor intersectional and certainly not inclusive. It’s nothing new.

geekandmisandry:

corbinite:

osirisjones:

star-wars-discousre:

osirisjones:

star-wars-discousre:

feminismandmedia:

star-wars-discousre:

You are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. That’s it. Aces aren’t LGBT.

I mean for one your forgetting a bit of that. Like the Q+.

Mod Bethany

The full acronym is LGBT.

I love me some ahistorical bullshit

The “full” acronym at one point was “GL”, after lesbians fought against male homosexuality being the “face” of the movement (i.e., the Alliance for Gay Artists (AGA), founded in 1982, was renamed the Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Artists shortly thereafter; and the Gay Activists Alliance never included “Lesbian” in their title).

The “full” acronym at another point was “LGB”, only after bisexual activists campaigned fiercely to be included, and is often still not even included in acronyms

The “full” acronym at yet another point was “LGBT”, only after trans activists campaigned fiercely to be included

Queer was added to the acronym after it was reclaimed and re-politicized by ACT UP off-shoot Queer Nation in the early 1990s. LGBTQ has been a thing since the 90s.

ONE Archives, which is the largest repository of LGBTQIA+ materials in the world and was founded by some of the principle members of the early (1950s-60s) homophile movement, which led to the gay rights movement post-Stonewall, uses the full acronym LGBTQ on their website and also freely uses the word “Queer” interchangeably.

As of 2014, NOW (National Organization for Women) agreed to switch to use of the full LGBTQIA acronym, and it likely isn’t the only large social rights organization to have done so

Many LGBTQ+ magazines use LGBTQ, including One(which has existed in some form since the 1950s) and The Advocate, use LGBTQ or LGBTQIA as the full acronym and regularly use “queer” as a phrase (and, in fact, some articles have welcomed asexual people and their narratives as part of the queer experience).

The acronym is constantly evolving. It’s not static. To claim otherwise is blatant ignorance. The modern-day LGBTQ+ community is a result of decades of political activism, social inclusion, and community outreach. It’s nota rigid structure that operates by a strict set of rules about who can and cannot join.

The full acronym is LGBT. Cishets don’t belong in the community. Aces aren’t inherently lgbt. We don’t want our oppressors in our community.

“we don’t want our oppressors in our community” 

as if trans people don’t already have to deal with their oppressors (cis people) being in their community

as if LGBTQIA+ people of color don’t have to deal with LGBTQIA+ white people in the community

as if LBTQIA+ women don’t have to deal with GBTQIA+ men in the community

as if disabled LGBTQIA+ people don’t have to deal with able-bodied LGBTQIA+ people in the community

the LGBTQIA+ community is huge and consists of people with multiply-overlapping identities and privileges. we all (unless you’re a cis, able-bodied, wealthy, white gay man) have to deal with a member of our oppressing class in the LGBTQIA+ community

Even cis, able bodied, wealthy, white gay men occasionally have oppressors in the restricted lgbt community if straight trans people are included (although this is more rare; the only example of a homophobic trans person I can pull up is Caitlyn Jenner, my point is just that intersectionality means this is possible all along in a number of ways and accepting another dimension of intersectionality to the acronym isn’t anything new)

Reblogging for the historical smackdown.

and this fool is STILL going off in the notes about how “aces aren’t inherently lgbtpn no matter what you type on the internet lmao”

well by that logic, aces ARE inherently LGBTQIA+/MOGAI no matter what you type on the internet lmao :) and there’s really nothing you can do about it except cry about the cishets on your tumblr. like please

still no research or facts, just plugging one’s ears and repeating the same old, tired, INCORRECT notion that aces don’t belong in the community despite tons of evidence and research being presented. i think OP intended to go back and forth forever on this, but it’s pretty clear they’re not shit if all they can say is “well they’re not cuz I say so, SO THERE lalalala” in the face of well thought-out responses. 

edit: my comments may be “bullshit” but at least i’m not a bigoted aphobe LOL. this may come as a huge surprise for some of you, but criteria for belonging in the LGBTQIA+/MOGAI community isn’t limited to “opposite” gender identity and sexual orientation??? gasp!! “opposite gender” LMAO okay you just keep on with your bad binary self and we’ll be over here supporting actual inclusion and intersectionality and not being terrific assholes about it.

I’ve been doing a lot reading this summer and I thought it would be interesting to post the things I find thought-provoking.

Against Charity by Mathew Snow
Rather than creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.

The core problem is the bourgeois moral philosophy that the movement rests upon. Effective Altruists abstract from — and thereby exonerate — the social dynamics constitutive of capitalism. The result is a simultaneously flawed moral and structural analysis that aspires to fix the world’s most pressing problems on capital’s terms.

Rather than asking how individual consumers can guarantee the basic sustenance of millions of people, we should be questioning an economic system that only halts misery and starvation if it is profitable. Rather than solely creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.

Having been reading more and more socialist/radical left commentary, I feel like most criticism can be distilled down into, “the system is wrong, so why are we focusing on making this thing inside the system better?” This is particularly evident in the criticism of animal welfare by animal rights advocates, i.e. why are you pushing for better treatment of animals before they’re killed when they shouldn’t be killed in the first place?

Lessons in White Fragility: When Vegan Abolitionists Appropriate Intersectionality by Dr. C. Michele Martindill
White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.

They spout clichés such as “all lives matter” or “just go vegan” or “veganism is not about race” or “intersectionality shows the interconnectedness of all oppressions.” When anyone in the animal rights movement claims they are practicing intersectional veganism, defining it merely as wanting justice for all and being against all exploitation and oppression, they are operating under a misguided act of cultural appropriation. They are also working to insure that an upper class white cis gendered ableist man dominated ideology remains at the center of the vegan abolitionist animal rights movement. Intersectionality or pro-intersectionality is not a let’s-have-a-group-hug approach to social justice, nor is it simply a path to growing a revolution—increasing movement membership–that will end all oppressive social systems.

Intersectionality has become a buzzword these days, without acknowledging Patricia Hill Collins or Kimberle Crenshaw or that the term was originally used to describe how Black women experience multiple systems of oppression. This was important for me to read because before I knew the history, I had thought that intersectionality was simply the acknowledgment that multiple systems of oppression can affect a group of people and how oppressions are interconnected.

This Is What I Mean When I Say “White Feminism” by Cate Young
I’m talking about the feminism that disregards the fact that whiteness is a privilege that is not afforded to all women. 

Every single time women of colour talk about “white feminism” or “white feminists” within the context of discussions about the way that the mainstream feminist movement privileges whiteness, we deal with an onslaught of defensive white women insisting that they personally are not like that, and would you please say “some white women” and not make generalizations?

Now, I understand the impulse to get defensive. It can be very off-putting to feel attacked for a transgression that you know yourself not to be guilty of. But in the context of social justice and movement building, if you’re feeling attacked, it probably means you’re having your privilege challenged, not that you are a bad person. As I always say, “If it doesn’t apply to you, then it’s not about you. If it’s not about you, then don’t take it personally.” Being a good ally means recognizing that sometimes your input is not needed or wanted, and that it’s incredibly inappropriate to demand that a marginalized group, (in this case, WoC within the feminist movement) restructure a conversation that is happening to serve their needs, in a way that is more “comfortable” for the very people they are mobilizing against. That is the very definition of flexing one’s privilege.

