Theory and Praxis: The Feminist Solidarity Group at UT-Austin
Layne Parish Craig and Erin Hurt

There can be no mass-based feminist movement to end sexist oppression without a united front--women must take the initiative and demonstrate the power of solidarity.

-- bell hooks, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Among Women” 127

Significantly, I learned that any progressive political movement grows and matures to the degree that it passionately welcomes and encourages, in theory and practice, diversity of opinion, new ideas, critical exchange, and dissent. [...] Again and again I have to insist that feminist solidarity rooted in a commitment to progressive politics must include a space for rigorous critique, for dissent, or we are doomed to reproduce in progressive communities the very forms of domination we seek to oppose.

-- bell hooks, Outlaw Culture 65-7

These two quotations from bell hooks encapsulate the inspiring but fraught project of feminist solidarity, a project that seems to rest on values and concepts with wide appeal and applicability – consensus building, political and social unity, organized political action, human relationships – but is often mitigated and troubled by questions raised about the enactment of these very values. Whom does “solidarity” include and exclude/ignore? Upon what issues is it necessary for a group in “solidarity” to have consensus? Is a cohesiveness based on identity affiliations more or less effective than one built on shared political views or goals? What practical (personal, social, or political) actions does one take to demonstrate a commitment to feminist solidarity? What models are currently available for thinking about this concept and what do they look like when applied? In an effort to think through these questions in concrete ways, this paper examines a specific narrative of feminist solidarity: the authors’ experience with the founding and developing of the Feminist Solidarity Group at the University of Texas at Austin English Department. The following account, first given at the 2008 Conference for College Composition and Communication (CCCC), explains how this concept of solidarity both structured and continues to shape our group since its creation in 2006.

Feminist Solidarity at UT-Austin: A Conversation

Part One: Motivations

Erin: My own motivation for starting this graduate student group came out of my experience of isolation within my classes, as well as a huge absence of conversations happening about issues like how to work with professors in the department, and how to deal with other students in the program. In other words, for me, this group presented an opportunity to engage other students in meta-conversations about the department, how it functioned, and our own roles within it. It seemed to me that we got a lot of instruction about what books to read, how to read, writing papers, how to go on the job market, how to put together a teaching portfolio, etc. – but what about how to find a mentor/advisor, dealing with a class that doesn’t respect your authority, having kids during graduate school, preparing for colleagues who may be dismissive of your work or of you?

Layne: I also found graduate school isolating, and also intimidating, in that it emphasized competition over cooperation and mentorship, the opposite of the model I had become politically and personally invested in as a progressive undergraduate. I needed to build a relationship between my personal beliefs and my academic discipline, and in conversations with Erin, we started to outline what that kind of relationship, structured around feminism, would look like. We decided that it would include one-on-one mentorships between new graduate students and more experienced ones, honest, ongoing conversations among groups of graduate students, particularly women, and open sharing of academic and personal resources.

Erin: This kind of self-reflection, awareness of context and our own positions, as well as our own multiple partial identities, wouldn’t be possible without grounding this group in feminist values. Part of our motivation came from students’ and faculty’s refusals to acknowledge the underlying politics of a given situation, or that certain conversations were absent from department discussion. Feminism allows us a way to critique the kind of system in which we find ourselves, and gives us the rationale to seek changes that might make the department better for graduate students.

Part 2: Beginnings

Layne: My impression of the process of forming the group was that it highlighted some of the central conflicts within feminist communities. Addressing these issues was vital, helpful, and constructive; however, in resolving these conflicts we may have alienated some group members. I think this is because the conflicts we experienced had a lot to do with identity, language, and affiliation, very personal issues for many people.

A few incidents in particular come to mind: At our first meeting, about eight enthusiastic women responded to our email soliciting involvement in a “women graduate students group.” When we emailed interested people after that meeting, we carbon copied a professor who had expressed support for the project, mentioning the word “Ladies” as a tongue-in-cheek way to describe the group. She emailed the group expressing her concern about the term and its exclusion of non- or anti-feminine women. This early challenge to a facile definition of “women’s group” helped us see the potential for conflict between our language and our intentions, and became a defining moment in our group’s self-definition and its membership.

