Question Everything: a Stone Reader by A Power of Our Own (2019)

Author:A Power of Our Own (2019)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Liveright

Enough with Crumbs—I Want the Cake

Anarchy can dismantle patriarchy. I do not want what men have. I want more. I want to be free.

Mona Eltahawy

Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.

—June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays (1985)

I AM A FEMINIST. I AM AN ANARCHIST. TO ME, ANY DISCUSSION of power is essentially one about freedom, and talk of freedom is impossible without a reckoning with power.

In Rethinking Anarchy, the Spanish social theorist Carlos Taibo reminds us that “anarchists have frequently defined themselves first on the basis of what they reject—the state, capitalism, inequality, patriarchal society, war, militarism, repression in all its forms, authority.”

So what is the power that my freedom requires?

As a woman of color, I define power initially by what it is not. To be powerful is not to be what a man can do or be. Men are not my yardstick. If men themselves are not free of the ravages of racism, capitalism, and other forms of oppression, it is not enough to say I want to be equal to them. As long as patriarchy remains unchallenged, men will continue to be the default and the standard against which everything is measured.

Being powerful must mean more than doing what men do or being what men can be. I do not want what men have. I want much more. I want to be free.

To be free, I must defy, disobey, and disrupt.

“Civil disobedience . . . was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy,” the author and activist Howard Zinn wrote in You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times. “The greatest danger . . . was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public’s acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it.”

Power for a few exceptional women is not equality or empowerment for all, and it is no reason to celebrate. We must define power in a way that liberates us from patriarchy’s hierarchies. That is why I am an anarchist—why I defy, disobey, and disrupt. We must imagine the world we want so that we can redefine what power is, what a powerful woman looks like, and how power can be used to subvert rather than uphold patriarchy. We must imagine better. We can imagine better. By imagining that better world, we invent the power required for our freedom.

A shining example of powerful women came to me in 2014, ironically while watching the world’s grandest men’s sporting event, the soccer World Cup.

My father and I were in a Cairo café to watch the World Cup final, featuring Germany and Argentina playing in Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã Stadium. Germany won its fourth championship that night, and during the ceremony to hand the cup to the winners,

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