Sisterhood / Coalition 2
Conformity and Compliance, or we could just ... not.
So, I'm suggesting that RadMatFems may want to approach the paradox of our sameness/difference as women and feminists with a lighter touch that also means more shared strength. (See part 1 if you want a refresh.)
Taking some intensity out of sisterhood makes sense to me because I've been watching lots of feminists and women's groups who should be working together go to war instead. And, I've been hearing lots of women, as always, saddened or heartbroken by rejection or a lack of support that they can't explain other than with some unstated personal motive.
This is all very different to the cutting of tall flowers, to the knocking down of exceptional women. Though, that female aggression motivated by all kinds of patriarchal values is part of the drive toward conformity and compliance that I want to think about today.
Most of the feminists I have ever met seem like natural-born nonconformists. For many, this difference comes from wounds that showed them just how much power men have over women's bodies and lives even in a society where that power is no longer encoded in law. For many, this difference comes from a powerful personality and sense of adventure that patriarchal socialization tries to prune away. For some, this difference arrives in us through our reading and education. For some, we are born to love women and our primary affection and deepest desire sets us apart in a heteronormative world. And then, for lots of us, it's all of the above.
Nonconformists have a very hard time conforming, complying with a set of vague and possibly shifting social protocols and conditional acceptance. We distrust a catechism of code words, a dress code, an impatience with our own feminist becoming. We have figured out that the trick of gender is that no matter what a woman does, she's doing it wrong. And when we sniff a catch-22 on the air, we bristle. We are right to. My-way-or-the-highway, us-versus-them thinking is not the path to human liberation.
One reason that I have a lot care for this issue is that we all have to compromise with patriarchy to stay alive. No matter how gender non-conforming (GNC) or gender non-compliant, or punk, or crunchy hippie, or how archly corporate, none of us is free yet. We don't know what we will look like in our freedom other than relaxed and confident in our bodies and capabilities. What will 'looking masculine' or 'looking feminine' even mean in a world that really gets beyond patriarchy?
Conformity is one of those values that feminists don't critique directly because our whole critique is about it. I think we need to be alert to this because the demand for conformity — compliance — can sneak in the around the edges and cause a lot of strife and harm. Historically we've seen this play out between separatist feminists and other radfems (certainly libfems), and recently between Gender-Critical Conservatives and radfems over who's doing their values hard enough. With expected results.
I want to suggest that our feminist bonds not be based in who we sleep with, or how we dress and how colorfully or how simply, or how intense our performance of disgust at one or another kind of man. I want to suggest that our feminist bonds not even be based in perfect allegiance to a political position. This is why Medusa Rising talks in terms of working with women/groups whose values and goals align with our manifesto. Not comport, not accept. We do not have a statement or a letter to sign.
That's because the last thing we want is for a set of political principles to become demands that women 'do feminism right' by showing the correct tribal signs and saying all the right words. This is how a politics can slide into becoming an identity, a sameness that can only be maintained with pretty intense surveillance of comportment and behavior because humans are ... messy and wildly variant creatures thanks to our big, creative brains. And that surveillance, that policing, slides into demands for compliance that quickly slides into authoritarianism ... and now you're doing patriarchy again.
This is why patriarchy and capitalism get along so well: conformity and compliance are efficient and profitable. (Because there can always be a new element to conform to, one can never be perfectly conformist, perfectly safe, and so one will purchase ... whatever!) And it's why both the cultural form and the economic one tend toward authoritarianism, they both require quite a lot of control of messy, creative human creatures.
Rather than conform, let's agree to make our nonconformity a strength. We who are othered have been driving toward the center for a long time, trying to bring our difference into the heart and power of sameness and thereby change it. I don't think it's working for us, and I don't think it's helping us work for each other because we're always checking to see who's betraying us by being/getting too close/comfortable with that center (heteronormative-empirical-capitalist-patriarchy). The problem is that center is has really deep foundations and it's not going anywhere. It demands so much conformity in exchange for entry/safety/'freedom' that we can't change it.
But we can stop trying to get in. Yes, we have lots of policy work to do still, and that's not nothing (my next posts talk about this), but that policy is step toward greater possibilities for women's becoming. Paradox is the nature of all real things. What we also need is to build the world we want to live into. Our nonconformity moves out toward the margins, whether chosen or not. We choose feminism, but we don't choose the othering of our sex or race or sexuality... And the thing about the margin is that its where all the bubble and flow of creation is happening, where all the new art and ideas and music and style comes from. It's also where gray and black markets function.
And here I'm going to say a risky thing. I think #WomenSupportingWomen means a kind of gray market, an alternative economics, a literal building of literal new systems of care economics on the margins. Our businesses, our calls for funding, our organizations and refuges — these need to take our economic priority. Feminists are by necessity insurgents, maybe pirates – certainly rebels. We forget that many pirate ships were run as socialist democracies. And we're treated like pirates by the powers of the center. We should expect nothing else. So we will need to honor our otherness, our shadows, and our differences and let them bubble and flow (and clash, we do have to learn to tolerate tension for this to work) so that new foundations can settle out of that whirl.
Let's instead of loyalty tests, just encourage and support the deepest feminist learning in each other that we can share and that we can take in. Let's gather time and energy around our issues of concern and find the other women, different to us and elsewhere, who want to work on that concern and focus on the goals. It takes time to learn to move as a pack, as a pride, and it takes practice and checking in. The margins are a wilderness, its dangers are different to those in the center, but they do exist. Each needs the knowing and skill, the kenning, and then the freedom to use them.
As with all the enlivening tensions of this life, all our paradoxes, our work is to learn to artfully and generously engage their energy.
I do realize that to many women this image of a suburb is an image of extreme class privilege and the wealth hoarding of the Global North. It is also, from inside the culture that created the suburb, a symbol for a cloying sameness that stifles and suppresses the human spirit. It is also the structure of home and 'community' that supports the mini-feudalism of the nuclear family and the rule of the father therein, where he is free in his privacy to rule as benevolently or harshly, or capriciously, as he likes.
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