I think a lot of this can also be applied to privilege in general, i.e. when you call out someone’s privilege, they get defensive and insist that they personally don’t want or act on their privilege. It reminds me of a sermon that John Metta gave last month – I, Racist. He spoke about how he doesn’t talk about race with white people because they’re unable to divorce their participation in a racist system from an accusation that they themselves are racist. “Without being able to make that differentiation, White people in general decide to vigorously defend their own personal non-racism, or point out that it doesn’t exist because they don’t see it.”

I’ve been mulling over two really great pieces on animal liberation and the animal rights movement these past couple of weeks.

Aph Ko: Afrofuturism and Black Veganism: Towards a New Citizenship at the Intersectional Justice Conference

Aph’s work on Aphro-ismandBlack Vegans Rock is awesome, and this video is really important. I’ve been wanting to post this ever since it came out. I finally finished captioning it, so now you can view it on Amara in English. I also put the captions into a slightly edited transcript if you’d rather read her talk. Her description: “In my talk, I discuss how intersectionality is a useful tool for navigating current oppressive systems, and how Afrofuturism is a brilliant tool for creating conceptual blueprints for tomorrow.”

Aph touches on a lot of things and the video in itself is impactful, so I recommend just watching it all the way through (content warning for racial violence and imagery), but I’ll try to sum up some main points:

1. Intersectionality as “social layerism”
   
2. Citizenship politics
   
3. Racial and animal oppression
   
4. Afrofuturism and imagining freedom
5. Moving from the geocentric to the heliocentric model

Intersectionality as “social layerism”

I think we need to re-evaluate the ways that we think systems of oppression are connecting, because currently, I can tell that some activists are struggling to articulate how and why these issues are entangled, and instead, they try to engage with a type of analysis that I call “social layerism”, […] when activists try to enact a type of intersectional analysis, but they just end up superficially layering these issues on top of one another without any meaningful connection or analysis. So that basically means that a lot of people are saying anti-racism, feminism, speciesism, all in the same sentence, which is a really big deal, but there’s not really a lot of work being done on connecting these things conceptually.

Aph mentions a popular video, On Intersectionality in Feminism and Pizza, where Akilah uses pizza made from animals’ products and animals’ bodies to explain intersectionality, as an extreme example of social layerism. Akilah is literally talking about a pizza with toppings and not making any connections between feminine and animal oppression (see Carol J. Adam’s The Sexual Politics of Meat), or any other type of oppression, instead explaining intersectionality as additional layers of issues that aren’t connected or entangled. Although intersectionality has become mainstream, its meaning hasn’t really translated into our social movements.

Citizenship politics

Aph explains how the compartmentalized, single-issue movements of today – feminism, anti-racism, animal rights, etc. – prevent more meaningful connections between oppression to take place. She brings up the the issue of physical borders as a concrete example of citizenship politics, and also as an analogy to the policing that happens within different types of activist spaces. She gives examples of the vitriolic reaction against Black Vegans Rock that white and non-Black minorities have had.

A lot of vegans who believed that veganism was in their possession, in particular, a part of white citizen identity. A lot of white people felt like they unquestionably had access to, and could be the gatekeepers over, veganism, and that Black people who talked about race in conjunction with veganism were crossing a border […] that white folks created, and our racialized discussions about animal rights were threatening them and their current citizenship to the landscape of animal rights. Our attempts at talking about race and animal at the same time was viewed as deviant, wrong, and barbaric. We had to do it “the right way”. We had to go through the right channels to become a proper animal rights activist, which meant adopting Eurocentric ideas about animal oppression, Black oppression, and more. If you do talk about race as a person of color, or if you create your own project, your citizenship to the animal rights space is interrogated, and you’re viewed as not belonging, and being inhospitable as a guest to their white space. You’re basically told to “go back from where you came from,” which were these, like, weird, Brown, anti-racist spaces, ‘cause white people didn’t talk about race in the vegan world, right? It was, leave your race out of this, this has nothing to do with race.

Aph also talks about the hyperresentation of certain Black folks in veganism and animals rights that are held up as examples of “proper citizens” who’ve been “rehabilitated” and have “transcended race talk”. In essence, “Eurocentric post-racial veganism is being used to superficially show Black bodies in a way where Blackness isn’t even really central or discussed, but used as a tool to facilitate a violent form of diversity that serves as a sedative for Black rage.”

Racial and animal oppression

Aph talks about the documentary film, “Always in Season”, that she’s an associate producer on. This was a really emotional part of her talk, since it demonstrated how normalized lynching was not too long ago, and how Black people were (and sometimes still are) considered sub-human and animal.

As many as 15,000 people would be at one lynching. And you have to multiply that by 5,000 documented lynchings that have taken place. And like I said, those are only the documented ones. Experts say there were 2-3 times as many. And this is an image – luckily, you can’t see it too well – but in the center is a 17 year old Black boy named Jesse Washington, who is being tortured and burned in Waco, Texas in 1916. This form of terrorism was so highly organized that they even had postcards they created. […] So this is the front of a postcard, and there’s a guy right here. He was the one sending the postcard. He marked himself in it. They were not afraid to even show their faces. That’s how normalized this was. And at the back of this postcard, to his father, he wrote, “This is the barbecue we had last night.”

This film is about what Black and white people had to live with then, and what they’re living with now. Lynching was like hunting, however, no licenses were required, which meant that Black folks were always in season, which is why it’s titled that way. So I don’t think Black oppression is “like” animal oppression, I argue that it’s a part of it. If Black people are considered sub-human and animal, then what they’re experiencing is also, I argue, animal oppression. So when animal rights activists from the dominating class keep telling people like me that Black people are “centering” ourselves in an animal rights movements that’s supposed to be about animals, you have to realize that Black people intimately understand what it means to be hunted and terrorized. And as long as Black activists are making the necessary connections to animal oppression, then animal oppression will be a product of our racial liberation movements, considering racism, I argue, is also a speciesist thing.

Aph and her sister Syl have argued for an epistemological revolution (see Why Animal Liberation Requires an Epistemological Revolution). Instead of viewing oppressions as manifesting independently and then connecting with other oppressions in the similarity of their material violations, we need to realize that the root of all oppression is due to citizenship in the territory of “sub-human” or “other” that is inferior to the dominant class (“glorified white humans”).

Afrofuturism and imagining freedom

Part of the power that the dominant society has is being able to take away your imagination such that the way the world is given to you is the only way it can ever be, and the only movement you can ever really do in that system is to get more comfortable. The way white supremacist patriarchy has defined us is seemingly all we can ever be as minorities.

When the system steals your imagination, they have arrested your future. Most of us are so caught up in the fight today, especially in intersectional circles, we’re so caught up in the fight and the language of oppression that we’ve kind of forgotten that this fight is supposed to be temporary. We cannot start building homes in our trenches. We are only here temporarily. Eventually, the goal is, we want to climb out and build a new landscape, because, remember, that’s the goal. It’s not just to stay in the fight just to fight, but it’s to get out and find a space that’s revolutionary.

Aph introduces Afrofuturism as a path forward from becoming a decolonized being to shaping society after liberation has been achieved.

Liberation isn’t the end, it is merely the outcome of revolution. However, we can’t forget to start planning for the day after our liberation comes, because that’s the day when we have to build a new system, and a new society, and we have to start working on that blueprint today. And the day after liberation is the day that we’re most vulnerable, so we need to create some conceptual architecture for tomorrow.

