A Report on the Living West as Feminists Project

In the dedication to her 2021 book We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, abolitionist Mariame Kaba mentions a lesson her father taught her: “Everything worthwhile is done with others.” Later in the book Kaba discusses this principle further, noting that organizing work, especially around restorative justice and prison abolition, cannot be done in isolation. “What matters to me, as the unit of interest, is relationships,” Kaba asserts, pointing out that prisons serve to isolate people and break relationships and that her political commitments as a prison abolitionist are to develop stronger relationships with people (179). Relationality is thus not simply one aspect of organizing work for Kaba; it is the central principle that has been driving her decades-long work against the prison-industrial complex.¹

Kaba’s words are directed at organizers, but they can also offer academics an opportunity for reflection. What are our political commitments as scholars of feminism, imperialism, settler-colonialism, capitalism, the global West/US West? What central principles drive our research, writing, pedagogy, and ways of being in the world? After all, it is not only the prison-industrial complex that isolates people and breaks relationships; borders, global capitalism, and patriarchal structures too are mechanisms that serve to isolate people and break relationships, to alienate us from ourselves, from other people, and from our environment. If we are committed to dismantling these systems, we must be committed to building stronger relationships. If we are to research, write, and teach in a way that is worthwhile and transformative, we must do it with other people.

Living West as Feminists: Conversations About the Where of Us (LWAF) is an attempt to put relationality at the center of our scholarship and to insist on thinking and writing with other people. Led by Dr. Krista Comer, this project takes up concepts like feminism, whiteness, and the West through conversations with feminists.² It is important to note that talking about any of these troubled concepts—feminism, whiteness, and the West—means considering how the places we occupy or have occupied have shaped us, thinking about how our inclusion in a space often comes at the expense of another’s exclusion from that same space, and recognizing that a political commitment to relationality requires refashioning our relationships with place, land, and modes of belonging. Hence, a key aspect of LWAF is that each participant selects the location for their interview, so that reflections on place and land are central to the conversation, and so that participants can share not only the thoughts and ideas they have but also the physical places that mean something to them and that have shaped their understandings of feminism.

The project commenced in summer 2021; as the graduate intern for LWAF, I had the opportunity to see how work that takes relationality as its central principle departs from “traditional” academic discourses and methodologies. In this paper I offer a report on LWAF, sharing the insights gained from being part of a collaborative feminist project and reflecting on the possibilities this type of work holds for graduate students and early career scholars in US West studies and in the humanities more broadly.

The Project

Living West as Feminists is a book project—under contract with the University of Nebraska Press—which commenced this past summer with Comer travelling to various cities in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Utah, and California to interview feminist colleagues working on/in the US West. The participants in this first round of interviews included professors, a retired professor and fiction writer, a graduate student (myself), an editor, an education specialist, and a nonprofit executive director. The locations that participants selected for their interviews included places like campgrounds that they frequent often, a park where they like to bird-watch, a public library, their parents’ house, and their own backyard.

Fig. 1.

Visual timeline from Krista Comer’s project: Living West as Feminists

The interview questions ask participants to reflect on their evolving relationship with feminism, what places they consider home places or places...