Faux Feminism: An Interview with Serene Khader
Like so many women of color from working class backgrounds, I have always searched for a place to call home in mainstream feminism. Serene Khader’s book Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop (Beacon Press, 2024) feels like that kind of home.
Serene Khader, PhD is a professor of philosophy and feminist thought at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Khader takes the reader through the ideas, or myths, that have led us to the fall of Roe and the ever-dire childcare crisis in the United States. But Faux Feminism does not just tell us where we went wrong. Khader also cites the many women of color feminist writers from the 1960s, 70s, and present that have offered a blueprint of how to attain liberation for all. What becomes clear is that mothers across the racial, economic and national spectrum are tied to one another.
When I first picked up Faux Feminism, I flipped through the table of contents and saw that a women of color feminist perspective was prevalent throughout. I was immediately drawn in by the chapter “Equality and Intersectionality” since it covered the history of forced sterilization in Puerto Rico, which is an issue close to my heart. I have a personal history of infertility, and as a Puerto Rican woman trying to conceive, the specter of forced sterilization on the island haunted my journey to motherhood. Reproductive rights, the ability to have children or not have children, is often at the center of many feminist struggles. But often the focus on the right for women, usually white women, to not have children overshadowed the history of poor, disabled, women of color who were prevented from being mothers, either because of forced removal of their children or coerced sterilization by the State.
To read a book that not only laid out how white feminism has failed us but also foregrounded Black, Latina, Asian American and Indigenous women’s struggles for liberation and equality across social, racial and class lines was what I needed. For so many of us, to be a mother is a just as much a feminist issue as it for those who do not want to be mothers.
Faux Feminism is a well-researched, conversational examination of the pitfalls of white feminism which examines how a truly liberatory feminism can offer us a way out by centering the needs of the most vulnerable women. The accessible and poignant prose makes it feel as if you and Khader are sitting down chatting, and you don’t even realize you are privy to a world-class seminar on the philosophy of ideas. Faux Feminism makes it clear that feminism and philosophy are for everyone.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Khader as she shared her experience and research on writing a book about bad feminisms, women of color social movements, and childcare for all. Our conversation continued over email the next day, so what follows is a mix of in-person and over-email interview questions, which have been edited for clarity.
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JCM: Faux Feminism is an incredibly timely book, with the fall of Roe and the increase in abortion bans throughout the United States. What inspired you to write Faux Feminism? How long did you want to write this kind of book?
SK: I think there’s a lot of stories about what inspired me to write it. But one of them is that I wanted to tell a story about what feminism was. That puts the lives of women of color and other non-elite women, women in the labor movement, at the center. And that helped provide a positive vision of what feminism could be in light of all the criticisms of mainstream feminism. I think people a little bit older and younger are aware that there’s this thing called white feminism that they don’t want to participate in. They might have even heard these terms like neoliberal feminism, white savior feminism, or girlboss feminism. I think unless we get greater clarity about what those things are and what we can do instead, we can end up a little bit politically stuck. So what I really wanted to do was to write a book that would try to explain: What is the set of ideas that makes these bad feminisms bad? And what can we think instead? It’s not like once we criticize white feminism there’s nothing left like there. Once you recognize that these feminisms are founded in excessive focus on individual freedom, then we can move away from that and recover the core of feminism that is about opposing structural hierarchy and inequality.
JCM: You published Faux Feminism with Beacon Press. What was the research and writing process like? How did it differ from a typical academic book, like your 2018 Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic?
SK: The biggest difference was learning to put storytelling at the center. With academia, and especially since I’m a philosopher, we tend to be very shy of storytelling. We focus on making the argument clear, with as little story and rhetoric around it as possible. And so I had to realize that telling stories is a really important part of getting people to understand what you mean, in building people’s interest in the topic and the focus.
Throughout my life as an academic, I’ve received feedback that I’m easy to understand and that I communicate with the public well. What I had to realize is that writing a book for a particular audience isn’t really about explaining. It’s about telling a story that brings people in and throwing in some explanation along the way that frames the significance of the story. I had to learn how to lead with stories. And because this book is so much about the values that actual feminists have had, I had to learn a lot of real people’s stories, right? I couldn’t just make up the stories. And so I got to research successful feminist movements.
One of the more fun elements of the book was finding all the times when people making feminist arguments in ways that focus on oppression instead of individual freedom were actually very successful. And it was also fun to kind of learn about the history of the 1960s, and the ways in which the concept of oppression, as we know it, was coming into currency. I got to study the movements that were making up that concept and what debates they were having and what they did.
JCM: You are a philosopher by training. A feminist philosopher at that. How has your experience, particularly in a male field, influenced your work in Faux Feminism?
SK: It’s influenced my ideas a lot, I think. And individualism can sort of be an enemy of feminism. Some of the stories I tell are about being alone in professional philosophy and how actually, rather than being left alone, what I needed was the solidarity of other women, gender expansive people, people of color.
