Stop Thinking Properly: Feminist Activism and Coalescing with History

This article argues for a historically grounded, radical re-imagining of feminist coalition in the present moment. Feminist social science scholars and activists critical of NGOization and the Non-profit Industrial Complex have demonstrated how neoliberal feminist coalitions tend to prioritize institutional life-lines and outcome-oriented activism at the expense of systemic social change organizing. I join these critiques by situating the black feminist cultural production of Bernice Johnson Reagon and Alice Walker as critical rejoinders and vital to imagining beyond these now dominant coalitional imaginaries. I read two late 1970s/early 1980s narratives, Reagon's "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century," and Walker's novel Meridian, and track the political imaginaries that are paved over by the powerful drive and desire for institutionalization as a non-profit or NGO. I argue for the significance of pain and the practice of coalescing with history where, as Reagon and Walker differently suggest, bodily, emotional, and psychic pain are an indispensable part of coalition. Pain is necessary to decenter, de-individualize, and disrupt the political presentism of coalescing feminist activist subjects. The painful experience of coalescing across difference makes it possible for social movements to coalesce with history, a nonteleological connection between the political imaginaries of the past, present, and future.