Don’t call it a backlash

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July 1, 2022

Don’t call it a backlash: maintaining optimism in the face of despair

By Megan Clement (follow me on Twitter)

This month, for obvious reasons, I have been thinking a lot about optimism and despair.

In the practice of feminist journalism, so much of what we do is driven by the idea that things are wrong, and need to be fixed. We deal daily with the reality that women are being harassed, targeted, tortured and killed for the simple fact of being women. We point this out in an attempt to convince people that things should change.

Our guiding principle is a utopian one: the liberation of all women from discrimination, from violence, from male domination. But in order to get there we have to deal with the horror stories that constitute so many women’s everyday lives.

Last month, I spent time talking to a couple from the United States – Andrea and Jay – who went on a holiday to celebrate their pregnancy and got sucked into a quagmire of state-sponsored misogyny when Andrea began to miscarry.

Despite being at risk of sepsis and haemorrhage, Andrea was refused a medically necessary abortion because the foetus still had a heartbeat. Because of Malta’s abortion ban, she and Jay were stuck in hospital for a week, waiting for that heartbeat to stop so doctors could intervene to save her life. All the while, the risk increased. Jay described the experience to me as “psychological torture”. Andrea had to be taken to Spain by air ambulance to end her very wanted pregnancy safely and with dignity.

Quote: despair comes not just from bearing witness to the persecution of women and gender minorities, but from seeing the horrifying backsliding on the modest gains we had made.

As Catesby Holmes reported for Impact last week, Andrea’s nightmare could now become reality back in her home country, too. As well as rolling back abortion rights for millions in the US, the conservative-stacked supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade also places miscarriage squarely in prosecutors’ crosshairs.

Hence the despair, which comes not just from bearing witness to the persecution of women and gender minorities, but from seeing the horrifying backsliding on the modest gains we had made.

It is hard to know what else to feel when six conservative justices vote to take away women’s bodily autonomy; or when the Taliban bans girls from school all over again, and forces women to cover their faces; or when Polish feminist activists are prosecuted for providing abortion medication to women in crisis; when a French court says women can’t wear what they want in swimming pools and an international federation bans trans women from competing in swimming at all.

In the face of these losses, there has been a spate of thinkpieces declaring #MeToo, or feminism itself, to be either over or in crisis. The reflex is understandable, and in the United States in particular, decades of progress have been lost due to gerrymandered minority rule by fundamentalists.

But these declarations of despair for feminism – which, like much journalism right now, often seem to be more of an
attempt to identify a “vibe” than to actually interrogate structural questions – can lead us to forget our history.

As philosopher Geneviève Fraisse told my colleague Rebecca Amsellem recently on The Method podcast, the concept of a backlash is “a dehistoricised image”. Instead, she argues, we should understand these developments as a shifting of the balance of power during the course of a continuous struggle that is as-yet incomplete. Otherwise we are simply condemning ourselves to start again from zero.

Quote: We can't give up, because we have so many things to achieve

After I reported on Andrea’s story, I received an email from “a white man who denies the existence of transsexuals” who told me he engages in the “fine and hilarious hobby” of posing online as a feminist activist who can provide abortion pills to people who need them in countries with restrictive laws, before turning over their details to the police.

“I SURE HOPE ROE OVERTURNING WEEK IS AS EXCITING FOR YOU AS IT WILL BE FOR ME,” he wrote.

I have no idea if this person is simply trolling me, or whether he does indeed spend his time reporting people who seek abortions to the police. But what can you do, on receiving an email like this, if not despair?

You can do what conservatives have been doing for decades in order to withdraw rights from women, LGBTQI+ people and racial minorities today: you can organise.

When I started interviewing feminist activists from around the world for Impact’s interview series earlier this year, I was driven by anger. Anger that women only represent 4% of MPs in Nigeria’s lower house of parliament; anger that trans rights were being weaponised in Australia’s election debate; anger that Turkish feminists are being threatened in the courts for the simple fact of counting femicides.

But when I speak to the women who are in the midst of these struggles, they are rarely angry. They do not despair. In fact, they are optimistic.

With a flair for understatement, Melek Arı told me this month that women were “not living through a very good period of time” in Turkey at the moment. But despite her government withdrawing from the Istanbul Convention on violence against women, and despite facing the shutdown of her organsiation, she was unbowed. “We can’t give up, because we have so many things to achieve,” she said.

Here’s Nigeria’s Ebere Ifendu on losing a vote to increase women’s representation in parliament: “It gave Nigerian
women an opportunity to come together more strongly as a movement … It brought about a kind of cohesion, a kind of sisterhood.”

And Jackie Turner, on transphobia in Australia: “We know that the people who are really passionate about this are a small group of anti-equality lobbyists. We also know that people who know someone well who is trans, perhaps a trans sibling or a co-worker or friend, are overwhelmingly supportive of trans equality.”

If these campaigners can maintain optimism in the face of government hostility and coordinated right-wing attacks, the least we can do is try to share it.

I am not sure I will ever be able to jettison the anger I feel at stories like Andrea’s or the people who make it their life’s work to remove the rights of women and LGBTQI+ people. I will be angry at Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump for the rest of my life. But I am going to try to give up on despair, because it does not serve me, it does not serve feminism, and it gives the bastards exactly what they want.