r/fourthwavewomen

We need to talk about the total collapse of structural analysis in modern progressive spaces. Over the last few decades, a deeply disconnected academic drift has colonized social justice movements. Borrowing heavily from post-structuralist and neoliberal frameworks, it has replaced decades of rigorous sociology on socialization and material structures with a superficial cult of absolute individual "choice" and subjective "identity."

First of all, by decreeing that any individual action is inherently liberating the second someone "chooses" it, this ideology has effectively erased the very concepts of conditioning, brainwashing, and systemic oppression.

For decades, materialist and radical feminists (from Simone de Beauvoir to Christine Delphy) painstakingly demonstrated how women are socialized from birth into submissive roles. They proved that patriarchal norms are deeply internalized, enforced things like the sexual division of labor and strict aesthetic boundaries.

The post-structuralist "choice" ideology has completely undone this work. Today, the dominant academic narrative claims that wearing ultra-stereotyped makeup, high heels, or participating in industries built entirely on the commodification of the female body are acts of "individual empowerment", solely because a woman says she chose to do it.

it treats human beings as entirely detached, autonomous actors who make decisions in a vacuum, completely ignoring the massive weight of marketing, social punishment, and childhood conditioning.

It turns feminism into a consumer choice. Instead of fighting to dismantle the patriarchal structures that impose these standardizations, it asks women to manage their own alienation like a capital asset. If you are merely "choosing" your oppression, then there is no longer a collective enemy, there is only a market of identities.

Since post-structuralism and neoliberalism put so much emphasis on individual identities and the nuances within individual identities, rather than on the idea of building coalitions around the fact that the majority of a given group’s interests are shared, they have undermined part of what feminist sisterhood used to mean. Women and feminists have been divided, compared, and pitted against one another, and intersectionality has turned into a sort of competition over who is the most oppressed, rather than a tool for better understanding different forms of oppression and how they intersect.

Anyway, my other posts on the sub have already talked at length about how sexism has been pushed to the bottom of the list of oppressions considered important, worthy of analysis, protest, or outrage. This is largely because men are the leaders of other social movements, while those other movements are supposedly gender-neutral by definition, whereas the leaders of feminism are women — and therefore are taken less seriously, listened to less, and so on.

The consequence is that this ends up killing any possibility of alliances, solidary and empathy between women of different races, classes, and sexual orientations in the bud, in favor of an extreme solidarity with men who share the same race, class, and sexual orientation, even when there is sexist or sexual violence, misogyny, or the outright exclusion of women’s demands. You can see this, for example, in the granting of voting rights to Black men in 1870, which explicitly, deliberately, and knowingly excluded Black women.

r/fourthwavewomen

If a man wants you in a ball gag .. girl, RUN.

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