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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Alison PhippsORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© The Author(s) 2021.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.
Author(s): Phipps A
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: European Journal of Cultural Studies
Year: 2021
Volume: 24
Issue: 1
Pages: 81-93
Print publication date: 01/02/2021
Online publication date: 19/01/2021
Acceptance date: 02/04/2018
Date deposited: 14/01/2022
ISSN (print): 1367-5494
ISSN (electronic): 1460-3551
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420985852
DOI: 10.1177/1367549420985852
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