Moving from the geocentric to the heliocentric model

So in a lot of our movements today – even our intersectional movement – we assume that white people are at the center of our solar system, and we orbit them. And so this has produced, in my opinion, a "Dear white people,” type of activism – and that’s a film – where the only way minorities can get any rights or anything done is through white people. And in order for liberation, we have to educate them. This is even why people say “women and people of color”. Where does that leave me? “Women and people of color.” Even in intersectional movements, we say this because these are descriptors for bodies that are not white men. So this is again: they are at the center of our universe. And I’m arguing that we need to move to a model that’s similar to the heliocentric model, which says that we do not orbit whiteness. White supremacy orbits us, and inferior beings, in order to exist, grow, and thrive. There is no white supremacy if there is no anti-Blackness. Just as the earth needs the sun’s light to thrive and grow, systems of oppression need sub-humans in order to feel superior.

I know many in the room would call that intersectional. I’m calling that an Afrofuturistic politic. And what’s interesting about the heliocentric model, again, is that the sun is a conglomeration of all beings that are labeled inferior, sub-human, and animal. And my sister Syl […] says, “Racism, sexism, ableism, speciesism, classism, and so on… These are real phenomena, of course, but as philosopher Sylvia Wynter warned, we should avoid mistaking the 'maps’ for the 'territory’. The territory is the massive domain of Others, whose scope can only be grasped when we dig deeper to go beyond the constraints of the specific -isms and see ourselves as – following Frantz Fanon’s words – damned beings by virtue of lacking of full 'human’ status.” And that’s what connects a lot of us who are labeled oppressed: in addition to non-human animals, we’re viewed as sub-human.

Aph explores the reimagination of citizenship within an Afrofuturistic framework for everyone labeled inferior. With this framework, racial liberation movements will tackle animal oppression – those with citizenship in the same domain of Others, with their intimate knowledge of what it means to be sub-human, will be the authors of change, creating new conceptual architectures for the future.

The power of Afrofuturism is that it’s model-less. There is no model. It’s ambiguous. And its power lies in that ambiguity because there are no structures, there are no leaders, there are no hierarchies, which I would argue are the foundational elements for systems of oppression. It’s about reimagining your citizenship beyond white supremacy and patriarchy.

Animal Liberation: Devastate to Liberate, or Devastatingly Liberal? by Anonymous
By liberating ourselves, from the oppressive chains of causes, identities and ideology of group politics, we may stop walking round towns looking for animal abuse and instead aim for how to rid ourselves of the behaviour which currently reproduces the state and class divided society in our own activity.

27. Of course the idea of a cruelty free product is a carefully crafted illusion. No such thing can exist — all commodities are cruel. Every single thing that can be bought, every service, every item of food, every household good, every house, road or car has been produced with the forced slavery of working class people. The predominance of middle class people who make up the animal rights movement ignore this because they tend not to have to suffer half as much in society themselves. Even if you were only interested in cruelty in regard to animals (a trait with a perplexing popularity amongst the human members of the animal rights movement), how could you avoid using animal in rubber, glues or on photographic film? This isn’t mentioned to make anyone feel bad about taking photos or whatever but merely to show that the notion of being a “true vegan” in this society is an impossible goal. We didn’t choose for it to be that way, we don’t use such things deliberately for that reason — under this economic system we simply have no control over such a thing.

55. It tends to go without saying but there is every reason to combat hierarchy when it rears its ugly head because hierarchy is precisely the trait which keeps humans in a dominating position over animals. The concept of speciesism, like racism and sexism, is nothing other than a specific application of authoritative power. If it were approached as such then perhaps, perhaps, the animal rights movement wouldn’t be so full of the liberal / fascist nonsense it is today.

62. As soon as any movement around a specific cause develops committees, officers, group contacts etc, it starts to develop a division of status and its campaigners begin to behave like governments. As long as the issue is seen to be animal rights then hierarchical tendencies will crop up and be tolerated. As long as individuals refuse to think about what exactly hierarchy is, and recognise that hierarchy is the crucial king-pin holding all of us, and animals into the roles of the oppressed, then the well-meaning efforts of libertarian liberationists will continually be in vain.

This was something that I came across at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair a few weeks ago, and I think it speaks a lot to the animal rights movement and social movements in general that this anonymous author’s critique of animal rights in England in the early 1990s is basically the same problem of citizenship politics that Aph critiques in her talk in 2016: “It’s all about where you fit in. Who’s doing it right, who’s doing it wrong, whether you’re an abolitionist or a welfarist, whether you’re intersectional or decolonial. It becomes less about the actual oppression, and more about power. Who is right, and who is wrong? Who belongs, and who doesn’t?”

Our movements reproduce the same power structures that underly the oppression that we’re fighting because we’re operating under the same Eurocentric, capitalist models. Recognizing that the human/animal divide – that hierarchy and power gradients – is the linchpin of oppression is the first step in imagining a future for ourselves.

~Land of hope and glory documentary

~Dominion documentary

~From Dr Joy

~Viva, a fab UK charity which has loads of info

~ This book out herewhich is free to download which I would highly recommend to everyone.

~From Earthling ed

~ Dear leftists critiques of veganism

~Veganism as left praxis

~The left and speciesism

~ Testimonies from many former “humane” farmers here

Purplewashing | Decolonize Palestine

Purplewashing refers to when a state or organization appeal to women’s rights and feminism in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.

radfemblack:

radfemblack:

radfemblack:

radfemblack:

radfemblack:

radfemblack:

radfemblack:

radfemblack:

Purplewashing | Decolonize Palestine

Purplewashing refers to when a state or organization appeal to women’s rights and feminism in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.

Much to the dismay of colonizers everywhere, it was once much easier to justify colonialism. The language surrounding it used to be rather straightforward; we deserve these lands and resources because we are more advanced; because God wanted it this way; because you are savages. Israel, as a settler-colony, was no exception to this line of reasoning; the sentiments of the founders of Zionism, and later of the State of Israel, are well documented regarding the native Palestinians, who they deemed as being “backwards” and not as deserving of the land as they were [You can read more about this here].

It is now a faux pas to say any of this quite so bluntly, even as (neo)colonialism prevails. Today, it is more fashionable to justify the theft of lands and resources under the guise of being protectors of human rights, unlike the enemies they seek to dominate.

It is within this context that Israel is rebranding itself. One facet of this propaganda is now centered on its supposed deep concern for the rights and freedoms of women, even Palestinian ones. This has come to be known as purplewashing, which consists of:

“political and marketing strategies that [indicate] a supposed commitment to gender equality. It often refers to the image-cleaning of western countries, which have not achieved genuine equality between men and women but criticise inequalities in other countries or cultures, often where there is a Muslim majority.”

These strategies constitute representing Muslim women -which Palestinian women are largely coded as despite the existence of non-Muslim Palestinians- as uniquely abused in order to create the narrative that feminism only exists on the side of the West. This is part of an ideological framework referred to by scholars as colonial feminism, whereby women’s rights are appropriated in the service of empire; in the context of Palestine, this rhetoric is also known as gendered Orientalism. The Palestinian Arab/Muslim is framed as an “other”, who is culturally or even genetically predisposed to misogyny. Naturally, this is juxtaposed with the framing of a liberal, enlightened, Israeli Westerner. Ultimately to Israel, this facade of feminism is a way to improve its image, and incorporate women into its violent, colonial, racist systems and institutions, as well as a way to paint Palestinians as unworthy of statehood or even humanity. The fact that these systems subjugate other -usually Palestinian- women is hardly mentioned.

Death and destruction, but feminist

Much of Zionists’ attempts to market Israel as feminist revolves around the Israeli army. The Israeli army’s official social media accounts and those at pro-Israel groups such as the LawfareProject,hail the Israeli army as “one of the only armies in the Western world in which women are drafted to military service by law”. They praise women’s participation in the ethnic cleansing campaigns and massacres of the 1948 Nakba, and cheer on the increasing role of women in combat positions.

