Alison Phipps's Blog, page 3

Writing your introduction and conclusion

One of the most difficult things to do in drafting any piece of writing (but especially a thesis or dissertation) is the introduction and conclusion. Students often try to tackle the introduction first; I usually advise them to write both the introduction and conclusion last, because they both have a summative function. I also advise students to write them together, because they function as ‘mirror images’ of one another. Here are a few tips I share with my students – I hope you find them useful.

Introduction

The main purpose of an introduction is to ease your reader into your topic, giving enough of a sense of what is to come later in the dissertation without getting too deeply into the issues. This can be a difficult needle to thread and there are no ‘right’ ways to do it – it is a process of drafting and redrafting, and moving things around, until you feel it works.

Generally, your introduction should:

Clarify the focus of your study. What exactly did you research, and what did you want to find out? Introduce your research questions and briefly explain why you are asking these questions and not others (you will cover this in more detail in your literature review). Put your research in context. Why was it worth doing? What gap(s) in our knowledge about your topic did it address, and why are they important? (again though, you will cover this in more detail in your literature review). Did it have broader social or policy relevance as well as its academic contribution?Give other contextualising information. What time period and geographical area(s) did your research cover? What population(s)? Briefly summarise your methodology. What was your methodological framework? What data did you collect and how did you collect it? How was it analysed? (you will cover this in full in your methodology).Briefly provide any background information your readers might need, and clarify any key terms that might need to be understood before your readers move on to your literature review and/or theory (assume an educated non-specialist).Give an overview of the structure of your dissertation – what will each of the chapters cover and how do they link together?

These sections can be presented in the sequence you prefer – see how it flows for you – it will be different for different topics and projects.

Conclusion

The main purpose of a conclusion is to connect the beginning of your project with the end. Conclusions are often written perfunctorily and in a hurry, which is a big mistake – this is your opportunity to make the most of your findings and to state very clearly why your research is important. In terms of marking, an interesting and clear conclusion can make up for a multitude of sins (poor structure, vague argument for example) in the write-up of your data. It is the last thing your marker will leave, so try to leave them feeling positive about your work.

Generally, your conclusion should:

Briefly restate your main findings and the arguments you have derived from your data. Remember here that you do not need to have all the answers – in fact, it’s useful to leave a few loose ends and open questions for the reader to ruminate on afterwards. Go back to your research questions – this is something that students often fail to do! And it’s especially important if you have had trouble structuring your data analysis. Remember what you wanted to find out in the first place – have you answered your questions? Also, remember that if your data did not answer your questions that is not a problem – it’s likely that it answered questions that were much more interesting instead. The conclusion is an opportunity to reflect on why that might have been the case. If your data did not answer your initial research questions then now is the time to move on from them and talk about all the other things you found out that were much more important. Say how your research has contributed to knowledge about your topic. Has it filled a gap in the academic literature and how? How might scholars be able to use it in future? Does it have broader social or policy implications and what are they? If it does have policy implications you may want to make some recommendations, but this is more relevant to some dissertations than others and it is not necessary if not appropriate. The same with recommendations for future research – if your project has raised some burning additional questions that should be investigated you can spend some time reflecting on this, but don’t recommend further research for the sake of it. Explore any limitations of your project and how you might do things differently next time. Would you use a different theory? Would you conduct your research any differently and why? Remember that being aware of your project’s limitations is a strength and not a weakness this doesn’t mean you have to trash your own work but I would certainly encourage you to be reflexive and humble about it.

Again, these sections can be presented in the order you prefer – experiment and see what works – although if your final section covers your project’s limitations I would add an additional short paragraph rounding everything off and saying a few final words about your topic and your project, to leave your reader with something positive. The last few lines of your dissertation are likely to be the ones they remember most!

White feminism and the racial capitalist protection racket: from #MeToo to Me, Not You

Originally published on the Manchester University Press blog

On May 25th 2020, Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, an act that precipitated a powerful wave of Black Lives Matter protests across the world. May 25th 2020 was also the day Amy Cooper (a white woman) called the police on birdwatcher Christian Cooper (a Black man, no relation) because he asked her to leash her dog in Central Park. Her use of the phrase ‘there’s an African-American man threatening my life’ was a threat to get Christian Cooper killed by a cop.

These incidents are linked by more than just a moment in time. White women are deeply, and often deliberately, complicit with white supremacist violence, and our complicity usually takes the form of victimhood that appeals to the punitive power of the state. And although her allegation against Christian Cooper was false, Amy Cooper has something in common with mainstream feminist movements that coalesce around genuine victimisation and trauma, such as the recent viral iteration of #MeToo. The focus of these movements tends to be naming and shaming perpetrators and calling for institutional discipline or criminal punishment to get these ‘bad men.’

My book Me, Not You describes the political dynamics of mainstream white feminism in the core Anglosphere and parts of Europe. It makes a difficult and uncomfortable argument: that this movement, exemplified by #MeToo, not only centres bourgeois white women but also treats other groups as disposable. This is not just about inclusion and representation, but about the ideologies and attachments that undergird our politics; it is not primarily about individuals, but about the systems and structures that shape our world.

In March 2021, marketing executive Sarah Everard was allegedly murdered by a serving Metropolitan Police officer after disappearing from London’s Clapham Common. The previous June, members of the same police force were suspended for taking selfies with the bodies of murdered sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry in a different London park. A vigil for these three women, and almost 200 others who have died in police custody or prison in England and Wales, was subsequently led by feminist group Sisters Uncut and violently broken up by police. Yet mainstream demands following Everard’s murder promised more power to the carceral system – calls for the criminalisation of street harassment and for misogyny to become a hate crime.

The demands themselves were unsurprising, but that such carceral feminism persists even after a white woman has allegedly been murdered by a cop shows how deeply mainstream feminism is mired in white supremacy. We are happy to say ‘Black Lives Matter’, but we do not put our own interests on the line and act with an understanding of exactly what police and prisons are for. Abolitionist thinking tells us that carceral systems preserve state and elite interests, protect private property and resources, dispose of economically surplus populations, and ultimately ensure that racial capitalism functions unabated. While we say, ‘Black Lives Matter’, we legitimate the very systems that demand, and deliver, Black demise.

White women’s experiences of sexual violence enter a world in which ‘protecting white womanhood’ is really about protecting racial capitalism and white supremacy. Because of this, we claim protection that has always been predicated on Black death and the deaths of other marginalised people. Furthermore, although bourgeois white women are not usually subject to state violence, the same white men who purport to protect us from the Others do reserve the right to abuse and kill us themselves.

