What is a woman?
The political question of the hour…
In short, to us there are many ways to understand what “a woman” is that are often simultaneous – a social role, a cultural archetype, an individual identity or its fracture, a personally experienced reality, a drag, a creative persona, a shared & felt way of life, an assigned position in society, a descriptive attempt at anatomical or biological categorisation of people in the scientific paradigm.
What we find most important to our political strategy for changing the world, is the understanding that:
a) anyone considered by society a woman or woman-adjacent experiences a level of misogynistic patriarchy (that can include e.g. “effeminate” cis men)
b) transgender people (e.g. binary trans women) and gender-binary-non-conforming people (e.g. butch lesbians) experience misogynistic patriarchy based on how society reads them, often in new fucked up ways because of disrupting the patriarchal paradigm of “natural, unquestionable order”
c) womanhood has been a target of oppression for longer than capitalism existed.
Therefore, we have a political fight and a cultural fight at our hands.
Womanhood in capitalism
Capitalism works with patriarchy in specific ways that affect us right now. Being classed as a woman in capitalism, regardless of personal views on the matter, directs our daily survival, shapes our safety, limitations and opportunities, our relationships, and our commodification as objects to be utilised, used, bred, worked, violated, to decorate and be pleasant to look at. And commodification to ensure reproduction – both social reproduction through our bodies, organs and care-work, and the for-profit reproduction in jobs that make the world go round, as women-assigned people statistically mostly work jobs that are menial, physically hard, low-paid, low-status, yet often essential to functioning of everything else in society and corporate industry – agriculture, natural resources, cleaning, textiles, nursing, teaching, care, customer service, call centres, administration.
The end of capitalism alone will not spell the end of patriarchy, deeply engrained over thousands of years into the shape of social relations, bodies, culture, mythology, collective psyche. Whatever our personal experience of gender assigned and/or lived is – our work is inspired by “historical situationism” (bell hooks) and always engages with womanhood both as an experience of this particular moment in our culture (how it feels to be treated or live as a woman right now) and as a sub-class category in the system of labour exploitation (what it means to our daily life survival options).
Class conscious solidarity
This also means we extend no solidarity to women and those affected by patriarchal misogyny who are capitalists or align themselves with capital – those who live off ownership of assets such as companies, financial investments or accumulated interest, homes for rent, factories, any other resources and means of production. We are on the same side with those of us who must sell our own labour to live (paid jobs), exchange our labour for access to resources to live (ie. house-making for an employed partner or parent), or find alternative economies that are based on free sharing and reclamation of resources from our class oppressors (anarchist networks and practices such as squats, communes and social centres, shopping without money :p, free-diving for food, etc.).
TL;DR- yes, of fucking course we are trans-inclusive and gender-non-conforming-inclusive (and gender-conforming inclusive)! Not just because it’s morally correct, but also because we can politically trace exactly how patriarchal misogyny attacks trans and gnc people and gc people. And track how the reality of gender we LIVE actually defies the patriarchal dogma of two distinct, polar-opposite, binary sexes/genders – and that fucks up patriarchy’s grip. There are many ways to be a woman or femme or feminine. We are all sisters & siblings in the same fight for liberation from gender-based dogma & oppression, even if areas of patriarchal assaults affects us somewhat differently. Also, fuck landlords.
