White Tears, White Rage: Victimhood and (As) Violence in Mainstream Feminism
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White tears, white rage: victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism Article (Accepted Version) Phipps, Alison (2021) White tears, white rage: victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism. European Journal of Cultural Studies. pp. 1-13. ISSN 1367-5494 This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/94087/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse: Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University. Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available. Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Cite as: Phipps, A (2020) ‘White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism’, European Journal of Cultural Studies (forthcoming) White tears, white rage Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism Alison Phipps, University of Sussex Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears. This in turn depends on the dehumanisation of people of colour, who were constructed in colonial ‘race science’ as incapable of complex feeling (Schuller 2018). Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people. Such feminisms exemplify what I call ‘political whiteness’, which centres assertions of victimhood: through these, womanhood (and personhood) is claimed to the exclusion of the enemy. Through legitimating criminal punishment and border policing and dehumanising marginalised Others, claims to victimhood in mainstream feminism often end up strengthening the intersecting violence of racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy. *** 'You ought to be ashamed of yourself,' said Alice, 'a great girl like you,' (she might well say this), 'to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!' But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall (Carroll 1865, p18). 1. Introduction: feminism in testimonial culture I’ve been called one of the first to speak out. No. I was the first. I called the New York Times. I blew it wide open, not them. They won the Pulitzer and I’m the one hard-up for money. It’s disgusting. (Rose McGowan in Gilbey 2019). The above quote comes from a 2019 interview in the Guardian newspaper, in which actor Rose McGowan disputed how credit for the exposure of Harvey Weinstein had been assigned. As her comments intimate, being the first to speak out is powerful in the testimonial cultures that characterise neoliberalism and its heroic, individuated self (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, p4). Speaking out can attract political dividends: in earlier work (Phipps 2016, 2020) I have theorised experience, especially of the traumatic kind, as a form of investment capital in what Ahmed (2012[2004], p45) calls the ‘affective economies’ of testimonial culture. Trauma can be disclosed or ventriloquised to generate further capital in the form of feeling, creating political gain. Being the first to speak out can also have material rewards, particularly in media ‘outrage economies’ that thrive on controversy and scandal. 1 #MeToo could perhaps be seen as the paradigm feminist movement of the testimonial age. However, it did not start out that way: it began in 2006 as a programme of work created by Black feminist and civil rights activist Tarana Burke, to help survivors of sexual violence, particularly young women of colour, find pathways to healing.i The phrase ‘me too’ denoted Burke’s central principle of ‘empowerment through empathy’ which focused on marginalised survivors connecting and supporting each other (Murray 2017). Eleven years later, this phrase went viral as a hashtag, following a tweet by actor Alyssa Milano and the input of other white celebrities and politicians (Tambe 2018). Analysis of over 600,000 #MeToo posts showed they varied between personal stories and support, posting articles, discussing alleged perpetrators, and general commentary (Manikonda et al. 2018). However, perhaps supported by the declarative nature of the hashtag and the testimonial media cultures it was shared in, #MeToo was generally viewed as a movement of mass disclosure. Testimony has been fundamental to public feminisms around sexual violence (Serisier 2018). Putting our trauma ‘out there’ is a means to escape being consumed by it ‘in here’ (Lorde in Desmoines and Nicholson, 1978, p13), a way of reclaiming subjectivity and control after it has been stolen through sexual violation (Serisier 2018, p11). However, the mass public testimony of #MeToo both echoed and departed from feminist consciousness-raising principles. As Tarana Burke herself argued, social media movements do not automatically provide aftercare; in an interview with Elle, she said: ‘I [worried] people would say “me too” and then not go to a rape crisis centre’ (Murray 2017). The demographics of the movement also diverged from Burke’s focus on more marginalised survivors supporting one another. Most of the key figures in the viral iteration of #MeToo were Western, white and middle or upper-class (Tambe 2018), reflecting the makeup of mainstream feminism and especially its media iterations.ii As Black actress and sexual violence activist Gabrielle Union said on Good Morning America, ‘I think the floodgates have opened for white women’. Union’s use of floodgates as a metaphor is significant. #MeToo was described as a ‘flood’ of stories of sexual assault by CNN, CBS and CBC, and a ‘tsunami’ on CNBC, in the Times of India, the New York Times and the US National Post (see Phipps 2020, p37, 71). These characterisations evoked trauma on a massive scale, representing the movement as a collective weeping, a release of (white) tears. 2. The ‘wounded attachments’ of political whiteness In her 1995 book States of Injury, Wendy Brown argued that progressive movements tended to coalesce around ‘wounded identities’ that demanded recognition and protection, whether from hate speech, harassment or violence. For Brown (1995, p55), such politics not only reified said identities but ontologised trauma, producing a ‘politics of recrimination and rancor’ with deep investments in victimisation and suffering. Second-wave feminism in particular, Brown argued, had instantiated ‘woman’ as an identity based on injury. She interpreted feminist consciousness-raising and the ‘speak out’ as akin to Foucault’s (1978) ‘modern confessional’ in their production of accounts that could be appropriated by punitive (and therapeutic) state governmentalities. Solidifying the ‘truth’ of women’s experience through ‘speaking out’, she contended, was not necessarily liberation (Brown 1995, p42). 2 As I have argued elsewhere (Phipps 2019), the ‘wounded attachments’ Brown attributed to feminism are likely to be those of middle-class whiteness, given the domination of both first and second waves of mainstream feminism by bourgeois white women (Ware 1992, p18). By ‘mainstream feminism’, I largely mean Anglo-American public feminism. This includes media feminism (and some forms of social media feminism), institutional feminism, corporate feminism and policy feminism. This is not a cohesive and unified movement, but it has clear directions and effects. Building on HoSang (2010), I call the modus operandi of this feminism ‘political whiteness’. This goes beyond the implicitly or explicitly ‘whites first’ orientation of most politics dominated by white people: it has a complex affective landscape involving attachments to the self (often the wounded self) and to power (often in the form of the state). These attachments produce a number of dynamics: narcissism; alertness to threat (which in white women’s case is often sexualised); and an accompanying need for control. Political whiteness characterises both mainstream feminism and the backlash against it, as they ‘battle it out’ (Banet-Weiser 2018, p1) on the contemporary cultural stage. Victimhood is central to these battles (Banet-Weiser 2018, p4). Women’s sexual victimisation has been at the forefront of recent mainstream feminist campaigns, exemplified by actions such as the Women’s March as well as the viral iteration of #MeToo. Responding to this, the backlash has been preoccupied with who the real victims are. One of its central claims is that ‘feminism has gone too far’ (Nicholas and Aguis 2017, p31), that men are now fearful because harmless touching has been defined as abuse. These narratives are bolstered by broader stories of white victimhood which have underpinned Brexit, the election of Trump, and the elevation of other far right figures and parties worldwide (Corredor 2019). 3. Crying ‘white-lady tears’ On International Men’s Day 2019, Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan broadcast a monologue comparing middle-class white men to endangered rhinos.