Reframing Feminism with Dr. Serene Khader

We love reading books that express things we actually may have always known in our hearts, but previously didn't have the language for. Dr. Serene Khader’s book Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop was one such book for Nat, and so we brought Serene on Reframeables to talk more about her work and break down the book for an absent Rebecca. We talked about feminism’s changing landscape in North America and beyond, and then we added “sex therapist” to Serene’s résumé as we talked about the orgasm gap and how an understanding of intersectional feminism will make for better sex. We even got into how Serene was inspired by Reframeables and now wants to start a podcast with her sister!

Serene Khader is a writer, political philosopher, and feminist theorist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop (2024) and Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (2019), among other works. She is professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center and holds the Jay Newman Chair in Philosophy of Culture at Brooklyn College.

Links:
Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop
For more from Serene, check out her website and follow her on Twitter

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Chapters

• 0:00 This week's episode
• 2:05 Feminism at a crossroads
• 6:53 Faux feminism
• 12:38 We need more clarity about what we should do
• 16:37 Conversations with students
• 22:31 The freedom myth
• 25:57 The orgasm gap
• 32:55 Tools from philosophy
• 35:50 A topographical map of feminism
• 43:11 Sitting with uncomfortable things
• 46:48 Getting the sisters together

Transcript

Natalie
Hey, it’s Nat.

Rebecca
And Bec — two very different sisters who come together to reframe some of life’s big and small problems. We’re moms, writers.

Natalie
We have soft boundaries. We see the world differently, but we both lean into vulnerability together and with our guests, because we like deep dives. So come with us — let’s reframe something.

Tamara
Hey, it’s Tamara stepping in for two sick Davey sisters. As an honorary sister today, I’m excited to get into the podcast conversation that Nat had with Dr. Serene Khader, an American moral and political philosopher and feminist theorist. Nat chatted with Serene, a philosophy of culture professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, about her book Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop. They talked about feminism’s changing landscape in North America and beyond, then they added “sex therapist” to Serene’s résumé as they talked about the orgasm gap and how an understanding of intersectional feminism will make for better sex. They even talked about how Serene was inspired by Reframeables and now wants to start a podcast with her sister. I am always amazed by the interesting voices that Nat and Bec get on the show, and this one is no different. So here we go: reframing feminism with Dr. Serene Khader.

Natalie
Hi, Serene. I’m actually going to introduce you properly as Dr. Serene Khader, who is joining us to talk about her wonderful new book. And I’m so bummed that Rebecca is not sitting on the other box of our screen right now, but she is at a thing that she has to be at. So our job, Serene, is to basically explain faux feminism, why we fall for white feminism, and how we can stop to Rebecca. Because she’s like, “This is for me. I really want to be able to go through this book with Serene — but ok, you’re going to do it all for me, Natalie.” So here’s us doing the job.

Serene
Thank you so much for having me, Natalie. And I was telling you before that I wish I could have a podcast with my sister. So I will also imagine that I’m explaining it to my sister, and not just yours.

Natalie
Oh, I love that. Ok, talk to me though. I mean, I’ve got some questions, obviously, sort of laid out here. But when you decided to write about feminism at a crossroads, which is essentially, like, kind of your opening line in your cover flap, what was the prompt — to maybe give us a little bit of context about you?

Serene
Yeah, so the book is called Faux Feminism, and then there’s a colon: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop. And I wrote that book at a really different political moment from the one that we’re in now, because of course we’re speaking in the aftermath of the US presidential election, and of course now this title with white feminism in it, folks think is about white women’s voting behaviour and the fact that the majority of white women supported Donald Trump. And of course, that’s something that I think is important to talk about and that we should be talking about and that fits with the mission of the book.

But I actually wrote the book about sort of a different crossroads, which is that, you know, even just a year or two ago, we were at this amazing moment in political history where, you know, I’m based in New York City, the majority of women in the US (I bet it’s similar in Canada) identify as feminists. And that is something that we have never seen before, right? In the US, over 60% of women answered yes to the question, “Are you a feminist?” And for me, that’s partly a moment with a ton of potential, because it’s like: actually, here is the moment where we can harness this kind of identification for real deep social change that makes a difference for women and gender expansive people all across the economic and racial spectrum.

But I say that feminism is at a crossroads because clearly not everybody who is a feminist has been on that team. And, like, one of the things that the book really tries to do is offer a book that anybody who can read, whether they’re really an old hand at feminism or new to feminism, that is very honest about the fact that feminists, and especially mainstream feminists, have a history of excluding or harming women who are not terribly privileged. And so I’m both very honest about that history and I try to say, “But there’s something else that we can do instead. And that other thing has been alive for at least a hundred years, especially in the activism of women of colour and women in the labour movement, but also in the activism of all different kinds of women.”

So there’s this crossroads where on the one hand, feminism is at the height of its popularity. On the other hand, things get popular by being diluted. And in particular, a lot of white and rich women have kind of made clear that they climb the ladder and are willing to throw it down behind them. And so at that crossroads, we have to choose, kind of, are we going to reclaim a heart of feminism that really is, as bell hooks said, for everyone? And as I said, like, I think especially in the States we’re in a dark political moment, but I think we need to situate it in this bigger context, which is that in the last 10 to 15 years, like, I think there is a lot of will to, like, be interested in deep social justice and to think about how we can do feminism differently.

And part of the reason that white feminism is in the title is that I think obviously different generations will see things differently. You know, I’m an old millennial, but, like, for millennial and Gen Z folks, people who are interested in social justice, they’ve heard of white feminism before. They’re feminists, they know white feminism is something they want to avoid. This book is partly here to kind of explain, “Ok, what is that thing we want to avoid?” and to make clear that there’s an alternative.

Natalie
Ok, so I’m doing some deep thinking just even about the wording because it’s so interesting to me. Just the other day I was reading a white paper — so my area of interest these days, it’s always going to have feminism sort of as a baseline for myself. But from within that field in education, I end up talking about care studies. And I found this really interesting white paper that I actually thought was, like, pretty solid until I got to their reference section and they had divided their thinkers, which I thought was really important. They had sort of listed all sorts of folks in care studies from sort of early years of who was talking about it, you know, and then into much more sort of current studies. But they framed one specific section of some of the earlier voices as white care study voices, but they called them white feminism.

Serene
Oh, that’s interesting.

Natalie
And I found it very interesting, because as a deconstructionist in terms of, like, my language, I like to sit with the words first and then kind of make sure we’re all on the same page. And that’s pretty much impossible.

Serene
Yeah.

Natalie
One of the things that we’re struggling with with this book, right, is that even with the words “white feminism,” whatever are the sort of terms that are attached can end up being either misused or, like, incorrectly adopted in certain contexts. So I guess just as, like, a primer could you, for some of the folks listening, dissect a little bit some of that sort of key language?

Serene
Sure, yeah. Before I do though, because I’m so curious about your story — so in case listeners don’t know, I assume care studies refers to studies of caring for people who are in periods of dependency, like children.

Natalie
Yeah.

Serene
Broader than that? Yeah. You tell me.

Natalie
Broader — yeah, yeah. Definitely broader. And it’s interesting because care studies in sort of its original earlier, earlier voices, actually, one of the very first studies that ever existed ever was care work being done by flight attendants.

Serene
Oh, right — like the emotional labour work by, like, Arlie Hochschild, yeah.

Natalie
Yes.

Serene
But I just wanted to ask you, like, did they have a section by women of colour feminists, or was it like…?

Natalie
Huge — huge, huge, huge.

Serene
Ok.

Natalie
Oh, 100% — and that was how they were dividing.

Serene
That’s so interesting. And so all of the white women in the section were grouped into white feminism?

Natalie
Yes.

Serene
Ok. Well that’s interesting in itself, because I mean, at least my view is, and I think actually most people who write about white feminism’s view, is that, like, being a white woman doesn’t necessarily make you a white feminist.

Natalie
Exactly.

Serene
And also more controversially, being a person of colour doesn’t mean you’re, like, immune from falling into white feminism.

Natalie
Well, you talk about that in the book, absolutely.

Serene
Yeah. And in fact, I think maybe one of the things that makes this book a little bit different is that it’s written really from a place of compassion, which doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of anger about how white women have treated women of colour and other broader injustices in the book. But it’s written partly from a place of thinking, like, white feminism is actually something that almost anybody can fall into. Like, it opens (as you’ll know, Natalie) with, like, a story of… I won’t give too much away, but it opens with the story of the confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett. Who is, for folks who don’t know, she is a Supreme Court justice who essentially nailed the final nail in the coffin on abortion rights in the United States. But she is a woman and her confirmation hearing definitely centered on the idea that she was a new kind of feminist, and that people who were critical of her stances on things like abortion rights and immigration — well, like, we were the fake feminists, because how dare we judge this powerful woman?

And the book opens with the story of her confirmation hearing, and her offering this advice to young girls — and then my realizing that she’s offering a sentence that is the same sentence in a storybook that I am reading to my daughter, right? Like, I have a PhD in this. I’ve written multiple books about this topic. I’ve been studying this for my whole life. And even for me, I have this moment of being, like, telling my daughter that, like, “Feminism is about dreaming big,” actually has a bunch of dark undersides to it.

And so to answer the question a little more directly — and the book isn’t even necessarily specifically about white feminism. It’s about what I call “feminisms for the few” — a bunch of different types of feminism that end up serving the interests of privileged women and throwing other folks under the bus or just ignoring them. And I argue in the book that that’s a theoretical position, right? Like, it has to do with the beliefs and the framework that you approach things with, not your personal identity you come with. Of course, it’s probably more likely that you will buy into those beliefs if you are a person with a lot of privilege, but it’s not something that is just by virtue of your racial positioning in society you’re automatically a white feminist.

And also I’ll just throw in, like, for me, a big part of the argument of the book is that these faux feminisms, these bad feminisms, these feminisms for the few, they have, like, a central defining idea, and that is the idea that feminism is a movement for individual freedom instead of a movement against group-based hierarchy.

Natalie
Thank you. I think that that’s really, really important for folks to be able to, like, dig in, not just to the book, but just to the language. And I think that language is an access point, right? So I really appreciate you taking the time to do that for us.

Serene
Thank you. I mean, I feel like a big part of why I wrote the book as a philosopher, and I know you’ve said in some podcasts that you have a background in philosophy, so I might ask you to say more about that if you want to — but was to really be like, “I study values and I study arguments. And so the thing that I can bring to the table here is some sort of moral clarity about what the position we want to avoid is and what the position we want to adopt instead is.” Because, as I said, I think most of the audience of the book — maybe not all, but most of the audience is going to pick up the book because they have this sense that, like, there’s been this thing called white feminism and it’s bad. That’s a great starting point.

But we will be politically stuck if we just think it’s like, “Oh, I just don’t want to be a white feminist,” or, “I don’t want to do feminism in the wrong way.” Like, we need more clarity about what we should do — like, looking forward and how to avoid falling to the pitfalls. Like, one of the things I say in the book, I think, is, like: do we want to restrict ourselves to, like, calling each other out after something bad has happened? Or do we want to be able to get out ahead of the bad things and say, like, “These are the positions we should be supporting. These are the ones we shouldn’t.” And that’s why I think focusing on the idea that feminism is a movement against oppression, where we understand oppression as hierarchy that affects groups, really is part of the key to understanding how to move forward.

Natalie
And I think that framing is actually, like, really key to our whole Reframeable vibe here on the podcast.

Serene
Love that.

Natalie
Because I think that folks really have struggled at times with even the word “reframing” and how we’ve used it, because I think that it has been connected to a toxic positivity sort of vibe.

Serene
Oh yeah.

Natalie
Which we’re like, “That’s really not what we’re about. And that’s ok that you think that, because it just means we all need to spend a bit more time together to be able to understand that for us, reframing is literally about gaining perspective through the lens of other people’s work and then being able to move through to the other side of whatever it is that we’re working on.” And I think that right now, this very specific moment in time, the crossroads that you refer to in your book, which was then, but is also now.

Serene
Yeah.

Natalie
And will probably be going on for a long time because this is not, like, a one-day job. I think that that reframing is a constant act. So that’s part of what we’re trying to do here.

Serene
Yeah, I love that. And I feel like that’s also a way in which the book and the podcast are really aligned — that, like, a lot of the book ends up being about this idea that, like, feminism is about empowering yourself. And like, at the end of the day, one of the problems with that is actually, like, “You’re changing the way you think, is it going to change the world?” Like, I love that you kind of brought that out about the toxic positivity of the sort of self-help framing of reframing — like, “Oh, if you just think about your situation differently…”

Natalie
Everything’s better.

Serene
Yeah, I think a lot about, like, the talk about scarcity mindset. And I remember I talked to this coach once that was like, “You’ll be better if you stop operating from a scarcity mindset.” And of course, sometimes you will. But at the time they were saying that it was the depths of the pandemic, and I had a toddler at home, the whole time continuing to work my full-time job — like, I felt like I could barely, like, brush my teeth. And then the person is telling me, like, to reframe my scarcity mindset about time — but it’s like, “No, my time is objectively scarce.” Right?

Natalie
Yes.

Serene
It’s not like my mindset that has removed childcare.

