12 thoughts on “11 | Feminist Futures / Getting to the Roots”
Alyssa Victorino
When I was 12, my sister filled an empty tissue box with feminist quotes. I don’t remember why she did this but I was fascinated by it. One day, I secretly emptied it out and read all of them at once. My favourite was from Audre Lorde. It read (excluded from word count!):
“And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking (Lorde, 1984).”
The piece of paper with this quote on it has been on my bedroom wall for 12 years. I didn’t know that words could make me feel so much. Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture beautifully highlighted this power of language. It can lead you to question, to be moved, to create narratives of your own. She also mentions how it can be manipulative in its use to justify and perpetuate violence, calling for us to stay vigilant in noticing how words can both heal and hurt (Weiss, 2013). Words can help us to make meaning, but they cannot capture all the bad in this world. Neither all the good.
Every year, I take something different out of this Audre Lorde excerpt. But at this moment, as I’m revisiting it, I think only about our class. All of you have informed my thinking in countless ways by your truths. You have shaped my learning whether you are aware of it or not. We sat together throughout all the heaviness and found ways to care for each other—passing tissue boxes around, sharing playlists, creating friendships. This is what it means to let life in (Ahmed, 2017). This is the stuff that words sometimes can’t do justice explaining.
Every week, I kept coming back to Suheir Hammad’s “First Writing Since,” and her plea to “affirm life.” It is not easy to fight for social change. It requires heavy work, it asks too much from us. But, we are more than the struggle. And in order to create policies/research/stories that affirm life, that are created out of love rather than fear (Stevenson, 2015), we still need to dress up and party (Lorde, 1984). We have to lean into the words we put on our walls for strength. We have to keep moving in honour of our lives because lightening the load is part of the work (Ahmed, 2017). After Weiss (2013), radical change is not linear; it is not measured by a complete absence of injustice. This concept of finality distracts us as the work is happening everyday.
My feminist toolkit is full of life, and therefore, I am also full of life. Because, as Ahmed (2017) put it, “we are our own survival kits” (p. 249). As she put it, to survive is to have hope. Survival is to dance anyway, to laugh in the depths of grief and hopelessness. It is to be, to resist being preoccupied by answers; it is living in the questions. My tools consist of my body, my voice, my words. My toolbox consists of all of you. To survive as a feminist is to keep living, day by day, affirming life, together.
Proximity: “ get close to the problems, and solving a problem cannot be done from a distance.” In 2021, as part of the last-mile delivery of maternity benefits, I traveled to remote hamlets deep within forests (enjoying treks through the dense greenery). During one such visit, I met an autistic tribal teenage girl, soon to become a mother, who had not received any government benefits. Upon understanding her situation, I realized she could not identify the father of her child and did not even comprehend how conception occurs. Deeply moved by her story, I uncovered a systemic issue: the current maternity benefit system required a declaration of the father’s identity for the mother to qualify for the conditional cash transfer program. Determined to change this, I fought at the state level, which escalated to the federal level in 2022. This effort ultimately led to the delinking of father identification from maternity benefits, and the revised guidelines were issued. As rightly pointed out by Brian, my stay close to the community made me understand several systemic issues that I could not comprehend otherwise.
Sarah Ahmed’s Killjoy Toolkit made me reconsider resilience, a quality I had often equated with strength. Her article revealed how resilience can become an intentional force that compels individuals to endure endless violence and pain, standing in contrast to self-preservation and indulgence. This perspective resonated deeply with me where girls in India are raised with a saying, “You are a girl; learn to have resilience; otherwise, what will your in-laws think?”. Another striking realization was that privilege does not mean invulnerable—things happen, and life can fall apart. This insight prompted me to embrace the vulnerable side of myself, which I had cautiously suppressed under the name of being looked up to as an empowered and independent woman. I now acknowledge that I feel weak and overwhelmed at times, even when I have the option to seek help, and one can embrace invulnerability as well.
A thought-provoking article linking radical feminism to gardening emphasized the importance of addressing the root causes of systemic issues. This analogy made me reflect on the structural oppressions in India, which have intersected and persisted for thousands of years. While it can be argued that the situation has improved, we cannot ignore the deep-rooted structural oppressions perpetuated through organizations, religions, or caste systems that trace back to the medieval era. Although I don’t yet have answers to resolve these systemic issues, this reflection has sharpened my perspective to connect the historical context to current challenges, enabling me to identify and understand their roots more precisely.
The metaphor of “the bird in the hand” and “the blind woman” symbolizes the intersection of language and power. The bird represents language, while the woman signifies practice. She worries about how her language—her birthright—was withheld from her. This highlighted the consequences of whether a language is nurtured as “living” or allowed to wither as “dead.” The role of language in either amplifying or silencing voices is profound. Written language has been wielded as a tool of power, often taken away from vulnerable communities. I have witnessed firsthand how language and technology reinforce barriers that exclude entire communities. This realization serves as a powerful reminder of the deliberate silencing of voices and erasure of identities, especially for those who endure war and systemic violence. It reinforces my aspiration to uncover and challenge the systems that rob people of their tongues and voices.
Having seen all these:
How can roots make or break a feminist future?
What are some of the most prominent and successful models that tried to break a systemic issue from its roots and allowed an optimistic future hope?
When I graduated from college in 2018, Bryan Stevenson was my class commencement speaker. He gave a very similar speech, reciting the same statistics about mass incarceration in the United States and offering his four anecdotes for creating justice. Just two years earlier, at my ex-boyfriend’s graduation, I also got to listen to John Lewis, an American civil rights hero, tell us to get into “good, but necessary trouble.” After both speeches, I remember feeling inspired, hopeful, and energized about the future I would attempt to forge as I entered “the real world.” I had spent the past four years learning about anti-black racism, feminist theory, and women’s and LGTBQ+ social movements, so I thought I had acquired all the knowledge and tools I needed to enact justice. But I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Only a few years after graduating, I completely lost sight of my hopeful energy. After George Floyd’s murder, I remember talking to a friend one night, a friend who had coincidentally gone to the same college as me, about how fucked up (excuse my language) the world was. I remember coming to this realization so vividly because I felt it somatically – my whole body tingled as every last drop of hope left my body. I remember feeling scared.
I think I became so overwhelmed and angry by the constant violence against marginalized groups I was witnessing, that I subconsciously began to protect myself by distancing myself from the causes I had always cared about. My values didn’t change, but I definitely withdrew a bit. I soon began working for the United Nations, and I convinced myself I was doing my part. I told myself I couldn’t take every single issue on, that I only had the power and capacity to do so much. As I got comfortable working to “enact change” from a distance, I told myself I felt less angry. In reality, the anger hadn’t gone anywhere – I was just numb and avoiding dealing with harsh truths.
I recognize the privilege I have, to have been able to take a step back from it all, and how turning a blind eye makes me complicit in perpetuating forms of structural violence. But, this class has re-invigorated the hopeful energy I used to have and given me the much-needed kick in the ass I needed to re-embody my forgotten feminist roots. Through community, learning from, and forging new connections with my classmates, I’ve been able to engage with issues of structural racism, violence, and settler-colonialism in a much deeper way. We’ve had so many raw and honest conversations about our personal experiences with structural violence and militarism and have been forced out of our hopelessness to reimagine what a more dignified society might look like.
In reading Sara Ahmed’s, A Killjoy Survival Kit, I am reminded of the importance of staying in touch with my feelings and of having my favorite feminist resources nearby. In revisiting Stevenson’s words, I am reminded of the necessity of staying proximate to the causes and communities that need attention. This inspires me to work on local causes and smaller-scale solutions rather than trying to combat global issues. And, in listening to Toni Morrison’s Nobel laureate speech, I am reminded to be careful with the power of my language.
Question: What are some tools/resources for avoiding emotional burnout while sustaining activism?
One of the things I keep coming back to every single week during this class (besides the fact that I still kind of, somewhat, think we would be better off if a meteor hit earth) is knowledge: who possesses the knowledge? Who gets to spread that knowledge? Who is a considered as someone who possesses knowledge? And who is actively listening to that knowledge?
What Bryan Stevenson described as getting close or getting proximate to something is when you can start finding ways to solve things, or see things in a different perspective, resonated deeply with me and to my own reflections on storytelling. Storytelling can be really powerful, and we saw that last week with Evelyn Amony’s book and each of us partake in some method of storytelling every single week during the discussion time in class. There is a reason why there’s always a box of tissues in the classroom. In thinking about how a feminist future should/could look like, for me a big part of it is that there needs to be a change of what we consider as knowledge. Not every single feminist will have the privilege to go to a university and take classes on the theory behind feminist, anti-racial, queer movements and the work that is being done. Sara Ahmed very concisely expressed my own struggles between theory and praxis, because to me relying solely on theory to explain the practical work being done feels not only too simplistic but also can be a source of violence by not acknowledging different ways of knowing, different ways of engaging in feminist work, different lived experiences. And yet it has been this academic setting (through the readings, each of our weekly posts, the discussion during class, even our WhatsApp groupchat) that has allowed me to understand and get close to different ways of knowing and sources of knowledge. And for that, I’ll forever be grateful.
I think I want to finish this post, before posing a final question, by explaining two elements of my survival kit as presented by Ahmed. The first one would be two books in particular, “The Priory of the Orange Tree” and “A Day of Fallen Night”, which yes, they are high fantasy books and not necessarily what comes to mind when we think about feminist book. Yet, these books have not only provided me with thoughts and reflections about bodily autonomy, duty and responsibility, queer joy, and motivation to fight for the future, but they have provided me with a community and a sense of belonging. And the second element, which would be part of the tool item in the kit, is queering the way I approach life. We live in a time where queer bodies are constantly seen as threatening, or as “wrong”, or as something not normal. Queering my approach to life, to me, means finding queer joy in a world that is constantly telling us not to. To me, queer joy is both a tool and a future.
Question:
How are each of us going to ensure that we continue working towards a feminist future?
When I was in the 7th grade, I had to give a speech to my class on a topic of my choosing. I gave a speech on ‘feminism’. Thinking back on it now, I couldn’t tell you where 12 year old Emma learned the word feminism (certainly not from my catholic school lessons) or what I talked about in the speech. But I remember how it felt to give that speech, or to practice it in front of my mom in the living room. The feeling of connection to an idea, a community, a movement, of contributing to something. To put it into a word, I would say I was/am moved, but I don’t think that really does it justice. Its the kind of thing you just know it when it happens. I have the same feeling pretty much every week sitting in this class with all of you.
This weeks readings have further emphasized a major theme of my year: community. “Feminism needs feminists to survive” (Ahmed, 2017) (and vice versa). Without community we cannot survive, let alone thrive or enact change or build feminist futures. I am reflecting on my feminist community, experiences, and survival kit through this weeks reading. Ahmed says ‘Survival can also be about keeping one’s hopes alive’ and I loved that idea. Surviving is getting through the day, but that doesn’t have to mean just enough to make it to tomorrow. Survival is about gardening, caring for yourself and other, it is about building a future for tomorrow, and continuing to hold critical vigilance.
Throughout this course we have all looked at heavy, challenging, unimaginable content, themes, experiences. But this week I am focusing on the positive, the path of least resistance which allows for change and even encourages progress. I found myself thinking back to one of my favourite poems by Mary Oliver as I worked through these readings and reflected on the course. ‘Wild Geese’, I’ve included an excerpt of this poem below:
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.”
Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, we keep surviving. I am grateful and thankful to be surviving alongside all of you, in a community where we have and will continue to support one another. To me, community is the meaning of ‘getting to the root of it’. Weiss comments that gardens do not usually weed themselves, that there is no finality even in uprooting (I was very pleased to continue to reflect on gardening as radical action this week via this reading). These garden metaphors serve as a reminder to stay critical and vigilant, that radical futures are constantly made and remade by our own hands. Continuous maintenance, growth, and care are the keys to both a healthy garden and a healthy community. That is how I want to close reflecting on this course, not as a final discussion/blog post (well to some extent yes it is because obviously this is a blog post) but as a part of continuous reflection which will be ongoing maybe forever. Thank you all for being a part of my community and reflection.
Question: What can we do to stay hopeful, to continue to build and remain in community and safe spaces throughout time?
Proximity is a commonality in gardening, language, activism, and feminism which can help us progress in each department. Toni Morrison’s lecture made me reflect on how I had learned about language death as a linguistics student in undergrad—usually as an indicator that a language is simply not spoken anymore. The thought of a dead language encompassing a manipulated, censored, or dull version of communication made sense to me in a theoretical way, and then as I reflected more on my experiences in a language revitalization class, it also applied practically too. When we learned about Indigenous language revitalization, the aim was not only to revive the languages, but also to revive the cultural ties within the native speaker communities and their sense of belonging within communities and lands.
Proximity to language necessitates proximity to culture, which necessitates proximity to land, which brings us to “Getting to the Roots” by Penny Weiss. Nurturing connections and stopping ourselves from jumping to conclusions means that we need to spend time to get to know one another—increase our proximity—to fully understand our communities and how we plan on operating in different roles to support our policy/political goals. Can we revive an ailing plant? Possibly, but first we need to know whether it’s overhydrated or dehydrated, what’s in the soil, and more. Will we be able to leverage roles within institutions to change them? Possibly, but first we need to know how the specific institution runs, how flexible it is, which relationships we can foster to guide feminist policy, etc.
As the Bryan Stevenson video points out, we need to get proximate to our issues of interest in order to solve them. New, uncomfortable experiences provide opportunity for growth, as the courthouse officer proved when he learned of Stevenson’s work, starting to unlearn some of his prejudice. I think it’s important to note Sara Ahmed’s “Permission Notes” in this scenario though; if we know that a situation can put our safety at risk or will freeze us into inaction/hopelessness rather than movement/activism, it’s important to take care of our wellbeing as well (also as resistance!).
And then just in a general sense, I think that proximity to our creative, playful, transformative selves is an overarching part of hope and feminism that allows us to persist over difficult times. On the flip side of that, I think that anger and sadness towards injustice are some of the strongest initial motivators to make change. Feeling in tune with our own emotions and those of the people around us help to guide us to action that feels fulfilling, at the end of the day.
And here are my questions for this week: how close to an issue do we have to feel we are to begin meaningful, reflexive activism around it? How do we foster close connections and community when the systems we live in tend to work against this?
This week, I wanted to give up.
And it reminded me of a session at an event I had been to. I was attending a conference for municipal and regional progressive politicians and activists. The facilitator came onstage and told us she wanted to do something that would be a bit of a change of pace. She told us she had been thinking about giving up recently and asked us if any of us had also been thinking about giving up recently. She then asked that a few volunteers join her onstage in working through an exercise.
The exercise went like this: first, those on stage would say everything they could think of for one side of the argument in their heads. (To give up or not to give up?) Then, they would move to the other side of the stage and do the same, but for the other side of the argument. Then they would switch. And again. And again, and again, until they had nothing left in their heads or on their hearts.
The facilitator began: “I want to grow a garden…”
What followed was the most powerful moment of the conference for me, and the method has stayed with me. I used it again this week.
For the facilitator, growing a garden was giving up. It was giving up organizing and focusing on what she could do with her hands. So I was struck when the Weiss reading this week compared social activism to gardening. I remembered a question Dr. Baines had asked earlier in the term about questioning who narratives of binaries were serving. I started to wonder about tangible vs intangible change, about whether focusing on my own to hands really took anything away from the thoughts in my head or the words on my tongue. About how many times I wondered if the bird was alive or dead and missed the motive completely.
I offer you all a poem that I wrote after the conference, based mostly on remembered quotes from the exercise I described above.
I want to grow a garden.
I see the state of the world,
And the gains seem so slow
And the losses are so devastating
What could matter more
Than growing a garden?
Maybe 1 degree of change looks small from here
But over there the change seems huge
In 30 years when we are drowning
And the world is burning
And my children ask me,
Mom, what did you do?
I want to have an answer good enough for them.
The other day I was presenting
I was in my element
And I was talking about something that was important –
It is important
And in the middle of the presentation
My phone buzzed.
I finished my presentation,
And when I checked my phone,
It was my mother
Telling me
How proud she was of me.
The personal sacrifices are too great
for the potential collective gains
This work keeps me from my family
And yet,
I do it for them.
I am the first in my family
Not to go to a residential school
And now I am here
I am inviting others, saying
“You belong here, and
we need you.”
When I log into my email
Or my Facebook
I feel nauseous in the pit of my stomach
at all the hate I will receive.
I want to grow a garden.
And yet, who else will do this work?
Better me than them.
Better I know the reality than live naive to it.
I think it would be easier to be a mother
In another profession.
Everything I go through,
I drag my family through with me.
This class has provided me with something I have been missing in my life—both at home and at school. Throughout the years, I have struggled to find peers in professional or academic settings who share the same passions as I do. I’m not referring to interests like policy, global affairs, healthcare, judicial systems, or human rights in general. I mean classmates who prioritize care, empathy, strength, vulnerability, and listening, especially in times when they are needed. I have sought peers who establish a reciprocal foundation of trust and openness, reflecting the ideas we discuss regarding the care and support we provide each other in the classroom.
We talked extensively about hope in this class. Initially, I struggled to grasp its importance. However, through our honest discussions and the works of authors we have read—particularly Sara Ahmed, Yasmin Abdelnour, and Niran Abu Moghli, as well as various case studies in the final report on the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) and men’s activist groups advocating for gender inclusion in African countries—it became clear that hope is crucial for moving forward, regardless of one’s identity or motivation.
From Bryan Stevenson and Sara Ahmed, we learn that change requires discomfort and resilience, which are essential for achieving justice in our world. Hope is not easily attained; it is rooted in strength and vulnerability, discomfort and comfort, and community and humanity. Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life emphasizes hope, illustrating that it comes with difficulties, struggles, and failures, yet it supports and propels us through obstacles. I never fully identified as a “feminist” before, but with Ahmed’s assertion that “to survive as a feminist is to build the tools to survive in a world that resists your survival,” I have come to appreciate the depth and significance of effective feminism in uplifting not just women but all those who face oppression.
Through interactions with my peers, I learned that, despite our different backgrounds and experiences, privilege and marginalization touch us all. As Penny Weiss and Evelyn Amony illustrated, no meaningful change can occur without a community. Community and hope work together to create life, growth, and resilience. In this class, we have fostered a community rooted in hope and vulnerability, prioritizing the understanding and empathy I mentioned earlier. I don’t know if I will ever experience a space like this again, and I am deeply grateful for the conversations we’ve had and the ideas we’ve shared.
Two assigned readings for this week particularly stood out to me for various reasons which were important to me and my entire journey within feminism which began as far back as my pre-teen years. Some points and examples that I found in “Getting to the Roots” and “Living a Feminist Life” greatly summarized and explained key developments my understanding of social issues, social theories, how the world works, my lived and learnt experiences, and how they all intersect together. These writings also explained and detailed how my understanding will further develop and change in the future too.
My journey into feminism can be compared with Weiss’s explanation about the existence and socialization of plants in their writing. The author wrote that plants do not live in isolation, and that the shade of one tree affects another (Weiss, 2013, p. 141). They elaborated by detailing that the root systems of plants affects what is available for new seeds that just took root and that plants that are clustered together protect each other from insects (Weiss, 2013, p. 141). These analogies reminded me immediately of why my exposure to feminism began at such a young age, which I suspect is younger than most. I grew up around many women and men (mostly women) who were always fascinated by my yearning for knowledge (mostly scientific and historical), usually reading books and encyclopedias before even attending kindergarten. These individuals sometimes had deep conversations with me about social issues and they often expressed how important treating everyone equally in every way was for a healthy society that benefits everyone. In a way, I was in the shadow of these people close to me (immediate and close family) who helped me as best as they could to see me prosper, protected from unwanted thoughts that would stunt my growth, which I found eerily close to how Weiss described plants.
Weiss made a similar point about the importance of cooperation and making meaningful connections with people and communities. According to the author, progressive movements such as feminism attempt to influence people to move away from individuality and independence (Weiss, 2013, p. 142) which I agree with as finding my own sense that I belong to a community of people important to me has been crucial to understanding my position and development in the world. I do relate completely with Weiss’s comparison made on this point about how plants depend on each other for survival or growth, along with “know yourself, your community, and your allies” (Weiss, 2013, p. 142). It has been crucial to me and how I found myself in feminism.
I found it very cool that I noticed before I even opened “Living a Feminist Life” that I remembered it from our first week. The first page of the conclusion immediately stood out to me, as I have expressed a very similar concern in this class during our discussions. I remember sharing that reflecting on my own thoughts, actions, and interactions, had made me enjoy life less, and I jokingly mentioned that not caring about issues would make life more enjoyable. This is what Ahmed’s “becoming a killjoy” passage (2017, p. 235) reminded me of. I also found two quotes very insightful, and ones that I may remember for a long time, which were “survival thus becomes a shared feminist project” and “feminist needs feminists to survive” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 236).
My question would be rather straightforward and it builds on my reflection and comment for this week: How does a feminist balance their understanding of and advocacy for social issue and justice while living a joyful life without spending every living moment without worrying about inequalities and issues that they deeply care about? It is honestly personally tough sometimes and if anyone can give me their secret formula for this one question, it would help me tremendously and it will be greatly appreciated.
I listened to Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize lecture on my bus ride, and as I was walking home from the station was kind of surprised to find that I was crying. Something about the way she spoke, her use of story, her beautiful but understandable sentences reminded me of my grandmother. My grandmother rarely spoke about her life, about things that she had been through, but she used to tell me the story of “the little red hen,” who outsmarted a clever fox by using a stone to replace her spot in the fox’s bag.
She told me that story over and over throughout my childhood. It was simple, and short, and she never explained it beyond the narrative itself. Looking back, I think of that story as a gift. Weiss writes that political institutions are opportunistic; roots growing where they can, in “whatever environment supplies adequate resources such as oxygen, water, warmth, and food” (2013, 147). I suppose my grandmother was hoping to impart a similar lesson about resourcefulness, survival, and perseverance. As such, I see the story differently now than I did as a child, but there is nostalgia in the time, as Morrison said, “…when language was magic without meaning.”
This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about language. In the first week, I shared that I’ve been frustrated in the past, that I feel the burden to use my words, my experiences to shape feminist futures. I’ve been tempted to avoid being a ‘killjoy,’ by placing myself in depoliticized situations, because it is a burden to carry the weight of communicating what the future could be. Morrisons’ words once again help me here; “Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable…. unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction.”
Not to reference Hozier twice in one course, but in a similar way, I see the simple existence of language as an example of how survival itself can be an act of protest. In his song “Butchered Tongue,” Hozier speaks about the power of place names as a way for the land to remember languages destroyed by colonial violence, where even though colonial powers did their best to remove all traces of a culture, the land remembers:
“In some town that just means “home” to them; With no translator left to sound; A butchered tongue still singin’ here above the ground.”
To end in a hopeful way, I’m also reminded that we are not alone in this pursuit of a feminist future. As Ahmed writes, “…the opening up of what is possible takes time, work and love: a love for others, a connectedness to and with others, as well as work for and by others” (2003, p.251) It is not easy to carry the weight of what the world could be, but we aren’t alone.
What does it mean to be a feminist storyteller, and what is the power of story in both remembering our past, and building our future?
The readings this week highlight the challenges, strategies, and emotional labour of driving systemic change. With Stevenson’s insights on social justice, they underscore the importance of proximity, rethinking narratives, maintaining hope, and embracing discomfort in activism.
Systemic change is challenging but achievable. Stevenson states that distance perpetuates injustice, emphasizing proximity—getting close to the communities we aim to serve—as a foundational step toward meaningful change. This is also reflected in Ahmed’s killjoy survival kit, which highlights emotional proximity in feminism, focusing on acknowledging exclusion and building solidarities through shared experiences to dismantle systems of privilege and oppression. For me, this implies that proximity is not just physical but also emotional, fostered through shared experiences and values. It also underscores the critical role of grassroots organizations, which work closely with affected communities, embodying both physical and emotional proximity in their efforts to create lasting change.
Weiss’s description of activism by drawing lessons from gardening adds another dimension. Her idea of uprooting oppressive systems aligns with Stevenson’s call to challenge entrenched narratives. Like the deep and interconnected roots of weeds, Weiss highlights how oppression is sustained by hidden, self-protecting structures. She urges activists to go beyond surface issues and tackle the systems that uphold inequality. Stevenson’s critique that slavery evolved into systems like racial terror and mass incarceration reflects this need to dig deeper. A consequent thought from this is the need to tailor strategies to address systemic oppression based on specific context. Just as uprooting different types of plants requires varied tools and techniques, tackling oppression demands a nuanced approach that considers unique cultural, historical, and structural factors at play.
Hope and discomfort are central themes in all of the works, with hope shown as an active, often radical resistance to despair, driving persistence in the face of systemic challenges. In many activist movements, particularly those led by marginalized groups such as women, ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ+ communities, hope is cultivated through collective action and community support. For example, feminist movements advocating for reproductive rights and the Black Lives Matter movement show how hope is maintained through ongoing struggles against systemic injustices. These movements persist despite the challenges and resistance they face, believing that meaningful change is possible.
Question:
How can hope be sustained in activism when facing long-term, systemic struggles that seem resistant to change? What are some concrete ways activists can keep hope alive in the face of setbacks?
I have a book on my list I have been meaning to read called Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World. While I have not gotten around to reading it yet, it’s basically about how the need to maximize parking spaces has shaped cities since the invention of the car which has exacerbated many problems (like lack of affordable housing, diminishing green space, the climate crisis, etc.). Although I cannot make too many connections I was thinking about the general concept while reading and reflecting on Weiss (2013) writings. I got to thinking about how gardening can be an act of resistance itself. I often go for runs along the Arbutus Greenway, which is lined with community gardens. This is my favourite running route, especially in the summer, because there are always people out in the gardens, whether they are gardening or just sitting in the sun. Often I spot a group of people having an after-work drink on a picnic bench. These gardens have become community gathering spaces as much as a place to grow plants.
Gardening can revitalize so much of what urbanization has taken from us. Cities have individualized us and separated us from the natural world. Community gardens like the ones along the greenway can reconnect communities. They preserve green spaces for people to gather and tend to the land. Where people learn how to work with nature to care for and nurture plants. They can be part of the solution to the climate crisis. Food can be grown and distributed locally, creating a sustainable food system. This can create better and more equitable access to fresh, healthy food. With these gardens, people are able to produce their own food or it could be purchased within the community at affordable costs. Community gardens have the potential to create alternative food systems that resist the ones currently dominated by large multinational corporations. Gardening might seem like a small act of resistance, but it can also be a way toward a feminist future. A future where communities and the environment are cared for holistically.
Maybe not all acts of resistance tackle the roots of the problem, and maybe that’s ok? Sometimes, these small acts can be for survival. A small, tangible act to strengthen your hope and give you the energy to keep going.