This is true of Sarah Everard’s alleged murderer, and countless other law enforcement officers worldwide who have harmed girls and women. It is also true of the far-right politicians who profess concern for ‘women’s safety’ in their campaigns against immigrants and trans people, while harassing and assaulting the women they know. This is the patriarchal protection racket writ large – the threat of stranger rape that makes women seek safety with our male partners and family members, who are actually more likely to abuse us. At systemic levels, this protection racket mainly targets class-privileged white women. And it is fundamental to the preservation of racial capitalism.

Acts and threats of sexual violence impose bourgeois binary gender and facilitate the free and low-cost social reproduction capitalism depends on. Sexual violence keeps women in our place, and punishes anyone who does not conform to dominant gender and sexual norms. Acts and threats of sexual violence also support historical and ongoing colonial systems in which commercial and caring labour is extracted from Black and other racialised communities for little or no reward. Rape is a practice of terror used to subjugate colonised, displaced and dispossessed populations in war, occupation, settlement, enslavement and theft (including their neo-colonial forms).

At the same time, the pretext of ‘protecting (white) women’ constructs communities, cultures and nations as violent to justify colonisation, border regimes and military-industrial projects, and to dispose of unwanted populations. Black feminist historians have exposed the widespread brutalisation and killing of Black, enslaved and other racialised and colonised men in response to allegations made by or on behalf of white women. The spectre of sexual danger is still deployed to vilify, abuse and kill Black men and other men of colour, and to construct queer and trans people as threats and make it impossible for us to survive. It facilitates the demonisation and deportation of migrants, the invasion of countries, and the ‘putting away’ of racialised and classed groups deemed surplus to capitalist requirements.

In all these ways, sexual violence is a pivot for the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism. The acts and threats that keep us afraid, that make us docile subjects of capitalism, also drive us into the arms of the carceral-colonial state and enable many other kinds of violence in the service of capitalist accumulation. By pulling the levers of carceral systems, white feminism is a willing participant in this racial capitalist protection racket. In the process, it trades freedom for the illusion of safety and treats more marginalised groups as disposable. This is how #MeToo often ends up becoming Me, Not You.

A letter to ‘gender-critical’ feminists

I know you despise me. I know some of you spend a lot of time talking and thinking about me and my work. I know you think my work is ‘anti woman’ and some of you genuinely experience it as profoundly hurtful. I don’t mean to hurt anyone and I am sorry to cause you pain. 

There is so much hurt and pain around. Social media is full of it, everywhere we look. I know a lot of you have been hurt – and hurt very badly – by violent men. Your pain is palpable, and so is your rage. I share it. I hate that you have been hurt. I am enraged for you. 

I know that when I talk about what mainstream feminist activism against sexual violence does in the world, you hear particular things. I am concerned about how some voices are heard above others, and how women’s pain is used by bad actors to do bad things. But what you hear is that your pain doesn’t matter. What you hear is that you should keep quiet and play nice. Please believe me when I say that is not what I mean at all. 

I am a white, middle class, cis woman. I have a lot of advantages. I have also survived multiple forms of abuse and live with the effects of this every day. The advantages I have mean I have access to resources and my pain has a chance of being heard. They mean that if I had gone to the police I might – might – have been taken seriously. What they don’t mean is that I haven’t suffered – and that is also true for you. Your suffering is valid. 

This is not a zero-sum game. Intersectionality means that oppression and advantage can exist simultaneously – it doesn’t mean that one cancels the other out. I know that when people talk about ‘privilege’, you feel it erases your pain. It doesn’t. 

I am concerned about the ways ‘speaking out’ can become ‘speaking over’ when power and advantage are not taken into account. I am concerned about the ways mainstream feminism tends to pull the levers of existing systems instead of trying to build alternatives. This is not a critique of individual survivors. I want survivors – like you and me – to have better options than criminal punishment, media exposure, or silence. I also want our anger to be directed at the right targets.  

We face the same enemy. There is a war on women worldwide being perpetrated by violent men, in the everyday and in the corridors of power. It seeks to put women back in our place – it violently reasserts traditional patriarchal gender. This war targets anyone who doesn’t conform – trans and gender nonconforming people are very much in its sights too. We face the same enemy. And once trans rights have been rolled back, LGB rights and women’s rights will undoubtedly be next. 

I am worried when ‘gender-critical’ feminists ally themselves with powerful white men who purport to protect them from trans people. These men who are so concerned with ‘women’s protection’ also expect to be able to abuse women with impunity themselves. We are their property – to be used and abused at will, and defended violently from ‘the others.’ These men both wage the war on women, and use its victims to wage war on other groups and conceal themselves as the true threat. This is nothing more than a protection racket and I want us all to see it for what it is, and join forces against it. 

I realise I am not in control of how you will read this. I am not going to get involved in any reaction on social media – it isn’t good for me, and I don’t think it can be good for you either. This ‘debate’ has become so toxic that I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind. But I hope you try to read this letter in the spirit in which it’s intended, and reflect on it if you can. As a woman and a survivor I stand with and by you. But I cannot stand back while you direct your rage at entirely the wrong target. We are all in this together and I want us to fight our common enemy.

Thank you for reading,

New Books Network interview

My book Me, Not You is ‘book of the day’ on the New Books Network, and they have just released a podcast interview I did with the lovely Jana Byars. Listen here and please do share widely. As a matter of fact, I am taking a break from Twitter at present for self-care reasons, so if any of you are able to tweet the link I’d be really grateful

New paper ‘White tears, white rage’

I have a new paper out in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, called ‘White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism’. It is available freely, fully open-access – click here to read it. The abstract is below.

Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears. This in turn depends on the dehumanisation of people of colour, who were constructed in colonial ‘race science’ as incapable of complex feeling (Schuller, 2018). Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people. Such feminisms exemplify what I call ‘political whiteness’, which centres assertions of victimhood: through these, womanhood (and personhood) is claimed to the exclusion of the enemy. Through legitimating criminal punishment and border policing and dehumanising marginalised Others, claims to victimhood in mainstream feminism often end up strengthening the intersecting violence of racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy.

Tackling sexual harassment and violence in universities: seven lessons from the UK

This is the text of an online keynote I gave, hosted by the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California and the Freie Universität Berlin, on February 5th 2020. It was the last in a series of sessions on sexual harassment and violence in universities; when I was invited to speak, I was honoured but also concerned about what I could offer as a UK-based academic whose work on sexual violence has been focused on universities in my home country. My work started in 2006 with a pilot study at my own institution, and since then I have been involved in a number of research and intervention projects, collectives and campaigns. I thought it would be useful if I tried to distil what I have learned over the past fifteen years for fellow scholars, activists and organisers in other contexts and countries. So here are seven lessons from the UK: I hope some of them will resonate and perhaps help others avoid the mistakes I have made. In fifteen years my work has been characterised more by failure than success: but along the way I have at least learned to fail better.

