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Coalition, Talent, Interval, FiLiA2025

Time to Accept Our Assingment

Esmée Streachailt

29 Sep 2025 — 6 min read

Stickering is feminist praxis

Coalition, Talent, Interval, FiLiA2025 | by Esmee

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Medusa Rising, embodied this time as me, is headed to the Euskal Herria (French Basque Country)to reconnect my own mamma with her people. And then we/I will be at FiLiA2025 (DM me on socials if you want to meet up).

(Fun Matricultural Fact: DNA studies have now shown that the Basque have been there since the Paleolithic. The reason their language isn’t connected to others is that it is an original language, untouched by the Yamnaya’s PIE, untouched by Latin. What did our Goddess Civilization ancestors sound like? Some of them sounded like the Basque! How fucking cool is that!!!)

This Gorgon’s Mission: connect with the women/groups who feel like natural partners in a ‘node of coherence’ in my Big Dream of a Vast Feminist Global Coalition connecting – not guiding, not setting agendas – us from the most harm-healing grassroots to the most international feminist think tanks. Because it is time, cousins.

The way we conceive and work to enact feminist coalition at Medusa Rising follows Luce Irigaray’s concept of ‘the interval’. And at this scale, that interval enables collective autonomy, strategic intersectionality. What am I saying?

As I said in a very early post, the interval is a physical, subjective, and moral/spiritual space between any two conscious creatures as well as between any creature and the ecosphere (more on this in other posts). In any relationship or interaction, the first moral duty is to respect the interval, to connect through it, never to close it down. When two creatures/subjects interact through their interval, they each remain whole and sovereign, put action and energy into the space between them, and THAT, that becomes a kind of generative and alchemical mutual enlivening that unfolds organically.

All abuse, violence, domination, colonization, … these are all shades of murder because they are all actions that collapse the interval and force the other to surrender their life/life-energy/being to the perpetrator.

This is the reasoning behind MR’s total uninterest in middle grounds and precious little use of project tracking. Between creatures, the middle ground will always wind up being controlled and to the advantage of the stronger one.

We seek no middle ground with patriarchy. We ask no compromise of women or our coalition partners.

It is only in our wholeness and differences that we can lend to the power of a RadMatFem/Matricultural/feminist future world. It is in the synergy, in the alchemy of our agendas, views, needs, powers, insights, identities, traditions, histories that we can make a new way and world.

So the women of Medusa Rising are nothing like each other except in our commitment to women and our desire for real world change that makes women freer, safer, healthier, and more whole. We all came to our feminism along unlike routes, we come from a range of cultural and ethnic lineages, and we bring wildly different techne, nous, eros, and telos to this work (skills, knowledge, desire, goals). Nevermind our relative degrees of intro/extroversion, preferred paces of work, what trauma we carry, and our personalities. It’s one for all and all for one around here. As our founder, I plan to keep it that way.

This is maybe unusual or unexpected when people look at my avatar, my own face, or my name. It’s all very … ‘white’. And I grew up in the US Midwest, upper middle-class, etc etc. My family tree is mostly landed gentry and actual royalty back in the Old World. My earliest US ancestors on both sides were plantation owners in Virginia, this is the late 1600s. My history is the whole colonial history of this country. There is a cold spring in western Texas – out in the Commanche/Jumano/Lipan Apache ranges that my people flat stole from those peoples and anyone else who might need a good place to rest while traveling or migrating through all that hot, low desert. The first building there, and it’s still there, was a defensive tower. My families fought on both sides of the Civil War. I’m a GenXer. I should be a pretty annoying “Karen”– except that a Karen (it’s sooo sexist) is a very patriarchal kind of woman and I … am not.

In my own life I was a stranger everywhere at least a little bit. In the Midwest of the 1970s and ‘80s I had a Texan father and a French immigrant mother. Our neighbors were taken back at the level of garlic, onion, and heat in our food. My accent was really weird when I first started school. On my dad’s side I’m an 11th generation USian, but on my mom’s side I’m second-generation. That is only the very surface of what made me ‘this much’ just other enough to sense what being outside and suspect could feel like. I have a glimpse of what the cold glare of other feels like. Just a glimpse, but I have a talent for metaphor and imagination, so I can pretty imagine that people who are not like me also need to be allowed to be themselves in their fullness – which is my applied theory of social justice. Much more punk-grunge than mean girl.

So, back to that interval. What Irigaray is describing is the respect and care and privacy that people offer each other in healthy, ethically grounded relations. The privacy is important, it’s the source of our self-ness, the way we are on the inside. One of the most disturbing and damaging elements of domination/colonization that the other is not allowed this privacy, this inner life. The other must be transparent – and you can see how all domination structures shoot themselves in the foot from the first. You can see how the cruelty justifies itself, trying to get that far inside of people. The interval, rather, is the spacetime where we can offer and we can dance and unfold while everyone involved still has their own boundary as well as intervals with others.

Something like this is how I imagine the coalitions I want for feminists to function. When I’ve written about strategic intersectionality, about combining forces where our goals and interests overlap (and not interfering where they don’t), I’ve been thinking in these Irigarayan terms. Thinking a little bit like an outsider even as on the outside I read for an insider. I want us to make a kind of dancing and leaping, totally committed and unpredictable global feminist web of coalitions – from the think tanks to the crisis shelters – that Patriarchy/Capital/Fascism can’t grasp and squash.

I have no idea exactly how to do that other than doing the next right thing and following the trails of chime and groove until … we win. I’m a poet and philosopher by training. An activist and organizer by accident, really, and therefore always as much a student as a leader. You can tell I’m learning-in-public how to produce podcasts and run social media. You can tell that ‘fuck it - good enough’ is becoming my mantra.

I just know it’s time. The center is falling in on itself. There’s a way out. It’s not waiting for us to notice it. Arche-Mamma gave us our assignment: Make the Way Out.

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