Natalie
Yeah, absolutely. And one could potentially reframe some other component of that conflict of whatever that sort of scarcity mindset has been described as, but that is so true. I think that, ugh, all of it is so fascinating and I’m going to tie it back to the language around feminism for me when I think of the way that I’ve tried to have conversations with students over the years. And before we started this conversation I told you that in my past life I was a high school teacher. So I was teaching, you know, as the department head I was always taking the grade nines — so I was taking the youngest of the crew in the high school because I was like, “I want to start them off as strong as possible.” And then I would end up taking the 12s. And so that group I would sort of help to shepherd out of the building into whatever sort of arena they were heading off to.

And I found it so interesting — I can remember this exact moment when I had one young woman stand up in class and cry. She was crying and she looked, to be honest, like me, but now make me 17, ok? So long blonde hair, glasses, whatever. So just imagine that look. She’s standing there crying about how I hate feminists because my brother is suffering from anorexia and this is because of them. This was the leap that she made.

Serene
Wow.

Natalie
And I just remember feeling completely at a loss for how to gently guide the conversation towards something healthy for both her, and then probably for her brother at some level.

Serene
Right.

Natalie
Because if he was a few years younger than her, then this means his exposure to this word was now going to be modelled. Now, potentially there were different conversations happening at home or with, you know, other members of the family, but this was happening with a very influential part of his life — was this sister who was so caring for him, but had turned her blame on a word that I think was connected back to social media, I think was connected back to all the things that we’ve already kind of gestured to here.

Serene
That’s so emotionally heavy too. What was the reason? Was it that we talk about anorexia as something that afflicts women, or…?

Natalie
That probably was the heart of it, but she didn’t even really make that link. Like, that’s what was so interesting about the moment — was I wasn’t even able as a teacher… and I mean, I don’t know, at the time I’m like 30-something, I’m not yet a mother. Like, I don’t have a lot of the language that I think has come to me over time. But I didn’t have the tools, I think, to be able to truly help. And I wish that I could have handed her a book like this.

Serene
Oh, you’re so sweet.

Natalie
To be able to say… no, I really mean it, because I was like, “Oh my gosh, I really need a little bit of help,” — in terms of how to foster a reframed understanding of a term that she barely had any sense of anyways. And, you know, when I was in university a long time ago it was still called “women’s studies.” So I was an English lit major and then a women’s studies major — and now that same program is called “gender studies” and it’s much more, you know, like, holistic and fulsome, and, like, wonderful things are coming out of that program. Wonderful colleagues I have continued to meet to this day, like, in my world of television and film, all graduated from that same very solid program out of U of T. So I just know that it has continued to do the work. And I think that that is what also you’re saying in this book is that the work is ongoing and it’s changing and it’s iterative, right?

Serene
Yes. And I love that connection. My immediate reaction when you were telling your student’s story was to be like, “Isn’t it great that we have a better and deeper understanding of gender now than feminists in the 1980s might have had when some of the models for talking about anorexia were developed?” And it’s also why I think it’s important to talk about things like white feminism, because it does create a bunch of growth.

You know, the other night I had a book event with a friend that I haven’t seen for 20 years, but she and I both worked at a mainstream feminist organization just out of college. And one of the things she kept sort of bringing out is like, “Can you believe these things we used to believe and do when we were 20?” And now they seem kind of hilarious. And at most, I think a lot of progressive people would criticize them, but if it’s obvious that something’s wrong now, it’s obvious because there have been critical voices.

Natalie
Yes. Oh, that’s beautiful.

Rebecca
Sometimes people ask us if we make money doing this podcast. The answer is we don’t. In fact, every hour we spend on Reframeables is time not spent at a paying gig. And the steps to making a podcast are actually many. Finding the guests, booking the guests, reading the books, planning the questions, editing the interview, uploading it into the podcast world, making the artwork. So if you value this podcast, please consider supporting it with a financial contribution. Memberships start at $6 a month on Patreon and include a monthly extra where we record our five things in a week. In this world we have to support what we love, and with that support an energy comes back to us — so thanks for going to patreon.com/reframeables and becoming a supporter. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to be making a podcast, but here we are, three years later, still doing it with your help. So go to patreon.com/reframeables — now, on to the show.

Natalie
Ok, so with a critical voice here, help me to define the freedom myth — so the freedom myth that you’ve connected in your book.

Serene
Yeah. So the freedom myth is basically the idea that feminism is a movement to free individual women from social expectations. And I think a lot of us come to feminism through that type of feeling. I also used to teach intro to women’s studies, and I remember, like, you sit in the room and you watch all these young people suddenly be like, “Oh my God, I thought I was so free and actually I’m really programmed,” right? Like, “I don’t just, you know, apologize for everything that I say because that’s the kind of person that I am.” And, “I’m not just the one who’s listening to everyone because I choose to.” Or, “I don’t just spend two hours straightening my hair in the morning because it makes me happy.” Right? Like, “Or if it does make me happy, I’ve realized it’s making me happy because I’ve been formatted in this kind of way.”