When I was 12, my sister filled an empty tissue box with feminist quotes. I don’t remember why she did this but I was fascinated by it. One day, I secretly emptied it out and read all of them at once. My favourite was from Audre Lorde. It read (excluded from word count!):
“And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking (Lorde, 1984).”
The piece of paper with this quote on it has been on my bedroom wall for 12 years. I didn’t know that words could make me feel so much. Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture beautifully highlighted this power of language. It can lead you to question, to be moved, to create narratives of your own. She also mentions how it can be manipulative in its use to justify and perpetuate violence, calling for us to stay vigilant in noticing how words can both heal and hurt (Weiss, 2013). Words can help us to make meaning, but they cannot capture all the bad in this world. Neither all the good.
Every year, I take something different out of this Audre Lorde excerpt. But at this moment, as I’m revisiting it, I think only about our class. All of you have informed my thinking in countless ways by your truths. You have shaped my learning whether you are aware of it or not. We sat together throughout all the heaviness and found ways to care for each other—passing tissue boxes around, sharing playlists, creating friendships. This is what it means to let life in (Ahmed, 2017). This is the stuff that words sometimes can’t do justice explaining.
Every week, I kept coming back to Suheir Hammad’s “First Writing Since,” and her plea to “affirm life.” It is not easy to fight for social change. It requires heavy work, it asks too much from us. But, we are more than the struggle. And in order to create policies/research/stories that affirm life, that are created out of love rather than fear (Stevenson, 2015), we still need to dress up and party (Lorde, 1984). We have to lean into the words we put on our walls for strength. We have to keep moving in honour of our lives because lightening the load is part of the work (Ahmed, 2017). After Weiss (2013), radical change is not linear; it is not measured by a complete absence of injustice. This concept of finality distracts us as the work is happening everyday.
My feminist toolkit is full of life, and therefore, I am also full of life. Because, as Ahmed (2017) put it, “we are our own survival kits” (p. 249). As she put it, to survive is to have hope. Survival is to dance anyway, to laugh in the depths of grief and hopelessness. It is to be, to resist being preoccupied by answers; it is living in the questions. My tools consist of my body, my voice, my words. My toolbox consists of all of you. To survive as a feminist is to keep living, day by day, affirming life, together.
Proximity: “ get close to the problems, and solving a problem cannot be done from a distance.” In 2021, as part of the last-mile delivery of maternity benefits, I traveled to remote hamlets deep within forests (enjoying treks through the dense greenery). During one such visit, I met an autistic tribal teenage girl, soon to become a mother, who had not received any government benefits. Upon understanding her situation, I realized she could not identify the father of her child and did not even comprehend how conception occurs. Deeply moved by her story, I uncovered a systemic issue: the current maternity benefit system required a declaration of the father’s identity for the mother to qualify for the conditional cash transfer program. Determined to change this, I fought at the state level, which escalated to the federal level in 2022. This effort ultimately led to the delinking of father identification from maternity benefits, and the revised guidelines were issued. As rightly pointed out by Brian, my stay close to the community made me understand several systemic issues that I could not comprehend otherwise.
Sarah Ahmed’s Killjoy Toolkit made me reconsider resilience, a quality I had often equated with strength. Her article revealed how resilience can become an intentional force that compels individuals to endure endless violence and pain, standing in contrast to self-preservation and indulgence. This perspective resonated deeply with me where girls in India are raised with a saying, “You are a girl; learn to have resilience; otherwise, what will your in-laws think?”. Another striking realization was that privilege does not mean invulnerable—things happen, and life can fall apart. This insight prompted me to embrace the vulnerable side of myself, which I had cautiously suppressed under the name of being looked up to as an empowered and independent woman. I now acknowledge that I feel weak and overwhelmed at times, even when I have the option to seek help, and one can embrace invulnerability as well.
A thought-provoking article linking radical feminism to gardening emphasized the importance of addressing the root causes of systemic issues. This analogy made me reflect on the structural oppressions in India, which have intersected and persisted for thousands of years. While it can be argued that the situation has improved, we cannot ignore the deep-rooted structural oppressions perpetuated through organizations, religions, or caste systems that trace back to the medieval era. Although I don’t yet have answers to resolve these systemic issues, this reflection has sharpened my perspective to connect the historical context to current challenges, enabling me to identify and understand their roots more precisely.
The metaphor of “the bird in the hand” and “the blind woman” symbolizes the intersection of language and power. The bird represents language, while the woman signifies practice. She worries about how her language—her birthright—was withheld from her. This highlighted the consequences of whether a language is nurtured as “living” or allowed to wither as “dead.” The role of language in either amplifying or silencing voices is profound. Written language has been wielded as a tool of power, often taken away from vulnerable communities. I have witnessed firsthand how language and technology reinforce barriers that exclude entire communities. This realization serves as a powerful reminder of the deliberate silencing of voices and erasure of identities, especially for those who endure war and systemic violence. It reinforces my aspiration to uncover and challenge the systems that rob people of their tongues and voices.
Having seen all these:
How can roots make or break a feminist future?
What are some of the most prominent and successful models that tried to break a systemic issue from its roots and allowed an optimistic future hope?
When I graduated from college in 2018, Bryan Stevenson was my class commencement speaker. He gave a very similar speech, reciting the same statistics about mass incarceration in the United States and offering his four anecdotes for creating justice. Just two years earlier, at my ex-boyfriend’s graduation, I also got to listen to John Lewis, an American civil rights hero, tell us to get into “good, but necessary trouble.” After both speeches, I remember feeling inspired, hopeful, and energized about the future I would attempt to forge as I entered “the real world.” I had spent the past four years learning about anti-black racism, feminist theory, and women’s and LGTBQ+ social movements, so I thought I had acquired all the knowledge and tools I needed to enact justice. But I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Only a few years after graduating, I completely lost sight of my hopeful energy. After George Floyd’s murder, I remember talking to a friend one night, a friend who had coincidentally gone to the same college as me, about how fucked up (excuse my language) the world was. I remember coming to this realization so vividly because I felt it somatically – my whole body tingled as every last drop of hope left my body. I remember feeling scared.
I think I became so overwhelmed and angry by the constant violence against marginalized groups I was witnessing, that I subconsciously began to protect myself by distancing myself from the causes I had always cared about. My values didn’t change, but I definitely withdrew a bit. I soon began working for the United Nations, and I convinced myself I was doing my part. I told myself I couldn’t take every single issue on, that I only had the power and capacity to do so much. As I got comfortable working to “enact change” from a distance, I told myself I felt less angry. In reality, the anger hadn’t gone anywhere – I was just numb and avoiding dealing with harsh truths.
