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Quote by Alison Phipps

“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?”

Quote by Alison Phipps

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Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

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Alison Phipps

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“Trans-exclusionary and anti-sex-work feminism amplify the mainstream movement’s desire for power and authority, and pursue it by policing the borders of feminism and womanhood. The mainstream preoccupation with threat becomes an overt ‘us and them’ mentality, and the necropolitical desire for annihilation is deliberately turned on more marginalised people.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”