Feminisms in Motion: Voices for Justice, Liberation, and Transformation

by Jessica Hoffmann (Editor), Daria Yudacufski (Editor), Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Contribution by), adrienne maree brown (Contribution by), Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Contribution by)

Overview

In recent years, feminism has been at the forefront of social criticism in the United States, but the mainstream face of feminism is still typically white and often focused on gender issues to the exclusion of race, class, and almost everything else. Meanwhile, there are long and rich traditions of women-of-color-centered feminisms that acknowledge all systems of power as connected, and recognize how ending one form of violence entails the transformation of society on multiple fronts.

From 2007 to 2017, a small, Los Angeles-based independent magazine called make/shift published some of the most inspiring feminist voices of the decade, articulating ideas from the grassroots and amplifying feminist voices on immigration, state violence, climate change, and other issues.

Feminisms in Motion offers highlights from 10 years of make/shift magazine, providing a wide-ranging look at contemporary intersectional feminist thought and action.

We are living in a moment of mounting racist violence, xenophobia, income inequality, climate displacement, and war. Intersectional feminism has been creating and pointing toward solutions to these problems for generations. Feminisms in Motion offers ideas, critique, and inspiration from diverse feminists from Los Angles, to India, to Palestine, who are pointing toward a world where all people can thrive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781849353342
Publisher:	AK PR INC
Publication date:	10/16/2018
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jessica Hoffmann is a writer, editor, and museum administrator. Utne named her one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” Her writing has appeared in Bitch, ColorLines, SFAQ, and the anthology We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists, among others. She has spoken and presented workshops on intersectional feminism across the U.S. and Europe.

Daria Yudacufski is the executive director of Visions and Voices: The Arts and Humanities Initiative at USC. She was formerly the director of the Cross Cultural Centers at CSULA and the programming director of the MultiCultural Center and Women’s Center at UCSB. She has spoken about feminism at numerous universities, and in media outlets including Ms., Feministing, and the book Feminist Media: Participatory Spaces, Networks, and Cultural Citizenship.

Read an Excerpt

We edited and published make/shift, a biannual independent magazine of community-based, intersectional feminist art and action, from 2007 to 2017. We mailed out the twentieth and final issue in the summer of a year that felt like a watershed moment for feminism in the U.S. mainstream. It was a year that started with enormous Women’s Marches and closed with a social-media outpouring of truths about sexual violence that knocked powerful abusers from their pedestals one after another. A sliver of a 1968 poem by Muriel Rukeyser was being quoted all over: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” Rukeyser asked. She quickly answered, “The world would split open.”

In some ways it does feel like the world is splitting open. But it also feels entirely unsurprising. Even if we weren’t editors of a feminist magazine who have had the repeated experience of finding that the majority of submissions to each issue were about sexual violence, we are women in this world. We know pervasive sexual violence is the truth because it is and because we do not have the privilege of rationalizing or denying it. (In other words, and of course, #ustoo.)

And: that Rukeyser poem is actually about a different kind of war. It’s called “Käthe Kollwitz,” and it’s about an artist and the World Wars she lived through, and economic inequality, and the gendered experience of these, and motherhood, and art, and yes the body (simultaneously individual and social), too.

But what can that mean, “one woman”? We know #metoo, the social-media hashtag that is threading together stories of sexual violence, is true because we are women in this world, but the second we think that, we hear Sojourner Truth asking “Ain’t I a Woman?” at a women’s rights convention in 1851, insisting on the inextricableness of gender and race in her identity—and arguing for the linking of nineteenth-century struggles for women’s rights and for the abolition of slavery. We hear the Black feminist group the Combahee River Collective saying, in 1977, “we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.” We hear Kimberlé Crenshaw synthesizing these ideas—ideas born from lives—in the term “intersectionality” in the 1980s. And we hear queer feminism asking what this word “woman” means, while knowing that if violence against women were taken seriously, at large, addressing it would mitigate other violences (as Courtney Desiree Morris argues in her widely shared 2010 essay originally published in make/shift, “Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements”). By now we’ve all read the stories about how many of the men behind recent mass shootings have a history as domestic abusers. We know violences, and the systems of power they enforce, are connected.

It is true, this idea that if one woman told the truth about her life, the world would split open, and it is an idea ripe for questioning, challenging, expanding, refracting. To keep pushing at it: what should we make of a split, or several? Is the world already split open along multiple seams? What do these splits feel like? What do they do? What could they do? What would it take for the world to heal?

