Renée Gerlich

Renée Gerlich is a writer and artist based in New Zealand who discusses her political activism around women’s rights and feminist politics today. Detailing the assimilation of the left by liberalism, Gerlich notes how liberal leftism is fundamentally a political vehicle of men who are not served by the right while underscoring how the rise of pornography is not coincidental to the neoliberal project of railroading of women’s voices and bodies. Gerlich notes the “land grab” by the neoliberal left which seeks to control women’s bodies through the medicalisation of gender by Big Pharma and the prostitution and pornography lobby and she criticises the ethos of “individual freedom” that disregards the lives of the collective. Describing internal hierarchies within feminism, she discusses her having been cast out of a feminist group and the changes that she underwent as a result. Gerlich explains how the essence of transgender ideology has taken root through the isolation and punishment of women utilising social censure and corporeal punishment while analysing how this “seed” has taken root within some feminist groups that punish certain women who are not interested in curating the feelings of men and contending that women need to assert their boundaries uncompromisingly.