Radiating Feminism

Resilience Practices to Transform our Inner and Outer Lives

Beth Berila

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000096361
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: History

Radiating Feminism: Resilience Practices to Transform Our Inner and Outer Lives is a practical guide to embodying feminist principles not just in our politics, but also in our very ways of being.

Bringing together intersectional feminism with mindful reflection and embodied practice, this book offers practical wisdom for living by feminist principles in our daily lives. Each chapter includes practices and interactive activities to help navigate common challenges along feminist journeys. The book also draws on wisdom from feminist leaders and contemporary conversations from social justice movements. Both inspiring and guiding, the book will provide readers with the skills to cultivate resilience to face the many barriers to feminist social transformation.

Radiating Feminism will be of use to students of Gender Studies, Social Work, Psychology, Community Health, and the Social Sciences, as well as anyone with a longstanding or fresh commitment to feminism and social justice.

1Introduction

Creating a More Just World

Beth Berila

Introduction: Creating a More Just World

What kind of world do you long for? What does freedom look and feel like to you? To your communities? Is there music? Dance? A smell or a taste? Take some time to imagine it. Write or draw out a few words/images that invoke that possibility for you.

Really focus on your longing for that world. Where does it live in your body? Is it in your heart center? Your throat center (the seat of your voice)? Do you open and lean toward it or armor and brace yourself? Does any part of you say that world is impossible? Where does that skepticism live (in your head, maybe?) Notice it but invite it to pause for a moment while you explore your longing for a better world.

Now time travel. Go a hundred, a thousand years out. What does liberation feel like then? How do we relate to one another?

Know that people around you who are working towards justice are also imagining better worlds. Their worlds may have some commonalities with yours and some differences; but, as the Zapatistas note, “The world we want is one where many worlds fit” (qtd. in Brown 2017, 155). Intersectional feminism demands it, as our different positionalities on the power axes of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, national identity, immigrant status, religion, culture, and so on create different experiences, needs, and possibilities (Crenshaw 1991). A truly just world will weave together all those diverse visions, navigate tensions between them, and create space for those differences. As Adrienne Maree Brown so eloquently notes in her book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, “it is the freedom we are longing for, which will never be given to us, which we have to create, the pulsating life force of the collective body we are birthing, the rhythm of a shared heart” (2017, 196).

Practice 1.1 Imagining Liberation

What does that better world look like to you? Write it, draw it, paint it, sing it, and/or dance it. What are its principle values? How do people relate to each other across differences in that world? What do our daily lives look like in that world? Set a timer for 15 minutes and create—with no voices of “that’s not possible.” Let your imagination tap into that connection with the vibration of a better world. Dream.

Hold that vision in your heart. Come back to it when things get hard. Compare your vision to that of other people in your community and create a collage of your combined visions. Have community dialogues about what needs to happen in order to create that world. Remind yourself of this vision every day when you get out of bed. Hold your actions accountable to that vision.

Together, this visioning creates a collective pulsation as we all work towards liberation, doing our work to “transform yourself to transform the world,” in the words of the great Grace Lee Boggs (qtd. in Brown 2017, 53). What if that pulsation does beat like a collective heart, adaptable and large enough to include all of our individual hearts in a web of interdependence and connection? How can that support us as we work to create the justice we want?

This book offers practices and insights for the arc of feminist experience: those days when we can almost touch that better world and are inspired to create bridges to it, and those days when we can barely get out of bed because of the pain of oppression—that directly affecting us and that targeting others in our community. If you are committed to social justice, chances are you have experienced—or will experience—both ends of that spectrum and everything in between. It’s part of the feminist journey.

In my over 20 years of teaching first Women’s Studies and now Gender and Women’s Studies¹ at two different universities, I have worked with hundreds of students who have navigated this journey. I have also worked with community organizers and colleagues who are on their own social justice journey, and I have reflected deeply on my own path. This book highlights several common themes that people face along that journey, offering insights from intersectional feminist social justice warriors and embodied reflection practices to help guide us along our way.

We aren’t in this alone and we don’t have to recreate the wheel. People have forged the path before us and can offer us a hand. Some of the wisdom will resonate with you, some probably won’t—there’s no book that is going to speak to everyone all the time. But getting clear on what doesn’t resonate with you and what you need instead can be just as important as leaning into what does. I see this book as a guide to help you build your resources, so that you can cultivate the capacity and resilience to intentionally navigate your feminist journey.

