#1242 Serene Khader - Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined by Doctor Serene Kader. She's professor of philosophy and Women's and gender studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and she also holds the Jane Newman Chair. In philosophy of culture at Brooklyn College, and today we're going to talk about her book for feminism, Why We Fall for White Feminism and how we can stop. So Serene, welcome to the show. It's a huge pleasure to

00:30 Serene Khader: everyone. Uh, IT'S a huge honor to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Ricardo.

00:35 Ricardo Lopes: No, it's completely my pleasure. So, um, let's start perhaps here with a few definitions. Also because in this particular case, I know that there's a variety of forms of feminism and feminists identify in different ways and So on. So, uh, what is feminism? How would you define it?

00:57 Serene Khader: So I think that the best definition of feminism is really the one that Bell Hooks offered in the 1980s, which is that feminism is opposition to sexist or gender-based oppression. But in order for that definition to make sense, we also have to have in mind. A kind of clear understanding of what oppression is. Um, AND I think, um, the philosopher Marilyn Fry kind of crystallizes this really well also in the 1980s, saying oppression is a set of social conditions where you have structures that put some groups of people above other people. And so, I think this is the right way to look at feminism. But a lot of the book, and as you can kind of see from the title is about partly controversy. Over this definition. And so a lot of the book is about controversies um over this definition or over definitions of feminism in general and how if we work with the wrong definition of feminism, or if we have the wrong definition in the back of our heads, we can end up with policies that end up um being very harmful to groups of women or that don't actually succeed in overcoming oppression. And one of the things I want to say in The book is that many of us have today kind of in the backs of our heads, that what feminism is about is freeing individual women from social expectations. And I think that idea, um, even though it seems like a good idea to many of us when we talk about, you know, not wanting to do what we're told, resisting our programming, like, these ideas are very intuitively appealing and popular, but A lot of what the book shows is that they on their own, are not going to liberate, um, all women and gender diverse people, and also that sometimes they end up harming groups of us.

02:54 Ricardo Lopes: Right. Uh, SO I would also like to ask you about the waves of feminism. Uh, COULD you characterize the 12, 3rd, and now people also talk about the 4th wave of feminism because sometimes, you know, I hear from people, or I mean, um, lots of times it's more from people who are not very fond of feminism that, uh, I mean, from the 3rd wave onwards, it's Obsolete out of the, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so tell us about

03:24 Serene Khader: them. Yeah, so I will say something about the waves, but before I do, I also want to share that my perspective is a little bit anti-describing feminism in terms of waves. I think the right way to think about it is that this set of ideas, um, about resisting the oppression of women and gender diverse people have been active at many places and many times, and different groups of people have often had different priorities. So, I think even if you look at the 20th century in the United States, which is really where the story about the waves is supposed to come from. You will see that different groups of women were organizing with different priorities and different timelines. So, some books I really like to recommend about this are Paula Gidding's When and Where I Enter, Bonita Roth's Many Roads to Feminism, and, um, A book by several authors called, um, Feminism Unfinished. These books all tell a story about what was going on in the 20th century that are through the eyes of non-elite white women, but who were organizing. So, for example, in Feminism Unfinished, you hear that women in the labor movement were organizing throughout the 20th century, um, for things like paid parental leave, um, And fair wages, or you learn from um books about women of color feminisms that uh opposing racism and feminism together was always a central idea, or that the idea that you were oppressed by being excluded from the workforce didn't really make sense when you were a poor woman who had to work outside the home in order to Um, make money, or you were not oppressed by being put on a pedestal like a Victorian delicate person, when in fact, if you were a woman of color, you were thought of as a use object or a savage, right? So, this is all to say that I think that the wave image. IS not that helpful in describing the history of feminism. And so much of my book is about the idea that there are many strands of feminism. They've been all around us in different places. Which one do we want to pick up? And so, I think the waves image, which I will explain now, um, really encourages us to think that there's one feminist movement and that the priorities of one group of women define what feminism can be about. So what's the wave image? It basically tells us that there were Really, people only agree about the first two. They agree that kind of in the early 20th century, we had a movement focused on things like suffrage, um, access to women's education, women's access to the professions, and so on. And then in the second wave, um, that there was a focus more on sort of, uh, uh, we see the advent of radical feminism. And a focus on sort of cultural manifestations, um, and material manifestations of women's oppression that have to do with subjugation, especially, but not exclusively subjugation around sexuality. So, in the second wave, um, and also subjugation around, um, housewifery, which already kind of speaks to the interests of a certain class of women, right? Only, only a certain subgroup of women have ever been able to be housewives. And so, in the second wave, we start seeing people say like, politicizing things like rape, um, and, and, um, talking about marriage as an institution that um is inherently or, or that has historically been oppressive. So, Those are kind of the, the first wave and the second wave. And then whether there were third or fourth waves are topics of disagreement. Um, IF people talk about the third wave, um, people often talk about it as something that arose sort of when I was a child, like in the 90s as a movement that kind of Actually, there's two ways of describing the third wave. Some people describe the third wave as a movement that says kind of, you can be feminine and be a feminist. Um, SO, like, it's OK to wear lipstick and be a feminist. Some people describe the third wave as the wave that brings in intersectionality and the idea that feminism involves opposing oppressions like white supremacy, um, and kind of rampant exploitative capitalism. Um, BUT I especially resist that last characterization because I really want to emphasize that women, Um, of color and working-class women, they were organizing throughout all of the waves, um, and they sometimes had different focuses, acting like women of color kind of came into the picture when the rest of the world discovered intersectionality misrepresents history. And I don't really think there's a 4th wave. Some people say the 4th wave is online. I don't know. Um, WHAT do you? What have you heard of as the,

08:31 Ricardo Lopes: uh, yeah, it's more or less along those lines that it's online, uh, activism, let's say.

