Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall is published by Bloomsbury (RRP £16.99) and Feminism Interrupted by Lola Olufemi is published by Pluto (RRP £9.99). Reading her is to believe that another world is possible. But she makes up for it in optimism, looking ahead to a feminism that includes the experiences of all women. Olufemi takes her feminism so seriously that sometimes it compromises her authorial tone, rendering it drily determined her work sometimes reads like a military pamphlet. This frippery turns questions of agency into ones of pleasure, of entitlement, of being worth it. Olufemi argues that mainstream feminism is too often obsessed by personal choices: she refers, as others have, to the mind-numbing genre of articles that pose the question: “Can you be a feminist and … ?”. She points to those middle-class feminists who make much of Muslim women as needing saving from a system of oppression that is “other”, without recognising that oppression is everywhere: in the UK, two women a week are killed by a partner or former partner. The abortion referendum in Ireland, for example, leaned heavily on the cases of two women of colour, but there is little mobilisation for the rest of the maternal experience of women of colour. Olufemi shows how women of colour as victims are readily pressed into service to serve causes but then excluded from activism, and its spoils. And she does so without absolving her own communities, or elevating them into saintly victimhood. She exposes the yawning chasm between what constitutes mainstream feminist activism and the urgent needs of women of colour in maternity wards, single-mother households, abusive homes, hungry families – and those of disfranchised trans people and sex workers. In doing so she pulls off two things at the same time. Kendall is often unsparing and honest about issues that aren’t related to racism, pointing out that colourism among black communities predated contact with Europeans. Women of colour suffer twice, as the patriarchal state can also be racist Kendall cites as an example the fact that concern about rape culture in the US focuses on the date rape of suburban teens, and not the much higher rate of sexual assault faced by, for instance, indigenous and Alaskan women. They seek not to eject white women from the movement, of course, but to point out how those women, because of their platforms and access, bury the needs of others. It sounds divisive (and has been accused of being so), but look closer and it’s obvious what Kendall and others mean when they identify cliques and exclusivity among white feminists. Running through Kendall’s work is the notion that “ solidarity is for white women”, the name of a campaign she started in 2013.
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