I recognize the privilege I have, to have been able to take a step back from it all, and how turning a blind eye makes me complicit in perpetuating forms of structural violence. But, this class has re-invigorated the hopeful energy I used to have and given me the much-needed kick in the ass I needed to re-embody my forgotten feminist roots. Through community, learning from, and forging new connections with my classmates, I’ve been able to engage with issues of structural racism, violence, and settler-colonialism in a much deeper way. We’ve had so many raw and honest conversations about our personal experiences with structural violence and militarism and have been forced out of our hopelessness to reimagine what a more dignified society might look like.
In reading Sara Ahmed’s, A Killjoy Survival Kit, I am reminded of the importance of staying in touch with my feelings and of having my favorite feminist resources nearby. In revisiting Stevenson’s words, I am reminded of the necessity of staying proximate to the causes and communities that need attention. This inspires me to work on local causes and smaller-scale solutions rather than trying to combat global issues. And, in listening to Toni Morrison’s Nobel laureate speech, I am reminded to be careful with the power of my language.
Question: What are some tools/resources for avoiding emotional burnout while sustaining activism?
One of the things I keep coming back to every single week during this class (besides the fact that I still kind of, somewhat, think we would be better off if a meteor hit earth) is knowledge: who possesses the knowledge? Who gets to spread that knowledge? Who is a considered as someone who possesses knowledge? And who is actively listening to that knowledge?
What Bryan Stevenson described as getting close or getting proximate to something is when you can start finding ways to solve things, or see things in a different perspective, resonated deeply with me and to my own reflections on storytelling. Storytelling can be really powerful, and we saw that last week with Evelyn Amony’s book and each of us partake in some method of storytelling every single week during the discussion time in class. There is a reason why there’s always a box of tissues in the classroom. In thinking about how a feminist future should/could look like, for me a big part of it is that there needs to be a change of what we consider as knowledge. Not every single feminist will have the privilege to go to a university and take classes on the theory behind feminist, anti-racial, queer movements and the work that is being done. Sara Ahmed very concisely expressed my own struggles between theory and praxis, because to me relying solely on theory to explain the practical work being done feels not only too simplistic but also can be a source of violence by not acknowledging different ways of knowing, different ways of engaging in feminist work, different lived experiences. And yet it has been this academic setting (through the readings, each of our weekly posts, the discussion during class, even our WhatsApp groupchat) that has allowed me to understand and get close to different ways of knowing and sources of knowledge. And for that, I’ll forever be grateful.
I think I want to finish this post, before posing a final question, by explaining two elements of my survival kit as presented by Ahmed. The first one would be two books in particular, “The Priory of the Orange Tree” and “A Day of Fallen Night”, which yes, they are high fantasy books and not necessarily what comes to mind when we think about feminist book. Yet, these books have not only provided me with thoughts and reflections about bodily autonomy, duty and responsibility, queer joy, and motivation to fight for the future, but they have provided me with a community and a sense of belonging. And the second element, which would be part of the tool item in the kit, is queering the way I approach life. We live in a time where queer bodies are constantly seen as threatening, or as “wrong”, or as something not normal. Queering my approach to life, to me, means finding queer joy in a world that is constantly telling us not to. To me, queer joy is both a tool and a future.
Question:
How are each of us going to ensure that we continue working towards a feminist future?
When I was in the 7th grade, I had to give a speech to my class on a topic of my choosing. I gave a speech on ‘feminism’. Thinking back on it now, I couldn’t tell you where 12 year old Emma learned the word feminism (certainly not from my catholic school lessons) or what I talked about in the speech. But I remember how it felt to give that speech, or to practice it in front of my mom in the living room. The feeling of connection to an idea, a community, a movement, of contributing to something. To put it into a word, I would say I was/am moved, but I don’t think that really does it justice. Its the kind of thing you just know it when it happens. I have the same feeling pretty much every week sitting in this class with all of you.
This weeks readings have further emphasized a major theme of my year: community. “Feminism needs feminists to survive” (Ahmed, 2017) (and vice versa). Without community we cannot survive, let alone thrive or enact change or build feminist futures. I am reflecting on my feminist community, experiences, and survival kit through this weeks reading. Ahmed says ‘Survival can also be about keeping one’s hopes alive’ and I loved that idea. Surviving is getting through the day, but that doesn’t have to mean just enough to make it to tomorrow. Survival is about gardening, caring for yourself and other, it is about building a future for tomorrow, and continuing to hold critical vigilance.
Throughout this course we have all looked at heavy, challenging, unimaginable content, themes, experiences. But this week I am focusing on the positive, the path of least resistance which allows for change and even encourages progress. I found myself thinking back to one of my favourite poems by Mary Oliver as I worked through these readings and reflected on the course. ‘Wild Geese’, I’ve included an excerpt of this poem below:
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.”
Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, we keep surviving. I am grateful and thankful to be surviving alongside all of you, in a community where we have and will continue to support one another. To me, community is the meaning of ‘getting to the root of it’. Weiss comments that gardens do not usually weed themselves, that there is no finality even in uprooting (I was very pleased to continue to reflect on gardening as radical action this week via this reading). These garden metaphors serve as a reminder to stay critical and vigilant, that radical futures are constantly made and remade by our own hands. Continuous maintenance, growth, and care are the keys to both a healthy garden and a healthy community. That is how I want to close reflecting on this course, not as a final discussion/blog post (well to some extent yes it is because obviously this is a blog post) but as a part of continuous reflection which will be ongoing maybe forever. Thank you all for being a part of my community and reflection.
Question: What can we do to stay hopeful, to continue to build and remain in community and safe spaces throughout time?
Proximity is a commonality in gardening, language, activism, and feminism which can help us progress in each department. Toni Morrison’s lecture made me reflect on how I had learned about language death as a linguistics student in undergrad—usually as an indicator that a language is simply not spoken anymore. The thought of a dead language encompassing a manipulated, censored, or dull version of communication made sense to me in a theoretical way, and then as I reflected more on my experiences in a language revitalization class, it also applied practically too. When we learned about Indigenous language revitalization, the aim was not only to revive the languages, but also to revive the cultural ties within the native speaker communities and their sense of belonging within communities and lands.
Proximity to language necessitates proximity to culture, which necessitates proximity to land, which brings us to “Getting to the Roots” by Penny Weiss. Nurturing connections and stopping ourselves from jumping to conclusions means that we need to spend time to get to know one another—increase our proximity—to fully understand our communities and how we plan on operating in different roles to support our policy/political goals. Can we revive an ailing plant? Possibly, but first we need to know whether it’s overhydrated or dehydrated, what’s in the soil, and more. Will we be able to leverage roles within institutions to change them? Possibly, but first we need to know how the specific institution runs, how flexible it is, which relationships we can foster to guide feminist policy, etc.
As the Bryan Stevenson video points out, we need to get proximate to our issues of interest in order to solve them. New, uncomfortable experiences provide opportunity for growth, as the courthouse officer proved when he learned of Stevenson’s work, starting to unlearn some of his prejudice. I think it’s important to note Sara Ahmed’s “Permission Notes” in this scenario though; if we know that a situation can put our safety at risk or will freeze us into inaction/hopelessness rather than movement/activism, it’s important to take care of our wellbeing as well (also as resistance!).
