This project emerged out of a shared sense of frustration with some of the places in which feminist activist movements and thinking seem stuck. The concept of “stuckness” (or as Sara Ahmed might put it, “stickiness”) is not entirely negative. We do not envision the concept as an individual “problem;” rather, we want to think about how various ideas and ideologies sediment in ways that are both inhibitive and generative. These sticking points can show us places that demand our attention, and attending to them can prove fruitful in the ongoing process of self-reflection necessary for organizing and theorizing.
Not surprisingly, the sedimentation of internal marginalizations, particularly around race, is one of the major sticking points that contributors address. Joy Castro, for instance, documents the continuing exclusions that are perpetuated in academia, and therefore in “theory” more generally; the foreclosing of particular emotions, especially anger, can function to elide anti-racist feminist critiques. Paying attention to the recurrence of these sticking points allows us to reconsider these problems; in “Feminist Killjoys (and Other Willful Subjects),” Sara Ahmed calls on us to reclaim the killjoy, who points out the underlying problems and exclusions that characterize feminist critiques, both in society at large and those internal to movements, such as racism. She notes that attempts at addressing exclusionary practices can fail to take into account the affective significance of critique and conflict. She writes,”The feminist subject ‘in the room’ hence ‘brings others down’ not only by talking about unhappy topics such as sexism but by exposing how happiness is sustained by erasing the signs of not getting along.” Attention to the affective impact of conflict proves especially important in terms of figuring out how to encourage dissent within communities.
These sticking points represent not only the persistence of the problems, but also the inadequacy of attempts to address them. Pointing to the superficiality of attempts at inclusion, Duchess Harris, for example, analyzes how, despite initial optimism, black women’s roles in electoral politics have not substantially improved in the face of the election of President Obama; she demonstrates the need for further consideration of the persistence of racism and sexism in the political sphere and raises questions regarding numerical versus substantive representation. In his rethinking of the structure of Batterer Intervention Programs, Daniel Horowitz Garcia highlights the ways in which anti-violence strategies are most effective when they mesh clearly with feminist organizations. His work here focuses on clearly connecting individual and systemic violence, recognizing that shifting analyses of problems requires the continuous re-thinking of the strategies developed to address them.
Through self-reflection, contributors also talk about shifting these sedimentations; brownfemipower acknowledges her participation in the institutionalization of radical women of color feminism in ways that were sapping her energy and contributing to separations between radical activism and home life. Through exploring her daughter’s activism within her own community, and reformulating the family structure to raise her daughter, she is able to provide an example of how to “unstick” ourselves and move beyond normative boundaries in order to create new ways of being.
