How emotions shape feminist coalitions

Intersectional solidarity and emotion

Feminists have paid extensive attention to how to achieve coalitions across race, class, or other inequalities. Such coalitions are often accompanied by feelings of disappointment, betrayal, anger, and guilt (Ahrens and Meier, 2019; Einwohner et al., 2019; Evans, 2016; Evans and Lépinard, 2019b; Kennedy-Macfoy, 2012; Reagon, 1998). Intersectional praxis refers to the ‘strategies activists use to negotiate the dynamics of solidarity and difference in coalitions’ (Zavella, 2017: 509). Black feminists particularly have emphasized intersectional praxis, including decentring Whiteness, recognizing structural and interactional racism, and forming genuinely inclusive organizations that ‘explicitly affirm group differences . . . [and] substantively engage diverse groups in deliberation’ including through organizational rules (Einwohner, et al., 2019: 2; Hill Collins and Bilge, 2016; Lugones, 1994; Srivastava, 2005). Intersectional praxis – and the emotions that are part of it – occur both ‘from within’ White-dominant organizations that push for inclusion of people of colour and ‘at the margins’ as people of colour organize autonomously (Labelle, 2019: 207). Such practices may lead to intersectional solidarity, which Ciccia and Roggeband (2021:1) define as ‘encompassing framing and transformative praxis to redress disparities in resources and representation’.

Many groups do not successfully practice intersectional solidarity. Emotions are part of the barrier. The emotional dimensions of inequalities of race, class, sexual identity, or gender constrain intersectional coalitions or lead to conflict (Luna, 2010). Confronting differences of structural location and experience within coalitions entails grappling with how power and position shape emotions and feeling rules for both the dominant and the subjugated (Srivastava, 2005). Positions of lesser power are associated with feelings of fear, anger, and frustration, while those of greater power are associated with guilt and shame (Jasper, 2011; Kemper, 2001). At the individual level, such emotions threaten ‘friendship and solidarity bonds’ (Flam, 2015: 4). In coalitions, such feelings are directed towards coalition partners, based on their relative power due to identity composition, location, or organizational influence.

Feminist coalitions across inequalities are imbued with feelings of mistrust, betrayal, anger, and guilt (Delap, 2018; Flam, 2015). Feminists of colour describe such anger (Lugones, 1994). bell hooks (2015 [1989]) described ‘black female rage towards white women . . . rooted in the historical servant-served relationship where white women have used power to dominate, exploit, and oppress’ (pp. 177–182). Anger, shame, or guilt of the more powerful also can inhibit intersectional praxis in coalitions as ‘longstanding [structurally privileged] activists who feel marginalized and unacknowledged may come to express their anger’ (Cole and Luna, 2010; Flam, 2015:4; Srivastava, 2005). As Yuval-Davis (2011) points out, even as coalitions solidify, they may include not just feeling ‘at home’ in a ‘safe space’, but also feeling ‘angry, resentful, ashamed, indignant’.

Empathy

As discussed above, empathy or affective solidarity may foster connection in intersectional coalitions. Unpacking its emotional dimensions helps understand how. Flam (2018: 318) argues that coalition partners’ ‘compassion’ for ‘distant suffering’ is only a ‘feel-good’ emotion for the privileged. In a different vein, Black feminist theorist Jennifer Nash (2013:3) argues for political community ‘rooted in a radical ethic of care’ that she calls ‘affective politics’. Rather than reifying or ignoring identity, affective politics is ‘rooted in affiliation and a shared set of feelings’ (Nash 2013: 14). Patricia Hill Collins (2000) also suggests empathy as a persistent theme in Black feminist thought. Yuval-Davis (2011: 14) views this version of care as at the core of a ‘feminist political project of belonging’ that provides a sense of safety that permits ‘emotional engagement to be, at times, angry, resentful, ashamed, indignant’. Yuval-Davis and Hill Collins refer to this as transversal politics, a form of coalition that builds on common values and distinct standpoints to establish solidarity and mutual trust.

Emotional labour and intersectional praxis

In intersectional coalitions, coalition brokers, leaders, and participants engage in emotional labour to manage feelings about each other and their relationship and ensure participation and influence by less-powerful participants (Guenther, 2009). Coalition brokers and leaders can foster solidarity and trust through practices that attempt to empower marginalized members, such as prioritizing their participation in meetings and leadership and using frames and rituals that resonate with diverse constituencies (Ahrens and Meier, 2019; Guenther, 2009; Zavella, 2017). Gawerc (2021: 5) found that such efforts allowed groups to ‘unite around shared principles while engaging difference’. Doerr (2018) suggests cultural alongside linguistic translation, in which participants’ positions of relative power and their cultural assumptions are translated for one another.

