Kajsa Ekis Ekman

In this episode, Swedish journalist, writer, and activist Kajsa Ekis Ekman reviews the history of the New Left since 1968, when the values of the oppressed class were highlighted, to today, when power has adopted the language of the oppressed, what she calls “patriarchy changing clothes” while using feminist language. Discussing the importance of class issues within feminism, Ekman highlights how corporate slogans of Zalando’s “celebrate diversity” campaign cost these corporations nothing, as they prefer posturing their purity without making any real material changes to how they treat their workers. Comparing this class paradigm to current gender politics, Ekman gives an exegesis of the word “woman”, which is currently being erased in many western nations, even prefixed with “cis”, such that the meaning of “woman” has been perverted into a privileged oppressor of men vanishing all possibilities of women to speak of themselves as an oppressed class. Ekman notes that the left relies on the discursive framework of “being oppressed” to speak within the university and within wider society, detailing the bizarre disconnect between workers’ unions, which have historically highlighted their labour grievances, and the “sex worker unions”, which are consistently underscoring “how great” their “profession” is, meanwhile it remains “the only industry that has to kidnap workers to survive.”