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Title: Anarchafeminism
Author: Chiara Bottici
Date: December 2, 2019
Language: en
Topics: anarcha-feminism, ontology, transindividual, manifesto
Source: Retrieved on May 16, 2022 from https://publicseminar.org/2019/12/anarchafeminism/
Notes: This text was presented at UNESCO Night of Philosophy on 16 November, 2018, in Paris. https://publicseminar.org/2020/05/anarchafeminist-manifesto-1-0/

Chiara Bottici

Anarchafeminism

1. Why anarcha -feminism?

It has become something of a commonplace to argue that in order to fight

the oppression of women, it is necessary to unpack the ways in which

different forms of oppression intersect with one another. No single

factor, be it nature or nurture, economic exploitation or cultural

domination, can be said to be the single cause sufficient to explain the

multifaceted sources of patriarchy and sexism. Intersectionality has

consequently become the guiding principle for an increasing number of

left-wing feminists, both from the global north and from the global

south. As a result, there is hardly any publication in the field today

that does not engage with the concept of intersectionality — whether to

promote it, to criticize it, or simply to position oneself with regards

to it.

Yet, strikingly enough, in all the literature engaging with

intersectionality, there is barely any mention of the feminist tradition

of the past that has been claiming exactly the same point for a very

long time: anarchist feminism, or as I prefer to call it

“anarchAfeminism.” The latter term has been introduced by social

movements trying to feminize the concept, and thereby give visibility to

a specifically feminist strand within the anarchist theory and practice.

This anarchafeminist tradition, which has largely been neglected both in

the academia and in public debate more in general, has a particular

vital contribution to offer today.

To begin with, together with queer theory path-breaking work aimed at

dismantling the gender binary “men” and “women,” it is important to

vindicate once again the need for a form of feminism that opposes the

oppression of people who are perceived as women and who are

discriminated precisely on that basis. Notice here that I am using the

term “woman” in a way that includes all types of women: female women,

male women, feminine women, masculine women, lesbian women, transwomen,

intersex women, queer women, and so on and so forth. Despite the alleged

equality of formal rights, women are still objects of consistent

discrimination and the advancement of queer rights can be accompanied by

retrogress on women’s battles that we thought had been won once and for

all (from the right to abortion to equal pay for equal work).

Far from being an issue of the past, feminism is therefore more

imperative than ever. Yet, it must be supported by an articulation of

women’s liberation that does not create further hierarchies, and this is

precisely where anarchafeminism can intervene. While other feminists

from the left have been tempted to explain the oppression of women on

the basis of a single factor, anarchists have always been crystal clear

in arguing that in order to fight patriarchy we have to fight the

multifaceted ways in which multiple factors — economic, cultural,

racial, political, etc. — converge to foster it.

This neglect, if not outright historical amnesia, of an important

leftist tradition is certainly the result of the ban that anarchism

suffered within academia in particular and within public debates in

general, where anarchism has most often been misleadingly portrayed as a

mere call for violence and disorder. Yet, this is a ban that happened to

the detriment of historical accuracy, global inclusiveness, and

political efficacy.

My proposal is to remedy such a gap by formulating a specific

anarchafeminist approach adapted to the challenges of our time. The

point is not simply to give visibility to an anarchafeminist tradition,

which has been an important component within past women’s struggles, and

thereby reestablish some historical continuity, although this alone

would certainly be a worthwhile endeavor. Besides historical accuracy,

recovering anarchafeminist insights has the crucial function of

enlarging feminist strategies precisely in a moment when, as

intersectional feminists have argued, different factors increasingly

converge to intensify the oppression of women by creating further class,

cultural, and racial cleavages among them.

At a time when feminism has been accused of being mere white privilege,

this task is more crucial than ever. The emancipation of women from the

global north can indeed happen at the expense of further oppression of

women from the global south who most often replace them in the

reproductive labor within the household. It is precisely when we adopt

such a global perspective, all the more necessary today because of the

increased mobility of capital and labor forces, that the chain linking

gendered labor across the globe becomes apparent and the timeliness of

anarchafeminism all the more evident. We need a more multifaceted

approach to domination, in particular, one able to incorporate different

factors as well as the different voices coming from all over the globe.

As Chinese anarchafeminist He Zhen wrote at the dawn of the twentieth

century in her Problems of Women’s Liberation:

“The majority of women are already oppressed by both the government and

by men. The electoral system simply increases their oppression by

introducing a third ruling group: elite women. Even if the oppression

remains the same, the majority of women are still taken advantage of by

the minority of women. […] When a few women in power dominate the

majority of powerless women, unequal class differentiation is brought

into existence among women. If the majority of women do not want to be

controlled by men, why do they want to be controlled by women?

