DoesFeminismHelp

Does ‘feminism’ still help us ‘care’?, Deep Discussions, Sun morning
ADOPTER(S)	Helen Graham
FACILITATOR(S)	it would be good to identify facilitators in advance! enter names here

‘Feminism’ and ‘feminist’ are loaded. As political terms they have helped organise thinking about the world, making connections between different women’s experiences and have allowed an articulation of resistance and alternatives. However, they have also been shown to be ambivalent for many women, terms of racial and class exclusivity which are not equally open to everyone. In a public context where feminism is either lampooned or falling out of usage, yet at a time when the links between women’s particular experiences of neo-imperialism and global capitalism are in constant danger of falling out of view or being appropriated for cynical use, this workshop will collectively explore whether ‘feminism’ still helps us ‘care’?

Key questions:

• What do you care about?
• How has ‘feminism’ enabled you to care, and to act on caring? How does ‘feminism’ help organise, align or express particular aspects of our politics?
• What has ‘feminism’ prevented or made less possible? Does the question ‘are you a feminist’ close down politics?
• Is or why might the term be worth fighting for?

How the workshop will engage with these questions

The workshop will work through these questions by starting from our particular experiences and practices of ‘caring’ – the emotional processes through which the world and its inequalities come to matter. This will act as a validation of each of our local understandings as a means of drawing ‘feminism’ as an explanatory ‘transcendental beyond’, a political means of explaining what we can see by what we can’t, into question.

The workshop will be a two hour session. The session is aimed at anyone who has ever ‘cared’, or felt unable to care, through feminism.