If ‘anti-racist’ white liberals feel comfortable voicing disdain for poor white people – many of whom are in similar economic, educational and political positions to those in Black communities – then their motives in the BLM movement must be questioned.
I’ve learnt a lot from my abortion. I’ve learnt that I’m not an awful person; I’m just a person who had to make a decision. I hope that by talking about it and reiterating that it’s not something to be ashamed of – and yes, it’s not something to be ashamed of even if you feel like the world’s worst ever person – another woman feels a little bit better about exercising her right to choose.
Painted as the political version of an allotment-owning Hannibal Lecter — despite the fact that he visibly lacks any threatening qualities — there are plenty of people who dislike Jeremy Corbyn.
In Foucault’s words, ‘visibility is a trap,’ and this isn’t all that it is. Visibility is a weapon, used by the state to afford privacy to some, and exposure to others: those that become a part of the mass body known as the ‘unemployed’. Take a step further, and you will see that those who are at the very bottom – the homeless – are afforded no privacy at all. They are out in the cold, subjected to the derision of those who could also quite easily fall into a state of constant visibility.
Can a working-class graduate learn to be ‘polished’, and more to the point, should they? Should they be forced to conform to social codes that are rooted in old-school ‘toffishness’ (as Boris Johnson calls it) if they wish to succeed, and should ideas of meritocracy be based upon working-class people going through a metamorphosis into, well… somebody else?
My time with her was short; two hours at most. But over that period, I learned the story of an extremely strong, phenomenal woman, who has fought to be recognised as the person that she truly is, even in the face of doctors who didn’t believe her, a socially conservative family, a discriminative police force, and people on the street in the town that she lives in, who can’t accept her for what she is: a woman.
‘Their voices are missing, and this persistent erasure or negative representation reflects […] a cultural and political violence towards these women’
Despite the many disagreements in opinion, moralising will not get rid of the demand for sex, but rather endangers and isolates sex workers further. ‘Equality’ will only exist when all women are afforded the same basic rights, and those who are now ostracised are put at the forefront of the conversation. The commodification of the sex worker by the feminist is not a new phenomenon, and women such as Sophie Walker must recognise that they, themselves, are at risk of becoming the real perpetrators of female oppression.
‘I asked her what she wanted to photograph, and she said, ‘I want to take pictures of policemen kicking children,’ and I said ‘You’re in.’ It was the shortest interview I had ever done’