#cinzia arruzza

[academicdaydreaming]

4•16•21

Light Friday reading

[ghinanotlinetti]

A Review of ‘Feminsm for the 99%: A Manifesto’ by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya & Nancy Fraser

Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto is a book published by Verso Books, and is essentially a manifesto for feminist rooted in socialism. As I read this book in its entirety, I found myself agreeing with most if not all of the points that were made by the authors. Throughout the manifesto, the contributing authors make it clear that the rise of capitalism is greatly responsible for enabling exploitation, oppression and discrimination. There are also other factors which play into widening the gap of inequality such as race, class, and gender. I connected with this manifesto a great deal largely because I myself cannot comprehend neo-liberal values, and yet these values were seen as the norm and/or the ideal. I remember the time when Hilary Clinton’s vow to ‘break the glass ceiling’ for women pursuing a political career gained popularity; although there have been many women who’ve praised her and portray women like her as an icon, I found myself rather intimidated and disturbed by women such as Clinton and the women that would rally behind due to the fact that there would be a pattern or commonality that I, and many other women, could see in this group of women. For starters, I and other women look nothing like these women (they’re white most of the time), and secondly these women would have access to a plethora of resources from a system which favours this type of women (i.e. they had money, wealth that many women only dream of possessing). I mention Clinton and her glass ceiling because the book references this in the statement: “We have no interest in breaking the glass ceiling while leaving the vast majority to clean up the shards.” I read this statement over and over again, because these words are the exact the words I’ve been dying to say but could never piece out during the rise of white liberal feminism. White neo-liberal feminism seemed to have become the golden standard for women’s liberation, and yet I found it quite odd how easy it was for this ideology to exclude a large population of women in the global society whilst claiming to be “universal”. The moment I was confronted with just how much white women dictated the grounds for gender development, I was an exchange student in a Scottish university studying Gender and Development. From being cut off when I tried to speak up in the class group discussions to saying and idea but from an Eastern perspective and have it be questioned shortly after that idea was repeated but used in a Western perspective and then applauded by the white girls in this class gave me much to think about when class was over and I made my way in the snow from the university grounds to my flat. I do want to mention that the professor was a white woman and she was well aware of imbalances of power especially in gender and development studies, so she was a wonderful woman and I appreciate her very, very much, her classes were the best. But it was very clear to me that the white girls who came to this class were very much trained into thinking in neo-liberal and “Caucasian” trains of thought. It’s not that I’m disturbingly shocked because of how surprised I was, if anything I wasn’t even the slightest bit surprised and this gave me clarity in really and truly having every intention in fighting for my rights and every other woman’s rights to speak their narrative and voice their story with power and confidence.

This manifesto, along with my memories and teachings as a student of international studies, has given me clarity in voicing my principles and what I believe in. Just as any twenty-something-year-old I’m still learning, but I’m also at that stage where I’m able to ground myself in my core believes and search for what truly speaks to me and that won’t be what everyone believes. I also want to mention the post-face because there was a point which I felt really hit the nail and this is on women and labour. The authors speak about labour in terms of sustenance, survival and consequence. Generally speaking, it’s implied that men pursue hard labour to have a right in taking on the role of breadwinner of the family, they strive and work-hard for glory and praise, whereas women who are committed to childcare and other labour that is associated with maintaining the household are typically seen someone who’s just doing what they’re suppose to be doing, nothing praise-worthy, they simply do labour (which is most often unpaid) out of “love”. Many aunts who are caring for more than three children come to my mind when I read this explanation of labour in the post-face; women in our society are told that it is our purpose to be a mother typically by men (and I know this because it happened to me) and I strongly disagree. A woman's purpose shouldn't be reduced to giving love and receiving basically nothing in return; we are our own person, we have dreams, desires, hopes, fears, and ambitions beyond our capacity to give love.

