The Feminist Combining Process
created by:
Sangeeta Ahmed, Ashley Howard and Hiywete Solomon
Types of Feminist Combining
The Combining Process is manifested in the creation of a movement informed by more than gender, race, class, or other types of identity politics. It recognizes the common struggles and solutions across movements led by various marginalized groups and works towards mutually beneficial ends, without necessarily relinquishing the original identity and cause of the movement. We see Combining achieved by recognizing seemingly disparate issues as different manifestations of a larger problem and thus integral parts of multiple struggles.
Feminist combining links feminist transformation with other forms of transformation. It involves women, men, and social movements in solidarity, that is, opposing forms of injustice that one does not directly suffer from. Feminist combining involves both the integration of other issues into the women’s/feminist movement, and the integration of feminist issues into other movements. Eventually, combining leads to more sophisticated, multi-dimensional ethical stance and understanding of social problems.
Feminist combining can happen on a personal level, or on an organizational level.
Personal Feminist Combining
Personal combining or solidarity happens when people become committed to supporting the struggles of others against a form of oppression or injustice that does not affect them personally, and from which they may even benefit. To elucidate this point we can consider the following instances:
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When whites oppose racism (For example, anti-racist movements and Peggy McIntosh's article "White Privilege Unpacking the Invisible Napsack")
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When able-bodied individuals are in favor of disability rights (American Civil Liberties Union)
We distinguish personal combining as linked with but distinct from activism or even participation in groups. Personal Combining may simply be changing one’s worldview and personal conduct. Personal Combining can come from empathy towards someone who is oppressed, often friend, loved one or family. A father’s love for his daughter may open his eyes to the evils of sexism. Likewise, a heterosexual parent’s love for a gay child incites the former to oppose homophobia. Again, Personal Combining can also come from one’s own education and moral development, as one learns about other forms of injustice and takes a stand against them.
Personal combining can lead to organizational combining, and also come from it. When a group commits itself to combining, it usually takes on the responsibility of educating its gender, class, or race-privileged members about the oppressions their sisters or comrades suffer from, encouraging personal combining.
Organizational Feminist Combining:
Feminist combining also happens on the organizational level, i.e. when movements and formal political groups come together with each other, as coalitions and alliances, to transform economic and social values, practices and institutions in feminist ways. In creating these links, organizational feminist combining enriches feminism’s understanding of women’s oppression, and ability to transform and transcend it. At the same time, organizational feminist combining brings feminist analysis to other social movements – anti-racist, gay/lesbian, ecology, peace – enriching their analyses and transformational abilities.
A reading of the History of Feminist Combining allows us to appreciate how the Feminist Movement originated as a single identity politics movement around gender polarization – that is, as a movement of women against sexism and male domination. When women got together to fight their oppression, they brought other forms of oppression into the women’s movement, but it became dominated by women privileged in race, class, and ability; their narrow view of women’s issues largely prevailed. The less privileged multiply oppressed women within the movement felt left out and oppressed within the movement. Their protest and activism set into motion the beginnings of Organizational Feminist Combining. Not only did working class women, lesbians, and women of color within the group mobilize for Combining, women in other non-women groups sought to develop meaningful alliances with the mainstream Feminist Movement.
By recognizing these two distinct sources of combining we can deduce that Organizational Feminist Combining takes two main forms: internal and external. Combing contains distinctions based on the effective organizational structures of the different Combining groups. The distinction between internal and external Combining serves to highlight Combining as a process encompasses both introspection and outward growth.