Time’s Up ? « LRB blog
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/01/16/sophie-smith/times-up
Reese Witherspoon announced that she ‘will now officially divide time like this: “Everything that happened before @Oprah speech : Everything that will happen after”.’ The workers she stood alongside might disagree. Monica Ramirez of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas pointed out that ‘Farmworker women … have a long history of combating workplace sexual violence.’
The problem with thinking in terms of breaks and moments is that it risks obscuring not just how tedious the work of politics can be, but also the mismatch between the occasional swiftness of democratic politics and the slow rate of structural change. On the whole – in the absence of war, revolution or crisis – socioeconomic shifts come incrementally. Oprah reminded her audience that Rosa Parks worked for the NAACP long before she kept her seat on the bus. That moment after which nothing could be the same was the result of slow-burning grassroots organisation.
History may not be the only thing at issue between these groups of women. The #Time’s_Up movement uses the language of radical left-wing politics. But it has yet to do radical left-wing politics. Whether or not this happens will determine whether Time’s Up’s invocations of ‘solidarity’ and ‘structural change’ represent something more than the mere co-option of leftist rhetoric. Talk of ‘exploitation’ is a case in point. Sexual exploitation is itself bound up with wider power differentials, not just between men and women, but between rich and poor.