[Wamvan] Four Brief Critiques of SlutWalk’s Whiteness, Privilege and Unexamined Power Dynamics

[Tami Starlight]

http://www.peopleofcolororganize.com/activism/slutwalk-whiteness-privilege-sex-trafficking-women-color/

Four Brief Critiques of SlutWalk’s Whiteness, Privilege and Unexamined
Power Dynamics
16 May 2011 by ernesto

Many websites have devoted pages and pages to SlutWalk, an event that
has popped up in several North American cities. More criticism is
emerging about the privilege, self-involvement and whiteness of
perspectives forwarded in the action.

Clearly much of the media, a lot of men and society itself are deeply
misogynist and racist. But is the fixation with “slut-shaming”
addressing the fact that white supremacy and misogyny remain strong?
Or are we having easier conversations — e.g. don’t assault me or pick
on me for my choices — in favor of much more challenging ones about
sexism and lack of opportunity for women that cut the legs out from
under ideals such libertarianism holds dear — meritocracy, the
Protestant work ethic and the illusion that everyone regardless of
race, class or gender has unlimited free choice?

My first reactions to SlutWalk distill from there…

1.) Reclaiming What?

According to its website, SlutWalk’s organizers “are tired of being
oppressed by slut-shaming; of being judged by our sexuality and
feeling unsafe as a result. Being in charge of our sexual lives should
not mean that we are opening ourselves to an expectation of violence,
regardless if we participate in sex for pleasure or work. No one
should equate enjoying sex with attracting sexual assault.”

And that gets to one of the essentially problematic things of
privileged white folks attempting to define for everyone else what
works for them personally or because they want a satirical device.
When events are about everyone individually for themselves defining
whatever they think is good for them, regardless of its impact on
other communities (especially communities of color, who
disproportionately face the brunt), do communities of color really
need to define themselves in such terms?

I thought to myself, after hearing of SlutWalk, about how much
language and empowerment is racialized. How would the Mexican-American
mothers I know feel about their daughters calling themselves whores?
Or the Black mothers of friends react to their daughters calling
themselves sluts? Probably not well. Many communities of color have
had growing movements against anti-woman language for good reason. For
communities of color, even those who aren’t expressly political,
there’s a visceral reaction to name-calling aimed at women of color,
who are seemingly always the targets of names whose historical,
cultural, social and political edge white women will never confront.
>From ‘welfare queens‘ to ‘unwed mothers,’ images are almost always
racial. As a Latino male, people who look like me (and Black men as
well) are often the ones visualized when people think gender
oppression. But white supremacy means Caucasians do not, for the most
part, need to think about messaging regarding normalcy and deviance,
or that people of color, especially women of color, have been subject
to these issues all our lives. Historically, the masses of white women
have not fought with women of color, but instead sided with white men
in exchange for their own freedoms.

In addition, there’s a painful history in which Black women were the
sexual property of white men as legacies of slavery, which white women
don’t have as part of their collective memory.

When I consider reclaiming pejoratives, I’m often reminded of what
communities of color contend with. The use of racial slurs to empower
communities of color has been advocated by some for many years. Yet
can anyone really point of a single social, political, cultural or
economic advance that is a direct result of Blacks, Latinos, Asians,
etc. referring to ourselves as epithets? Have young people been given
important tools to self-actualize and change their objective
conditions by calling each other words racists use? Are communities of
color more empowered when white people can ironically use racial
taunts as reputed endearments? Does anyone seriously entertain the
idea that the shock value once derived by using racial slurs in music
and media exists in any other fashion now but one in which the power
people thought such actions might take away from institutional racism
instead got submerged into selling points of “credibility” to
consumers?

To a similar point, Kristen Powers sardonically remarks, “Just what
the women of the world have been clamoring for: to call themselves
sluts. No wonder a 2008 Daily Beast poll found that just 20 percent of
women call themselves “feminists,” and only 17 percent would want
their daughters to use the label…. SlutWalk defenders say that they’re
being ironic, that it’s supposed to be funny that women are turning a
word used to dehumanize them into a badge of pride. If you don’t like
the slut walks, then you just don’t get the hilarity of women debasing
themselves in the name of empowerment.”

2.) Personal Versus Political

One of SlutWalk’s biggest problems is its active effort to
decontextualize patriarchy to a super libertarian wet dream of
personal preference, without really seeing that the stubborn
I’ll-do-whatever-I-want individualism is one of the primary
contradictions women face. In reality, women’s disempowerment is
institutional, and no amount of visioning the world as one of doing
whatever women want takes away the self-doubt women are taught and the
limits on what a society that is still anti-woman places on them.