Therefore, instead of competing with men for power, women should strive

for overthrowing men’s rule. Once men are stripped of their privilege,

they will become the equal of women. There will be no submissive women

nor submissive men. This is the liberation of women.”[1]

The timeliness of these words, written in 1907, shows how prophetic

anarchafeminism has been. And here also comes the answer to our question

— why anarchafeminism? — because it is the best antidote against the

possibility of feminism becoming simply white privilege and, thus, a

tool in the hands of a few women who dominate the vast majority of them.

In an epoch when the election of a single woman as president is

presented as liberation for all women, or when women such as Ivanka

Trump can claim feminist battles of the past by transforming the

hashtag#womenwhowork into a tool to sell a fashion brand, the

fundamental message of anarchafeminists of the past is more urgent than

ever:

“Feminism does not mean female corporate power or a woman president: it

means no corporate power and no president”. [2]

2. Why feminism and why women?

At this point one may object: why insist on the concept of feminism and

not just call this anarchism? Why focus just on women? If the purpose is

to dismantle all types of oppressive hierarchies, should we not also get

rid of the gender binary, which opposes “women” to “men,” and thus also

imprisons us in a heteronormative matrix?

We should be immediately clear that when we say “women” we are not

speaking about some supposed object, about an eternal essence, or, even

less so, about a pre-given object. Indeed, to articulate a specifically

feminist position while maintaining a multifaceted understanding of

domination, we need a more nuanced understanding of “womanhood.” By

drawing insights from a Spinozist ontology of the transindividual, I

argue that bodies in general, and women’s bodies in particular, must not

be considered as individuals, as objects given once and for all, but

rather as processes. Women’s bodies, like all bodies, are bodies in

plural because they are processes, processes that are constituted by

mechanism of affects and associations that occur at the inter-, intra–

and the supra-individual level. To give just a brief example of what I

mean here, think of how our bodies come into being through a

inter-individual encounter, how they are shaped by supra-individual

forces, such as their geographical locations, and how they are made up

by intra-individual bodies such as the air we breath or the food we eat.

Only if women bodies are theorized as processes, as sites of a process

of becoming that takes place at different levels, only then will we be

able to speak about “women” without incurring the charge of essentialism

or culturalism. If we adopt this transindividual ontology, we can also

use the concept of woman outside of any heteronormative framework, and

thus use the term in such a way that it comes to include all types of

women: feminine women, masculine women, female women, male women,

lesbian women, bisexual women, intersex women, transwomen, ciswomen,

asexual women, queer women, and so on and so forth. In sum, all those

bodies that identify themselves and are identified through the always

changing narrative “womanhood.”

To sum up on this point, this transividivual understanding allows us to

articulate the question “what does it mean to be a woman?” in

pluralistic terms, while also defending a specifically feminist form of

anarchism. Developing the concept of women as open processes also means

going beyond the individual versus collectivity dichotomy: if it is true

that all bodies are transindividual processes, then the assumption that

there could be such a thing as a pure individual, who is separate, or

even opposed, to a given collectivity, is at best a useless abstraction

and at worst a deceitful phantasy.

3. Which women? And which anarchafeminism?

So if anarchafeminism is the lens, what should be the framework for such

an enterprise? Adopting an anarchafeminist lens also means taking the

entire globe as the framework for thinking about the liberation of

women. This implies going beyond any form of methodological nationalism,

that is, of privileging certain women and thus certain national or

regional contexts. If fighting the oppression of women means we have to

fight all forms of oppression, then statism and nationalism cannot be

any exception. If one begins by looking at the dynamics of exploitation

by taking state boundaries as an unquestionable fact, one will

automatically end up reinforcing the very oppression that one was meant

to question in the first place. Put in a slogan, we could say: “the

globe first” because the framework is the message, and adopting anything

less than the entire globe as our framework is at best naïve

provincialism, and at worst obnoxious ethnocentrism.

