Flow, Unfolding, Feminism is a project about the future |by Esmée Streachailt
We have to be willing to improvise, mess up, revise, and make world on the fly -- we're not building a buisness model we can product test, we're making world.
An introduction to an upcoming series on sisterhood/coalition, here I want to muse about holding things lightly in another way. And I know I'm doing this with heavy things: sisterhood, world building. That's the point.
The deeply paradoxical nature of reality is like that. The triple goddess of our ancestors is paradox: Death-Regeneration-Life, rinse and repeat. She is the Cosmic Both/And.
RadMatFems deserve the space to improvise, to fuck up, to revise, to keep moving through the mistake until a better way opens, to invent, to flow, to unfold, to fail even spectacularly.
We have a problem we can't get past. Feminisms of any serious kind are future-making projects. There's a point just this side of all our critique where we ask, or are asked:
So, what does a feminist world/matriarchy/gylanic systems look like? How does it work? How will people be there?
Here's one possible schema for describing this other-world compared to the one we are in.
Raine Eisler and her Center for Partnership Systems are deep in imagining this future.
And we have inklings, we have these big conceptual words, and examples of very small contemporary societies, but we can't say for sure what any of that will feel like and look like in reassuring detail. We can't just plop a Late Neolithic Gylanic society down on top of a Late-Capitalist Post-Modern Patriarchy and expect them to meld beautifully. I mean, I could get an AI to generate that village-metropolis scene, but ... We can't assure anyone. What we might aim to make (while never quite making it all the way) is a hybrid of these ancient and shiny paradigms. Like living into climate collapse, we sort of know, but we can't really say what kind of people will survive on earth in 100 years (if any).
See, just as we have to reach back into 'pre'-history, down into the layers of earth and into mythologies – what Mary Daly called the backround and what mythopoetics folks call the understory – to understand the complete human past, we also have to reach forward into fiction to conjure our more-human future. Hence, women's science fiction and it's necessity to our nourishing.
At some point, feminism and eco-survival are all about imagination and improvisation. This is Holding Lightly. Can't be already ready. We just have to take our skills, our solidarity, our learning and know that we can rely to them encounter the New.
Because something Ontologically New is what we need to make for women to survive, for a human world to persist. It's done, essentially, by intervening in the past and seeing what comes out of that interval of alchemy. To change law around men's violence, or prostitution, or regenerative farming, or corporate obligation, we reach into the past in texts and in the collective mind, and redirect that energy so that the future stops repeating that pattern.
I certainly don't mean stop reforestation or mutual aid networks or efforts to criminalize buying sex or increasing the carcereal price of sexual assault... No. Just, some of us might (also? rather?) articulate and begin to embody what comes after we establish the bare fucking minimum of women's dignity.
All people working to 'change the world' are doing this alchemical magic. It's not mechanical, it's not math, it's not marketing. It's not language police, othering, or the branding we call 'identity' these days. It's taking ahold of the threads of becoming and weaving new patterns but without any of the actual control of a weaver. [[Well, that's was a tired metaphor. But, you know.]]
The only way anyone has ever done this magic is to stop giving even a shit about what the Center of Power thinks, or wants, or even does. (Well, I mean, we do have to make sure they're not disappearing our friends and neighbors.) That's why I keep talking all this vaguery about 'building on the margins' and 'moving outward' and whatnot. Negotiating is already a losing position.
I'm not joking when I say a 1000 fold increase in the number community gardens could usher in deep change.
Other than a weather eye to know when they come for us, mabye we should stop working with reference to the larger patriarchal project's judgment or acceptance or even conditional agreement.
If it was not clear before, maybe now it is clear that Patriarchy, 1.0 and 2.0, are death drives, death eaters, and fundamentally hostile to life.
It cannot ever ever never accept us. Like any living historical construct, it will defend itself. And we shouldn't want to be part of it, outward is where life is manifesting.
It's hard to hold such a thing lightly. That is, however, the only way to work an energy as vast as time, reaching into the past to affect the future can only move through a portal, and we are portals. Women know the costs of bad social planning so intimately. We don't want to harm anyone – most feminism is a 'do no harm' kind of philosophy. People's ways of life and people's lives are at stake. But that's ALWAYS the case. Every social paradigm, policy, leader, they have always had people's lives and ways of living at stake. There's nothing to be done about it. We only have Earth Prime and the experiment is on-going all the time.
Want more of this kind of work, or want to dedicate this post in the name of an ancestor, sister, sister-friend, lover, daughter? Use Eopsin's Ward to have your dedication added here.
