Intersectional Feminist Theory to Practice
Since I agreed to write a piece about feminist theory to practice for Equity Labs, I knew I wanted to write a nuanced view of what intersectional feminism can look like in the world of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ). Recently, I attended a presentation at a coworking space in Denver. This event demonstrated some of the important components of applying generations of feminist scholarship to community spaces. The one I noticed most acutely was simply the fact that no one tried to speak over one another. When I realized this, I started to feel emotional. I spend a lot of time in either male dominated or hierarchically driven spaces. My positionality as a cisgender, heterosexual, white woman privileges me in male and hierarchical spaces and being at an event where I witnessed successful application of feminist theory thrilled me.
My primary exposure to feminist theory came to me in my environmental education graduate program. In this context, I read, listened to, and watched media curated by diverse feminist scholars (both in and outside of the academic space). We watched music videos and read peer reviewed articles seeking to make clear all the different successes, critiques, and failures of feminist theory and feminism. I processed shame and guilt around the kind of white-woman feminism I practiced for years. This kind of feminism excluded (and still excludes) the experiences and expertise of Black, Indigenous, and other Women of Color alongside transwomen, femmes, and female-identifying people.
A clear example of this is the Pink Pussy Hat. After #45 got elected in 2016, the Pink Pussy Hat aimed to represent feminists across the United States. A strong message became clear over time though, this kind of feminism never intended to include everyone. It pushed a racist, transphobic, and capitalist version of feminism. This kind of feminism existed throughout time and looked, and still looks, like white supremacy.
So, when I talk about feminist theory to practice, when Equity Labs implements feminist theory in our practices, we are not seeking to continue an exclusive narrative. We engage with the scholarship and writing of people like bell hooks, adrienne maree brown, Mariame Kaba, Sarah Ahmed, and Eve Tuck. With these incredible thinkers (and so many more) and the combined experiences on our team in communications, education, marketing, and social work, we design our offerings and our marketing with intersectional feminist ideals at the center. In practice, our implementation looks like lateral decision making in our team, a focus on relationships instead of productivity, and accountability with radical love. Some of the primary tensions with feminist theory to practice revolve around outdated, segregationist, misogynistic ideas about the workplace. We make a few suggestions on how to reframe some of these ideas toward an intersectional feminist ideal.
Accountability ⇔ Punishment
Radical love and community accountability processes call us to utilize systems of accountability that do not include punitive actions. How can your workplace community build an accountability process for group behavioral expectations, work tasks, and interpersonal interactions that rely on relationship building and opportunities to heal from harm? Read more from Mariame Kaba on this topic.
Openness ⇔ Gatekeeping
Information sharing and relationship building rely on trust and vulnerability. Asking people in our workplaces to engage in building trust and willingness to be vulnerable requires time and intention. Opposing this is gatekeeping. Keeping some people out of the loop of decision making or out of places of power entirely is preventable. bell hooks writes about her experience as a Black woman, scholar, and thinker in academia and educational spaces extensively in Teaching to Transgress and explores the role of love in our daily lives in All About Love: New Visions.
Consistency ⇔ Urgency
Most workplaces insist on a constant state of urgency and time scarcity. These relationships with time are not sustainable and can be deeply exclusive of people who are neurodivergent, people in care giving responsibilities, or people immersed in different cultural perceptions of timeliness. Black feminist thinker, writer, and organizer, adrienne maree brown offers her book, emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds, as a place to rigorously explore alternative relationships to time, productivity, and how this connects us to the natural environment.
Relationship ⇔ Power
The information and systems we value in our workplaces are changing, more employees are looking for inclusive, flexible workplaces. More people are challenging hierarchical, paternalistic supervisor/employee relationships in favor of relationships where lived experiences are valued as much as employment experience. Challenging relationships where power differences exist is central the scholarship of Eve Tuck. From education to research methods, Indigenous scholar and researcher Eve Tuck explores the ways Indigenous Feminism fiercely agitates white supremacy in our current world.
Ecosystem development ⇔ Linear growth
Throughout history, Western and patriarchal thought was always obsessed with the cause-effect relationship. It is an obsession forged for and by those with the agency to effect the changes they desired to see in their environment. Intersectional feminist interrogation of the causal relationship complicates the linear and sequential nature of this relationship and instead insists on the practice of curating ecosystems or timescapes of people, wisdom, and knowledge. Ecosystem development places the people insisting on the change at the center of a movement rather than being excluded. The joy of success, the pain of labor and the anticipation of change are all shared in such spaces. In her book Living a Feminist Life, Sarah Ahmed writes about curating networks and spaces to sustain resistance to the pressures of linearity with carefully crafted strategies.