For our second meeting, we held an organizational potluck at my apartment, and I sent an email to a class I was taking that semester that was made up mostly of women. That week, I was confronted in class by a transgendered student asking if ze was invited to participate; of course, the answer was yes, and ze did come and was instrumental in organizing the group, but the conversation was a reminder for me of the perceived and historical exclusions of feminism, and the importance of being aware of the ways in which language shapes how others see our project.

Erin: These issues arose again as we worked to name our group. Participants offered many ideas for the group name, but most were gendered. We hit on the name “Feminist Solidarity Group” as a temporary solution, but it ultimately was a perfect name, upfront about our feminist values while also emphasizing our goals of supporting each other and the feminist communities at UT-Austin and in academia.

Another impression that I have about the beginnings of the group has to do with the tension between our department’s largely inactive Women, Gender, and Literature concentration. We distanced ourselves from the WGL concentration because it implied a kind of academic allegiance rather than the political one that we were looking for. Furthermore, we purposely kept ourselves as an informal rather than official school group, in order to give ourselves the ability to be more critical of the department and its processes. Setting our group up in this way gave us a kind of freedom that concentrations and faculty advisor-led groups lacked.

I would add that, while daunting at times, negotiating the conflicts and tensions that arose during the FSG formation gave each of us the opportunity to do what we had hoped to do – to insert politics back into our personal and professional interactions with each other. In trying to come up with a name and structure for our group, we had to deal with and acknowledge the real world politics of our various members and figure out ways to reach a consensus.

Part 3: FSG Membership and Activities

Erin: In terms of composition, the group has developed in two different ways. On one hand, we have developed a loose community of feminists made up of those signed up on the listserv, those that send responses to information we collect, those that come to our panels and potlucks. On the other, we have developed a more close-knit group of core planners – this latter group is responsible for most of the conceiving of our various activities. We’ve noticed that in the little over two years since we formed, the core planning group has not changed much.

Layne: Our activities might be seen as divided into two categories: those that promote success for a broader range of academics, and those that promote a broader idea of academic success. In the former category lie our mentor program, which is open to all students, the educational panels we have held on LGBTQ issues and parenting in academia, and our potlucks. During each of these activities, we look for practical ways to address the issues under discussion – at our parenthood panel, for example, faculty members realized they could copy keys to the nicer faculty bathrooms to offer another privacy option for graduate student mothers changing or nursing babies – but we try to keep in mind that the conversations themselves are often the most helpful benefit to come out of each event or program, as they build personal networks that academics can draw on to continue developing a culture of solidarity.

Erin: The other type of activity we put together is events based loosely on the idea that academic success is often measured too narrowly, leaving many academics unfulfilled because of the disassociation between their personal politics/lives and their scholarship. I would consider our panels that deal explicitly with feminism – pedagogy, identity, activism, scholarship – as falling into this category. In these panels, we invite graduate student speakers to discuss their experiences, beginning conversations that usually go far beyond the original topic of the panel. In these discussions, graduate students get to listen and talk to each other about issues they are passionate about in a low-pressure, supportive environment. In a field in which research and passion and politics and teaching are sometimes seen as inappropriate or dangerous pairings, our roundtables are meant to remind students of the broader significance of their academic projects to their lives and to their ideological systems.

Part 4: Goals

Layne: The Feminist Solidarity Group is not a radical activist group challenging the essential structure of academia. It is run by graduate students with little power, and little time, to advocate for some of the sweeping bureaucratic and ideological changes that I believe our field needs. It also does not have a strong activist presence outside the academy. Erin and I are sometimes disappointed that we have not started a significant conversation about the connections and disconnects between feminism in academia and in our larger communities. Two wishes that I would have for our group’s future are, first, that it would offer more opportunities for its members to create bonds with non-academic feminists, anti-racists, and other activists, and, second, that it would begin a more critical discussion about feminism in the academy.

