Sara Matthiesen

Studying WGSS

In early November 2024, Prentis Hemphill moderated a conversation between Angela Davis and Lama Rod Owens on the themes of community, trauma, solidarity, Black liberation, and collective freedom at the East Bay Meditation Center, a spiritual home with an activist legacy in the San Francisco Bay Area. Three days prior, Donald Trump secured a second presidential term by winning all seven swing states and the popular vote — making it impossible for those who cast a vote against Trump to direct their grief and rage at the undemocratic electoral college. Israel’s genocidal siege on Gaza had just passed the one-year mark, and the most conservative calculations put the death toll at 43,000, with nearly two million displaced from their homes.¹ The day after the election, the net worth of the world’s top billionaires and major US defense contractors soared.²

Into this bleakness, Davis offered an insight that brought me to tears. In reflecting on the “dangers of community that is grounded in the perpetuation of trauma,” she invoked the state of Israel’s weaponization of Jewish persecution.³ One effect of this manipulation, according to Davis, was that it cut off the possibility of solidarity. This was not merely a strategic error, however. On the stage of the East Bay Meditation Center, Davis made the case for solidarity’s life-changing and sustaining potential and expressed genuine grief for those who would never experience this relation as either “recipients” or “purveyors.” She recounted her 2011 trip to Palestine where she met a Palestinian who had been imprisoned in an Israeli prison at the same time Davis was incarcerated in San Rafael, CA, awaiting her trial in the early 1970s. He and other prisoners had sent Davis a letter of solidarity through activist networks. She described meeting him forty years later. “We embraced, but we had already known each other for decades. … That experience of solidarity is an important part of the meaning of freedom. I don’t know whether one can experience freedom except in solidarity with others struggling for freedom. … There’s no such thing as a single solitary person being free! What would you do with your freedom?!” ⁴

This last quip got a lot of laughs, whereas Davis’s invocation of collective freedom and her genuine grief for anyone who would never have this experience clearly took the audience’s breath away. Leave it to Davis to make solidarity irresistible at a moment drenched in despair. A little over two years into the second Trump administration, I return to a conversation staged beyond the academy to ask what lessons on solidarity WGSS has offered — and what it might yet offer — to the growing number of people responding to escalating violence and repression by joining together in shared struggle. What would it mean to make that prospect irresistible? As the longer-standing right-wing repression of gender studies and allied disciplines intensifies through our opponents’ cynical distortions of knowledge claims, those of us practicing WGSS would do well to assess what we are offering in the way of study for the purpose of struggle.

I suspect one reason I was so struck by Davis’s unequivocal embrace of solidarity, a relation that should be regarded as the pinnacle of human experience, is because one lesson we could take from WGSS scholarship is that solidarity is hard — and not only when it comes to the “trouble between” white feminists and feminists of color.⁵ In her analysis of feminist solidarity in #metoo, Rebecca Wanzo offers what is arguably the most familiar version of this lesson, whereby the longstanding problem with “sisterhood” between “women as an undifferentiated biological category” is contrasted with scholarship by feminists of color who theorize solidarity across difference.⁶ Black feminist and feminist of color texts written in the 1980s that Wanzo cites both bear this lesson out and diagnose a more widespread challenge to solidarity. For example, in “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women,” bell hooks analyzes multiple obstacles that keep women apart.⁷ While she makes clear from the jump that white women’s myopic focus on unity through “shared oppression” and racism within the women’s movement are overarching threats to solidarity, hooks also spends much of the piece enumerating how what she describes as the “politics of domination” manifest in various ways within and across different groups of women. She documents the varied consequences of “internalized sexism and racism” that lock women in competition with one another, while arguing that ignorance of class differences or outright refusals to “repudiate class exploitation” further stymies true “Sisterhood.” Writing four years before the publication of hooks’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Audre Lorde similarly placed “ignoring the differences of race between women” as the greatest threat to “the mobilization of women’s joint power” even as she theorized numerous, related “distortions” that kept people divided.⁸ Bernice Johnson Reagon’s classic piece on coalitions, originally delivered as a speech at the 1981 meeting of the Michigan Womyn’s Musical Festival, defines the challenge of solidarity across difference even more forcefully. “It [coalition] is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn’t look for comfort.” ⁹ While hooks, Lorde, and Reagon clearly approach their writing as political education in that readers are meant to put their insights to action, it is undeniable that solidarity in these writings is a relation that is hard fought for white women and women of color as well as the “most of us” Cathy Cohen theorized in 1997.¹⁰ And this is all before those of us who do manage to find shelter in Lorde’s/Zami’s expansive “house of difference” have even looked outward at the forces that Reagon rightly diagnosed as threatening our collective survival.¹¹

