Transversal Dialogues on Intersectionality, Socialist Feminism and Epistemologies of Ignorance

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Transversal Dialogues on Intersectionality,

Socialist Feminism and Epistemologies of

Ignorance

Nina Lykke

To cite this article: Nina Lykke (2020) Transversal Dialogues on Intersectionality, Socialist

Feminism and Epistemologies of Ignorance, NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 28:3, 197-210, DOI: 10.1080/08038740.2019.1708786

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2019.1708786

Published online: 29 Jan 2020.

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ARTICLE

Transversal Dialogues on Intersectionality, Socialist Feminism and

Epistemologies of Ignorance

Nina Lykke

Gender Studies, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

ABSTRACT

Through a personalized story, anchored in historical reflections on the formative years of feminist research in the Nordic context in the early 1970s, the article engages in transversal conversations. The focus is dis-sonances and redis-sonances between intersectional feminisms and socialist feminisms, and their critiques of monocategorical (neo)liberal feminisms. The method is transversal dialoguing, implying that participants in politi-cally conflicted conversations, shift between “rooting” (situating their own stakes along the lines of feminist epistemologies of situated knowledges) and“shifting” (seriously trying to imagine what it takes to inhabit the situated perspective of interlocutors). A starting point for the article’s transversal conversations is recent critiques of white feminist intersection-ality research in Nordic and broader European contexts, claimed to neo-liberalize and whitewash intersectionality. Shifting to the perspective of the critics, the author takes responsibility for her stakes in epistemologies of white ignorance. A historical reflection on her becoming a socialist feminist in the context of New Left students’ and feminist movements in Denmark in the aftermath of the students’ revolts of 1968 is used as prism to a discussion of socialist feminisms in the Nordic context in the 1970s, and their paradoxes of being attentive to class, while entangled in classic marxism’s eurocentrism and epistemologies of white ignorance. To dig further into the question of genealogies of leftwing epistemologies of ignorance, characterizing Nordic socialist feminism in the 1970s (and haunting European socialism more generally), the article critically rereads a piece of the authors’ research from the 1970s—an analysis of the work of socialist feminist, Alexandra Kollontaj, and her role in the Russian revolu-tion. Rooting, the author suggests that the epistemologies of white ignor-ance in Nordic feminist research rather than emerging from monocategoricality and (neo) neoliberalism, as the critics suggest, should be sought after through a critical scrutiny of leftwing versions of eurocentrism. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 27 August 2019 Accepted 14 December 2019 KEYWORDS Intersectionality; socialist feminisms; mono-categorical (neo)liberal feminisms; post- and decolonial critiques of marxism; leftwing epistemologies of white ignorance; leftwing eurocentrism; Alexandra Kollontaj

White feminist research has been criticized for politically neoliberalizing and whitewashing inter-sectionality; erasures of race by European, including Nordic, scholars have been given special attention here (Bilge,2013; Crenshaw, 2011; Lewis,2009, 2013; Tomlinson,2013a, 2013b,2018). A chapter on the genealogies of intersectionality in my book (Lykke,2010), and my contribution to a European conference on intersectionality (Lykke,2011) was among the targets of this critique. One of the things, criticized by Canada-based intersectionality scholar Sirma Bilge (2013) was my juxtaposition of two historical icons involved in struggles against multiple, intraacting1oppressions, Black Feminist Sojourner Truth2and Socialist Feminist Alexandra Kollontaj.3The critique of this

CONTACTNina Lykke ninly@fastmail.fm

https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2019.1708786

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

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juxtaposition raises questions about the relationship between intersectional feminisms and socialist feminisms, about the genealogies of their critiques of monocategorical liberal feminisms, and about convergences, dissonances and potential grounds for coalition buildings and transversal conversations.

I think it is important to take responsibility for one’s research and to critically scrutinize its blind spots. Moreover, I believe in the situating of knowledges, and agree with the critics that feminist theorizing should not be delinked from politics and activism for social and environmental justice and change. The aim of the article is, therefore, to make myself accountable for the juxtaposition. Along the lines of Donna Haraway’s classic linking of ethico-political accountability to epistemol-ogies of partial perspectives and situated knowledges, which“can be held accountable for both its promising and its destructive monsters” (Haraway,1991, p. 190), I shall reﬂect on the “sites” and “sights” (Haraway, 1991, p. 201) which led me to make this juxtaposition, i.e. account for its grounding in activism, as well as for its implied blind spots. More precisely, I shall link to a speciﬁc moment in my history as activist and academic feminist, which prompted me, in my account for long-term historical genealogies of feminist theorizing of multiple inequalities and intraacting oppressions, to bring in Kollontaj after having accounted for Truth’s iconic position (Lykke,

2010, pp. 76–78). The moment, which will serve as a pivot for the analysis, is my becoming a socialist feminist, lesbian activist, and a feminist marxist academic in the context of New Left students’ and feminist movements in Denmark in the aftermath of the students’ revolts of 1968. This moment will be my prism to a historical reﬂection on socialist feminisms in the Nordic context in the 1970s, and their paradoxes of being attentive to class, while entangled in classic marxism’s eurocentrism (Chakrabarty,2000), and epistemologies of white ignorance (Sullivan & Tuana,2007; Wekker,2016), i.e. epistemologies which universalize certain white, in this case: white European working class lenses. Moreover, to dig further into the question of genealogies of these leftwing epistemologies of ignorance, I shall also critically reread a piece of my feminist marxist research from the 1970s—an analysis of Kollontaj and the struggle to integrate anti-sexist, anti-patriarchal and democratic values in the Russian revolution (Arnfred, Skibstrup, Bryld, Lykke, & Møller,

1977–1978).