Whereas several feminist theories produced in the global north have

failed to understand the extent to which the emancipation of white,

middle-class women happened at the expense of a renewed oppression of

working-class racialized bodies, anarchafeminists have traditionally

adopted a more inclusive perspective. It is not a coincidence that most

anarchist theorists, from Kropotkin to Reclus, have been geographers

and/or anthropologists. By exploring the processes of production and

reproduction of life independent of state boundaries and on a planetary

scale, these authors not only were able to avoid the pitfalls of any

form of methodological nationalism, but could also perceive the global

interconnectedness of forms of domination, beginning with the

intertwinement of capitalist exploitation and colonial domination. This

is not just a remark about theorists: such a global framework has been

very well present among activists as well, not only in the global north,

but also in the global south. For example, different anarchafeminist

programs in Latin America have taken the common property of the globe as

their framework for thinking political action political action,

bypassing any sense of national belonging and often also emphasizing the

racialized dimension of women’s oppression.

A side remark, notice that though I am using labels such as Latin

American or Chinese anarchism, I would also argue that all those labels

must be used as a ladder that we should abandon as soon as we have

reached the top: the vitality of the anarchafeminist tradition consists

precisely in its capacity to transcend state boundaries, methodological

nationalism, and even the Eurocentric biases that a lot of radical

theory produced in the global north still carries within itself. It is

very revealing, for instance, that most of the feminist tools, whether

rooted in Marxist feminism, post-structuralist feminism, or radical

feminism, derive from theories produced in a very small number of

countries. We can actually name and count them with one hand: France,

Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and perhaps Italy. To

combat this Eurocentric trend, and the subsequent privileging of Western

Europe, it is pivotal to bring to the center of the discussion texts

produced by anarchists worldwide, thereby arguing for a form of feminism

beyond Eurocentrism, and beyond ethnocentrism.

4. The coloniality of gender: Another woman is possible.

If we take the globe as our framework, the first striking datum emerging

is that people across the globe have not always been doing gender, and,

moreover, even if they did do it, they did it in very different terms.

It is only with the emergence of a worldwide capitalist system that

gender binary “men” versus “women” became hegemonic worldwide. This does

not mean that sexual difference did not exist before capitalism. It

simply means that binary gender roles were not as universally accepted

as the primary criteria by which to classify bodies. Modern capitalism

made the mononuclear bourgeois family, with its binary gender roles,

hegemonic.

Marxist feminists have long since been emphasizing how capitalism needs

a gendered division of labor because, being predicated on the endless

expansion of profit, it needs both the extraction of surplus value from

waged productive labor as well as unpaid reproductive labor, which is

still performed largely by gendered bodies. Put bluntly, capitalism

needs “women,” because it needs the assumption that women are not

“working” when they wash their husband’s and children’s socks: they are

just performing their reproductive function, and thus fulfilling their

very nature.

As Maria Mies, among others, emphasized, perceiving women’s labor not as

proper work, but as simply the result of their gender, is pivotal to

keeping the division between “waged labor”, subject to exploitation, and

“unwaged labor,” subject to what she called “super-exploitation.” [3]

This form of gendered exploitation is “super” because, whereas the

exploitation of waged labor takes place through the extraction of

surplus value, that of women’s domestic labor takes place via denial of

the very status of work.

By building on these types of insights, Maria Lugones has recently put

forward the very useful concept of the “coloniality of gender.” [4] With

this move, she aims to emphasize how the binary division “men/women” and

the classification of bodies according to their racial belonging went

together, being exported by Europeans through the very process of

colonial expansion that accompanied the worldwide spread of capitalism.

Within the American context, Lugones showed how gender roles were much

more flexible and variegated among Native Americans before the advent of

European settlers. Different indigenous nations had, for instance, a

third gender category to positively recognize intersex and queer

subjectivities, whereas others, such as the Yuma, attribute gender roles

on the basis of dreams, so that a female who dreamed of weapons became a

male for all practical purposes. There has been a systematic

intertwinement among capitalist economy, racial classification of

bodies, and gender oppression.

It is manifest, and yet all too often forgotten, that to classify people

on the basis of their skin color, or their genitalia, is not an a priori

of human mind. Classifying bodies on the basis of their sex, as well as

classifying them on the basis of their race, implies, among other

things, a primacy of the visual register. Such an primacy, according to

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí is typical of the West, particularly when looked at

from the perspective of some African pre-colonial cultures. As she

points out in her seminal “The Invention of Women,” the OyoYoruba

cultures, for instance, relied much more on the oral transmission of

information than on its visualization, and they valued age over all

other criteria for social hegemony. [5] They did not even have a name to

oppose men and women before colonialism: put bluntly, they simply did

not do gender.

Therefore, questioning the coloniality of gender means also questioning

the primacy of the visual: it is by seeing bodies that we say: “here is

a woman!” or “that is a man!.” But it is also within such a visual

heteronormative views of womanhood and thus open new paths toward

subverting them. Put in a slogan, we could say:

“Another woman is possible; another woman has always already began.”