08:37 Serene Khader: OK, I mean, I think that that's deceiving too when we have seen such huge waves of mass protest, especially like in the streets in the last 10 to 15 years. So I almost wonder if the fourth wave idea, um. Almost precedes things like the women's strikes that um we saw all over the world in 2015 and 2016, or the movement for Black Lives um at the um in the 2010s and 2020s. Um, I think it's kind of a mistake to just, I'm a millennial, it's an old millennial, but I think it's a mistake to describe my generation's activism as mostly online, even though it is on it online as well as in other places.

09:21 Ricardo Lopes: So do you think that there are versions of feminism that might be harmful to women?

09:30 Serene Khader: Yeah, so there are definitely ideas that people that think of as feminists that can be harmful to women. So, I think one thing that's helpful here is to kind of distinguish what I hope is the true moral core of feminism from, um, actions that people who have called themselves feminists have taken. I think it is absolutely true that actions that are taken by people who call themselves feminists have been harmful. Um, AND even actions that have been taken by people using definitions of feminism that are different from mine, but don't seem totally off the wall have been harmful to women. So, for example, um, you might think of one of the ideas that I criticize in the book that we'll talk about more later is the idea that feminism is about freeing women from backward cultures, right? Like, That on its own, um, and for many people actually seems like it's a good idea, right? Like, many people think like religions are telling women that their only job is to take care of children and listen to men. Um, AND maintain a house. And so wouldn't it be better, um, if we reduced women's religious adherence. But as I go into in the book, right, like, these are the justifications of the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, right? These are the justifications of European far right parties, um, consistent bans on hijab and other sorts of Islamophobic practices. So, that's just one example, um, but I think often, um, ideas that seem feminist can harm other women. Another one that I talk about extensively in the book is the idea that feminism is about um allowing women to enter the paid workforce. Um, OF course, many women, including me, right, like, our lives are better. Because we are able to do forms of work that we value besides um care work, right? And I also do care work as is manifest in my children's paintings being in the background, but like, of course, I value that I was able to get a PhD and be a writer. But the If you only talk about having women be able to enter the professions, and you don't do something about the revaluing of care work, what you actually have end up with and have ended up with is this new class of exploited, racialized, often immigrant women, whose job it is to do the devalued work that facilitates women of my social classes entry into the paid workforce. Um, And isn't gonna liberate all women until we do something about the care work problem in its own right.

12:27 Ricardo Lopes: And what is it that you call white feminism then?

12:32 Serene Khader: So, um, white feminism is actually not my term. And even though it's not in the title, it's in the title, it's not really a term that's that important to me. But white feminism in general is a feminism that reflects the priorities of privileged white women. Um. So, you might think of it as a feminism that is really associated with individualism, that is uncritical of things like the carceral state. So I think one good example of white feminism that we have seen a lot of action around in the 2020s is like the idea that a previous generation of often white feminists had that like, um, Punishment through the carceral system for things like intimate partner violence and rape was going to be um the solution to these problems. And I think one of the things that we have come to understand is, I mean, that We have a lot of critiques of the incarceral system around racism, but also very specific to feminism that sometimes these policies turn women of color, uh, you know, make women of color more vulnerable because they are, for example, likely to be criminalized when they make a call about intimate partner violence in their home. Um, WHITE feminism is also kind of about saving people in a lot of cases, but like, it's the idea that it's not just that the priorities of the privileged group are correct, but also that the privileged group is in a position to tell, um, like, to decide what should happen to women with, um, fewer opportunities and privileges or who are just, you know, having a different kind of life. That's, I think, what white feminism is. White feminism is in the title of my book, even though it's not as central of a concept for me, is that I also think that the term white feminism has just kind of started to function as a stand-in for what I call feminism for the few. Um, WHICH are various forms of feminism that promote the interests of elite women at the expense of non-elite ones. And what I try to do in the book is to kind of say, uh, and I coined this kind of idea of freedom feminism. I want to say these bad forms of feminism are actually united by a certain Value orientation, and that's a value orientation toward individual freedom.

15:08 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so let's tackle then what in the book you deem to be a series of myths regarding feminism. So the first one is the freedom myth. What is that about?

15:21 Serene Khader: Yeah, the freedom myth is sort of what it sounds like. It's the idea that we will achieve the end of gender-based oppression or that feminism will have succeeded if we reduce every individual woman's um Uh, Sort of constraint by social expectations. So put simply, feminism, freedom feminism, or the freedom myth is the idea that feminism is about individual freedom and that caring about individual freedom is the path that will lead us to all of our liberation. Uh, BY the way,

16:02 Ricardo Lopes: no, no, I, I was just wondering, uh, because that's the freedom myth we're also going to, uh, talk about the individualist myth and others. Um, WOULD you think that a label such as liberal feminism would also apply here instead of white feminism or something equivalent to that?

16:23 Serene Khader: Yeah, OK. I love this question. Thank you so much for throwing it in because I often get from sort of scholars of women's studies, the question of why isn't this just a criticism of liberal feminism? And I think this is an answer where my training as a philosopher becomes very important, because It could be a criticism of liberal feminism, depending on how you define liberal feminism. But if you go look at like definitions of liberal feminism, they will sometimes say things like, uh, liberal feminism is the idea that we should seek legal equality between men and women. I don't necessarily think that's a bad idea or the problem. It might be a problem to think that's the only thing you should do. Also, weirdly, liberal feminism is often defined as a feminism that cares about equality. And that is a real problem for me because a lot of what I'm trying to do in the book is say that um we need to actually resurrect a kind of equality. So, I do think I'm criticizing some of the things that people associate with liberal feminism. But I think that being unclear about what the definition of liberal feminism is, has been causing a lot, a lot of problems. And I also think that, and maybe this is very important, a lot of the bad kinds of feminism, I point out, can be held by people who are not liberals and Um, I think the section on the culture myth really shows that, like, lots of, like, radical feminists or even Marxists, right? Like, believe that culture is a source of women's oppression and we should eradicate it. So, another reason that I am not, Um, focused only on liberal feminism is that I think, um, the vices of freedom feminism often come from people who are not liberals too. And so we shouldn't assume like, oh, I'm a socialist feminist, or like, I'm a black feminist, so I can never do freedom feminism. Like, I was, I think, before this book, mostly known for my work about the global South, and one thing I can say, um, I think with relative authority is that imperialist views about other women are kind of spread among a variety of, of feminists with different other beliefs, um, within the West.

18:54 Ricardo Lopes: How about the individualism myth, uh, explain that one.

18:59 Serene Khader: Yeah, so the individualism myth, um, is basically the idea that feminist progress can be counted in whether individual women are doing better than they were doing before. Um, AND there's a lot of problems with this view. Um, BUT two of them are one, that individual women can be doing better than they were before. But still be more, like, but still have their oppression reinforced, and I'll explain that in a 2nd. AND 2nd, that, um, Improvements in the situation of some women. DOES not translate into improvements into the situa in the situation of all women. So, I'll go through those two in turn. The first one, which I think is a little bit kind of harder to wrap your head around, is the idea that women can be doing better than we were doing before and also remain oppressed. Um, THE example, and one reason that we can remain oppressed is that if we don't think about what's happening to men across the same time period, Um, we will miss an oppression is a, right, it's a relationship between social groups. So, what can be happening is women can be doing better than they were before, but be facing new kinds of harms or be subordinated to men in new kinds of ways. And I think that actually is the reality for many women all over the world right now. And I think, um, One, and I think there's a lot of examples of this. I think we can see a reaction to this in so many Gen Z women's kind of saying, you know, you hear about like love girls now, for example, like, I don't want to be in a relationship with men because what men have become. Uh, NOT all of them, of course, but, but what many men have become is not something that I want to be involved with because there is the assent, for example, of this, this form of masculinity for young men that says, like, you know, I do think I deserve sexual service from another person, right? I do think I should be able to joke about whether women should have the right to vote. I don't know if this got coverage in Portugal, but this is a real thing. One of Trump's former staffers. Um, MADE a joke about whether we should repeal the 19th Amendment, which is the amendment that gives women the right to vote in the United States. And, you know, this is what men on the right are joking about now. So, I digress a little, but I just want to say that You know, this trend in Gen Z is young women intuitively understanding something that is really going on, which is that in many ways, women's lives are better, but also men have privileges that they didn't have before or are trying to seek them. A more kind of data-based um example of that is the phenomenon the late geographer Sylvia Chan referred to as the feminization of, um, responsibility and obligation. And Chan um studied women all over the global South, and one of the trends that she found all over the place is, OK, women have more access to income. And that does make our lives better in a bunch of ways, right? Like, it is better to be able to leave your abusive husband. It is better to have enough food to eat, right? Like, we're not going to challenge those claims. But on the other hand, You saw and see new forms of oppression of women or men claiming new prerogatives. So, now, women are just working more across the board than we were working before. Like, you're doing your care work and you're doing your work outside the home, or, um, Men are claiming an ability to benefit from women's work that they weren't claiming before. So, in the South, you see all these cases, um, I think this is a very kind of classic and clear-cut case where, you know, there are user fees for children's schools and where historically, it's like, Um, It's part of if only the man has income, it's the man's responsibility to pay for user fees for schools. Now women make an income, and now there's this shift to, oh, women's money. IS for for children's school, men have more money that they can use for gambling, uh, and to purchase sex workers. So, the, um, which is not, of course, true in every case, but we need to be able to see these kind of phenomena where women's lives can be getting better, but men's men can be the ones who are benefiting, and we won't see that. If we only ask, our individual women better off than they were. The second phase of the individualism myth that maybe also I can talk about a bit more with the other myths because it runs through the book, um, is the idea that women can, um, Improve their lives by throwing other women under the bus. Or even if they're not throwing other women under the bus by benefiting from the exploitation of other women, and You know, we can talk about, and I know we will talk about the more, you know, funnier, egregious examples like girl bosses in a minute, but also, I think, you know, talking about my own situation. Part of what it is to be um a woman in, like, the profession, like in the classes in the United States where you're going to the office or um are making more than a certain amount of income. If you have children, um, you are also in a situation where your ability to do what you want to do kind of depends structurally on the exploitation of other women, right? Like, the The who has taken care of my children professionally, like, well, that's an industry dominated by immigrant women, women of color who are paid not very well. And also, I mean, to help people understand the responsibility here, I think I differ from a lot of people who are critical of this and that like, I don't necessarily put the blame on individual moms of the Um, professional classes, because it's also the case that, like, many people like me couldn't afford what it would take, um, on our own to have non-exploitation of women who are care workers. But there's also a simple solution to this, and it's also a sign of a social failure, right? Like, society should be investing in this work and treating it as valuable. And then this trade-off for, um for women would no longer be um as salient, and most importantly, because the, the trade-off for women of the professional classes is important, but much more important is the basic livelihood and rights and well-being of the women who are doing this devalued work.