Methodologically, the article is inspired by feminist transversal politics and the method of establishing transversal conversations. This method was introduced by Italian feminist peace activists, and, in the 1990s, theorized by feminist scholars Yuval-Davis (1997) and Cockburn (1998). Recently, the notion of transversal conversations has been revitalized by black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins in her analysis of the US Black Lives Matter movement (2017). The method has also been taken to bear on controversies in academic feminism (Pryse,2000). Basically, the method implies that participants in a conflicted conversation, shift between “rooting” (situating their own stakes along the lines of feminist epistemologies of situated knowledges) and“shifting” (through situated imagination (Stoetzler & Yuval-Davis,2002) seriously trying to imagine what it takes to inhabit the situated perspective of their interlocutors, but without pretending that different positionings can be collapsed and power differentials erased).

To account for the relationship between intersectional and socialist feminisms, on which Bilge’s critique made me reﬂect, I commit to two transversal dialogues, both related to current debates on intersectionality. Firstly, I engage in a dialogue with Bilge (2013). This dialogue was started at a seminar in Sweden“Intersectionality and Whitewashing—Transversal Conversations Beyond the Comfort Zones”, to which I invited Bilge in 2017. Secondly, I commit to another transversal conversation with a recent historical study of feminist research in the Nordic countries (Dahl, Liljeström, & Manns,2016). Due to a focus on the formative years of this research, 1975–2005, and a critical approach which resonates with Bilge’s critique in terms of spelling out a lack of attention to race, racism and white privilege in Nordic feminist research in its formative years, this study will serve as a historical frame of reference for my personalized story and for the shifting-dimension of my dialogue with Bilge. However, taking also the rooting-part of this dialogue further, I shall argue that problematic methodological choices make the study by Dahl et al. (2016) overlook how

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profoundly this emergingfield of research, in its formative years, was informed by socialist/marxist feminist class analyses of differences between women, and by an urge to understand the implications of these differences in terms of power differentials, and strategies for integrating women’s and class struggles. In the transversal conversation with Dahl et al. (2016), too, I build on dialogues started before this article came into being, i.e. at a book launch seminar in 2017, to which I was invited as speaker.

So the article is an intervention in two transversal conversations, though I am of course aware that it, seen in isolation from its intertextual relations, is controlled by my authorial “I”, and therefore not equal to a dialogue sensu strictu. However, referencing the two seminars in 2017, with Bilge and with Dahl, Liljeström and Manns, I underline that the article is part of a sequence of dialogic moments, which I hope will be continued.

The reason for entangling these two transversal conversations, is,firstly, to take responsibility for my stakes in the epistemologies of white ignorance, on which both Bilge (2013) and Dahl et al. (2016) in different ways critically focus. Shifting, I try to make myself accountable for my entanglement in these epistemologies. I account for Bilge’s critique, and its launching me into personal reflections on relations between socialist/New-Left/marxist, and intersectional feminisms. Moreover, I anchor my personalized story in a broader historical and geopolitical context through the lens of Dahl et al.’s (2016) analysis of Nordic feminist research, and its blind reproductions of post WWII European erasures of race, displacing issues of race, racism and white privilege to the USA (or other places outside Europe), to the Nazi past and/or to the extreme right (Goldberg,2006).

However, a second reason for intervening in these transversal dialogues is to call critical attention to problematic effects of collapsing socialist feminisms and monocategorical feminisms, be this monocategoricality linked to neoliberalism as Bilge (2013) does, or related to a Nordic nationalist project as Dahl et al. (2016) do. Rooting in my personal history, I scrutinize the socialist/ New Left/marxist feminist moment of the 1970s, where I started my trajectory as activist and critical intellectual, and I revisit my historical research from back then on feminism, sexual politics and struggles for workers’ democracy in the Russian October-revolution. To foster alliances across different kinds of social movements, and to understand how historical genealogies cast shadows into present and future, I argue that it is important to recognize the theoretical and political contributions of socialist feminisms to the critique of monocategorical feminisms, and to the theoretical and political struggles to come to terms with intraacting power differentials. However, taking lessons from the shifting process, I also argue that it is as important to stop blindly repeating a European, including Nordic, leftwing gesture of bringing-in-class, when criticisms for lack of attention to race, racisms, and white privilege are put on the agenda. Instead of allowing this gesture to create stallmates, which it has done in feminist intersectionality debates (Bilge,2013), I argue that it is important to critically scrutinize how European socialisms throughout the twentieth century have had their share in the upholding of epistemologies of white ignorance.

Intersectionality and its discontents

As Bilge’s (2013) critique of my intersectionality research (Lykke,2010,2011) is a starting point for this article’s discussion of the relationship between socialist feminist and intersectionality-based critiques of mono-categorical feminism, I shall start with a summary of her intervention. Overall, Bilge argues that“disciplinary feminism”, embedded in neoliberalism, depoliticizes and “whitens” intersectionality by pushing the discussion to a metatheoretical level without empirical and political grounding (Bilge, 2013, pp. 411–412). Whitening takes place along two intertwined lines, she argues. Intersectionality is inappropriately appropriated as a brainchild of feminism in general; hereby the key role of Black Feminism is side-stepped (Bilge,2013, p. 413). Moreover, the genealogy of intersectionality is broadened to other kinds of nexuses than gender/race (Bilge,2013, p. 416), thus side-stepping the gender/race-nexus as just one among other axes of inequality and

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oppression. Bilge sustains her arguments with examples from European and Nordic feminist intersectionality-research, including my juxtaposition of Kollontaj and Truth (Lykke 2010, pp. 75–78).