Hannah MacLeod, women’s officer for Australian Young Labor praised women’s participation in the Israeli army as “empowering” and pushed for Australia to encourage this participation. There is a “Hot Israeli Army Girls” Instagram account and Maxim magazine’s infamous “Women of Israel Defence Forces”, was deemed so crucial to Israel’s international reputation that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs threw a party celebrating its publication. One of the more recent and successful additions to the purplewashing of Israel has been Gal Gadot starring as Wonder Woman. Gadot, being a former IDF soldier herself, posted support for the Israeli military as it murdered thousands of Palestinians in its 2014 assault on Gaza, and helped spread the racist and baseless idea that Palestinians use their children and women as human shields. Nonetheless, none of this has stood in the way of trying to frame her as an icon of empowerment for women everywhere.

All of these efforts are meant to sell the idea of Israel being a liberal haven. That sexual assault is rampant in the Israeli army does not make the glossy brochures and social media posts; instead, they are all designed to convey the idea that this objectification in service of a settler-colonial fantasy is the height of female empowerment, an empowerment that Palestinian and other Arab and Muslim women can only aspire to.

This purplewashing of a colonial military, which in addition to subjugating the native population, is also one of the largest exporters of drones globally and has supplied weapons to some of the most repressive, racist regimes in modern history, including Apartheid South Africa. Such a military is anathema to the framework of intersectionality which undergirds a feminism that seeks to dismantle patriarchy and end violence against all women.

Intersectionality as threat

The body of theory on intersectionality in feminist movements, created by and largely expanded on by Black feminist writers, compellingly posits that challenging one aspect of structural power alone such as patriarchy, while leaving white supremacy unscathed, only empowers white, upper-class and otherwise privileged women at the expense of all other women. This understanding that feminism must be about ending not only patriarchy but racism and other oppressive systems has led to acts of global solidarity with Palestine, such as from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, notably regarding the partnership between the Israeli military and American police departments.

Zionists’ reaction to this solidarity has frankly been nothing short of unhinged, often attacking the concept of intersectionality as a whole. Monica Osborne from the Jewish Journal declared intersectionality “an even more sinister threat than the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state”, and Sharon Nazarian, a senior vice president for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in her article for the Forward used a series of myths and half-baked talking points to declare that of course Zionism and feminism are compatible, and expressed her dismay at how “anti-Zionism is becoming increasingly visible in intersectional discourse”.

A purple-tinted view of history

Smearing intersectionality and solidarity efforts is becoming increasingly unpopular, and so instead there has been a push to purplewash Israel’s history instead. These efforts start with its history, especially in regards to its 4th Prime Minister Golda Meir. Zionists gush over Meir as “an icon—feminist and otherwise—of the 20th century.” The titles of one of her more well-known biographies simultaneously declared her as the “iron lady of the Middle East” and the “first woman prime minister in the West”. This is indicative of Zionist attempts to reap the benefits of Israel being considered a Western country even as they work to portray Israel as indigenous to the Middle East.

To Palestinian women, however, she was no more empowering than the male Zionist figures who sought and seek to erase our very existence; she once infamously declared that because Palestinians did not have a state or ascribe to modern-day conceptions of nationalism, they were not really ethnically cleansed:

“It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” [You can read more about this here].

These efforts to purplewash Meir are made even more ridiculous by the fact that she did not even consider herself a feminist, as biographer Elinor Burkett stated, “American feminists loved to adopt Golda, but she was not interested…she ignored gender prejudices…she didn’t think of her [premiership] as an achievement for women. She thought of it as an achievement for Golda.”

In the present day, Zionist groups like Hadassah and the Zioness coalition are increasingly attempting to present themselves as feminist, indicative of a concern amongst Israeli hasbarists that Zionism needs to be rebranded in a more social justice inclined era. This is reflected in Hadassah’s online speaker series, “Defining Zionism in the 21st Century” including a “Zionism for Millennials” segment led by speaker Chloe Valdery, an evangelical Zionist and secretary of the Zioness coalition. Recently, Zioness has been revealed to be an astroturfinggroupco-founded by Amanda Berman, a Lawfare project executive. Zioness also stirred controversy for attempting to insert itself and its purplewashing agenda into Chicago’s Dyke March and Slutwalk Chicago’s annual protest. Understandably, these efforts were rejected by the radical organizers behind the protest, with Slutwalk Chicago’s statement explaining that they were adamantly opposed to Zioness centering its politic “over the fight for equality and against patriarchy”; they continued:

“We find it disgusting that any group would appropriate a day dedicated to survivors fighting rape culture in order to promote their own nationalist agenda.” They later added that “we fight for equality for everyone which means we stand with Jewish AND Palestinian people, while taking a firmly anti-state, anti-imperialist position that necessarily includes Israel.”

The fixation on Palestinian women

Zionists’ purplewashing their nationalist agenda also often takes the form of a contrived concern for Palestinian women, even while erasing the identities of the Palestinian women living within the green line as “Israeli Arabs”, in an effort to depict Israeli society as ‘multi-cultural’ and tolerant [You can read more about this here].Native informant Yoseph Haddad, whose entire career revolves around being a bankrolled “Israeli Arab” mouthpiece for the Israeli government, posted a graphic titled “Israeli-Arab Women: Breaking the Glass Ceiling”. Per the accompanying caption on Facebook, Haddad presented individual Palestinian women having roles as professors, police officers, or even winning a singing competition as proof refuting the existence of Israeli Apartheid. Haddad also wrote that “While women face systemic discrimination and oppression all over the Middle East, in Israel Arab women can be anything they want to be”. Besides the insulting notion that individual members of an oppressed group having certain jobs or positions precludes the existence of systemic racism, the implied message is clear: Palestinian women living under Israeli rule are “better off” than they would be under Palestinian rule.

Thus, Palestinian women are depicted as in need of saving from Palestinian men. NGO Monitor, an anti-Palestinian group with close ties to the Israeli government and settler movement, specializing in smearing Palestinian human rights organizations as ‘terrorist’ groups, published a special report titled “The Exploitation of Palestinian Women’s Rights NGOs” which scolded Palestinian feminist activists and organizations for “focusing on Israel as the cause of gender inequality, while not paying adequate attention to internal, systemic practices within Palestinian society that are discriminatory against women”.

In a 2017 Daily Beast article, liberal Zionist wonderboy Peter Beinart accused leftists of overlooking Hamas’s misogyny and paternalistically fretted over what it would look like “when Palestinians more fully govern themselves”. Even Beinart’s more conservative Zionist counterpart Bret Stephens, whose racism against Palestinians is so unbridled that he has openly described Palestinians as “psychotic” and “seized by bloodlust”, nevertheless also positions himself as deeply concerned for Palestinian women, and similarly declared that the “so-called progressives now find themselves in sympathy with the misogynists of Hamas”. In that same article Stephens takes it a step further and declares, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the prominence of women at the Gaza Strip’s Great March of Return was orchestrated by Hamas because “Israeli soldiers might be less likely to fire on women”, conveying his worldview where Israeli soldiers value Palestinian women’s lives, unlike Palestinian men, with all the subtlety of a nuclear warhead. That the Palestinian women in question could have attended the protests of their own accord or that Palestinian men also do not deserve to be murdered at the hands of their occupiers were not even considered points worth entertaining.

Even the Israeli government’s official website has a page dedicated to “the status of women in Gaza” which cynically lists the issues Palestinian women face regarding gender-based violence and limited employment, as if issues of sexism can all neatly be reduced to Hamas’ creation a little over 30 years ago, or as if the Gaza Strip, which has become the world’s largest open-air prison, is not increasingly becoming unlivable in every meaning of the word thanks to Israel’s blockade and bombardment.