26:27 Ricardo Lopes: And then we also have the culture myth you, you've already touched a little bit on it earlier, but tell us more about it.

26:36 Serene Khader: Yeah, the culture myth is the idea that culture and tradition are impediments to women's liberation. Um, I talked about Islamophobia in some of the previous examples, and I think this is a classic place where we see it, right? Like, almost every time that Muslim women come into the picture, what we hear is that Um Well, these women are very oppressed. The reason they're very oppressed is that there is a set of religious traditions that oppresses them. So the solution has to be for them to become less tied to these traditions and groups and be and adopt um the lifestyle of contemporary Western culture. It's also not only an Islamophobia, right? Like this is shot through the history of Western colonialism. So, you'll see, for example, like false historiographies about indigenous women that will um talk about how severe the oppression of indigenous women at the hands of indigenous men was prior to colonialism, when in fact, um, You see in indigenous North American cultures, a wider range of gender roles and um um greater appreciation for gender equality than in almost any cultures you might find. Also, today, for example, you'll hear people talk about sexual assault of native women and leave out that native women are most likely to be raped by non-indigenous men. Um, OR, um, another example that kind of, I, I,

28:19 Ricardo Lopes: I think, uh, sorry for interrupting, but I think that another, another great example is, uh, also how, uh, Western colonization almost tried to annihilate, uh, matriarchal societies,

28:32 Serene Khader: for example, yeah, no, and I think that's a, I mean, a very good kind of summary of it and not just try to annihilate it, but pretend that they don't exist, right? Like I,

28:41 Ricardo Lopes: like, because there are still some of them out there.

28:44 Serene Khader: Yes, or that they never existed, right? I think in the Western imaginary and like according to what I call the Enlightenment teleological narrative in the book, right? Like, what is the past of humanity or what are the cultures of brown and black people? Oh, well, those cultures are ultra patriarchal cultures that they need to evolve out of. But that's not the reality. And also, I mean, to be clear, there are cases where we Experience ultra patriarchal cultures and context, but even in those, like, it's not obvious that like ending the culture or ending the religion is the solution, because, and there's a number of reasons for that, but like, one is that All cultures and religions have multiple strands, right? It's a mistake to say that like what Islam is, is what the Taliban says it is, right? Like, obviously, yeah,

29:38 Ricardo Lopes: because through throughout history and even now there are progressive versions of Islam, for example, exactly,

29:47 Serene Khader: exactly. And I mean, historically, if we want to talk about history, like the status of women in the Middle Ages in Islam was superior in many ways to the status of women in Europe. So it's complicated in ways that the culture myth really doesn't let us see. The culture myth, also, I should add one thing, um, is It part of why it's so dangerous is that it obscures the reality of imperialism. And this is very much in my mind since, you know, we're talking a couple days after the US um Uh, removed Maduro from power in Venezuela. Um, SO, it feels very important to talk about the omnipresence of imperialism right now. Um, BUT, The culture myth lets people in the West and in the north say this, well, like, What is the rest of the world like? The rest of the world is backward and regressive, right? And So, anything that the West does to those places can only be beneficial to the people in those places. Now, that misses a lot of things, but one of the deep things that talking about culture misses is that it misses that sexism in many places is often a result of imperialism, not a result of an unchanging culture that was kind of always there. The Afghanistan example, I think is a very like the the examples of both Afghanistan and Iran, I think are kind of clear cut examples of this where US imperialism played a role in retrenching gender conservative understandings of Islam that would not necessarily have been the dominant ones if not for US involvement in the region,

31:52 Ricardo Lopes: right. Um, AND then you also talk about in the book, you also talk about the restriction myth. Uh, WHAT is that about?

