Yearning & Negation | by Esmée Streachailt
Essay | What about feminist love, feminist schisms, and movement repair?
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Yeah, still thinking on that gorgeous conversation with Jocelyn at WLRN and feminist schisms. I am intuiting a new element of schism that hadn’t emerged for me before: yearning. RadMatFems, like other historically optimistic people (we who believe another world is possible), live in a near constant state of yearning and frustration. So, on the deeper meaning of the radical feminist NO.
We inheritors of the second wave are so damn sure our analysis is correct. We are sure because we’ve had to revisit and refine it and re-study X and Y issues again and again as official channels have concocted backlashes, patriarchal mutations, or skepticism about our data and the theories we use to organize it. We have honed this knowledge.
From this knowledge we yearn mightily for peace for women, for a way of life that is – ahhh it hurts to write it in this moment – more than just trying not to get hurt. To not have oil rain down and catch fire on the streets across Persia. This is our negation, our NO: no more of this gleeful geopolitical and so personal violence. Our NO, the feminist NO opens a conversation with the future. The patriarchal NO closes off the future mutations of a feminist world, it can even break history (as it is doing now).
We split with each other under the threat of the NO because we yearn so deeply for our human wholeness, for our natural state of creative and care-ful problem solving, the joy of creating better conditions for each other. The NO comes down and we sort squish around it, seeking a way forward, a way toward, a way to keep breathing. The pressure is so geological in scope that some of us squish over very far away from our roots and feminist mission. Without clear strategy, choices are made of necessity. Some muddy and confuse and get us all painted with the others’ brushes and constantly batting away the patriarchal hand that would paint us right out of historical relevance.
Which is our proper place: Massive Feminist Relevance.
Some of us whirl into eddies of “How can I make sure I am served in what we build? How can I be sure not to surrender into changes that mean my work and renown fall away?” It's protective, smacks of NGO industrial complex thinking: if we actually solve The Problem, then what? Some of us would rather keep this oceanic yearning in a state of churn than build the world that would soothe it.
I’m not even saying that's a conscious process, but unconsciousness and shadow-holing is not the business of radical, radical materialist, or matriarchal feminisms.
A better question is this, “What can I bring to making manifest what we yearn for?” This is a much less defensive question and prepares our energy for mingling and tactical imagination. It gets us just a wee bit closer to going out of business because women are finally safe from the alienation and predation of the Godlets (most recently the networks of ruling/Epstein class) whose world is built to enclose and extract from us.
We need, in other words, to become a credible threat in the name of our yearning.
We can't do that if we let the schismatic pressure win. We don’t have to do everything together and move on the same issues in the very same style all the time – predictability is the last quality we need in this tyrannical era! But we do have to get that coalitional moxy working. We do need to recognize the yearning in each other and query it for points of mutual need or power.
It’s funny because when WLRN invited me on, I thought we were going to talk about these schisms and ways to move beyond them because they’d sent me Thistle’s really lovely and I think analytically correct essay about feminists maybe not bullying and terrorizing each other for a change. I could feel the yearning in that essay. She said smart and wholehearted things about feminist love in that essay. Instead Jocelyn took our conversation on feminist love in another and really gorgeous direction.
We haven't talked of it much this last decade of fighting for women on two cultural fronts and a million geographic ones: this yearning, movement work, politics writ large, and about negation. We yearn for a more replete world. One where joy-love-care are not externalities to the business of life, but its purpose. One where women who love women are safe and welcome everywhere and unremarkable. One where women who love men are safe and fully alive in that love. One where negation serves its true purpose as a catapult to refreshed imagination and world making.
Where we have taken power lightly enough to destroy it, unbraiding its violence from our systems and forms to be replaced with agape as a civic virtue and structure. Where our prestige is reserved for skilled generosity and self-unfolding in conscious relation to the community and ecology. As a foundation of feminist love, agape holds the admiration of friendship over other sentiments. Friends don’t force each other to be the same, they delight in their differences and organic unfolding, their symbiosis. Could feminists offer this freedom, this flexibility, this lightness to each other?
Could we negate the dour aggression of the neo-patriarch, the vast weight of the fearful women who survive shaking and often not all with the lightness of our certainty that we are right about the Godlets, that we know better, and that when we bring our separate energies and magic into the work there is no stopping it or us? Could we? Could we honor the lost and fallen of our sisters with our vitality and unapologetic presence? But more, our demanding relevance?!
Could we honor our yearning with the negation of putting down the weight of the Godlet’s grids, algorithmic corrales, his outdated borders and his weirdly insistent death drive?
Esmée Streachailt is the founder/editor of Medusa Rising.
Songs for Breaking Up with Male Supremacy
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