5. An ongoing manifesto:

These words, “another woman is possible; another woman has always

already began” could indeed be the starting point for a new

anarchafeminist manifesto. In contrast to other manifestos, the latter

would inevitably have to be open and ongoing, as ongoing as the

transindividual ontology that sustains it. Starting with Errico

Malatesta’s insight that anarchism is a method, and thus not a program

that can be given once for all, the writing of such a manifesto could

proceed along three axes:[6]

FIRST: At the beginning was movement: anarchism does not mean absence of

order, but rather searching for a social order without an orderer. The

main orderer of our established ways of thinking about politics is the

state. Because we are so accustomed to living in sovereign states, we

for instance tend to perceive the migration of bodies across the globe

as a problem. On the contrary, we should remember that, whereas

sovereign states are a relatively recent historical phenomenon (for most

of humanity, peoples have lived under other types of political

formations), human beings have been migrating across Earth since the

very appearance of so-called Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is therefore

also a Femina migrans, or perhaps even better, an Esse migrans. Hence,

the need for an anarchafeminism beyond boundaries and beyond

ethnocentrism.

SECOND: Just do it : Do not aim to seize state power or wait for the

state to give you power, just start exercising your own power right now.

Aiming to seize state power, or asking for recognition from it, means

reproducing that very same power structure that needs to be questioned

in the first place. This means not only “think globally, and act

locally.” It also means that freedom is within everybody’s reach and can

be exercised in a number of ways that are not mutually exclusive: resist

gender norms, play with them, refuse to comply, civilly disobey, boycott

capitalism, and so on and so forth. These actions are not simply

“lifestyle anarchism,” or “individualist strategies,” as some have

labeled them. They are political acts per se, which can go hand in hand

with larger projects, such as the increasing examples of mass

mobilization, general strikes, communal living and queering the family

that are proliferating around the globe. To think about bodies as

transindividual processes also means that we should escape the false

alternative between individual versus collective strategies, and work at

all different levels. Global is the oppression, so global has to be the

fight.

THIRD: The end is the means, the means is the end : there cannot and

there should not be any fully-fledged political program for an

anarchafeminist manifesto. If freedom is the end, freedom must be the

means to reach it. Anarchism is a method for thinking as well as for

acting, because acting is thinking and thinking is acting. In the same

way in which bodies are plural and plural is their oppression, plural

must also be the strategy to fight such an oppression. As anarchists

have been saying for a long time: “multiply your associations and be

free.” In other words, search for freedom in all your social relations,

not simply in electoral and institutional politics, although the latter

can also be one of the levels to operate in. But if freedom is both the

means and the end, then one could also envisage a world free from the

very notion of gender as well as the oppressive structures that it

generated. Because gendered bodies are still the worldwide objects of

exploitation and domination, we need an anarchafeminist manifesto here

and now. But the latter should be conceived as a ladder that we may well

abandon once we have reached the top. Indeed, it is implicit, in the

very process of embarking in such an anarchafeminist project, that we

should strive toward a world beyond the division between men and women

and thus also, in a way, beyond feminism itself.

---

Chiara Bottici is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School

for Social Research. She obtained her PhD from the European University

Institute (Florence, Italy) and taught at the University of Frankfurt

before joining the New School for Social Research. This post has also

been published: Spanish translation: “Anarcafeminismo” Reporte Sexto

Piso, September 12 (2018) Italian translation “Anarcofemminismo” in

Progressive Politics , edited by Enrico Biale and Carlo Fumagalli,

Fondazione Feltrinelli, Milano, pp. 32-50 French translation of a

revised version : “Pour un Anarchaféminisme”, Libération, 15 November

2018. It will also be Republished in: Materialism and Politics, edited

by Bernardo Bianchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, Ayse Yuva,

Berlin, ICI Berlin Press (forthcoming).

[1] He Zhen, “Women liberation”, in Anarchism. A documentary history of

libertarian ideas, Vol 1, edited by Robert Graham, (Montreal: Black Rose

Books, 2005), pp.341.

[2] Peggy Kornegger, “Anarchism: The Feminist Connection,” in Quiet

Rumors, (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012), 25.

[3] Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. Women in

the International Division of Labour , 1986, London, Zed Books

[4] Maria Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” The Palgrave Handbook of

Gender and Development, (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016).

[5] Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí , The Invention of Women. Making an African Sense

of Western Gender Discourses , (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1997).

[6] Errico Malatesta, Anarchia, (Rome: Datanews, 2001), 39.