On 'female leadership', the neoliberal co-optation of feminism, and the language that we use
Neoliberalism and 'female leaders' in Brazil and elsewhere.
Image credit: The Guardian article ‘Are female leaders more successful at managing the coronavirus crisis?’
It’s an old tactic, but it’s effective. And it’s why people who are committed to social justice and liberation must continuously interrogate their own language, claims, and advocacy.
Right-wingers, populists, neoliberal capitalists, neoconservatives, and racist, sexist, power-hoarding individuals and coalitions all continue to co-opt social justice and progressive language and symbolism today, even as that language changes. One reason why they do this is: it’s easy. Nobody has a copyright on ‘female leadership’, ‘gender equality’, ‘female empowerment’, ‘anti-corruption’, ‘for the people’ or any other kind of human-rights sounding, supposedly progressive discourse. But the other, principal, reason as to why they do this is because it’s effective.
I saw this firsthand in Rio de Janeiro after the spontaneous protests against the Worker’s Party-led government in 2013. Participating in these protests is largely what led to my decision to move to Rio in 2014; I was propelled by a sense of optimism that leftist criticism of neoliberal economic policies and the significant pressure on and loss of trust in the Worker’s Party’s direction in Brazil could lead to progressive change. Back then, Dilma Rousseff was the first female president of Brazil, hand-picked by Lula Ignacio da Silva to be his successor. When I arrived in Brazil in 2014, I saw her narrowly elected for a second term in an extremely polarized national election. A flurry of articles about her when she was first elected and then re-elected wondered if ‘gender parity democracy’ could be possible in Latin America.
Right-wing Brazilian political parties and their allies co-opted the language of ‘o povo’ (the people) by 2016, a term that the Worker’s Party used consistently. They declared themselves representative of ‘Brazilian people’, storming ‘to the streets against corruption’, when many Brazilians rallied to impeach then-president Dilma Rousseff, despite the fact that many of these pro-impeachment supporters were urban, White and upper-middle class Brazilians.
I wrote about how the campaign for Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment was based on a misogynistic media campaign and lacked actual evidence for an impeachment that would be constitutionally sound. I focused on feminists who were rallying to Rousseff’s defense, including those that had previously criticized her government and political party for their increasingly neoliberal economic policies, including austerity measures, enormous budget cuts on education and healthcare, alliances with right-wing Brazilian parties and politicians, their open sale and destruction of Indigenous Brazilian land, and much more.
Feminists weren’t rallying for Rousseff simply because she was Brazil’s first female president. Many young feminists understand that cis-heteronormative ‘female’ leadership doesn’t symbolize a feminist victory, and it isn’t even necessarily something that we are fighting for. Feminists were fighting to preserve their democracy from a parliamentary coup d’état. They created coalitions, like ‘Feministas Pela Democracia’ of different feminists collectives, organizations, and individuals in cities across Brazil, organizing demonstrations, events, online discussions, and more. This same multi-coalition, multi-ethnic, and multi-state feminist organizing muscle, which was strengthened significantly in 2015 during the ‘Primavera Feminista’, also sprung into action and led the resistance against Jair Bolsonaro’s election in 2018 with the campaign #EleNão.
Dilma Rousseff was never a declaredly feminist leader, and she also wasn’t one in practice. Yes, she was a female president, but by all means, many of her policies, and those of her predecessors, left Black, Indigenous, and poor Brazilian women for the worse. In recent years, while Brazil’s femicide rates seems to have decreased, this rate has only decreased for White Brazilian women. Murders of Black Brazilian women have increased by more than 15% from 2006-16. If Rousseff represented ‘female leadership’, she represented White Brazilian women, the upper elite of the Worker’s Party, and the mainstream left-wing economic tendency of the time, which was markedly neoliberal and continued to privatizing industries in Brazil and reduce social investment spending. In complete deadpan, Rousseff continues to speak out today about the rampant neoliberalism and neofascism in Brazil today under Bolsonaro’s government, but remains uncritical of the policies and practices during her leadership.
