Revolutionary Feminisms. Brenna Bhandar

able to acknowledge my ambivalence. But for so long, I just couldn’t do it.

      The analytic categories available to us (here I’m thinking about those generated by feminism) lacked the capacity to help us to understand that. We needed to try to think about what happens when we’re face-to-face, knowing that the battle is around the importance, the centrality of the legacies of imperialism for the making of our lives as women in Britain at that time. But actually, what it means is asking, who are we facing? We need to know that stuff; we need to have ways of understanding that colonialism transcends, even in neocolonial times, apparently, formal independence. It ricochets down through the generations, but also down into the interactions between one constituency and another. At the Birmingham National Women’s Liberation conference,³ there was a big fight in the plenary session around imperialism. (It was also around sexuality and all sorts of other things.) We said, ‘You cannot begin to move forward unless we can grasp Britain as a neoimperial power.’ Its links with Israel and Palestine, and Ireland at the time – those old modes of imperial/colonial power – were part of the ‘nowness’ of empire. Women stood up in that great big hall screaming at each other. This wasn’t just a battle between an ideological position that said to understand Britain now we need an anti-imperial lens, and another that said we need to form around gender; it wasn’t just those ideological positions confronting each other, but groups of actual women saying, ‘You are this, that, or the other’ – abusing each other, in one way or another. So who is facing who then? Who have we become?

      It’s no longer Gail Chester and Gail Lewis on opposing sides of that ideological argument; it’s a phalanx of white women facing us, and from her perspective, probably a phalanx of Black women (and I am aware of the imagery of that language!). If we’re going to make an intervention to expose the limits of white feminism in whichever political frame – its limits, its incapacity to really grasp what it might mean to be a gendered subject in South Africa, a Black woman in Brixton, in Gaza, in Toronto – what might that mean, actually?

      The feminist project did not and does not have the capacity to engage that; it needed something, and yet there we were: feminist subjects facing each other in battle. Everyone running away feeling wrecked. Everyone going home feeling like, ‘Well, I’m never going to go to a feminist conference again.’ With us being blamed for wrecking the conference, or the plenary at least. So in part, I want to understand how there can be such explosions, and I want to understand them psychically, affectively and emotionally, not only structurally, because I think politics needs an emotional understanding too. In that I’m totally influenced by my social, cultural and psychological biography, alongside theoretical approaches of people like Raymond Williams and his ‘structure of feeling’ concept; Wilfred Bion and his theory of thinking; Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, with the sociogenic principle; or Audre Lorde and notions about anger, the ‘master’s tools’ and silence. These are all part of an intellectual inheritance available to me.