You Know What Else Has No Place In the Feminist Movement?

214 Notes

We are a group of established feminist activists, educators, writers, bloggers and lecturers. We are speaking out as the result of the behaviour and posts coming from some of the online feminist community, which we view as unhealthy for the movement. After some thoughtful consideration, we can no longer be silent.

The recent controversy around Hugo Schwyzer has prompted alarming behaviour among the online feminist community that we are compelled to address. We want to be clear: In no way do we excuse Schwyzer’s past actions. Many strong and valid critiques have been made around Schwyzer’s position in the feminist movement — some of those critiques have been made by some of us writing this letter — and it’s crucial to create an open space for those concerns to be shared and addressed.

The issues that we are bringing up for discussion today go beyond any individual person. Our concerns center around solidarity, accountability, and the state of feminism.

Silencing and bully tactics have no place in the feminist movement. To bully and silence repeats the patterns of domination, control, and abuse of power that feminism seeks to change.

We have witnessed first hand silencing and bullying behaviour of some feminists by other feminists in our community. This behavior has caused a great deal of concern, anger, and fear. We fear being personally targeted and ostracized, with our reputations tarnished as we are falsely aligned with Schwyzer and his actions simply because we disagree with the way in which the discussion around him has been controlled. Silencing others and censoring ourselves impedes our social justice work. Bullying instills fear to the point that we, the collective anonymous authors of this statement, do not feel safe openly expressing our views. As a result, we are forced to respond to this behavior anonymously—an unfortunate and unacceptable result of take-down culture. These issues are not simply about us. We are concerned there are others whose views may be suppressed as well.

This kind of behaviour and the way in which feminists are being attacked by one another, severely threatens to eliminate any possibility of having an honest, productive, and respectful conversation about the issues that have come up in all of this. It creates an unsafe space within the online feminist community; the same community from which many of us seek support and solace given the hostile environment we experience daily as feminists in the outside world.

The rifts that have come out of this controversy do not advance the feminist movement especially in terms of working towards collective freedom. Rifts within feminism are nothing new. But if there is one thing we’ve learned it is that continuing to attack each other is fruitless.

Our call is for legitimate critique, open discussion and accountability without personalized attacks. The all/nothing, with us/against them framework that dominates the movement at this time is detrimental to gender justice activism and impedes the social and political progress we all seek. We ask you to join us in committing to accountability, open dialogue, and ethical interactions. We ask you to reject personalized attack, bullying, and take-down culture.

Audre Lorde famously said, “Your silence will not protect you.” Within the feminist movement, we must all remember that our silence — or the silencing of others — will never produce radical social change.