Erin: I would add that sometimes, because of a greater lack of discussion and community at the department and campus levels, it feels like we are reinventing the wheel. To address some of those larger issues, and to work on tackling them, it would be better for our group to have (like Layne says) more communication with other campus groups. For instance, UT now has a faculty LGBTQ group whose agenda includes gaining partner benefits for homosexual and non-married heterosexual couples. This seems like an issue that might greatly affect UT graduate students, but one in which our group has not participated.

Another issue that Layne and I have attempted to address, but which has never really gotten off the ground, is the relative absence of feminists of colour from the FSG. We are continually interested in making our group as inclusive as possible. However, I would like to see more conversations take place with feminists of colour in academia within and including our group.

Layne: Solidarity has remained a lens through which I see FSG activities: in each meeting, panel, or program we put together, the underlying goal is to overcome our isolation and individualistic perceptions of our careers to rest at least for a while in a community that explicitly and consciously offers support to its members. Erin and I hope to continue and enlarge our participation in creating these kinds of spaces and communities, because we see them as essential to the ideals and praxis of feminism.

Solidarity: Definitions and Practices

Though we use the word solidarity relatively uncritically in the above conversation, we want to use our informal reflections as the starting point for a more critical conversation about how our negotiations with solidarity relate to the larger conversations about how and why it works as a feminist concept. In order to situate our experiences, we will use the next section of this paper to trace historical formations and theoretical models of solidarity, before returning to a closer analysis of our group’s construction of and experience with solidarity. Through this contextualization and analysis, we will attempt to determine the actual and potential roles of the FSG in promoting and re(-)forming feminist solidarity.

Solidarity has long functioned as an organizing principle within the feminist movement, helping to gather feminists together in critical masses that work to achieve various social and political goals.[1] Though a key concept to the movement prior to the time of the second wave, we will focus on this particular period as a time when the movement’s seemingly united front crumbled and its views of and relationship to solidarity underwent enormous contestation and change. At its simplest, solidarity functioned during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s as a means by which members of “consciousness raising groups” (e.g. national feminist organizations like NOW) built identity-based coalitions. However, many of these second wave groups often used as a foundation for their solidarity the assumption that the term “woman” functioned as a ”stable” descriptor with set terms and certain political goals, a problem that resulted in the disempowerment and erasure of racial and sexual minorities within the movement. In her 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful, editor Robin Morgan illustrates the totalizing potential of feminism in her description of the women’s movement: “[this movement] has the potential of cutting across all class, race, age, economic, and geographical boundaries—since women in every group must play essentially the same role, albeit with different sets and costumes” (xviii). Morgan’s reduction of cultural difference to “sets and costumes” essentially ignores the attention to diversity, exchange, and dissent hooks outlines in the above quotation, and has been subject to critiques such as that of Brian Norman, who notes the “thin subsection” of black feminist writings included (123) and Chandra Mohanty, who argues in her seminal work Feminism Without Borders that Morgan’s “universal sisterhood” promotes “appropriation and incorporation” of the multiplicity of women’s voices, particularly those of Third World women (116).[2] Writing like that of Mohanty and Norman is indicative of the particular problems raised by ideas of solidarity that understand unity to be founded on agreement. bell hooks argues that this kind of silencing “universalism” led many feminists, disillusioned by bourgeois white women’s “vision of Sisterhood” and the “notion of common oppression,” to turn their backs on feminism (127).

As more feminists began to challenge this essentialist understanding of “woman” and to describe the oppressions they faced, ruptures and fissures developed between different feminist groups. Factionalism and identity politics emerged to become a new dominant organizing principle of the movement.[3] But the concept of solidarity did not disappear – rather, feminists began to grapple with new forms that would address the dialectic nature of solidarity, one that calls for some kind of common ground as well as the ability to recognize and allow for differences. hooks is one of many who work to rehabilitate the concept, and her view of solidarity exemplifies the general direction of feminist thinking. In her 1986 essay “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Among Women,” she suggests that to address both elements, feminists must have ”a community of interests,” “shared beliefs and goals around which to unite,” and “sustained, ongoing commitment” (138). For this to happen, however, she argues that feminists must give up the kind of solidarity that relies on safety, support, and encouragement; only then can they embrace a version that requires feminist participants to do the hard work of learning to know and engage each other’s differences, to see conflict as a tool rather than an obstacle, and to make others’ goals one’s own (138).

