Feminist Relations: Rethinking Feminist Disagreement and Resistance in an Uncertain World

Feminists disagree. Some feminists disagree radically and with passion. While feminist scholarship has extensively problematized the assumption of a unitary feminist subject and called for pluralized, situated feminist subjectivities that can unsettle the Western-centric genealogies of feminism, how such a pluralization compels us to rethink feminist resistance remains undertheorized. This paper proposes to shift the starting point of this debate from the subject/subjects of feminism to feminist relations, or relations between different feminists. Going beyond the debates around similarity/difference, I suggest that this shift invites feminists to consider how they actually navigate the tensions between two foundational feminist values: autonomy and solidarity. From this perspective, feminist disagreement is not a failure of one’s feminist identity but an ordinary and inevitable part of feminist collective action. Yet, this inevitability is not coming from an entirely agonistic position that puts opposition at the center. The focus is rather on relational commitment, or the commitment to sustain one’s relations with different feminists, including the ones of conflict and radical disagreement. In a growingly uncertain world marked by rising authoritarianism, neoliberal exploitation, global climate crisis, and algorithm fetish led by the Big Tech, this paper argues that making this choice becomes both (1) an act of feminist solidarity and (2) a collective reclamation of feminist agency. This is neither a particularized or a (false) universal form solidarity that extends to only like-minded or similar feminists. Instead, it is a relational re-grounding of solidarity that encompasses one’s all possible feminist relations, including ones characterized with “uncomfortable” feelings such as disappointment, hurt, contempt, shame, distrust, etc. In this sense, resistance becomes an everyday practice of both democratic care and inter-subjective care for one’s feminist relations. Thus, by bringing together Jennifer Nedelsky’s and Kenneth Gergen’s views on relational subjectivity, critiques of Chantal Mouffe and Wendy Brown, and Ella Myers’ view on democratic care and worldly ethics, this paper aims to develop a relational understanding of feminist resistance that is grounded in embodied everyday practices in which feminists choose to remain accountable to one another, even and especially when they disagree, radically and with passion.