We have found that, in every one of our campaigns, at some point, somebody will present us with the line of deservingness.
Level Up believes in a world where people of all genders are loved and liberated from bodily and systemic violence. We believe that bodily autonomy and reproductive justice are at the heart of building this world.
This is why we’re demanding an end to imprisonment for pregnant women. It’s why we’re demanding corporations stop selling hair products that are giving Black women breast and uterine cancer. It’s why we’re calling for abortion to be decriminalised and for the Premier League to abolish the culture of sexual violence in football. We make these interventions because we believe, if we can achieve them, it will bring us all closer to a more living, liberated world.
Level Up is strategic and ambitious in our demands because we won’t sell short our collective liberation. Ours is a politics of solidarity: a commitment to stand for what is right, not what is easy, comfortable, or convenient. It is grounded in the knowledge that in the words of Maya Angelou: “no one of us can be free until everybody is free”.
In principle, this is something that most people – most feminists – will say they proudly support. But we have found that, in every one of our campaigns, at some point, somebody will present us with the line of deservingness.
Deservingness
The line of deservingness is present in almost every feminist ‘issue’. It’s where people appear to find their support for our demands capped by whether they assess an individual or group (either real, or hypothetical) as worthy or deserving of the dignity, compassion and justice that is, in fact, an inherent part of being human.
When we say “end imprisonment for pregnant women”, we’re met with: “but what about women who commit violent crimes?”
When we say: “decriminalise abortion”, we’re met with: “but what about women who are over the 24-week legal limit?”
In every campaign, somewhere, there is always a hypothetical woman, just off to the left, who will be discounted from dignity, compassion and justice on the basis of either her identity or her actions. In discounting her, we justify the system’s existence.
As feminists committed to liberation, we refuse to abandon her – whether she is hypothetical or real. We keep our sights fixed on the systems. It is not always easy, or comfortable – but it’s not meant to be. And when we look more closely at the lives and contexts of actual women who have committed violent crimes, and women who are desperately seeking late-term abortions, you will almost always find that they have been horribly failed by the systems and people who were meant to keep them safe in the first place. Their needs are much, much greater than their deeds.
To concede to respectability is to throw some women under the bus in favour of others. In the long-term, we all lose, because the logic of the system – and the forces that divide us, and diminish our collective power – remain in place.
Liberation starts in the mind
The last 14 years of Conservative government austerity have caused many feminists to internalise an austerity of imagination; of wanting to secure “quick win” reforms to a hostile system where asking for anything more is deemed “unrealistic”, or “unpragmatic” or “impossible”. In doing so, we push liberation further and further into the distance.
Our liberation begins with liberating our minds, dreams and solidarity from tried-and-tested division tactics and tired respectability politics. And that starts with doing away with the line of deservingness.
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