Strong Feelings and Partly-Healed Arguments: Building Reciprocity and Negotiating Differences in Contemporary Feminist Groups

In Sisterhood and After, her 2019 book about the UK women’s liberation movement, Margaretta Jolly reflects on the strong emotions captured in oral history interviews with feminist activists. Beyond expressing their anger at male-domination and ingrained sexism, what stands out is the intensity of women’s feelings about one another. Painful memories of racism, class privilege, and division in the women’s movement produce moments of “discomposure,” and expressions of such “uncivilised” emotions as shame, guilt, jealousy, boredom, and competition. Testifying to “deep and ongoing personal investments in the philosophical basis of women’s liberation,” feminists’ discomposure nonetheless speaks to “partly healed arguments over the differences and inequalities between women.”
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\nJolly’s account of difference and dissent is a far cry from utopian images of feminist solidarity and support. Yet the faultlines of ideological and cultural division that she describes are, if anything, even more evident in today’s polarised feminist cultures. Contemporary clashes between feminists increasingly play out online, prompting calls to cancel difficult or outmoded voices. This toxic environment threatens the grounds for reciprocal understanding, the ability to tolerate ambivalent accounts of past feminisms, and the potential to build future political alliances.
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\nIn this talk Gabrielle Moser and Helena Reckitt reflect on ways in which they have attempted to work across differences, of generation, nationality, ability, cultural heritage and experience, in feminist groups they have co-run for almost a decade: EMILIA-AMALIA Feminist Working Group in Toronto, and the Feminist Duration Reading Group in London. They share how their groups have devised events and organisational structures, including those informed by earlier feminist practices, in order to build feminist exchange. They explore how past feminist engagements with psychoanalytic theory —including the use of group analysis, consciousness-raising, free association writing and dream narration — have helped to foreground the often repressed feelings of resentment, conflicting desire, and complicity inherent to group dynamics.
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\nAcknowledging ‘bad feelings,’ including rivalry and frustration, anger and disappointment, that emerge in group work, Moser and Reckitt address how they have attempted to deal with tensions and conflict, around opposing ambitions and priorities, public recognition versus collective efforts, division of labour, and the demands of host institutions. Returning to Jolly’s use of oral history to tell complex feminist stories, they reflect on their efforts to build the muscles of reciprocal understanding through conducting oral history interviews and hosting listening parties.

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