One SlutWalk blog post is typical of so much of this discourse: I like
to look attractive to men, I like porn, etc. and this is about others
not telling me what to do. Critique whiteness or the idea of the sex
industry (porn, prostitution) and its impact on communities of color?
You’re a ‘disgruntled misogynist rapist.’ Ask for community
accountability for the privilege involved in a terminology that women
of color don’t have the same freedoms related to. ‘I could really care
less.’

Unquestioned is the desire to be unaccountable to one other, but only
ourselves, our moods and personal likes as an organizing aspiration.
Corporate media takes no issue with promoting and featuring women
perceived to be sexually available to men and seemingly liberated.
Such is in part due to the fact that women’s sexuality is a commodity,
and that extreme libetarianism (i.e. the idea that the ‘right’ to do,
be, and define one’s happiness is the ultimate objective of a social
order) is a political ideal under capitalism. We’ve all been sold this
idea for “freedom” for years.

But has any successful sociopolitical movement sustained any gain when
its primary attraction is the freedom to define yourself by whatever
institutionally constructed image you “want”? As I Blame the
Patriarchy reminds us, calling oneself a slut in a society that is
patriarchal does little more than reinforce men’s ideas of their
superiority.

A problem with initiatives where one’s work is all about everyone
defining for themselves what’s best is that, as feminist organizer Jo
Freeman wrote, the only ones who ever actually benefit are the
connected, the privileged and the cunning. History bears out that, in
a white supremacist society, those individuals are most assuredly
white, and, in a women’s grouping, such are generally white women.

Because we have Western epistemology, some think freedom is being able
define our realities. Yet if our realties and dreams are dictated to
us by a colonial mentality, then you are asking only to empower
yourself in the market. Thus you are only fortifying what you claim to
be destroying. Without a thorough understanding of how capital
functions in the lives of women and actively rejecting that, one
merely supports a set of values already in existence.

Moreover, the SlutWalk drive battles against the social justice basis
in which radical feminism has sought kinship by declaring this battle
isn’t about institutional violence against women, but one’s right to
do a particular thing or two in a society whose anti-woman basis does
not change.

3.) White Privilege and What Communities of Color Face

A lack of understanding of practical political realities, especially
for cross-sections of communities of color, seems evident related to
SlutWalk.

As noted previously, some of this is about language that is
racialized. More is about privilege. Rebecca Mott writes about the
uncritical adoption by those with the privilege to do so of word
‘slut’ and obscuring the brutality of the sex trade — an underground
industry impacting largely women of color in North America. Mott notes
embracing prostitution without understanding what such means to women
trapped in the business has dangerous implications.

If you want to know what it to be a Slut, a Slut without freedom of
movement, freedom of speech, freedom of safety – then place yourself
inside the skin of the Ultimate Slut.

Women and girls inside most aspects of the sex trade are raped,
battered and murdered whatever they wear, whatever environment they
are placed in.

What does any Slutwalk do that makes any practical difference to that?

Instead too many who join Slutwalk say that women – avoids the
messiness of girls – choose to be inside the sex trade. That for those
women being a Slut is just their work.

So they march in proud solidarity to keep the sex trade running
business as normal.

If I am feeling nice I would say that is turning a blind eye to any
violence that is the norm inside the sex trade. But today I don’t feel
like being kind – I would say it a deeply privileged and selfish
attitude, that sees women inside the sex trade as sub-human who are
good only to use as propaganda.

How many women who go on and on about being inside the sex trade is
just “work”, have done it full-time for several years, with no power
or choice over what punters will use them?

How many women who go on and on that it just work, have been in
conditions where rape is so normal is cannot be known, where it is
normal that women disappear, where no has no meaning?

Mott adds on a comment at We Won’t Submit about a discussion with a
leader of the Devati anti-prostitution movement in India. In that
country, the writer says, Indian feminists, who have negated the
Devati experience as Third World women who in turn have long simply
chattel for mens’ sexual desires, support the Toronto-created protest.
Yet it is lower caste women who don’t have those luxuries. And rather
than fight back and organize to defend the Devati and change the
abuses such women face, the idea devolves into simply normalizing
their abuse as “sluts,” without understanding such actions could be
deeply offensive to these communities, which have long been
objectified by the globalized gaze.
In a just as important vein. To The Curb calls to account the idea of
cultural imperialism, and to whose benefit.

According to SlutWalk’s website, the event is slated to be reproduced
in Argentina sometime this year. It’s the country I was born and
raised in, among Spanish, Guaraní and Portuguese speakers – and I can
assure you that the word “slut” is not used by anyone there. This is
not what we need. I do not want white English-speaking Global North
women telling Spanish-speaking Global South women to “reclaim” a word
that is foreign to our own vocabulary. To do so would be hegemonic,
and would illustrate the ways in which Global North “feminists” have
become a tool of cultural imperialism. I will be going back home in
about a month, and want to do so without feeling the power of white
women bearing down on me from 6,000 miles away. We’ve got our own
issues to deal with in South America; we do not need to become poster
children to try to make you feel better about yours.

