Sisterhood / Coalition |by Esmée Streachailt
Let's take the pressure off!!!
I'm thinking about the power in holding a thing lightly.
I'm thinking about how women come to this movement and what we seek from it, and how we get in our own way.
I have a really hard time getting out of my own way because I make (everything) that I want to do into A Very Big Deal. It's So Important! It Must Be Perfect! Liberation Or Death! Meditation Equals Mystical Revelation Or I'm Doing It Wrong! Ideas Must Be Expressed In Their Final Form!
I pysch myself out.
That's what I want to leave behind in 2024. And I wonder if feminists can do that with the intensity of our concept of sisterhood. (I'm not alone in this wondering.)
By which I mean a whole bunch of things that are not totally clear to me yet. Let me try to focus on just one of them here.
Feminists feel like strangers in our own world because we are. Just by coming into feminist consciousness we evolve into a self that is a little more alienated from 'normal and accepted' kinds of womanhood. We become harder to parse to our social set and, for a little while, to ourselves too. We call this feeling Loneliness.
Many of us also feel like strangers, alienated, because we have been made alien by the harms men do to us. Many of us have experienced abuse and violence directly, often on top of other harms that come on us as racialization, xenophobia, lesbophobia, chronomisia, and the long slow grind of neoliberal disregard for the humanity of working-class women everywhere.
So, lots of feminists are walking wounded. We find this lineage of ideas, maybe we find community among feminists, and we Need That Support and Sweetness So Badly that we can ask too much of it.
I'm being a little vague here because this happens in so many ways that it's worth a book.
I want to suggest that we re-imagine sisterhood lightly. Scale down our demands of each other and scale up our demands of the systems that harm us. Maybe the sisterhood isn't global — it might not even be regional. Maybe sisterhood serves us better as something we do with small cohorts: the women in your organization, your feminist friend circle, your reading group? Sisterhood might less be a politics and more a support network, a balm against the stochastic terrorism that is a patriarchal society.
The metaphor carries such intimacy, such unconditional trust, such expectation that so much does not need saying... And I think in feminist work quite a lot needs raising all the way up to consciousness for discussion and integration. We need to respect our shadow, our own internalized misogyny/racism/xenophobia and our own personal traumas because these affect our work and community as feminists as much as they do any other part of our lives.
What if we hold sisterhood a little more lightly? Reserve that energy, that intimate support and deep process for women we are very close to where we can do this deeper work? What if everything else is solidarity, coalition?
I know, these words don't have the ring of myth about them. I think that's a kind of power, though. Solidarity is the belief that everyone deserves as much freedom as I do, (see the necessary book On Freedom by Timothy Snyder, also an audio book). Coalition is the practice of solidarity. It's issue focused, often very focused, and lasts as long as necessary. Coalitions are flexible and deliberate in a way that might serve us better.
The way I've seen it play out, sisterhood's intimacy gets tangled up in identities, in identification, and that sameness — that conformity and compliance — implied by identity is good for neither intimacy nor for work among women who come from so many kinds of difference as women do and whose stated goals is epochal levels of change.
We might be putting too much pressure on ourselves, each other, and the process of this movement, and getting in our own way. There is so much pressing on us, so much drive to be perfect in order to even be recognized in this patriarchal world. Our alliances, our work, our own personal becoming deserve more tenderness, more care, more learning in public, more humility, more forgiveness, more understanding that feminism, women, and living in human bodyselves is just messy.
And mess is not always dangerous. Often it's where the deepest creative and inventive work takes root.
How are y'all thinking about all this??
This is the first of five posts.
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