Turbulent Times

There is such a profound certainty and hope when we can touch into a connection to a better world. Not a certainty as in we know how things will play out, but a certainty that justice will prevail—eventually—and that our actions towards it matter, however seemingly small. But that connection sometimes seems tenuous at times. It takes intentionality and regular practice to nourish it, along with a clear feminist social justice vision to create the conditions to manifest that better world. Sometimes the connection is so faint it is almost elusive.

I am writing this book during the first couple of years of Donald Trump’s administration. Since he took office, there has been daily public outrage at the actions of his administration: his (mis)handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, the internment of migrants, including children, in “detention centers” under deplorable conditions, the Islamophobia behind the “travel” ban, the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, the anti-labor court rulings, the assaults on women’s reproductive rights, the anti-Semitic attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, and the repeals of much of the progress made under President Obama’s administration. Alongside all this has been a rise in hateful rhetoric and violent action toward some of the most marginalized communities, including Muslims, people of color, immigrants, Jewish communities, women, people who are living with disabilities, and LGBTQAI+ communities. In this context, fear, anger, and outrage are justifiably high.

Simultaneously, volcanos are erupting in Hawaii, wiping out homes and livelihoods. Flint, Michigan still doesn’t have clean water, while Nestlé and other corporations are privatizing water around the world, making it unaffordable and unavailable to those who need it. Oil pipelines and telescopes are being built on Indigenous land despite the staunch protests of those communities. Wildfires are consuming the Amazon forest and parts of Australia at terrifying rates. The threat of nuclear weapons grows. The list goes on. While these injustices have taken on a new dimension, those of us grounded in social justice know that none of this is new. Today’s horrors are extensions of long-standing patterns of oppression.

Many people have been swimming in such despair that they feel immobilized. The urgency seems to come from all fronts. There is no time to rest and regroup. Where is that better world, some think? What can we possibly do that will make a difference? How can we even see our way to productive action when we are drowning in rage and despair?

And yet. Every day I go to campus and work with some of the brightest, most visionary and inspired feminist students, people who WILL make a change against all odds. Simultaneously, the Black Lives Matter movement is founded in love and a celebration of Black life in the face of ongoing violence towards Black communities. The #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock took on big business, environmental racism, colonization, and the government in order to reclaim Indigenous land and live out a relationship to the Earth as a living, breathing organism that we need to honor, not own. Hundreds of lawyers camped out in airports to help people resist the oppressive travel ban that targets Muslims and immigrants. Muslim communities came together with Jewish communities to support and heal after the attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. LGBTQAI+ communities refused to be used in an Islamophobic divide and conquer strategy after the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. These actions are deeply inspiring and influential, reminding us that our voices matter and that transformation is possible.

It happens on a smaller scale, too, this pulsation towards a better world. Community gardens are cultivated in areas with food insecurity. Young people gather diverse books, like eleven-year-old Marley Dias and her #1000BlackGirlBooks, or they write their own books when their stories are not told. Transformative Justice and Healing Justice efforts thrive in communities. Daily acts of kindness towards fellow human beings that we refuse to hate despite the constant messages that tell us we should. These are all examples of what Grace Lee Boggs describes when she writes that to create this better world,

[w]e can begin by doing small things at the local level, like planting community gardens or looking out for our neighbors. That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously.

(Boggs 2007)

THIS is the world I want to inhabit: the one that we work daily to invite and create. For that to happen, we need to maintain our connection to that vision of the better world. This is a living, breathing feminism: both dynamic and organic, existing in our very beings and in our connections with one another. In order to help us fully radiate our feminism through all aspects of our lives, this book will integrate feminist principles with mindful, embodied practices. Intersectional feminism challenges us to examine how our complex identities make some of us disproportionately vulnerable to oppression or privilege and position us in complex power dynamics with one another. We have to account for these dynamics if we are to create that better world. Embodied resilience practices can help maintain a lifeline to our vision of hope by offering ways to deepen self-awareness and compassion while helping us be more centered in the present moment. Radiating Feminism offers ways to embody our values in our speech, our behaviors, our ways of relating with one another, and our very breath. Together, they help us birth more empowering alternatives.

