Anti-Racist Feminist Politics: Thinking with Backlash, Creating New Worlds

Although it has only been 5 years since George Floyd’s murder and the global Black Lives Matter protests, progress on racial justice has seemingly stalled. Despite institutional actors’ bold statements supporting racial justice, we are witnessing not merely a backsliding on their commitments but the denial and delegitimisation of racial justice as a concept, a politics and as a set of policy goals for social change. From the denigration and abandonment of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives, to the targeted harassment and violence against high profile women of colour in public life to the criminalisation of different kinds of protests, racial justice appears to be out of step with the times. Anti-racist feminist actors—at both the grassroots and in institutions—find themselves in the middle of a reactionary whirlwind. The backlash—against racial, gender and migrant justice and trans rights—emanates from both the political left and right, including within progressive social movements. This poses fundamental challenges to solidarity and coalition-building. Whilst this current backlash is both terrifying and exhausting, backlash politics are not new and anti-racist feminists have always had to navigate treacherous waters when political opportunity structures open and close. Indeed, much can be learned from how previous generations—from the 1968 student protestors to gay liberation activists to Black Power militants—responded to the erosion of their fragile social, political and economic gains. This section is about thinking with the concept of ‘backlash’—what it means, what it does politically and even, what kinds of opportunities it might create. Does the backlash look and feel differently when it comes from the socialist left rather than the Christian democratic right? Is backlash even the right concept to be using in this moment, when, perhaps, the Black Lives Matter protests and the subsequent political overpromising and under-delivering, were merely an interregnum to politics as usual? This section will also consider the spaces that backlash creates, namely marginality. As bell hooks (1989: 207) argues, marginality is not only ‘a site of deprivation…it is also a site of radical possibility, a space of resistance…[marginality] offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds’. This section will actively solicit contributions from: • early career researchers • scholars of diverse geographic locations, including the Global South • racially minoritised and other underrepresented scholars We seek panel and paper proposals and other creative contributions addressing the following questions: • What are the origins of the current backlash against racial, gender and migrant justice and trans rights? What are the implications for feminist politics? • Was it always ever thus? What are the histories of backlash? What is, and isn’t, distinctive about this period of backlash and the threat it poses to anti-racist feminist politics? • What does the concept of backlash illuminate and what does it overshadow? What are we not discussing when we use the concept of backlash? • How is resistance enacted at the grassroots, in civil society and within formal political institutions? • How is the backlash experienced by different marginalised groups? How do they resist, challenge and create new worlds in the midst of backlash? • How might campaigns and movements for justice shift away from linear conceptions of progress in the face of backlash and aim for other temporalities and understandings of ‘success’? • Is it possible to find joy in the backlash? How do groups balance the material politics of deprivation with the joy and pleasure of being marginal and undercover? • How does backlash travel across time and space? What transnational networks and coalitions are needed for effective resistance work, and how might they operate?