How to ruin a book

[bloodygranuaile]

After reading the Marie Kondo book for the politics book club, I considered suggesting Silvia Federici’s Revolution at Point Zero, but decided not to try to make the book club read a third Federici book in a year because I know not everyone gets stuck on the same things I get stuck on. BUT THEN, someone else in the book club suggested Revolution at Point Zero for all the same reasons I wanted to read it, which was very cool! And then we voted to read that one! And while I was having some trouble finding the time to actually sit down and read it, when I did, it was just so friggin’ good, and I was very pleased to have a bunch of people willing to read multiple Federici books a year with me.

 

So of course, the universe being what it is--i.e., a malicious entity that punishes me personally every time I dare to relax about anything--I was about halfway through the book when the news dropped that, in her latest publication, Federici has gone TERF.

 

Once the defensive numbness had worn off my first impulse was obviously to throw the book off a bridge, but, given that I would now have to go significantly out of my usual pandemic-circumscribed routine to get to a bridge to throw it off, I slogged on, though my enjoyment of the book was considerably ruined. Every time it made a good point--say, for example, "We believed that the women's movement should not set models to which women would have to conform, but rather devise strategies to expand our possibilities," or “‘What does being female actually mean; what, if any, specific qualities necessarily and for all time adhere to that characteristic?’ To ask that question is to beg for a sexist reply. Who is to say who we are?”--I just got frustrated and disappointed all over again. This happened a lot, because there are, in fact, a whole lot of good points made in a fairly small book. The essay “Why Sexuality Is Work,” in particular, is one that I would strongly have preferred not to be ruined forever, because that whole framework of it being work that you do, instead of a somewhat nebulous fundamental state of being, was extremely useful for me. I am significantly annoyed that I only got to feel good about how useful it was for a week. 

 

I am sure we will have a lot to say about how the book theorizes reproductive labor and the various failures of both liberal feminism and factory-focused Marxism to properly attend to the work that goes into reproducing the workforce. Oh, and about the way capitalist relations create and enforce supposedly “natural” ideas about womanhood that are actually made-up nonsense designed to uphold a hierarchical division of labor where the profit-makers get to cheap out on a bunch of it. (Apparently it’s real important to rigidly gatekeep and uphold those “natural” lines of division if we ever want to free ourselves from them, or… something. I don’t know, I don’t understand TERF logic.) 

 

Uhhh anyway TL;DR great book, shitty news, abolish the police