This study investigates how some women in the United States are engaging in projects of solidarity around war on the Internet, how their positioning is represented, and how the site authors reach toward what María Lugones describes as “liminal” spaces for coalition. While Lugones views the ambivalence in liminality as “both a communicative opening and a communicative impasse” (76), she sees possibilities if we continually keep in mind that we do not know another person and that we resist fitting her into a prefabricated narrative (84). I will discuss this more below.

In this roundtable discussion, Layne Craig and Erin Hurt (“Theory and Praxis”) and Morgan Gresham (“Creating Feminist Solidarity”) refer to processes of feminism and solidarity that include a hopeful or friends-building stage and a stage of disillusionment.[1] As interactive and dynamic spaces, the websites examined in this paper differ in that they do not reflect the ebbs and flows as much as they provide centres for information, communication, and action. The process parts of coalition happen outside of these main electronic venues.

However, there are similarities to this project in the roundtable discussions that include Gresham’s work on Caroline Knapp and the suggestion that women seek “moments of connection” to emerge from “a world of isolation and of fear.” Likewise, Jessica Restaino’s paper on “Mother Rhetorics” also describes a gendered environment and a “language of fear, paranoia, and perfectionism” that can isolate women. Restaino refutes this language and proposes that women examine it “with a critical eye, one dedicated to destabilizing Motherhood in favour of motherhoods,” which recognizes diversity in mothering approaches. Hurt and Craig also mention the issue of isolation in their graduate school experiences as one motivation for connection with other feminists. And, Hurt and Craig’s delineation of what “feminism” has excluded, along with the questions of how to change concepts and practices, remains crucial for feminists. The activist websites that I examine offer connections and action in relation to the multiplicity of women’s positions, and this project examines efforts toward feminist solidarity in these electronic spaces.

One website aimed at coalition, Women Against War, is produced by women in the Capital District of New York in Delmar. These women are performing grassroots organizing, protests, and lobbying, and they are reaching out to support and communicate with Muslim women in their community. Solidarity among Muslim and non-Muslim women seems to contain a consistent urgency in the United States, especially in light of recent protests to shut down a New York school aimed at educating Muslims and non-Muslims about Arabic language and culture.[2]

The other website examined is by Captain Barb, who is retired from the U.S. Air Force, and presents images, opinions, and information on women who have served in the U.S. military. Her site is called American Women in Uniform, Veterans Too! Captain Barb wants to keep the knowledge that women have fought in all U.S. wars alive, and she posts self-described “rants” about the lack of equality in the military if it includes “exceptions,” or exclusions for women. She has posted a collection of photographs of women in the current U.S. wars, creating electronic correspondence and communication.

The women of Women Against War, Captain Barb, and the women on her website have participated in bodily practices in particular locations and times, contributing to goals of solidarity and knowledge production about women and war. This kind of knowing by women is not always valued, but Donna Haraway makes a case for specific situated knowledge in her “argument for situated and embodied knowledges and an argument against various forms of unlocatable, and so irresponsible, knowledge claims” (583). In response to the objection that these specific embodied accounts might be considered relativist, she writes that the “alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology” (584). Haraway acknowledges that knowledge is partial, not whole, and not the “master narratives” of modernity. This is a postmodern critique of epistemology that still offers possibilities for solidarity.

The websites of Women Against War and American Women in Uniform, Veterans Too! offer different kinds of solidarity, yet they share certain feminist tactics. Although they differ on their approaches to war, there are four ways in which these websites counter ignorance, contributing to solidarity around women and war, and forwarding feminist projects.

By using the Web as one tool for grassroots coalition-building and for disseminating and exchanging information, these women are reaching for spaces of liminality. While occupying single-category identity groups such as “women against war” or “military women,” these women also extend their communication to women of different cultural, racial, and religious positions. There is evidence in these websites of what María Lugones calls “[…] recognition of opacity and on reading opacity, not through assimilating the text of others to our own” (84). In other words, these women assume that there is something that they do not know about other women and their positions, and they seek to learn from other women. In Layne Craig and Erin Hurt’s “Theory and Praxis” paper, they mention Brenda Lyshaug’s work, which calls for internal work similar to Lugones’: “Cultivating 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” (Lyshaug, qtd. in Craig and Hurt).

Lugones also addresses how to recognize the complexity of others; she argues that no one should assume that we can really “see” another person and understand her. We should instead assume “opacity” of others (84). If we assume opacity of others, and consider the liminal states that they may occupy, we can, according to Lugones, reach out with “complex communication.” She describes it thus:

The authors of these websites stand in opposition to the Bush administration’s stated desire for silence about some categories of knowledge, and they provide liminal sites contradicting the wilful ignorance of the administration and the public about women organizing around war; discussing women’s military service, equality in the military, and women who have been sexually assaulted during military service; and bringing together women opposing warfare as a political method and opposing U.S. policy about war and troop levels.

When clicking on the Muslim Solidarity link from Women Against War sidebar, the linked page shows a photo of a group of women with headscarves, gathered together in an outdoor public space. This image is unlike most images of Muslim women circulated in public discourses in the U.S. Most images show women in poor conditions in Iraq, weeping over the deaths of their loved ones or in Afghanistan covered in burqas. We do not usually see images of Muslim women in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in the U.S. in positions of power, as gathered with other women, or as calm or peaceful, but the images on this website present different representations.

The women of Women Against War have reached out to Muslim women in the community in the form of what they call “kitchen table gatherings,” referencing historical U.S. grassroots organizing and by making the domestic interior space – the kitchen – a political and public place. These are women engaging in feminist and civic discourse and supporting other women, while countering the more dominant and mainstream machinations of fear, bigotry, and knowledge-making. And, this is a move toward solidarity where women are reaching for that liminal space that Lugones describes. Widespread ignorance in the United States about the texts of Islam as well as the variations of ethnic, national, cultural, and political practices of Islam is in part opposed by this website and the actions that it describes. Kitchen table gatherings of Muslim and non-Muslim women can contribute to specific, located, embodied practices of communication and political action.

Likewise, the website American Women in Uniform, Veterans Too! refutes stereotypes of women in several ways: It presents collections of linked documents about women participating in war, gives statistics and historical information on women and war, and significantly, it provides a long list of photos and narratives of women participating in recent and current conflicts. These photographs show women in uniform in action on their jobs. The images highlight the women and their functions in the military: one being pinned with “the Distinguished Flying Cross for valiant flying”; others show women working as medical staff, and another woman is in the lookout on her Navy ship. There are pages and pages of photographs that continue on this website, with women from many different racial and cultural backgrounds.

By situating their knowledges in specific practices and personal testimonies, the women on the websites about war are creating connections, forwarding feminist epistemologies, and reaching toward liminal spaces in order to learn about other women in actions toward coalition and feminist solidarity.