Contextualization of dissident feminisms
My thesis is that today, minoritized women including immigrants, transgender people, sex workers, lesbians, etc.—here I am referring to the title of by a text written by Luzenir Caixeta in 2011 (reprinted 2013) (*4), “Minoritized Women Effect a Transformation in Feminism” — are those who are making a transformation in and of feminism. My reference is to dissident movements within feminism that transform its white, heterosexual, essentialized perception (based on features that are seen as natural elements of a category called “woman”) into dissident feminisms (that is, feminism in plural!). Luzenir Caixeta, a philosopher and theologian who works at maiz. Autonomous Center of and for Migrant Women in Linz, Austria, on health prevention, counseling and education of migrant sex workers, states:
(I)n recent years, a number of authors have become well known around the world who are of the opinion that the new feminism must go much further beyond the old demands of white, Western and heterosexual middle-class women for legal equality. Attention should be given to the women who have always been marginalized, and the causes leading to differentiation based on class, ethnicity and gender should be opposed (Caixeta 2013: 146). (*4)
Even more, she straightforwardly subtitled a section in her aforementioned text, “Dissident Currents within Feminisms” and states that this section refers directly to the essay by the Spanish philosopher Beatriz Preciado, “Report after Feminism: Women on the Margins” (2007). (*7) Caixeta, in reference to Preciado, argues that in opposition to a past feminism that developed its political discourse based on the division “between men (as dominators) and women (as victims), modern feminism is developing new political concepts and strategies for action that call into question what has previously been regarded as generally true: namely that the political subject of feminism [was] women — meaning women in their predefined biological reality, but especially women according to a certain notion: white, heterosexual, submissive and from the middle class” (Caixeta 2013: 146) (*4). Therefore, the dissident demand in feminism asks for a process of radical differentiation. Beatriz Preciado asks for “feminisms for the excluded” (Preciado 2007, quoted after Caixeta 2013: 147 (*4)). Or, as s/he argues in the text “Pharmaco-Pornographic CapitalismPostporn Politics and the Decolonization of Sexual Representations,” these new feminisms for the excluded are “dissident projects for the collective transformation of the 21st century” (Preciado 2013: 251) (*8). Dissident feminisms stand in opposition “to a gray, normed and puritanical feminism, which sees in cultural, sexual or political distinctions a threat to its heterosexual and Eurocentric image of women” (Caixeta 2013: 147). (*4)
I emphasize that Preciado talks about the “proletariat of feminism” — a coinage that s/he uses in reference to the writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes — that includes all those “monstrous bodies” left out of puritan Western feminism. These are subjects such as “whores, lesbians, raped, butch, male and transgender women who are not white … in short, almost all of us” (Preciado 2013: 251). (*8) Preciado lists names and delineates a genealogy of positions that challenge the naturalness and universality of the feminine condition. I quote from Preciado’s text “Pharmaco-Pornographic CapitalismPostporn Politics and the Decolonization of Sexual Representations” in order to propose the genealogy of dissident feminisms:
The first of these shifts is in the hands of theoretical gay and lesbian theorists like Guy Hocquenghem, Michel Foucault, Monique Wittig, Michael Warner and Adrienne Rich, who define heterosexuality as a political regime and a control device that makes the difference between men and women and transforms the resistance to gender standardization into pathology. Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam insist on the processes of cultural significance and stylization of the body through which the normalization of differences between the genders is effectuated, while Donna Haraway and Anne Fausto-Sterling bring into question the existence of two sexes as biological realities, regardless of the scientific-technical processes representation is constructed with. Moreover, along with the processes of emancipation of blacks in the United States and the decolonization of the so-called “Third World,” the voices of criticism are also raised against the racist assumptions of colonial and white feminism. We have become empowered with projects and thoughts by Angela Davis, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa and Gayatri Spivak, and black feminist, postcolonial, postChristian, postJewish, postMuslim projects, or those from the Diaspora that will require thinking gender in its constitutive relation to the geopolitical differences of race, class, sexuality, migration and human trafficking (Preciado 2013: 251). (*8)
Marina Gržinić ( 2014): Dissident feminisms, anti-racist politics and artistic interventionist practices. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 04 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/dissident-feminisms-anti-racist-politics-and-artistic-interventionist-practices/