Engendering the Left : Anarchism in Settler Colonial Territories

Engendering the LeftAnarchism in Settler Colonial Territories Caroline Waldron (bio) Sonia Hernández. For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900–1938. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 248 pp. ISBN 9780252044045 (cl.); 9780252086106 (pb.); 9780252052989 (ebook). Theresa Warburton. Other Worlds Here: Honoring Native Women's Writing in Contemporary Anarchist Movements. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021. 320 pp. ISBN 9780810143456 (cl.); 9780810143463 (pb.); 9780810143470 (ebook). Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu. Emma Goldman, "Mother Earth," and the Anarchist Awakening. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2021. ISBN 9780268200282 (ebook). For over a century, the search for alternative means and methods to counter the triumvirate of patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism has included the well-worn ideologies of anarchism and feminism. Early twenty-first century activists and their opponents, each of whom have recognized the potential for these ideologies to weaken the interlocked systems' triangulation on power, have generated more recent interest and rejuvenation in these ideologies. A new wave of anarchists and feminists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have defined paths for resistance, which helped grow these movements. Feminists emerged on the frontlines to protest an entrenched culture of sexual violence and, in particular, the cancer of harassment that had metastasized in American workplaces and homes; women, non-binary, and intersex people bore witness to a growing endemic perpetuated by a sexist backlash and propagated through social media. When, in 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election having made misogyny a campaign promise, #MeToo, Time's Up, and others came out. At the forefront of these movements were anti-racist feminists, many of whom were also a part of Black Lives Matter. The coalitional social movement politics of the early twenty-first century drew momentum from other groups, including anarchists. By 2016, anarchists were veterans of challenging the "new world order" that emerged after the Cold War. They protested the rise of neoliberalist globalization which had increased income inequality, threatened democratic reform, and exacerbated tensions in the global north and south. [End Page 149] Feminists, anti-racists, and anarchists participated with, and benefitted from, each other; the ideological symmetry and organizational synergy intersect the movements. For example, feminists, anarchists, and antiracists theorize that the hegemonic conditioning of power gets propelled by systems (capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism) that use the "have nots'" to police and maintain the hierarchical orders over which they have little power. The shared resources (including organizing tactics, shared material support, and information about supporters with similar political standpoints) have mobilized actions among feminists, anarchists, and anti-racists as they organize in tandem and in parallel campaigns, as was the case in the protests against Trumpism. In the twenty-first century, many individuals adhere to the ideas and practices of all these movements, and movement actors call each "camp" home. At this recent and contemporary moment, feminism and anti-racism overlapped, as was the case of nineteenth-century anarchism. The current conditions of these radical political movements are an inheritance of previous generations. This history is the story to which scholars Sonia Hernández, Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu, and Theresa Warburton draw attention. Each of the authors reveal the central role that anarchist feminists have played in bridging time and place as well as social movements. While the foci of these works employ distinct methodologies, the books share a common theme: female activists, despite moments of acceptance, became marginalized. The marginalization comes from different sources; sometimes it is caused by individual men, and other times it is temporary allies who knock them out. More often, it is the insipid modus operandi of a movement's structure based on the very hegemony that anarchism, feminism, and antiracism recognize. Regardless of how or why marginalization happens, Hernández, Hsu, and Warburton show that the impact of anarchist feminists went well beyond the movement itself, into other radical groups as well as mainstream society. Read together, Hsu, Warburton, and Hernández provide insights into how gender operated in and beyond anarchism. They reveal why anarchist feminism grew in particular places (Canada, Mexico, the United States, Kanien'kehá:ka, and the Chippewa nations, among others). The authors also share a common understanding regarding...

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