For example, one of the stories I tell in the book is about a job interview where afterward, this older man came up to me and asked: What else do you do in those shoes? Yeah, that really happened. And one of the healing things about this book is every time I tell this story, people are like, oh my God. But I was a young person alone in this room of white men. I knew it was wrong, but what was I supposed to do about it? This experience of being a woman and a person of color in this extremely white, male dominated profession has also taught me a lot about the value of solidarity and the importance of advocating for feminism in ways that say, we need to find community.
JCM: As you write in the intro: “I am not just trained to notice ideas; I’m trained to see logical connections among them, to think a step ahead.” How do you hope people who read this book will think about the ideas they hold and think a step ahead when it comes to the goals of feminism?
SK: I love this question. What I try to do in the book is to show how the value of individual freedom can seem like it’s the be all, end all of feminism. Especially because so many people come to feminism from feeling like they’re constrained. The Indian feminist theorist Nivedita Menon says that becoming a feminist can feel like hitting that “reveal formatting” program on the document that’s your life. But part of what I try to show is that this value of individual freedom has a secret life beyond just helping us make sense of what it feels like to be constrained, and that the secret life of that value is not an entirely good life.
At this point, rhetoric about individual freedom is being used by the Right and by women on the Right to try to make it seem like nobody can criticize their behaviors that throw other women under the bus. I use Amy Coney Barrett as an example of this in the book. A more recent example is Representative Nancy Mace, who is best known for trying to exclude her trans colleague from using the bathroom and using a transphobic slur. When she was told that she was out of order in Congress, she replied with, “I’m not going to let a man tell me what to do.” So this rhetoric of “no one can tell me what to do” at this point is serving the right wing.
JCM: That’s individual feminism. Right?
SK: The rhetoric of individual freedom is deeply wrapped up in colonialism, especially in the idea that women need to be freed from their cultures and that women of color’s cultures are the thing that is holding them back. And to me, one of the most important things in the book is that there’s a whole chapter about colonialism in a book that people might not expect to find a chapter about colonialism in. Another secret life that the value of freedom has is that it turns our attention away from times where what we need is support and not to be left alone. And I think things like reproductive justice, which you and I have been talking about extensively, offer a lot of examples. You can talk about abortion in terms of individual choice, and obviously abortion is very important. But if you don’t have abortion access, which might require federal funding for you, then the rhetoric of individual choice is kind of empty.
JCM: Women of color feminist theory seems to be a guiding thread throughout all the chapters. Why was it important that women of color feminist writers were at the forefront? Can you talk more about how you put contemporary feminist thinkers, like Tressie McMillan Cottom, in conversation with their predecessors, like Black Lesbian feminist writer Audre Lorde?
SK: Part of why women of color feminism is so central to the book is that it’s in the movement of women of color and women in the Global South that we see the most kind of liberatory possibilities for feminism. Part of the positive message of the book is this central view of Black feminism that I just think is right, which is that the way to do activism is to find the most vulnerable people in your group and fight for them. And so part of why women of color feminism is so central is that it’s right about a lot of things. But also this idea that you need to find the most vulnerable people and fight for them comes from Black feminism. And it’s so important to understanding how to do activism well, especially in this current moment.
I wrote the book in a very different political moment. I did not think that I was going to be in the throes of another, worse Trump presidency. I feel more committed to that Black feminist principle now more than ever, when we’re watching the Right saying, we’re going to find vulnerable people, target them, and then hope that nobody else cares. We’re going to target trans people and immigrants so intensively and abusively in the first couple weeks and they hope that will convince people to be like, “Oh, that’s not me.”
That message of solidarity, and seeing that what happens to vulnerable people is a threat to all of us, is an important message from women of color feminism. I wanted to draw attention to the work of people who are not always discussed theorists. I think of bell hooks and Audre Lorde and Tressie McMillan Cottom as philosophers, and as having philosophical insights and being part of a tradition.
So many ideas that theorists think they are discovering now can be found in these literatures by women of color and Black women, in particular. To give one example, right now, people think they’re discovering for the first time in philosophy that sometimes oppressed people don’t have the language to talk about their oppression. This is like a new topic in philosophy. But then you go read Audre Lorde’s speeches and it’s like, yeah, she’s talking about this 50 years ago.
One of the reasons I really admire both Lorde and Cottom is how they write such heavy hitting theory in such an accessible way. And I talk a lot in the book about the essay “On Beauty” in Thick, which I think is such an amazingly theoretically dense essay but doesn’t necessarily feel that way when you’re reading it. The point that Cottom makes about beauty being inherently hierarchical and a form of capital, racial capital, it’s such a brilliant point, and it’s also made in this style where it’s woven into a narrative that makes it much more powerful.
JCM: You organize your book through these myths, or misconceptions: the restriction myth, the individualism myth, the culture myth, and the judgement myth. Why did you choose to go that route?