Meanwhile, Marielle Franco, a city councilwoman in Rio de Janeiro, was an openly feminist and bisexual Black politician from a favela. She was elected on the strength of her work at the Commission of Human Rights, and the three pillars of her election campaign: Women (with a feminist perspective), Favelas, and Black people. On March 14th, 2018, she was assassinated for her transformative proposals, commitment to accountability, investigation and transparency, and the danger she represented to powerful, rich, White Brazilian politicians in power. Her murder, and lack of accountability and justice until today, is something that profoundly shook Brazilian feminists, particularly Black Brazilian feminists, and mobilized dozens of Black feminist Brazilians to run for government - not to simply fill up municipal, state and federal governments with more women, but with more Black feminists who want justice.
Marielle Franco was an acquaintance, and someone who I had the profound privilege of having organized with, listened to and supported. Her model of leadership was never focused on her own ascent to power, and was not built on the ambition that she would maintain this power either for herself, nor for a political party. She shared power and kept herself accountable to her community. Above all, as someone who is profoundly committed to strengthening young feminist activism, I was impressed by Marielle’s commitment to young feminists in Rio de Janeiro. She showed up to everything, was always on the streets for every single protest or demonstration, coordinated a hundred different public events and conversations in every corner of the city, wanted to strengthen every single feminist space, recognized young feminists for their leadership, analysis and contributions, and recruited young feminists to work in her mandate and lead campaigns. The night that she was murdered, she had attended an event in the newly inaugurated ‘Casa das Pretas’ (House of Black Women) in Lapa, Rio de Janeiro celebrating young Black feminists.
It’s not easy to write about Marielle and this is the first time that I do so in a more personal way after she was murdered. Her murder is still psychologically wounding in a way that I can’t describe; her image now on t-shirts and murals around the world.
Both neoliberalism and neoconservadorism has significantly strengthened around the world, and women are also a part of this project. ‘Female empowerment’, ‘women’s rights’, ‘female entrepreneurs’ can and all have been co-opted into neoliberal and neoconservative projects, whether or not young women, young feminists, or older feminists know that.
When feminist discourse, language, and thinking became much more trendy and prevalent in popular culture around 4-5 years ago, people who are not actually interested in liberatory, queer, intersectional, or inclusive feminist futures began to co-opt language around ‘women’s rights’ and much more. Girl Boss feminism, anyone? What has been described as ‘mainstream’ feminism is not feminism by my books, nor by many others’. It is the co-optation of feminist language and discourse by individuals, groups, and systems that do so for their own profit, benefit, and goals - because they know that feminist values and beliefs have now been morally justified on a much larger scale.
Female representation and leadership in a system that is racist, capitalist, classist, and wrong in so many ways is not a feminist victory. ‘Gender parity’, ‘gender equality’ and ‘female empowerment’ in this system underscores the ideology that women have the same right as men to be power-hoarding leaders, billionaires, and all the rest. ‘Success’ in this system is on the base of rampant exploitation, racism, neoliberal colonization and more - this is not the feminist reality or future that we want.
Now, I am not saying that I don’t want female representation or leadership. Nor that I don’t want women to succeed. I’m saying that I want feminists, and especially feminists from the margins, to transform this world and system that we live in and organize for our collective liberation. One of my favorite young feminist journalists, Olutimehin Adegbeye, the Othering Correspondent at The Correspondent who is entirely responsible for me having subscribed to the platform, wrote about feminism from the margins for the young Nigerian website YNaija.
What Olutimehin describes as ‘mainstream feminism’ in this article sounds like White feminism to me, and in other parts it reminds me more of what neoliberal capitalism, which she refers to as heterocapitalism, has imbibed as feminism and spit out.
This sort of feminism is easily digestible, taking a reactionary and invariably reductionist approach to social injustice. ‘Equal pay for equal work’ campaigns replace anti-capitalist frameworks for eliminating impoverishment, ignoring the fact that poverty is manufactured and sustained by exploiting working class, rural and under-educated people. The pursuit of ‘gender equality’ reinforces the Eurocentric gender binary, normalising the violence of this man/woman dichotomy while making sociopathic masculine conditioning somehow aspirational. Slogans like ‘real men don’t rape’ or ‘Say no to rape’ provide individualised catharsis for ‘good’ men and wounded women. Yet, as South African feminist scholar Pumla Gqola writes, there are social and psychological structures that make sexual violence absolutely necessary in our society. Simplistic catchphrases like the above provide little room for meaningful analysis.
