Sisterhood / Coalition
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.
