From the streets of Khartoum and Kabul to the blockaded enclaves of Nagorno-Karabakh, from the besieged neighborhoods of Gaza and Lebanon to the mountains of Kurdistan, women’s voices rise in a chorus of resistance and resilience. Consider the haunting similarity of experiences shared by women across territories struggling against colonial and imperial wars:
Every night I have to decide whether to put on pyjamas or something more solid.
100 meters away: can see your home but can’t go home.
How should I see my future and my children’s future in a blockaded and unrecognized country?
What are ways and tools for us to survive as a people on the verge of ethnic cleansing, verge of genocide? 1
Spoken by Armenian feminists in Nogorno-Karabakh on April 24, 2023 on an episode of Women’s Magazine on KPFA Radio hosted by Margo, these words could easily have been uttered by women in Sudan, Gaza, Rojava, or any of the world’s numerous “war zones.” In them we hear the resonances between different forms of women’s resistance against oppression and violence, and the specificity of each context in which the struggles unfold. These are the sentiments reflected and echoed in the essays, poems, and artworks within this issue. Together they form a mosaic of life-affirming labor that defies the globalized culture of killing. 2
This year’s U.S. presidential election result, its preceding antagonistic campaigning, and the president-elect’s stated intention to “massively expand executive power” confirm, yet again, that we are living in a time of rising fascism and thanatocracy. 3 We are witnessing not only the mass murder of human and nonhuman life but also, with it, the death of our era’s presiding global orders. 4 Neoliberal capitalism and its brother, militarism, have unmasked the illusion of liberal democracies and states that can and purportedly want to protect all the peoples of the world. This illusion has utterly collapsed.
Today imperial militarism and capitalist modernity — systems rooted in colonialism, patriarchy, racial capitalism, and eco-cide — exert devastating control and unleash unspeakable destruction across the world: in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Kurdistan, the U.S., the UK, Poland, Argentina, Myanmar, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Western Sahara, and most visibly in Gaza, the whole of Palestine, and now Lebanon. Institutions of western liberal democracies mandated to prevent genocide, hold war criminals accountable, and execute justice for crimes against humanity have not only failed to ameliorate the globalized crises of this moment but have also, with brazen hypocrisy, compounded them. We analyze this “failure” as integral to the design of these structures. In imperial cores like the U.S., UK, France, and Germany, fascists in centers of power and on the margins — in public office and mainstream media, and in the streets, migrant hotels, apartment complexes, businesses, and places of worship — attack people of color, migrants, Arabs and Palestinians, Muslims, and others deemed outsiders, enemies, and terrorists. The forces of racial and gendered capitalism, militarism, imperialism and colonialism, religious fundamentalisms, patriarchy and misogyny, racism and ethnocentrism, caste oppression, heterosexism, ableism, and carcerality are destroying, bit by bit, people, communities, and nations, with the entire planet in grave danger, engulfed by this culture of killing. At this crossroads, we can hear Antonio Gramsci’s words echoing from his time to ours: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old world is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Against this backdrop of global devastation, it could be easy to lose hope.
Rather, the long and deep crisis of our time has spawned new and renewed feminist visions, organizing strategies, and modes of being in the face of institutional and state violence. The contributions to this issue testify to the crisis and chart feminist pathways through the crossroads toward cultures of life. In contributions ranging from scholarly essays to poems to visual art to film, we document feminist political practices, organizing strategies, classroom pedagogies, and communal practices for building anti-colonial and anti-oppressive relationality, emotional intelligence, political strategy, and social organization. Whether focused on training students for a profession in social work delinked from the U.S. state or building zones of autonomous governance and self-defense in Rojava, the contributors offer examples of security building that seeks to ensure the freedom, dignity, meaningful livelihoods, creativity, joy, and “thrival” of all.
Genealogies
As co-editors of this special issue, we stand together at this crossroads, holding hands as we face the uncertain future with determined hope. As two people with very different origins and life trajectories, we could not have predicted our relationship or the emergence of this journal issue from it. Elif is in the early stages of her life’s journey while Margo is nearing her life’s end. How was this meeting even possible?