And I talk about this quote from an Indian feminist theorist, Nivedita Menon, who says that coming to feminism is like clicking the reveal formatting button on your life, right? Like, just like in a document the margins are being set by this background program, and then you hit “reveal formatting” and you see there’s all these things that are forcing the document to take the form that it takes. And I think that’s often how people come to feminism. And so I get that people come to feminism that way, but a lot of what I’m trying to argue in the book is that we can’t stop our understanding of feminism there.

And I think two of the reasons that we can’t stop feminism there is that one, privileged women exercising their freedom does not automatically result in liberation for everyone. And in fact sometimes it even results in the opposite, because privileged women have incentives. If people remember the demure meme, right — like, privileged people will always have an incentive to be “not like the other girls” and then to succeed as well as they can in the system and, like, kind of leave other people behind them.

And then I think another reason that the freedom myth is a problem is that there are some problems for women and for gender expansive people that just really can’t be well understood as losses of freedom. And so some of the ones I talk about in the book have to do with inequalities — like, maybe we’ll get into this a little bit later, but I offer the orgasm gap as an example, and also issues about the redistribution of labour. To go back to care studies, right, unless we revalue care labour and create a social system for redistributing and valuing it, all women are going to be kind of screwed and we can expect more and more exploitation of more vulnerable women to solve this problem.

Natalie
Yes. Ok, you just talked about orgasms, so we’re going to jump to that. I was like, “Ooh, I’m making a note of this very potentially interesting question.” Is it ok if I read just, like, one little line from the book?

Serene
Of course. I don’t have the book in front of me, but please do, yeah. You can remind me what I said.

Natalie
On page 46, you write that, “The lesson of better sex under socialism is partly a lesson about what feminists can gain from thinking in terms of changing distributions instead of removing restrictions.” And I was crafting a podcast question as I read that, and I’m like, “So tell me how feminism can make sex better.” And I feel like that quote says it, but why don’t you tell us a little bit more there.

Serene
Yeah, so the orgasm gap — and yeah, obviously I started talking about orgasms, so we can’t not keep talking about orgasms. Everyone’s curious. And I think it’s a great example because I think it speaks to something that is in almost everybody’s life. And people might think it’s frivolous, but it actually speaks to a very, very deep-seated inequality in our society that we have to do something about.

So the orgasm gap is basically the fact that in sexual encounters between men and women, men are very much more likely to report orgasm. And then you add to that the fact that we kind of define a sexual encounter between a man and a woman such that sex has only happened if male orgasm has happened. And other forms of activity and female orgasm are just like not a necessary part of the encounter. And I think people will be familiar with that, but I think you hear (in especially kind of young people, but I think in everyone, right) like, the idea that in a sexual encounter, especially in a hookup, like, it’s totally on limits for a man to assume that he will have an orgasm and the woman should wait, or see how things go, you know.

So that’s the orgasm gap. I tell the story in the book of hate-watching Goop one night (which is Gwyneth Paltrow’s show) and realizing that she’s like, “I have this revolutionary on the show who is this woman, Betty Dodson, who had been teaching women how to have orgasms and, like, visually showing them for a long time.” And so I looked at the person’s name and I was like, “Why do I know this person’s name?” I’m hate-watching this Goop episode, I don’t know, in, like, 2020 or something. And then I look at the person’s name, I look it up, and then I say, “Oh, when I was, like, a kid in the 90s, I was seeing this person’s book on my friend’s mom’s shelves.”

And so it’s like, “Why is the person who my friend’s mom’s were reading still a revolutionary? Why is teaching people how to have an orgasm still, like, this revolutionary thing?” And I think to me, obviously, it is very important to teach women and trans and queer people about their bodies — and to also teach men about bodies that are not their own, which might actually be a bigger part of the problem, but that’s not what Betty Dodson was doing, even though she absolutely was a revolutionary, especially in her time.

But I’m thinking, like, “Wait, is the problem today the same problem that my friend’s mothers were facing 20, 30, 40 years ago?” And I think part of the answer to that is no — like, sexuality is a lot less restricted than it was then, right? Like, people have a lot more freedom around sex. That generation was told they shouldn’t have sex outside of marriage. Clearly, it’s no longer the main social expectation that people shouldn’t have sex outside of marriage. Like, clearly, there’s a vast array of pornography now.

