Masochistic Feminism, or Reflections on the White Feminist Industrial Complex

Abstract:This review essay examines three popular feminist texts that diagnose the problem of "white feminism." I ask: how is it that a group of actors—white women—who are not visibly working under the mantle of feminism come to be claimed by feminists, by these authors, as evidence of feminism's own bad politics? While seeking to understand a narrative built around a capacious conception of feminism that then bemoans feminism itself, I also mark the masochistic impulse of contemporary feminist politics that I argue these books—and the markets around them—produce and represent. Each of these books are constructed around mapping a dangerous and toxic white feminine subjectivity that can be overcome only through white women's wholesale allegiance to Black feminist thought, and through their repeated willingness to abject themselves through accounts of their own enactments- knowing or unknowing- of violence. Taken together, these books (along with a slew of popular writing condemning white feminist behavior) reveal an industry in anti-white feminist writing that insists that white women accept the inevitability of their own harmfulness over and over again, repeatedly confronting the truth of their "narcissism."