The Feminist Hierarchy, White Feminism, and False Feminist Agency

Feminism has been studied and contested for centuries—its origins, interpretations, the way its practice shifts across time and social position. To take on this subject with the depth it deserves, I have divided this examination into two parts. The first addressed how feminist agency is performed rather than practiced: the way young women learn to cite feminist coalition, femininity, and solidarity as a kind of social legibility, and how this same performance scales — and is often monetized — in women who occupy positions of relative power. Through a close reading of one such case, a social media creator whose public rhetoric of allyship obscures her own participation in racial and class hierarchies among women, I argue that claiming oppression has become a convenient alternative to reckoning with one’s own oppressive position. The second part of this examination will turn inward, to the psychoanalytic and internalized dimensions of this same performance — the ways in which women come to inhabit and unconsciously reproduce the very structures I describe here. 

Priority for most young women is as follows: men, performance of relationship with men, relationship with man, performance of femininity, performance of feminist coalition, performance of female friendship, female friendship. I position these in order because there is truth behind the phenomenon; young women are still learning their being, discovering their worth, normalizing the structures that the patriarchy pushes, deconstructing them, interpreting their own choices good or bad. Amia Srinivasan, English philosopher, argues the political and personal relationship women have to sexuality, interrogating the position women have in their own private sexuality versus their external portrayal. Srinivasan argues that the desire is never purely personal — that even our most private sexual and romantic inclinations are shaped by political and social structures we didn’t choose. This is precisely the tension underlying the priority list above: what looks like a woman’s authentic pursuit of romantic sexual fulfillment is inseparable from a performance she has been trained, often unconsciously, to give. I’d like to explore this concept, but taking this external reality that most young women face through the social relationships they form whether it be family,  friends, media, etc. — both in regard to sexuality and femininity. Why is it that young women form such performative parasocial relationships regarding their sexuality and gender? And how is this phenomenon either overcome or upheld throughout their lives? These questions are precisely why this priority complex that young women have remained so performative and not at all authentic—relaying a false image of the feminist kinship they claim to be synchronous with. Feminist agency is often performed rather than practiced, and this performance allows women in positions of relative power to claim victimhood instead of reckoning with their own complicity in oppression.

Feminist theory is intersectional, feminism is not white, although it comes off white to many online. Bell hooks refers to feminism as the interlocking of white-supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy — all mutually suppressive systems of oppression. The form of feminism I will be referring to here revolves around this logic, as agency in feminist subjects is often mostly in the form of white feminism, only accounting white women. Let us not understand, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes in “Under Western Eyes”, ““women” as a group, as a stable category of analysis, that assumes an ahistorical, universal unity between women based on a generalized notion of their subordination…bypassing the social class and ethnic identities”, but the truth is that it is carried out from white feminists hoping to relate to every woman regardless of class, race, social group, the same to them. It is using rhetoric such as “wlw”, assuming  all women in a wlw, woman loves woman, relationship experience the same systems of oppression. But no, it is not just you, a white woman coming from an upper class social group who experiences oppression, in fact being mistaken as a sibling instead of a lesbian couple, sounds the most understandable remark that society has to offer for a lesbian relationship. This becomes extremely evident in the critiquing of those oppressing others — and I will be drawing on the same case study I have been referring to throughout this essay. In hopes of keeping this ‘creator’/’online persona’ private and not to draw specific attention to the harm she herself is also causing, I will keep her identity as such as well. This behavior is not only representative of the white victim mindset a lot of white women subject themselves to usually out of their own white guilt, but it is the same form of phenomenon as claiming a culture through their oppressed experiences in order to get out of their whiteness and privilege. Whiteness grants privilege regardless of gender, race, sex, economic status; looping class and status into that, only further determines your place in society, so it makes sense for a white woman to feel the need to claim a culture such as “wlw” in order to place themselves as a person subject to oppression, even in this form. What is wrong with this situation still is the objective place society is put into, a cycle of belittling and punishing those uneducated enough to be open-minded enough not to make assumptions. But this scrutiny is its own exercise of power: it pushes an authentic mistake as if it were a considered political position, foreclosing the possibility of correction in favor of condemnation. A woman in this position, of this race, class, social division ought to do better about claiming a culture when only weaponizing every other group of woman or man in favor of their own external position; performance is the only form of power, hiding behind an identity that is further perpetuating the standards that your people have indoctrinated every other group into. 

