Flow, Unfolding, Feminism is a project about the future
We have to be willing to improvise, mess up, revise, and make world on the fly -- we're not building a buisness model we can product test, we're making world.
An introduction to an upcoming series on sisterhood/coalition, here I want to muse about holding things lightly in another way. And I know I'm doing this with heavy things: sisterhood, world building. That's the point.
The deeply paradoxical nature of reality is like that. The triple goddess of our ancestors is paradox: Death-Regeneration-Life, rinse and repeat. She is the Cosmic Both/And.
RadMatFems deserve the space to improvise, to fuck up, to revise, to keep moving through the mistake until a better way opens, to invent, to flow, to unfold, to fail even spectacularly.
We have a problem we can't get past. Feminisms of any serious kind are future-making projects. There's a point just this side of all our critique where we ask, or are asked:
So, what does a feminist world/matriarchy/gylanic systems look like? How does it work? How will people be there?
Here's one possible schema for describing this other-world compared to the one we are in.
Raine Eisler and her Center for Partnership Systems are deep in imagining this future.
And we have inklings, we have these big conceptual words, and examples of very small contemporary societies, but we can't say for sure what any of that will feel like and look like in reassuring detail. We can't just plop a Late Neolithic Gylanic society down on top of a Late-Capitalist Post-Modern Patriarchy and expect them to meld beautifully. I mean, I could get an AI to generate that village-metropolis scene, but ... We can't assure anyone. What we might aim to make (while never quite making it all the way) is a hybrid of these ancient and shiny paradigms. Like living into climate collapse, we sort of know, but we can't really say what kind of people will survive on earth in 100 years (if any).