So I think I started thinking about the restriction myth partly because of the idea that, like, “Wait, actually we have a situation where there’s a lot more sexual freedom, but feminism hasn’t solved the problem it was supposed to solve,” right? Like, if people feel, like, free to have sex, but the kind of sex that we’re having still says that men’s pleasure is the be all of everything, then something is wrong. And in order to diagnose that, we need to be able to think about inequalities, right? Like, the question of like, “Who matters more, who matters less?” Not just, “Are people free?”

And I think there’s another kind of additional downside of the freedom focus, which is that saying that saying that, like, “You just need to kind of let go of these social expectations of women,” ends up actually really burdening women — like, in a way kind of similar to the stuff we were saying about toxic positivity and reframing, right?

Natalie
Yeah.

Serene
You will read about the orgasm gap and then all the solutions are like, “Go find time to yourself to, like, explore your body and buy a jade egg.” But is the issue that, like, women need to free themselves, or is the issue that men need to change? And is the issue that we need to change our system of who values more and values less? And also is the issue that our definition of sex needs to change so that it’s not just built around male pleasure as the sort of sine qua non?

Because I also talk about (and this is where the sex under socialism thing comes in) there are not orgasm gaps in every population of people. There aren’t huge orgasm gaps among women who have sex with women. And there are also not huge orgasm gaps, at least according to the researcher Kristen Ghodsee, there was a dramatic difference in the rates of orgasm reported by women in East and West Germany in the 1980s. And it seems like part of the reason there was that people saw sex as, like, a human need, as a part of health. There were resources to help you have it. And also people didn’t think you needed to work yourself into the ground, because there’s also this issue of, like, telling people that they need to find time to explore their body when there’s an epidemic of women’s exhaustion — like, it’s not very helpful advice.

Natalie
I love reading books where a lot of the notions, they feel, like, instinctively right. This is what I kind of knew was right, but I just didn’t have the language for it. And I think I am so adamantly in love with how language can do that type of eye-opening work. I mean, all those years ago that was grad school for me, because I was just like, “Oh, these were things I was doing instinctively as an educator, as a thinker, or whatever. But now I have this body of work to support what I was thinking and will help me deepen that thinking,” right? Because I’m now doing it with others — what I would sort of call kind of my collegial reading buddies. You know what I mean?

Serene
Yeah.

Natalie
You know, when I read bell hooks, I’m like, “Oh. This is what I always actually maybe knew in my heart, but didn’t have the language for.” And that’s what I felt like with your work here.

Serene
Thank you.

Natalie
Specifically around that topic. I was like, “You can be my sex therapist.” Because, ok, Serene, that’s wicked. You’re right — like, it’s, like, a socialist act to be thinking in this way.

Serene
I’ll add that to my CV now.

Natalie
Natalie’s sex therapist. Anyways, I just really feel like there was something in that for me. You grabbed hold of an idea that helped me to deepen my own thinking and I appreciate that so much.

Serene
Thank you. I know you said it’s about language, but I think that’s also one of the things I really value about being a professional philosopher. Like, I think when philosophy works right, which it usually doesn’t, but when it works right part of what it can do is say, like, “Here are the tools that will help you see an injustice that you didn’t see before.”

Natalie
Yeah, because it really is about tools, isn’t it? I mean, actually, one of our reframing documents that we came up with early in our practice when Becca and I were putting this work together was a tool — like, a reframing tool to help explain what we meant by reframing, but also then how to make use of it. And I’ll share it with you after.

Serene
I would love that.

Natalie
I think that it’s just the idea of it being a process and, you know, multiple steps, and it’s iterative, and it doesn’t mean it’s just done, right? I mean, all of these kinds of thinking.

Serene
And the tools that like popular culture, especially under white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism — like, the tools that are just lying around, they’re not the tools that are going to help us actually achieve liberation.

Natalie
No, and I would actually say I won’t call them a tool. Like, I think that they’re the opposite of the tool. They’re like weapons and we need tools.

Serene
Oh, I love that.

Natalie
And that’s kind of how to just sort of reframe it for myself, because otherwise it can feel so depleting, right?

Serene
I mean, whether we use the tool word or not, like, Audre Lorde was right that, like, the master’s tools are not the tools that will dismantle the master’s house, yeah.

Natalie
Yes, they’re not going to do the work, exactly. Oh my goodness, ok.

Serene
Yeah.

Natalie
Oh, so I love that so much. Ok, you did talk about a topographical map of feminism. And I thought that that was a really great image that maybe could be useful to folks as sort of a way to even think about how feminism isn’t just one thing.

