White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism

Alison Phipps

doi:10.1177/1367549420985852

Abstract

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.

Highlights

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
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
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, young women of colour, find pathways to healing

Summary

Introduction

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. 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.2 As Black actor and sexual violence activist Gabrielle Union said on Good Morning America, ‘I think the floodgates have opened for white women’.

Results

Conclusion