Abstract
Misogyny is a weighty term. Its affective power invokes spectres of rape, sexual assault, hate-fuelled insults and gas-lighting. Its presence in nearly every culture on the planet haunts our pasts and frames our presents. Aiming to build an understanding of misogyny for our future social justice efforts, I look to Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, where she dusts off an old definition of misogyny as the hatred of women to describe it as the enforcement branch of a patriarchal society, a renewed engagement for feminists and activists alike. In particular, this framing provides opportunities to examine misogyny from an intersectional lens, including its intersections with race, gender and sexuality. For example, through stories such as that of Pamela George, an Indigenous woman from Regina, Saskatchewan who was murdered in 1995, I argue that it is crucial that we recognise the collusion between settler colonialism and misogyny. Or in the case of transphobic comedian Dave Chapelle, we must understand the interplay of heteronormativity and cisnormativity in propping up transmisogyny. Consequently, I argue that an intersectional logic of misogyny provides not only a shift but a tipping point for feminist and queer movements to come.
Keywords
[M]isogyny is not about hating women. It is about controlling them. (Kate Manne, 2016)
To many, misogyny may feel like an outdated concept, a term that has been replaced by words such as oppression, gender-based violence, sexism, even patriarchy. When I was an undergraduate student in philosophy and women's and gender studies, circa 2003, there was a sense in which the term had lost favour, representing the height of ‘angry feminism’, and otherwise closing down possibilities for ‘reasonable’ feminist inquiry and engagement. Arguably, more widespread use of the term misogyny reappeared in relation to the 2016 United States Presidential election, where Hillary Rodham Clinton faced some of the most misogynist, gut-wrenching criticism ever documented in American media. Clinton was the target of sexist spurns and misogynist vitriol at every step, including merchandise at the Republican National Convention that included buttons, t-shirts and bags that read ‘Hillary sucks, but not like Monica’, ‘Trump That Bitch’ and ‘KFC Hillary Special. 2 Fat Thighs, 2 Small Breasts . . . Left Wing’ (Beinart, 2016). Trump supporters revelled in the attack, demoralising Clinton at every turn, but more striking was that the opposition was slow to respond and even slower to address the misogyny at play (Alptraum, 2017; Bordo, 2017). In an interview about the anti-Hillary movement that engulfed the 2016 election, bell hooks laments the fact that Clinton's loss represented a grand return on investment for patriarchy. Further, she reminds us that ‘patriarchy has no gender’, noting the widespread hostility that surfaces in relation to empowered women (Alptraum, 2017: 3) and which was reflected in the negative treatment Clinton received from feminists throughout her campaign (Featherstone, 2016).
Fast forward to six years post election, and both media and scholarly discussions of misogyny have increased (Manne, 2018; Banet-Weiser, 2018; Blair, 2021; Wrisley, 2021; Zempi and Smith, 2021). At the same time, we have witnessed an increased polarisation of right and left, powerful upswells of social rebellion and a drastic increase in public and media attention surrounding not only misogyny but also white supremacy, racism, colonisation and heteronormativity through the Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, It Gets Better and Land Back movements. These movements have contributed to a shifting landscape around not only misogyny but the way that violence and injustice are mediated in the social and political sphere.
Misogyny has rhizomatic roots that run deep within the philosophical, scientific and cultural texts of Western civilisation (Holland, 2012; Gilmore, 2018). In most of these timelines, misogyny is understood to be the hatred of, or contempt for, women and girls: ‘a feeling of enmity toward the female sex, a “disgust or abhorrence” toward women as an undifferentiated social category’ (Gilmore, 2018: 9). 1 When I first started surveying feminist and philosophical literature for discussions of misogyny, I found very little that strayed from this lens until I came across Kate Manne's (2018) Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. 2 Rather than relying on the historical definition of misogyny as the hatred of women, Manne defines misogyny as the ‘“law enforcement” branch of a patriarchal order’ (2018: 78). This enforcement doesn’t necessarily require justification via the beliefs and values of its perpetrators – as in, a documented hatred or hostility – rather it operates through ‘policing and enforcing its governing norms and expectations’ (Manne, 2018: 78).
To further illustrate the logic of misogyny, Manne argues that the historical definition is both too narrow and not focused enough to account for its many and diverse applications. Its narrowness lies in its reliance on the individual misogynist's activities and beliefs, rather than the patriarchal ideologies that provide fertile ground for misogyny, a claim that echoes Kate Millett's argument from decades earlier (Millett, [1970] 2016). And regarding the lack of focus, Manne notes that if we define misogyny as that which is enacted upon women, simply because they are women, we miss the instances where misogyny operates to police particular people who engage in particular activities, that is the Indigenous sex worker, the trans woman, even the gay man, as we will discuss later. By shifting the lens from the individual misogynist who hates women, to the patriarchal society in which women are controlled, punished and policed, Manne's logic of misogyny reminds us that patriarchal societies operate by surveilling their subjects, especially the degree to which their subjects submit to required gendered behaviours.