32:00 Serene Khader: So the restriction myth is the idea that the harms of sexism or the harms of gender-based oppression can be understood as, um, restrictions, right? Like always things that hold you back or prevent you from doing something. And what I really want to push, and this is another kind of place where my training as a political philosopher feels really important, is that we really have to see that there are harms of sexism that take the form of inequalities, not restrictions. Um, Some harms are just fundamentally about some people having more and some people having less, and we won't see that um if we just are looking for restrictions. And an example of that that I offer in the book that I think is pretty compelling is the example of what's called the orgasm gap, um, which is, um, It's kind of two things. It's the fact that in sexual encounters between men and women, um, men are much more likely to have an orgasm than women, and it's also kind of used to refer to the fact that the sexual act is defined as being around male orgasm, right? Like, The, the act has failed if um there has the men haven't had an orgasm, or if somebody in, in the best scenario, if both people haven't had an orgasm, but even in that case, right? Like one of the questions you might want to ask is, is the obsession with orgasm even like itself, a male-centered way of looking at sex. So, I bring this up to say, We clearly live in a moment that is less restricted around sexuality than the moment that I grew up in, and certainly the moment that our parents grew up in, right? Like, the, you know, our parents grew up in a time, or at least mine did, when, you know, premarital sex was like, Like, not acceptable, right? People engaged in it, but you wouldn't talk about it, you would judge people for it. You know, we live in an age where pornography is very widely available. We live in an age where, and of course, this is a good thing, like, there's a, a variety of like more recognized, so like sexual practices, um, and identities. So, yeah, we have in a certain ways, a lot more sexual lack of restriction than we had, and in a lot of ways that has been good. But what is it all for, or like, has it succeeded if that lack of restriction is still like, OK, now this group of young women who wants to have sex with men are less restricted, but they still cannot expect that their partner will care about their pleasure, like, To me, this is an example of a problem that is like, we won't see what's wrong if we don't see that sometimes what we have to care about is inequality, the idea that some people's pleasure matters more than other people's.

35:12 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh, AND finally, and before we move on to other topics, you also talk about the judgment, uh, myth.

35:22 Serene Khader: Yeah, so the judgment myth um is basically the idea that Um, We should never, that it's, we should never judge choices that women make or that feminism is about respecting women's choices. Um, THIS too, I think is an idea that on its own sounds like a good idea. It's also a response to something that's very real, which is like the savior vibe in historical feminism that I talked about earlier, like, it's a response to the fact that women in privileged positions like to kind of punch down and tell, um, sex workers, for example, that they're making the wrong choice. Um, OR it's also a response to the fact that people like to criticize working moms, people like to criticize stay at home moms. It's not in a certain way like this, we don't want to criticize these choices for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is that people are making them from a very limited menu. So, I understand why this don't judge women thing is here, but there are two problems with it. One problem is just that refusing to judge each other isn't a political agenda, right? Like, it's a recipe for stepping back, focusing all our attention on saying, you do you, instead of focusing our attention on developing the agenda that will actually Produce change. And one of the things I try to say in the book is this judgment obsession is actually a product of like a deliberate right-wing attempt to turn women on each other instead of like, having us be able to make a political agenda together. So, I talk in the book, for example, about how the mommy Wars were really a product of the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment that tried to tell women, oh, like, feminists hate you if you're a stay at home mom, when the reality was, well, the right is not fighting for um things like wages for stay at home moms, feminists were, even if many of them were not themselves stay at home moms. Um, Second problem with The judgment myth or the idea that feminism is just about respecting other people's choices, is that I do think we have arrived at a time where it is sometimes important to judge women in positions of privilege. It's not in every case, and I brought up already the ways in which kind of I unchosenly benefit from the exploitation of care workers. Um, But there are cases, especially now, where women in positions of privilege use this don't judge me thing in order to like to justify and not be criticized for what are flagrant, you, you know, senses of disregard for other women, and that is so on the rise as we see the rise of right-wing women. And we watch kind of a global slide toward fascism. Women on the right love to say, you know, in the book, I focus more on the girl boss, but right now, I mean, we're in a slightly different political era. The, like, one example in the states is that um there's a senator from South Carolina, Nancy Mace, um, Who is a absolutely a conservative right-wing woman. She is also um a woman who broke a lot of personal barriers, right? Like she went to the Citadel, which was historically an all-male military academy. She doesn't like let people tell her to be silent, right? Like, so she has elements of feminism and has benefited from feminism. How does she use that? She uses, like, one of her main agendas has just been to constantly deride and try to deny the rights of trans women. So she did things like put a um a biological sign in front of the word woman in the Capitol bathroom and take a picture of herself with it. And then whenever somebody criticizes her, she says things like, I'm not gonna let a man tell me what to do, right? Like, so, to me, this is a clear example of a case where a woman is weaponizing the don't tell me what to do, don't judge me framework to throw other women under the bus, and I think we should criticize Nancy Mace for um For violating the rights of trans women so heavily and trying to kind of fracture them from the rest of the feminist movement.

40:10 Ricardo Lopes: OK, and so what I, I guess that's related to that in a way, what do you make of the idea of girl bosses?