Other feminist scholars offer variations on this theme, though they often work from different perspectives and with different terms. Bernice Johnson Reagon, in her oft-cited 1983 essay “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” argues that solidarity through coalitions with unlike and potentially hostile people offers a means of survival for those in marginalized positions (357). Brenda Lyshaug’s concept of “enlarged sympathy” calls for group members to create solidarity by connecting affectively, which allows those in a coalition to cultivate deeper forms of recognition with each other without appropriating another’s experience (79).[4] Others, like Brooke A. Ackerly, emphasize a group framework that requires members and the group itself to self-interrogate as a way to purposely encourage dialogue and dissent, thereby incorporating difference (47-48, 56).[5] To some degree, these are all variations on the theme of inclusivity by way of different levels of engagement, and insist on self-interrogation, foregrounding goals over shared experiences, and an ongoing process of group identify formation. This brief overview, by no means meant to be exhaustive or complete, illustrates the directions of feminist thought with regards to solidarity.[6] In the rest of this paper, we will foreground one attempt to rehabilitate and empower the idea of solidarity in feminist academic communities.

Reflections: Solidarity in the FSG

The Feminist Solidarity Group arose from a desire for a specific kind of solidarity – one that addressed a lack that we felt within the space of our English department, emphasized feminist principles, and offered a means by which to network, mentor, and support each other. We wanted a group that emphasized cooperation while also being a space in which we could discuss and critique the structures in which we found ourselves and in which we participated. As our experiences illustrate, however, we inadvertently began in a way that echoes Robin Morgan’s uncritical conception of solidarity, by assuming that certain language would implicitly work for everyone. By envisioning our group’s participants as women, we risked alienating not only non-feminists in the department but also students who were potential allies; we were fortunate that some of these students were willing to raise the issue and force us to construct a more ethical and inclusive solidarity.

Despite our work toward inclusion, however, our group members still share some of the same kinds of identity markers that we have critiqued as potentially limited or exclusionary. Our solidarity was founded on circumstances as well as political goals, and these circumstances made particular ways of organizing and deliberating possible. All of us were graduate students in our twenties and thirties, the vast majority identified as women, and the majority were and are white. In addition, most of the original members knew each other in person (as department colleagues) before the group was founded, though we were not all close friends or members of the same cohort or academic concentration. We take classes and have offices in the same buildings, live in the same city, and have access to similar technological and academic resources, which allow us to coordinate meeting times, set up email lists, and communicate about our specific frustrations and goals more easily. On the one hand, our shared frames of reference made it easier to fulfill bell hooks’s criteria for solidarity, “a community of interests, shared beliefs and goals around which to unite, to build Sisterhood.” On the other hand, proximity to one another and to the power structures we depend on for funding and career advancement also made it necessary to forefront issues of privacy and confidentiality, particularly when dealing with online communication. It became imperative that we establish a high level of trust among our members early on, even as we were still determining our “shared beliefs and goals.”

Excepting the early reorganization of our group and continuing concerns over privacy, however, the issues we have faced have not been about conflict so much as participation and maintaining a constant group of participating members. For our group, contentious debate has not been the issue. Instead, we have faced the issues of inaction and deflection: we worry that our group may not be fulfilling its potential as a contributor to political dialogue at a department and community level. We are not like Reagon, who describes her participation in solidarity as a desperate act, claiming, “The only reason you would consider trying to team up with somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive” (357 – sometimes it seems we don’t have as much at stake as the kind of feminist communities she describes. What is at stake for a group like ours, with members who see a variety of issues at different levels (some systemic, some easily solvable)? To conclude this essay, we will briefly discuss three feminist goals in which we believe our group holds a stake and has the potential to make a contribution.