The logic of misogyny, therefore, includes the words, behaviours and expectations that enforce patriarchal social relations, and Manne's reframing has already had quite a large impact within the contemporary feminist landscape, providing fertile ground for scholars, journalists and lawmakers alike (Doherty, 2019; Wrisley, 2021; Wyeth, 2022). In what follows, I extend Manne's argument to an intersectional understanding of misogyny: one which recognises misogyny's role in enforcing intersecting systems of white supremacy, heteronormativity and cisnormativity. 3 For in fact, one of the most important moves that we can make in discussions of misogyny is to expand its historical definition beyond that which is committed by cisgender, heterosexual men, against cisgender, heterosexual women, thereby addressing a patriarchal system of control that uses transphobia, racism and heteronormativity to circumscribe its object. In service of this aim, I discuss misogyny as it sustains settler colonialism, misogyny within and through the queer community and transmisogyny, each of which contribute to a better understanding of misogyny as a system of control, and societal enforcement of a patriarchal system built on interlocking forms of oppression.
I also briefly address the language of misogyny, arguing that often and increasingly, the terms ‘sexism’, ‘gender-based violence’ and especially the latter's acronym ‘GBV’ are sanitising in the face of the violence that misogyny references. Consequently, I discuss the impacts of not only a renewed understanding of misogyny but also a call to talk, organise, write and shout about misogyny and its insidious counterparts, transphobia, homophobia and white supremacy, demonstrating that we are at a tipping point where we must call it misogyny. That is, we must expand and sharpen our work of naming instances of violence and injustice. Through increased awareness, we are also better able to see that the misogynistic acts we (increasingly and more and more frighteningly) see in media, social movements and legal cases are only the bravest and most violent examples of an insidious culture of violence and control that is taking place all around us. Ultimately, I am hopeful that through amplifying and complicating our understandings of misogyny we are able to engender our own tipping point for intersectional feminist and queer movements to come.
Misogyny: Retelling old stories
Born of the ancient Greek etymology of miso (‘hatred’) plus gyne ‘woman’, misogyny is an old term, seemingly simple to define. Antipater of Tarsus used the word misogunia (μισογυνία), in a text called On Marriage (c. 150), to extoll the virtues of marriage while criticising his contemporary Euripides’ derogatory comments towards women (Antipater of Tarsus, 1995). Ultimately, Antipater viewed misogyny in contravention to the sanctity of marriage and the love that men must display towards their wives; however, I would caution against praising Antipater's seemingly positive intervention, as this early argument endorses the familiar criticism of those women who are not appropriately bound to men and links a hatred of women to their failure to participate in the requisite patriarchal order.
Case in point: Antipater's centuries-old origin story is amplified by the present-day online men's movement known as ‘The Red Pill’ (found at r/theredpill). The Red Pill is a subreddit community that uses ancient Greek and Roman texts to bolster its present-day arguments for antifeminism, rape culture and hegemonic masculinity (Zuckerberg, 2018; Ging, 2019). Followers of the Red Pill call themselves ‘incels’, a term that means ‘involuntary celibate’ and refers to their perceived entitlement to sex and affection. ‘Incels’ thus expect women to adhere to traditionalist expectations of femininity and lash out at those who do not conform. Donna Zuckerberg's (2018) Not All Dead White Men explores the enterprise of the alt-right men's movement via The Red Pill, demonstrating the widespread impact of its (false) appeal to both history and authority via Classic texts. Through such an appeal, Red Pill-ers and incels lend credibility to their claims, positioning themselves as guardians of a white, patriarchal, Western civilisation (Zuckerberg, 2018). Although Zuckerberg largely takes aim at the role of technology in mobilising a new era of misogyny and violence, she sounds an alarm bell around the fact that online communities like the Red Pill operationalise the white (male) supremacy of more visible alt-right political and social crusades.
Not surprisingly, then, today's misogyny is networked. Sarah Banet-Weiser writes that the misogyny of the twenty-first century is ‘expressed and practiced on multiple media platforms, it attracts other like-minded groups and individuals, and it manifests in a terrain of struggle, with competing demands for power’ (2018: 2). Scholars, historians, even journalists and public interest authors increasingly recognise and name its operation, acknowledging that misogyny is a weighty term, heavy-hitting in a way that terms like sexism or even patriarchy are not. To this effect, Gail Ukockis writes that: For decades, the word ‘sexism’ seemed sufficient to describe the demeaning treatment of females . . . Sexism can be subtle, such as a man talking over a woman during a business meeting. In contrast, the word ‘misogyny’ is a much stronger word than ‘sexism’ because it is simply defined as hatred of women. . . . misogyny implies an overt and violent aspect. (2019: 1)
Ukockis references the affective force of misogyny as the term invokes spectres of rape, sexual assault, hate-fuelled insults and practices of gas-lighting. It is palpable, triggering; it lives in the bodies of its targets.