40:18 Serene Khader: Yeah, um, so, I make of the idea of girl bosses that On one hand, they really speak to something important and good, which is the way that feminism of a certain type really has permeated the culture um of Women who are under a certain age, right? Like, now, like, part of why the girl boss became popular is that in a certain way, we have succeeded in raising a couple generations of women who don't want to be told what to do, who think that they do have a right to do things that people told women they couldn't do before. And yet, The Girl boss speaks to the success of, like, one quarter of feminism or one side of feminism, and leaves out another important side, and it shows us how feminism can go wrong if it only tackles sort of one part of the agenda. So, what's missing from Girl boss, among other things, is an understanding of and value for caring work and work that has been traditionally assigned to women. So, what the girl boss basically says is, you can go take no prisoners, be really successful, make all this money, you know, whatever. But The reality is that um if you are going to actually have that life for many people, especially if you're gonna have children, that is going to depend on labor of other people. Um, THAT who take care of your children, in many cases, like, right, of the ones who are, you know, the examples like Rachel Hollis that I talk about in the book, right? Like she says, there's a nice woman who comes in here and cleans my house. I don't know her name, right? Like, the, this is going to depend on On labor that's devalued. Also, if you don't depend on that labor, you can't be a girl boss and have children, right? Like, so, because literally, there are only so many hours in the day, you can't take no prisoners all day in the office and have, like, what's happening to your children. Or if you're working an 80 hour work week or something, um, literally, like, how are you gonna do these other things that are necessary for reproducing life? So, I think what is really defining of the girl boss is this devaluation of women's labor, and it kind of shows us the downside of focusing on bringing of individual women into the workforce, um, without focusing on the need to revalue and redistribute care labor. If you only do that one side without the other side, Huge numbers of women are going to be um exploited, and also even for the girl boss herself, right, like, she's not the one I feel the most sorry for, but even the women at the top echelons do more caring labor in their households, do more mental load than their analogous men. So this isn't, it's not a path out. Also, I'll say another kind of related, but not identical problem with the girl boss. It's just that it's too obsessed with labor. And so I think one thing that has been kind of interesting to see emerge in the late girl boss, post-girl boss place is anti-work feminism, bimbo feminism, these, um, which I mean, bimbo feminism is a, I mean, even that is a little bit outdated, but these are all reactions also to the idea that the way to express your feminism is to work and to work harder, right? Like, This is, I mean, why is it the case that the way that you have to demonstrate that you deserve equality and that you're an equal member of society or you don't deserve to matter less is to prove that you can work harder than everyone else.

44:29 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and maybe be exploited by your boss.

44:32 Serene Khader: Yeah, exactly, right, like, and this goes to sort of one of the old standing feminist and socialist critiques of um a certain bad kind of equality, right? Like, great is what we want, I mean, want to be as exploited as like men have been in the capitalist wage relation. Not really.

45:01 Ricardo Lopes: So, uh, yeah, that, I think that makes a great segue to my next question because I actually wanted to ask you, in what ways do you think that these ideas intersect with, uh, capitalism, the economic system we live in? I mean, uh, because, uh, there's also, or at least in your book I read about this term neo-liberal feminism, so tell us about that.

45:27 Serene Khader: So I think they intersect super heavily with capitalism and particularly the form of capitalism that we live under now, like, The The whole idea that what freedom consists in is not being told what to do or in freeing yourself from other people's expectations, that's a really narrow understanding of freedom, um. It's the understanding of freedom that prevails best in capitalist societies, right? Like, and in sort of unrestricted capitalist societies, that's it, like, well, like, just like freedom for the market is not having the state intervene in the market or not having the state tell businesses what to do. What our individual freedom consists in is not having other people tell us what to do. There are also like other kinds of deep material connections between capitalism and The kind of feminism that I, that has caused problems. So, um, The this whole problem about care work arises partly from the fact that, you know, capitalism uprooted people from extended kinship worker kinship, um, situations that used to provide care and not foist it all on individual women. Um, SO whereas it might have been in the past that you can, you know, drop your kids off at grandma's house next door or grandma lives with you, like this is no longer the reality for the majority of workers in the West, um, so I think there's a lot of connections in terms of neoliberal feminism specifically. So, neoliberal feminism is associated with the idea that working on yourself is a way that you express feminism, and that kind of speaks to It speaks to neoliberalism in a couple of ways. It speaks to how work and work talk is supposed to now pervade every domain of your life, right? Like, you're supposed to be a good worker, not just in the factory or in the office or in the restaurant or wherever you happen to work. You're also supposed to show that you're a disciplined worker by making sure that you have the appropriate skincare routine and going to the gym 10 number of times. So, um, I definitely think that neoliberal feminism is a face of freedom feminism, um, but I don't think we should sort of reduce freedom feminism to that. Um, AND I think one of the reasons that we shouldn't reduce freedom feminism to that is that we can see, um, bad forms of feminism operating even as neoliberalism declines because I think one of the things that we are seeing globally right now is that neoliberalism may actually no longer be the order of the day, right? Like we may be living under a different type of capitalism. Um, One that um That is not as obsessed with individual discipline and work on the self and is more racialized, for example, so that like, no matter how hard, if, if we, if, if we return to kind of more old style racist social arrangements, the idea that working on yourself is going to make you worthy is going to decline in popularity, um, if you are not a white woman, for example. Right,

49:07 Ricardo Lopes: yeah, it reminds me of those kinds of talks. And narrative surrounding self-improvement and personal responsibility, right, as if people are not in a particular socio-cultural economic context that limits what they can do even to a certain extent.

