war

And So the Radical Vagina was Most Patriarchal of Them All

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This Summer, the trajectory of the Jeremy Corbyn surge has been mirrored by the most fascinating but also irritating brand of cuntpolitik. After frequent reminders of Yvette Cooper’s radical vagina, comment pieces about how abstaining from voting on savage cuts to tax credits was feminist and how real feminists would elect a woman whatever her politics, I was feeling all cunted out. Then it got worse, the cuntpolitik came back last night with a vengeance as my newsfeed was overrun by the march of the #WhiteKnights4WomensRights despairing that Corbyn didn’t have enough vaginas at the top table – OH NO! Which white women will represent all the women of the land?! And yet – masked by this circus of identity politics — are the most violent forces of patriarchy at play. The masculinity of liberal imperialism is being mobilised with full force.

The politics of women’s representation in Labour has often been a bitter pill to swallow. While the excitement about Blair’s Babes raged on in the 1990s, it was Harriet Harman, the new Secretary of State for Social Security, who announced that Labour would go ahead with the Conservative plans to scrap lone parent benefits. This is a  politics that has  always been about securing the interests of cis white middle class women. I asked, only to be met with a resounding silence, where all these think pieces were when Diane Abbott was running for Labour Leader. Suzanne Moore (who doesn’t even think trans women are women) instead seems comfortable leading the charge against ‘brocialism’ while bemoaning a socialism which focuses too much on inequality as working class women continue to bear the brunt of austerity. This kind of lazy privilege is why the ‘bold’ portfolio of cuntpolitik unleashed on us this summer, Corbyn’s consultation on issues disproportionately affecting women and his support from the majority of women in the party received not one mention. The demand for women’s representation above all else wrongly presumes that women exist on a singular axis – that we are not black, queer, disabled or working class. It misses the first lesson of intersectional theory, our difference means that to speak of ‘women’s’ issues is necessarily incoherent.

Indeed, this politics rests on even shakier ground – an inaccurate understanding of patriarchy. If patriarchy was concerned primarily with men and women, it would not punish feminised men so violently. Rather, it is concerned with pegging that which is not masculine as undesirable. While we debate whether John McDonnell got the job because Corbyn trusted him most or because he is a bloke, we all remain blind to a broader and more pernicious consolidation of liberal masculinity.

When the Cold War ‘ended’ the seeds for the War on Terror were already being sown. Now, in ISIS, it has found every caricature of horror realised. As for Corbyn, he is the only thing more frightening to liberalism than beheadings – he who will not go to war. The imperative of war was deeply embedded in the conception of the liberal state. The white noise of war drums has been sounding ever since. It is in the shadow of war that political obligation* is constructed, by exploiting the claims that women – under patriarchy – have on the emotions of men. It is necessary therefore for the liberal state (or its women) to constantly be under threat. For so long, we have been on the cusp of war and it is to this mode of being (one of constant emergency) that Corbyn represents a serious threat.

We should have seen it coming. When the tide turned in Corbyn’s favour and the smears kept rolling in, the salient accusation was not one of racism or extremism but his passivity. From Yvette Cooper’s shift in CLP hustings to more adamantly defining the position of Prime Minister by the ability to ‘defend’ the country (read: militarily) to his Sky Hustings stand-off with Liz Kendall – the contradiction would be as delicious as it is illuminating if it wasn’t so frightening. Kendall and Cooper, the two women in the race, led the most gendered attack – the emasculation of Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn is not only passive, he is also irrational. He cannot be rational because the West needs there to be no option but to fight. ‘In these uncertain times’ – when the infantilised arab other is playing with the toys we left behind – it is now more important than ever that that which is masculine is ready to fight for the liberal project. As the non-white other is feminised by his irrationality, so too is Corbyn. The anti-imperialist is necessarily queered – Corbyn’s is a masculinity that the hegemon cannot comprehend.

This is why, as a feminist, my interest was most drawn by the announcement that Jeremy has appointed the UK’s first woman Shadow Secretary for Defence – Maria Eagle. I’m fascinated by the contradictions this appointment exposes. The Conservatives are on the offensive, the war machine is readying itself for an intensification of struggle and the carnage of Europe’s sins is landing squarely on its doorstep. The nebulous question of ‘security’ is about to be milked for all it is worth. In the coming months, we must constantly remind ourselves that it is those who have power who determine what is most in need of security – single mothers on benefits or the pockets of arms traders.

Owen Jones, in hindsight, was right to identify that Corbyn will come under attack for being “weak on defence and military action abroad” but he was wrong to think that taking on the language of the military industrial complex will provide any solutions. To shake the core of this patriarchal rot, Jeremy Corbyn must uproot the foundations of the marketplace of morality on which liberal imperialism rests. He must queer the state.

Edit: the article was written in the early hours of Monday morning when reports emerged that Gloria De Piero had been appointed shadow Defence Secretary. Since then the shadow cabinet has been reworked with the position now going to Maria Eagle. The article has been edited accordingly.

