Liberal feminism is, by and large, also a carceral feminism: wedded to the idea that the only way to protect and preserve the rights of women is to turn to the prison–industrial complex as the final enforcer of gender justice.
I’m really proud to have been included in The Baffler’s first newly redesigned issue. You can read an interview with Lindsay Ballant, the quarterly’s art director, about the process. She mentions the fantastic artwork by Sarah King that accompanied my piece.
An excerpt:
The discourse of rights, the sort so often raised by Clinton and her fellow liberal feminists, lays out a fictitious claim to “equality.” (On National Coming Out Day, to take just one recent example, Clinton tweeted that “every single American deserves full equality under our laws—no matter who you are or who you love.” She then offered up a quotation from an op-ed she wrote for Orlando’s LGBT paper after the Pulse nightclub shootings, “I’ll never stop fighting for your right to live freely, openly, and without fear,” neatly sidestepping the inconvenient truth that she had starting fighting in earnest for that right only around 2012, when opinion polls started tilting in favor of gay marriage.) Over the years, Clinton succeeded in amalgamating her claim to be a feminist with her claim to be a gay ally. She wasn’t wrong in either case, but the questions need to be asked: Which feminism? And whose rights?
You can read the rest here. Contact me for a pdf if you can’t access it.
Image: Tim Pierce.
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