“White feminist tears deploy white woundedness, and the sympathy it generates, to hide the harms we perpetrate through white supremacy. These tears are not just personal; they are political too.”
Source: Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
“For white feminists, criminal punishment represents protection, not oppression. It is the colonial master’s intervention, the ‘empathy’ of Angry Dad. It is also the indirect demonstration of our own will to power.”
Source: Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
“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.”
Source: Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
“Claiming the right to be nasty in resistance to gendered respectability politics is often done by women who continue to be positioned as respectable by the world at large. And the ‘respectability’ of bourgeois white women has been central to colonial narratives that construct us as superior to women marginalised by race and class. Affronts to this ‘respectability’ have justified fatal violence against men of colour. This position of race and class supremacy means that our anger may not always be as radical or transgressive as we might like.”
Source: Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
“While bourgeois white women claim our right to be ‘nasty’, we expect more marginalised women to be nice.”
Source: Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
“If someone keeps disappointing you again and again, that's on you. Once someone shows they’re all about themselves, it’s time to stop hoping they’ll suddenly morph into a saint. People don’t change just because you want them to. So, stop hitting replay on the disappointment soundtrack and start looking out for yourself. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice—well, you know the rest. Set those boundaries and let them live their self-centered lives while you protect your peace.”
“The infliction that comes with white feminist anger, with its willingness to create collateral damage, perhaps makes it less of an ‘outlaw’ emotion than we might wish. In the symbolic and material game of ‘cops and robbers’, we are often identified with the cops.”
Source: Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
“Our anger at heteropatriarchy demands criminal and institutional punishment. But saying ‘fuck the patriarchy’ is hardly radical when this is followed by calling on patriarchal disciplinary power.”
Source: Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
“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.”
Source: Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
“Reactionary [trans- and sex worker-hostile] feminism accelerates the white feminist ‘war machine’, using the media and social media outrage economy to maximum effect. Although its numbers are small, this movement is tightly networked and highly organised. Its tactics are similar to the notorious harassment campaign Gamergate: it identifies and then relentlessly attacks target after target, seemingly with the aim of total submission.”
Source: Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism