Can We Put a Movement Back Together? | by Esmée Streachailt
Bonus | Letter from a reader & reminder of the scope of this project
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Letter from a Reader and to Our Readers
Epstein is bringing #MeToo back into consciousness which is bringing back another round of White Women Really Fucked Up the Racial Semiotics There, Huh? And, sisters, if we keep doing this we’re done, cooked, over forever. Like, they will push us all out of public life and into a dangerous dependency on the worst men. This Epstein-Class-Far-Right-Tech-Bro-Takeover is much too entwined for any of us to pretend that any part of it is friendly to our causes. Epstein and Maxwell running around 4Chan and Reddit, shit talking #MeToo, promoting QAnon... Like.
Esmée Streachailt
On this Oligarchic Cadre from 2025 in 5 Parts
So, it’s right on kismet time that I got an email the other day from a reader who permitted me to share this conversation as long as I didn’t quote her, so I’m paraphrasing. Her concerns are still with us, and I thought that responding to one woman might land well for many of us. She’s coming from a place I’ve heard many of us cry out from lately. She's not specific about her experience, but she starts by saying she wants to know what I would say to someone like her given that I’ve done some public thinking about feminist solidarity.
(ES) Hi Sister. Well, I have to start with thank you for this trust, and for the compliment of it.
(Sister) She references Jane Clare Jones’s history of feminist thought course and how there Jane talked about some big divisions among women: having children or not, having a high status job or not, loving men or not. These differences have been a source of division, even suspicion among feminists and they're just choices about how feminists live their lives, not a necessary political opposition.
Yes, they are debates over best strategies for breaking patriarchy and who owes whom solidarity and what it should look like. They do tend to become more personal or identitarian very quickly. And, these are more recent kinds of ‘divisions.’ The old ones still hold, race, class, sexuality. Some of the childless women are lesbians who often feel less solidarity from heterosexual women than they would like, etc. For all that, I’m not sure any oppositions are “necessary.” Some are sticky or stubborn or wicked, but not necessary.
But none of that was really the issue for this sister. The problem was, again, the speaker at FiLiA’s opening who not only chanted “free, free Palestine” and claimed that it’s not possible to be feminist without supporting Palestine.
Ah, I see. I was at FiliA too. The presenter was asked not to do that, from what I hear. I think FiLiA leadership simply had no idea how much energy you have to focus on differences of this intensity inside a ‘big tent’ feminism. I was shocked at the treatment women gave each other, both ways.
One of the things most feminists have to confront is that we have never had much of a theory of geo-politics, so those issues are very, very hard for us to handle in any methodical way. And we have no power at all. None. We might fight each other over this, we might name-call, blame, even threaten and harass – and the metrics in the world and Israel and Gaza will not budge. We have no influence at that scale. At much of any scale really.
We could do better for each other if we remember that. You, me, WDI, TWV, the positions we take, the emotional investments we have literally mean not a thing to the larger world. How many of us have been kicked off socials or shadowbanned? How many of us have been hounded in the name of siding with this or that project of male domination? We would do ourselves a service to accept that and turn to face each other and figure out how to build some power together so that when we do speak out it matters.
The alienation feminists feel is deep, and then for a woman in diaspora facing white supremacy and its anit-semetism, it's even deeper. There’s so much in us, in each other, that needs healing and grounding.
Our sister then tells me the stakes for her are high. That while she’s not threatening other women’s wellbeing, some are threatening hers, especially emotionally.
How so? I want you to do what you need for yourself. I don’t know if you mean that you would unsubscribe from MR, but needs must. You are the best judge of your peace. I just don’t know who has threatened you or how. By wanting the ethnic cleansing of Gaza to end? Or by threatening you directly? I’m missing some context here. I’m sorry, though. There is so much pressing on all of us that the ‘one thing too many’ inside of feminist community can come from anything, I can see how this could be it for you.
Not for the first time, I then witness a feminist talk about pulling away from the whole movement, from all of the work. There’s no site of collective action where she would feel supported/welcome since most of them are captured by gender identity ideology or by pro-Hamas sentiments, or by the far-right. Maybe withdrawal is her only option, she laments.
Or there's group of actual radical feminists with some historical and global perspective. ;) Unfortunately, we can only learn who can stand with us by working with individual feminists and groups over time. All relation is a risk. I hope to find ways to take even this difference between women and turn it into an energy for building. Women in diaspora have issues in common, after all.
Esmée Streachailt
On Relationality, on the Space Between Us & Its Generative Quality
And the leaders we’re dealing with? In the US, in Israel, in Gaza, Iran, Russia, …. They're all extremists, nationalists, zealots, brutal strongmen, and most of them are criminals trying to stay in office (or in hiding) so they don’t go to prison. Like, these are all ailing nations even for patriarchy, and they need to be repaired.
The world needs repair. This is one of the values of the Jewish tradition I most admire. Tikkun olam – to repair the world that shattered once. I see my feminism in that light, but the repair means a different world comes to be.
What to do, she asks, if the only solidarity she trusts is her personal circle? How can she avoid being part of the problem (which I take to be schism) but still contribute to the solution?
Well, just don’t go around with the christofash and the nationalists, Ok? But, like, really, maybe you can’t be part of solution-making in this way. Maybe that's not your role, not the role that suits you really. But let’s ask some questions, OK?
Beyond this issue, what feminist issues call to you? What harm comes to women and/or girls through male domination that matters so much to you that you could work on that with a woman who supports the people of Gaza (not Hamas)? If there’s nothing, then OK. Maybe you’re more committed to one cause than the cause of women. OK. Then be of feminist use to the women connected to that cause. Israel and Jewish culture are not without their misogynies. But if there is such an issue that would transcend this one, go work on it, and work on it in a way that lets it be disconnected from the catastrophe.
That catastrophe is not going anywhere, not for a long time. Both this specific one and the general catastrophe that is the world male domination creates. Schism is their tool. One we use against ourselves. That is how men benefit. Their lines and messes divide us and then we don’t all join together to solve hunger or sexual violence because we might get cross over one of the million sins of patriarchy that marks of us one way and others another way. And so we, feminists, stay weak and ineffective and women, including us, keep suffering.
We may have to be a little bit more pragmatic than we’re happy with in order to connect enough across differences to build any power to have any effect that really matters for women. Compartmentalize a little so that our intersections with other kinds of women can flourish. And if someone is cruel or antisemitic to you – tell them off and leave that group. That may not mean that you have leave all feminist movement.
But I don’t know you well though to know, really, how to advise you. All I can give is my sense of how this awfulness might be less awful. No matter what I say, I’m still talking in abstractions. You are the woman living this experience.
Here our sister tells me that she mostly agrees with my previous assessments that division among women serves men’s interests, that she can compartmentalize some choices other women make that run counter to her values. She wishes that more women could look first to female solidarity than focus on the victims on one or other side of a fence.
I would like that view to be more common as well. And I would like to focus on the living women in Gaza and Israel even more so. The harmed and the dead have become symbols brandished at each other to say “See, you did this,” or “See, you do not care about this enough.” What a dishonor to the dead and the ways they have been harmed and killed.
We’re all living in the grief of this. That's also part of the heat here is that women on both sides (of so many issues) are ignoring each other’s grief. We can’t seem to mourn, so we stay in the anger, in the could have been….. Maybe we should just mourn together, like really hard and deep and then see what comes of that.
Part of what is driving that blame cycle is that both Jews and Palestinians/Muslims in diaspora feel (and are) on the sharp end of a lot of suspicion, hate, and violence mostly from the same Anglo-white assholes. Both groups, out here in the wider world, feel like their safety is always on the line. Because it is. Many temples and mosques in the US have been defaced in recent years, again, the attacks in New Zealand over these years. Whole communities of Muslims are under direct attack by the Trump regime, the Muslim Rohingya have been ethnically cleansed from Myanmar, and so on and more still. The far right is always anti-semetic at heart no matter what pro-Israel noises it makes.
Like, there is no space in the world for either group to get their breath. That could be a point of connection, that problem. But to get it to be a connection, we have to stop wanting to resolve it or win, or whatever, in the forms patriarchy gives us, because then we’re just trying to lessen how much of patriarchy’s catastrophe lands on us. If we accept that we are in a competition (out here) for the right to exist, we’re incapable of building a feminist world. And they win.
But then our sister notes that just “one side” of this issue seems willing to take the broader perspective.
I’m going to have to stop you there. At FiLiA a number of Jewish and other women went after the young women of TWV in the lobby, and one of those young women was badly hurt at the disco. A whole group of more conservative US feminists broke off to have an off-campus event focused solely on the Israeli victims. "Rape is not resistance." Well, no kidding. No dialogue, just blame and distance. So, I want us to be very specific about actors and who’s on a side and who’s being tolerant. Everyone I saw misbehave and taunt other women and everyone I heard of at FiLiA that did – all have some sitting with themselves to do.
This sister points out that feminists don’t hang the flag of Israel from windows, they don’t shout “Am Ysrael Chai!” Our sister hasn’t observed non-Jews wearing kippahs in solidarity, but they do see feminists wear the kheffiya. The gestures of tolerance feel very one-sided to her.
You’re totally right. I don’t see that anywhere in the US on social media or in public. I don’t know how most Jews feel about others wearing their symbols, but the kheffiya has become much more of a political symbol, and was never a religious one. Diaspora Palestinians have actively encouraged its adoption by others. I think even Israel’s gentile supporters would not wear the star or the kippah in daily life out of respect and without permission. Is there a loud voice giving that permission? I can’t see and hear everything. Maybe that message needs amplification.
And this is where men’s wars and men’s history get involved. It is a deep misfortune of history of that the modern state of Israel was created by an imperial style fiat of European powers on land where other people were living. The bloodlines of the Palestinians in Gaza go back to the Bronze Age, too, they were the Cannanites. And people everywhere have only grown more reactionary since 9-11.
So it’s been a running catastrophe. The one time both sides got close to a workable peace deal, something close to two states, radicals in Israel assassinated their prime minister. So it’s the most insanely complicated legacy of WW2 and the Holocaust, and it’s mixed into anti-imperialist politics therefore.
Jews have been underdogs for 1000 years, longer. I think a little of the pro-Palestinian sentiment is an underdog-reflex among social justice types because we all feel (and many are) underdogs. But in the modern era, after the war, all of the colonized peoples of the world have been wanting out from under the power and influence of Western colonizers. Gaza has become part of that wider movement, and in the last decade has become too much of its only symbol. But they are the underdogs here, their only friends are rogue and terrorist states.
Which is terrible for them and deadly terrible for Israelis. But, right now, perception is that Israel is powerful, backed by western powers, and that Gaza is the underdog. Now that most of Gaza has been leveled and people are dying of hunger and cold with no permission for aid to come in, that perception is fact.
What is feminists' role in this, our place in this? I don’t think it’s to merely tolerate each other. I think, for us out here, it is to forget completely that the women in that region live on two sides of a wall and take whatever position and action means the women there get to live in safety and dignity. The Board of Peace sure as hell is not going to take that position.
To that end, in my spaces, in Medusa Rising, in the Discord server we’re building, we won’t tolerate women coming at each other over anything. We’re here to think and dream bigger than that. To parse and find the strengths among positions not to choose one of them, but to build another stronger position than either of them. Medusa Rising is anti-imperial, but it’s not anti-Israeli-women. All women live under the threat of a pogrom like Hamas ran on Oct 7. Anywhere, and often in many places, men just get a band together and go hunting. India has a massive problem with “rape gangs” now. American fraternities on school campuses have long been rape clubs. It’s just appalling. These trends travel…
This is hard. A problem is coming for Israel as the US is weakened by our current regime. As we lose power and allies, so will Israel. I am terrified of this for those people and for Jews of the diaspora. As the US weakens, nationalists here are going to get agitated, again, and look for scapegoats, again. Like, we all do well if we prepare for that.
Esmée Streachailt
The fuzzy boundary between Them - In 5 Parts
But I would have Medusa Rising, as I would personally, side with a Jewish woman under attack on the socials, and with a Palestinian woman – right up until she threw an insult or threat herself. The RadMatFem problem is not the never-ending conflict. Our problem is women using it against each other. We have to remember that there are Israeli women who celebrate the deaths of Palestinian children, who cheer the expulsion of farmers in the West Bank. We have to remember that there are longstanding peace projects lead by inter-religious feminist groups in the region. There just is not one good and one bad side.
We all have to earn trust and give grace in this work. You and me, too.
With warmth and sisterhood
Esmée
I wonder, sisters, cousins, what you think about the problem of feminist schisms, how you approach solidarity with feminists whose commitments differ from yours. It will take all of us to think and enact this solidarity strategy together.
Esmée Streachailt is the founder & editor of Medusa Rising.
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