In promoting individual behaviour or ‘choice’ as the antidote to systemic oppression, mainstream feminism dilutes the fight to end sexism. Simultaneously, by focusing only on patriarchally-defined categories of ‘women’, it devalues and erases identities or lived experiences that don’t fit neatly into its limited scope. In this way, it contradicts itself and ends up doing the counterproductive work of enforcing patriarchy’s rules regarding who deserves to exist safely. In the final analysis, mainstream feminism doesn’t seek to end patriarchy. It seeks to adapt it to better benefit ‘deserving’ women.
Olutimehin centers queer feminism in her analysis, a feminism that is inclusive, intersectional, binary-busting, and comes from the margins. Queer feminism is transformative, much larger than the gender binary, and perhaps large enough to truly make space for the liberation that we need: “Queer feminism, including trans feminist scholarship, provides robust analyses of gender, poverty, interpersonal and state violence, bodily autonomy, sexual predation, domestic abuse, and stigma-free access to healthcare and safe housing, all of which affect people of all identities and orientations.”
Feminism from the margins can be thought of deliberating centering the lives, oppressions, joys, and leadership of those on the margins: the poor, the young, the elderly, the queer, the trans, the homeless, the sex workers, the unemployed, the individuals with disabilities, and so many more. In thinking about who are on the margins, we should think about the groups of people who have less power, hold less autonomy, and are often spoken for. I think of those on the margins as those who aren’t seen ‘fit to belong’, or ‘fit to lead’, those who aren’t deemed worthy of participation, or the hassle of enabling their participation. From the margins to the center, bell hooks wrote about how feminist theory wouldn’t be revolutionary if all experiences of oppression and joy weren’t included and on the table. Much of Olutimehin’s work and writing focuses on our similarities and differences as human beings, what causes othering and what creates belonging. She says, “Human beings are expansive, and we do a disservice to ourselves by insisting otherwise.”
As long as we continue to write *cis* women into monolithic tropes that they aren’t, and prescribe them as pre-determined feminist victories, such as ‘female leaders’ and ascertain them as being inherently better than men (another monolithic and completely homogenous group, of course), we are going to be subject to both valid and invalid attacks from right-wingers who have put gender on a cross. They are going to rail against feminism and feminist movements when it suits them, and when they have a good argument, but then also use women and social and ethnic minorities as representation and validation of their moral codes when it benefits them. And finally, they are going to continue reinforcing the gender binary, and even defend cis-women’s rights, for specific reasons and at key moments.
That’s why we are vulnerable to how these liberal-sounding catchphrases are used, and in part may not have even realized how dangerous and harmful they were to begin with, especially if we have an inclusive understanding of the term ‘women’, and don’t immediately refer to non-binary persons and trans individuals as well. That’s why a conservative woman who is running in a racist political party, on a wildly neoliberal bed of economic policies, can win her election somewhere around the world, and right-wingers and mainstream media will call it “a win for women and for women’s rights”. If you’re interested in feminism and feminist movements, and you’re still talking about ‘female empowerment’, ‘female leaders’ and women in a cisgender sense, then it’s time to think about the language that you use, the way that language is used in different contexts, and the harm that it engenders.
To quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a prison abolitionist and geography professor, “Identity is not consciousness.” And identity also doesn’t necessarily mean that you organize for collective liberation, champion feminism from the margins, and see feminist leadership as an interrogation of power, who has it, how to share it, and how to invert power structures. Let’s remember that the next time that we hear somebody talk about ‘female leaders’.
Feminist leadership and transformation is much less about saying than doing.
In reality, feminist leadership is much more nuanced and difficult to practice than simply ‘sharing power’, and some of the organizations that spout ‘feminist leadership’ every 5 minutes have the most toxic, entrenched feminist leaders who refuse to share power around. Some of the most prominent feminist thinkers in the world today aren’t perfect, and I and other young feminists are not here to roast them and demand their perfection, but we do want to see more inclusion, more investigation of privilege, less institution-building and more building from the margins. But that’s a future essay.
Here’s what I’m reading, watching & some young feminist news:
[In Spanish] Luchadoras, a young feminist-led Mexican organization started this Twitter thread that documents all of the feminist occupations of and protests at human rights commission offices across the country to create shelters for victims of gender-based violence and to demand justice and accountability that began this month. They share pictures from more than 8 states that are participating in feminist occupations… this is an undeniable moment that highlights Mexican feminist movements’ demands.