As Struggling to be Heard says, white women have the privilege to
think of women of color as an afterthought, a people who implicitly
are receptacles for their ideas. “It is white supremacy and its very
ideals and systems that make these disputes possible. That make it so
that it takes hordes of women of color to say something before white
women begin thinking about how they can be more pro-active.”

Criticism of women of color who have spoken out, including in an
important piece on South Asian women, has been typically nasty. On its
Facebook page, SlutWalk organizers claimed critics called them white
supremacists (without ever presenting where such happened), and
implored — almost on cue, if you’ve been through the political
trenches before –that they’re not white supremacists and that people
of color need to speak out about the criticism.

What most white people don’t understand is that critiques aren’t about
them getting their feelings hurt about a criticism or the ability to
find a person of color to legitimize their ideas to the politically
immature. Such is an old tactic many movements have used to divide
people of color and pit us against each other (and for some people of
color to curry favor for their own gain). More importantly,
communities of color have long memories and have seen played out many
times this sort of advantaging the people of color who will defend the
white people or who the white folks like. Almost never do any of these
erstwhile defenders of white privilege have any legitimacy, role or
relationship in communities of color (even though they’re happy to
pull a POC card when defending whites) or any actual institutional
power in white organizations. And at the end of the day the only
people who are impressed by such compradors are the other white
people.

Seriously. Asking your brown friends to defend you, rather than
sincerely and substantively addressing concerns from communities of
color, really doesn’t win you any points with communities of color. At
all. In fact, you end up looking like the manipulative white people
you think you’re not, and ones we’ve seen before.

4.) SlutWalk as Anti-Feminist Battering Ram

Lastly, I have found some of the SlutWalk approach most problematic
related to an ahistorical understanding of women’s organizing.
Ironically, or maybe not so much, SlutWalk advocacy has come at the
expense of the feminist movement, demonizing a struggle that has many
hard-won victories to its credit.

To turn social justice and women’s self-determination into what one
story refers to as an approach of “look, but don’t rape” seems fine to
many. But why draw a line against feminists who don’t favor
exclusionary language; believe women’s media representations (e.g.
porn, advertising, sexualizing girls, etc.) shape people’s perceptions
of women; and who fought for the rights you now enjoy? Does dismissing
their criticism, especially when it’s shut down with uber-libertarian
fuck-the-world-it’s-about-my-needs rhetoric, genuinely serve the
people who need to have these conversations, or a cause you believe in
(unless the cause is oneself)?

Moments like these prompt me to measure justice movements by other
struggles’ starkest disagreements. To give an extremely brief synopsis
of one instance I regularly consider, the mainstream and radical ends
of the civil rights movement clashed mightily about integration, and
more broadly the right to be in places at which one was unwelcome.
What would the radical movement (whose threat of rise indubitably
forced institutional concessions to the mainstream movement) have
become had Malcolm X said, ‘I not only disagree with Rev. King, but I
oppose his approach enough that I will stand with those who oppose
him’? In spite of disagreements, Malcolm X defended King’s right to
fight, confronting people like George Lincoln Rockwell in support of
King.

And while, among SlutWalk folks, none have even a hint of a shadow of
civil rights pioneers to claim, how they’ve responded to the feminist
movement’s questions says a lot about who they are, their aspirations,
and their regard for those who are peers.

In talking about her exposure to SlutWalk, Meghan Murphy at The F Word
zeroes in on some of SlutWalk’s anti-feminist underpinnings. “Instead
what I found, over and over again was, not only a refusal to align
with feminism, but often, an outright aversion to it. I saw numerous
attacks on radical feminism and radical feminists and I witnessed the
reinforcement of negative and untrue stereotypes about feminism (you
know the ones: man-hating, misandrist, no-fun, sex-negative, etc).
While I do believe the organizers had good intentions, desiring that
Slutwalk be inclusive to all, it began to look a lot like the
‘funfeminist’ – NO NO WE’RE THE CONVENTIONALLY ATTRACTIVE FEMINISTS.
THE FUN ONES. WE’RE OK. WE LIKE PENISES AND PORN AND LOOKING SEXY kind
of feminism that, in the end doesn’t successfully challenge much of
anything, and simply repackages sexist imagery in ‘empowering’
wrapping paper.”

In short, it’s an old game: me versus a movement.

Special thanks to Gunjan Chopra for suggesting this topic, as well as
editorial review of the article. Thanks to Ikonoklast for the reminder
on epistemology.

