SDG 5 aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Browse books and journal articles relating to this SDG below and find out more on the UN Sustainable Development Goals website.
Goal 5: Gender Equality
The sheer multiplicity of positions, tensions, debates, concerns, and complexities of my colleagues’ accounts of their feminist activist identities underscores the absence of a singular ‘feminist activism’. As well as offering a multiplicity of feminisms, my colleagues’ narratives illustrate the complexity of establishing and maintaining their activist identity in the context of the community sector. Not only were my colleagues grappling with constraints on their activist identities deriving from their intersection with the government, other funders, and institutions (such as the police) but they were also negotiating constraints on their feminist activist identities as part of their interactions with their colleagues. From their accounts, it is evident that the almost utopian ideal of feminist activism grappling predominantly with external constraints (Reinelt, 1994; Nichols, 2011; D’Enbeau and Buzzanell, 2013) overlooks the complexity of organizing through a multiplicity of feminisms within feminist organizations. The micro-politics, the small negotiations within these discussions I had with my colleagues are therefore important to how we can effectively practice solidarity in social movements, particularly when these movements have become increasingly formalized.
In the following sections, I draw together some of the elements of my colleagues’ accounts of their feminist activist identities to explore the constraints and possibilities of engaging in activism through difference. The remainder of Part IV is structured like a spiral: starting at the widest point of intersection with external stakeholders, narrowing the focus to within the collective, and finally looking at the stories of my colleagues specifically. I first attend to the context of the community sector to unpack how feminist activist identities shift and change at various intersections between the collective and stakeholders.
Academics who venture into ‘the field’ and engage with activists are frequently unsettled by the complexity of negotiating the lines of their academic and activist identities. As Reedy and King (2019) elucidate, those lines cross multiple other lines of identity such as insider and outsider or participant and friend. These lines of identity are further complicated by simultaneous, and sometimes divergent, institutional commitments to research and political commitments to the social justice cause of the movement. Consequently, academic activists often have a tangled sense of self and are unable to neatly distinguish one line from another. Other activist ethnographers have underscored, however, that examining the tangled lines of identity is essential to understanding the messy, multifaceted process of social change (Naples, 2003). As Behar (1996: 6) puts it, ‘what happens within the observer must be made known … if the nature of what has been observed is to be understood’. In other words, we can better understand social change if we come to terms with how we were changed.
It is unsurprising, then, that when I started volunteering with the collective, I quickly became unsettled. I was concurrently a volunteer, a colleague, a researcher, an insider, an outsider, an activist, an academic, and, in the end, a friend. For the first few weeks, I continued to carry my initial assumptions about academics and activists. But these lines became increasingly tangled as I repeatedly crossed the cityscape. My fieldnotes show a marked evolution from my ‘academic’ stiff and formal observations of my participants, to a vulnerable exploration of how my ideas and identities were unsettled as I learnt more from my colleagues. It was not that I had lost my sense of self as a researcher, academic, or activist.
