Welcome to Litsy!

It‘s been a long time since I have read anything ‘academic‘. I feel like my brain has had a work out! I loved it! Aileen Moreton-Robinson lays bare the issue of white race privilege and the subject position of white middle class woman in the Australian feminist movement and it‘s negative impact on Indigenous women. Fascinating reading! This book has ruffled a few feathers since it was published 20 years ago. And it is still relevant.

‘Race‘ refers to all those who are non-white. Failing to racialise white women, as such means that white race privilege remains uninterrogated as a source of oppression and inequality.

To speak of gendering other struggles is to centre the subject position middle-class white woman. Whiteness as difference, privilege and identity is not marked, named or challenged…

The invention of a tradition that did not exist prior to colonisation is a strategy to reclaim the colonised Muslim male self through the subjugation of Muslim women. Whiteness is salient in shaping the lives of people of colour through its ideological presence in former British colonies.

The work of Radha Kumar on feminism and identity politics in India reveals the degree to which Muslim culture has reinforced men‘s power over women by the use and construction of ‘traditions‘ that position women as subservient and inferior. These ‘traditions‘...are a manifestation of Muslim men‘s need to assert their cultural dominance after British colonisation, rather than orthodoxy.

Implying that white women of the dominant culture can allieviate the oppression of women from other cultures by providing them with the space to have a voice expresses a naivety about why white women have the power to be able to be inclusive.

White middle-class feminists utilise race privilege to write about their gendered oppression, but whiteness remains invisible, unnamed and unmarked in their work.

Earning equal pay with white men does not necessarily reduce the oppression experienced by white or other women.

Socialist and marxist feminists start from the assumption the the world is not equal. Nonetheless, whiteness remains invisible but central to their analyses...(differences) between men and women are not biologically determined but class and gender based.

Liberal feminists seek structural reform to reduce inequalities. They do not seek to change the structure that gives men power over women, and implicitly acknowledge that they are in an asymmetrical relation of power with men.

Liberal feminists such as Betty Friedan (1963) argue that sex is biologically based while gender is culturally constructed.

Whiteness is often invisible to white womens as a marker of radical identity and is not perceived as problematic because one‘s identity is thought to be ‘natural‘…White women‘s privilege in theory has become normalised because it is grounded in the assumption that the womanness of all women was the same version of womanness experienced by white middle-class women...found in the work of first wave feminists Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Taylor.

As more and more white people moved into the area, appropriating land through government grants and, later, purchases, Indigenous people became displaced, dispossessed and forced into dependency on government; socially and economically they were systematically being excluded from the new society.

White women‘s fear of Indigenous women‘s sexuality was connected to preserving their social status as white men‘s possessions, a status connected to an ideology of true womanhood which encompassed Christian morality, virtue & reproduction of the white race.

(won‘t lie, this book is making my blood boil for Indigenous Australians)

This book shines a light on white power and privilege in Australian feminism. First published 20 years ago, the author might have hoped we‘d have made more progress by now.

Making people aware of their privilege, understand it & then give some of their power up is fraught.

For my part I am trying to read, watch & listen more. As I say to my white privileged husband,
“Just shut up & listen”.
I need to keep taking my own advice. 🤐

“White women civilised, while white men brutalised”.

Slowly working my way through this one. Am finding the academic writing challenging, but I will persist.

#truth 😢

Think I‘m going to have to be selective with my quotes from this seminal work, or I‘ll be clogging up Litsy.

#truthtelling #blackaustralianwriting

#Upnext I saw this new 20th anniversary edition in my favourite book shop. As someone who considers herself to be a fairly ‘rabid‘ 😂 white feminist ✊, and reasonably well informed on Australian indigenous issues, I am looking forward to learning some things from this book.

Hope I can handle it 😳 and that I can actually understand it, given its academic nature.

Dewey‘s Reverse Readathon TBR

Also participating the MS readathon all month to raise money for families living with a MS diagnosis. If you can donate, please do so: https://www.msreadathon.org.au/s/94086/99947/s

@DeweysReadathon #reversereadathon #reversereadathon2020 #MSreadathon #MSreadathonaus

I‘m sure this book is terrific, but I am struggling to penetrate the dense academic prose. I‘m afraid this one‘s not for me. I suspect it would be a great addition to a women‘s studies class.