My first lesson is: name the problem.

Sara Ahmed has written: ‘When we put a name to a problem, we are doing something.’ This doing, in her words, is ‘gathering up what otherwise remain scattered experiences into a tangible thing.’ This gathering up, this making tangible, can allow the thing to be addressed. As James Baldwin famously said: ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’ It was the UK student movement that made us face the issue of sexual harassment and violence in our universities: in the early 2010s, some amazing young feminists persistently named and worked to address it. I want to acknowledge, amongst others, Kelley Temple, Susuana Amoah and Hareem Ghani, who were all Women’s Officers of the National Union of Students (NUS).

The first national study of sexual harassment and violence against students was published by NUS in 2010. Called Hidden Marks, this was a survey of over two thousand self-identified women students across all four UK nations. One in seven had experienced a serious physical or sexual assault; 68 per cent had been sexually harassed. I worked with NUS on the research, and shortly after the report’s release they commissioned me, with Isabel Young, to research ‘lad culture’ in universities and how that framed sexual harassment and violence.

Isabel and I recruited forty women studying in England and Scotland, for focus groups and interviews. Our participants were very clear on what ‘lad culture’ was: a group dynamic enacted by young men in team sports and on the social scene, characterised by misogynist and homophobic ‘banter’. This ‘banter’ often involved rape jokes and sexual harassment and had the potential to escalate into more extreme forms of sexual violence. Our report, entitled That’s What She Said, theorised ‘lad culture’ as a conducive context for sexual violence. It was launched on International Women’s Day 2013.

That’s What She Said entered a climate in which women were ready to snap. For Ahmed, ‘feminist snap’ occurs when our experiences of negotiating worlds that demean and exclude us become overwhelming. The report prompted an outpouring – in feminist groups, students’ unions, classrooms, faculty offices and on social media – from women who had had enough. And as Ahmed says, moments of ‘snap’ can be catalysts for change. In the movement that emerged around ‘lad culture’ we raised awareness, created training, and developed partnerships with local support services. We used the media to ‘name and shame’ perpetrators and the institutions that enabled them. We lobbied university leaders for a better response. By 2015, this had prompted the formation of a task force by Universities UK (the body that represents UK university leaders) on violence against women, harassment and hate crime.

The taskforce report, released a year later, recommended that all institutions adopt centralised reporting procedures, develop effective disclosure responses, and run training programmes. Afterwards, the Higher Education Funding Council for England made £4.7 million pounds available for projects addressing sexual harassment and hate crime on campus, which supported institutional initiatives across the country. There was also further data-gathering: in 2018, NUS and the 1752 group (the UK’s first lobby group on staff-student sexual misconduct) conducted a study with almost two thousand current and former students, and found that 40 per cent had experienced at least one instance of sexualised behaviour from university staff.

In 2019, three years after the taskforce report, Universities UK circulated the results of a progress review of 95 institutions across all four UK nations. It found that 87 per cent had a working group on sexual harassment, violence and/or hate crime and 76 per cent had secured senior leadership buy-in. 81 per cent had delivered training, and 78 per cent had developed or improved reporting mechanisms. Crucially, it found there had been an increase in reported incidents and ‘a profound change in the initiatives and ideas that are now available for sharing across the sector’. It concluded that ‘over time, this will help facilitate cultural change at both institutional and sector level’.

The activist movement against ‘lad culture’ and sexual violence in UK universities had succeeded in naming the problem and getting institutions to face it. Yet despite this huge achievement, I was circumspect. Institutional actions had mainly consisted of policy compliance and getting rid of ‘bad apples’ using disciplinary procedures. The movement, despite the input of a number of women of colour, was dominated by fellow white women who seemed happy to accept or even encourage this approach. But sexual harassment and violence are not a disease infecting particular ‘bad apples’ – they sit deep within the tangle of roots that nourishes the whole rotten tree.

This leads me to my second lesson: don’t individualise the issue.

Sexual violence is about systems. To understand it we have to think big: I theorise it as a pivot for heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and its colonial extensions. It works at the level of the nation, the state, the community and the household; it allows for the extraction of socially reproductive and hyper-exploited productive labour; it facilitates the expropriation of land and resources. It enters the world via four vectors – threats, acts, allegations, and punishment – and these must be considered together if we are to understand why sexual violence occurs and how to stop it.

Acts and threats of sexual violence impose bourgeois binary gender and facilitate the free and low-cost social reproduction capitalism depends on. They keep women in our place and enable men’s domestic power over us. They punish people who do not conform to dominant gender and sexual norms. They support historical and ongoing colonial systems in which economic and caring labour is extracted from Black and other racialised communities for little or no reward. Rape has been used to terrorise and subjugate colonised, displaced and dispossessed populations in war, occupation, settlement, enslavement and theft (including their neo-colonial forms).

Allegations and punishment of sexual violence have achieved the same ends. Black and other racialised and colonised men have been brutalised and killed following accusations made by white women. Sexual violence is used as a political device to construct populations, cultures and nations as dangerous, to justify border regimes and military-industrial projects. The spectre of sexual danger can be deployed to demonise and deport migrants, and to funnel racialised and classed populations into the criminal punishment system. It can also be brandished to construct queer and trans people as a threat.

Sexual violence in the university performs all these functions, at a smaller scale. Sexual harassment and assault are used to demean and dominate, to make students and staff (usually women) unwelcome, to keep us under control, and to express and maintain supremacy. In UK student communities, there is evidence that ‘lad culture’ and its attendant sexual violence is the preserve of middle- and upper-class white men who see successful young women as a threat. Sexual harassment of students by staff usually involves senior male academics (the majority of whom are white) expressing their entitlement and abusing their power. As well as women, gender-nonconforming students are at high risk of violence, and being marginalised by race, class and/or disability creates additional vulnerabilities.

Acts and threats of sexual violence reserve and shape the space of the university for privileged white men (and some white women, too). They articulate and preserve the power relations of the institution and the wider world. And in universities, as in the wider world, certain groups are constructed as more sexually violent than others. There is anecdotal evidence that queer academics, especially those who are also Black, are more likely to be accused of sexual misconduct. A recent report described how anti-radicalisation agendas in UK higher education construct Muslim men as particularly misogynistic. The institution is not neutral when it comes to addressing sexual violence.

My third lesson is: know the institution.

