The vigorous debates in and around feminism and feminist praxis since the later 2000s have produced some of the most challenging political engagements with contemporary social and cultural life; in this they are paralleled by the more recent growing trends in anti-racist activism and action and by the growth of decolonial praxis in the same period. There are significant changes in critical politics, theory and activism. Lola Olufemi’s impressive Feminism, Interrupted is a significant contribution to these developments, tracing developments in a number of shifting fields, disrupting much of the established feminist orthodoxy – making what the US civil rights leader John Lewis used to call ‘good trouble’, and building a compelling call to action fitting current circumstances. In this context, Lola Olufemi’s new book is both a timely and stirring intervention. Feminism, Interrupted expresses the radical voices which are coming into feminism from the solidarity work taking place on the ground. It both unravels a silenced history of radicalism — and points toward a truly just future. PDF / EPUB File Name: Feminism_Interrupted_-_Lola_Olufemi.pdf, Feminism_Interrupted_-_Lola_Olufemi.epub Where interventions using law and policy might mean the difference between stopping an illegal deportation, use it. Where community organising might help in providing urgent care to people abandoned by the state, use it. I think in many ways a watershed moment has come – younger feminists who are being politicised much earlier because of the breakdown of economies, the onset of this pandemic, ecological crisis, the instability of the neoliberal age are able to see through the smokescreen that liberal feminism places over our priorities.

MM: You write that ‘white feminist neo-liberal politics focuses on the self as vehicle for self-improvement and personal gain at the expense of others.’ Is this solely a politics for white middle class women by white middle class women or can the rest of us also be provisionally drafted in to do its bidding? and to ‘journey’ from one to another is sacrilege. Because our society sees sex as ‘natural’, and therefore self-evident, it has As Olufemi insists, “As feminists, we must continue breaking the law to provide abortions and associated medications on demand to live the lives we deserve. Those who have been cast outside of ‘acceptable’ face of abortion rights should be at the center of our demands.” True radicalism cannot arise from tweaks within existing legal frameworks that continue to oppress the most vulnerable; rather, we must overhaul those systems to unravel a new imaginary, in which all are free and equal. LO: I think the idea of frames of thought as disparate and incoherent really scares people because the inability to make a universal claim or universal demands means the journey to freedom is longer and more complicated but I think, just as consequence of how I learnt about the different schools of feminist thought in school, I’ve always been at peace with that. I don’t believe in universals but I do believe in an idea that I take from Audre Lorde, that sitting with tension, with distortion, is productive. That the tension caused when we place different kinds of feminism in conversation with one another create new routes, modes of thinking and practices that get us closer to what our perceived goals are. I loved the tweet that you did where you stated that you’d learnt things from different, overlapping and sometimes conflicting theorists. I think it perfectly sums up something that I’m always striving towards, to understand and incorporate different ideas from different strands of feminism that are all making a claim about the way the world should be. Liberation means chaos, it might mean a million different ideas at once and that potential excites me. To recognise that this frame of thought advocates many things, some conflicting is not to give in to the idea that no short-term political demands can be made – the urgency of the conditions of our lives make those demands clear to us. Embracing chaos doesn’t mean embracing abstraction. I think that tendency stemmed from a refusal to think about oneself and one’s life in isolation, recognising that suffering is not unique to a specific location or historical context – and that states, across the world, used the same patterns of repression and dispossession. There is something to be gained from becoming alive to the ways our lives are closely knitted together by historical encounter, trade, labour, through military intervention and so on.Arruzza, Cinzia, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser. 2019. Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. London: Verso. Another popular TERF argument is that, instead of challenging the gender binary, transitioning merely reaffirms it. To argue that trans women simply reaffirm a stereotypically ‘feminine’ model is to see all trans women as a homogenous group: feminine, heterosexual and wanting to transition. It ignores the fact that cis and trans women adopt stereotypical femininity for the same reason, blaming them for the gender scripts necessary for survival. In many cases, trans women may be actively encouraged by doctors and Gender Identity Clinics to adopt conventional femininity as a means of ‘proving’ that they are who they say they are. This proof would not be necessary in a different world. These kinds of requirements have far less to do with individuals and more to do with the way rigid ideas about gender are currently embedded in our social lives. The aim, at the very least, is to destroy that rigidity. legality does not equal access. there are many more complicated demands to be made: mainstream movements will always defeat their own purpose as long as they consider the law as the sole indicator of progress' options to choose from: male and female. These categories refer to our ‘biological makeup’. To deviate from either option is unnatural The events was cancelled due to the COVID-19 outbreak, but we are delighted to present a written conversation instead.

A careful and detailed description of a feminist politic that is expansive and fundamentally hopeful'oppression is rooted in a singular place. We can believe that sex and gender are made up categories, embellished by social attitudes and recognise that the violence that occurs as a result of them is very real. It is the violence that defines our experience of the world, not our biological make up that we often know little about it. (How often do you think about your chromosomes?) Often being perceived as a woman or failing to do womanhood correctly is enough to put somebody at risk of harm. It is also important to remember that Western conceptions of gender are not and have never been, universal. Gender has no single story. There are countless examples of gender non-conforming and variant expressions across the world that challenge the idea of ‘man’ and woman’ and evidence that they have existed for centuries. The colonial project played a large part in marking certain sexual and gender practice taboos, in line with religious and imperialist ideas of nature. A number of colonial projects used penal law to outlaw expressions of gender variance and ‘homosexual’ acts between men in places such as India, Kenya, Australia and Uganda. This is not to imply that non-Western examples of gender variance were always free from policing and scrutiny in pre-colonial contexts, but to reaffirm that though gender may appear self-evident, its history is dependent on context. Just because specific ideas and practices of gender are central in the West, does not make them a global phenomenon. In “Transmisogyny” Olufemi presents a more accessible interpretation of Judith Butler’s seminal “Gender Trouble”, arguing that both sex and gender are socially constructed rather than predetermined, although non-Western perspectives on gender are only briefly mentioned. Her subsequent argument that it is the “violence that [people coded as women by society] face that defines our experience of our world” rather than biology, and that it is this umbrella that critical feminism should use, is worth more debate than it is afforded in the book. The rest of the chapter is spent refuting the moral panic generated by trans-exclusionary radical feminists in the national media and exhorting critical feminists to reject the artificial dichotomy between cis & trans women that “gender critical” activists are attempting to create. If you’re a supporter of trans rights and find liberal ponderings on whether you can be a ‘feminist in high heels’ irritating, this is the chapter for you. Olufemi starts from looking at “the sexist state” and its use of austerity and state violence. Here, she maintains a decisive focus on British cases — avoiding the all-too-common tendency for discussions of racist police violence to end up deflecting attention to the United States alone. The incarceration of asylum seekers in institutions such as Yarl’s Wood detention center is a crucial focus, here: feminist struggles which focus on citizenship-based rights neglect the fact that some of the most vulnerable women, most in need of solidarity, are denied access to those very rights. This demands an overhaul of a state system whose own structures perpetuate patriarchal violence.