Manne also differentiates between misogyny and sexism, noting that ‘sexism can be complacent [while] misogyny may be anxious’ and that ‘sexism has a theory; misogyny wields a cudgel’ (2018: 88). However, Manne would disagree with Ukockis's assessment that misogyny's strength is due to its supposedly ‘simple’ definition. Manne's argument that misogyny functions as a policing and enforcing branch of patriarchy, while sexism functions as the rationalisation and justificatory branch (2018: 80), demonstrates that sexism often operates to naturalise sex differences or to make them seem inevitable, thus upholding sexist hiring practices or social arrangements. On the contrary, misogyny enforces women's subordination through its ability and potential to target women quite selectively, rather than across the board (Manne, 2018: 79), a nuance that the ‘hatred of women qua women’ does not allow.
In fact, misogyny has never been ‘only’ about the hatred of women (as if a singular application is any less brutal) but instead has so many other dangerous lives and applications. Take a devastating case of misogyny in Quebec, Canada: the Montreal Massacre of 1989, when Marc Lépine murdered fourteen women and wounded many more at École Polytechnique de Montreal. Lépine marched into a mechanical engineering classroom with a semi-automatic rifle, divided the class by sex and forced the more than fifty men in the class to leave the room. He then lined the remaining nine women up against the wall and opened fire. ‘I am fighting feminism’, Lépine shouted to his victims (Gagne and Lepine, 2008; Jaynes, 2019), and his suicide letter further avowed his hatred for feminists, assuaging any doubts about it being a misogynist act.
Manne's argument enables a wider reading of both the actions of individuals such as Mark Lépine and the social systems which enable such atrocities to happen. The Montreal Massacre was not an isolated and rare case of Lépine's unhinged hatred of women qua women. Instead, it was a deadly expression of his deeply held beliefs about the acceptable behaviours of women and men that already exist within our institutions and social systems. Lépine did not hate ‘women’, he hated feminists, and he hated feminists precisely because they were ‘seizing for themselves [the advantages held by] men’. 4 Lépine enforced his sexist beliefs through mass execution, and in this way, misogyny represents both the hatred he felt for the women at École Polytechnique de Montreal and the very real ideological, educational and political systems that prop up such beliefs.
Misogyny, both the word and its effects, can still quiet a room in a way that sexism cannot. Sexism invokes charts, graphs and workplace analyses, whereas misogyny lands with blunt force, heaving and daring. As such, misogyny lingers in the body; it haunts us long after impact. Speaking to these sensory experiences of misogyny, Samantha Pinson Wrisley has recently outlined that misogyny is a ‘profoundly affective social dynamic’ (2021: 2) and that any efforts to engage with misogyny must incorporate this emotional and affective impact. Through this claim, she references well-known arguments surrounding the false dichotomy between emotions and knowledge, pointing towards feminist and queer theorists who have already demonstrated the political efficacy of emotion, among other productive elements (Hooks, 1995; Ahmed, 2004). Turning to Manne's logic of misogyny, however, Wrisley argues that Manne's definition is ‘fundamentally incompatible’ (2021: 3) with the complex emotional and psychological landscape of misogyny. In particular, Wrisley argues that by turning away from a definition of misogyny as the hatred of women, Manne divorces misogyny from its ‘affective root’, and therefore, ‘abstracts misogyny from its originary meaning in order to make it more epistemically sound and politically palatable’ (2021: 11). Wrisley's detailed reading of Manne's de-emotionalisation of misogyny, then, argues that a structural take on misogyny ultimately conceals its true, affective nature.
On this front, I disagree with Wrisley. I don’t disagree that Manne seeks to de-psychologise the misogynist's ‘feelings’ of enmity towards women, nor that she strives to remove the burden of assessing the internal psychological comportment of the misogynist, by way of practising ‘psychology from the outside’ (2018: 20). Rather, I disagree that Manne's definition results in an operation that is void of affect, and that she dissuades us from accounting for the emotional impact. For, in fact, the logical shift that Manne calls for is much more specific than Wrisley notes. Rather than arguing that misogyny itself must be understood without emotion and psychology, Manne argues that our investigations (and therefore required evidence) must move beyond the internal feelings and motivations of the misogynist and towards the emotional, psychological and societal effects of misogyny on the bodies/psyches of its targets. That is, the women, girls, Two Spirit, trans and non-binary people that bear the impact of hateful epithets, assault and constriction. For both the word and effects of misogyny are inextricably bound to the psychological and physical effects of fear, anxiety, pain and unease, as much as they are bound to their description and invocation. Thus, Manne's renewed logic of misogyny provides a clear and distinct method of identifying and understanding misogyny's affective impact. At the same time, she does not suspend those instances where misogyny is the visceral outpost of internal hatred and disgust, nor our ability to bring such affective landscapes to bear on our movements to come.