As with sexual violence, when considering the institution, it is necessary to think big. I draw on abolitionist university studies, which understands education as key to the capitalist, colonial, modern world-making project. Eli Meyerhoff theorises education as a mode of primitive accumulation, which creates the preconditions for racial capitalism through hoarding the means of study and using them to credentialise us for stratified economic roles. It inculcates us into ways of knowing and learning that reflect capitalist norms and practices: separate public and private spheres, the rational and consuming individual, and colonial dichotomies between culture and nature, modernity and tradition, value and waste. We become ‘competent’ in the knowledges of the state and status quo, and other forms of world-making are cast as deprived and less evolved.

Higher education has shaped nationalism, patriotism, citizenship, democracy and ‘civilisation’. Anthropology, economics, demography, sociology, psychology and criminology have rationalised exclusion and exploitation. UK universities are deeply embedded in state capitalist violence, including post-9/11 counter-terrorism regimes through which academics become border guards. They are also places where student protest is violently repressed. As economic actors themselves, universities are central to flows of dispossession and accumulation. They have been built upon indigenous and/or enclosed common lands and enriched by transatlantic slavery. They are now entrenched in the neoliberal rationalities and practices of privatisation, outsourcing, downsizing and precarity, and are subject to, and have, complex financial interests (including in the military-industrial complex).

During COVID-19 in England, the moral bankruptcy of our higher education system was starkly exposed. Our increasingly privatised universities lured students to campuses with promises of ‘Covid-safe’ teaching, to collect fees and rents. Students were blamed and punished as the virus inevitably spread, then told they could not return home and trapped in infection hotspots by fences and cops. There was horror and condemnation of university leaders as this situation progressed. People who perhaps did not know before, realised exactly what the institution is. But this institution is what white feminists have looked to, to protect us from sexual violence. How can the institution protect us from violence, when the institution is violence? The university cannot not save us – it is what Audre Lorde would call the master’s house.

So, my fourth lesson is: put down the master’s tools.

Activists against sexual violence in UK universities have mostly made gains in policy. In response to our lobbying, institutions have made written commitments, amended discipline processes, revised reporting procedures and commissioned training. We have worked hard for these successes and have done well to achieve them. But policy machinery constructs the institution as benign and able to be worked on, concealing the violence built into its very existence. Contemporary UK policy work also tends to be undertaken within neoliberal systems of measurement, monitoring and audit that generate surplus value for the university. This creates an emphasis on maintaining the appearance of a functional institution, not worrying about the reality.

This is what Ahmed terms ‘institutional polishing’ – initiatives ostensibly about equality, that are actually about little more than generating a marketable image. These initiatives are what she calls ‘non-performative’ – they do not produce the effects they name but substitute for them instead. A non-performative is seen as doing something, when in fact it allows institutions not to do anything else. A report produced in response to an issue, which is then used to declare that the issue has been addressed. A policy which is created and publicised, but ultimately not followed because just having the policy is what counts. In the UK, it has become important for institutions to look like they are doing something about sexual harassment and violence. But looking like and doing are not necessarily the same thing – in fact, sometimes the first allows us to escape the second. Policy is very often one of the master’s tools.

Institutional polishing can also turn into institutional airbrushing when problems emerge. ‘Naming and shaming’ perpetrators has been another key strategy of the mainstream movement against sexual violence, and it is powerful because it threatens to mar the institution’s polished image. But the key word here is ‘image’ – the impact of the disclosure on the surplus value of the institution is more troubling than the disclosure itself. Communities often close ranks around sexual violence perpetrators. But in universities (which present themselves as communities but are actually corporations), the financial impact of disclosure must also be projected and totted up. For something to be marketable it must be unblemished, so the problem is airbrushed out.

What I call institutional airbrushing takes two main forms: concealment and erasure. Either issues are minimised, denied or hidden and survivors encouraged to settle matters quietly, or when this is not possible, the perpetrator is ‘airbrushed’ from the institution and it is made to appear as if they were never there. Confidentiality or non-disclosure agreements are often used, or financial settlements given to perpetrators to convince them to resign. Institutional airbrushing stabilises the system; it communicates and embeds the idea that all the institution needs to do is to remove the ‘bad’ individual. After the blemish is airbrushed out, the malaise that produced it remains. And after the blemish is airbrushed out, it has a tendency to reappear elsewhere. ‘Bad apples’ can always re-attach themselves to a different rotten tree. This is called ‘pass the harasser’ and it is a significant problem in UK higher education.

I am not saying that people who perpetrate sexual violence have a right to keep their jobs. I also know that not excluding a perpetrator from an institution can be a de facto exclusion of survivors. But I am concerned that, like capitalism itself, institutional airbrushing moves problems around rather than addressing them. I am also concerned that ultimately, we may outsource our perpetrators to women in lower-status, lower-paid economic sectors. Although ‘naming and shaming’ can be a form of direct action when other avenues are closed, it more often triggers institutional airbrushing than genuine institutional change. Institutional airbrushing is one of the master’s tools: it does not prioritise the personal interests of survivors but the financial interests of the institution. And when done in the corporate media, ‘naming and shaming’ can also be co-opted in the service of the bottom line.

This brings me to my fifth lesson: don’t mistake outrage for justice.

In the corporate media, trauma is big business. The phrases ‘disaster porn’ and ‘tragedy porn’ have been coined to describe our fascination with the troubles of others, which creates a market for the consumption of pain: photographs of drowned migrants on European beaches, stories of sexual assault in Hollywood, and videos of Black people being brutalised and killed by police. This material, usually fed to us online via ‘clickbait’, gives a quick fix of sympathy and outrage but does not often lead to systemic analysis or radical political action. Instead, it objectifies its subjects to make media outlets money. In the corporate media, holding governments, institutions and individuals to account comes a poor second behind manipulating outrage to generate revenue. This is what I call the ‘outrage economy’ of the contemporary Western media.

Sexual violence stories are capital in this economy, exemplified by the viral iteration of #MeToo. Although it was started by Black feminist Tarana Burke as a survivor-led movement of mutual support, #MeToo went viral following a tweet by white actor Alyssa Milano, as a moment of mass media disclosure. It was described as a ‘flood’ of stories of sexual assault by CNN, CBS and CBC, and a ‘tsunami’ on CNBC, in the Times of India, the New York Times and the US National Post.

A key limitation of this mainstream iteration of #MeToo is that media markets, like all markets, are profoundly nihilistic. Clicks, likes and shares are a multi-denominational currency. As long as they accumulate, as long as media companies can make advertising revenue and harvest our data, it does not matter why. In other words, the media using sexual violence as clickbait does not imply support for feminist goals. The media using sexual violence as clickbait does not mean survivors will not themselves be vilified if this happens to be the juicer story.