To emphasize a specific side-stepping mechanism, the gesture of bringing-in-class, Bilge puts a particular focus on two major European feminist conferences on intersectionality in Frankfurt, 2009 (Lutz, Vivar, & Supik,2011), and in Lausanne, 2012. As this part of her argument is key to this article’s discussion of relations between intersectional and socialist feminisms, I shall spell out the specifics of this critique. In line with other critics (Lewis,2009,2013; Tomlinson,2013a, 2013b), Bilge analyses the intersectionality-debates on these conferences as iconic for a general European erasure of race (Goldberg,2006). But she also pinpoints how the class/gender nexus in particular is used as erasure-mechanism by white European feminists. Thus, for example, she underlines how participants in one of the iconic conferences claimed “due recognition” for the ways in which “French feminist thought (both materialist and socialist/marxist strands)” has focused on the class/ gender nexus, and in that sense “been tackling the ‘same issues’” as intersectionality, but “with different theoretical and conceptual tools” (Bilge, 2013, p. 416). In Bilge’s optics, this example demonstrates how intersectionality as“a tool to be deployed for anti-racist purposes” is co-opted and undermined, since“race was not of concern” in the French theorizings of the gender/class nexus in question ((Bilge,2013, p. 416). I assume that Bilge sees my bringing in of Kollontaj and her focus on the class/gender nexus, next to Truth (Lykke,2010, pp. 75–78) as being in line with the gesture of this French intervention.

Bilge’s critique puzzled me not the least because the way in which it targeted my bringing in of Kollontaj, opened links to my formative years as a feminist activist and academic in the 1970s, participating in Scandinavia-based socialist feminist movements, and anti-authoritarian, New Left-oriented students’ movements. Bilge’s critique called forward associations to intertwined political and theoretical commitments, which meant much to me back then: my engagement in a rethinking of Marx’ theories of capital, class struggle and power from feminist, lesbian, anti-authoritarian and democratic perspectives aiming at making space for gender, queer sexuality, sex-positive feminism and subjectivity, and contributing to democratic and anti-authoritarian ways to organize struggles against intraacting social inequalities. This chain of associations became also entangled with memories of my relationship to my passed away lesbian life partner, Mette Bryld, whom I met in the context of these movements, and with whom I shared political commitments to socialist feminisms, and to a feminist rethinking of marxism through the lens of joint research on Kollontaj (Arnfred et al.,1977–1978). What disturbed me, when reading Bilge (2013), was that it was as if my political autobiography as a New Leftist, and queer feminist was suddenly reﬂected in a mirror which returned an image of a (neo)liberal monocategorical version of feminism, which the activist and academic groups in which I participated back then were radically critiquing and explicitly opposing for their bourgeois liberalism, monocategorical approach to feminist issues, and complicity with capitalism.

Puzzled I asked myself: what had gone wrong here? Had something happened to which I and my socialist feminist friends from back then had not been attentive? Had we overlooked something? We who, in our feminist-marxist students’ hubris, thought we were able to critically take into account all the complexities of intraacting capitalist oppressions. We who arguedﬁercely for the necessity of intertwined struggles against multiply entangled oppressions. We who from our position as feminist students and activists tried to strike up alliances with women factory workers and demonstrated together with them under banners with the slogan“No women’s struggle without class struggle, no class struggle without women’s struggle”. How could a mirror framed along the lines of the concept of intersectionality decades later cast an image back on all this, which erased its focus on intraacting oppressions, and imposed an interpretation of it as mere liberal, monocate-gorical feminism?

I was bewildered, but the more I delved into the critique, the more the following questions started to haunt me: how could strong critiques of class oppression and protests against (neo)

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imperialism and (neo)colonialist racisms (the US war in Vietnam, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Apartheid in South Africa, etc.) go hand in hand with our socialist feminist commitment, while questions of structural racism and white privilege in our own countries were buried in epistemologies of ignorance? How could we as socialist feminists, on the one hand, be so attentive to the gender/class nexus and violent, multiply oppressive effects of imperialism and colonialism in other places, while we, on the other hand, side-stepped structural racism and white privilege, when looking at our own national contexts? While thinking through these questions, I followed the example of intersectionality scholar Lisa Bowleg (2008) and started to critically reread my own and my socialist feminist colleagues’ research from back then to reflect on its blind spots. What I found, was reflections on the intertwinement of power differentials based on gender, class and sexuality, on intraactions of class struggles and women’s struggles, on discussions of tensions regarding sexual and women’s liberation within the framework of patriarchal socialist movements, etc. I also reflected on genealogical links between our entangled anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist commitments as part of the 1970s students’ movements, and the ways in which some of us became engaged in critical postcolonial research in the 1990s (Arnfred,1995,2004; Arnfred, Bakare-Yusuf, & Kisiang’ani,2000; Bryld & Lykke, 2000). With reference to the mentioned Haraway quote on sighting/siting (1991, p. 201), it was nevertheless, a troubling bottom line in my reflections that issues of race, racism, and white privilege related to our local Scandinavian contexts were out of “sight” from the “site” of the socialist feminist and marxist groups, I was part of in the 1970s.

A telling example is a compendium (Arnfred, Kalleberg, & Matthis,1973), which laid the ground for a seminal feminist-marxist study circle“The speciﬁc character of women’s oppression under capitalism”. The study circle was organized under the auspices of the Nordic Summer University (NSU), an independent academic organization, organizing study circles and symposia, which was founded in 1950, and which in the 1970s became an important hub for New Left students’ move-ments. The study circle had a big impact on the founding of feminist studies in the Nordic countries. A fairly big group of the probably over 100 participants ended later in academic positions, struggling for the institutionalization of the right to do feminist research. The compen-dium was divided into the following sections: “family”, “labour market”, “class”, “sexuality”, “culture” and “strategy” in resonance with the subgroups of the study circle. Or in other words: the nexus class/gender/sexuality was very present and visible, while issues of race, racism, and white privilege were absent.

This recognition made me even more puzzled. How could the feminist socialist and marxist groups to which I belonged back then be so blind to issues of race, racism and white privilege in the Nordic context? How could we who were so attentive to intraactions between gender, class and sexuality, and strongly critical of liberal feminism’s class-blindness and mono-categorical versions of feminism, focused on equality within the limits of capitalist, bourgeois society, at the same time, have been so immersed in epistemologies of white ignorance? How could we have let ourselves be seduced by myths of living in a racial “homogenous” society, where racism and white privilege allegedly played no role, just because the skin colour, we saw on most people’s faces, when looking around in our local context, was the same as our own? How could we avoid seeing that Scandinavia, Norden and Europe more generally were historically formed by racialization and racialized power structures due to colonial pasts and postcolonial presents? While reflecting on these questions, the work of anti-racist scholar David Goldberg (2006) on the specific European post WWII erasures of race, became important for me, together with queer of colour scholar Fatima el-Tayeb’s (2011) reflections on specific leftwing versions of it. However, it also became clear that I needed to reflect on the specificities of the Nordic contexts.

To help me in the eﬀorts to dig deeper here, the earlier mentioned study of Dahl et al. (2016) was helpful. Their study can be read as a critical, local, genealogical intervention in the intersectionality debates, based as it is on a meticulous rereading of a big body of historical texts. The study shows how the “Nordic” performs unreﬂectedly in discourses on the institutionalization of feminist research in the region 1975–2005, and how mainstreams of feminist research in the period

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reproduced epistemologies of ignorance regarding race, structural racism and white privilege. The authors also pinpoint how questions of race and ethnicity in the early 2000s through an emergent body of feminist migration studies were constructed as“recent arrival” (Dahl et al.,2016, p. 117). Against this background, they ask why race/ethnicity appeared as research problems in tandem with increasing migration from non-Western countries, instead of being reﬂected as issues pertinent and pressing for critical feminist analysis of history, society, culture and politics in the Nordic countries throughout modernity. According to Dahl et al. (2016), research on race, structural racism, and white privilege was on the margins (de Los Reyes, Molina, & Mulinari,2003; Myong,2009), until the intersectionality-debates exploded in the region in the 2000s. They also critically pinpoint how the sudden proliferation of intersectionality analyses around the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century was accompanied by problematic stories of a move from homogenous to more multicultural societies which resonated with the“recent arrival” discourse (Dahl et al.,2016, p. 117). So, basically, what I learnt through shifting to the perspective of Dahl et al. (2016) was that the lack of attention to race, racism and white privilege in the Nordic context stood out as a general trend.

Were Nordic feminist studies monocategorical in their formative years?

The study of Dahl et al. (2016) is important in the context of this article, because it historically contextualizes my personalized story as part of the process of shifting in my transversal conversa-tion with Bilge. However, one more reason to refer to this study is my wish to expand the transversal conversation to include it as yet another interlocutor. When I root in my situated perspective, Dahl, Liljeström and Manns’ account (2016) of the role, played by discourses on“the Nordic”, in the production of epistemologies of white ignorance, stands out as important. But I shall also argue that their analysis needs to be taken further. While rooting, I am thrown into the same kind of puzzlement that Bilge’s critique called forward in me. Once more, I come to see my formative years as socialist feminist, lesbian activist and academic reflected in a contemporary mirror, in which I only partly recognize the activities, in which I took part. In one respect, Dahl et al.'s (2016) story of the genealogies of the gender/race nexus (or rather their story of the lack of attention to it) in Nordic feminist research in its formative years resonates with the one I told as part of my shifting process in the previous section. However, in another respect, our analyses are contrasting. For rooting brings me to challenge Dahl et al.'s (2016) claims that feminist research in the Nordic context started out as monocategorical, that it was totally bent on unity, consensus and erasure of conflicts, and that class and race entered together much later, accompanied by “harsh conflicts” (Dahl et al.,2016, p. 39).

The three authors do, indeed, note that marxism and issues of class/gender was on the agenda of early feminist research in the Nordic context. But they also state that the lack of attention to race meant that even class diﬀerence was erased:

Even though much attention was given to the relation between class and gender, and critical readings of Marxist theories of oppression were plentiful, the absence of bringing other oppressive systems into discus-sions unintentionally, it seems, resulted in a reinforcement of the idea of women as a single category. (Dahl et al.,2016, p. 44, note 18)

As discussed elsewhere (Lykke,2018), I think that this rather contradictory reference to a double erasure of race and class, which leaves early feminist theorizing in the Nordic context as monocategorical, taps into a widespread neoliberal erasure and amnesia, when it comes to take into account the impact of marxism and socialism on radical post-1968 thought and politics, including feminist theorizing and academic feminist activism. In the case of Dahl et al. (2016), I consider the reproduction of this erasure to be an eﬀect of two problematic methodological choices, which I shall spell out.