I also disagree with the argument that Manne's renewed definition of misogyny renders it too common, or that we need some expression of a ‘negative affective or emotional orientation towards women as a group’ (Wrisley, 2021: 5) in order to define it as misogyny. It is precisely because Manne shifts the focus from the perpetrator to the victim that misogyny becomes something we can start naming. This is what misogyny requires: a voice, an army, a sensation-turned-rage. In fact, I liken Manne's cudgel of misogyny to Sara Ahmed's experience of being a (feminist) killjoy, the one who speaks up and names the inequities that are in the world – naming racism in a University's hiring process, addressing sexism at the dinner table. In the face of such vocalisations, Ahmed describes the resultant feeling of ‘a burning sensation on skin. . . . That flooding: it happens. It still happens. Feeling wrong, being wrong; being wronged’ (2017: 39). As feminists, we often register wrongs in relation to ‘the sharpness of an impression’ (Ahmed 2017: 22), and Ahmed describes this as a sensational experience. Her use of sensation refers both to the feelings evoked by actions and touch, as well as the sensational outputs of the killjoy as she speaks up or is the object of a misogynist gaze.
So often, misogyny is discussed as an affect associated with the misogynist himself – his hatred of women, his violence and anger – but in fact, in an effort to locate the target of misogyny as an agent within the narrative, we gloss over the ways that misogyny is a sensation that is carried in the body of its targets. For many, there is no speaking the word ‘misogyny’ without feeling the marks it has left. As its use in popular media grows, so too does its sensation, its application to the many experiences of women, girls, trans and non-binary people that may have had the sense/sensation but not the logic to name it. Consequently, it is precisely through loosening misogyny from a singular definition that we are better able to recognise both its widespread impact and its entanglement with interlocking systems of oppression. To understand misogyny as the enforcement arm of patriarchy, and not only the hatred of women, therefore, enables us to re-read cases and examples from the past Stories that otherwise would not have been weighed down by misogyny's heavy hand and can now be retold with much more precision, and with increased clarity regarding misogyny's supporting cast (i.e. racism, homophobia, transphobia, White Supremacy). We are also better able to see that misogyny's force always and already relies on centuries of recognised and invisible violence enacted against those who do not conform to racialised, sexualised and gendered rules.
Finding misogyny in settler colonialism
On Easter weekend in 1995, two college-aged, Caucasian men – Steven Kummerfield and Alex Ternowetsky – kidnapped and murdered Pamela George, an Indigenous woman from Regina, Saskatchewan. The high-profile and controversial case focused heavily on the lifestyle choices, race and character of George, while praising the upper-class characters of the young men who committed the crime. 5 During the trial, the original charge of first-degree murder was overturned, and the two young men were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to only six and a half years in jail. The soft sentencing dredges up numerous questions about the integrity of the case, particularly the blatant racism and sexism that motivated the murder itself and which underlay the legal outcome. 6
In her comprehensive analysis of the case, feminist scholar Sherene Razack focuses on the ways that the murder of Pamela George (2000: 95) clearly demonstrates settler colonialism's reliance on the spatialisation and dehumanisation of Indigenous women – their bodies are actually limited to certain places, certain movements, certain definitions. Tellingly, Razack (2020) revisits this argument in her paper ‘Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine’, where she recounts another murder case, also of an Indigenous woman and also as a result of ‘policing’ the movement and location of an Indigenous woman's body. Two decades pass in the blink of an eye when we read Razack's opening lines alongside one another: ‘On Easter weekend, April 17, 1995, Pamela George, a woman of the Saulteaux (Ojibway) nation and a mother of two young children, was brutally murdered in Regina, a small Canadian prairie city’ (2000: 91); ‘On 27 March 2014, Loreal Tsingine, a 27-year-old Navajo woman was shot and killed by Austin Shipley, a white male police officer, also 27 years old, who said he was trying to apprehend her for a suspected shoplifting’ (2020: 1).
Although the stories differ – Loreal Tsingine was shot by a police officer during an attempted arrest and Pamela George was assaulted and beaten to death on a dirt road – both women are defined by the enforcement of neo-colonialism. Both cases also reveal longstanding collusions between racism and misogyny.
During Kummerfield and Ternowetsky's murder trials, news coverage and court proceedings identified Pamela George as a ‘prostitute’, rather than through other identifying terms. In fact, she was regarded by the defence lawyer, the Crown attorney and the jury to be partially responsible for her death because she chose to participate in prostitution.
7
Such references to prostitution or sex work specifically cast George as the racialised other and separated her from acceptable society (read: the (white) women that are deserving of respect and legal rights). To this effect, Razack writes: While it is certainly patriarchy that produces men whose sense of identity is achieved through the brutalizing of a woman, the men's and the court’s capacity to dehumanize Pamela George derived from their understanding of her as the (gendered) racial Other whose degradation confirmed their own identities as white—that is, as men entitled to the land and the full benefits of citizenship. (2000: 93)
Razack details that colonial countries have been well aware that the key to assimilation is to conquer – metaphorically and literally – the colonised country's women in assurance of the successful development of a new nation (see also: Enloe, 1996; Kaufman and Williams, 2007; Puar, 2007). If misogyny is about controlling and policing women, then colonisation doubles down on the racialised woman, rendering her both the physical object of attack and the abject warning to women who may transgress the expected boundaries of (white) femininity.
