Amelia Horgan in Tribune:
Political movements are always defining their boundaries. When someone who acts in the name of an emancipatory struggle does something questionable or even reactionary, a typical response is: Well, they must not be a proper member of our movement, because no real comrade would have done that. There’s nothing wrong with this position, at least at the level of argument. It is typically an attempt to define what the movement should be, how its members should ideally conduct themselves, rather than what it is or has been.
Obituaries of Gloria Steinem, who died earlier this month, can for the most part be divided into two opposite camps. Steinem is seen either as iconic and emblematic feminist, or as the opposite: a false feminist who reflected what are taken to be limitations of the Second Wave, and who may have even betrayed the movement at the behest of the CIA.
Feminism is not an organisation with a membership card. Anyone can claim to be a feminist, though others might disagree. The question is what to do when this disagreement emerges — when we are confronted with those things that would make someone by our (anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and so on standards) not meaningfully a feminist. The feminist theorist Sophie Lewis has an answer to this: such people are not not part of the movement, but they are best understood as representatives of ‘enemy feminisms’. They remain ‘feminist’ in the sense of contesting patriarchal constraints, though their politics are not ours.
More here.
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