This book will also explore some of the pitfalls and challenges along the way, offering insights from my own journey through feminism as well as my years of experience teaching Gender & Women’s Studies with numerous college students, along with words of wisdom from feminists who have gone before. Throughout our journey together, I offer practices that we can integrate into our daily lives to help us really radiate our feminism through all the cells of our being and all the facets of our lives, our actions, and our communities.

The journey is rich and full of hope. It requires the unique gifts of each and every one of us.

Practice 1.2 Defining Your Feminism

This is a good place for you to define your feminism. What does it mean to you? Who are your inspirations for it? What do you see as the major sources of oppression and the best paths towards liberation? Are you interested in equality, equity, justice, liberation, or all of them? What issues are you most committed to and why? What ignited your feminism?

After getting clear on your own sense of feminism, connect it to those around you. Where does yours resonate with the visions in your community and where does it differ? Are those differences tensions to be navigated? Threads to be woven together?

Why Mindful and Embodied Feminisms?

How can mindfulness and feminism work together? For me, it seems a natural fit. I had been teaching GWS for years and trying to live my feminism (which is always evolving) for longer. Each semester, I see amazing students find language in GWS courses for what they have been thinking and feeling. They learn to name their gut sense that things are just not right with the world. They cultivate a deeper analysis of what produces those conditions. They strengthen their voices and find a community of likeminded people. They laugh and cry. They become intellectually and politically empowered.

And these same fierce feminists often struggle to fully embody the beliefs they hold in healthy, holistic ways. Even the sassiest students can be in abusive relationships, struggle with eating disorders or addictions, or demean themselves with negative self-talk. Sometimes, this split happens from one sentence to the next. Add to that the exhaustion that comes from meeting every fight (and framing it as a battle), showing up so fully and so consistently without a break and without any nourishing and healing practices that can cultivate resilience and sustainability. Maybe some of this sounds familiar. I began to wonder … what is missing? What could allow for a more holistic empowerment?

This, by the way, is very similar to my own trajectory to feminism all those years ago. I found feminism in college. My very first college class was with the resident Marxist feminist in the economics department at the state university I attended. I walked into class a smart, overachieving, sheltered, white, middle-class young woman; he walked into the class in skin-tight leather pants, snakeskin cowboy boots, a ponytail, and a radical feminist philosophy. That man rocked my world. He is the reason I became a professor. From him, I took classes like the “Feminization of Poverty,” which is one of the first places I learned about systemic oppression. As a white, then-heterosexual (I now identify as queer), cisgender woman growing up in the suburbs of Ohio, I believed in equality but until those classes had no real analysis of power or a sense of how justice differed from equality. My identities located me in the “dominant” group in many ways, but I also grew up in a union family with a nascent class consciousness. My mother raised me as a single mom for the first several years of my life, and we struggled financially. We became much more economically secure when she met and married my stepfather (whom I consider my father). Both my parents were from blue-collar, working-class families. Overall, my childhood was economically middle class, but with strong working-class and union underpinnings.

That was the ground on which my college classes harvested a feminism grounded in structural analysis of oppression. My first official college Women’s Studies class was called “Decolonizing Feminism,” in which we read Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s canonical essay, “Under Western Eyes,” while watching the televised Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings.² I came to feminist studies through a transnational and intersectional feminist lens. By the time I graduated college, I was a full-blown feminist.

My doctorate program in Syracuse, New York deepened my understanding of intersectionality while also challenging me to constantly examine my own positionality and exposing me to a great deal of community activism in the region. As I studied the writings by feminists of color, I examined my own position as a white woman in white supremacist society. I also came out as queer during that time, and launched right into activism around trans-rights. The vibrant community activism in the area taught me a great deal about social change in complex communities.

I still examine these questions every day, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Practices
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Creating a More Just World
• 2 Embodying Our Feminism
• 3 Oppression, Trauma, and Embodied Healing
• 4 Unlearning Our Toxic Inner Voice
• 5 Navigating the In-Between
• 6 Recognizing and Dismantling Embodied Privilege
• 7 What Is an Ally and Is It Enough?
• 8 How to Have Difficult Conversations about Social Justice Issues
• 9 On Anger and Love
• 10 Feminist Burnout and Sustainability
• 11 Filling Our Well When Change Is Slow
• 12 Conclusion: Riding the Cycles of Change
• Index