In the intervening decades where neoliberalism’s usurpation of identity politics has been supercharged by social media algorithms that amplify our worst impulses, the tenor of political education on what bonds are possible between feminists has radically shifted as the field has sought to distance itself from “white feminism.” As Jennifer Nash and Samantha Pinto have argued about public-facing scholarship that benefits from elite publishing companies’ tendency to capitalize on identity politics evacuated of their radical potential, white women within feminist thought have gone from “possible redemption” to “irredeemability.” ¹² In these books, hooks’s warning that forming bonds around “shared oppression” is a dead end to both sisterhood and survival gets distorted into a cynical formula that too frequently collapses racial constructs (whiteness, Blackness) into demographic groups (Black women, white women) into ideologies (white feminism, white supremacy, Black feminism). And this is to say nothing of other differences that keep a bigger “us” divided in a multitude of ways. Here, solidarity is not desirable even if hard fought, but seemingly beside the point, as there exists no meaningful exit strategy from hooks’s “politics of domination” that has the myth of racial hierarchy at its center. Unlike Combahee River Collective’s 1977 “A Black Feminist Statement” or Mab Segrest’s Memoir of a Race Traitor, which model in different ways how identity is a potential “source of radical politicization,” these works prioritize hegemonic identity categories over those that might emerge through bonds of affiliation in shared struggle.¹³

I have been thinking about this turn in public-facing WGSS scholarship since first reading an urgent question posed by Finn Enke. In a retelling of 1970s transfeminisms that produced meaningful solidarity between trans and cis activists in the face of what are now called TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), Enke asks “Why, when existing nuanced narratives might invite us to deeper analysis, are stories of exclusion and abjection so magnetic?” ¹⁴ This is surely due in part to the fact that, as Wanzo notes, “solidarity as ‘women’ is a utopian project that does both affective and strategic work, which many feminists continue to utilize well into the twentieth century,” despite longstanding and repeated critiques of “universalist rhetoric.” ¹⁵ At the same time, as Enke makes clear, amplifying only this lesson offers our students and the wider public a model of solidarity defined entirely by the negative — what it is not. I believe most WGSS students at my institution could explain why universalism is both false and exclusionary, and that many could extend that lesson to the necessity of solidarity across difference. I am far less certain that these students could recite Davis’s lesson that only in struggling for freedom alongside others are we ever truly free.

Following Trump’s second victory, where he saw gains with Black and Hispanic voters, and mostly men under fifty, it appears that the supposed promises of aligning oneself with white Christian supremacist heteropatriarchy has seduced far more than the white women Trump voters who were widely condemned by feminists following the 2016 election.¹⁶ In what Pew describes as the “diverse voter coalition” that put Trump in the White House for the second time, I see a perverse version of Reagon’s insight about coalition that “the only reason you would consider trying to team up with somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive.” ¹⁷ We are in decidedly bleak political terrain when Reagon’s lessons about the inherent risks of organizing across difference can be applied to the “diverse voter coalition” who looked at MAGA and saw their best shot at survival. This might be too generous a read, and I am quite aware that what many Trump supporters hope to keep alive are the same forces that want Cohen’s “most of us” dead. Still, as every organizer knows, membership in “them” and “us” is not fixed but is something we struggle over. And part of that struggle entails making the political case and emotional appeal for why someone should see themselves in a collective “us.” To return to Reagon, our coalitions might not need to feel like home (assuming home is a place of safety and comfort and not somewhere one must escape), but they cannot be sustained only by the recognition that they are hard but necessary. A sole focus on survival risks minimizing narratives of when and how we feel most alive, and there are surely more stories for WGSS to tell about how shared struggle is one rich source of this feeling. In the words of one ICE defender from Minneapolis, “We belong to each other now in a way that we weren’t sure we could count on before.” ¹⁸ For those of us moved to act by what Reagon described as being “worthwhile for human beings in general and in the future,” is it not because we feel most alive when we are experiencing someone else’s humanity? ¹⁹ This is surely part of what Davis’s reference to collective freedom was describing. Perhaps now more than ever the tools of WGSS could turn toward making what is already true irresistible: that our fates are bound together and that an “us” in struggle means feeling alive by touching freedom.