Hard Parts of Coalition x FiLiA2025 in Brighton
I say this because the critique of colonialism is ALSO a form of grief for the broken and bleeding bodies of women. If we cannot hear that in each other's vioces, we are lost.
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Most feminist coalitions in the US have collapsed. That's just facts. And coalitions between feminists and other political groups (as groups) also usually collapse. The latter because the other group smacks up against our goal of shifting male supremacy to sex egalitarianism and balks pretty hard. The former because women, like most humans, have a hard time holding more than one axis of oppression in their work.
Shifting off of male supremacy is clearly not a goal of 3rd wave/liberal/inclusive feminism. It’s also not even imaginable to reactionary/conservative/post-feminism (whatever the fuck those are besides compliance). No need to rehash that here.
Holding only one axis of oppression (or two) usually means, just sort of mechanically, that a feminism is going to limit its explanatory and interventionist power. It’s going to behave in ways that echo patriarchal patterns or are classist, racist, sexist, colonialist. It’s a fact. Patriarchy expresses itself in class, race, sex, and extraction, and ….
These are the same problem: some partial allegiance to the existing world that forbids us both solidarity and success. It's the problem that led to the second wave women leaving the New Left in the 1960s and that led (mostly) African-American women to split with white dominated organizations in the women's movement.
These were actual featured topics at FiLiA2025. Our fractiousness and how harmful it is was a big theme in my conversation with Pragna Patel in the run-up. So it was almost like a message direct from Her when all the mess kicked off. This moment is a test, and I don’t think passing it means tolerating women’s horizontal violence and policing, and I don’t think passing it means we all have to move together in harmony.
FiLiA2025 felt like a perfect symbol of the position of feminism/s now. Attacked by Bash Back and protested by TRAs at the beginning, and then infiltrated and sobotaged by far-right aligned women near the end – right down to getting physical with my friend Jane Clare Jones who was previously singled out by such women for a long campaign of abuse meant to silence her. Young women were, again, told they're doing feminism wrong. Young women of color were, again, told that many women in the Global North will not support the anti-colonialist elements of their work.
Some of you have learned nothing in the last 40 years and it shows.
Both TRAs and FR women looked at FiLiA's organizers, all exhausted and still rowing, and saw a target.
Some folks can’t and should not work together, ever. Medusa Rising will forever-never-ever work with women, NGOs, grassroots orgs, think tanks, political groups or parties that support authoritarian, colonialist, far right, xenophobic, genocidal, or ecologically destructive ideas, policies, or actions. Those are the methods of the very system that ends the lives of 5,000,000 women annually and irrevocably damages the lives of 100s of millions more.
MAGA. Likud. Hamas. Reform. Fidez. United Russia. Dominionism. Dark Enlightenment. All of these offer less than nothing to women while they demand our compliance, obedience, and servility.
But MAGA is not the US, Likud is not Israel, Hamas is not Palestine, Reform is not the UK, Dominionism and Islam and Zionist Judaism are NOT the whole of spiritual knowing or practice, and the Dark Enlightenment is just another colonizer we will probably have to fight hand to hand.
Women owe these ideologies and these men not one thing.
FiLiA tries to do a very hard thing. It tries to be a big-tent feminist conference. It does lots of absolutely essential work outside the conference and internationally. It’s not perfect, and it’s not always pretty, but it is necessary to our strength as a movement that we have a place to gather as exchange views and knowledge – not just reinforce our current condition.
When we do that over a problem-harm as intense as the depraved violence of Oct 10 and the obscene violence of Israel’s response (which is doubling as Netanyahu’s get-out-of-jail-free card), we all bring tremendous emotional energy to the conversation. Naturally. Especially those of us close to such a conflict.
Which is why it is fucking well incumbent on us to maintain our comportment, to leave room for each other, to stick to our feminist commitment to the both/and of complexity, and to never-ever-not-ever make any of these moves:
- Reframe an issue for sympathy and in its simplest least representative form: Rape Is Not Resistance
- Demand that all women make room for our politics and agree with us
- Make one group responsible for the politics of another group they work with on a shared issue that may benefit all kinds of women
- Go gunning for an organization or woman in acts of sabotage for careerist advantage or in service of some male dominated political project
This is erasure of our sisters. It’s cowardice. It’s lefty-bro and TRA behavior. It’s authoritarian. It’s its own mode of colonization. It’s single-issue, one axis thinking. It suuucks.
I bet most of the women who went at TWV’s team online were not ready for young women fully educated in their feminist lineage and down to brawl with confidence. I admired the way they practiced (unknowingly) one of the Gorgon’s maxims: We don’t pick fights, but we do win them.
