‘Where might we go if we dare’: moving beyond the ‘thick, suffocating fog of whiteness’ in feminism

Lewis, Gail; Hemmings, Clare

doi:10.1177/1464700119871220

Cited by 25 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 10 publications

(3 reference statements)

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“…Programmes of inclusion of any kind therefore strike at the heart of the process of separation, barriers to understanding, and tackling core drivers of loneliness and ways of removing these barriers to understanding are crucial to removing loneliness. Lewis and Hemmings (2019) explore the 'thick, suffocating fog of whiteness' in feminism in tackling creative possibilities of intersubjectivity. Creative possibilities of intersubjectivity can become means by which fragmentations in feminisms 7 can become productive opportunities for dialogue and collaboration.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Liminality of Loneliness: Negotiating Feminist Ethics and Intersectional Affectivity

Christou

Bloor²

2021

Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change

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This paper draws on auto-ethnographic and creative material to disentangle loneliness as including moments of tension but also the potential for personal liberation. The analysis draws on intersectional reflexivity as a joint project building on feminist friendship and activist academic collaboration. Our collaborative critical auto-ethnography sought to reach the co-production of narratives of loneliness while embracing the diversities of our positionalities. Our differing points of departure and arrival were harnessed to understand our experiential perspectives on loneliness. We conceptualise through feminist and intersectional theories the liminalities of a 'biopolitics' of loneliness. We address ethical, affective and performative aspects of how loneliness is understood. We can then advance propositions for alternative analyses that can contribute to feminist studies of loneliness. In the analysis we clarify the often nebulous interconnections of materialisms, affectivities and ethical feminisms to disentangle loneliness from the 'individual experience' to a 'social platform' of wider collective responsibility in tackling some of its traumatic and destructive effects. We explore these issues in the emerging context of the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic that has led to farreaching social, psychological, and physical impacts upon loneliness, in turn augmented by UK state policies.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Liminality of Loneliness: Negotiating Feminist Ethics and Intersectional Affectivity

Christou

Bloor²

2021

Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change

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“…This, as Sharpe suggests, is work for white people to do. We need to cut through what Gail Lewis, in another context, has called the ‘thick, suffocating fog of whiteness’ (Lewis and Hemmings, 2019: 405) and see how dominant relations of reproduction and care have been thoroughly racialised. We need to learn that being surrounded by the comfort of familiarity is only ever available to a dominant few and is itself a product of imposing discomfort and worse on the subordinated, the objectified, the refused.…”

Section: Rending the Fabric Of The Kinship Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

In the wake of the hostile environment: migration, reproduction and the Windrush scandal

Gedalof

2022

Feminist Theory

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This article examines the place of reproduction in the UK migration policy popularly known as ‘the hostile environment’, introduced in 2012 by the Conservative–Lib Dem Coalition government, and the ‘Windrush scandal’ that followed. In order to think through how the reproductive sphere comes in to play in this policy and its consequences, I draw on theoretical insights from the work of Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, both of whom invite us to reflect on the ways in which the afterlife of enslavement and empire continues to impinge on the status of Black subjects, and the ways in which our notions of the maternal, reproduction, kinship and belonging are entangled in this process. I begin by examining the place of the reproductive sphere in the hostile environment policy itself, before moving on to discuss the Windrush scandal and the ways in which it can be seen as an attack on the reproductive needs of its victims. I then consider these findings further through an engagement with the work of Sharpe and Hartman, arguing that the scandal reveals ways in which we continue to live ‘in the wake’ of racialised understandings of the reproductive that mean that some people are refused the possibilities of attachment and affiliation, so that, in Hartman's words, theirs is ‘the perilous condition of existing in a world in which you have no investment’. In the final section, I respond to Sharpe's call for white people to ‘rend the fabric of the kinship narrative’ that produces these exclusionary terms of belonging and permits the repetition of such brutalities as the hostile environment.

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“…I need to move beyond the repetitive conversations that keep us – in the words of Toni Morrison (1975)– “from doing the work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being.” So how do I divorce from these repetitive conversations while also reckoning with the “thick, suffocating fog of whiteness” that pervades UK feminist academic spaces (Lewis cited in Lewis & Hemmings, 2019, p. 7)? How do we write for ourselves while sitting with these tensions?…”

Section: How the Other Half Lives But Ain't I A Woman?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Refuting “How the other half lives”: I am a woman’s rights

Johnson

2020

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‘Where might we go if we dare’: moving beyond the ‘thick, suffocating fog of whiteness’ in feminism

Cited by 25 publications

References 10 publications

The Liminality of Loneliness: Negotiating Feminist Ethics and Intersectional Affectivity

The Liminality of Loneliness: Negotiating Feminist Ethics and Intersectional Affectivity

In the wake of the hostile environment: migration, reproduction and the Windrush scandal

Refuting “How the other half lives”: I am a woman’s rights

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