* See specifically: R Westbrook, ’I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl That Married Harry James’: American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War II, American Quarterly (Dec., 1990)

I Don’t Want Your Paper Bag Test Solidarity: On Ferguson and Liberal Pacifism.

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Black mothers know well how to grieve dead children. We die, from curable diseases, from poverty, from police violence, in a world where skin tone determines our life chances. On Tuesday morning a Grand Jury in St Louis, Missouri, as expected, decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for murdering the unarmed teenager Michael Brown. Wilson joins a long line of white American officials who have taken black lives with impunity. In response, white liberals tweet #blacklivesmatter and profess their solidarity. All too often, this solidarity rings hollow.

The unspoken reality is that black bodies are necessarily threatening in this racial hierarchy, not just to avowed racists. Within hours of Michael Brown’s murder, the police released footage aiming to depict him as a criminal. The liberal media response was telling. Sympathetic outlets rushed to decry claims of his criminality, and a lengthy battle began over the dead teen’s image. The implicit assumption was that this mattered, that in order to render Mike a victim worth grieving, we had to see him as non-threatening.

That is a battle we can never win. When Mike knelt down with his hands up, Wilson reminded us that there is nothing we can do, no amount of subservience will absolve us of the sin of being black in a white world. Our existence as human is resistance to domination; having survived centuries of denigration and violence, we are still here. Enslaved and then impoverished, white society then blames us for the violence it unleashes in us.

So we get told simmer down, protest peacefully. These liberals sound so much like our oppressors because they are. Having professed their sympathy with black plight, they turn to law enforcement agencies to euthanise our rage. They arrive with guns to remind us that we are disposable. The mythology of African savagery has not yet escaped American popular consciousness – like the beast, we are to be caged or put down should we threaten social order. Theirs is the solidarity of the old paper bag test, when blackness was split into different shades of acceptability.

They police our expression and tell us it is for our own good, as if we need their advice about how to resist their privilege and power. They tell us to kneel down and bear the pain, as if these knees haven’t known enough gravel, as if the problem is that black mothers just don’t pray hard enough for their children. When people loot and riot, liberals demand from the powerless a nobility that has never been shown to us – Missouri’s Governor called for ‘peace, restraint and respect’ from Ferguson residents as Darren Wilson walked free having shown none of those virtues to Michael Brown. They ask us to be suicidal; as Oxford’s Professor Karma Nabulsi has put it, there are thousands of Ghandis in Palestine today, in graves and in prison cells.

Liberals ask us to play by the rules and cannot comprehend the hopelessness of people who would rather turn to violence; their experience tells them that American democracy is ultimately benevolent. If a good case is well presented, justice cannot be denied for long. Ferguson residents do not have the luxury of such naivety. They know too well that the same courtrooms we are told will give us justice once saw deeds to black bodies trade hands between slave-owners. We have nominal legal freedoms now, but they are useless when the state shows little will to protect us from the continued violence of white supremacy. Rioting is the only defence left for a community whose backs have been against the wall for centuries.

The liberal cannot understand this because, swimming in privilege, he cannot understand what it means to be dominated. Hence, as L.V. Gaither points out, acts like the murder of Michael Brown are so frequently dishonestly presented as “extreme” acts of racism in an otherwise healing society.

If it is radical to stand in defence of this skin then so be it. No matter where we are in the world we feel the repercussions of racial demarcation. We then are told to be quiet about it, to stop whining. Our self-defence is framed as beastly, as blind rage. They give us slavery, said wait for us to free you. They give us Jim Crow, said wait for affirmative action. They give us apartheid, then said swallow Truth and Reconciliation. We have been waiting to be human for too long. We refuse to keep going like lambs to the slaughter. If whether or not Michael Brown stole a box of cigarettes mattered to you; if you’re straining to hear from the ‘articulate’ peaceful protesters; if you think you’re reining our anger in for our own good, your paper bag test solidarity has no place in our struggle. Tell me liberals, what do we do when the wax is all burned out? What alternative do you offer to stargazing at liberation? You preach ‘peace’ to a people under attack. If your peace is without justice, it is just the calm before another storm.

(All are welcome to republish so long as you link to the original article)

The War Poet

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There is an urgency, and cynicism, in your disposition,

in the way palms cup – hips with

the weight of everything that was not us atop your shoulders.

 

It stays strange how slickened bodies rhyme

as though couplets; in some thoughtless or thoughtful sonnet

and yet still empty stays my love

and Cox, and Nesbitt, and Oliver

 

this Pacific shares your home, and Atlantic

and these palms could gain no purchase

in your day; my hour

and time is no gift for these fingertips

 

no, just flesh, sin, puckered lips –

such a gift of self-destruction

And falling apart by touch

these entangled souls.

 

and the days where these letters met silence

and the times when these cupped palms remained empty

and the hours between these dampened sheets;

and the immeasurable breaking of this ecstasy;

 

this vulgar love and loss

the keen imagination

the Sun in this lust

this knowledge that our love is borrowed.

 

And the story of our skin remains somebody else’s

and this exotic and slanted curve.

 

And that the names of these heroines still rhyme.