Take Back the Fight by Nora Loreto

Author:Nora Loreto [Loreto, Nora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2020-09-15T20:19:27+00:00

TW: White Feminism

An obvious and stark reality of how perspectives on trigger warnings broke down was the undeniable whiteness that was embedded in debating their use. Roxane Gay’s essay about the complexities of existing in a world full of triggers captured the difficulty of being able to definitively say that trigger warnings should be standard practice. In 2014, two years before the letter circulated by John Ellison at the University of Chicago, Tressie McMillan Cottom, a writer and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University wrote about trigger warnings on her blog. As an expert in the neoliberal university, she argues that, “Trigger warnings make sense on platforms where troubling information can be foisted upon you without prior knowledge, as in the case of retweets.”23 But when you try to apply this logic to the academy, it doesn’t work:

Yet, no one is arguing for trigger warnings in the routine spaces where symbolic and structural violence are acted on students at the margins. No one, to my knowledge, is affixing trigger warnings to department meetings that wasp-y normative expectations may require you to code switch yourself into oblivion to participate as a full member of the group. Instead, trigger warnings are being encouraged for sites of resistance, not mechanisms of oppression.24

McMillan Cottom’s observation cuts to the heart of a key tension. White feminism has long been named, criticized and theorized, and feminist practice that rejects white feminism has underpinned many movements, whether implicitly or explicitly, from Black Lives Matter to Idle No More. The whitelash to Sunera Thobani’s presidency at the National Action Committee on the Status of Women exposed that white women were not willing to do what was necessary to support a racialized woman in a position of power.

We can characterize much of the mainstream feminist movement in Canada as espousing “white feminism.” From the early days of the suffrage movement, the rights that mainstream feminists were fighting for were the rights of white, wealthier, able-bodied women. Many of the movement’s trailblazers supported eugenics movements. Many were racist. One of Canada’s most famous suffragettes, Nellie McClung was a vocal supporter of eugenics, a pseudo-scientific movement that was rooted in racism and bigotry towards people with disabilities. One of the policies that McClung advocated was forced sterilization, which remained legal in Canada until the last of the forced-sterilization laws were repealed in the 1970s.25 Erika Dyck, Professor and Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, wrote that in Alberta alone, nearly 3000 people were sterilized between 1928 and 197226 Indigenous women were not among those sterilized in the beginning, as they didn’t even have access to health care at all. Most of the people sterilized were done so based on how they placed in so-called intelligence testing.27

Sterilization remains a tie that binds Canada through time, moving from a policy advanced by many white suffrage activists to become a practice that is quietly forced on Indigenous women, according to many women who have undergone it, as recently as 2017.

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