And then just in a general sense, I think that proximity to our creative, playful, transformative selves is an overarching part of hope and feminism that allows us to persist over difficult times. On the flip side of that, I think that anger and sadness towards injustice are some of the strongest initial motivators to make change. Feeling in tune with our own emotions and those of the people around us help to guide us to action that feels fulfilling, at the end of the day.
And here are my questions for this week: how close to an issue do we have to feel we are to begin meaningful, reflexive activism around it? How do we foster close connections and community when the systems we live in tend to work against this?
This week, I wanted to give up.
And it reminded me of a session at an event I had been to. I was attending a conference for municipal and regional progressive politicians and activists. The facilitator came onstage and told us she wanted to do something that would be a bit of a change of pace. She told us she had been thinking about giving up recently and asked us if any of us had also been thinking about giving up recently. She then asked that a few volunteers join her onstage in working through an exercise.
The exercise went like this: first, those on stage would say everything they could think of for one side of the argument in their heads. (To give up or not to give up?) Then, they would move to the other side of the stage and do the same, but for the other side of the argument. Then they would switch. And again. And again, and again, until they had nothing left in their heads or on their hearts.
The facilitator began: “I want to grow a garden…”
What followed was the most powerful moment of the conference for me, and the method has stayed with me. I used it again this week.
For the facilitator, growing a garden was giving up. It was giving up organizing and focusing on what she could do with her hands. So I was struck when the Weiss reading this week compared social activism to gardening. I remembered a question Dr. Baines had asked earlier in the term about questioning who narratives of binaries were serving. I started to wonder about tangible vs intangible change, about whether focusing on my own to hands really took anything away from the thoughts in my head or the words on my tongue. About how many times I wondered if the bird was alive or dead and missed the motive completely.
I offer you all a poem that I wrote after the conference, based mostly on remembered quotes from the exercise I described above.
I want to grow a garden.
I see the state of the world,
And the gains seem so slow
And the losses are so devastating
What could matter more
Than growing a garden?
Maybe 1 degree of change looks small from here
But over there the change seems huge
In 30 years when we are drowning
And the world is burning
And my children ask me,
Mom, what did you do?
I want to have an answer good enough for them.
The other day I was presenting
I was in my element
And I was talking about something that was important –
It is important
And in the middle of the presentation
My phone buzzed.
I finished my presentation,
And when I checked my phone,
It was my mother
Telling me
How proud she was of me.
The personal sacrifices are too great
for the potential collective gains
This work keeps me from my family
And yet,
I do it for them.
I am the first in my family
Not to go to a residential school
And now I am here
I am inviting others, saying
“You belong here, and
we need you.”
When I log into my email
Or my Facebook
I feel nauseous in the pit of my stomach
at all the hate I will receive.
I want to grow a garden.
And yet, who else will do this work?
Better me than them.
Better I know the reality than live naive to it.
I think it would be easier to be a mother
In another profession.
Everything I go through,
I drag my family through with me.
I want to give up.
I want to grow a garden.
This class has provided me with something I have been missing in my life—both at home and at school. Throughout the years, I have struggled to find peers in professional or academic settings who share the same passions as I do. I’m not referring to interests like policy, global affairs, healthcare, judicial systems, or human rights in general. I mean classmates who prioritize care, empathy, strength, vulnerability, and listening, especially in times when they are needed. I have sought peers who establish a reciprocal foundation of trust and openness, reflecting the ideas we discuss regarding the care and support we provide each other in the classroom.
We talked extensively about hope in this class. Initially, I struggled to grasp its importance. However, through our honest discussions and the works of authors we have read—particularly Sara Ahmed, Yasmin Abdelnour, and Niran Abu Moghli, as well as various case studies in the final report on the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) and men’s activist groups advocating for gender inclusion in African countries—it became clear that hope is crucial for moving forward, regardless of one’s identity or motivation.
From Bryan Stevenson and Sara Ahmed, we learn that change requires discomfort and resilience, which are essential for achieving justice in our world. Hope is not easily attained; it is rooted in strength and vulnerability, discomfort and comfort, and community and humanity. Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life emphasizes hope, illustrating that it comes with difficulties, struggles, and failures, yet it supports and propels us through obstacles. I never fully identified as a “feminist” before, but with Ahmed’s assertion that “to survive as a feminist is to build the tools to survive in a world that resists your survival,” I have come to appreciate the depth and significance of effective feminism in uplifting not just women but all those who face oppression.
Through interactions with my peers, I learned that, despite our different backgrounds and experiences, privilege and marginalization touch us all. As Penny Weiss and Evelyn Amony illustrated, no meaningful change can occur without a community. Community and hope work together to create life, growth, and resilience. In this class, we have fostered a community rooted in hope and vulnerability, prioritizing the understanding and empathy I mentioned earlier. I don’t know if I will ever experience a space like this again, and I am deeply grateful for the conversations we’ve had and the ideas we’ve shared.
Two assigned readings for this week particularly stood out to me for various reasons which were important to me and my entire journey within feminism which began as far back as my pre-teen years. Some points and examples that I found in “Getting to the Roots” and “Living a Feminist Life” greatly summarized and explained key developments my understanding of social issues, social theories, how the world works, my lived and learnt experiences, and how they all intersect together. These writings also explained and detailed how my understanding will further develop and change in the future too.
My journey into feminism can be compared with Weiss’s explanation about the existence and socialization of plants in their writing. The author wrote that plants do not live in isolation, and that the shade of one tree affects another (Weiss, 2013, p. 141). They elaborated by detailing that the root systems of plants affects what is available for new seeds that just took root and that plants that are clustered together protect each other from insects (Weiss, 2013, p. 141). These analogies reminded me immediately of why my exposure to feminism began at such a young age, which I suspect is younger than most. I grew up around many women and men (mostly women) who were always fascinated by my yearning for knowledge (mostly scientific and historical), usually reading books and encyclopedias before even attending kindergarten. These individuals sometimes had deep conversations with me about social issues and they often expressed how important treating everyone equally in every way was for a healthy society that benefits everyone. In a way, I was in the shadow of these people close to me (immediate and close family) who helped me as best as they could to see me prosper, protected from unwanted thoughts that would stunt my growth, which I found eerily close to how Weiss described plants.
Weiss made a similar point about the importance of cooperation and making meaningful connections with people and communities. According to the author, progressive movements such as feminism attempt to influence people to move away from individuality and independence (Weiss, 2013, p. 142) which I agree with as finding my own sense that I belong to a community of people important to me has been crucial to understanding my position and development in the world. I do relate completely with Weiss’s comparison made on this point about how plants depend on each other for survival or growth, along with “know yourself, your community, and your allies” (Weiss, 2013, p. 142). It has been crucial to me and how I found myself in feminism.
