Sisterhood / Coalition 3
Solidarity = Freedom Making Action
One of my favorite not-feminist thinkers is Timothy Snyder (I mean, he's one of everyone's at this point). We're both GenXers, went to lots of REM concerts in the 1980s and 90s, both huge fans of Vaclav Havel the dissident statesman, &c. Both very interested in the history of the mid-late 20th century because ... it was wild with incredible forces pulling toward liberty and toward oppression (that called itself liberty). When Trump was elected (the first time, Medusa's Blood!), Snyder wrote the important book On Tyranny, and now that he's back, Snyder has published the follow up, On Freedom (both available as audiobooks).
If the first rule of resisting tyranny is “Do Not Comply In Advance,” then the five elements of freedom are What To Do Rather Than Comply.
He's thinking about a pretty standard liberal democracy and how to preserve it, and he does a decent job of including of women in this thinking, but what I want to do here, as we move toward talking about coalition, is think about his Five Elements of Freedom in the context of women's movement and feminist solidarity.(1)
Patriarchy tends to think in Nouns, in properties and property. Freedom is a property of Man, for example. And Snyder tends to think about Freedom as a set of properties or conditions that result in human thriving. I want to go the RadMatFem way and think about freedom as a Verb, a process, an ongoing creation (something that makes sense on the bubbling and flowing margin).
The Five Elements of Freedom
- Freedom of the human experience - sovereignty
- Freedom of the unknown - unpredictability
- Freedom of movement - mobility
- Freedom of knowing - factuality
- Freedom of togetherness - solidarity
That word "sovereignty" will set off some RadMatFem alarm bells because of its connection to property and territory, to the impossible self-sufficiency and isolate unity of the Male Default, the godlet forever seeking this idealist perfection and never attaining it and raining hell on his others in the process. (3) Snyder doesn't mean it that way, or not entirely. His concept of sovereignty is more like human maturity or self-realization or authenticity.
