Recent years have seen a global wave of feminist protests. In the US, the Women’s Marches brought hundreds of thousands to the streets, while #MeToo raised public awareness for sexual violence. In Poland, Ireland and Argentina similar numbers protested against restrictions on reproductive rights and the 8th of March mobilized masses from Berlin to Buenos Aires and from Istanbul to New Delhi. In Spain, around 5 million people participated in a feminist general strike. These protests appear as the only successful transnational social movement of our times that is challenging right-wing populism as well as authoritarian neoliberalism. At the same time, right-wing parties and movements are gaining momentum, attacking the achievements of the women’s and LGBTIQ movements. They portray feminist issues as elitist and as a threat to allegedly ›natural‹ gender roles and ways of life. On the one hand, they build on existing racist and sexist attitudes and intensify them. On the other hand, they successfully articulate widespread discontents with social inequality and lack of democracy in the age of neoliberalism, presenting themselves as the voice of the ›common people‹.
All of this poses new challenges for feminist politics to effectively organize against the anti-feminist backlash and to take a clear stand against right-wing authoritarianism as well as neoliberalism. A New Feminist Class Politics can be an important strategy in addressing the intersecting bundle of domination and inequality. The devaluation of women and the exploitation of feminized and racialized care work are the main stakes of the current capitalist economy. Interlocking systems of oppression demand intersectional political answers. How can we fight sexual violence not only in Hollywood, but also at the work place? How can we connect the struggle for abortion rights to a broader framework of reproductive justice? How do we fight the privatization and precarity of care work and create conditions of good care for the many, not just the few? This reader brings together different feminist analyses that address these questions and offer some strategic approaches to our future struggles.
This brochure is a special english issue, a compilation of articles taken from various issues of the LuXemburg Magazine.
- Download E-Paper [1] (pdf, 2 MB)
- The print version can be ordered soon here [2].
Contents
Breaking Feminism. [3]In search of a new feminist Class Politics [3]
Preface
From #MeToo to #WeStrike [4]
A Politics in Feminine
by Liz Mason-Deese
»Feminism Is for Everyone« [5]
Perspectives for a Feminist Class Politics
by Barbara Fried
Ragpicking Through History [6]
Class Memory, Class Struggle and its Archivists
by Tithi Bhattacharya
Gender as symbolic glue [7]
How ›gender‹ became an umbrella term for the rejection of the (neo)liberal order
by Weronika Grzebalska, Eszter Kováts and Andrea Pető
Holy Shit [8]
Family and Gender politics of the right wing ›Alternative for Germany‹
by Gerd Wiegel
Ni una Menos [9]
Interview about femicide and its political meaning
with Alex Wischnewski
Our people are worth the risks [10]
A southern queer agenda from the margins and the red states
by Southerners On New Ground SONG
Your Gender Is Yours, Proletarian! [11]
Queering class Struggle
by Atlanta Ina Beyer
Authors [12]