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Accepted Paper:
Feelings of female solidarity – how affective solidarity underlies transphobia
Henrike Kraul
(Freie Universität Berlin)
This contribution is an ethnographic case study on the affective solidarity underlying the transphobic activism of a women’s collective. It shows how affect produces solidarity and feelings of belonging amongst members of the collective whilst deliberately denying solidarity to trans people.
Paper long abstract:
Whilst transphobia has had a pervasive presence within recent Euro-American history, the current surge of trans-exclusionary politics calls for efforts to comprehend the underlying affective and relational dimensions of trans hostility.
In this contribution, I will show how affective solidarity underpins and motivates transphobic activism. Based on ethnographic research in a trans-exclusionary women’s collective, I will discuss how affect produces the emic notion of ‘female solidarity’. This notion underlies practices which further affective solidarity and feelings of belonging amongst members of the collective whilst at the same time deliberately denying solidarity to trans people in general, and trans women in particular. I will show how the concept of female solidarity works to create affective boundaries around both the female subject and the feminist subject, and how solidarity is being negotiated along the defining lines of the category ’woman’.
Ultimately, I will suggest that ethnographic research focusing on the affective dimensions of solidarity and its inherent ambivalence equips us to confront anti-feminist and trans-exclusionary politics. Reflecting on the anthropologist’s position within a context of ambivalent solidarity, I will argue that it is through the thorough understanding of the ambivalence of affective solidary relations that new forms of solidarity can be envisioned.