Table Of ContentInnocent Subjects
Innocent Subjects
Feminism and Whiteness
Terese Jonsson
First published 2021 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Terese Jonsson 2021
The right of Terese Jonsson to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3751 7 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3750 0 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0342 9 PDF eBook
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1. ‘That Old Chestnut’: Feminism and Racism 1
2. British Feminisms in the Aftermath of Empire 32
3. Leaving Feminist Whiteness Behind: Narratives of
Transcendence in the Era of Difference 66
4. Inevitable Whiteness? Absolving White Feminist Dominance 97
5. Liberal Whiteness and the ‘New’ Feminism 126
6. Feminist Complicities 159
Notes 183
Index 217
v
Acknowledgements
My thinking and writing is fundamentally indebted to the work of the
many Black feminists and feminists of colour which I draw on in this
book. I want to thank and acknowledge all those who have been doing
the often unrewarding and emotionally draining work of challenging
and critiquing racism and whiteness within feminist theorising, politics
and communities for a long time.
Throughout the process of research and writing, I have been incred-
ibly lucky to have shared learning, friendship, support, despair and
laughs with a number of amazing feminist thinkers and doers. Andrea
D’Cruz, Anna Bull, rashné limki, Dyi Huijg, Naaz Rashid and Sarah
Keenan have not only informed my thinking through their incisive and
generous feedback on various versions of different chapters, but have
also been great friends and colleagues. Ongoing conversations and
collaborative scheming with Humaira Saeed have been central to the
development of my ideas and analysis. Rashida Harrison’s knowledge
and shared enthusiasm for exploring the archives of Outwrite Women’s
Newspaper benefited my thinking about the paper’s political signifi-
cance. Anna Feigenbaum and other members of the Feminist Activist
Forum’s ‘DIY feminist history group’ also informed my perspective
on Outwrite’s legacy for contemporary feminists. Conversations with
Nydia Swaby enriched my understanding of the histories of Black
British feminism. My analysis has also been influenced by conversa-
tions which started at the ‘Feminist Complicities’ meeting in 2015 and
continued from there, including in particular with Nadine El-Enany (in
addition to people already mentioned above). Throughout the journey
of my PhD and then writing this book, I have benefited from and appre-
ciated intellectual and political discussions with members of the Gender
and Sexuality PhD forum at London Metropolitan University, the ‘Race’,
Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies (REPS) postgraduate network, the
‘Critical Edges’ organising group and event in 2019, the Citizenship,
Race and Belonging (CRaB) research network, the Critical Pedagogies
reading group, and the feminist reading group, the latter three all at the
vi
acknowledgements
University of Portsmouth. I want to thank my students at Portsmouth
for inspiration, in particular those who engaged with openness and
thoughtfulness in conversations on my Equality or Liberation? The-
orising Social Justice module. A number of colleagues at Portsmouth
deserve mention for their kindness and care in the midst of a sector
which encourages the opposite, in particular Joseph Burridge, Emily
Nicholls, Naheem Jabbar, Sukh Hamilton and Rusten Menard.
This book grew out of my PhD research which I completed in 2015.
My supervisor, Irene Gedalof, helped me, with great care and patience,
shape and carry out the research. I would like to acknowledge and thank
my thesis examiners, Sara Ahmed and Sunny Singh, for their critical
engagement with my work, which gave me ideas for how it could be
developed. I also want to thank my MA dissertation supervisor Nirmal
Puwar, who influenced my thinking and direction of scholarly travel
during my MA in Gender, Culture and Modernity at Goldsmiths
College in 2004–05.
Both the PhD and the book were a long time coming and there were
times when it was doubtful that either were going to come at all. Many
friends, older as well as newer, have provided steadfast encouragement,
laughs and reality checks when I needed them. In particular, I want to
thank Denise and Jackie Hales, Sam Stewart, Dan McMahon, Johanna
Novales, Soley Mustafa, Yula Burin, Sarah James, Leslie Barson, Sian
Fletcher and everyone at Otherwise Living.
I am grateful for David Shulman’s support for my work and incredible
patience in seeing this book through to completion and I would like to
thank him and everyone else at Pluto Press. I also extend my sincere
thanks to the anonymous reviewers of the initial proposal and chapter,
whose comments were incredibly helpful in refining and clarifying my
arguments and the ways in which I communicate them.
My dad, Kurt Jonsson, passed away as I was writing this book, in
March 2018. It is difficult to succinctly summarise the influence he had
and continues to have on my life and my work, but I am particularly
thankful to him for teaching me to think critically, to ask questions and
to believe that things can be changed (even though we did not always
agree on what questions need to be asked or what needs to change). I
am grateful to my mum, Gunilla Jonsson, and my sister, Linda Forsberg,
who have both been consistently supportive of me and my various
endeavours and winding paths, and who continue to be an important
vii
innocent subjects: feminism and whiteness
part of ‘home’ for me. Thank you to Natasha, without whose deep
care, support and patience I would not be where I am today, and this
book would certainly not have been completed. I also want to thank
the Parker-Campbell-Hinton family for their generosity and openness.
Special thanks go to my niece, Amiyah, and my nephew, Alex, for all the
joy and creativity they bring into my life.
Finally, I do not have the words nor the space to fully describe the
influence Lani Parker has had on me as a person and on my work. I can
only thank her for her unwavering encouragement and love, her close
attention to and feedback on various drafts of chapters, and for always
challenging me to think deeper and act braver.
All royalty payments I receive for this book will be redistributed to
the Resourcing Racial Justice fund (http://resourcingracialjustice.org/)
and anti-racist feminist projects.
* * *
Some material in Chapter 3 has previously been published in article
form, as ‘The narrative reproduction of white feminist racism’, in
Feminist Review, 113 (2016).
viii
1
‘That Old Chestnut’:
Feminism and Racism
In a letter published in Spare Rib in December 1980, reproductive rights
activist Jan McKenley writes of her frustration that most white feminists
around her seem to have stopped caring about racism:
I’m beginning to feel invisible again within the WLM [women’s lib-
eration movement], having to work myself up to making ‘heavy’
statements that will embarrass sisters in meetings – I can see the
eyebrows going up already – ‘Not racism – that old chestnut again
– it’s so boring.’ Well, if it’s boring for you, white sister .... I’ve got no
monopoly on dealing with racism – it’s your problem too.1
Noting that the topic had been ‘trendy’ a year or two prior, McKenley
describes being ‘left feeling that racism was “last year’s thing”’, urging
her white ‘sisters’ to take out ‘the 1978 file’ again in order to remind
themselves of the anti-racist arguments they should already know but
appear to have forgotten. ‘And if you don’t take that file off the shelf, I
hope it falls on your bloody head, so don’t say you haven’t been warned!’
the letter ends.
Fast forward 37 years. In her 2017 book Why I’m No Longer Talking
to White People About Race, writer Reni Eddo-Lodge discusses recent
feminist debates on social media and in the liberal press, highlighting
how racism continues to ‘cause immovable fault lines in the movement’.
‘Too often’, she continues, ‘a white feminist’s ideological standpoint does
not see racism as a problem, let alone a priority’. Drawing attention to
the long history of Black feminist critiques of white feminism, Eddo-
Lodge questions why, if white feminists ‘can understand the patriarchy’,
they ‘struggle to understand whiteness as a political structure in the
same way’.2
1
