By: Aidan Rowe

Aidan Rowe — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 18:30:58 +0000

The TERF/pro-trans feminist split is basically analogous to the divide in class politics between those for whom the revolutionary class subject is an already-constituted Worker and proponents of the multitude, recomposition and the like. For the TERFs, the disintegration of the category Woman as an ontologically stable homogeneous collective subject (grounded in a biorealist concept of ‘sex’ as prediscursive fact, and an understanding of gender subjectification as a homogenising/unitary/unifying process) is the disintegration of the very possibility of politics. Similarly with the “Old Left” who attach themselves to a class figure which basically amounts to an ever-shrinking cultural subgroup centred around rapidly disappearing forms of industrial labour. The TERFs cling to ciswomanhood the way the Old Left clings to (at best) the Fordist mass worker (if not the 19th century proletarian) because for both no other basis for politics is imaginable. Aside from the obvious fact their politics sustains coherence only by colluding with structural violence against a marginal group, TERFism is basically a form of political cryogenics (‘cryopolitics’ as I like to call it).

By: keir

keir — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 14:15:42 +0000

Someone on twitter pointed out that the biggest risk of declaring yourself a feminist is NOT being called a TERF. I think they’re right. It’s not a great example of the more general point as that particular dispute is an example of sincerely held, if incommensurable, positions.

Comments on: That joke isn’t funny anymore

By: Aidan Rowe

By: keir