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“White women have a right to be angry about sexual violence. Survivors have a right to spaces without abusers. All survivors fantasise about revenge. But whose bodies are forfeit when white women mobilise punitive state and institutional power to achieve it? Who are the real casualties of the white feminist war machine?”

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Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“The investment of sexual trauma in the outrage economy allows the ‘good’ woman (cis, ‘respectable’, implicitly white) to be used to withhold support and resources from the ‘bad’ ones. Trans women and sex workers are pitted against more privileged women, in a politics that does not challenge how neoliberal capitalism has created massive inequalities of distribution.”

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Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“At a very basic level, anti-rape activism is about survival. Many of us are survivors trying to survive, and spectacles of mass wounding such as #MeToo evoke a gendered state of siege. Being raped often involves a visceral fear of death, whether the rape is physically violent or not – it is what makes us freeze, instead of fighting back. And if we freeze, perhaps we need our ‘kill’ after the experience is over. Unlike Arya Stark, we do not do our own killing. Instead, we ask the ‘Angry Dad’ or ‘White Knight’ of the state or institution to do it for us. And the destruction of bodily boundaries involved in criminal punishment mirrors the experience of rape.”

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Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“Instead of interrogating intersecting systems, politically white feminism roots violence either in aberrant or all male bodies. The mainstream focus on ‘bad men’, and the reactionary focus on male biology, do not account for how capitalist economic predation and misogynist sexual predation go hand in hand. They do not account for how this interplay is racialised, domestically and geopolitically.”

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Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“Sometimes, sexual violence is a ‘cultural problem’ (but only when this culture is non white). Sometimes, it is a product of male anatomy (but only when this anatomy is assigned to a trans woman or a man of colour). Sexual violence is never the violence of heteropatriarchy or globalising racial capital. Instead, representatives of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism weaponise the idea of ‘women’s safety’ against marginalised and hyper-exploited groups.”

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Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“This…exemplifies how trans-exclusionary feminism uses the experience of rape. Drawing on the radical feminist idea of the penis as a weapon, it ‘sticks’ this organ to trans women through an obsession with their surgical status. The ‘threat’ posed by the trans woman is then juxtaposed with the threatened (white) femininity of the abuse survivor. Cue outrage.”

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Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“This is mainstream sexual violence activism in a capitalist context. We ‘invest’ our trauma in networked media markets, to generate outrage and the visibility we need to further our cause. Cynical media corporations exploit this outrage, building visibility for their brands through clicks, likes and shares by encouraging audiences to consume our pain. Meanwhile the threat of damage, through widespread outrage, to the brands of exposed institutions and organisations leads to a purging of ‘bad men’ from high-profile sectors. These individuals may well move on to start all over again, while dysfunctional systems are left intact. Although this is not our intention, this seems more like NIMBYism to me than radical political action. Although this is not our intention, I’m afraid this is the ‘Me, Not You’ of political whiteness.”

FeminismCapitalismActivismWhitenessSexual ViolenceMetooMetoo Movement
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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