Providing greater insight into the intersections of racism and misogyny, Moya Baily (2014) describes the misogyny faced by black women in the United States as misogynoir. Misogynoir is a form of anti-black sexism that erases, stereotypes and fetishises black women in media and society. Although I won’t apply a term that is specific to black women in the US to an Ojibway woman in Saskatchewan, the concept of misogynoir echoes the cumulative lashings that Pamela George endured. Neither her gender nor her race alone bore the violence of that night. She was murdered precisely because she was an Indigenous woman, a sex worker, an object of disdain and abuse. In fact, a friend of the assailants shared that he spoke to each of the men on the phone after the murder occurred, during which time Kummerfield told him that ‘We drove around, got drunk and killed this chick’, while Ternowetsky bragged that ‘She deserved it. She was Indian’ (Eisler, 1996: 28). As misogynoir invokes an intersectional reading from the outset, so too must George's murder in its demonstration that misogyny is rarely just about gender.
The sting of Kummerfield and Ternowetsky's comments underscores the insidious racism and the complacent misogyny that both led to George's death and protected Kummerfield and Ternowetsky from harsher sentencing. It also speaks to Manne's argument that we must move beyond definitions of misogyny as men's hatred of women ‘simply because they are women’ (2017: 32). In Pamela George's case, we can see that the court's painting of Kummerfield and Ternowetsky as white middle-class college boys who just wanted to have some fun kept them from being classed as misogynists (Roberts, 1997). Kummerfield was noted to have gone to dinner with his girlfriend the night of the murder, and to confiding in his mother and asking her for help after the events took place, thus tempering his character (Razack, 2000: 111–112). Arguably, such factors prevented Kummerfield and Ternowetsky from being accused of harbouring the deep-seated hatred of all women required to define them as misogynists. At the same time, such descriptions locate Pamela George apart from the other women in the men's lives; she is limited to ‘the stroll’, understood only as an object of sexual gratification. Even the judge warned the jury that it would be ‘dangerous’ to convict Kummerfield and Ternowetsky of first-degree murder because George was ‘indeed a prostitute’ (Roberts, 1997: A6).
A key mechanism by which misogyny operates is through its enforcement of a gendered ‘law and order’, as Manne (2020: 7) expounds in Entitled, her follow-up to Down Girl. In this case, the law and order includes Kummerfield and Ternowetsky's assumed entitlements to George's ‘feminine-coded goods and services’, which include attention, affection, admiration, sympathy, sex and children, among other things (Manne, 2018: 130). George's assailants felt entitled to her services of sex and affection, while at the same time, her presumed inability to perform her feminine-coded duties – such as the requisite social, domestic and reproductive labour – on account of her participation in sex work provided them with the grounds for violent enforcement of the patriarchal order.
Pamela George's murder thus illustrates the ways that misogyny operates to police particular people who engage in particular activities. George was murdered because she was an Indigenous woman who was also a sex worker; a particular type of woman engaging in a particular type of activity. Further, she carried these signifiers in her bones. She walked and worked in those spaces which demarcated her to sex work, her skin marked her as the racialised other. Her assailant's comments (‘She was Indian’) and behaviour (they stalked other Indigenous women on the stroll and drove George to an out-of-town location) indicate that her race and her gender played affective roles in the outcomes of the fateful night. And Kummerfield and Ternowetsky received lesser sentences because a structural, colonial racism operated alongside an enforced and systemic misogyny to render Pamela George as an object of disdain, while her murderers were deemed worthy of special consideration. Notably, on top of a light sentence, both men served under three and a half years of their six and a half year sentences (Canadian Press, 2000).
Returning briefly to the murder of Loreal Tsingine by police officer Austin Shipley, although the case isn’t explicitly related to gender, it still relies on the unspoken misogyny central to settler colonialism. Tsingine was shot and killed upon suspicion of shoplifting and the threat of a weapon: a pair of inch-long medical scissors visible in the accompanying surveillance video of the shooting. Despite her small, 100-pound frame, the man who killed her relied on a prototypical police narrative which cast her as an unstoppable threat, ‘a force that only bullets can stop’ (Razack, 2020: 2). Remembering that settler colonialism relies on space itself as the feminine landscape on which the masculine constructs of culture, civilisation,and reason are built, 8 the murder of Loreal Tsingine reveals the ways that ‘the violence that is written on the Indigenous woman's body [is] a multiscalar imprinting of colonial power’ (2020: 9). Shipley, thus, mounts his own white masculinity through his engagement with the other as ‘settler colonialism's . . . processes require and produce subjects who understand their own racial superiority in gendered ways’ (Razack, 2020: 2). He adhered to an institutionally coded narrative to plead self-defence – he was not a misogynist because he was terrified of her; he was not a racist because he followed all protocol (Razack, 2020: 1–2, 13–14). Shipley was neither charged, nor subject to an external investigation; Loreal Tsingine is remembered as an Indigenous woman on a beer run. 9
It is no mistake that Pamela George was targeted at the intersecting axis of patriarchy, racism and colonialism, nor that Loreal Tsingine was subject to the enforcement of white masculinity via settler colonialism. Through this discussion, we are able to see that misogyny involves not only an individual's hostility but also the societal policing of those who fail to uphold the expectations of femininity to which they are subject, expectations which are coded by whiteness, colonialism and heteronormativity. Such a frame moves beyond understanding misogyny to target all women because they are women, to a concept of it as often manifesting by targeting specific women, and so provides us with an avenue to recognise the neo-colonial misogyny of attacks on Indigenous women, girls and Two Spirit people, which in a racist society would otherwise go unrecognised. 10
The names of Pamela George and Loreal Tsingine, thus, stand in for thousands more Indigenous women and girls, whose stories we do not know because their cases never made it to trial, an invisibility that is also felt within the transgender community, as thousands of people are assaulted and murdered each year and denied full legal representation and intervention. Although Manne expounds upon instances of transmisogyny in greater detail in Entitled, an intersectional understanding of misogyny still warrants much greater attention. In what follows, I offer a small contribution to this necessary conversation.
