Metapatterning, Grief, Brighton
This chasm can't be where feminists land after 50 years
I don't know right now. I'm in this experiential loop where I think I can do something or reach out somewhere or say something alchemical and inevitable enough. And then, ah, no. No, the ground needed for that is gone. Gone for good. Certianly in my well-couped US, and maybe about even my little feminist corner of the world. I'm meditating here. I'm wondering. Do any people, any politics, have the mettle to be principled and responsive to changing needs?
People are deported for wrongthink. People are fired for wrongthink. Kidnapped and deported for speaking Spanish, for reporting a sexual assault.
The words WOMAN and FEMALE cannot be used in government documents, on websites, in grants for all the world-changing research our universities no longer do. The ERASURE of us is running deep.
This puts me in grief. Feminists do not currently hold the power to shape the general public discourse or the policies of the world. Some celebrate the exclusion and persecution of trans and queer citizens even at the expense of all the work of our foremothers. This puts me in grief.
Because we have actionable responses to the world’s problems in our long decades of research, thought, and social experimentation. Grief.
And I’m still processing FiLiA2025. The disruptions there all come from grief, too. For the dead. For the living in terror and hunger. For the women destroyed by Hamas. For the long history of Canaan, of which Gaza was a city. Thousands of years of grief.
