and, btw, this is precisely the kind of crap that has been the root of some incredibly contentious blow ups in the feminist blogsophere.
it goes like this. a woman of color (or a sex worker blogger; or a lesbian blogger; or or or) points out that a white feminist blogger has done something pretty shitty to her. some back and forth about what feminism is supposed to be all about.
white blogger: "How dare you point at me and cry sexism (racism, ethnocentrism, elitism, imperialism, etc.)! I am not the one in power. I have NO power, no power at all. I'm just a feminist. Feminists are powerless. We can't be the ones who are the enemy! Why are you picking on us, when Palin might become Veep. Oh Noes Oh Noes Oh Noes. *gnashing teeth* We have to be united here. *rending of clothes* We mustn't become confused and torn asunder by these internal criticisms and all this stuff about how feminists! my dog! feminists are racists (sexist, imperialists, etc.) this is so horrible. oh noes oh noes oh noes. why do you people always have to cause such trouble!?"
this is what Wendy Brown describes as the consequence of victimized identity politics. It is the consequence of believing that power is two-dimensional: one group has and wields it, against the rest of us, groups who have utterly no power. Brown writes:
"Initial figurations of freedom are inevitably reactionary in the sense of emerging in reaction to perceived injuries or constraints of a regime from within its own terms. Ideals of freedom ordinarily emerge to vanquish their imagined immediate enemies, but in this move they frequently recycle and reinstate rather than transform the terms of domination that generated them. Consider exploited workers who dream of a world i which work has been abolished, blacks who imagine a world without whites, feminists who conjure a world without men or without sex, or teenagers who fantasize a world without parents. Such images of freedom perform mirror reversals of suffering without transforming the *organization of the activity through which the suffering is produced* and without addressing the *subject constitution that domination effects*, that is, the constitution of the social categories, "workers," "blacks," "women," or "teenagers."
...
"It would thus appear that it is freedom's relationship to identity -- its promise to address a social injury or marking that is itself constitutive of identity -- that yields the paradox in which the first imaginings of freedom are always constrained by and potentially even require the very structure of oppression that freedom emerges to oppose. This, I think, is not only a patently Foucaultian point but is contained as well in Marx's argument that "political emancipation" within liberalism conceived formal political indifference to civil particularity as liberation because political privilege according to civil particularity appeared as the immediate nature of the domination perpetrated by feudal and Christian monarchy. "True human emancipation" was Marx's formula for escaping the innately contextual and historically specific, hence limited, forms of freedom. True human emancipation, achieved at the end of history, conjured for Marx not simply liberation from particular constraints but freedom that was both thoroughgoing and permanent, freedom that was neither partial nor evasive but temporally and spatially absolute. However, since true human emancipation eventually acquired for Marx a negative referent (Capitalism) and positive content (abolition of capitalism), in time it too would reveal its profoundly historicized and thus limited character."
WEndy Brown, _States of Injury_
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)