One of the choices that makes the work of Dahl et al. (2016) end up contributing to a neoliberal glossing over of the ways in which the socialist/marxist radicality of early Nordic feminist research generated a commitment to a feminism focused on diﬀerences and power diﬀerentials between

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women rather than to a monocategorical liberal feminism concerns their setting the analytical starting point to 1975. Beginning the investigation 7 years after the students’ revolts of 1968, the analysis of Dahl et al. (2016) misses important links between early feminist research, and the anti-authoritarian, leftist students’ movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. There were, indeed, other trends in Nordic women’s and gender research at the time, more focused on equal opportu-nities and liberal feminism—trends that were more outspoken in Norway, Sweden and Finland than in Denmark. But the trends which produced the radical demands for changed curricula and research agendas, which initiated the institutionalization of feminist research, came from the intraacting forces and passionate intensities derived from convergences between feminist and socialist/marxist students’ movements. Without the strong links to socialist feminist activism, the demands for feminist curricula and research agendas would never have become rebellious enough to envision and struggle to initiate the radical institutional changes, which an implementation of these demands entailed within the framework of conservative and most often explicitly anti-feminist, anti-socialist and generally hostile university environments. I claim that the intense radicality, pushing for different curricula and research agendas, did not come from a liberal, monocategorical, equal opportunity-oriented feminism prone to negotiate within given societal frameworks. It came from visions about doing academia radically differently, fuelled by the activist moods of socialist feminist students, and carried by the radicality of intraactions between feminisms and New Left-oriented anti-capitalist protest, which produced intensive commitments to research on feminist interventions in the socialist movements, on differences and power differentials between women, and on entanglements of class and gender in the theorizing and politics of historical and contemporary socialist women’s movements. For a historical study to grasp these links, a starting point 5–7 years earlier than the one chosen by Dahl et al. (2016) would have been pertinent.

One important line of feminist socialist/marxist research in the 1970s, which the study of Dahl et al. (2016) overlooks, is the study of the history of socialist feminist movements. The early 20th century revolutions in Russia as well as the (failed) socialist revolution in Germany by the end of WWI, the utopian socialist and anarchist upraisings in the nineteenth century, the Paris Commune of 1871 were in focus of this early feminist marxist research (Arnfred et al.,1977–1978; Dahlerup,

1973; Matthis & Vestbro,1971). A common denominator for these historical studies, was their aim to understand the dynamics of the relationship between women’s and class struggles, and the question how, within a context of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles for socialism, to strategically approach the issue of differences and power differentials between middle class and working class women. Another line of research was contemporary studies of working class women, differences between the working conditions of proletarian and middle class women, including differences in the function of the proletarian and middle class family (Arnfred et al.,1973; Arnfred & Syberg,1974; Borchorst et al.,1977; Foged,1975; Lie,1975). In both lines of research class/gender intraactionsfigured centrally, together with class difference and intracategorical analysis of working class women’s specific situations. Even though some of this research was published after 1975, it is important to understand the context of the student revolts in the late 1960s and early 1970s as its points of reference.

One more methodological problem in the study of Dahl et al. (2016), which also contributes to their problematic cementing of Nordic feminist research as monocategorical in its formative years, is the choice to focus on texts and interview statements which articulate consensus and unity rather than looking at dissenting ones and taking into account intense and highly articulated and definitely not hidden away conflicts which characterized both the feminist movements and the ways they were translated into academic feminist efforts to set up study and research programmes. Having participated in intense struggles over different kinds of feminist politics and theorizings throughout my activist and academic career, and very often ended up in positions of disidentification and dissense, I become once again puzzled, when, in the study of Dahl et al. (2016), Ifind this history framed, as if the situation in the 1970s and 1980s was characterized by consensus, unity and fear of

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dissent. The study claims that“dissention concerning theoretical and political issues were [seen as] likely to threaten a fragile unity that was needed in order to gain foothold in academia”, and that the “norm of consensus”, generally characterizing mainstream Nordic academic culture produced “a lack of readiness to theorise the category of women in terms of multiple power regimes” (Dahl et al.,

2016, p. 45). When reading statements like this, rooting makes me pinch my arm, asking in disbelief how can the enormously conflictual feminist movements (outside and inside Academia), that I was part of back then—movements which fought intransigent internal struggles on power and differ-ences within the category of women (along the lines of class, sexuality and relations to the labour market)—be retrospectively reflected as if they were consensual and focused on unity? Angry and explicit disidentifications were the order of the day in the past as they are today! As I have argued elsewhere (Lykke,2017), due to intersectional differences, feminism is to be understood as built on disidentifications rather than identifications.

To sum up my dialogue with Dahl et al. (2016), I shall emphasize that, shifting, I wholeheartedly agree with these authors’ analysis of the problematic lack of attention to race, racism and white privilege in the Nordic context, while, rooting makes me disidentify with their portrayal of early Nordic feminist research as monocategorical, and consensual.

