Quick Search:

White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism

Phipps, Alison (2021) White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 24 (1). pp. 81-93.

[thumbnail of phipps-2021-white-tears-white-rage-victimhood-and-as-violence-in-mainstream-feminism.pdf]
Preview
Text
phipps-2021-white-tears-white-rage-victimhood-and-as-violence-in-mainstream-feminism.pdf - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.

| Preview

Abstract

Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears. This in turn depends on the dehumanisation of people of colour, who were constructed in colonial ‘race science’ as incapable of complex feeling (Schuller, 2018). Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people. Such feminisms exemplify what I call ‘political whiteness’, which centres assertions of victimhood: through these, womanhood (and personhood) is claimed to the exclusion of the enemy. Through legitimating criminal punishment and border policing and dehumanising marginalised Others, claims to victimhood in mainstream feminism often end up strengthening the intersecting violence of racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy.

Item Type: Article
Status: Published
DOI: 10.1177/1367549420985852
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
School/Department: School of Humanities
URI: https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/12623

University Staff: Request a correction | RaY Editors: Update this record