#NiUnaMenos 👊💜 #LaRevoluciónSeráFeministaONoSerá ¡Las Comisiones serán feministas! ⚠️ En solidaridad con la toma de la #CNDH en #CDMX, familiares de víctimas, activistas y compañeras solidarias, se han sumado a la exigencia de justicia. 💥 Abrimos hilo 💥Translated: #NotOneLess, #TheRevolutionWillBeFeministOrItWont. The commissions will be feminist! In solidarity with the takeovers of the National Commission of Human Rights in Mexico City (CDMX), family members of victims, activists and comrades in solidarity, have joined together to demand justice. We open this thread.
Chicas Poderosas, a regional Latin American organization strengthening feminist media activism and investigation shared this list of 6 must-know tips for investigative journalists.
Ever wonder what it’s like to be a woman of color in a nonprofit organization? This video illustrates the journey and confluence of racism and interpersonal conflict in the nonprofit sector.
Cuties is one of the best films that I’ve watched recently, and the uproar over how it was marketed on Netflix is deserved, but the White feminists and conservative men criticizing it isn’t. Perhaps we should still boycott Netflix, but for other reasons, and not because Cuties is inherently a pedophilic film. There is so little nuance and autonomy given to girls that it seems simply inconceivable to many that a young girl could be exploring her sexuality through imitating what she consumes and sees as validated around her. The film also explores how she is punished, as a young Black girl of Senegalese origin from a conservative family living in Western society. The filmmaker says that the film is feminist in how it brings to attention how girls are sexualized, but I think the film is just as feminist in showing so much nuance and depth to the young protagonist’s story.
[In Spanish] “I don’t believe in transnational feminist solidarity just like that”. Pikara magazine interviewed Ochy Curiel, an Afro-Dominican activist and academic back in 2014 and I was re-reading this interview these days. The standout part of this interview for me, translated by myself, is when Curiel says,
“I don’t believe anymore in feminist solidarity and also, neither in a transnational feminist solidarity just like that. The changes don’t come because we are all wonderful, beautiful women but because there is work done on the power relations that lay behind everything. Why is it, that hegemonically “the other [women]”, are prime material for investigations of publications of people who have privileges? This seems to be unquestionable, it is assumed, and moreover, we feel politically correct [about it], when it is a co-optation of women’s cultural and social experiences. Of course we have to create alliances as feminists, but not with all feminists, because some are complicit with patriarchy and with racism…. We are human but we are situated. This logic to think that we have to all be united in order to strengthen the movement… it’s not like this. We have realized that this supposed articulated solidarity is made possible with exploitation and subordination of other [women] at its base, and there are some who are not willing [to put up with this]. For mental health and because there isn’t enough time in life, you have to act with those who you want to act with. I believe more in affections and earned trust.”
If I hear any more monolithic tropes about Zoomers… some are ‘woke’ for sure, but others are groomed to become far-right terrorists. Unfortunately, here’s some news about the latter by HOPE Not Hate.
For the past 20 years, young people have consistently been optimistic about the future. But COVID-19 seems to have dealt a sudden blow to their belief in their own agency. Christine Huebner and Dena Arya spoke to young people aged 15-24 in the United Kingdom to talk about this new pessimism.
Chinese diaspora activism and its implications for international solidarity work. This is an extremely deep dive by scholar Mengyang Zhao. Transnational activism is still not something that is completely accepted or validated by activists who are operating within their country-of-residence, despite glowing media accounts of transnational solidarity. What is the future of transnational solidarity work in the face of growing right-wing nationalism?
The treatment of female athletes, and intersex women in particular, has a long and sordid history. This is a deep dive by Ruth Padawer for the New York Times Magazine into the history of publicly humiliating athletes by basing their eligibility to compete on their gender or (biological) sex.
I edited this excellent piece by Maya Bhardwaj for Mobilisation Lab earlier this month:
And I haven’t talked about this much yet, but I’m also a DJ and passionate about records, online radios, synthesizers, and music from the ‘80s and ‘90s. I hope that every issue of New Wave can feature some music and so for this one, here’s a set that I did for The Lot Radio earlier this month to end this unexpected newsletter, which came rushing out of me all of a sudden. But I still want to stick to a biweekly rhythm for interviews, which means: stay tuned for next week’s interview with Bárbara Paes from São Paulo.
What an incredibly edifying, nourishing read. Thank you for your ideas and for engaging so powerfully with mine.