WHY WE ARE FEMINISTS by Lierre Keith GET INVOLVED
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DEEP GREEN RESISTANCE (DGR) IS A MOVEMENT BASED PARTLY ON THE BOOK, BY DERRICK JENSEN, LIERRE KEITH, AND ARIC MCBAY CALLED DEEP GREEN RESISTANCE: STRATEGY TO SAVE THE PLANET. DGR HAS A PLAN OF ACTION FOR ANYONE DETERMINED TO WHY WE ARE FIGHT FOR THIS PLanet—and WIN. SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEBSITE, GIVE FEEDBACK, AND LET OTHERS KNOW. TAKE ACTION. START OR JOIN A DGR FEMINISTS ACTION GROUP. VOLUNTEER. BY GET INVOLVED Website: deepgreenresistancenewyork.wordpress.com LIERRE KEITH Facebook.com/dgrnewyork Phone: (917) 830-3595 E-mail: [email protected] deepgreenresistance.org WHY WE ARE FEMINISTS: • Langford, Rae and June D. Thompson. Mosby’s Handbook of Dis- eases, 3rd Edition. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier Health Sciences, 2005. THE FEMINIST FRAMEWORK OF DGR • Lenskyj, Helen. “An Analysis of Violence Against Women: A Manu- BY LIERRE KEITH al for Educators and Administrators.” Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1992. • Jeffreys, Sheila. “Sado-Masochism: The Erotic Cult of Fascism.” Q: Is DGR a feminist organization? Lesbian Ethics 2, No. 1, Spring 1986. A: Unconditionally yes. • Smedley, Audrey. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2007. In the words of Andrea Dworkin, “Feminism is the political • “UN calls for strong action to eliminate violence against wom- en.” UN News Centre. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story. practice of fighting male supremacy in behalf of women as asp?NewsID=16674&Cr=&Cr1=. a class.”1 SUGGESTED READING • Andrea Dworkin. Life and Death. New York: The Free Press, 1997. Let’s start with the phrase “women as a class.” From a radical • Cordelia Fine. Delusions of Gender. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. perspective, society is made up of groups of people; some • Sheila Jeffreys. Beauty and Misogyny. New York: Routledge, 2005. groups have power over other groups. The powerful use • Robert Jensen. Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculin- ideology to naturalize their dominance and the subordinate ity. Boston: South End Press, 2007. • Rebecca M. Jordan-Young. Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of group’s submission: if society is actually arranged by nature Sex Differences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. or god or the cosmos, then there’s no point in fighting it. Ideology can be very effective at foreclosing resistance. The model of racism we have inherited in the US was Lierre Keith is a writer, small farmer, and radical feminist activist. She is the author of two novels, as well as a work of nonfiction, The Vegetar- originally created by the English in their attempts to ian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability (PM Press, 2009), which has colonize Ireland. Before that, differences between peoples been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” were seen as cultural. But by the 17th century, the English She is also coauthor, with Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, of Deep had solidified an ideology that made biological claims Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet (Seven Stories Press, 2011). She’s also been arrested six times. about the supposed inferiority of the Irish. The Irish weren’t culturally deficient—they were by their nature “savage.” Visit Lierre’s website: http://lierrekeith.com/ 1 10 NOTES The English image of the Irish was constructed around the 1. Dworkin, “Woman-Hating Right and Left”, p. 30. concept that they were a separate “race” from the English, 2. Smedly, p. 63. a race that was godless, immoral, lazy, “wicked, barbarous 3. Dworkin, Letters, p. 270. 4. Griffin. and uncivil.” Underpinning this image was “the belief 5. Grossman. that many Irish were incapable of being civilized, that the 6. Lenskyj. ‘wild’ Irish, those who most vigorously resisted English 7. Langford and Thompson, p. 7. hegemony, would remain untamed: and that the only way 8. DeKeseredy and Kelly. 9. “UN calls for strong action to eliminate violence against to bring them under some form of civilized control was to 2 women.” enslave them.” With this racial ideology, people around the 10. Jeffreys, p. 65. world could be enslaved or simply wiped out with no ethical 11. Bancroft, p. 75. or moral reservations on the part of the colonizers. That’s 12. Ignatiev. pretty much the last four hundred years in one sentence. BIBLIOGRAPHY • Bancroft, Lundy. Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of An- The point is that race is not biologically real. Politically, gry and Controlling Men. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2002. • DeKeseredy, W. and K. Kelly. “The Incidence and Prevalence of socially, economically, race is, of course, a brutal reality Woman Abuse in Canadian University and College Dating Rela- around the globe. But the concept of race is a creation of the tionships: Results From a National Survey.” Ottawa: Health Canada, powerful. If we want a just world, the material institutions 1993. that keep people of color subordinate need to be dismantled. • Dworkin, Andrea. Letters from a War Zone. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1988. And the concepts of “whiteness” and “blackness” themselves • Dworkin, Andrea.”Woman-Hating Right and Left,” in Dorchen will ultimately be abandoned as they make no sense outside Leidholdt and Janice G. Raymond, eds. The Sexual Liberals and the of the realities of white supremacy. Attack on Feminism. New York: Pergamon Press, 1990. • Griffin, Susan. Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1981. A lot of people get confused when asked to apply the same • Grossman, Lt. Col. Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of radical analysis to gender. But from a feminist perspective, Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York: Little, Brown and the parallels are obvious. Are there differences in skin tone Company, 1995. across the human species? Yes. Why do those differences • Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1996. mean anything? Because a corrupt and brutal arrangement 9 2 of power needs an ideology called racism. Are there psychologically. We can all fight. differences in the shapes of people’s genitals? Yes. Why do those differences matter? Because a corrupt and brutal The planet is in shreds; the indigenous displaced and arrangement of power—patriarchy—needs an ideology disappeared; slavery a way of life only temporarily veiled by called gender. distance and fossil fuel; male supremacy is saturated with sexual sadism, women and girls rendered voiceless and Patriarchy is a political system that takes biological males violated. We say: enough. Liberty and a living planet will and females and turns them into the social categories called only be won when masculinity—its religion, its economics, men and women, so that the class of men can dominate its psychology, its sex—is resisted and defeated. DGR “people called women.”3 Gender is to women what race is stands with women in this war. Join us! to people of color: the ideological construct that underlies our subordination. Men’s socialization is the process that turns a child into a boy and then into a man. Being a man requires a psychology based on entitlement, emotional numbness, and a dichotomy of self and other. Masculinity is essential to any militarized culture, because those are the psychological traits necessary in soldiers. One can only kill on command if the human impulse to care for one another has been subdued or eradicated. The constant need to turn others into Others is one result: the rejected, “soft” parts of the self are projected outward so they can be destroyed.4 This is a project that will likely never end as humans do have hearts and souls, and those can never be excised, try as men might. The Viet Nam vets who suffered the worst post-traumatic stress weren’t the ones who survived atrocities, but those 3 8 genital mutilation) and footbinding as well as ubiquitous who committed atrocities.5 child sexual abuse. Femininity is really just the traumatized psyche displaying acquiescence. Masculinity requires what psychologists call a negative reference group, which is a group of people “that an It’s become chic to embrace trendy notions from Post- individual … uses as a standard representing opinions, modernism in some activist circles. This includes the attitudes, or behaviour patterns to avoid.” Boys in idea that gender is a “binary.” But gender is not a binary: patriarchal cultures create negative reference groups as a it’s a hierarchy, global in its reach, sadistic in its practice, matter of course. Boys’ first despised Other is, of course, murderous in its conclusion, just like race, just like girls. No insult is worse than some version of “girl,” usually class. Gender is the ideology that underlies the material a part of female anatomy warped into hate speech. But once conditions of women’s lives: rape, battering, poverty, the psychological process is in place, the category “female” prostitution, and gynocide. Those conditions could not can easily be filled in by any group that a hierarchical exist without the creation of social categories “men” and society needs dominated or eradicated. “women”—and those violent, violating practices are in turn are what create people called women. Those conditions, A personality with an endless drive to prove itself against known in the aggregate as patriarchy, have to be resisted another, any other, combined with the entitlement that and dismantled, until the concept of gender no longer has power brings, creates a violation imperative. Men become meaning. “real men” by breaking boundaries, whether it’s the sexual boundaries of women, the cultural boundaries of other Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White, has peoples, the political boundaries of other nations, the argued for abolishing the white race, defined as “white genetic boundaries of species, the biological boundaries of privilege and race identity.”12DGR invites white people to living communities, or the physical boundaries of the atom undertake that very necessary project, both personally and itself.