49:29 Serene Khader: Exactly. Or like if you just celebrate choice under these conditions where your choices are really limited, like, uh, uh, you could be choosing, and I think this is a really central thing in the book and in all my work, like you could be choosing the best option on your menu if your menu sucks, like. Then the only solution is to change the menu, and your individual choices are never going to change the menu. Collective action is what changes the menu, and that means also caring about people who are not like you and stopping thinking of your feminism as only about like, oh, my victory is a victory for all women, or I'm gonna set an example and I'm done.

50:14 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh, TELL us now about intersectionality. I mean, what is it? What is intersectional feminism and why do you think it matters?

50:26 Serene Khader: So, intersectionality is a term that, um, the black feminist legal theorist Kim Crenshaw coined, um, in the, I think either 1989 or 1990, so, um, right around there, um, but The basic idea behind intersectionality is the idea that there are multiple axes of oppression. So you have racism, you have sexism, you might have others, right? Like you might have homophobia, you might have capitalism. But that for people who face multiple oppressions, these axes will intersect in their lives that will make them face qualitatively distinct forms of oppression, such that you won't be able to tell, like, you won't be able to just separate out, this was the racism and this was the sexism. So Crenshaw uses this great example of a person, I mean, a very upsetting example too, but of a black woman who was hit by two cars, um, and sustained, and they're coming from opposite directions, but you cannot look at her body and say, well, this injury came from this car, and this injury came from this car, right? Like, the injuries now are kind of enmeshed with each other. And so, That insight um is important partly because it's about how, um, She focuses on advocacy discourses, but advocacy and movements that try to focus on only one thing at a time, right? Like, I'm gonna focus on gender only, or I'm gonna focus on race only, can end up actually just not addressing at all the forms of oppression that people who um occupy both of the categories. Um, EXPERIENCE, right? So, like, um, Part of the oppression of being a black woman that I sort of talked about earlier is not about being excluded from work, right? Like, it's about being expected to work too much all the time for not enough, right? Like historically in the United States for nothing because that's the history of slavery. But also, I mean, being expected to work for less money than other people, being sequestered in jobs that are um Less well paying than those of other people. So, we need to be able to see those kinds of situations and organize against them. And part of why intersectionality is important, and of course, there's a million reasons, but is that it makes clear that sometimes to end sexist oppression, like, we're going to have to fight against other oppressions too, right? Like, there is the basic upshot of a feminism that says, like, I'm only going to care about gender. One thing is, like, that might not even make sense because, like, what is, like, If gender on its own doesn't exist, like, what are we focusing on, then what it often means de facto is I'm only gonna focus on the gender oppression of elite women or the form that it takes for elite women. And then you can do that, but then you will miss, like, the point isn't just that you'll miss racism or you'll miss class exploitation. The point is that the gender oppression that working class women face, or that queer women face, or that women of color face is enmeshed with these other things. So if you don't also fight the other thing, you won't be able to get rid of the gender-based oppression in their life.

54:07 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Uh, I would like to ask you now because this is another question that you explore in your book. Is tradition the enemy of feminism?

54:18 Serene Khader: I think the answer to that is no. Um, AND uh that's one of the big points I want to bring home in the culture myth. Um, THE part of the problem with the idea that feminism is about opposing tradition is that it misses the fact that sometimes we can make new feminisms. By drawing on traditional ideas or by um reconceiving our traditions. So, we talked about progressive versions of Islam before. Um, I think one example is that women of all kinds of religions, um, will often find In their historical traditions, um, ideas that are supportive of gender equality. And actually, I'll add something that I haven't said about this before that your question about neoliberalism, Ricardo really brings to light. Like, OK, I think it's also like, We are. In an era where our moral vocabulary is very evacuated by capitalism. Um, AND so one of the reasons that we might wanna, and not just capitalism, right, by kind of Just a lack of value discussion or a lack of exposure to sort of better forms of life that we could lead together. One of the valuable things about tradition is that it can sometimes help us imagine things that we have not seen, but we know might have existed in the past, or we can. Um, FINE practices that are not practiced by the majority, but actually exist, you know, exist somewhere, or there's a vocabulary from there somewhere. I think I use this example in the book, but like, thinking about the variety of gender roles in indigenous traditions, for example, is a good, um, is a helpful example here, that it's like people who um are transphobic or want us to kind of return to extreme gender binarism, want to pretend that there's no such thing as people who, like, it's a new creation, that there's people who don't fit the gender binary, and Um, obviously, there's no form of collective, our whole form of collective life will collapse if, um, they exist as equals openly in our society. But one of the things that we see from looking at pre-colonial societies and, um, in many cases, is that actually, there have been other forms of life where, um, gender roles have been much more varied. Um, AND there has been a lot of respect for individual flourishing, and we don't have to invent that now, right? Like that has existed. So, tradition can also be a real source of power for our emotion and moral imaginations when we're looking at the right traditions or looking at them through the right lenses.