One: A principled approach to feminism in academia

The first and most obvious mandate for the Feminist Solidarity Group is to take an ethical approach to feminism and solidarity within academic communities, one that addresses exclusions within feminism by maintaining a self-critical, group-centred approach. Given ongoing divisions within feminist communities, this is a process that is very much “at stake” for us. Soon after the group’s organization in 2006, a small group “blog committee” circulated a draft of a “mission statement” to our members, and after undergoing revision by the group as a whole, it was posted on our blog:

[FSG] activities and discussions are open to women, men, and transgendered graduate students who are committed to standing in solidarity with one another, recognizing and attempting to address gender inequity and intolerance in the academy, as well as all the various forms of racial and class oppressions and discriminations that intersect gender, and sharing our experiences in order to help others with the practical, personal, and political challenges of graduate school and academic life.

Ideally, this mission statement would be the foundation for a “working set of principles for our projects that is feminist and community based” (Naples 192), but the complications lie in defining the community (or avoiding defining the community) in, through, and for which the group works. In this statement, group members attempted to address previous areas of conflict by being both specific and open about gender inclusion. We also used the term “the academy” to identify both our own subject positions and the object of our group’s critique, a delimitation that works to avoid the totalizing discourse Mohanty critiques. However, in this statement we placed a lot of responsibility on our group to incorporate disparate groups of students and organize against a variety of interconnected oppressions. In some ways, we have lived up to that responsibility, as we outline above in describing our focus on broadening access to academic status and success in our parenting panels and LGBTQ 101 workshop. However, we have to frequently acknowledge that in demography and political focus, we fall short of Lyshaug’s “fluid alliances between diverse subjects,” as the relatively few members of the group that participate most largely determine the group’s priorities. We are working through sending out information on our listserv and starting conversations among members to move toward broader coalitions within and in support of the communities and principles we affirmed in our mission statement.

Two: A cooperative and ethical approach to consensus building and knowledge building

Closely related to the issue of ethical solidarity in academia is the concept of cooperation, a value often identified with feminism and one mentioned frequently during the group’s inception as something we felt was missing in existing academic circles. Elizabeth Ermarth advocates an emphasis on cooperative movement building over academic success in her 2007 article “Professionalizing Feminism”: “When women emphasized solidarity first, they improved their economic and professional situation; when women emphasized professional ambition first, solidarity tended to go out the window” (39). We think that one contribution the FSG can make to academic feminism is to re-imagine the goals and values of our academic careers, eliminating some of the isolating possessiveness that seems to pervade research and teaching, enabling discussion not only of the different career tracks available to graduate students, but also of the diverse personal and political investments that characterize our approaches to our careers. In workshops with titles like “Authority in the Classroom” and “Feminism in Academia,” we try to start conversations that run counter to the profession’s emphasis on winning competitive fellowships, getting elusive “research one” jobs, and “keeping one’s cards close” about our successes and struggles. While the kind of self-examination and personal choice our group prioritizes arises out of privileges we have as academics (i.e. unstructured time for thinking and writing and a range of career options for which we are qualified), charging top-tier graduate students to approach their careers with an eye towards coalition building, sharing of teaching and research resources, and open communication is not without consequences in a field as rigorously competitive as university work. The dearth of academic jobs for new Ph.D.s encourages both an intense focus on individual achievement and a desire for coalitions that work to exclude those whose goals call into question the priority (or the definition) of scholarly success, and as Mohanty, Heyes, hooks, and others have noted, the discursive and economic pressures can work to silence critical voices even in progressive academic communities. We believe our group performs a service as one of very few “safe spaces” for criticism not only of policies, and politics, but of some of the foundational myths of academia.

Three: Connections between feminist academics and extra-academic communities

One such myth is the idea of university spaces as “apolitical,” in the sense that they do not engage directly, but merely comment upon, tensions in extra-academic politics at a local, national, or international level. As Stanley Fish has argued elsewhere, “academics should not refrain from being political in an absolute sense – that is impossible – but that they should engage in politics appropriate to the enterprise they signed onto.” Just as the FSG interrogates the definition of community, we would like to challenge Fish’s notion that there exist stable boundaries to “the enterprise [we] signed onto” as feminist academics. While the FSG works mostly within the space of our own program and with English department colleagues, as we discussed in the above conversation, one of our goals is to establish more connections with groups within and outside the university setting. Our group listserv has become a place for members to post about issues and events that may be too “political” for other departmental email lists; recently, conversations have developed there about reproductive rights, racism in the feminist blogosphere, and the politics of the raid on the FLDS compound in West Texas. Also, through the listserv and our programming, we highlight the work of our members in extra-departmental groups and causes. For example, one of our members works as the research assistant for the partner benefits project Erin mentioned above, and her experiences will be the focus of an upcoming FSG symposium to build awareness of LGBTQ organizing on campus.