Rethinking epistemologies of white ignorance in a Nordic, leftwing feminist context My transversal dialogues have so far generated a twofold response. Shifting has led me to recognize my being immersed in epistemologies of white ignorance, while rooting has brought me to reflect differently on the genealogies of these epistemologies. In the work of Bilge (2013), epistemologies of white ignorance are related to neoliberalism and the post WWII European erasure of race (Goldberg, 2006). In the optics of Dahl et al. (2016), they are analysed as converging with epistemologies of Nordicness as the epitome of Janus-headed white Western modernity with its interlinked faces of humanist saviour and violent colonizer (Mignolo, 2011). However, when I reflected on genealogies as part of my rooting process, I was pointed in somehow different directions—towards the operation of specific leftwing genealogies. This is due to the key role, played by marxist and socialist feminisms in early 1970s feminist research in the Nordic context.

To further investigate these other genealogies to epistemologies of white ignorance, I shall critically reread the research on socialist and marxist feminism, Kollontaj and the Russian revolu-tion in which I was engaged in the 1970s (Arnfred et al., 1977–1978), and revisit the historical context of European leftwing critiques of capitalism and imperialism out of which this research emerged. The purpose is to spell out the paradoxes of a raceblind, but classconscious feminist research, and more broadly argue for a recognition and critical revisiting of the ways in which strong trends in European socialism and marxism, feminist socialisms and marxist feminisms included, have contributed to the upholding of epistemologies of ignorance.

Let me first look at the post-1968 New Left marxist/socialism that together with feminist movements was the context out of which our Kollontaj research emerged. What I retrospectively identify as a key problem which haunted—and still haunts—European, including Nordic socialism, is that socialist critique of the violent, destructive, long-term effects of post/colonial capitalist conditions and the unmarked, modern subject’s cultivation of epistemologies of ignorance in this respect, were exclusively targetting the class of bourgeois capitalists. The ideological ignorance of the capital possessing classes, and their actively upheld blindness to the oppressions and inequalities that capitalism generated worldwide, was an explicit key target of marxist critiques. What has not been in-depth reflected, however,—neither in the 1970s nor today—is the ways in which European working classes and socialist parties, claiming to act on their behalf, were actively involved in the colonial matrix of power (Mignolo, 2011). First of all, it must be recognized that the European working classes, men in particular, were actively entangled in colonial and post/colonial enterprises through their roles as soldiers and sailors, and both women and men from these classes were also involved as poverty driven work migrants, travelling en masse to the so-called“new” worlds in

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search of better lives as settler colonizers. Secondly, it needs to be critically thought through how the workers’ avantgarde, employed in so-called key industries (transport, heavy industry, building) in the most“modern”—i.e. industrially advanced—parts of Europe in marxist theory of social change, was defined as the revolutionary subject par excellence. This idea of an avantgarde was key to twentieth century Communist framings of class struggles within European nation-states, and central also to broader socialist understandings of thefight against imperialism and colonialism. European capitalism was criticized as key actor in terms of forcing capitalism upon colonized countries worldwide, while European socialism, built on the workers’ avantgarde (white and male) by contrast was defined as embodying a “saviour modernity” (Mignolo,2011), possessing the ability to help the“backwards” world out there in its process of socialist modernization. The following quote from the founding Manifesto of the Third Communist International, 1919, demonstrates unambiguously how the colonial matrix of European supremacy pervaded Communist/marxist thought:

The liberation of the colonies will only be feasible in conjunction with the liberation of the working classes in the mother countries. (. . .) If Capitalist Europe forces the most backward parts of the world into the whirlpool of capital. Socialist Europe will come to the aid of the liberated colonies with its technique, its organizations, and its spiritual inﬂuence, to facilitate the transition to a methodologically organized Socialist establishment. (Quoted in James,2011, p. 125)

The quote resonates with the ways in which post- and decolonial critics (Boatca,2015; Chakrabarty,

2000; Mignolo,2011) have pointed out how key trends in classical marxist theory are implicated in eurocentrism and epistemologies of unmarked whiteness. As Mignolo emphasizes (2011, p. xviii), marxism as theory and political practice emerges from within white western modernity. It is, there-fore, embedded in the latter’s problematic universalisms, epistemologies of white ignorance, the dichotomy humanitas/anthropos (“civilized” humanity/human beings per se), and a modern logic of linear progress (Osamu,2006). This does not imply that socialism/marxism has to be dismissed as white theory altogether. According to some post- and decolonial scholars, marxist thought has laid important groundwork for theories of imperialism and global inequalities (Boatca,2015). In a queer, postsocialist4sense (Atanasoski & Vora,2017), it has also been pinpointed how feminist marxism has had a long-lasting impact on feminist theorizing and imaginaries of protest (Lykke,2018). Though, what I want to emphasize is that socialists, including the anti-authoritarian, Soviet-critical branches emerging as“western marxism”, “New Left”, “feminist marxism” “socialist feminism” etc., need to take responsibility for blind spots and epistemologies of ignorance.