Queering misogyny
As the Red Pill movement and the murder of Pamela George demonstrate, misogyny is deeply intertwined with entitlements to sex, including expectations around not only gender but sexuality. When we restrict analyses of misogyny to a gender binary – the belief that misogyny is enacted on cisgender women by cisgender men – we fail to see how dependent it is on the heterosexual matrix; the invisible norm that casts everyone as heterosexual and by association, cisgender (see: Rich, 1980; Butler, 1990). Consequently, although misogyny is primarily directed at women and girls, within queer communities, misogyny can be directed at anyone (female, male, trans or non-binary) circumscribed by feminine codes of expression (both their presence and their absence).
One of the first (and still most-cited) public calls to action regarding so-termed ‘gay-male misogyny’ was actor Rose McGowan's 2014 tweet that stated ‘[g]ay men are as misogynistic as straight men, if not more so’ (Selby, 2014). McGowan received severe backlash for her statement, and eventually issued a public apology, but her comment continues to serve as an access point for expanding hetero- and cis-normative definitions of misogyny. In particular, it reminds us that belonging to a marginalised group does not void one from committing oppressive acts. Jack Halberstam has also written on the matter of gay-male misogyny, sharing an experience of attending the University of Michigan's ‘Gay Shame’ conference in the early 2000s. Following a less than enjoyable experience as one of the very few presenters that did not identify as a ‘cis, white, gay man’, Halberstam identified what they describe as ‘white gay male hegemony.’ For Halberstam, much of this hegemony is bound to the history of gay shame, shame which in part emerges from the ‘experience of being denied access to privilege’ (Halberstam, 2015: 223). White gay male misogyny, then, enacts a form of horizontal warfare, mobilising the shame of past homophobia and discrimination, while enforcing a hegemonic present which accesses power by taking aim at femininity and femme-coding.
Thus, even within queer communities, misogyny enforces socio-cultural expectations of femininity and feminine expression, expectations that are directed at lesbian, queer and trans women as well as at gay men and people who are gender non-conforming. In fact, the apparatus of heterosexuality and patriarchy within gay male communities ensures the survival of misogynistic ideals by making ‘opposition to femininity an essential component of belonging’ and reinforcing very specific gender and racial hierarchies (Hale and Ojeda, 2018: 312).
The term transmisogyny is used to refer to misogyny experienced by trans female/feminine people as misogyny intersects with transphobia (Serano, 2007). Recent public outrage surrounding transphobic comments made by notable figures such as J.K. Rowling (Ring, 2021), Margaret Atwood (Clark, 2021) and especially comedian Dave Chappelle (Romano, 2021) demonstrates that the general public is increasingly starting to wake up to transphobia. Although, like the tenuous discussions of gay male misogyny, transmisogyny warrants much more analysis and visibility.
Dave Chappelle's (2021) Netflix comedy special The Closer has divided the internet due to its blatant discrimination against trans people, but it is his unsuccessful ‘but I have a gay (trans) friend’ moment that demonstrates that it is transmisogyny that takes the final punch. During the special, Chappelle tells the story of his friend Daphne Dorman, a trans woman who had dreams of being a comedian and who allegedly idolised Chappelle. When Chappelle was touring his comedy special Sticks and Stones in 2019, he asked Dorman to open for his San Francisco show. According to Chappelle, Dorman bombed her set but rose victorious, thanks to a rousing round of unscripted banter with Chappelle once he took the stage. It is clear that in recounting this story, Chappelle tries to paint himself as an ally, to build sympathy through proximity to someone he describes as ‘one of the coolest people [he had] ever met’ (Chappelle, 2021). And yet, throughout The Closer, Chappelle intentionally misgenders Dorman, repeatedly characterises himself as transphobic (particularly in relation to Dorman's appearance and a hug between the two of them) and ensures that any praise Dorman receives is either in his service or at his expense.
