Women's March, New York, Jan 21, 2017. Credit: Erik McGregor SIPA USA/PA Images
As the earth spun on its axis, from dawn to dusk on 21 January 2017, there were women marching in all weathers in 673 cities across the globe, like a giant Mexican wave, against Donald Trump’s election and his divisive brand of politics which is rearing its head everywhere. No sooner were the mainstream media congratulating the women-led marches for the size, the amazing co-ordination, the peacefulness and sheer joyousness of it all, then ructions have erupted among various groups of people who felt excluded. One of the things that I loved about the London march, which I attended, was its inclusiveness – that it was women-led but everyone was welcome: men, transwomen and all those who identified somewhere on the non-binary spectrum.
The ructions confirm a trend. We are witnessing an amazing reversal where the term ‘woman’ has become toxic while ‘feminism’ is no longer the pariah concept it once was. Feminism’s popularity has an inverse relation to the hollowing out of its revolutionary potential. A number of factors are responsible for this: corporate feminism; its increased commercial value as witnessed in the fashion industry’s co-option of the term – Dior launched a $700 T-shirt which reads ‘We should all be feminists now’; the politics of a vocal minority of transwomen which seeks to erase woman as a category; and the amplification of these voices by various institutions, the low point being the Green Party Women’s callout to its ‘non-male’ followers. However, if you remove the victims of patriarchy at the stroke of a pen by calling them something else, does that mean that patriarchy no longer exists?