The FSG’s ability to continue influencing our department’s culture and forming alliances on campus and in the community depends precisely on our continued examination and critique not only of our own actions and politics, but also of the ways that feminist solidarity functions in academic and other communities. Solidarity operates in inclusive and exclusive ways on a number of personal, professional, and rhetorical levels. While we have theorized here about our personal experiences as “insiders” in a particular project built around feminist solidarity, our larger goal is to provide one basis for continued examination of the ways that women’s and feminist solidarity is enacted and represented across a spectrum of mediums and communities. While the stakes and stakeholders vary among spheres of action and particular coalitions, forming ethical models of solidarity seems essential to the feminist project.

Many of the theories we’ve spotlighted in this article return over and over again to the troubled concept of solidarity as a (the?) pre-requisite for change. Why are feminists drawn to this concept in the first place? What do we need to understand about the history of solidarity to form ethical feminist coalitions and groups? When solidarity is found outside of political or identity-based coalitions, what forms does it take? What representations of solidarity undermine or uphold feminist values? Where does solidarity exist outside of the self-conscious formations we’ve described here – in what environments does it thrive, and in what environments is it limited by a lack of access to the power of organization and time for self-reflection? The responses to this essay by Morgan Gresham, Jessica Restaino, and Cambria Stamper address such issues in more detail, as they consider alternate sites of feminist solidarity and reflect on the myriad of ways in which communities seek to establish ethical and beneficial relationships among their members.


Notes

1 For overviews of the work done on feminist solidarity, see Nina Ulasowski's "'It's a hard row to hoe, girl': Feminist Solidarity in Women's Antiwar Activism: Women in Black and the Dilemma of Difference" (Honours Thesis, University of Queensland, 1998) [http://www.gilasvirsky.com/femsolidarity.html] (20 Apr. 2008); and Carolynn O’Donnell’s “A Philosophical Account of Feminist Solidarity Between Women” (Senior Thesis, Mount Holyoke College, 2007). back

2 Specifically, Mohanty criticizes the framework that Robin Morgan uses in her edited collection, taking issue with Morgan's theories that assume that all women experience "a common condition" and share a "common worldview;" she argues that Morgan understands women to share the same experience in spite of their various differences, as a kind of "universal sisterhood" (111, 109-117). back

3 For further reading about both the forms of discrimination faced by women of colour within mainstream feminist organizations as well as their responses and critiques, see Gloria Anzaldúa’s and Cherríe Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back. For further reading about the development of identity politics, see Barbara Ryan, ed. Identity Politics in the Women's Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001). Ryan offers an overview of both praise and criticism of a politics of difference. back

4 Specifically, Lyshaug's enlarged sympathy involves "imaginatively introjecting others' differences into oneself in order to claim a kind of kinship with them, a practice that can thereby alter one's own self-understanding to some extent [...] [The result] for participants is the capacity to recognize the complexity of others," which Lyshaug argues makes for a more committed coalition (author's emphasis, 89-94). back

5 In particular, Ackerly argues for a process that she calls "deliberative learning," in which feminist groups adopt a structural model in which they must be constantly interrogating issues as a way to "[engage] with women at the margins of our own spaces" (47, 48, 56). At the end of her article she offers "design considerations for feminist deliberative forums" such as how to "choose participants, design meetings, provide networking opportunities, prioritize language and translation accommodation, and establish evaluation criteria and processes" (58). back

6 Though much work exists that discusses the potential of solidarity, there are also accounts of failed attempts. For further reading, see the section entitled "Lessons On Inclusiveness" in Ryan's Identity Politics in the Women's Movement. back

 

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