POSTSCRIPT: If you want to catch a fantastic discussion about the
issues that are being summoned in the SlutWalk debates, but done a
million times better, I cannot recommend The F Word’s recent sex show
highly enough. The program forwards so many important points about the
male gaze, patriarchy and female self-determination on issues that
everyone really needs to hear it.

This post has generated several replies. A few common ones were
replied to here. In brief:

Some claim ‘reclamation’ of the word ‘slut’ here is not in the
traditional sense of reclamation, but rather reclamation by exposing
the lack of basis, consistency, the damned-if-you-do,
damned-if-you-don’t that characterizes the use of the word slut.
Beyond what I find inaccurate (my understanding of the material I’ve
read in fact makes the right to call onself a slut core to this
conversation), I think clearly if the idea is to focus on a
consistency of language, usage and perception, unexamined (and
inherently problematic, since you’re setting yourself up to get used
by a news media that goes for the most salacious thing possible as a
ratings ploy) one has chosen to trade the basic notion of human
dignity for attention. Slurs, by their very existence as slurs
(racial, gender-based, etc.), have no actual practical basis or
consistency that is in any form empowering. Using the word slut does
not create a watershed moment that changes this dynamic.

Some found the language critical of libertarianism and capitalism to
be divisive and contrary to what feminists of color have emphasized. I
must strongly encourage anyone presenting a reading of writings by
feminists of color that seeks to obscure anti-capitalist and very
openly critical approaches (toward white feminists and occasionally
one another) to take another long (looooooong) look at the literature.
Many didn’t see the plurality of the feminist struggle, the
individualist approach or the capitalist one; in fact, they understood
the particularlies of issues facing various communities, impacts of
imperialism, et al. that didn’t affect white women in the same way, or
at all. Anne Valk’s Radical Sisters is among many books that discusses
these divisions and the struggles feminists of color raised. I’m all
for unity, but not at the cost of sweeping aside the very real, open
and honest contentions feminists of color courageously raised at a
time many others wouldn’t… and helped us all grow in the process. I
can only ask others to study this history, or at least not
misrepresent it.

I don’t have a lot of interest in dignifying retorts to things I never
wrote (e.g. you’re saying I’m a tool of whites, that I can’t make my
own decisions, you’re trying to make decisions for me as a woman,
etc.), but I suspect most of us are busy enough that playing such a
game is understood as pointless. If you don’t like my opinion or don’t
think I have a right to one, I don’t mind hearing that, but would
appreciate honesty in that regard. Happy to dialog on what I actually
wrote as well.

In addition, I appended a two related thoughts in a comment below, but
thought them important enough to note here. Many critiques of the
feedback from women of color contain two key assumptions I believe
must be questioned at every opportunity:

The implication that SlutWalk is creating/facilitating a conversation
that critiques (e.g. racial justice, etc.) are distracting from. I
believe it is at best grandiose and at worst outright arrogant to
suggest SlutWalk is creating or facilitating a conversation around
gender violence, rape, or anything else. All of these conversations
were already happening, and it’s wrong and disrespectful to those who
are in the community doing this work on a daily basis to suggest
otherwise. A particular group of folks (mostly young, white, educated
people to whom such daily work might not otherwise interest or appeal)
just weren’t participating in them or were aware of such until
recently. Moreover, implications critiques are distractions simply tap
into such mythology.

Though I didn’t get into it in the original piece, I don’t believe
SlutWalk is substantively contributing to a conversation against rape.
Then again, I don’t think a particularly persuasive case has been made
for how combating sexual assault is practically happening in the
context of championing (‘reclaiming,’ etc.) the word “slut” — at least
any more than if people of color adopted demeaning self-references in
responses to the institutional crimes we face or how Westboro Baptist
Church contributes to a conversation about gender by using anti-gay
slurs.

Am I likening one to the others? No, though I do think some posturing
becomes somewhat of a sideshow that doesn’t actually address the
matters well- (or ill-) intentioned people may wish.

That merely getting posts, people, etc. talking about sexual assault
even if people may not like the terminology is a good thing. Political
organizers may recognize this approach from the
at-least-I’m-doing-something school of praxis. Unfortunately, there
are two problems. First, it’s not true — there is a good chance people
talking about an issue using the worst frame won’t gain anything, and,
even more problematic, may get a negatively skewed perspective on the
matter due to the way language and bias via same stilts our collective
understanding of an issue, any issue; or simply validate backward
thinking in an anti-woman society. Second, such approaches are borne
of low expectations of people, and of our potential to articulate
complex matters into ways that result in action-oriented community
organizing. SlutWalk hints at the necessity to grab attention and thus
get people talking… about one’s project, and the words you use to get
media attention. And though marketing is a wonderful thing, its
service to outcomes is often elusive.

Thanks!

--
"Until all of us are free, the few who think they are remain tainted
with enslavement." Lee Maracle
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