SK: I chose to frame the first part of the book in terms of myths because myths can deeply shape our thinking without our even being aware of them. They are ingrained patterns of thought that have power over us. Myths also sometimes offer us false promises. I try to show that certain very deeply rooted and intuitive ideas about what feminism is are actually dead ends. The idea that feminism is about nonjudgment, for example, takes our attention away from trying to change the world. The idea that it is about freedom from socialization is not just implausible—it ends up serving as a justification for driving a wedge between women of color and our cultures. An important step towards a better feminism is recognizing that the idea that feminism is about freedom is not living up to its promises.
JCM: You cite the National Welfare Rights Organization’s (NWRO) stance that mothers should be paid to stay at home with their children. Particularly Black mothers, wherein you point to the history of Black women having to take care of everyone else’s children since the start of chattel slavery in the Americas. How does that force us to reenvision work and labor as it relates to motherhood?
SK: The NWRO is a powerful example because it shows how the struggle for the right to care—grounded in the realities of poor, Black women—is actually central to the liberation of all women. Their main argument was that caring for children was socially valuable work. They were also incredibly ahead of their time in advocating for things like a basic income and freedom from government surveillance of one’s intimate life (they had had welfare caseworkers do things like check whether they were “hiding a man” in their closets).
Their vision is exactly what we need to rescue ourselves from the hole white and neoliberal feminism has dug us into. The idea that feminism is about having a career has created a world of overworked women; the average women does two more hours of housework a day. Care work is not going to stop needing to be done. The only solution for women is to provide social supports. The NWRO could see this partly because its members were Black women who had had their capacities to care and love denigrated. The political theorist talks about the struggle for what she calls “intimate justice” as central to Black women’s struggles in America.
JCM: You cite the often-ignored history of sterilization in United States that targeted poor, disabled women of color and La Operación that sterilized thousands of women in Puerto Rico, a colony of the United States. Why is it important to acknowledge those histories? What was it like to address that kind of violence?
SK: The stories of colonial violence in the book—not just of coercive sterilization, but also of the use of sexual violence to dispossess Indigenous women from their lands—were extremely difficult to write about. I don’t think the extent and systematic character of these types of violence is widely acknowledged. In Puerto Rico, the number of women sterilized was something like 1 in 5.
It was also heartbreaking to read the stories of women of color feminists who sought solidarity from white women around these issues and instead got what felt to them like a slap in the face. There are oral histories of Latinas in California, who had already been organizing with the National Organization for Women, who asked that organization to support their campaign against things like sterilization during childbirth. They were instead told that any barriers to sterilization were impingements on women’s freedom. So on top of the literal violence, there was this additional betrayal.
JCM: Childcare is at the crux of many feminist issues. You focus on the economic and racialized aspects of childcare, namely that it is often done by, and at the expense of, lower-income women of color, who are often immigrants. What would it take for feminists who rely on that “cheap labor” to see that childcare workers’ issues are tied to their own liberation?
SK: I think they need to see what you said at the end of the question, which is that the fates of women across the racial and economic spectrum are intertwined around this issue of childcare needing to happen. It’s an issue that is faced by women across lines on the economic spectrum. The only solution our society has to offer is for more privileged women to pass it down to less privileged women, who then face this problem themselves. And this keeps going farther and farther down the line until we end up with what’s often called the “caring deficit” in the social science literature, where women from the Global South are leaving their children at home with a paid domestic worker to care for children here.
A big part of it is just recognizing that the fates of almost all women are intertwined on this issue, and that the only way to solve it is to revalue care work. We are all affected by this to varying degrees. This work is not valued because it’s been done by people who have been assumed to be willing to do it for free. Then in the United States, there’s another intertwined racial history where slavery made it the case that enslaved Black women were doing this work for free and less than free for so many generations. So I think it’s about realizing that this is a problem that affects all of us. The way to solve it is to focus on what would make the lives of domestic workers, daycare workers, childcare providers, and house cleaners better.
From a history of elite feminist activism, there’s this idea that we’re going to do what helps elite women and it’s going to trickle down. We know that doesn’t work, but maybe there is some hope for the idea that focusing on making domestic work appear as real work, by showing care to the people who do it, might actually transform our society.
One movement that I talk a lot about in the book that I love to shout out is, “Ni una menos” in Argentina, which people should check out because they are fighting the political Right in the same kind of way that we are now. One of their mobilizing slogans that I think was so instructive, was: “All women are workers.” One of the ways that they were able to mobilize across the class spectrum and unite with labor, which is something that feminists from the elite classes have had difficulty doing, was by focusing on this idea that all women are workers and that women’s work is work.
About the Author
Jennifer Caroccio Maldonado is a Boricua writer from Queens. She has published essays on mental health, travel, Latinx culture and comics at HuffPost, Bitch Media, and Comicosity. Her poems have appeared in Poydras Review, Post-Traumatically Stressed Feminist, and New Voices anthology series. Currently Jennifer works as an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Baruch College, CUNY. You can learn more about her work at www.jennifercaroccio.com or follow her on Twitter @jcaroccio.
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