By Felicity Adams
Above all else, we must overcome exclusionary feminisms that merely seek a share in existing power structures that embody the dialectics of colonialism and reproduce the status quo. As Audre Lorde says “the failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower”. This means that rather than assimilating with regulatory systems and institutions, such as the police that aim to divide us, we must unite and join the real struggle against these regulatory, imperial-capitalist forces that harm us all. It requires that we also look reflexively at the history of the gender binary and understand this system as what Che Gosset describes as: “part of the carceral continuum“. Fundamentally, it means that we must embrace the complex and intersectional nature of these struggles to change the systemic inequalities at the heart of capitalism. That is of course if we are truly committed to achieving the liberation of all people.
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With thanks to En-Gender for permission to publish the piece.
About the author
Felicity (Flick) is a PhD candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) at the School of Law, Keele University, England. Flick is funded by an in faculty GTA Studentship. Flick’s PhD project undertakes a queer-feminist abolitionist critique of penal governance and prison law to explore how transgender women constitute and are constituted by the penal system in the UK. Flick’s PhD research interests include: gender, incarceration and criminalisation, prison abolition and anti-carceral approaches, penal governance and prison law, and abolition feminism and queer theory.
Photo credit to Life Matters from Pexels
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