Misogyny is not better when it’s Zionist

The aforementioned fixation on Palestinian women obfuscates how dehumanized Palestinian women and Palestinian mothers in particular actually are by Zionists and throughout Israeli society. This is evident in how Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked openly called for the murder of Palestinian women because they give birth to “little snakes.” Bret Stephens similarly targeted Palestinian mothers in a particularly atrocious article, saying that unlike Western mothers who worry their child will get a bad tattoo, Palestinian mothers want their children to die fighting the occupation; he then went on to say that he has yet to meet an Israeli mother who wants to raise a murderer, because in his view state-sanctioned murder vis-a-vis military conscription or having children write messages of racist hate on missiles about to be launched into Lebanon do not count.

Stephens finally openly states that Palestinian culture is “a culture that openly celebrates murder and is not fit for statehood”, consequently, if Palestinians want a state, they should, like postwar Germany, put themselves “…through a process of moral rehabilitation” and that for Palestine, “this should start with the mothers.”

Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli military intelligence officer turned academic made public statements regarding ‘raping the wives and mothers of Palestinian combatants’ to deter ‘terrorist attacks’. These comments were defended by his university as “the bitter reality of the Middle East”. This sentiment is widespread throughout Israeli society, as the eminent scholar Rabab Abdulhadi noted in her incredibly valuable article for Feminist Studies; Israel’s bloody 2014 assault on Gaza was gleefully supported with Israeli social media posts that included a sexualized image of a hijabi women with calls on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to rape her. Furthermore, public banners sponsored by an Israeli city’s city council told Israeli soldiers to ‘pound their mothers and come home to your own mothers!’, and a popular t-shirt design amongst Israeli men who served in the army depicted a bullseye pointing at a pregnant Palestinian niqab-wearing woman with the caption “one shot, two kills.”

Palestinian women are targeted for these kinds of racist and misogynistic attacks because Israel is an ethnocracy, which aims to cement the domination of a certain ethnic group on all spheres of society, a crucial aspect of which is demography. Within this framework, Palestinians are viewed as “demographic threats”[You can read more about this here]. This obsession with demographics necessarily manifests itself, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has written, in racist and gendered policies to “contain and reduce the Palestinian population” through assaults on Palestinian daily and domestic life, extending to the often fatal denial of essential treatment to pregnant women, as evidenced by two UNHCR reports of checkpoints delaying pregnant Palestinian women’s access to healthcare. These reports state that 68 women had forced roadside births resulting in 34 miscarriages and that inadequate medical care during pregnancy was found to be the third cause of mortality among Palestinian women of reproductive age.

The aim is to “target the literal biological reproduction of Palestinian life”; these policies have shaped, Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues, a “death zone” for Palestinians and Palestinian women especially, as part of a larger, ongoing process of dispossession congruent with settler colonial practices elsewhere. This death zone is “the space where the biological, material and cultural reproduction of Palestinian social life is put at daily and intimate risk.” According to Shalhoub-Kevorkian, this “sexual violence is central to the larger structure of colonial power, its racialized machinery of domination, and its logic of elimination. Colonialism is itself structured by the logic of sexual violence.” Attacks on Palestinian women’s lives include rape and other forms of gender-based torture in Israeli prisons, consistent with the UN’s findings that sexual violence as part of overarching violent conflict is “used as a means of inflicting terror upon the population at large” and “can also be part of a genocidal strategy”.

Furthermore, as reported by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women Dubravka Šimonović, Israeli settlers also frequently attack little girls going to school, to such an extent that some families have become too afraid to send them. While this is a case of gendered human rights abuses committed by non-State actors, it is ultimately de facto endorsed by the Israeli State through their consistent ‘failure’ to investigate or prosecute perpetrators. Šimonović also reported on the traumatizing effect of Israeli home raids and demolitions, with a woman testifying that she took to sleeping fully covered in anticipation of soldiers’ entering her bedroom during a night raid, as has become all too customary.

Solidarity, not condescension

That misogyny exists within Palestinian society is undeniable. However, the idea that Israel represents salvation from this misogyny, rather than embodying the racist and colonial structures that perpetuate it, is far more questionable. In fact, there is much evidence that weakening community structures, disruptions in law and order, economic hardship, forced migration and over-crowded living conditions in refugee/displacement camps, all of which Palestinians have experienced as a result of Israeli violence, are all factors that increase the risk of sexual and gender-based violence, especially against women and girls. Furthermore, the bureaucratic colonial fragmentation of Palestine into different areas of control, especially the division of the West Bank into areas A, B, and C and the divide between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is actually an obstacle to preventing this violence or holding its perpetrators accountable [You can read more about this here].

Palestinian feminist scholars and organizers have been studying and resisting Israel’s violent practices against all Palestinians, and its gendered practices against Palestinian women in particular. As a result, we recognize that true liberation for Palestinian women is impossible with anything short of the liberation of all Palestinians from Israeli settler colonialism. As Palestinian feminists, human rights activists and representatives of women organizations declared in a statement of support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement:

“The struggle of Palestinian feminists [is] as marginalized women who are deprived of equal rights and as part of an indigenous people suffering under a regime of occupation and apartheid. We cannot accept the backseat reserved for an obedient minority that must be filled in conferences or statements issued by Israeli groups. We are struggling for our rights, all of our rights, national, social and otherwise, and against all oppression.”

Palestinian women reject all purplewashing attempts to minimize Israeli violence against us and all Palestinians, which only seeks to bolster Israel’s image at the expense of Palestinians’ rights. Palestinian women in the struggle are aware that they are fighting for the rights and human dignity of all, and that “feminism that doesn’t have an understanding of how it intersects with racial and ethnic oppression is simply a diversification of white supremacy.” We hope you will join us in working for the liberation of all Palestinians; and that the next time you see an pro-Israel organization brazenly attempt to use the feminist movement to cover for colonialism, you can see that purple really isn’t Israel’s color.

Further reading

• Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera. Militarization and violence against women in conflict zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian case-study. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera et al. Sexual Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism. Jadaliyya. November 17th, 2014. [Link]
• Farris, Sara R. In the name of women’s rights: The rise of femonationalism. Duke University Press, 2017.
• Jad, Islah. Palestinian Women’s Activism: Nationalism, Secularism, Islamism. Syracuse University Press, 2018.
• Abdulhadi, Rabab. “Israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence.” Feminist Studies 45.2-3, 2019: 541-573.
• Elia, Nada. “Justice is indivisible: Palestine as a feminist issue.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 6.1, 2017.
• Sharoni, Simona, et al. “Transnational Feminist Solidarity in Times of Crisis: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement and Justice in/for Palestine.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 17.4, 2015: 654-670.
• Abdulhadi, Rabab, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, eds. Arab and Arab American feminisms: gender, violence, and belonging. Syracuse University Press, 2011.
• Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim women need saving?. Vol. 15. No. 5. Sage UK: London, England: SAGE Publications, 2015.

radfemblack:

radfemblack:

radfemblack:

radfemblack:

radfemblack:

radfemblack:

radfemblack:

Purplewashing | Decolonize Palestine

Purplewashing refers to when a state or organization appeal to women’s rights and feminism in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices.

Much to the dismay of colonizers everywhere, it was once much easier to justify colonialism. The language surrounding it used to be rather straightforward; we deserve these lands and resources because we are more advanced; because God wanted it this way; because you are savages. Israel, as a settler-colony, was no exception to this line of reasoning; the sentiments of the founders of Zionism, and later of the State of Israel, are well documented regarding the native Palestinians, who they deemed as being “backwards” and not as deserving of the land as they were [You can read more about this here].

