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Bourgeois Feminist Bullshit
The Rebecca Traister view of gender and the world...
Nair, Yasmin http://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/02/bourgeois-feminist-bullshit
Publisher: Current Affairs
Date Written: 21/03/2017
Year Published: 2017
Resource Type: Article
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
All the Single Ladies and its particular version of feminism appeals to the upper middle-class feminist sensibility: It appears to empower, while in fact reaffirming power as it already exists. It flatters people into thinking that the existence of single women is revolutionary in itself, even though its whole argument is that they don’t disrupt the economy or anything else. But being single is no more revolutionary or interesting or world-changing than marrying; the point ought not to be what people are doing in their personal lives, but what changes we can bring about in their political and economic lives.
As we saw too clearly in the last election, this kind of feminism is incapable of thinking beyond the symbolic, and of creating meaningful changes in women’s lives. One cannot discuss Rebecca Traister without discussing Hillary Clinton, since Traister’s support for Clinton has been the source of much of her dispute with fellow feminists. Clinton is the exemplar of a “non-threatening” feminism, one that gets women into boardrooms (and into public office) without actually changing the underlying structure of companies or governments. The reason rich Democrats overwhelmingly favored Hillary Clinton in the primary is that Hillary Clinton offers their ideal political platform: symbolic gains for the gender, without the actual material gains that might require sacrificing some wealth.
Yet wealthy feminists like Traister, because they do not understand how women’s interests can actually conflict based on economic class, cannot understand opposition to Clinton as anything other than sexism. Thus when fifty-three percent of white women voted for Trump against the first female major-party presidential candidate, it created a puzzle for Traister.
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