It's finally happened (and four other stories)
Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.
This week has been intense. Work-wise things were hectic, and at home they were fairly hectic, too. My daughter was off school for two whole days because her teachers were on strike. It’s the second time in not so long that she has been home because of industrial action, and the flat was busy with the four of us, the mess taking over surreptitiously. But now, it’s dark outside, and the kids are (almost) asleep, and I finally have some time to send out this newsletter. So let’s get to it.
1) The UK has (finally) passed major childcare reform
It’s been a big week politically in the UK, as the Chancellor unveiled his Spring Budget. Among his announcements was a big expansion of childcare provision. The context (for readers who are not familiar with it) is that Britain has some of the most expensive childcare in the OECD and the sector is on its knees. Over the past year, campaigners, mostly women and mothers, have pushed to make childcare a political issue. In the past, it was seen as something for women to worry themselves about. The Conservative government’s reform is a real coup for activists, as is the fact that, as we head to an election within 18 months, the opposition Labour party has pledged to “completely reimagine childcare,” too.
On the details, the reform itself is far from ideal. As the Labour MP Stella Creasy told me, “it’s not a solution” to the crisis. The government has essentially increased demand by extending free provision, without adequate funding and ensuring enough places to take all of these children. Here is a link to my interview with Creasy which goes into detail on this (it was also put out as a podcast episode at my day job if you would rather have a listen).
Pregnant then Screwed, the leading campaign group on this issue, tweeted the following after the reform was announced, which captures the sense of victory for many parents over this change.
2) South Korean women are abandoning the patriarchy
In what can only be described as a major power move, South Korean feminists who are part of a movement called 4B are turning their back on male domination. Rather than struggle against the patriarchy, according to this long read in The Cut, these women are disengaging with it:
4B is shorthand for four Korean words that all start with bi-, or “no”: The first no, bihon, is the refusal of heterosexual marriage. Bichulsan is the refusal of childbirth, biyeonae is saying no to dating, and bisekseu is the rejection of heterosexual sexual relationships. It is both an ideological stance and a lifestyle.
In a December edition of The Backlash, I shared some links to coverage of feminist protest against anti-feminism in South Korea and background on misogyny in the country:
During the 2022 South Korean presidential race, conservative candidate Yoon Suk-yeol denied that structural inequality between men and women exists and threatened to abolish the Ministry of Family and Gender Equality. He narrowly won the presidency in March 2022 by catering to young men, who overwhelmingly believe that discrimination against men in South Korea is severe.
3) The most nuanced interview you will read on trans rights
The vitriol and nonsense on this topic is ubiquitous, but every once in a while there is a metaphorical light in the darkness of the internet and the reactionary insanity that some people call the “trans panic”. In this interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, writer Masha Gessen, themselves trans and non-binary, is wonderfully lucid about how America (and some other countries I can think of…) are eating themselves alive on this issue. Here is a snippet:
MG: I think one thing that I’m really happy to have been able to do is just write about trans people as though there’s nothing unusual about trans people.
DR: Where the transness is almost incidental to what you’re writing.
MG: Exactly. We have to wade into this controversy, which does exist. Some of the criticism of trans coverage in the [New York] Times and elsewhere has said, Oh, it’s a manufactured culture war. Well, of course. All culture wars are manufactured, but this one is happening. So we have to figure out a way to cover it, I think, in a complicated way.
4) The woman who helped coin the phrase “identity politics”
The Drift magazine interviewed the queer, Black feminist Barbara Smith, who founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press with the writer Audre Lourde (of “poetry is not a luxury fame), and was instrumental in coming up with the now well-worn phrase “identity politics”. Smith was seemingly ahead of her time intersectionality, too. Here she talks about different kinds of feminism:
It’s really too bad that more people don’t know about the history of socialist feminism, because socialist feminism is poles apart from girlboss feminism and white feminism, as it has more recently been defined and written about. (I’m thinking about Koa Beck’s book.) If more people knew about the history, I think they would see more hope in feminism, and they would also have more respect for feminism because they would say, Damn, they really fought for something important, you know?
Having class, race, gender, and sexuality as part of your analysis is like having a microscope that lets you see what’s actually going on in a way that, if you only have a magnifying glass — a one-vector way of looking at oppression — you’re not going to see. A multi-issue, structural analysis of how oppression plays itself out is like an electron microscope. It’s a lot different from that magnifying glass.
5) Germany has a feminist foreign policy
Earlier this month, Germany’s foreign ministry launched feminist foreign policy guidelines, and its development ministry unveiled a strategy on feminist development assistance. Is this empty virtue signalling or a genuine attempt to push for feminist progress along different priorities of state? And what does it actually mean in practice?
This analysis by Saskia Brechenmacher compares Germany’s approaches to other countries (including Sweden, which dropped its own feminist foreign policy last year). Hat tip to the subscriber (you know who you are) who alerted me to the fact that the policy had been adopted. Here is an excerpt from the piece:
In the eyes of many advocates…..a feminist approach to foreign policy goes beyond simply integrating women into foreign policy processes or adding a greater focus on gender equality to the long list of global policy priorities. Instead, they argue for a more radical rethinking of international engagement. According to this view, a feminist approach to foreign policy would center human security over state and national security, and focus on dismantling the global economic and political structures that reproduce gender inequality as well as other forms of exclusion, discrimination, and injustice.
Brechenmacher also raises interesting questions around war, security and pacifism:
Perhaps most importantly, there is the much bigger question of how a feminist foreign policy fits into broader shifts in German foreign policy over the past year, particularly the move toward higher defense spending and deterrence politics in light of the threat of Russian aggression and the war in Ukraine. Even though not all feminist advocates subscribe to pacifist political commitments, most place a strong emphasis on disarmament, military restraint, and multilateral conflict resolution, viewing militarism as inherently linked to patriarchal power structures.