Reflections from the Chair

A Feminist Playbook for 2025 

Comments made at the March 2025 Anniversary Luncheon of the Santa Barbara Women's Political Committee

I want to get to the good stuff as soon as possible, the feminist playbook – what our feminist strategies should look like right now and for the next four years and beyond, but before that, I do want to start with the conditions that we are facing – what’s new and what’s old. And since you are all reading the news as I am, I’m not going to enumerate the attacks on basic rights and democracy that we are all witnessing, or list the Executive Orders, the banned words, the genocide, the life-saving programs being dismantled, the precarity and anxiety so many are experiencing, or the fascist solidarities the Trump administration is building with authoritarians around the globe.

Instead, I want to start with what I know best and what some of you might not be tracking, which are the attacks on women, gender, and sexuality studies programs in colleges and universities across the country.  I know I do not need to convince this crowd about the urgency of feminist research and feminist approaches to knowledge. Feminist research is the source of everything we now know about how gender shapes all facets of our lives – including health disparities, wealth and poverty, safety and violence, the impacts of climate change, war and occupation, household work and paid labor, migration and displacement, and the list goes on. The reason I want to talk about feminist studies today is not because of its indispensability, but because I think we can use the attacks on women’s and gender studies as a paradigm, as a lens through which to understand what we are up against and how we need to orient and organize ourselves as feminists under these unprecedented conditions.  

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As a chair of a Feminist Studies department, I am part of an informal national network of other WGS chairs and we’ve been meeting on zoom to share what’s happening on our campuses and to develop legal resource guides, opposition statements, and the like. 

This group was convened by Jennifer Nash, who is Distinguished Professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University, and the Director of the Black Feminist Theory Summer Institute. And she opened our first meeting by talking about the fast and slow death of women’s studies. On the one hand, we have the fast death, the rapid-fire onslaught of executive orders taking aim at so-called gender ideology; the closures of at least three longstanding women’s studies programs announced in the last six months; Northwestern pulling its financial support for the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women which has now been cancelled as a result (this conference is nearly 100 years old); death threats called in to gender studies at Yale; intruders and bomb threats in gender studies at Rutgers; a stabbing in a gender studies classroom at University of Waterloo, and feminist faculty being doxed and placed on right-wing watch lists around the country. This is the fast death, the recent whirlwind, the onslaught. On the other hand, we have the slow death of women and gender studies, or the fact that, in some ways, the discipline has been under attack since its inception: sometimes externally, by men’s rights groups demanding men’s studies in the 1990s, by male protestors who threatened violence at feminist events on campus, by harassment or isolation or devaluing of feminist faculty, but often just internal neglect by universities that have failed to provide feminist studies with sufficient institutional support. What I am getting at here is that the unpopular and dangerous quality of engaging in feminist scholarship feels both new in some ways and also quite old.

The reason I’m highlighting the dual nature of the assault on feminist studies, the fast and slow death, is because it of course mirrors the situation that all feminists currently find ourselves in. It is simultaneously shocking to witness new heights of misogyny on the national stage and in all branches of government AND these expressions of misogyny are also deeply familiar, they feel old.  

So, with an eye to what’s new and what’s old about anti-feminism, I want to offer a lesson that I think this moment is teaching me, anyway, and then I’ll move on to strategy, to the playbook.

II. 
The lesson is that the raw, shameless, unfettered misogyny of the Trump Era presents us with an opportunity. It frees us from post-feminism, or the claim that talking about misogyny is outdated and anachronistic.  I believe we now have a mandate to revisit some basic questions that they told us were no longer relevant: What does it mean that so many men hate women? What does it mean, for humanity, for our collective future, that men feel entitled to control women’s bodies and women’s labor?  What does it mean that we still track girls and women into marriage, the site where these inequalities become naturalized and romanticized?  What does it mean that to be a woman, especially a woman of color, is still to be charged with being unqualified? If these sound like some second-wave, well-worn questions, there is a reason. We, apparently, did not spend enough time here. This is why my own scholarship has been focused here, on the long durée of misogyny, and its interconnections with white supremacy. I argue in my writing that because centuries of patriarchy do not get undone in 50 or 100 years of feminist organizing, we can expect one anti-feminist backlash after another until we get to patriarchy’s last breath. 
Bertrand Russell describes naked power as power exerted without attempting to obtain consent. It doesn’t bother to hide its intentions. Naked power is not concerned with the rights of citizens or the rule of law, or moral standing in the eyes of the majority.  It is terrifying, but it does bring clarity-- it leaves no question about the violence and cruelty that demands our response. Voters, including young male voters, and white voters, elected a president convicted of sexual abuse and who has boasted about his ability to sexually assault women. This president has ordered the federal government to “defend women from gender ideology extremism and restore biological truth,” which is to say, to protect women from feminism, to protect women from our own strivings for freedom.   

Following the lead of critical race scholars, we can understand misogyny as woven into the very fabric of our nation, or baked in to our political systems and institutions, in much the same way that racism is. This means that our work will be done over centuries, not decades. Like the many dynasties that built the Great Wall of China, we will only do one piece of this work in our lifetime, and I believe we’re still working on a very basic piece:  how do we bring boys and men into a movement that seems irrelevant to them, or even against their own self-interests? (notice who is in this room) How do boys and men unlearn misogyny and humanize women? 

Recently, conservatives have begun disidentifying with the concept of empathy itself. They have also argued that accountability for harm, or women’s power to “cancel” men for the harm they commit, is the soft power of women, and that it must now be met with the hard of power of men. A widely circulated metaphor in the alt-right manosphere the Iroquois longhouse, a communal gathering space managed by women now being used by MAGA men as a symbol for the way that society has become too focused on women’s feelings and strategies, or the way our nation is now held captive by a metaphorical Den Mother who prioritizes consensus and care over men’s needs for ambition, risk, and expansion. So we are still here, in this basic place, where gender equity is experienced by legions of male voters as an existential threat to themselves.

