As usual, I’m frustrated.  I’m frustrated by the state of politics and equally frustrated by the state of activism.  I just read two articles on the Stupak amendment and the state of the feminist movement, and they both have me a little irked.  They’re both worth reading, but raise frustrating questions about the current state of affairs.

The first was a pretty decent piece by Barbara Ehrenreich, published at Salon: “Slap on a pink ribbon, call it a day.” In it, she looks at the culture around the pink-ribbon Breast Cancer “Awareness” movement, specifically how it seems to forgo science in favor of the medical industry, and how it dilutes a potentially broader movement for women’s health, including affordable healthcare and access to abortion.  She writes: “When the House of Representatives passed the Stupak amendment, which would take abortion rights away even from women who have private insurance, the female response ranged from muted to inaudible.”

And here’s a passage I find particularly compelling:

It’s not just that abortion is deemed a morally trickier issue than mammography. To some extent, pink-ribbon culture has replaced feminism as a focus of female identity and solidarity. When a corporation wants to signal that it’s “woman friendly,” what does it do? It stamps a pink ribbon on its widget and proclaims that some miniscule portion of the profits will go to breast cancer research…

While we used to march in protest against sexist laws and practices, now we race or walk “for the cure.” And while we once sought full “consciousness” of all that oppresses us, now we’re content to achieve “awareness…”

An on-point and concise, if not earth-shattering, analysis.  Her own experience with cancer, though, definitely lends depth.  And her suggestion that this new movement may actually support the medical industry — possibly even to the detriment of women’s health — is heartbreaking.

The second article is by Linda Hirshman, a professor at Brandeis, called “Don’t just swallow it: What women could learn from how the gay rights movement plays politics.” Hirshman’s article examines the liberal gay establishment’s movement to cut of the DNC from donations until the Democrats pass gay marriage, ENDA, and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  Her suggestion is that women follow suit in response to the Stupak amendment:

Right around the time the gays took their hands out of their wallets, 64 Democratic representatives amended the House healthcare bill to ban women from obtaining abortion coverage in the new health insurance market, a provision known as the Stupak amendment. Women are supposedly “furious” about what the House Democrats did. But no one with money is on record as striking back. Can you imagine the response from gay political activists if the House voted to strip all money for AIDS treatment from the healthcare bill? Maybe rich women Democratic donors are reconsidering their giving strategies. But they’re being awfully quiet about it.

She also writes:

As the Web site Open Left points out, the DCCC spent $1 out of every $12 it collected from its substantially female donor base electing the 23 Democrats who both voted for the abortion restriction and against healthcare; they must have missed that reproductive rights action circle briefing.

Unlike Ehrenreich’s, I’ve got mixed feelings about her analysis and her approach.

First off, I’m not surprised that folks aren’t getting what they (think they) deserve from the new Administration and Democratic Congress.  Even though they allegedly paid for it.  This girl was never really drunk on the Audacity of Hope.

Second, as always, I’m sick of hearing about gay marriage and DADT.  I’m sick of people acting like this is the time to throw down.  Bullshit.  It’s been time to throw down for a long time, and not because gays couldn’t get married but because queer kids and others on the margins are still being killed and killing themselves in disproportionate numbers.  (More on throwing down in regards to Stupak in a minute.)

Third, while I’m all about finding the tactics to play hardball and hold politicians accountable, I don’t really buy the agument that finding wealthy donors to the DNC is really a way to make change.  What kind of movement does that build?  How does that empower women or queers?  How does that put structures in place that ensure that our work won’t be undermined in the future?  No wonder the HRC “responded not by distancing itself from the activists’ effort but by saying that donors should always think carefully when spending scarce resources.”  Oh, like spending scarce resources on fighting for gay marriage in states like California that already have DP laws that offer all the same rights as marriage, while local LGBT community centers and youth programs struggle to keep their doors open?  Thanks, HRC!  (Sorry, sometimes mama can get a little to sassy sarcastic.)  Yes, it’s hypocritical for the Democrats to take people’s money to get elected and then turn their backs on them when they’re in office, but that’s a symptom that should only indicate that the real problem is the amount of money in politics to begin with.  Put another way: someone’s always ready to pay more.

The thing that I find most troubling about both of these articles, though, is that they’ve both got an implicit assumption that the Democrats’ Healthcare “Reform” package is actually a good starting point, and that the Stupak amendment fucked it all up.  I’m not familiar with Hirshman, but I’m surprised at Ehrenreich for this.  The Dems’ reform is hardly radical and does little to actually make healthcare more affordable or accountable for most Americans. This is the part about throwing down for healthcare: we should’ve been pulling out all the stops on the very first day that big money and the Blue Dogs started getting in the way.  I wasn’t even thrilled by the national plan — I’m a Single Payer girl — but at least that would’ve allowed for coverage of more people and at better costs.

Granted, the Stupak amendment is horrifying and if this is the health care bill that’s going to pass, we should not allow it to pass with a provision that actually limits individuals’ access to abortion. But we also need to be careful about how we frame it, and how we go about our organizing.

But what really gets my goat is that access to abortion shouldn’t be the one “issue” for women in healthcare.  Nor should gay marriage, DADT or ENDA be the “gay issues.”  What happened to solidarity?  Though not directly marketed at us, it feels like this single-issue segmentation is just dangerous as selling products with pink ribbons on them.  Maybe even more dangerous because it comes from our own internal divisions, rather than a capitalist and consumer culture designed to appease and segment us.

I saw this shirt on a blog the other day, and it made me happy — such a simple way of speaking clearly for what we want: