Recognizing and joining in my sisterhood

I’m still making my way through Manifesta, but I wanted to at least get some thoughts down while I do so.

“To be a feminist is to join in my sisterhood with women when often we are divided.”

This is a sentiment I see expressed periodically in my feminist studies and reading, but it didn’t fully reach me until I read this particular quote from Rebecca Walker on page 77.

I am someone with very few women friends, and even in my interactions with most women, I have an intense feeling of competition. It’s something that works at a visceral, gut level, and I know it’s from messages I have internalized throughout my life. I also know that a lot of women in my culture generally have similar feelings. It’s something I’m still trying to unpack and dissect and work through, but implicit in the above quote is that among feminists, among women, we should be showing solidarity with one another even—and perhaps especially—when we don’t agree.

We should be sharing our stories and our experiences with one another, and especially listening to each other. We should be realizing we’re all in this together, in all of our myriad, intersecting ways that we experience oppression. I carry a lot of my own privileges—I would never even know I had these privileges were it not for people sharing their stories and experiences. This is why I think it’s especially important for all of us to tell our own stories and to listen to one another.

These feelings of competition and distance seem almost especially tailored as a way to maintain the kyriarchy, and I think this is something I am going to continue to explore about myself. I think viewing and interacting with my sisters as sisters instead of competitors or even enemies is an incredibly subversive act that I would like to partake in fully.