Listen, in this historical moment, it’s All Against the Fash no matter what flag they fly.
I was more eager for FiliA this time than previously. I repped Medusa Rising, I met women I needed to meet and women I didn’t yet know I needed to meet. (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧ I feel like some very powerful flows are coming into sync now.
I will say to the Zionist women in Britain that you are, as TWV charged, completely out of step with the majority of the world’s feminists. Your parochialism, like that of most US feminist organizations, is both deeply limiting and terribly dangerous. Most of the world’s feminists have a deep political analysis and tungsten-level principles. They are radical in both their views of our problems and in their vision of our solutions. They lean far more anarchist and Marxist than do most women and feminists in the Global North because they live in the consequences of our nations’ rapacious, extractive, colonizing, capitalist and bottomless hunger for other people's resources and labor. When they speak, they are speaking from their lives.
None of these do, did, or would be willing to ally with Zionists, Reformers, or MAGA, or even run of the mill liberal capitalists. All of those ARE the problem. These, like the radfems and RadMatFems, would find the GC’s politically and functionally hopeless and debilitating. The “trans issue” is not the only issue, but it is the only issue that lets them ally with the likes of Nigel Farage and Charlie Kirk.
Total Woman Victory is doing us Global North feminists the most valuable service, For FREE. They are bringing us the voices, experience, and perspective of our feminist sisters from Everywhere Else. And we need this. We have been out of touch with each other for far, far, far too long. That disconnection has been both a plan and a happy second order effect of what we call ‘structural oppression.’
As I have argued from the beginning of this project, we need a smarter and more effective theory of coalition and a much deeper commitment to WOMEN among feminists in the Global North. As I said on Twitter this past week, working for women means using the world we have in a zigzag, in a swerve & weave kind of way so we avoid easy capture by men’s projects. Max Dashu has long argued that we need a revitalized AUTONOMOUS women’s liberation movement, and she is right about that. An OG feminist and historian of women’s deep time, her support of TWV and their goals should tell you all something.
And if you don’t like that something, please will you just fuuuck off and go do your work. Be amazing … somewhere else for the women you care for.
I don't say this becuase I do not grieve the rapes and massacre of Oct 10. My stomach dropped in terror when I saw the broken and bleeding bodies of women. I say this because the critique of colonialism is ALSO a form of grief for the broken and bleeding bodies of women. If we cannot hear that in each other's vioces, we are lost.
Like MAGA and Trump, reactionary feminists’ words and violence increase dramatically in amplitude but the interest chart is as flat as West Texas. Like Trump, so many of them are both scary and boring. I hope we stop letting them drain our energy, our anima.
The atrocities we see now in Gaza done to Palestinians by Israel or by Hamas to Israelis have been committed more than once by every single army of every single patriarchal nation ever to exist on this earth. We are all condemned in our patriarchal histories. And the Fight At The Feminist Disco, the fallout, the opportunistic sniper actions from far-right aligned women all show us that we have reached an exciting and revolutionary moment in women's liberation movement.
We see with perfect clarity now which women want to work across differences of race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, region For Women and which do not.
We see with perfect clarity now that there is a breathing future waiting for us if we have the pith, moxie, and discipline to create it.
Block, mute, forget. Give them nothing. Disengage from these internet spats, I say. They waste time and energy. They drain focus and effort. They only feed that beast whose maw chews our acumen and hope, swallows them in discord, and whose ass shits war.
We have visions. We know our assignment. Let us be about that.
A real, an effective, a robust global feminist and matriarchal coalition requires personal emotional maturity, containment that gives others space to be and grow as they will, and women from everywhere. A strategic intersectionality focuses on the intersections of ISSUES where different kinds of women can and should work together to deepen power and increase effect.
No one woman or group or organization can be deeply grounded in ALL FEMINIST LINEAGES or in the details of all local expressions of global patriarchy. We cannot live each other’s lived experience, but we can bring insights from these to the table. A true intersectionality of practice needs different women to come together for a big, Clear, ROBUST, AMBITIOUS GOAL.
Not for money. Not for fame. Not for ego and worship. Not for control over other women in the movement. Not for political sway. Not for power.
A goal. That we choose to serve, using our differences of experience and analysis as powers, as enhancements of the work toward the goal some group of women choose to take on. No one lineage will get us all free. But parts of all of them combined in sharp, responsive, and improvisational ways as we clear a way through to the other world we can all hear breathing in our dreams – that just might.
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