In my fifteen years in the field, I have become deeply uncomfortable with the key strategies of mainstream sexual violence activism. When institutions let us down, we often ‘invest’ our trauma in networked media markets, to generate outrage and the visibility we need to further our cause. But cynical media corporations exploit this outrage, building visibility for their brands by encouraging audiences to consume our pain. Meanwhile the threat of damage to the brands of exposed institutions and organisations leads to an airbrushing of ‘bad men’ from high-profile sectors. These individuals usually move on to start all over again, while oppressive systems are left intact.

When individual men are ‘named and shamed’ in the media, when institutional policies and initiatives focus on punishing or excluding these ‘bad apples’, there is almost no effect on the whole rotten tree. Indeed, we often end up nourishing its roots – when mainstream feminist activism relies on the patriarchal, racist, capitalist institution for punishment, we use the master’s tools to try to dismantle the master’s house. Like the carceral feminism that calls on the punitive state to put perpetrators away, activism against sexual violence in universities fails to dismantle the intersecting systems that produce sexual violence and strengthens them instead.

Because of this, my sixth lesson is: stop calling the manager.

The punitive tendencies of the mainstream movement against sexual violence are a key part of what I call its political whiteness. Political whiteness involves, among other things, a clear conceptual distinction between victims and perpetrators, an understanding of the state as benign, and a belief that punishment works. White and middle-class feminists have called for more police, more convictions and longer sentences – and when something goes wrong in our workplaces, we ask the manager to sort it out. And when we turn to authority, we legitimate and bolster that authority. In our efforts to address personal abuses of power, we turn to the institutional power that facilitates them. In thinking we can be safe in our institutions by punishing the ‘bad’ men, we conceal the fact that the institution itself is unsafe.

Our demands for discipline can also increase the institution’s power and ability to perpetrate violence. Policies that make it easier to dismiss harassers might chip away at everyone’s employment rights, especially in a post-pandemic context where universities are looking to make substantial cuts. Technologies such as codes of conduct or ‘morality clauses’ in employment contracts, or a ‘sex offenders’ register’ for higher education (which has been suggested by some activists), could be misused to target groups seen as ‘deviant’ or a sexual threat. Such forms of institutional governance are also ultimately designed to protect the university from liability, not to protect us. Law firm Pinsent Masons, which represents UK university administrations as they defend themselves against discrimination claims and has given them advice on breaking strikes, has written the guidance for universities on how to handle alleged claims of sexual misconduct.

There is also a difference between punishment and accountability. Punishment is a passive and impersonal process – the person who has been harmed hands over their power and is kept in the dark (although nevertheless it requires a huge amount of courage and work). Accountability, in contrast, is both personal and active. For Mia Mingus, accountability requires four steps from someone who has caused harm: self-reflection, apology, repair, and changed behaviour. It centres the person who has been harmed, their understanding of why the behaviour was harmful and their definition of what constitutes repair. It makes space for that repair, acknowledging that none of us is above causing harm and we may all need that space someday. It is the job of the perpetrator and not the survivor, and requires significant community input and support.

Accountability, as described by Mingus, would be difficult to achieve in higher education institutions which are corporations rather than communities, in which we are hierarchically organised, individualised, distrustful and overworked. None of this is conducive to honest communication and collective action. True accountability would require a collectivist, not a capitalist, institution – and this is probably an oxymoron. That does not mean, though, that while supporting survivors as best we can within the options currently available, we cannot also try to move in a better direction. In the longer term, we cannot keep calling the manager and relying on the system to do the work of accountability for us, when it is what needs to be dismantled.

This sets up my seventh and final lesson: be in it for the long haul. 

After fifteen years in the field, I heed Lorde’s advice that refusing to use the master’s tools may only be difficult for those who ‘still define the master’s house as their only source of support’. This is an invitation to stop relying on the master to deal with our collective problems, and to join the work of building a different house. A house where we tackle things together means a house founded on care – not the privatised care of the market and heteronormative family, not the bare minimum provided by the institution and state, but more capacious and collective ways of surviving and thriving. Instead of strengthening the status quo, mainstream feminist organising against sexual violence needs to become part of the broader project of making anew. We must think big and act small. What world do we ultimately want to live in? What are some baby steps towards it that we could realistically take?

I am referring here to the abolitionist distinction between reformist and non-reformist reforms. Non-reformist reforms move us towards the world we want, not further away. They shrink, rather than grow, the state and institution’s capacity for violence. To start with, in universities, this could mean creating small, self-organised groups of staff and students who imagine new ways of relating and solving problems together. It could mean using these prototypes to develop policy suggestions and initiatives which create structures of accountability rather than shoring up the institution’s power. It would mean making demands for institutional resources: money most importantly, and the time and space to do this important work. This would be a radical challenge to the current model of the university and to current mainstream feminist activism.

It would also be hard work, and might be bound to fail given what the university is. But all we need to do is move in the right direction. I take hope from recent mass strikes in UK higher education, which showed that neoliberalism has not stolen all our solidarity and community away. I also take hope from the many forms of grassroots care that have proliferated during the Covid-19 pandemic. I believe that we will not know what we can create until we free ourselves from how the institution stifles our imaginations and start doing what Tina Campt calls ‘living the future now’. People marginalised by race, class and disability, queer and trans people, have long been supporting survivors and working towards transformative justice outside the institution and outside the state. There are many amazing examples to emulate. This is work that will not be completed in any of our lifetimes, and it is not always easy to know whether we are dismantling power or helping to preserve it. This means we must be in it for the very long haul.

I hope at least some of these lessons are helpful – if so, I have created an infographic that you might want to download as a reminder (it can be used as a wallpaper or screensaver, or printed out if you prefer – click the image below to open full size, in order to save).

Joint book launch event

I recently participated in a joint book launch event, hosted by the University of Sunderland Gender Network, for Me, Not You: the Trouble with Mainstream Feminism and Gender Equality in Changing Times (edited by Angela Smith). The first part is a conversation between Professor Donna Chambers and me, and the second consists of presentations by Angela Smith and two contributors to her book, Katie Ward and Alice Wu. This is followed by a Q&A with all of us. The recording of the event can be accessed below.

The Road to Pride podcast

I recently talked about Me, Not You on Episode 2 of The Road to Pride podcast presented on behalf of Norwich Pride. The episode was called ‘The Fight for Trans Rights’ and I was delighted to be on it alongside Cleo and Rhy, who are trans- and non-binary scholar-activists respectively. You can listen to our chat here.

Gender, Violence and White Feminism: Q&A with Alison Phipps

This is an interview I did for the Climate Emergency Manchester blog.

Could you tell us a little about yourself – where you grew up, went to school, how you came to be a Professor of Gender Studies?