It is now a faux pas to say any of this quite so bluntly, even as (neo)colonialism prevails. Today, it is more fashionable to justify the theft of lands and resources under the guise of being protectors of human rights, unlike the enemies they seek to dominate.

It is within this context that Israel is rebranding itself. One facet of this propaganda is now centered on its supposed deep concern for the rights and freedoms of women, even Palestinian ones. This has come to be known as purplewashing, which consists of:

“political and marketing strategies that [indicate] a supposed commitment to gender equality. It often refers to the image-cleaning of western countries, which have not achieved genuine equality between men and women but criticise inequalities in other countries or cultures, often where there is a Muslim majority.”

These strategies constitute representing Muslim women -which Palestinian women are largely coded as despite the existence of non-Muslim Palestinians- as uniquely abused in order to create the narrative that feminism only exists on the side of the West. This is part of an ideological framework referred to by scholars as colonial feminism, whereby women’s rights are appropriated in the service of empire; in the context of Palestine, this rhetoric is also known as gendered Orientalism. The Palestinian Arab/Muslim is framed as an “other”, who is culturally or even genetically predisposed to misogyny. Naturally, this is juxtaposed with the framing of a liberal, enlightened, Israeli Westerner. Ultimately to Israel, this facade of feminism is a way to improve its image, and incorporate women into its violent, colonial, racist systems and institutions, as well as a way to paint Palestinians as unworthy of statehood or even humanity. The fact that these systems subjugate other -usually Palestinian- women is hardly mentioned.

Death and destruction, but feminist

Much of Zionists’ attempts to market Israel as feminist revolves around the Israeli army. The Israeli army’s official social media accounts and those at pro-Israel groups such as the LawfareProject,hail the Israeli army as “one of the only armies in the Western world in which women are drafted to military service by law”. They praise women’s participation in the ethnic cleansing campaigns and massacres of the 1948 Nakba, and cheer on the increasing role of women in combat positions.

Hannah MacLeod, women’s officer for Australian Young Labor praised women’s participation in the Israeli army as “empowering” and pushed for Australia to encourage this participation. There is a “Hot Israeli Army Girls” Instagram account and Maxim magazine’s infamous “Women of Israel Defence Forces”, was deemed so crucial to Israel’s international reputation that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs threw a party celebrating its publication. One of the more recent and successful additions to the purplewashing of Israel has been Gal Gadot starring as Wonder Woman. Gadot, being a former IDF soldier herself, posted support for the Israeli military as it murdered thousands of Palestinians in its 2014 assault on Gaza, and helped spread the racist and baseless idea that Palestinians use their children and women as human shields. Nonetheless, none of this has stood in the way of trying to frame her as an icon of empowerment for women everywhere.

All of these efforts are meant to sell the idea of Israel being a liberal haven. That sexual assault is rampant in the Israeli army does not make the glossy brochures and social media posts; instead, they are all designed to convey the idea that this objectification in service of a settler-colonial fantasy is the height of female empowerment, an empowerment that Palestinian and other Arab and Muslim women can only aspire to.

This purplewashing of a colonial military, which in addition to subjugating the native population, is also one of the largest exporters of drones globally and has supplied weapons to some of the most repressive, racist regimes in modern history, including Apartheid South Africa. Such a military is anathema to the framework of intersectionality which undergirds a feminism that seeks to dismantle patriarchy and end violence against all women.

Intersectionality as threat

The body of theory on intersectionality in feminist movements, created by and largely expanded on by Black feminist writers, compellingly posits that challenging one aspect of structural power alone such as patriarchy, while leaving white supremacy unscathed, only empowers white, upper-class and otherwise privileged women at the expense of all other women. This understanding that feminism must be about ending not only patriarchy but racism and other oppressive systems has led to acts of global solidarity with Palestine, such as from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, notably regarding the partnership between the Israeli military and American police departments.

Zionists’ reaction to this solidarity has frankly been nothing short of unhinged, often attacking the concept of intersectionality as a whole. Monica Osborne from the Jewish Journal declared intersectionality “an even more sinister threat than the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state”, and Sharon Nazarian, a senior vice president for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in her article for the Forward used a series of myths and half-baked talking points to declare that of course Zionism and feminism are compatible, and expressed her dismay at how “anti-Zionism is becoming increasingly visible in intersectional discourse”.

A purple-tinted view of history

Smearing intersectionality and solidarity efforts is becoming increasingly unpopular, and so instead there has been a push to purplewash Israel’s history instead. These efforts start with its history, especially in regards to its 4th Prime Minister Golda Meir. Zionists gush over Meir as “an icon—feminist and otherwise—of the 20th century.” The titles of one of her more well-known biographies simultaneously declared her as the “iron lady of the Middle East” and the “first woman prime minister in the West”. This is indicative of Zionist attempts to reap the benefits of Israel being considered a Western country even as they work to portray Israel as indigenous to the Middle East.

To Palestinian women, however, she was no more empowering than the male Zionist figures who sought and seek to erase our very existence; she once infamously declared that because Palestinians did not have a state or ascribe to modern-day conceptions of nationalism, they were not really ethnically cleansed:

“It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” [You can read more about this here].

These efforts to purplewash Meir are made even more ridiculous by the fact that she did not even consider herself a feminist, as biographer Elinor Burkett stated, “American feminists loved to adopt Golda, but she was not interested…she ignored gender prejudices…she didn’t think of her [premiership] as an achievement for women. She thought of it as an achievement for Golda.”

In the present day, Zionist groups like Hadassah and the Zioness coalition are increasingly attempting to present themselves as feminist, indicative of a concern amongst Israeli hasbarists that Zionism needs to be rebranded in a more social justice inclined era. This is reflected in Hadassah’s online speaker series, “Defining Zionism in the 21st Century” including a “Zionism for Millennials” segment led by speaker Chloe Valdery, an evangelical Zionist and secretary of the Zioness coalition. Recently, Zioness has been revealed to be an astroturfinggroupco-founded by Amanda Berman, a Lawfare project executive. Zioness also stirred controversy for attempting to insert itself and its purplewashing agenda into Chicago’s Dyke March and Slutwalk Chicago’s annual protest. Understandably, these efforts were rejected by the radical organizers behind the protest, with Slutwalk Chicago’s statement explaining that they were adamantly opposed to Zioness centering its politic “over the fight for equality and against patriarchy”; they continued:

“We find it disgusting that any group would appropriate a day dedicated to survivors fighting rape culture in order to promote their own nationalist agenda.” They later added that “we fight for equality for everyone which means we stand with Jewish AND Palestinian people, while taking a firmly anti-state, anti-imperialist position that necessarily includes Israel.”

The fixation on Palestinian women

Zionists’ purplewashing their nationalist agenda also often takes the form of a contrived concern for Palestinian women, even while erasing the identities of the Palestinian women living within the green line as “Israeli Arabs”, in an effort to depict Israeli society as ‘multi-cultural’ and tolerant [You can read more about this here].Native informant Yoseph Haddad, whose entire career revolves around being a bankrolled “Israeli Arab” mouthpiece for the Israeli government, posted a graphic titled “Israeli-Arab Women: Breaking the Glass Ceiling”. Per the accompanying caption on Facebook, Haddad presented individual Palestinian women having roles as professors, police officers, or even winning a singing competition as proof refuting the existence of Israeli Apartheid. Haddad also wrote that “While women face systemic discrimination and oppression all over the Middle East, in Israel Arab women can be anything they want to be”. Besides the insulting notion that individual members of an oppressed group having certain jobs or positions precludes the existence of systemic racism, the implied message is clear: Palestinian women living under Israeli rule are “better off” than they would be under Palestinian rule.