Margo was a child born of war. Throughout her life she has been seeking ways to explain and understand the world and the seemingly contradictory forces of destruction and creation, oppression and liberation, human strength and vulnerability. In the early years of the U.S. feminist movement she was active in anti-violence work and as a member of the historic Black feminist Combahee River Collective. During the late 1980s and into the 1990s she was a founding member of the Afro-Asian Relations Council in Washington, DC and the Institute for Multiracial Justice in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 1994 her work combining scholarship, teaching, and activism on gender, race, nation and militarism has connected her to feminists in East Asia, the Pacific Islands, and beyond. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network Against Militarism (IWNAM) and its U.S. member organization Women for Genuine Security, founded in 1997 and 1998 respectively. She also has long-standing relationships to feminist activists in South Korea and Palestine. All of this interconnected work and these relationships have formed what she calls her love stories. They have instilled in her a deep, unshakable love of life in all its forms. This love is what has compelled and inspired her, in community with others, to believe that beautiful, life-affirming futures are necessary and possible to create.
Elif is an internationalist organizer, writer, and anthropologist. Through her independent research and collaboration with artists she has worked on inquiries to explore and preserve depictions of Kurdish life. She has studied and practiced alternatives to capitalist modernity and the strategies employed by revolutionary movements to achieve these alternatives in Rojava with the Kurdish women’s movement. Bringing these perspectives to the collaboration, Elif’s experience complements Margo’s.
We met at an online round table organized by our dear friend and incredible Black German scholar Vanessa E. Thompson of Queen’s University in Canada. The roundtable was called “Global Wars and Solidarities” and was part of their miniseries entitled “Legacies of War: Imperialisms, Racisms, and Transnational Feminist Solidarities.” Margo moderated while Elif tried to make sense of the developments in Iran and East Kurdistan (Northwest Iran). It was a meaningful way to meet — online, thousands of miles apart — where not only thoughts and intellects were meeting but also hearts and souls. After that, Margo invited Elif on her radio show where they discussed alternatives for women’s global organizing structures and ways to expand and intensify organizing capacities while responding to the constant onslaught of crises, topics they had both been thinking about. In those early moments and since, we have combined our experiences and our commitment to scholarship, art, and activism to create a powerful synergy between different generations of feminist thought and action.
When the editors of S&F Online invited us to edit this special issue, we were engrossed in discussions of the crisis and of women in struggle. We were exploring two key models as alternatives to dominant political and epistemological frameworks to better understand the crises in front of us and expand our capacities for personal and collective prefigurative transformation. 5 One was the concept of feminist non-aligned movements, which draws from the Afro-Asian movement that formed after the Korean War and at the start of the Cold War among newly independent nations that refused to choose sides in the bi-polarization of the world. The movement’s beginning is formally marked by the Bandung Conference, or the Asian-African Conference, which took place in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. The other model we were exploring was world women’s democratic confederalism, a political concept developed by the Kurdish women’s movement in which women’s movements and struggles come together on a global platform to build the world we need without delay. Over and over these conversations led us to contemplating the materiality of rage, love, and hope as driving forces for change. When we received the invitation to edit an issue, we knew these values would frame our call.
When we sent out the open call, a first for S&F Online, we wrote, “By synthesizing the politics of love, anger, and resistance with hope and a steadfast dedication to meaningful freedom, feminist scholars and activists in the current century present numerous possibilities for a world markedly distinct from the one we now confront, unlocking the potential for abundant rewards. We believe that as feminists we have a responsibility for future generations, as well in the present time, to continue to struggle.” Our selections have shaped the issue into what it is today: “Rage, Struggle, Freedom.”
Curating this issue through a feminist liberationist lens, we offer a space that uplifts rage, hope, and love as forces of change, documenting legacies of resistance and sharing tools for action in political movements from classrooms to the streets. We were determined to recognize the profound power of artistic expression in feminist movements, so we dedicated significant space in this issue to poetry and visual art in addition to scholarly works. The result has been an interweaving of diverse strands of feminist theory and practice that confront global challenges and envision new possibilities for a more just and free world. The contributions to this issue delve into the transformative power of feminist rage, the life-giving potential of love and care, and the quest for true security rooted in community autonomy and self-defense. These contributions demonstrate how feminists worldwide are navigating rage, forging solidarity through struggle, and building meaningful forms of freedom with love and hope amidst despair.
