Hillary Clinton Feminist Analysis

Hillary Clinton is running a campaign for a GOP nomination, in which much of her support is based on her persona as an advocate of women’s rights. Depictions of Clinton’s projected image have little basis in fact. While she is not overtly misogynistic or racist like other politicians who are running for presidency, her actions as a policymaker have had the same devastating impacts to non-white women locally in America and abroad as her male peers. Though Clinton is one of the first women to run for presidency and be taken seriously (which certainly is to due to white privilege), she still condones foreign policies that destroy the lives of women around the world.
Hillary Clinton is allowed to occupy her platform as a feminist and amass enormous

support from women in America because liberal feminism has long accepted imperialism, capitalism, and racism as part of its identity. Many think that Clinton is in the process of breaking boundaries, when in reality she is not disassembling existing structures; she is providing a facelift to it. Clinton has successfully assimilated into patriarchy, though she does face unfair sexism and increased scrutiny, her views and policies are not promising for an increase in women’s rights. Clinton has supported further militarization of the Mexico border and deportation of undocumented immigrants, sending women and families back to lives of violence and poverty. Also, in 1975, Clinton defended men who sexually assaulted a 12 year old, employing the same “she was asking for it tropes” as conservatives do. She also served as a board member for Wal-Mart, who is notorious for the lack of payment and compensation their employees receive, most of whom are women. Clinton has supported the illegal invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, supports the expansion of Israel, and even lobbied congress to pass her husband’s incredibly racist crime bill, which led to mass incarceration, and has invested in many other individually economically and politically beneficial endeavors. Essentially, Clinton’s particular brand of corporate feminism has drastically affected the economic, political, and social stability of women and non-white people. Liberal feminism has produced a society in which women like Hillary Clinton, who are unabashedly anti immigration, pro-Israel and has a legacy of creating policies that have negative effects on women, are given more exposure and tribute than revolutionary women like Angela Davis or exiled women like Asaata Shakur. The former aspires to be one in the same as her male peers, while the others continuously critique the structure of not only patriarchy, but also white supremacy.
Liberal feminists support of Clinton is not only due to credulousness, but also reflects a narrowness of analysis, vision, and values.

In the U.S., feminism is understood as the rights of women (usually affluent white women) to share the spoils of capitalism, and imperial power. By refusing to fully confront the exclusions of non-whites, foreigners, and other marginalized groups from this vision, liberal feminists miss a crucial opportunity to create a more inclusive and more powerful movement. Feminist movements within the U.S. and internationally have long since accepted that, for them, feminism entails the communal confrontation of not only patriarchy, but capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and other forms of oppressions that combine together and reinforce their struggle. It means the fighting for the replacement of a system in which their rights are negated in the quest for corporate and political profit. It includes fighting so that all people anywhere on the gender, sexual, and body spectrum are allowed to enjoy basic rights like food, housing, healthcare, and control of their labor. This broader vision of feminism is present all over the world, like amongst the women of areas like Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, whose oppression is constantly evoked by Western political leaders to justify war and occupation. For example, Malala Yousafzai stated her support for socialism and criticized U.S. orchestrated drone attacks for killing civilians, displacing

families, and aiding Taliban induced violence, but her critiques of America’s use of drone warfare, and capitalism have gone virtually unmentioned in Western media. Along the same lines, The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan have made comments similar to Yousafzai, saying that U.S. backed groups as well as the U.S. occupation have resulted in the empowerment of Afghanistan’s most brutal gangs. U.S. politicians like Hillary Clinton would prefer to support illegal invasions to protect there interests that result in the devastation of millions of lives – women, men, children – then support an independent, pro-women’s rights government. This tradition of a far more inclusive form of feminism that does not profit off the victimization of non-white people has not been absent in the U.S.; Ida B. Wells and Sojourner Truth linked together their struggles for abolition and suffrage, where as leaders of the white suffrage movement, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton refused the inclusion of black women in their struggle for voting rights.
Imperial politics are dangerous, especially when employed under a feminist frame.

White women like Hillary Clinton, who have advantageously indoctrinated themselves into a mechanism of politics that entails the continued suffering of other women, especially non-white women become martyrs for their own brand of feminism, neglecting to analyze other forms of oppression that may affect women, like imperialism, classism, and race. It is no accident that non-white women, and women who live in regions that are or have been occupied by the U.S. around the world, and those who face mass political or economic repression in the U.S. are rarely given platforms to speak about their issues. The complex and multi-faceted struggles of non-white women go unheard, and for a reason too. To allow women who do not fit the Western liberal or corporate feminist model of womanhood a platform forces those who legitimize unjust wars and perpetuate racism through policies to confront their own prejudices, and the systematic brutality their nations enacts on various global societies, as well as within its borders. It is easy to claim and fabricate reasons as to why the war on drugs and terror are beneficial policies that will eventually help the greater good; it is another to examine what other types of oppressions exists that afflict the lives of otherized areas, especially the women in these areas. Western liberal feminism expects women to unanimously rejoice in the presidential election of

Hillary Clinton, while her administration carries out the same murderous policies on women around the world as her predecessors, and labels any legitimate criticism of Clinton as inherent egregious misogyny. The lives of non-white western women and those in the East and South are devalued, their struggles and independent resistance are infantilized, stripping these women of their agency by shamelessly declaring intervention as saving them. And non-white people, especially, women are often excluded. Hillary Clinton’s brand of feminism can be even more dangerous than traditional misogyny because of its deceptive nature and lack of culpability.