Thus, Palestinian women are depicted as in need of saving from Palestinian men. NGO Monitor, an anti-Palestinian group with close ties to the Israeli government and settler movement, specializing in smearing Palestinian human rights organizations as ‘terrorist’ groups, published a special report titled “The Exploitation of Palestinian Women’s Rights NGOs” which scolded Palestinian feminist activists and organizations for “focusing on Israel as the cause of gender inequality, while not paying adequate attention to internal, systemic practices within Palestinian society that are discriminatory against women”.

In a 2017 Daily Beast article, liberal Zionist wonderboy Peter Beinart accused leftists of overlooking Hamas’s misogyny and paternalistically fretted over what it would look like “when Palestinians more fully govern themselves”. Even Beinart’s more conservative Zionist counterpart Bret Stephens, whose racism against Palestinians is so unbridled that he has openly described Palestinians as “psychotic” and “seized by bloodlust”, nevertheless also positions himself as deeply concerned for Palestinian women, and similarly declared that the “so-called progressives now find themselves in sympathy with the misogynists of Hamas”. In that same article Stephens takes it a step further and declares, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the prominence of women at the Gaza Strip’s Great March of Return was orchestrated by Hamas because “Israeli soldiers might be less likely to fire on women”, conveying his worldview where Israeli soldiers value Palestinian women’s lives, unlike Palestinian men, with all the subtlety of a nuclear warhead. That the Palestinian women in question could have attended the protests of their own accord or that Palestinian men also do not deserve to be murdered at the hands of their occupiers were not even considered points worth entertaining.

Even the Israeli government’s official website has a page dedicated to “the status of women in Gaza” which cynically lists the issues Palestinian women face regarding gender-based violence and limited employment, as if issues of sexism can all neatly be reduced to Hamas’ creation a little over 30 years ago, or as if the Gaza Strip, which has become the world’s largest open-air prison, is not increasingly becoming unlivable in every meaning of the word thanks to Israel’s blockade and bombardment.

Misogyny is not better when it’s Zionist

The aforementioned fixation on Palestinian women obfuscates how dehumanized Palestinian women and Palestinian mothers in particular actually are by Zionists and throughout Israeli society. This is evident in how Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked openly called for the murder of Palestinian women because they give birth to “little snakes.” Bret Stephens similarly targeted Palestinian mothers in a particularly atrocious article, saying that unlike Western mothers who worry their child will get a bad tattoo, Palestinian mothers want their children to die fighting the occupation; he then went on to say that he has yet to meet an Israeli mother who wants to raise a murderer, because in his view state-sanctioned murder vis-a-vis military conscription or having children write messages of racist hate on missiles about to be launched into Lebanon do not count.

Stephens finally openly states that Palestinian culture is “a culture that openly celebrates murder and is not fit for statehood”, consequently, if Palestinians want a state, they should, like postwar Germany, put themselves “…through a process of moral rehabilitation” and that for Palestine, “this should start with the mothers.”

Mordechai Kedar, an Israeli military intelligence officer turned academic made public statements regarding ‘raping the wives and mothers of Palestinian combatants’ to deter ‘terrorist attacks’. These comments were defended by his university as “the bitter reality of the Middle East”. This sentiment is widespread throughout Israeli society, as the eminent scholar Rabab Abdulhadi noted in her incredibly valuable article for Feminist Studies; Israel’s bloody 2014 assault on Gaza was gleefully supported with Israeli social media posts that included a sexualized image of a hijabi women with calls on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to rape her. Furthermore, public banners sponsored by an Israeli city’s city council told Israeli soldiers to ‘pound their mothers and come home to your own mothers!’, and a popular t-shirt design amongst Israeli men who served in the army depicted a bullseye pointing at a pregnant Palestinian niqab-wearing woman with the caption “one shot, two kills.”

Palestinian women are targeted for these kinds of racist and misogynistic attacks because Israel is an ethnocracy, which aims to cement the domination of a certain ethnic group on all spheres of society, a crucial aspect of which is demography. Within this framework, Palestinians are viewed as “demographic threats”[You can read more about this here]. This obsession with demographics necessarily manifests itself, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has written, in racist and gendered policies to “contain and reduce the Palestinian population” through assaults on Palestinian daily and domestic life, extending to the often fatal denial of essential treatment to pregnant women, as evidenced by two UNHCR reports of checkpoints delaying pregnant Palestinian women’s access to healthcare. These reports state that 68 women had forced roadside births resulting in 34 miscarriages and that inadequate medical care during pregnancy was found to be the third cause of mortality among Palestinian women of reproductive age.

The aim is to “target the literal biological reproduction of Palestinian life”; these policies have shaped, Shalhoub-Kevorkian argues, a “death zone” for Palestinians and Palestinian women especially, as part of a larger, ongoing process of dispossession congruent with settler colonial practices elsewhere. This death zone is “the space where the biological, material and cultural reproduction of Palestinian social life is put at daily and intimate risk.” According to Shalhoub-Kevorkian, this “sexual violence is central to the larger structure of colonial power, its racialized machinery of domination, and its logic of elimination. Colonialism is itself structured by the logic of sexual violence.” Attacks on Palestinian women’s lives include rape and other forms of gender-based torture in Israeli prisons, consistent with the UN’s findings that sexual violence as part of overarching violent conflict is “used as a means of inflicting terror upon the population at large” and “can also be part of a genocidal strategy”.

Furthermore, as reported by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women Dubravka Šimonović, Israeli settlers also frequently attack little girls going to school, to such an extent that some families have become too afraid to send them. While this is a case of gendered human rights abuses committed by non-State actors, it is ultimately de facto endorsed by the Israeli State through their consistent ‘failure’ to investigate or prosecute perpetrators. Šimonović also reported on the traumatizing effect of Israeli home raids and demolitions, with a woman testifying that she took to sleeping fully covered in anticipation of soldiers’ entering her bedroom during a night raid, as has become all too customary.

Solidarity, not condescension

That misogyny exists within Palestinian society is undeniable. However, the idea that Israel represents salvation from this misogyny, rather than embodying the racist and colonial structures that perpetuate it, is far more questionable. In fact, there is much evidence that weakening community structures, disruptions in law and order, economic hardship, forced migration and over-crowded living conditions in refugee/displacement camps, all of which Palestinians have experienced as a result of Israeli violence, are all factors that increase the risk of sexual and gender-based violence, especially against women and girls. Furthermore, the bureaucratic colonial fragmentation of Palestine into different areas of control, especially the division of the West Bank into areas A, B, and C and the divide between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is actually an obstacle to preventing this violence or holding its perpetrators accountable [You can read more about this here].

Palestinian feminist scholars and organizers have been studying and resisting Israel’s violent practices against all Palestinians, and its gendered practices against Palestinian women in particular. As a result, we recognize that true liberation for Palestinian women is impossible with anything short of the liberation of all Palestinians from Israeli settler colonialism. As Palestinian feminists, human rights activists and representatives of women organizations declared in a statement of support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement:

“The struggle of Palestinian feminists [is] as marginalized women who are deprived of equal rights and as part of an indigenous people suffering under a regime of occupation and apartheid. We cannot accept the backseat reserved for an obedient minority that must be filled in conferences or statements issued by Israeli groups. We are struggling for our rights, all of our rights, national, social and otherwise, and against all oppression.”

Palestinian women reject all purplewashing attempts to minimize Israeli violence against us and all Palestinians, which only seeks to bolster Israel’s image at the expense of Palestinians’ rights. Palestinian women in the struggle are aware that they are fighting for the rights and human dignity of all, and that “feminism that doesn’t have an understanding of how it intersects with racial and ethnic oppression is simply a diversification of white supremacy.” We hope you will join us in working for the liberation of all Palestinians; and that the next time you see an pro-Israel organization brazenly attempt to use the feminist movement to cover for colonialism, you can see that purple really isn’t Israel’s color.

exclusive-cowboy:

positivityisntdiscourse:

Making it increasingly hard for trans and non-straight aspec people to get access to resources and aid for their aspec-specific issues in safe spaces does nothelp them.

By fighting to exclude ace/aro people y’all have only made it more difficult for us “lgbt aces/aros” to actually have easy access to aspec resources in LGBTQ+ safe spaces. Most safe spaces would only provide aspec resources if aspec people were included, and the only safe spaces I’ve gone to that actually have aspec information or resources have been inclusionist spaces. No exclusionist spaces I’ve seen have actually provided any, and “why don’t you make them outside of lgbtq+ spaces” doesn’t work because I need my aspec safe spaces to be lgbtq+ safe, because I’m not straight or cis and my bi-ness and transness is incredibly intertwined with my aspec identity.

If y’all will neither: 1, believe “lgbt aces/aros” when we say some of us might actually, desperately need aspec-specific resources and aid, and 2, help us receive that aid and fight for its inclusion in LGBTQ+ spaces, then you’re not an ally to “lgbt aces/aros” and you never have been.

This has never been the case.

If you are LGBT, you will be allowed into LGBT safe spaces. Regardless if you are aro/ace.

You will not be allowed into LGBT spaces if you are

• Cis Asexual Aromantic
• Cis Asexual hetromantic
• Cis Aromantic Heterosexual
• Aka Fucking Straight.

It isnt rocket science. If you aren’t being allowed into LGBT spaces it’s probably because you are trying to make people prioritize YOU over everyone else because you are ace/aro.

Ex: making rules about not talking sex, relationships, etc.

And forcing everyone to abide by those rules or seeing them kicked from a SUPPORT group.

LGBT people who are not aro/ace like we are, do not have to create online safe spaces for us because we can make our own support groups specifically for us.

Just because you are LGBT and Aro/ace, does not mean people will exclude you. People dont fucking care. So long as you aren’t straight or a crybaby about being Aro/ace, you can always find support groups.

The Laziness of the Aro/Ace community astounds me.

“Making my own safe space doesn’t work”.

“They’re supposed to make safe spaces for us”.

Bullshit. You havent even tried.

I’m bisexual, trans and aromantic. I’ve met more biphobic and transphobic aces/aros in support groups than I have “aphobes”.

This post is not about me being allowed into LGBTQ+ spaces as a bi/trans person, this is about me having access to ace/aro specific resources in safe spaces. I can get into LGBTQ+ spaces just fine!! This isn’t about me being lazy or getting kicked out of safe spaces for being a jerk! It’s about how the resources in many LGBTQ+ spaces are not suited for the needs an aspec person might have! These resources come in the form of:

• education/information about ace/aro identities and issues
• advice, therapy, and other aid that can be specifically applied to my needs as an aspec person, not just as a trans or bi person. Being aspec changes what kind of advice and therapy I might need. I might need a different kind of sex/dating education, a different kind of therapy that’s insightful of the fact that I’m aspec and the issues I might face because of that. Dealing with aphobia and ace-specific patholoziation affects all of that. Similar to how I need trans-specific resources, I need aspec-specific resources.

This is not a situation of me being too lazy to make my own safe space!! I’m perfectly willing to provide some education and information about being aspec, I’m perfectly willing to make “online safe spaces” but “online safe spaces” are not what I’m talking about! I’m talking about physical safe spaces and LGBTQ+ organizations! I’m a minor living in a low income household in the south, I do not have the resources to make my own physical safe space anyway!

LGBTQ+ safe spaces are supposed to provide safety for intersectional identities! Which means they should have the information and resources for “lgbt aces/aros” to be able to aid us when we need it! Yet inclusionist spaces are the only ones who’ve I’ve seen do that before! Groups like the Trevor Project have provided ace resources that I can use if they need them, and yet exclusionists complain about those even though they help more than just “cishet” ace people, they help “lgbt aces” too!

And as I said, aspec resources outside of lgbtq+ safe spaces don’t help me the way resources in lgbtq+ safe spaces do, because I’m not straight or cis! I need resources that will also be attuned to my needs as an lgbtq+ person! Resources that aren’t created entirely by cis straight people! This is not about being lazy!! This is about the need for aspec resources in LGBTQ+ safe spaces! Because intersectionality exists!

And you being aromantic doesn’t mean that you have the same needs or experiences as mine. Not all aspec people need aspec resources, but they’re vital for those that do. I’m glad you haven’t experienced aphobia, but I have.

Also. Acearo people are not straight and you cannot speak for their needs or experiences.

The face of depression.

Accurate.

Please sign the petition here

Sign the Petition

Intersectionality is non negotiable.

I am proud of the work I’ve done as part of theWomen’s March policy table – a collection of women and folk engaged in crucial feminist, racial and social justice work across various intersections in our country. I helped draft the visionandI wrote the line “…and we stand in solidarity with sex workers’ rights movements.” It is not a statement that is controversial to me because as a trans woman of color who grew up in low-income communities and who advocates, resists, dreams and writes alongside these communities, I know that underground economies are essential parts of the lived realities of women and folk. I know sex work to be work. It’s not something I need to tiptoe around. It’s not a radical statement. It’s a fact. My work and my feminism rejects respectability politics, whorephobia, slut-shaming and the misconception that sex workers, or folks engaged in the sex trades by choice or circumstance, need to be saved, that they are colluding with the patriarchy by “selling their bodies.” I reject the continual erasure of sex workers from our feminisms because we continue to conflate sex work with the brutal reality of coercion and trafficking. I reject the policing within and outside women’s movements that shames, scapegoats, rejects, erases and shuns sex workers. I cannot speak to the internal conflicts at the Women’s March that have led to the erasure of the line I wrote for our collective vision but I have been assured that the line will remain in OUR document. The conflicts that may have led to its temporary editing will not leave until we, as feminists, respect THE rights of every woman and person to do what they want with their body and their lives. We will not be free until those most marginalized, most policed, most ridiculed, pushed out and judged are centered. There are no throwaway people, and I hope every sex worker who has felt shamed by this momentarily erasure shows up to their local March and holds the collective accountable to our vast, diverse, complicated realities.

Loved being interviewed for this piece! Home girl rocked it out!

My favorite quotes:

“A good ally doesn’t try to steer the narrative for trans people. They just listen. They understand that their role is to support me by hearing me first. Allyship is about how you use information and education and awareness in spaces that don’t have our bodies — spaces where they aren’t present.”

—

“If you think there’s no risk in being an ally, then maybe you aren’t doing enough. If you think it is going to be a breeze or that you can change your profile picture on Facebook and tackle what we need, that’s not it.“

—

"Being an ally is hard to talk about because it is, at the same time, both simple and complex. It’s about respecting the other person’s full humanity, but it’s also about understanding how to do that. And how to do that is really difficult because I don’t think most people have ever been fully respected in their humanity. To not know what that feels like and then have the desire to grant that to someone else is a really hard spot to be in.”

Read more.