Confronting the Unspeakable
Through this collection we invite you to join us in confronting questions about our relationships with power, institutions, and each other. As feminists, how must we conceptualize our relationship to the state and to state-centered and state-aligned institutions? How do we understand our relationship to continued global oppression? How do we understand how elites and ruling classes in every corner of our world have forged the most violent global solidarity movement of any era? What is our responsibility to the wars, genocides, and intensifying militarization funded by countries that may be our home, and may not be, and to whom are we accountable? More importantly, how do we value life itself? Who do we have to become to prefigure the world we need? 6
By asking and answering, the contributions to this issue help us confront our own complicity and the moral compromises we often make in the name of progress, security, or national interest. These analyses offer us new ways to envision resistance and existence and to reimagine our values and priorities in a world crying out for radical change. Some of the answers in these essays, poems, and artworks — and perhaps as well in our hearts — approach the unspeakable. To utter these words and bring their visions to light in a public forum can risk harm. It is our hope and commitment that these difficult dialogues be engaged with care and security.
The Contributions
The issue is structured into four sections: Feminist Self-Defense, Memory and Anti-Colonial Struggle, Transnational Feminist Solidarities, and Pedagogies of Resistance and Imagination. In the first section on feminist self-defense, contributors offer analyses and discussions of contemporary feminist activists’ practices of resistance, self-defense, solidarity, and autonomy. The late Nagihan Akarsel’s essay, with an introduction by Şervîn Nûdem explores the Kurdish freedom movement, the concept of “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” (woman, life, freedom), and how Jineolojî, or women’s science, has challenged patriarchal systems and helped build autonomous democratic structures. Akarsel’s essay is a shortened version of the original, “The Virtuous Stance of Existence: Resistance,” originally published in Jineolojî in 2019 and translated by Nûdem for this issue. Iida Käyhkö’s exploration of self-defense as an alternative to state-controlled security offers a fresh perspective on freedom struggles by presenting self-defense as a multifaceted concept encompassing physical resistance, community building, and ideological defense. Electra B.’s artworks explore self-defense and security against police, prisons, and other forms of state violence in illustrations that elucidate the intimate and the structural.
In the second section, Memory and Anti-Colonial Struggle, Bramsh Khan’s narrative essay explores the lives of Zigri Baloch women in Balochistan, offering a history and analysis of their culturally specific understandings of freedom, honor, and spirituality. In the first half of the essay, Khan critiques how western/imperialist binaries misunderstand these important concepts and argues instead for genuinely listening to marginalized communities to understand their perspectives. In the second half, she offers a narrative vignette to practice these principles. Visual art by Youree Kim engages collective memory to explore the “tangled history of transnational sex trade/tourism, colonialism, militarized violence and control on disabled bodymind” and to witness colonial trauma and amnesia. Poetry by Loan Tran, Ximena Keough Serrano, and the Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草 explore collective memory as inheritance, intergenerational trauma, as well as the capacious power of narrative.
Part three, Transnational Feminist Solidarities, opens with a photo essay by the International Women’s Network Against Militarism (IWNAM), demonstrating how “artivism” in movements for genuine security can be educational, playful, and visionary and can build community. Helena Wacko’s essay explores how the symbolic use of the witch in feminist and reproductive justice movements in Argentina and Poland has the potential to forge local and transnational solidarities against conservative and neoliberal forces while also considering the ways that geopolitical contexts and racial and religious histories present challenges to these potentialities. The section closes with visual artwork by the YVE Collective, offering representations of women as global refugees and in resistance movements in Ukraine and Liberia.
In the final section on pedagogy contributors explore the issue’s themes in the classroom, offering practical tools for educators and students adaptable to other resistance work. Loren Cahill and Arianne Napier-White offer their innovative social work course as a model for teaching students about love, care, and community building through a radical, abolitionist lens. Through theory, analysis, and a sampling of course assignments, their essay offers a challenge to traditional social work education and prepares students for transformative community practice rooted in healing and imagination. Azza Basarudin examines the role that feminist rage has played in activism, scholarship, teaching, and pedagogy. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s assertion that “emotions are crucial to politics,” her essay explores the value of rage and its potential as an affective mode to learn from the past, exist in the present, and imagine the future. Basarudin’s analysis makes a case for rage as a potent tool for creating and strengthening solidarity among people of different backgrounds so that they might resist oppression more effectively together.
