From Fraternity to Solidarity: Towards a Feminist Reconstruction

• In Event: Feminist Revolution, Resistance, and the Idea of Solidarity

Abstract

Although there is a literature on the possibilities of solidarity among women, there is to date scant analysis of the import of feminist perspectives for the concept of solidarity itself. Theorists and the public tend to use the terms “fraternity” and “solidarity” interchangeably. Yet, we can ask whether the model of fraternity--exemplified in the Three Musketeers and their slogan “All for one and one for all,” or in the bonds among members of a single nation, or in pernicious form in White Supremacist and ultranationalist militias--can adequately characterize the sorts of transnational solidarities most needed today. Traditional understandings take solidarity to require not only standing with fellow group members or compatriots but also necessarily standing against, and even fighting, an “other.” In this paper, I will argue that feminist approaches that highlight notions such as care, mutuality, empathy, and difference have much to contribute to an enriched conception of solidarity more suited to address core problems of contemporary societies, including entrenched inequalities and crossborder crises like climate change.

To develop this feminist interpretation, I will draw on my earlier notion of networking solidarities, especially in activist and often transnational social movements, which contrast with the traditional unitary solidarities that pertain to the internal relations among members of a group, who stand in the same relation to each other and to the group as a whole (although the groups are often hierarchical in practice). With newer networking solidarities, whether in social movements or among civil society associations, each node--individuals or groups--can have diverse relations with the other nodes, contributing in varying ways to the shared aims, most often those of overcoming oppression or eliminating suffering. The willingness to provide mutual aid, (a core feature of both unitary and networking types of solidarity), can benefit from a feminist interpretation that prioritizes care and can better account for difference and intersectionality. In both ideal types, this would require greater openness to outsiders, provided they broadly share the overall aims, regarding them as co-participants in a common project. Although all types of solidarity often involve struggle, a feminist approach would argue for agonistic relations with others, if possible, rather than wholly antagonistic ones. It would call for egalitarian relations among group members and the use of democratic decision-making for setting plans and policies. Additional feminist transformations would concern the ends or aims of solidaristic action beyond the means or methods used. Here the focus would be on overcoming oppression—whether of gender, race, or class--and on providing care and equalizing its burdens, now unequally distributed both within societies and globally. The focus on care and carework, and on processes of social reproduction, importantly supplements the existing important efforts of solidarity groups to address income and wealth inequality under capitalism.

The paper will begin by analyzing the two ideal types of solidarity and interrogating the adequacy of the fraternal understanding of solidarity with its the band of brothers metaphor. Prominent examples of feminist activist solidarities oriented to women’s reproductive rights and to protesting violence against women will help to articulate an alternative understanding, e.g., the Green Scarves movement in Latin America (including the recent #NiUnaMenos) and in Europe and the Middle East (e.g., We Will Stop Femicide—WWSF--in Turkey, and the large protests in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini). The Swiss Feminist Strike Movement will prove suggestive in regard to feminist methods. These feminist solidarities will be differentiated from authoritarian populist or anti-abortion groups, which limit empathy with others and define themselves as superior to other groups, defined ascriptively, e.g., by race or migration status. They are often internally hierarchical in construction, and once someone enters the group, it can be hard to exit. The reciprocities are often instrumental, rather than instances of more intrinsic forms of mutuality. In the feminist cases, the terms of struggle tend to be qualified by the norm of justice—as structural injustices, or oriented to the expansion of care, rather than being directed against other individuals per se. They may also be differentiated in establishing mutually supportive relations among the diverse groups that make up the network, desiderata stressed by feminist theory. Likewise, the requirement of some measure of empathy is in line with feminist theory’s highlighting of the interaction of reason and the sentiments. The paper will finally take note of and address some of the limitations of this notion of empathy in application to solidarity, which should foreground a political readiness to take action.

Author

• Carol C. Gould, City University of New York