Serene
Yeah, so one of the things that I liked about the image of a topographical map was the freedom focus tells us to just look at boundaries, right? Like, what separates one thing from another and, like, maybe the idea that we want to cross certain boundaries. And I like the idea of a topographical map, because I think it tells us to also look at highs and lows, and that since I think feminism is like opposition to white supremacy and like criticism of capitalism, these are all anti-hierarchical movements. Like, I think we need to really look at questions about who’s at the top and who’s at the bottom.

And so a large part of the kind of positive part of the book is about movements that have done feminism differently. And I think one of the most important insights that feminists can take away is the insight of black feminism — that the way to make social change, if you think about the topographical map and the, you know, elevation, like, to fight for people at the bottom elevation instead of just fight for people at the top. And so that has been central to black feminism for at least a hundred years — like it goes back to the work of Anna Julia Cooper. bell hooks writes about it in Feminism from Margin to Center. For folks who know that book well, my book is very much in the spirit of that book. It does a lot of different kinds of argumentation, but it’s really, like, a reinterpretation of the spirit of that book, and then the Combahee River Collective also kind of explicitly argued this idea.

But the idea is, like, you want to make change for an entire group of people, like, the way you do it is by focusing on the people at the bottom. And I think we don’t usually talk about feminism that way. Like, we’re used to hearing, like, you know, talk about shattering glass ceilings, or we read our daughters these books that are like, “This is the first female astronaut and this is the first female president.” Although I guess…

Natalie
We’re not there.

Serene
We can’t have one of those in the United States.

Natalie
No.

Serene
Someday we’ll have one. “And this is the first female president of another country, and Marie Curie discovered radium.” But what we actually are seeing now is that focusing on the people on the top, like, doesn’t trickle down. And so what about movements that have focused on the people on the bottom? This is one of the things I think is really powerful about domestic worker movements, that I talk about at the end of the book, that have historically been led by black women — not exclusively by black women, but of course in the United States, there’s this very important history of domestic worker issues for black women because the first non-familial domestic workers in the United States were enslaved black women.

And I think I said a little bit earlier that all women are trapped as long as we don’t do something about valuing care work. The reason all women are trapped by it is that the work needs to be done, right — like, somebody needs to change the diapers, somebody needs to visit the aging parent in the hospital. Also, like, somebody needs to attend the funerals and, like, socially lubricate them. And as women of the upper classes and the middle classes enter the paid workforce, that need for that work doesn’t go away. So often we end up having to shift that work onto a woman of another social class — often a woman of colour, sometimes an undocumented woman. And then something that’s really important for people to understand is that it doesn’t stop there, because that woman is probably facing the same problem too. Chances are she has children (she may not) or she has some other caregiving responsibilities. She has to pass these on to someone else.

And unless we want to just keep making this a race to the bottom where we keep, like, finding more and more exploited people to handle the work, we have to come up with a collective solution to that work. And that’s something that black women’s movements have been focused on for a really long time. Like, in a recent op-ed, I talk about Dorothy Bolden, who was a domestic worker organizer in Atlanta in the 1960s (and she’s not a domestic worker organizer, but more a care work organizer), Johnnie Tillmon and the National Welfare Rights Organization in the 1970s and 1980s, who was arguing that entire time. And it’s interesting about Tillmon too, because it was a feminist organization — like, they identified as a black feminist organization, and the core of that organization’s mission was, like, “If you are a mom, you should get paid for being a mom.” Right? Like, why are people treating us as, like, drains on society when we are doing work that society absolutely needs to function.

And they had this interesting racial dimension, class dimension too, where they said, like, when a white woman is a housewife, everybody praises them. I mean, they still don’t pay them and that’s its own problem, but everybody praises them as doing this socially valuable work. But when it’s a poor black woman, suddenly you don’t even get the praise. So I think one of the things that that movement really saw is if we really valued care work as it appears in the lives of the most vulnerable people and came up with a social solution, that would transform everyone’s life. Getting every woman into the workforce is not transforming everybody’s life.

Natalie
No. And I think that that idea… I’m bringing it back to the map, and I thought that that was such an important visual image because of the fact that, like, you can spread out a bunch of ideas on a piece of paper, but when it is topographical, right — I mean, when there are raised levels of understanding in terms of how deep a story goes in terms of one’s understanding, I think that, well, we think in 3D. I just really think it kind of comes down to that. And when we are given that opportunity, which again, you let us do here with this book, I think that that enables a more nuanced understanding of how to make change. I love the ending of the book, but you can’t get to the end unless you’ve done the work with the earlier parts. I would actually love to do a book club about this book, and then you can come and hang out with our crew.

Serene
Oh, I would love that. I would love to hang out with your crew.

Natalie
I think it would be really interesting to get lots of different folks’s perspectives on this, on so many of the myths that you essentially bust. I mean, it’s like Mythbusters for feminism — I mean, that’s kind of what’s happening in here. It’s great. But I feel like there should be time spent on that very specific image, because I think we can all think we have ideas mapped out pretty clearly, and then it’s like, “No, you’re not looking at the map holistically enough.”

Serene
And there’s texture and layers of history to that, and people accumulate power and privilege over time. I also loved what you said about, like, “To get to the end of the book, you have to read the beginning of the book,” because the end of the book is really, like, the positive part of the book. But in order to get the positive part of the book, we have to do the work, right? And, like, part of doing the work is sitting with uncomfortable things. I try to be funny and compassionate about it.

Natalie
And you are. You do a good job.

Serene
But I haven’t met anybody, including myself, who doesn’t feel somewhat called out by at least something in there.

Natalie
Yeah. You know what? And I like that. I’m into it. I’m totally into the being called out piece in that way — in the way that is done in your text. And I think the way it can be done in conversation. I think that we really have hit a very strange place in the world of social media. You and I were both talking before the beginning of starting this that we’ve both made our way off of Twitter. And I think one of the reasons is that even though, you know, we kept getting, you know, given more characters to be able to say a little bit more, it’s never enough to say the thing you want to say, because there’s always a need for more words to explain history — like the layers piece that you’re describing there. And without those layers, a quick one-off is simply just, you know, mining for reaction.

Serene
Well, and people don’t always understand what it means, right?

Natalie
Exactly.

Serene
And I think part of why I wrote the book was, like, I think there are some people who hear a call-out and are like, “I think that’s about something,” but in 140 characters, like…

Natalie
“I can’t really…” Yeah.

Serene
It’s not everybody’s job to teach. And I think that’s an important thing for people to understand about call-out culture. Like, one of the things that I have been really holding as a woman of colour writing this book in this political moment is there’s a lot of, I think, justified anger from women of colour post-presidential election that I think absolutely people need to hold space for, acknowledge, is justified. Especially when, for example, black women seem to be the one constituency of people in the United States who seem to consistently be voting and turning their activism en masse, like, toward things that will make a positive change for everyone. I mean, there’s a reason for this justified anger. Not everybody has to educate.

Natalie
No.

Serene
But there is an important role for education to play. Part of my role in the role that I’ve chosen, especially because of my expertise and as a background, is to educate here. And so I hope actually that, you know, when people say “It’s not my job to educate,” that one of the things this book can do is help also take some of the burden off other women of colour to have to educate every time they tweet something.

Natalie
Yeah, well, that part of the tweeting and Instagramming and all of those pieces are so potentially important. But I really do think that what you do so beautifully with this text is give us the time, as readers, to sit in some concepts that perhaps… and we said it at the beginning — like, when things kind of get watered down into nothing, but I feel like I want to sort of turn, like, a gardening metaphor in there, but it’s escaping me. And now I want to get back to my book. But I feel like you do — you water something for me in terms of growth.

Serene
Thank you.

Natalie
And I am a reader of this material, and I still feel like I gained a ton. So I feel like that says a lot for what somebody could gain if they haven’t had that time and space, or even sort of just exposure. So I think a lot can be gained.

Serene
That means a lot to me. I feel very seen in that, so thank you.

Natalie
Oh, well, absolutely. Well, Serene, we’re going to have to pick this back up when we do our proper book club, and then you get to have your chat with Rebecca.

Serene
Yay. Maybe I’ll invite my sister too.

Natalie
Oh, that’d be so fun — oh my goodness, that would be amazing. Actually, just curious: what does she say about the text?

Serene
So she hasn’t finished reading it, but she was at my book event recently. No, I think she mostly agrees with it. I think she probably agrees in spirit and probably feels kind of similarly to you, that I brought some expertise that explained it a bit more. So she’s an attorney who worked with worker’s collectives in Texas for a long time — especially working with undocumented workers in the construction industry. So the part about working from below — actually, she has really worked within the trenches.

Natalie
Wow. Well, that would be a really interesting follow-up conversation. So we’ll just get the sisters together.

Serene
Yes.

Natalie
Thank you, Serene.

Serene
Thank you so much.

Natalie
This has been wonderful.

Serene
I really enjoyed talking with you, Natalie. Thank you.

Natalie
Wonderful. Take care.