I was born in North Yorkshire, then lived in Teeside for a while before my family moved to Bristol. After doing my GCSEs at the local comprehensive, I left home at 16 – I wanted to be a dancer and went into full-time professional training. But I lacked the talent to pursue ballet (my real passion) and was too self-conscious for musical theatre. So I mixed cocktails in a nightclub, and wrapped soap baskets in a Body Shop, but wasn’t content. I’d managed to get two A-levels at dance college, which in the 1990s was enough for a place at Manchester University – I chose politics and modern history. I was the first woman in my family to get a degree, and remain the only person ever in my family to be an academic. To start with, the language and ideas I encountered at university baffled me. But feminism was different.

I come from a long line of strong working women, but had been encouraged to aspire to white bourgeois femininity – feminist theory helped me understand why. I came out as queer, which was a personal and political revelation – in butch/femme communities and relationships I decoupled gender from assigned sex and learned femininity was something to experiment with and enjoy. I also realised that the state forces amassed against queer people – that were still raiding gay bars at the time – were not my route to liberation. And that there were some feminists who saw me as an impediment to theirs – in the lesbian ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s, butch/femme, BDSM and sex work were all seen as a capitulation to patriarchal dynamics rather than a way to subvert them.

I never planned to be an academic – but in between doing various office jobs I was offered a scholarship for my MA at Manchester, and won one to do my PhD at Cambridge. In 2005, just before I submitted my PhD thesis, I moved down to Brighton with my partner at the time. I was doing administration for the City Council and making sandwiches in a local café, when an hourly-paid teaching role came up at Brighton University. Then a temporary contract was advertised at Sussex – 9-months of cover for the Director of Gender Studies – and I got it. I’ve been at Sussex ever since. I ran Gender Studies till 2018, taking breaks to have two kids, and have worked part-time since 2011. I was promoted to Professor of Gender Studies in 2017.

How did Me, Not You come about, who do you hope reads it and what impact do you want it to have?

This book was in the making for a very long time. A year after I got my job at Sussex, something happened in my personal life – I was raped by a woman I was involved with. It happened in a small arts-based community, which largely closed ranks around her and ignored or dismissed me – this meant that apart from a few loyal friends, I only had books and writing to get me through the experience. I didn’t entertain going to the police – the perpetrator had a young daughter and was much more marginalised than I was, so I knew police involvement would harm her, perhaps even more than she had harmed me. While I was dealing with my own trauma, I also began to be approached by students who had been raped, because of my role as Director of Gender Studies. So I became a scholar-activist – and supporting survivors, pushing for institutional change, and building relationships with services and organisations were all intertwined with my research on sexual violence.

Long before #MeToo went viral, activists in universities had been ‘naming and shaming’ perpetrators in the media – this was often the only option. But I was always left with the question: where did these ‘bad men’ go? I knew some of them went to other institutions and continued the same behaviour – the ‘pass the harasser’ problem. And I worried that the suggested solution – to exclude perpetrators entirely from academia – might just outsource them to lower-status sectors, where women had fewer rights and protections. This fear of creating collateral damage was magnified in relation to criminal punishment – even when it is visited on privileged white men, this creates massive collateral damage amongst Black people and other marginalised groups. This was where ‘Me, Not You’ came from – it’s a play on and critique of #MeToo. It describes how mainstream white feminism is very self-regarding – my victimisation is the most important thing, and I will do whatever it takes to feel safe and/or vindicated, regardless of the consequences.

Me, Not You is written for fellow white women and white feminists. It’s about how mainstream feminism fails to tackle the structures that cause sexual violence – especially the deep structure of racial capitalism – and ends up fortifying them instead. The book is built on Black feminist theory, and Black women and other women of colour won’t need to read it – it won’t tell them anything they don’t already know. I hope the book will speak to white women who, like me, are uneasy about mainstream feminism and want to do things differently. In the conclusion, I discuss the concept of ‘abolition feminism’ as defined by Angela Davis – and as abolition moves into the mainstream lexicon following the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless others, I hope my book will explain why white feminism is not abolition feminism, and suggest how it could move in that direction.

You must have been totally unsurprised by the video of white woman Amy Cooper being asked by Christian Cooper (a Black man, no relation) to put her dog on a lead in Central Park, and calling the police to say he was threatening her. Is this a perfect representation of what you mean by political whiteness, and the ways in which white women’s vulnerability – real or imagined – is weaponised?

Political whiteness is the term I use in my book for the way mainstream feminism and other white-dominated forms of politics operate. It centres on victimhood, whether that’s the genuine sexual trauma at the root of #MeToo and other mainstream feminist movements, or the imagined white victimhood of the backlash against feminism, the vote for Brexit and the election of Trump. Whiteness is predisposed to woundedness – from a position of power, one is naturally preoccupied with threat. In white feminism, sexual trauma becomes political capital via the media, which usually leads to demands for criminal punishment or institutional discipline. This happens with little regard for more marginalised people – and as we know, the criminal punishment system is not designed to deal with men such as Harvey Weinstein, but to protect the interests of white elites and ‘put away’ those deemed surplus to requirements in racial capitalist production.

The wounded white woman is the icon of mainstream feminism – she’s also a trophy of the authoritarian right. Her power is rooted in colonial history – the ‘protection’ of bourgeois white women from indigenous, colonised and enslaved men (and subsequently, from free Black men) justified genocide and murder, and colonialism itself. And white women were deeply complicit – there is a long history of false allegations prompting racist state and community violence. Police in the US, UK and elsewhere continue to murder Black people, and (white) ‘women’s safety’ continues to justify state violence and the politics of the far right. As Zeba Blay has written, Amy Cooper was well aware of this when she told the police ‘there’s an African-American man threatening my life’. This was a reminder that she could get Christian Cooper killed by a cop. This act was more deliberate than the political whiteness I identify in #MeToo and other mainstream feminist movements. But white feminism can easily become intentionally cruel – trans- and sex worker-exclusionary feminists, for example, are similar to the Amy Coopers of the world in their wilful use of stories of sexual trauma to ostracise and vilify their enemies.

The same day as the Amy Cooper incident, a police officer in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck. This has prompted enormous protests in the US and other countries including the UK. What is your reaction to these events? Who are the most astute thinkers on this that we should all be following and reading?

To be honest, I’m not sure my reaction to these events deserves much space. I am in solidarity with Black people, and part of doing (as well as saying) that is to pass the mic. Black Lives Matter, and Black voices matter too – and the second is a precondition for the first. In other words, we can’t claim to oppose anti-Black racism while objectifying and speaking over Black people. There is a wealth of commentary and analysis being produced by Black people on current events – such as these articles by Zoe Samudzi, Mariame Kaba and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, these discussions hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw and the Dream Defenders, and so much more besides. Many of these people are on Twitter, and if you follow them you’ll find many others. I can also share some general recommendations for Black feminist thinkers who are important to me.