I found it very cool that I noticed before I even opened “Living a Feminist Life” that I remembered it from our first week. The first page of the conclusion immediately stood out to me, as I have expressed a very similar concern in this class during our discussions. I remember sharing that reflecting on my own thoughts, actions, and interactions, had made me enjoy life less, and I jokingly mentioned that not caring about issues would make life more enjoyable. This is what Ahmed’s “becoming a killjoy” passage (2017, p. 235) reminded me of. I also found two quotes very insightful, and ones that I may remember for a long time, which were “survival thus becomes a shared feminist project” and “feminist needs feminists to survive” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 236).
My question would be rather straightforward and it builds on my reflection and comment for this week: How does a feminist balance their understanding of and advocacy for social issue and justice while living a joyful life without spending every living moment without worrying about inequalities and issues that they deeply care about? It is honestly personally tough sometimes and if anyone can give me their secret formula for this one question, it would help me tremendously and it will be greatly appreciated.
I listened to Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize lecture on my bus ride, and as I was walking home from the station was kind of surprised to find that I was crying. Something about the way she spoke, her use of story, her beautiful but understandable sentences reminded me of my grandmother. My grandmother rarely spoke about her life, about things that she had been through, but she used to tell me the story of “the little red hen,” who outsmarted a clever fox by using a stone to replace her spot in the fox’s bag.
She told me that story over and over throughout my childhood. It was simple, and short, and she never explained it beyond the narrative itself. Looking back, I think of that story as a gift. Weiss writes that political institutions are opportunistic; roots growing where they can, in “whatever environment supplies adequate resources such as oxygen, water, warmth, and food” (2013, 147). I suppose my grandmother was hoping to impart a similar lesson about resourcefulness, survival, and perseverance. As such, I see the story differently now than I did as a child, but there is nostalgia in the time, as Morrison said, “…when language was magic without meaning.”
This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about language. In the first week, I shared that I’ve been frustrated in the past, that I feel the burden to use my words, my experiences to shape feminist futures. I’ve been tempted to avoid being a ‘killjoy,’ by placing myself in depoliticized situations, because it is a burden to carry the weight of communicating what the future could be. Morrisons’ words once again help me here; “Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable…. unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction.”
Not to reference Hozier twice in one course, but in a similar way, I see the simple existence of language as an example of how survival itself can be an act of protest. In his song “Butchered Tongue,” Hozier speaks about the power of place names as a way for the land to remember languages destroyed by colonial violence, where even though colonial powers did their best to remove all traces of a culture, the land remembers:
“In some town that just means “home” to them; With no translator left to sound; A butchered tongue still singin’ here above the ground.”
To end in a hopeful way, I’m also reminded that we are not alone in this pursuit of a feminist future. As Ahmed writes, “…the opening up of what is possible takes time, work and love: a love for others, a connectedness to and with others, as well as work for and by others” (2003, p.251) It is not easy to carry the weight of what the world could be, but we aren’t alone.
What does it mean to be a feminist storyteller, and what is the power of story in both remembering our past, and building our future?
The readings this week highlight the challenges, strategies, and emotional labour of driving systemic change. With Stevenson’s insights on social justice, they underscore the importance of proximity, rethinking narratives, maintaining hope, and embracing discomfort in activism.
Systemic change is challenging but achievable. Stevenson states that distance perpetuates injustice, emphasizing proximity—getting close to the communities we aim to serve—as a foundational step toward meaningful change. This is also reflected in Ahmed’s killjoy survival kit, which highlights emotional proximity in feminism, focusing on acknowledging exclusion and building solidarities through shared experiences to dismantle systems of privilege and oppression. For me, this implies that proximity is not just physical but also emotional, fostered through shared experiences and values. It also underscores the critical role of grassroots organizations, which work closely with affected communities, embodying both physical and emotional proximity in their efforts to create lasting change.
Weiss’s description of activism by drawing lessons from gardening adds another dimension. Her idea of uprooting oppressive systems aligns with Stevenson’s call to challenge entrenched narratives. Like the deep and interconnected roots of weeds, Weiss highlights how oppression is sustained by hidden, self-protecting structures. She urges activists to go beyond surface issues and tackle the systems that uphold inequality. Stevenson’s critique that slavery evolved into systems like racial terror and mass incarceration reflects this need to dig deeper. A consequent thought from this is the need to tailor strategies to address systemic oppression based on specific context. Just as uprooting different types of plants requires varied tools and techniques, tackling oppression demands a nuanced approach that considers unique cultural, historical, and structural factors at play.
Hope and discomfort are central themes in all of the works, with hope shown as an active, often radical resistance to despair, driving persistence in the face of systemic challenges. In many activist movements, particularly those led by marginalized groups such as women, ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ+ communities, hope is cultivated through collective action and community support. For example, feminist movements advocating for reproductive rights and the Black Lives Matter movement show how hope is maintained through ongoing struggles against systemic injustices. These movements persist despite the challenges and resistance they face, believing that meaningful change is possible.
Question:
How can hope be sustained in activism when facing long-term, systemic struggles that seem resistant to change? What are some concrete ways activists can keep hope alive in the face of setbacks?
I have a book on my list I have been meaning to read called Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World. While I have not gotten around to reading it yet, it’s basically about how the need to maximize parking spaces has shaped cities since the invention of the car which has exacerbated many problems (like lack of affordable housing, diminishing green space, the climate crisis, etc.). Although I cannot make too many connections I was thinking about the general concept while reading and reflecting on Weiss (2013) writings. I got to thinking about how gardening can be an act of resistance itself. I often go for runs along the Arbutus Greenway, which is lined with community gardens. This is my favourite running route, especially in the summer, because there are always people out in the gardens, whether they are gardening or just sitting in the sun. Often I spot a group of people having an after-work drink on a picnic bench. These gardens have become community gathering spaces as much as a place to grow plants.
Gardening can revitalize so much of what urbanization has taken from us. Cities have individualized us and separated us from the natural world. Community gardens like the ones along the greenway can reconnect communities. They preserve green spaces for people to gather and tend to the land. Where people learn how to work with nature to care for and nurture plants. They can be part of the solution to the climate crisis. Food can be grown and distributed locally, creating a sustainable food system. This can create better and more equitable access to fresh, healthy food. With these gardens, people are able to produce their own food or it could be purchased within the community at affordable costs. Community gardens have the potential to create alternative food systems that resist the ones currently dominated by large multinational corporations. Gardening might seem like a small act of resistance, but it can also be a way toward a feminist future. A future where communities and the environment are cared for holistically.
Maybe not all acts of resistance tackle the roots of the problem, and maybe that’s ok? Sometimes, these small acts can be for survival. A small, tangible act to strengthen your hope and give you the energy to keep going.