The Combahee River Collective, again in their 1977 statement, suggested an answer: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”

There are multiple feminisms, and we think the most promising of them keep asking questions, keep feeling the truths of interconnectedness, keep pushing to get at the roots, to expand the field of what to care about (everything) and what is possible. In a world structured on hierarchies enforced by violence by way of disconnection, we believe intersectional feminism offers the best views, and examples, of ways of living based on the reality of interdependence, ways that would allow everyone to thrive.

Table of Contents

Foreword by TK

Introduction by Jessica Hoffmann and Daria Yudacufski

“Without You Who Understand: Letters from Radical Womyn of Color” by Lisa Factora-Borchers, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Lailan Huen

“‘Love’ Is on Everyone’s Lips: A Roundtable of Women of Color Organizing in Detroit” facilitated by Adela Nieves, featuring Oya Amakisi, Grace Lee Boggs, adrienne maree brown, and Jenny Lee

“River” by Jessica Trimbath

“Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements” by Courtney Desiree Morris

“Pieces of Us: The Telling of Our Transformation” by the Azolla Story (Stacey Milbern, Mia Mingus, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha)

“The Power We Have: Things that Worked in Transformative Justice this Past Year” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

“Everyday Actions” by Sharon Hoshida

“What’s Pink Got to Do with It?” by Christine E. Petit

“How That Poetry Is Also About Us” by Heather Bowlan

“This Might Be the First Time” by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

“Bring the Troops Home? On Family Violence, Economic Fear, and War” by Jessi Lee Jackson

“Queers Demand an End to Militarism” by Roan Boucher

“Bathing Beneath the Lebanese Sky” by Stephanie Abraham

“Immigration at the Front: Challenging the ‘Every Woman’ Myth in Online Media” by brownfemipower

“On Prisons, Borders, Safety, and Privilege: An Open Letter to White Feminists” by Jessica Hoffmann

“Arrestable” by Ching-In Chen

“Learning to Say ‘Fuck You’: An Interview with Ida McCray” by Iris Brilliant

“Not Alternative: An Interview with Trifa Shakely” by Adela Nieves

“Sparking Difficult Dialogues”: Sam Feder and Dean Spade on Trans Documentaries

“Three Essays on Art, Academia, and Economics” by Jessica Lawless

“Debt” by Javon Johnson

“Dear Nomy” by Nomy Lamm

“Trashing Neoliberalism” by Yasmin Nair

“Community Reparations Now: Roan Boucher and Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia Talk Revolutionary Giving, Class, Privilege, and More”

“On Not Being Virginia Woolf” by Jennifer New

“Mamahood” by Randa Jarrar

“In the Kitchens of the Metropolis: An Interview with Silvia Federici” by Raia Small

“Toward New Visions of Sex and Culture Entirely” by Conner Habib

“Looking for Reproductive Justice: An Interview with Loretta Ross” by Celina R. de León

“Misdiagnosis: Reproductive Health and Our Environment” by Mariana Ruiz Firmat

“Decolonize Your Diet: An Interview with Luz Calvo” by Adela Nieves

“Some Monologues on Happiness: Performed by my friends, extemporaneously, as I performed oral sex on them” by T Clutch Fleischmann

“Where We are Not Known: Queer Imagination and the Photography of Kirstyn Russell” by Adrienne Skye Roberts

“The Attack on Attachment: Why Love Is the Loser in the So-Called Mommy Wars” by Andrea Richards

“M/Other Ourselves: A Black Feminist Genealogy or The Queer Thing” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

“Bringing Down” by Jen Benka

“A Race for the Ages/The Blink of an Eye” by Erin Aubry Kaplan

“Social Change through Failure: An Interview with Chris Vargas and Eric Stanley” by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

“Vulnerable and Strong: Manshi Asher on Women Resisting the Growth Paradigm in India” by Roan Boucher

“To All Who Came Before, We Say: Pa’lante!: A Conversation between Nuyorican Activist Emma Torres and Her Niece Anna Elena Torres”

Contributor Biographies

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Women of color have been at the center and forefront of some of the most urgent political struggles for freedom in the United States. They have pioneered, through practice and theory, models of collective, intersectional feminism that have demanded more radical and more just ways of living, being, and acting. Feminisms in Motion is a welcome and urgent anthology that foregrounds the exciting and compelling work of these activists and writers." — Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, The Refugees, and Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.

"It was never said out loud, but as a young girl in Tijuana I thought certain activities weren't meant for me. I wish make/shift had existed then to help show me what I know now: all worlds are possible." —Ceci Bastida (musician, former member of Tijuana No!)

“I cannot stress enough what a valuable space make/shift has been for women of color media makers.”—Maegan Ortiz, Executive Director of IDEPSCA (Instituto de Educacion Popular Sur de California)

From the Publisher