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Innocent Subjects Innocent Subjects Feminism and Whiteness Terese Jonsson First published 2021 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Terese Jonsson 2021 The right of Terese Jonsson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3751 7 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3750 0 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7868 0342 9 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0344 3 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0343 6 EPUB eBook Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Contents Acknowledgements vi 1. ‘That Old Chestnut’: Feminism and Racism 1 2. British Feminisms in the Aftermath of Empire 32 3. Leaving Feminist Whiteness Behind: Narratives of Transcendence in the Era of Difference 66 4. Inevitable Whiteness? Absolving White Feminist Dominance 97 5. Liberal Whiteness and the ‘New’ Feminism 126 6. Feminist Complicities 159 Notes 183 Index 217 v Acknowledgements My thinking and writing is fundamentally indebted to the work of the many Black feminists and feminists of colour which I draw on in this book. I want to thank and acknowledge all those who have been doing the often unrewarding and emotionally draining work of challenging and critiquing racism and whiteness within feminist theorising, politics and communities for a long time. Throughout the process of research and writing, I have been incredibly lucky to have shared learning, friendship, support, despair and laughs with a number of amazing feminist thinkers and doers. Andrea D’Cruz, Anna Bull, rashné limki, Dyi Huijg, Naaz Rashid and Sarah Keenan have not only informed my thinking through their incisive and generous feedback on various versions of different chapters, but have also been great friends and colleagues. Ongoing conversations and collaborative scheming with Humaira Saeed have been central to the development of my ideas and analysis. Rashida Harrison’s knowledge and shared enthusiasm for exploring the archives of Outwrite Women’s Newspaper benefited my thinking about the paper’s political signifi- cance. Anna Feigenbaum and other members of the Feminist Activist Forum’s ‘DIY feminist history group’ also informed my perspective on Outwrite’s legacy for contemporary feminists. Conversations with Nydia Swaby enriched my understanding of the histories of Black British feminism. My analysis has also been influenced by conversations which started at the ‘Feminist Complicities’ meeting in 2015 and continued from there, including in particular with Nadine El-Enany (in addition to people already mentioned above). Throughout the journey of my PhD and then writing this book, I have benefited from and appre- ciated intellectual and political discussions with members of the Gender and Sexuality PhD forum at London Metropolitan University, the ‘Race’, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies (REPS) postgraduate network, the ‘Critical Edges’ organising group and event in 2019, the Citizenship, Race and Belonging (CRaB) research network, the Critical Pedagogies reading group, and the feminist reading group, the latter three all at the vi acknowledgements University of Portsmouth. I want to thank my students at Portsmouth for inspiration, in particular those who engaged with openness and thoughtfulness in conversations on my Equality or Liberation? The- orising Social Justice module. A number of colleagues at Portsmouth deserve mention for their kindness and care in the midst of a sector which encourages the opposite, in particular Joseph Burridge, Emily Nicholls, Naheem Jabbar, Sukh Hamilton and Rusten Menard. This book grew out of my PhD research which I completed in 2015. My supervisor, Irene Gedalof, helped me, with great care and patience, shape and carry out the research. I would like to acknowledge and thank my thesis examiners, Sara Ahmed and Sunny Singh, for their critical engagement with my work, which gave me ideas for how it could be developed. I also want to thank my MA dissertation supervisor Nirmal Puwar, who influenced my thinking and direction of scholarly travel during my MA in Gender, Culture and Modernity at Goldsmiths College in 2004–05. Both the PhD and the book were a long time coming and there were times when it was doubtful that either were going to come at all. Many friends, older as well as newer, have provided steadfast encouragement, laughs and reality checks when I needed them. In particular, I want to thank Denise and Jackie Hales, Sam Stewart, Dan McMahon, Johanna Novales, Soley Mustafa, Yula Burin, Sarah James, Leslie Barson, Sian Fletcher and everyone at Otherwise Living. I am grateful for David Shulman’s support for my work and incredible patience in seeing this book through to completion and I would like to thank him and everyone else at Pluto Press. I also extend my sincere thanks to the anonymous reviewers of the initial proposal and chapter, whose comments were incredibly helpful in refining and clarifying my arguments and the ways in which I communicate them. My dad, Kurt Jonsson, passed away as I was writing this book, in March 2018. It is difficult to succinctly summarise the influence he had and continues to have on my life and my work, but I am particularly thankful to him for teaching me to think critically, to ask questions and to believe that things can be changed (even though we did not always agree on what questions need to be asked or what needs to change). I am grateful to my mum, Gunilla Jonsson, and my sister, Linda Forsberg, who have both been consistently supportive of me and my various endeavours and winding paths, and who continue to be an important vii innocent subjects: feminism and whiteness part of ‘home’ for me. Thank you to Natasha, without whose deep care, support and patience I would not be where I am today, and this book would certainly not have been completed. I also want to thank the Parker-Campbell-Hinton family for their generosity and openness. Special thanks go to my niece, Amiyah, and my nephew, Alex, for all the joy and creativity they bring into my life. Finally, I do not have the words nor the space to fully describe the influence Lani Parker has had on me as a person and on my work. I can only thank her for her unwavering encouragement and love, her close attention to and feedback on various drafts of chapters, and for always challenging me to think deeper and act braver. All royalty payments I receive for this book will be redistributed to the Resourcing Racial Justice fund (http://resourcingracialjustice.org/) and anti-racist feminist projects. * * * Some material in Chapter 3 has previously been published in article form, as ‘The narrative reproduction of white feminist racism’, in Feminist Review, 113 (2016). viii 1 ‘That Old Chestnut’: Feminism and Racism In a letter published in Spare Rib in December 1980, reproductive rights activist Jan McKenley writes of her frustration that most white feminists around her seem to have stopped caring about racism: I’m beginning to feel invisible again within the WLM [women’s liberation movement], having to work myself up to making ‘heavy’ statements that will embarrass sisters in meetings – I can see the eyebrows going up already – ‘Not racism – that old chestnut again – it’s so boring.’ Well, if it’s boring for you, white sister .... I’ve got no monopoly on dealing with racism – it’s your problem too.1 Noting that the topic had been ‘trendy’ a year or two prior, McKenley describes being ‘left feeling that racism was “last year’s thing”’, urging her white ‘sisters’ to take out ‘the 1978 file’ again in order to remind themselves of the anti-racist arguments they should already know but appear to have forgotten. ‘And if you don’t take that file off the shelf, I hope it falls on your bloody head, so don’t say you haven’t been warned!’ the letter ends. Fast forward 37 years. In her 2017 book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, writer Reni Eddo-Lodge discusses recent feminist debates on social media and in the liberal press, highlighting how racism continues to ‘cause immovable fault lines in the movement’. ‘Too often’, she continues, ‘a white feminist’s ideological standpoint does not see racism as a problem, let alone a priority’. Drawing attention to the long history of Black feminist critiques of white feminism, Eddo- Lodge questions why, if white feminists ‘can understand the patriarchy’, they ‘struggle to understand whiteness as a political structure in the same way’.2 1