Tragically, Dorman died by suicide on 11 October 2019, six days after the comedy night in San Francisco, a fact that Chappelle shares, with genuine sorrow, in the final lines of The Closer. Although links between the events of that evening and Dorman's death have been drawn, her family has noted that it is more likely that her suicide was the result of a lifetime of discrimination and PTSD on account of being trans in a world that continues to persecute all who transgress cisnormative gender categories (Thompson, 2021). However, Chappelle's comedy sketch still executes a very common trope of transphobia and homophobia: the use of 2SLGBTQ people as the punchline. Specifically, Chappelle enlists the ability of (trans)misogyny to target its victims quite selectively and to express itself through awkward uneasiness, misdirected anger at their occupation of roles and expressions not otherwise allowed within the patriarchal order. Therefore, it is no mistake that Chappelle plays up his adoration of Daphne Dorman, immediately following his own endorsement of J. K. Rowling, and his self-declared inclusion in ‘team TERF’ (Chappelle, 2021). He also includes a crass response to feminists who spoke out against his dismissive comments regarding the #MeToo movement, stating ‘Man, fuck y’all too, you canceled. I ain’t jerking off to none of your pictures again’, followed shortly by ‘What I think the feminist movement needs to be very successful … is a male leader’ (Chappelle, 2021).
Expanding misogyny beyond a heteronormative framework reveals that Chappelle uses precise and targeted language to ensure that Dorman sits askance of both womanhood and patriarchal desire. Dorman's suicide amplifies both the disproportionately high death rates within the trans community and the devastating impacts of misogyny like Chappelle's: misogyny that is relentlessly defensive; misogyny that is uttered casually for laughs. It also punctuates the fact that transmisogyny targets trans women or femme trans and non-binary people because they ‘dare’ to access what is already determined to be out of reach (femininity).
Through examining the misogyny perpetrated within trans and queer communities, we can also see that it is not only about ‘women’. Misogyny is about expressions of femininity that either abstain from or exceed the bounds of acceptability. Consequently, femininity, as the target of trans/misogy/noir and its many configurations, is not only bound to biology (whether expressed by people who are cisgender, transgender and/or gender non-conforming). For some gay men, femininity represents every slur that was used against them in the schoolyard and so masculinity and masculine credentials are coveted and expressions of femininity illustrate the failures of a patriarchal empire to mould its men (Hale and Ojeda, 2018: 315). For trans women, it is both a perceived relinquishment of masculinity and an occupation of assumedly undeserved femininity that disrupts the patriarchal order, drawing the ire of those bound and empowered by gendered norms. In all cases, it is necessary that we understand misogyny as an entrenched, networked system of control, rather than as something that can be solely attributed to the internal rantings of the individual misogynist. Through such a shift, we are better able to see misogyny's widespread collusion with colonialism, racism, transphobia and homophobia. We are also provided with an opportunity to imagine a future that is different from the past, and to amplify our role in making it so.
What will we make of misogyny’s future?
Despite there being an upsurge of texts about misogyny, very few offer ameliorative steps forward. Manne's logic of misogyny provides us with the tools necessary to unearth many instances of misogyny that have otherwise been shrouded, but she closes her text with a bleak story about the lack of response to the misogyny that is around us. Identifying Trump's election to the presidency as a culmination of the misogyny present in American society, she writes that: You might think [people across America] who likewise lament the result would now be waking up to the power of misogyny to distort our moral and rational judgements. You might think they would be willing to say mea culpa, inasmuch as many attacked Hillary Clinton relentlessly, viciously, disproportionately, misleadingly, moralistically, and sometimes, in my view, self-indulgently. But you would be wrong: this has largely not happened. (Manne, 2018: 283)
And so, it is at this juncture (the characteristic lack of concrete action in the face of a problem) that I think it is valuable to point towards the movements that are already in play: the complex, widespread and powerful engagements with misogyny that are always already happening around us. These include the 2017 Women's Marches, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, among others, each of which have set significant movements in motion, deepening our awareness of misogyny and its intersections with race, gender and sexuality.
Born of more than a year and a half of watching the American election campaign and listening to Donald Trump espouse racist, misogynist and homophobic ideologies on a daily basis, the 2017 Women's March on Washington, and the hundreds of concurrent marches, saw an estimated seven million participants worldwide. The March is believed to be the largest day of protests in US history and continues to signify the power and reach of peaceful protest (Broomfield, 2017). Similarly, the #MeToo movement was a ‘true cultural watershed and social sea change’ (O’Neill, 2021: 3) as it washed across social media in North America. Founded by Tarana Burke in 2006 when she used the MeToo hashtag to raise awareness about sexual assault, the movement exploded when Alyssa Milano called for its amplification in relation to widespread sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein. In Canada, #MeToo has resulted in concrete legal and political outcomes: the underfunded Status of Women Canada Office has since re-branded as the Department for Women and Gender Equality with an extensive new funding portfolio aimed directly at reducing and responding to gender-based violence (Government of Canada, 2019).
We also saw the tipping point of a renewed Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin on camera. Originally galvanised in 2013 after Trayvon Martin's murderer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted, Black Lives Matter has experienced multiple waves. Today, it is a decentralised activist movement that has chapters in communities worldwide, where local activists engage in protests, anti-white supremacy workshops and advocacy work. Despite substantial backlash, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the Women's March on Washington have cultivated stories, speeches, actions and offshoots. People around the world have put their bodies in motion and have shared deep and painful truths in public forums in an effort to pull the iceberg of misogyny/misogynoir/transmisogyny up from the water to take a look at what lies below.