Summed up with feminist decolonial scholar Manuela Boatca’s words, three lines of epistemo-logical ignorance are to be noticed in marxist thought:

Orientalism, the insuﬃcient treatment of gender and the disregard for racial and ethnic issues have featured prominently among the “blind spots” commonly imputed to Marxian theory in late twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst centuries . . . (Boatca,2015, p. 36)

Throughout the twentieth century, feminist marxisms have been focused on amending the second of these lacks, the insufficient approach to gender. The critical amendment efforts of the branches of feminist marxism, which laid important foundations for feminist research in the Nordic context, were, crudely summarized, focused on the marxist casting a group of unmarked male proletarians as workers’ avantgarde and as the subject par excellence of radical social change. The unmarked maleness of the avantgarde subject was made critically visible through analyses of the historically specific gendered divisions of capitalist labour, locating women workers in industries strategically defined as less central to revolutionary processes (e.g. textile industry, food production (sic!)). Moreover, the hierarchical and authoritarian model of social change, built on an avantgarde, embodied by a party, was also target of critical feminist scrutiny and rethinking. This was the reason for the study of dissidentfigures such as Kollontaj who argued against patriarchal structures in the proletarian movement, and against party dictatorship, much more radically than Trotzsky who later was celebrated for his protests against Stalinism, also by black marxists such as James (2011).

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However, the socialist feminist endeavours to amend the blind spots of marxism regarding gender, did not translate into eﬀorts to amend the problems regarding race, racism and white privilege. I shall illustrate this duality through a rereading of my and my colleague’s research on socialist feminism, Kollontaj and the Russian revolution (Arnfred et al.,1977–1978).

When interpreting the Russian Revolution with a post- and decolonializing focus on global relations of multiple inequalities and social upraisings, one conclusion is that the 1917-revolution’s main problem with the establishing of a sustainable worker-peasant alliance must be reframed. Seen from a post- and decolonial perspective, the problem was not the worker-peasant alliance per se, but that the Russian situation did notﬁt the eurocentric model of revolution, while the ruling Bolshevik party kept tenaciously to this scheme. At the time of the revolution, Russia was characterized by a small and undeveloped industry. The proletarian“avantgarde”, who, according to the Eurocentric model, was the one qualiﬁed to take the lead, was minute, compared to the gigantic mass of poor peasants. The Bolsheviks recognized this as a key strategic problem, but chose to“solve” it through a violent reinforcing of the eurocentric model through the leninist-stalinist party dictatorship, while reducing the socialist world movement, embodied in the Communist International, to service providers for Soviet State Capitalist foreign policies (James,2011). However, a second conclusion— important for my self-critical rereading of my 1970s-research—is that the dissident Workers’ Opposition, to which Kollontaj belonged, and which I and my colleagues (Arnfred et al.,

1977–1978) studied for its ideas about a council-based workers’ democracy did not have any robust answers beyond the eurocentric model either. On the one hand, the Workers’ Opposition had a potentially more hopeful strategy than the leninist-stalinist one. In tandem with its defence of socialist democracy, the Workers’ Opposition challenged the initiation of state capitalism embodied in Lenin’s New Economic Politics (NEP) of 1920–21, and argued for global solidarity, opposing the leninist-stalinist socialism-in-one-country doctrine. However, reread in a post- and decolonial per-spective, it is, on the other hand, clear that the Workers’ Opposition and its spokespersons (all politically silenced after 1921), still stayed within a eurocentric understanding of global social change. The Workers’ Opposition argued against party dictatorship, but did not transgress the Eurocentric model of social transformation, putting industrial workers central, and neither did we, who, decades later, analysed it from feminist-marxist perspectives.

So, crudely summarized, with our Kollontaj-research as case study, I shall conclude that the critical amendment eﬀorts of 1970s Nordic feminist marxism did not transgress the epistemologies of white, eurocentric ignorance of classic marxism. But as I think it is important not to take blind spots as mere given, essentialized facts, I shall dig a bit deeper and ask: Why did our critiques of insuﬃciencies regarding gender not link up with an understanding of classic marxist blind spots regarding race?

To open up more horizons here, I shall brieﬂy revisit other pathways of feminist marxisms than the eurocentric ones, dominant in the Nordic countries. Boatca (2015), for example, refers to feminist marxist work of the German Bielefeld school (Mies,1999). Researchers belonging to this group shifted the theoretical focus from the European nation-state to a global outlook, putting focus on worldwide entanglements of subsistence economies, including those to be found in the work of housewives. According to Boatca, this branch of feminist marxism contributed radically to a theorizing of postcolonial capitalism and a sociology of global inequalities, which took intraac-tions between gender and racialization into account in resonance with world systems theory (Boatca,2015, p. 52; Wallerstein,2004). Related ways of thinking were also found in the Italian, radical autonomous marxist feminist wages for housework group, founded in 1972, and theorized by Federici (2004).

I can only guess how feminist research in the Nordic context would have unfolded, had it taken such routes. But the German and Italian examples call forward the question: why did I and other Nordic feminist marxists not go in the same directions? The close at hand reply is that house-wiﬁcation in European countries such as Germany and Italy still was a living reality during the last decades of the twentieth century, while the labour market for women of all classes in the Nordic

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countries was undergoing major changes at the time, producing a situation characterized by mass exodus from exclusive housewife life to labour market participation (Borchorst et al.,1977). Even though parttime work for women was still widespread, and even though women continued to bear the biggest burdens of domestic work, labour market participation became a norm for women in the Nordic countries, independent of class, during the last decades of the twentieth century. I think that the mass exodus away from housewife life, combined with feminist versions of the 1970s sexual liberation ideologies, which were strong in Denmark and Sweden, in particular, are among the reasons why the wages for housework movement had only few supporters among Nordic feminists. The overwhelming focus became class diﬀerentiated wage work, and independence of patriarchal family relations. This put gender and class, the relationship of feminism and socialism, women’s struggles and class struggles high on feminist marxist agendas—and paradoxically interpellated a critical engagement with the most euro- and whitecentric parts of marxist thought, related to the formation of the modern,“free” proletarian subject, undone by feminist critique in terms of its unmarked maleness, but not in its unmarked whiteness. One lesson of my rereading is that these genealogies of the epistemologies of ignorance of Nordic feminist research need critical scrutiny.

