Social Butterflies, Knowledge Bridges & Coalition

The Problem

Feminists have a long history of working badly across cultural and ethnic differences. Even merely political ones! This is a deadly impediment to creating a partnership society/Hyper-Lithic/matriarchy sort of future. If matriarchy is imagined as a monolith, as hegemon, as some kind of Sameness, we are historically dead in the water. 

I prefer to be very alive in the water, swimming in the flows of encounter and generation.

We have an instinct to get everyone on-side, all working on one thing, in one way, together. Makes sense. In the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries, we are socialized to think corporately far more than entrepreneurially. Yet, feminists everywhere are deeply under-resourced and almost universally othered/reviled. In the US, funding for national and international programs that benefited women have been cut completely. Over the decades a movement with global liberatory ambitions has been pressured into fractures and splinters focused locally, usually on a single threat or kind of damage to women (what we call women's ‘issues’), and usually on survival rather than reparation. There's good reason for this. The forces we are working against are vastly wealthy and historically entrenched. 

When I imagine globally cooperative, strategically coordinated feminist coalitions I do not picture that monolith, and I do not forget about the splinters or how they came to be. 

RadMatFem Solution/s

I think of Diplomats. Attachés. Translators. Teachers. Women who think in webs, portals, confluences – women who know a coupling of energies when they see one and amplify it into a whole tidal shift. We all know these women. Rather than burrowing down into one community or kind of feminist knowledge/practice, these women are generalists and travelers. 

They are “knowledge bridges” in a stigmergic system, the neurotransmitters. They are a kind of witch. The women who notice deeply, observe, listen, absorb. I'm not talking about a “skill set” but a temperament, a personality type than can be enhanced by skills.

RadMatFem does not intend another round of Western Feminists showing up to show women across the world ‘how to feminist’. Gaia knows many are doing magnificent work.

Instead of all on-side, stigmergic feminisms. Instead of The Matriarchy, many matriarchies. Instead of liberation, liberations. 

But connected, intertwined, mutually supporting, well-informed on each other's work, difficulties, wins, questions, solutions. On the conditions in which or against which we are working, the particular tactics of the local patriarchs, etc. 

Yes, there's loads of writing in academic journals about this. Decades of great post-colonial analysis and practice. Yes. And brava for it!! We would do well for more WIERD nation feminists to read up a bit, but also we need to get to work twenty years ago.