I knew when my most recent book was assigned an end-of-October publication date that I would spend much of my book tour processing the election and its aftermath. As the title suggests, Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop is partly a meditation on the future of feminism.
The book is partly a postmortem on #Girlboss and I had thought that the tour would become an occasion to discuss how feminism has to be, not just about shattering glass ceilings, but about changing the distance between the ceiling and the floor. Of course, the events of November 5 ensured that that is not how it went.
Instead, I have spent the last month and a half speaking with hundreds of feminists about their grief and rage—and wrestled with practical questions of how we move forward.
The last question of my launch at Brooklyn bookstore on the night after the election has stayed with me: why can’t we just give up on white women?
This question was certainly an expression of the justified anger that many women of color, and Black women in particular have been feeling—at the fact that the majority of white women once again voted for Trump. (This is not what the book is about, but it was a major thing folks wanted me to talk about in November.) But 5 bookstore events and 6 podcasts later, I have also learned to see that question as something else: the question of what kind of a future there is for feminism, understood as a movement of women across race and class lines.
To be clear, I see that question as distinct from the question of whether feminism as a set of values—as bell hooks put it commitment to ending sexist oppression—has a future. Speaking with audiences has convinced me that commitment to that value is thriving and spreading. The conversations with Gen Z women and gender expansive people I have had in the last several weeks have also made clear to me that we need that idea more than ever. After all, they are on the receiving end of a rising tide of reactionary masculinity that will no doubt shape the political years to come.
But what is less clear is that the way to achieve those values looks like the movement many of us associate with feminism. One thing I have realized in retrospect that some of the examples in the positive section of my book are actually of women and gender expansive people applying a gender lens within movements focused on racial or economic issues. In a recent piece in Teen Vogue, Olufemi Taiwo even reads Faux Feminism as a book about how to achieve feminist aims through movements that may not be legible as feminist, such as domestic worker movements.
On the other hand, some of the movements I take as examples for the feminist future in the book are movements that began as movements focused on the traditional “feminist” issues that cut across other social fault lines, such as sexual violence. One of these is Ni Una Menos in Argentina. One of the most interesting things about that particular movement is that it has created a sustained alliance with labor, partly through making claims about women as a group—most notably, the slogan “all women are workers” discussed by Luci Cavallero and Veronica Gago.
I don’t have the answers about the future of feminism as a movement—and I don’t think anyone can, because so much depends on how we organize in the coming years—but it is certainly a question of this moment.