Another lesson is, however, that critiques, which overlook the profound anti-capitalist commit-ment, and the interlinked class- and difference consciousness of early Nordic feminist research, and collapse it with (neo)liberal monocategorical feminism, miss important points. Firstly, this collapsing obscures the ways in which intersectional feminisms and European socialist feminisms, inspite of the latter’s problematic relationship to race, have shared genealogies as far as an antagonistic approach to monocategorical (neo)liberal feminisms is concerned. Secondly, the obscuring of this particular overlap implies that the contributions of these socialist feminisms to feminist imaginaries of protest and to the struggle against entangled multiple oppressions, and their efforts to establish alternatives to neoliberal feminism are erased from the stories of feminism. Thirdly, the collapsing with (neo)liberal, monocategorical feminism implies a problematic erasure of the specific political potentials of these socialist feminisms related to their critiques of the patriarchal socialist strategies, that throughout the twentieth century have haunted and that, to some extent, still haunts eurocentric leftwing politics. Concluding remarks

Prompted by critiques of my take on intersectionality, the article engages in two transversal dialogues, one with Bilge (2013) on my juxtaposition of Truth and Kollontaj, and one with Dahl et al.'s (2016) study of the formation of Nordic feminist research 1975–2005, both centrally related

to the intersectionality debates. Through the dialogues, I tried both to ”root” (situate my own stakes) and to”shift” (seriously to visit my critical interlocutors’ point of view).

Rooting implied a disidentification with the reduction of my intersectionality research to an effect of the neoliberal university, and an attempt to counter-act the amnesia which, in current neoliberal, end-of-history climates, surrounds historical reflections on (post)socialist imaginaries of protest and ideas about other ways of organizing society than capitalism. I pinpointed the activist moment, socialist feminism of the 1970s, as my background for bringing in Kollontaj. However, in the shifting mode, I provided a self-reflexively framed historical analysis of blind spots of socialist feminisms, emerging in the Nordic context in the 1970s. I discussed the paradoxes of a classconscious, but raceblind socialist feminism,—a socialist feminism that put the gender/class nexus in focus, and opposed a monocategorical (neo)liberal feminism, complicit with capitalism, while inequalities, based on structural racism and white privilege, by contrast, were not taken into account in local Nordic contexts.

The critics ascribed the absence of white feminist reﬂections on race, racism and white privilege to neoliberalism (Bilge,2013) and to speciﬁc Nordic erasures of race (Dahl et al.,2016). Instead, through the rooting process, I related these blind spots to white European, including Nordic, leftwing agendas. To sustain this point, I revisited the post-1968 context out of which my socialist feminist research emerged, and reread a collaborative historical research project, in which

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I participated back then, dealing with socialist feminism, Kollontaj and the Russian revolution from feminist-marxist perspectives. Through this rereading, I engaged in a critical analysis of the eurocentrism and whiteness of socialism/marxism in line with post- and decolonial critiques.

As I hope to have pinpointed, I consider it important to critically revisit and take responsibility for the specific white European leftwing erasures of race, which the socialist feminist research, in which I was involved in the formative years of institutionalization of feminist research in Nordic Academia, failed to recognize and criticize. However, I also found it necessary to go critically beyond the collapsing of socialist feminisms and (neo)liberal, monocategorical feminisms, and to stop ignoring socialist feminisms’ specifics—their pinpointing of power differentials between women, and their critique of the ways in which socialist movements have been haunted by patriarchal approaches. Instead of continuing to collapse these socialist and (neo)liberal feminisms, I wanted to show the historical relevance for contemporary grapplings with genealogies to critically revisit socialist feminist research from the 1970s.

Notes

1. Following my deﬁnitional framework (Lykke,2010, pp. 50–52), I use the term ”intraaction” (Barad,2007) throughout the article to indicate the ways in which multiple oppressions are to be understood as entangled and mutually constructing each other.

2. Sojourner Truth (1797–1883)—an icon of Black Feminism, often quoted for her “Ain’t I a woman?” speech” (Gates & McKay,1997) at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio 1851.

3. Alexandra Kollontaj (1872–1952)—an icon of Socialist Feminism, active in organizing a socialist workers’ women’s movement as part of the Russian revolution in the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century.

4. I use“postsocialist” along the lines of Atanasoski and Vora (2017), who suggested the term as an analytics, which, based on queer temporalities, and unmoored from a limited geopolitical understanding as spatially and temporally linked to former socialist countries in Eastern and Central Europe, can address imaginaries of protest in a broad anti-capitalist sense.

Disclosure statement

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nina LykkeHas participated in the building of Feminist Studies in Scandinavia and Europe more broadly since the 1970s. Co-founded International Networks for Queer Death Studies, and for Ecocritical and Decolonial Research. Current research: cancer, death, and mourning in posthuman, queerfeminist, spiritual, materialist, decolonial and eco-critical perspectives; critique of white epistemologies of ignorance; intersectionality; autophenomenography and poetic writing. Website:www.ninalykke.net

ORCID

Nina Lykke http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7946-7185

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