100000000/10! This is a book I’ll be recommending to all my fellow social justice warriors, let’s fight together and be radical together for our society! Reading this during quarantine made me all in my feelings but this is exactly why social justice matters. We all matter. After this book I made a conscious effort to read a fiction book because I’m trying to avoid entering an existential crisis in these tough times 😅 my next review will be on a fiction book that I’ve recently read, it’s a best-selling novel and has been adapted into a miniseries and here’s an emoji for the hint: 🔥 (if you guessed Little Fires Everywhere then you’re absolutely right!) Happy reading my dudes!

[feminismisfor]

📕 MANIFIESTO DE UN FEMINISMO PARA EL 99% 👉 CINZIA ARRUZZA, TITHI BHATTACHARYA, NANCY FRASER

#LeeFeminismo

Vivimos hoy una crisis de la sociedad en su conjunto. El capitalismo, más allá de sus problemas económicos, también alberga contradicciones y desequilibrios de tipo ecológico, político, social y reproductivo: viviendas inasequibles, violencia policial, imperialismo, salarios insuficientes, etc.

Sin embargo, estos temas son obviados por las políticas del feminismo actual, que difunde una versión elitista y corporativa para proyectar una apariencia emancipadora sobre un programa oligárquico y depredador: un feminismo solo apto para la poderosa minoría acomodada.

Este manifiesto tiene un propósito: llevar a cabo una operación de rescate y corrección de rumbo para reorientar las luchas feministas hacia el resto de la población, y proponer con ella una reorganización total de la sociedad. El feminismo no debería detenerse con ver a las mujeres representadas en la cima de la sociedad, sino que debe involucrarse en las perturbaciones políticas, la precariedad económica y el agotamiento socio-reproductivo.

Para resolver la crisis actual, que es una crisis social total, hace falta otro feminismo, un feminismo para el 99 por ciento.

www.schooloffeminism.org/libros

[mermaids-ate-my-dinner]

[universitybookstore]

New from Verso, and professors Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto.

“This is a manifesto for the 99%. Those for whom increasing the minimum wage and implementing universal health and childcare would have a far greater impact on their lives that having more women CEOs. It is a manifesto that demands an end to mass incarceration and inhumane border regimes, the provision of safe and truly affordable housing, freedom for Palestine, an end to imperialist wars in the middle-east and much more.”

[jacobwren]

Social reproduction theory tries to do something different, namely to re-conceptualize what we mean by capitalism, challenging the notion that capitalism is an economic system, and rather insisting on seeing capitalism as a totality of social relations, the core of which is capitalist accumulation, but in which production and reproduction are intimately linked. If we look at capitalism in this way, then we can see how racism or sexism are not two systems interacting with a third economic system – capitalism –, but are rather sets of relations of domination and oppression that are integral part of the conditions of capital’s reproduction and are constantly produced and reproduced by the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. This also makes the question whether class struggle should have priority over ‘identity-based’ struggles not only obsolete, but also entirely misleading. On the one hand, if we think of the class as a political agent, then gender, race and sexuality are intrinsic components of the way people experience themselves and their relation to the world and to their conditions of existence, hence they are necessarily part of the way they will get politicized and struggle. People do not experience race, class or gender inequality as separate phenomena, people’s lived experience is not compartimentalized in this way: how one person is racialized is going to deeply shape the way she is exploited and will experience her exploitation, and viceversa. Political organizing cannot make abstraction from people’s experience, it must actually begin from people’s concrete experience, otherwise it ends up into rationalism: into the projection of bookish blueprints about what class struggle means or should mean upon people’s lived reality. On the other hand, if feminism and anti-racism want to be projects of liberation for all feminized and racialized people, then the question of capitalism is unavoidable. At this point the real question becomes: what kind of feminism or anti-racism do we need? The problem we had in past decades, for example, is not that identity-based struggles replaced class struggle, it is rather that the liberal position within feminist struggles and debates became hegemonic. How to break this hegemony is what we should discuss today, the debate about identity-based struggle versus class struggle misidentifies the problem, creates unnecessary divisions, and should be dropped once and for all.

Cinzia Arruzza

[her-bookshelf-tells-her-story]

Nothing that deserves the name of 'women’s liberation' can be achieved in a racist, imperialist society

Feminism for the 99%

[imtoopure]

From feminism for the 99%