57:20 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, I was actually going to say because, and I think this is something that we can learn a lot from anthropology and the work that anthropologists do, of course, and socio sociologists as well because even what we mean by tradition, I mean, it's sort of a socio-cultural construct because I mean, maybe if you ask people in the West, oh what is the tradition. FAMILY unit, they say, oh, it's the husband, the wife, and the kids, and that's it. But I mean if you go to and look into more traditional societies, hunter gatherers, artticulturalists, and so on, actually for the, for most of our history as humans, as Homo sapiens, we've had cooperative breeding. So I mean if you really want to. Talk about tradition. That's, I guess what's traditional in our.

58:14 Serene Khader: Yes, no, I mean, I think about this all the time. Like, I remember, I mean, this dates me a little, but I remember when I was kind of younger, and it was like same-sex marriage was controversial in the United States, and people would go around being like, marriage between one man and one woman is the natural human norm. And it's like, really? I mean, It seems clear that polygamy, at least, has been like a major contender throughout human history. You want to pretend that it doesn't exist, or, to your point, you don't even have to look that far back. This one man, one woman, breadwinner caregiver, like, that's not even the norm in the United States now, right? Like, It's our idea, like it's an ideological construction of tradition. I don't think it's ever been the case that the dominant like family form is one man and one woman.

59:09 Ricardo Lopes: And if it ever existed, it was only for a very short period of time.

59:13 Serene Khader: Exactly, yeah, I mean, if it did exist in the post-war era or something like that, well, quit, we all know now that it's economically untenable in the world we live in today, unless you're very wealthy, so here we are.

59:27 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so, uh, I have then just one last question, and I mean this is not, uh, directly about your book, but how do you look at the current state of women's rights in the US

59:41 Serene Khader: particularly? Um, IT'S terrible. But I'll say this. I could say more about why it's terrible, but I think more important is to remember that moments of crisis are also moments of opportunity, and so, One way we might look at the repeal of Women's rights in these extreme, I,

1:00:07 Ricardo Lopes: I sorry, I said Roe v. Wade. I, I thought you were, no, no,

1:00:10 Serene Khader: I, that was what I was, yeah, I was gonna say like we have the repeal of Roe versus Wade, but like abortion is not constitutionally protected anymore. But also we look at things like the undermining of basic women's workplace protections. Now people joking about repealing the 19th Amendment, right, like. These are like horrifying things that mark like a new political era that we should be worried about. On the other hand, People are outraged. En masse in a way that, um, you know, they may not have been in previous historical moments. And so this also might be a moment for mass movements around these things that also sort of take on board the insights of Um, feminisms that were not led by elite women in the past. So, around abortion, for example, like, I opened the book by saying, well, one of the things that the right has really done is taken advantage of the idea that abortion is a choice because it's very easy to twist that language to trivialize the importance of abortion. But maybe now is the moment where we can talk about abortion. As not just like an unfortunate choice you might have to make, but as something that is part of a broad package of things that women and other people who can become pregnant need in order to control their lives, right? And that includes things like Um, abortion, it also includes things like the right to parent, if you want a parent. Um, IT includes, um, access to abortion, not just the choice about whether to have one, and I bring that up because Things have changed in, like, in terms of what it's possible to organize around since I was a child, for example. Like, yes, we have seen these big legal losses, but I remember when I was a kid, like, no one would say the word abortion, right? Like, if people were pro-choice, they wouldn't say the word abortion. No, I think it's, it is not the, like, dominant, um, position among Democrats or people who are pro-choice, that you should never say the word abortion or that they're like, that it, um, that there are not good reasons people might choose to have abortions. So, I think this is a moment where the situation of women's rights is very dire, but the opportunities for organizing are very real, and there's a very real base of people who is energized around issues like reproductive rights and reproductive justice. I also think on kind of a separate face of feminism, because our rights on paper aren't. Everything. We are in a really important moment where we stand to be successful in organizing around care work. Um, AND in a way, the ascendancy of the right shows that, like, we, um, I think there's a lot of places you can trace this, but I wrote an article once saying this that I think is an interesting way to look at it, which is that The pandemic, among other things, like, really blew the lid off the invisibility of care work, right? Like, all of a sudden, people saw that their colleagues' children were in their Zooms. Like, this was no longer something that we were hiding from public view. I think that now, the cat is out of the bag. I'm, I'm mixing metaphors, and you can't put it back in. That's part of why you see the right wing ascendancy of trad wives and um pro-natalism. And hopefully that won't be the way this is negotiated, but I see an opportunity, like, I, I, I see that that suggests that, yeah, the cat's out of the bag, right? Like the right is talking about trad wives because the demand to see women's labor is now out and insatiable. They're trying to funnel it into their conservative agenda, but the energy is there ready to be used for what it's really about. Which is creating a form of life in which we value this work that is central to everybody's life and where we refuse to exploit um huge swaths of the human race in order to make sure that that work is provided.

1:04:41 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So, uh, the book is again for feminism, why we fall for white feminism and how we can stop. I'm of course leaving a link to it in the description of the interview. And Serene, uh, apart from the book, where can people find your work on the internet?

1:04:59 Serene Khader: Um, I'm, my handle on Blue sky is at Serene Carter, um, and they can also follow my work at Serene Cotter.com.

1:05:06 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a fascinating conversation.

1:05:12 Serene Khader: It's been fascinating for me too. Thank you so much, Ricardo.

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