Angela Davis, of course, is a legend – you can download Women, Race and Class and Are Prisons Obsolete? online, and you can also watch talks and interviews like this one on abolition feminism. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is incredible too, and while I recommend her book Golden Gulag (and she has another one, Change Everything, forthcoming), there are also various pieces by and interviews with her available free. Mariame Kaba is an inspiration to me and pretty much everyone else I share politics with – I’ll forever be proud and amazed that she endorsed my book, and I turn to her words almost every day. She is also hugely generous with her intellect and insight and can be found on many websites, podcasts and other platforms – the best thing to do is to visit her personal website and follow some links.

And in case any of your readers are under the impression that anti-Black racism is just a US problem, I’ll make some UK-specific recommendations. Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book has become a contemporary classic, and is a very accessible read for white people wanting to educate themselves on race. Lola Olufemi has a new book out, which is also very accessible and highlights issues with white bourgeois feminism as well as setting out her own feminist manifesto. I love the Surviving Society podcast – it’s co-hosted by Black scholars Chantelle Lewis and Tissot Regis, and covers a wide range of issues but with a particular lens on race.

I also want to draw your attention to this article by Lauren Michele Jackson – ‘What is an anti-racist reading list for?’ In it, she rightly states that while book recommendations are easy to give and feel good to receive, at some point we have to do the work of reading, and the gap between recommendations and reading is often a gulf. Furthermore, she argues, merely reading work by Black scholars is not anti-racism in and of itself, and in fact this can lead to the kind of ‘self-enlightenment’ which replaces political action. This does not mean we shouldn’t read – far from it – but reading the right things has to be part of a broader strategy.

Near the end of the book you have a brief section on things individuals can do, something you expand on in a recent blog post. How big a danger is it that a ‘white fragility’ focus will allow white people to try to ‘purge themselves’ of racism without fronting up to racist structures? How can we work against this and ‘do’ allyship (or comradeship as you put it) for the long haul, after the hashtags fade?

The drawbacks of ‘white fragility’ discourse are both a huge danger and an awful reality. Alison Whittaker and Lauren Michele Jackson are among many writers of colour who argue that the psychological focus of ‘white fragility’, and the individualistic focus of ‘white privilege’, reduce anti-racism to navel-gazing and hand-wringing rather than work towards structural change. As I say in my recent blog, this is a re-centring of the self, not a genuine engagement with the Other. And in the midst of the current Black Lives Matter protests, white people have centred ourselves on an industrial scale. From kneeling in the street attempting to ‘renounce our privilege’, to making airbrushed celebrity videos confessing guilt and ‘taking responsibility’, to institutional proclamations with no evidence of anti-racist actions (and plenty of evidence of racist ones).

As feminism has long told us, the personal is political – and white people are heavily invested in racial capitalist structures. Divesting from these will require work on the self, but self-analysis is not politics. Perhaps we need to shift the focus away from ‘how am I feeling?’ to ‘what am I doing?’ This doesn’t mean ignoring emotions, it means dealing with them in appropriate ways and not mistaking them for action. It means decentring ourselves and focusing on the Other; it means a politics of care. This isn’t easy in our narcissistic, stingy neoliberal culture – and for white feminists, being asked to care may evoke the compelled care we have historically opposed. Contemporary white feminists tend to eschew care – ‘nasty women’ are fuelled by rage. But this highlights the individualism of our politics, and its foundations in the nuclear family and binary gender. Rage on behalf of the self, which often seeks revenge, is perhaps seen as feminist because in the bourgeois nuclear family, the female self is diminished and denied.

By ‘care’, I mean an orientation to the social and natural world, not picking up your husband’s socks. For marginalised groups, care is a necessity – for instance, the disabled people and working class people (many of them Black and people of colour) abandoned by austerity regimes, and the queer and trans people creating new support systems when their families of origin reject them. Care is central to Black feminism and other revolutionary politics because it rejects and undoes racial capitalist violence and creates different ways of life. I want white feminists to learn from this. I want responsibilities for care held in common, beyond the gender binary, care for other human beings globally (especially the most marginalised), and care for our planet. In racial capitalism, care can be violence because it is compelled, forced, outsourced and unevenly distributed, and withheld from those who need it most. But care is also at the heart of the alternatives we need. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, abolition means making the conditions for a better world. So if we are going to ‘do’ comradeship after the hashtags fade, we might begin by caring for each other.

What do we do?

This blog was originally posted on the Manchester University Press website – if you visit the original version and scroll to the end, there is a code for 50% off Me, Not You.

‘What do we do?’ is the question I’m most frequently asked by readers of Me, Not You, and this question has become louder and more urgent in the past two weeks. Massive protests in the US and elsewhere against the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless others have brought the idea of abolition into the mainstream, and many white feminists are newly interested in fighting sexual violence without criminal punishment.

I am also at the beginning of a (life)long journey towards what Angela Davis calls ‘abolition feminism’, and the final chapter of my book shares what Davis and other Black feminists have taught me so far. For instance, there’s a thought experiment imagining a world without sexual violence (which would, of course, be a world without police and prisons), and some practical suggestions on how we could use that as our guide. This would be via what abolitionists call ‘non-reformist reforms’ – interventions that get us closer to, instead of further away from, our ultimate goal. I give examples of what these might look (and not look) like. The chapter also offers a ‘toolkit’ of questions white feminists can ask ourselves, to evolve our political action away from some of the problems identified in my book.

But despite this, the ‘what do we do?’ question persists – which suggests that perhaps readers are looking for more. What is this ‘more’, and why do some people want it? I’m not sure I would give it, even if I could. My book was intended to help readers understand the dynamics of mainstream feminism, not to offer a panacea (because one does not exist). It is not a set of instructions – I am not in charge of feminism, and as a middle-aged white academic I am definitely not interested in taking up that mantle. Bourgeois white women like me dominate mainstream feminism, but I am also struck by the fact that ‘what do we do?’ is most often asked by fellow privileged white feminists. I have several thoughts about why.

Whiteness and (the) social order

As I explore in my book, political whiteness both seeks authority and defers to it. The white will to power I write about can be satisfied by proxy, demanding an authoritarian response. We see this in white feminist calls for more police and longer sentences; we have also seen it during Covid-19, as while some white people have protested lockdown measures, others have informed on their neighbours for failing to observe them. Whiteness creates deep desires for both individual liberty and social control, and the impulse to call the manager or police to enforce the rules we need to feel safe sits beside our own need to be told what to do. The material and symbolic benefits we derive from the existing order also make it difficult and threatening to imagine anything different. As a result, we can get defensive: and demanding solutions are given to us can be a way of shutting down discussion of things we cannot face. It is what the CEO does when his staff bring him problems he does not want to have to fix.