III. 

So, what will we do? What is our playbook?

The Anyi Institute is a movement strategy think tank from which I’ve learned a lot about movement organizing, and they emphasize that all justice movements have an ecology made up of diverse strategies.

They see this ecology as divided into three different ecosystems: first, personal and cultural transformation work, like education; second, changing dominant institutions (like the law); and third building the alternatives, which can include mutual aid networks and other systems of care that braid our fates together. Each approach plays a crucial role in the larger fight for justice, yet often, movements become fragmented when different groups believe that their ecosystem is the most important one. 

So I want to use this paradigm to talk about our feminist playbook, especially in this time of unrestrained misogyny.

First, what does feminist personal & cultural transformation work look like in the Trump Era?  This is the work of transforming ourselves, so we are ready to call people into the feminist movement who are not already here. And, let me just say, this work is the hardest, for me anyway. It’s not fun chatting with people who still aren’t on board with feminism. It is deeply relational work that requires connection, mutual respect, and speaking to people using the language they know and focusing on the issues they care about. The hope is to come to a place of interest convergence, a place where their humanity and freedom converges with our own. 

Sometimes we judge this kind of educational and relational feminist work because it can seem like armchair organizing or virtue signaling. But if anyone in the room has ever done deep canvasing, where you listen to someone who has voted to take away your freedoms, you know that personal transformation work is HARD WORK. It is to listen to the person who wants to build the wall, to ban abortion, to ban the word “equality,” to fund a genocide, to deny healthcare to trans people, and so on—with the hope of understanding why they want these things, and to share with them how those choices are impacting the rest of us. We do this to find a seed of connection, even if only our shared sense of vulnerability and fear for the future. 

This is the work we do in the feminist studies classroom, and it’s what I’ve been dedicated to for 25 years.

The political scientist Daniel Martinez HoSang has argued that contemporary patriarchal fascist movements, and especially patriarchal white Christian nationalist movements, are driven in part by fear of humiliation. Under conditions of great inequality, people regularly witness other people’s suffering and humiliation. HoSang believes that for the millions of people who are loyal to patriarchal authoritarians like Trump, the desire to be the humiliator rather than the humiliated is a core psychological driver. Added to this are ever-popular narratives about how “boys are in crisis” or how men are being left behind, and we can see clearly that our feminist playbook will need to start with the relational work of engaging with men’s feelings. And I want to be clear that the best people to do this work are FEMINIST MEN, so we need to ask them to get busy.

Second, what does changing dominant institutions look like in the Trump Era?

Using the power of the people to pressure dominant institutions to change is what most people think about when they think about movement work. We have demands, we want things to change, so we call our representatives in congress, we march in the streets, we boycott, we divest, we vote. 

This kind of work was highly visible from 2015 to 2021, when three black feminist women, two of whom are queer, founded the Black Lives Matter movement after the police killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.  It was a simple message, that Black life matters, and it became a movement rallying cry that brought millions of people into the street around the world, and a platform that informed the Breathe Act, numerous policing reforms, and the Defund movement. Dominant institutions, like police and prisons, were being challenged.

And yet, the backlash was swift and effective. The right set about to discredit and misconstrue the movement, and to threaten and harass these Black feminist leaders until they feared to leave their homes. 

Then Trump was reelected and now we are all watching as their work is rolled back, along with basic rights and safety nets we didn’t even know were in danger. Agencies and systems designed to protect all citizens are being weaponized to protect the few and harm the many.   

This has led to some existential grappling among feminist movement leaders who are questioning whether these dominants institutions will EVER adequately represent us or create the conditions for our freedom. And this is why many grassroots feminist organizers have shifted much of their energy over to the third ecosystem, which is imagining and building new alternatives. 

So let’s talk about building feminist alternatives:

Three inspiring movements working in this ecosystem are the healing justice movement; the transformative justice movement; and the mutual aid movement. 

All three are deeply feminist projects led largely by Black feminists like Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, Patrisse Cullors, Cara Page, and Adrienne Maree Brown. Each of these movements is anchored in an understanding that the state will never keep us safe or provide us with the resources we need to live with dignity and self-determination. And when we come to that recognition, what’s left is to build new systems ourselves, within our own communities. 1.  The healing justice movement is about recognizing that systems of oppression wear us down and traumatize us, so it is vital to movement building to make sure people can rest, recover, have therapy, have childcare – in other words, we are making the revolution not one that just includes feminists, but IS feminist in its methodology. 2. The transformative justice movement is about shifting from a punitive model of justice to one that addresses the root causes of harm, and to a model of justice that also facilitates community-based accountability and healing after a harm is done. 3. And the mutual aid movement is about not relying on the state, but creating community-based networks to meet our own needs – not from a place of charity, but a place solidarity. 

Our feminist playbook will include each of these ecosystems that make up the ecology of feminist resistance. And healthy balance across these approaches will be vital. This means making a commitment to not neglect the slow work of personal and cultural transformation and the very slow and imaginative work of building new models of community when the state fails us. 

I want to leave us with the words of adrienne maree brown, who said recently on social media that the way we are going to get through this time is to: observe what’s happening; orient ourselves (gather our people, identify our skills, own up to the limits of our capacity; and then take action within our boundaries, and according to our capacities. We choose a lane, and go hard in that lane, so that we don’t get swallowed by overwhelm, depression, or anxiety.

So if I were to offer up a discussion question or two, it would be: which part of the movement ecology calls to you?  What is the lane in which you can work hard, but also sustainably? And what form of care or community do you need to keep going?