All We Want Is Everything
How We Dismantle Male Supremacy
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- 125,00 kr
Publisher Description
From the award-winning author of a “battle-cry of a book” (The Guardian) Rage Becomes Her, comes a fearless and timely manifesto for identifying and rejecting male supremacy in our daily lives.
Drawing on her trademark skill, wit, clarity, and sharp insight, Soraya Chemaly walks us through how male supremacy operates, adapting dynamically in order to maintain cruel, exploitative systems of oppression.
Male supremacy, she asserts, isn’t primarily about men dominating women; but rather a system that first and foremost violently pits men against each other using women and marginalized communities as resources in their competition for power. Under this system, anyone who isn’t white, straight, CIS, and adhering to strict rules of traditional masculinity is considered inferior and rendered “other”—women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, immigrants, religious minorities, the disabled, and Black and Indigenous communities. Being feminized defines vulnerability, exploitability, and disposability.
There is no justice for any community until we confront this defining injustice. Most men don’t have to benefit from this system or feel powerful for this system to work, indeed only a relatively few do. While women, particularly those with multiple marginalized identities, are hurt the most, men, too, need liberation from this oppressive system.
All We Want Is Everything offers both unflinching analysis and genuine hope, informed by the bold and revolutionary potential of feminist imagination. From private relationships to global politics, Chemaly shows how naming and refusing male supremacy is essential to resisting the forces tearing democracy apart. This fresh, timely, clear-eyed, and necessary manifesto is a call to refuse supremacist identities, relationships, and values in order to build more just, healthy, and sustainable worlds for everyone.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this nimble account, activist and journalist Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her) pushes back on trad wives and other such trendy efforts to re-entrench traditional gender roles. The reestablishment of such roles "extend far beyond intimate relationships, influencing personal interactions in public," and thus endangers gains made in women's rights, she argues. Beginning with an analysis of the home that expands outwards into schools, work, medical care, politics, and culture, Chemaly presents a trenchant critique of both men's obliviousness about the privileges that masculinity confers ("Brothers and sisters can walk down a street together for years and have completely different experiences") as well as of male fragility, or men's negative emotional reaction to women's successes (she points to a statistic showing men's stress levels rise when women make more than 40% of a household's income). She argues that society's antifeminist backlash is firmly rooted in male emotionality, as men who haven't moved beyond heteronormative gender roles feel resentment over remaining "existentially tethered to women as extensions of themselves" in ways women are no longer tethered to them. Elsewhere, she accuses the right-wing promoters of "trad" culture of being duplicitous in their efforts to paint it as unrelated to broader political life (she highlights the growing crackdown on women's reproductive rights to emphasize the seriousness of the political moment). It's a potent rallying cry for a beleaguered feminist movement.