The demand for pre-made panaceas also shows how neoliberal capitalist mentalities have permeated white feminist consciousness. We want instant gratification, something off the shelf. This is dangerous on many levels: grabbing at immediate answers can stop us from wrestling with important questions, and quick and easy actions are often ineffective. As I write in Me Not You, performative outrage, and calls to get rid of ‘bad apples’ from institutions or communities, are usually just forms of pressure release that enable oppressive systems and dynamics to continue. So is white self-analysis, if this is where we get stuck: Alison Whittaker and Lauren Michelle Jackson are among those who examine how white anti-racism more often constitutes navel-gazing, hand-wringing, and attempts to ‘renounce privilege’ and assuage guilt rather than work towards structural change. This is a re-centring of the self, not a genuine engagement with the Other.

As I say in my book, white feminists can – and should – take our lead from Black feminists and other marginalised people who are less attached to the way things are, whose imaginations are not so bounded and who model what Tina Campt calls ‘living the future now’. Black feminists have long tried to tell us that the view from where they are is much clearer than we can comprehend. Patricia Hill Collins famously called Black women ‘outsiders within’; bell hooks has written about her own experience of ‘looking from the outside in and the inside out’. I love Gail Lewis’ description of how, from the margins, it is possible to see across an entire field of vision – whereas from the centre one has to keep turning around and about. This is why many groups located on the margins are already working to formulate the answers white feminists want handed to us on a plate.

But we cannot expect more marginalised feminists to just hand us these solutions: political programmes have to be collective and developed through dialogue. We all need to do this work – and echoing Mariame Kaba, I think perhaps not enough of us are currently doing our small part. I join Kaba in her request that we all ‘work together to think through something different’, adding that white feminists should listen more than we talk, and acknowledging that thinking through something different is a long, hard slog. It is a lot easier to identify problems than to develop ways to tackle them (and I say this to myself as much as to anyone else). As I write in Me, Not You, ridding the world of sexual violence is not going to happen in my lifetime, or yours. But we can all do our own small part to move towards it, not further away.

Doing my small part

For the past fifteen years my main activist focus has been tackling sexual violence in universities. This work has included collaborating with Susuana Amoah and others at the National Union of Students, engaging individual institutions across Europe in research and training, and forming the Changing University Cultures (CHUCL) collective with Liz McDonnell and Jess Taylor. CHUCL aims to help universities reshape their structures and cultures so equality policies can be more meaningful, and so they can deal more effectively, and less punitively, with problems such as bullying, harassment and violence. We have not got very far yet, but we are in it for the long haul.

As we move forward with CHUCL, I am trying to keep an abolition mindset. This means refusing to become what Audre Lorde called the ‘master’s tools’ (in other words, being used to preserve oppressive systems even while we claim to dismantle them). This can happen in various ways. For instance, CHUCL research on structural and cultural problems in universities has been used as evidence they have already been solved (what Sara Ahmed terms ‘non-performativity’). Universities have reacted defensively and demanded we provide instant solutions, thereby absolving themselves of responsibility. They have defaulted to individualised forms of diversity training which are presented as ‘taking action’ but do not address, and instead conceal, the deeper issues we have pointed out. Key questions for us are: how do we help universities take responsibility for and tackle their own troubles? How do we build institutional capacity to deal with unacceptable and violent behaviour? And the big one: how do we push for real structural and cultural change?

We are taking our lead from survivor-led community accountability and transformative justice approaches that have worked in other contexts, but many institutions are a long way from having the capacity to implement these. Complete success would require a collectivist, rather than a capitalist, university. Of course, we are not going to get one soon – but we are thinking hard about ways to work towards it (and whether we even should, especially given universities’ complicity in racial capitalism, neoliberalism, colonialism and slavery and its afterlives). We have a lot of failure ahead of us before we can even imagine something that looks like success. But we are doing our small part.

We all have to do our part, if we want to change the world. So if something has struck you in my book – whether it has inspired you or made you feel uncomfortable – I am delighted, but you must consider if and how you want to act. If you do decide to act, make sure you start small. Reflect on, and work to undo, how your own actions perpetuate systems of oppression (and that includes saviour modes of ‘helping’). Use your privilege and/or your money to do one thing for the benefit of more marginalised people every day (and thanks to Mariame Kaba for this principle, which has been a touchstone in my more chaotic moments during Covid-19). When there is a crisis, step up. Through these actions, educate yourself on issues, think about the better world you want to build, and learn about – and from – those who may already be building it.

Building feminist futures

When your imagination is liberated from what is, when you are better able to visualise what could be, think backwards to something you could realistically work towards yourself sustainably and longer-term. You might be able to find a group of like-minded feminists organising towards the same thing, who you could support with your time and money. If you can’t find one, create one. Your action could be as simple as setting up a neighbourhood collection for your local food bank (it is difficult to eradicate violence while basic needs are not being met). Or you might decide to get involved in action against prison expansion or to free incarcerated survivors. You might even work towards implementing a transformative justice programme in your community, organisation or institution. As you take action, you could use my toolkit regularly to check in with yourself. And although there should not be gatekeepers, seek out visionaries to guide you.

I cite many of these visionaries in Me, Not You – you can look to Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and lots of others besides. Our feminist tomorrow is also being envisioned by the young Black feminists and others currently on the streets protesting police murders and demanding abolition. It is being envisioned by the young activists and authors producing resources for the fight. For instance, Lola Olufemi’s new book Feminism, Interrupted offers a manifesto for a different, and truly radical, feminism. Beyond Survival, edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, sets out practical strategies for tackling sexual violence without criminal punishment. Molly Smith and Juno Mac’s Revolting Prostitutes is a compelling argument for decriminalising sex work, one legislative advance that would eradicate a huge amount of violence and that we could all be campaigning for. These dynamic young feminists are not going to give you instructions either, but they do provide rich food for thought – and the future of feminism lies with them.

As we move towards this feminist future, there will be no easy answers. The problems with mainstream feminism have been well and truly exposed (and by many others both now and before me), but we are still figuring out how to solve them. And although white bourgeois feminists may need to get our own houses in order first, when we are ready, we will need ongoing conversations between feminists of all positionalities: younger and older, differently classed and raced, trans and cis, differently abled, sex-working and not, lesbian, bisexual, queer, straight, and more. These discussions would be led from the margins but everyone would have a voice; there would be space to question, learn and grow; and most importantly, talk would lead to action rather than being an end in itself. I am deeply invested in doing my part to facilitate this this journey, and will probably be asking some tough questions of fellow white feminists (and myself) along the way. And I will pose one back to you now: what do you want to do?