That is not to say that a white woman subject to this misrecognition cannot feel hurt, cast aside, unseen; this is an interrogation of how their rhetoric surrounding their identity, as a white woman, especially white women coming from a higher socioeconomic background, is still harmful and oppressive to different groups of women. Furthermore, the status of a white woman, objectively Westernized in the way they portray this scenario, is only favorable to those in their position, not black women, asian women, trans-women, women of working class, women as victims to colonial process, all those that are still ranked as lesser than this white woman. With that being said, a narrow lens of feminist practice, and calling out women that are inept to a specific form of internalized misogyny, only harms the practice altogether — lacking complexity, nuance, and depth regarding the many other circumstances, context that allows for oppression to take place in the first place. 

Critique is a form of consumption if not offering a form of agency. Part of the freedom women have is the freedom to educate, to inform, to be better for those that don’t know, and to be responsible in the same ways they expect everyone else to be. Knowing why things happen is only part of the work that needs to be done, but if not followed by the agency and contribution for betterment, then what else are you offering other than more harm, more oppression, more consumption that only fills the pockets of people in this position. Referencing a subject in this way is obscure, but it is real, and it is a big part of the false information that these “activists” and “allies” like to promote. Amia Srinivasan also comments, “psychoanalysis is very good at dissolving the dichotomy between oppressor and oppressed…very good at understanding the way in which we are both…a set of positions that can be switched between”. Her point here dismantles the assumption that oppression is a fixed role assigned to a fixed person. Someone can occupy the position of the oppressed in one context — as a woman navigating patriarchal expectations — and the position of the oppressor in another — as a white, upper-class woman reproducing hierarchies against other women. These positions are not contradictory; they are, as Srinivasan suggests, simultaneous and interchangeable depending on where power actually sits in a given interaction.

In another post by the online creator I have been referring to, she writes, “homophobia thinly veiled as bewildered confusion isn’t the take you think it is. Educate yourself on marginalized communities rather than inviting hate towards them. Your lack of awareness isn’t quirky”. It is unsure who this claim is specifically targeted towards other than someone who is indeed unaware of the homophobia they extrude, but it is just as harmful to assume it is anything other than miseducation in the form of bewildered confusion. The context of the situation described lacks the same depth that the creator is claiming to have, described in the same vague remark of “marginalized communities”. It would then be safe to also question the creator as to which marginalized communities she is aware of herself or able to uplift in her position as a white, upper-class female creator rather than only seeking out those who are not aware of the homophobia themselves. It is a common trend to critique others on their shortcomings in order to make change and assert agency in others regarding such prominent issues. It is also arguably not the oppressed who should feel inclined to take the responsibility in informing others of all they fail to understand. But reinforcing those undereducated or misinformed only further situates the hierarchy in this way, asserting the white upper-class female in the lead of all feminist matters once again. Agency is the form of autonomy that women fight for, it is the right any autonomous body is entitled to, but it does also need to be considered in all contexts. Mohanty states that “practices which characterize women’s status and roles vary according to class”. Although the problem remains, and there still is a population of those who are unaware, and that is not strictly assigned to those who have access to the resources to attain education; it is oftentimes those a part of marginalized communities who are often victim to the system that these people in power perpetuate through this rhetoric. It is propaganda, and it is still harmful. The question is not whether or not people need to educate themselves on crucial matters but how they got to this place of unawareness and lack of education and resources needed for making conscious and informed remarks. For a creator to critique the uneducated and weaponize their lack of awareness— instead of spread more thought provoking questions, have  deeper discussions of why this even happens, and provide the insight they claim to have— the cycle of harm and inequality they feel entitled to from those in lesser positions than them will only continue. 

It is far more convenient to perform victimhood than to confront the ways one’s own position — one’s rhetoric, one’s aesthetic, one’s platform — actively reproduces the hierarchy being critiqued. Claiming oppression requires no accountability; acknowledging complicity in oppressing others does. This final convenience of the false feminist agency I have described: it is easier to locate oneself as a victim than to reckon with the ways one’s own position, voice, and image participate in oppressing others. Patriarchal and white-supremacist social order trains women to cite as legible womanhood and feminist agents, so the failure here is not of individual women necessarily. There is no redistribution of power that would make the ‘ally’ language or activist aesthetics substantive, only structure women’s relationship to feminism as a social, economic scale to become monetized, in figures like the one I examined. 

Part II: The Internal Interrogation, Reckoning with Identity and Solving Performativity…