Interspersed throughout the issue are poems and visual artworks that encapsulate our collective insistence on rage, struggle, freedom, hope, and love. Opening the issue is a poem by J.D. Harlock in which children of a dark forest sing with life and hope. In the interlude, Livia de Souza Vidal’s short film explores Black women’s collective ancestry, memory, and futurity through ritual ceremony. Closing the issue is a poem by legendary Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan that insists that even when things seem dead and gone, “Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.”
The creative works in this issue are themselves forms of life-making. They offer a language beyond academic discourse to articulate the ineffable experiences of struggle, hope, and resilience. From the evocative verses of poets J.D. Harlock, Loan Tran, Ximena Serrano, the CAO Collective, and Fadwa Tuqan, to the striking visual art by the YVE Collective, Electra B., Youree Kim, Livia de Souza Vidal, and the collective expressions of the International Women’s Network Against Militarism, these artistic contributions weave a tapestry of affective and cultural memory. They embody the very essence of feminist resistance and imagination, providing a multifaceted exploration of our themes by engaging intellect, heart, and spirit.
Conclusion
In the darkness we see rays of hope. Feminists are resisting, building movements, strengthening relationships, envisioning futures, and organizing to transform the dominant culture of killing into a culture of life. While acknowledging the external and internal contradictions within and across our movements — the occasions we have disappointed, failed, even betrayed each other, including in the current historic moment — we choose living and practicing a politics of possibility and transformation. We choose. As Aurora Levins Morales wrote twenty-two years ago:
We cannot cross until we carry each other,
all of us refugees, all of us prophets.
No more taking turns on history’s wheel,
trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.
The sea will not open that way.This time that country
is what we promise each other,
our rage pressed cheek to cheek
until tears flood the space between,
until there are no enemies left,
because this time no one will be left to drown
and all of us must be chosen.This time it’s all of us or none. 7
In this spirit of shared destiny, collective liberation, and love of life, we present this special issue as one contribution to the politics of possibility. We invite you to engage with these powerful voices, to grapple with the challenging questions they pose, and to join us in imagining and building a world of freedom and interdependence where all life flourishes. We are the ones we have been waiting for. 8
ENDNOTES
- Margo Okazawa-Rey, “Armenian Feminists Speak,” Women’s Magazine, KPFA Radio, April 24, 2023, https://soundcloud.com/user-342990830/armenian-feminists-speak-nogorno/s-cIDjZP8F0RQ.[↑]
- “Culture of killing” refers to a concept developed by Farid Murra and Margo Okazawa-Rey that names and describes direct and indirect processes and ideologies that destroy the physical and material world as well as emotional and spiritual wellbeing and life-affirming values and bonds among peoples and between people and the natural world. This is done for the purpose of elites’ accumulating capital and gaining and maintaining individual and institutional power.[↑]
- American Civil Liberties Union, “How Trump’s Proposed Radical Expansion of Executive Power Will Impact Our Freedoms,” July 11, 2024, https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/how-trumps-proposed-radical-expansion-of-executive-power-will-impact-our-freedoms.[↑]
- For a brief analysis of thanatocracy, see Robin D. G. Kelley and Peter Linebaugh, “American Thanatocracy: A Conversation with Robin D. G. Kelley and Peter Linebaugh,” December 3, 2023, on Conjuncture, produced by Christina Heatherton and Jordan T. Camp, podcast, MP3 audio, 1:16:25, https://open.spotify.com/episode/6gBQEtKlTxUeQKUpfhmQhn?si=e24f6d9c1e52456f.[↑]
- On the Non-Aligned Movement, see “Non Aligned Movement,” Wilson Center Digital Archive, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/topics/non-aligned-movement; on world women’s democratic confederalism, see Abdullah Öcalan, “The Declaration of Democratic Confederalism,” March 20, 2005, https://web.archive.org/web/20090206200234/http://www.pkk-info.com/tr/eskisite/pkktarihi/PKK.ilk.bildirgesi.html.[↑]
- Zaporah Price, “Black History Month Keynote Celebrates Black Feminism,” in Yale Daily News, February 25, 2021, https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/02/25/black-history-month-keynote-celebrates-black-feminism/.[↑]
- Aurora Levins Morales, “Red Sea,” Aurora Levins Morales, 2002, http://www.auroralevinsmorales.com/red-sea.html.[↑]
- Jordan, June. “Poem for South African Women,” in Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, [1980] 2005).[↑]
