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. Perhaps the most powerful thing that can be done is sabotaging the law-making project and refusing to concede that abortion is unlawful. PDF / EPUB File Name: Feminism_Interrupted_-_Lola_Olufemi.pdf, Feminism_Interrupted_-_Lola_Olufemi.epub I capitoli più illuminanti per me sono stati quello relativo alle sex workers e quello dedicato al cibo e al corpo. JB: “Privilege” is a very contentious word, and I notice you barely use it. In fact, you cleverly avoid using many buzz words – were you conscious of the vocabulary you chose? Lola Olufemi explores state violence against women, the fight for reproductive justice, transmisogyny, gendered Islamophobia and solidarity with global struggles, showing that the fight for gendered liberation can change the world for everybody when we refuse to think of it solely as women's work. Including testimonials from Sisters Uncut, migrant groups working for reproductive justice, prison abolitionists and activists involved in the international fight for Kurdish and Palestinian rights, Olufemi emphasises the link between feminism and grassroots organising.

This book shows that the struggle for gendered liberation can change the world for everybody when we refuse to think of it solely as women's work' idea that women are born, and not made or named; that there is something inherent in biology that is crucial to womanhood. JB: You chose feminism over transfeminism as the main descriptor of your politics. Yet you are transinclusive and much of what you write pertains to the transfeminist manifesto. In fact, many people are really turned off the word feminist (as well as the word lesbian) because of some of the negative baggage it carries. Was there a reason for that choice? Judith Butler broke new ground in 1990 with her seminal text, Gender Trouble. In it she suggested that there is nothing

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Olufemi shows how women of colour as victims are readily pressed into service to serve causes but then excluded from activism, and its spoils. The abortion referendum in Ireland, for example, leaned heavily on the cases of two women of colour, but there is little mobilisation for the rest of the maternal experience of women of colour. She points to those middle-class feminists who make much of Muslim women as needing saving from a system of oppression that is “other”, without recognising that oppression is everywhere: in the UK, two women a week are killed by a partner or former partner. Olufemi argues that mainstream feminism is too often obsessed by personal choices: she refers, as others have, to the mind-numbing genre of articles that pose the question: “Can you be a feminist and … ?”. This frippery turns questions of agency into ones of pleasure, of entitlement, of being worth it. 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. There are a number of scientific studies that point to the fact that human beings’ sexual biology is far more varied than we 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. I think in more contemporary discussions that nuance can sometimes be lost. The fierce class politics of the originators of this integrated analysis can be erased. I think that’s how we can get to a depressing place where feminism is Hilary Clinton dropping bombs and Shell adding an apostrophe to their brand name for International Women’s Day. I think that’s also a consequence of neoliberalism. Everything is so atomised that resulting political demands emerge only at the level of what you look like and the position from which you speak, losing sight of larger group interests or political structures. I think what we lose when we have conversations only at the level of lived experience is the ability to make a wider case about how the world could be and draw attention to the messier, more complicated issues at play. If feminism is only when women ‘do’ things, what gets hidden is how some women’s suffering becomes a naturalised part of other women's successes. It also proceeds as if ‘woman’ is a universal category of agreement including no disruption, contention or dissent. Claims made solely on the basis of identity can never evolve, there is no where to go if the frame is simply, ‘as a woman, X argues this but as a woman, Y disagrees.’ A feminism that is striving for liberation, for new worlds, for something else can’t solely be legitimized by a speaker’s identifying markers – that’s not a radical ambition, it’s capitulation in my honest opinion.

As I’ve gotten older, I believe more in the possibility of transformative gender relations and crafting political ideas/demands that account for everyone. Book Genre: Essays, Feminism, Gender, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics, Race, Social Justice, Social Movements, Theory, Womens, WritingI’m interested in a feminism of the commons and I hope where this book sits is as a tool that can help expand the scope of demands made of the party political project in the short term but also aid in its abolition. I think in the UK, it is still fair to say that there were material gains and an improvement of conditions that could have been ushered in by Corbyn’s government, though this is also debatable for some people. I think sometimes the conversation about ‘pragmatism’ and reliance on political parties vs building outside of them can become too abstracted. It goes without saying that you can utilise a party political route to demand non-reformist reforms or temporarily relieve suffering, if the context allows and to make strategic gains without believing in the party political project, you can also abandon said route when/if it does not work. In a much-needed intervention against transmisogyny, Olufemi challenges hegemonic discourses that continue to repress and exclude. She shows alliances between far-right organizations, especially in the United States, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists, as well as pointing out crucial links between the exclusion of trans women from feminism and other forces of oppression such as racism. As she puts it, “There are ideological links between biological essentialism and scientific racism; both see the body in absolute terms.” Lorde, Audre. 1979. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, ed. Audre Lorde, 110–113. Berkley: Crossing Press. Dari kutipan itu saja, Lola Olufemi sebagai penulis mengingatkan bahwa masih banyak anggapan tentang feminis yang dibentuk oleh kulit putih. Membuat hal-hal tampak "mudah" padahal bagi kulit berwarna dan bukan ras kaukasian seperti Sandberg punya kesulitan dan hambatannya sendiri. Olufemi melalui buku ini ingin mengingatkan bahwa feminisme tidak hanya sekadar mendapatkan jabatan tinggi dan keamanan secar finansial saja. Feminisme juga menuntut adanya kesetaraan pada hal-hal esensial seperti akses terhadap layanan kesehatan dan pendidikan.