I use the metaphor of the tipping point because it captures that moment when rising momentum swells over the edge. It is the moment when we are more apt to see both the impact and potentialities of a shifting feminist/anti-racist landscape. For example, a more complex understanding of misogyny, as described above, shifts our line of inquiry from investigations that have relied on questions of intent, or pre-meditation (i.e. ‘How long have you hated women?’ ‘Did you plan your attack?’ ‘Is it all women or just this woman?’) and which demonstrate a reliance on causal stories about individual motives and intentions. On the contrary, a definition of misogyny as the societal policing of femininity helps us to recognise that we do not have a monopoly on the impacts of our actions and so misogyny has uptake well beyond one individual. We might want to ask different questions, such as what is it about our culture that enables the policing and control of femininity? Or, what is it about racism that fuels misogyny against trans women of colour? These are questions that shine a light on the many words and deeds that are part of society's enforcement activities, whether these are the product of individuals or of government policies, international development or online communities.
To see that we are in the midst of an encounter with the tipping point of misogyny is to see both that the concept is coming into much greater focus, and that its enforcement draws on thousands of years of memories, stories and terror. This encounter is also with the iceberg below the surface, as through readings such as Manne's we are better able to parse misogyny's jagged edges. For example, we can see its reach throughout all arms of a patriarchal society and its enforcement by way of foreign policy, the objectification of not just women but entire nations and the intense racism that operates through violence against Indigenous women, girls and Two Spirit people. Misogyny is institutionalised within Western political, social and cultural systems; it is critical that we begin to see the forest through the trees.
We must also understand that the public iterations of misogyny to which we are privy are only the bravest (and most violent) expressions of what lies beneath the surface. Hence, in requesting that we ‘call it misogyny’, I counter both Manne and Wrisley's unfounded fears that increasing our use of the term will somehow water it down or void its characteristic ‘“punch” and power’ (Manne, 2020: 10). Wrisley outlines the dangers of conflating misogyny and violence against women or gender-based violence such that doing so results in ‘political aimlessness’ (2021: 17) whereby we are caught between addressing misogyny as a psychological othering of women and addressing the expressions and manifestations which misogyny enacts (i.e. rape, murder, assault). Regarding these claims, I disagree. We are nowhere near a point of ‘political aimlessness’ or lost impact, not even close. Misogyny creates an understanding of violence against others that far exceeds the outputs that sexism affords. We might liken this to the difference between homophobia (fear of homosexuals) and homonegativity (negativity towards homosexuality), where the latter, though offering a valuable nuance to more concealed and institutionalised exclusions of lesbian, gay, pan, bi and queer people, doesn’t result in the same effect as the concept of homophobia. Just as queer people are not ‘negatively’ impacted by homophobia, women are not ‘negatively’ impacted by misogyny; they are scared for their lives.
Palatable language such as gender-based violence and, as indicated above, the increasingly used acronym ‘GBV’, softens the response. And although it may represent a strategic move in relation to entering conversations and spaces otherwise unavailable, as a term, GBV will never capture the emotional, affective impact that misogyny invokes. Misogyny is a less palatable, and therefore less ignorable, frame for violence against women and feminine expression. Calling things ‘misogyny’ invokes a combined fear and defiance; it is the concurrent sense of having gone too far and having finally named the truth. I am still the feminist killjoy, invoking a burning sensation on the skin, a blush, nervous eye movements, shame.
It is for these reasons and many more that misogyny must be named, and in so doing, connected to a much braver, much more intersectional framework. One that has the potential to tip the scales when it comes to changing both the language and the landscape around the enforcement of patriarchal systems. The Women's March, a worldwide Black Lives Matter movement and the #MeToo movement are just the beginning of a sea change, as a quick search of news headlines reveals that a number of jurisdictions are reviewing whether misogyny should be understood as a hate crime (Blair, 2021; Scott, 2021). Whether or not this is a valuable uptake is the topic for another paper entirely; however, for our purposes, the amplification of conversations around misogyny is a clear method towards greater recognition and thus clearer critique and condemnation.
In closing
Misogyny lives in our bodies, and consequently our theorisation and engagement with it unfolds not from standardised definitions but from our lived experiences, from its affective sting. We need to talk about misogyny's global reach into countries and nations, about its enforcement of sexism, its collusion with racism, its reliance on homophobia and its insidious transphobia. We need to use this weighty term in place of the more palatable gender-based violence. We need to differentiate between misogyny and sexism. We need to see that violence against Indigenous women, girls and Two Spirit people is fuelled by a misogyny that functions precisely because it is the contributing arm of neo-colonialism. And we need to explore why femininity remains the other within gay male communities. In all instances, the weightiness of misogyny's emotional affect, both as a descriptive concept and as a violent action, is never too far away. We are in the middle of compelling and significant social movements that are changing the landscape of our social movements; let us call it misogyny and see how much more we can reveal.