Workshops or consciousness-raising sessions for members of dominant groups are another technique of emotional labour, aimed at challenging feelings of superiority, anger, or resentment and channelling feelings of guilt into action (Delap, 2018). When coalition brokers and leaders reinforce privilege instead of managing and challenging the emotions associated with it, resulting coalitions are unlikely to practice intersectional solidarity (De Almagro, 2019). While White and otherwise-privileged feminists express ‘hurt feelings’ that can inhibit the formation of coalition (DiAngelo, 2018; Flam, 2015: 5), emotional labour by organizers could increase capacity to challenge one’s own privilege (Gould, 2009). But common techniques of emotion management – such as ‘rituals of emotional expression and personal experience’ in anti-racist discussions or consciousness raising – risk focusing on White women’s individual self-image and defence of an anti-racist identity (Srivastava, 2005: 41). Emotional expressions of anger, tears, guilt, and empathy do not move participants towards effective intersectional action (Srivastava, 2005).

In sum, past and present experiences of marginalization engender feelings of mistrust that work against coalition formation (Evans, 2019). Conversely, painstakingly forged interactional coalitions that deliberately begin to shift these emotions of power imbalance can set groups on a path to ongoing coalition. As Cole and Luna (2010) and Luna (2010) show, even apparently ‘successful’ coalitions are plagued with ‘tensions’ that exhaust participants. Thus, understanding the emotional dimensions of inequality and emotional labour to manage them are crucial to intersectional praxis.

Emergent feelings in collective action

Feminist coalitions across difference can evoke powerful positive emotions of solidarity and hope (Davis, 2007). For example, Cole and Luna (2010) and Luna (2016) show that the construction of actual and imagined community among women of colour across geographic, ethnic, or experiential bases can produce strong feelings of belonging. As Black feminist leader Barbara Smith wrote, talking about class, race, and sexual differences was important ‘Not for the purpose of divisiveness, but for the purpose of understanding and greater closeness’ (quoted in Breines, 2006: 169). As lesbian Puerto Rican activist Carmen Vásquez described, an experience in which she could express and ‘integrat[e] all of [her identities]’ was ‘a living, joyful, experience’ (Carastathis, 2013: 957).

This feeling of belonging with coalition partners develops through interaction (Jasper, 2011; Poma and Gravante, 2016; Van, Ness, Summers, and Effler, 2018). By participating in joint collective action, participants show that they are ‘emotionally invested’ in the coalition (Gawerc, 2021:8). Mass protests and rituals of singing, chanting, or story-telling can produce strong feelings of solidarity (Carastathis, 2013; Gantt-Shafer et al., 2019). For example, Zavella (2017) shows how practices of storytelling and spirituality helped connect diverse supporters of reproductive rights. This is especially effective when participants share an emotion culture (Gantt-Shafer et al., 2019).

Emotion culture compatibility and clash

Feeling rules about emotional expression vary by race, class, and nationality and are an important part of the cultural differences that face feminists in multi-racial organizations (Carastathis, 2013; Chun et al., 2013; Zavella, 2017). When interactions between coalition partners highlight their differences or rituals are meaningful within the emotion culture of only one partner, participants feel not solidarity, but alienation or negative feelings, making an ongoing relationship less likely (Gantt-Shafer et al., 2019).

Several studies show how differences in emotion culture between activists from different countries led to ‘culture clashes’ (Flesher Fominaya, 2015). In transnational European Global Justice network gatherings in the early 2000s, when Spanish activists with a more ‘serious’ movement culture interacted with UK activists who preferred incorporating feelings, art, and humour into meetings, neither was able to consider the other’s perspective. The culture clash produced ‘frustration, alienation . . . and a loss of ability to establish mutual solidarity’ (Flesher Fominaya (2015: 26). Similarly, divergent emotion cultures impeded coalition between indigenous Amazonian environmental groups and NGOs. Pieck (2013: 134) found that ‘[B]ureaucratized, professional organizations were shocked at the strong emotions . . . and seemed more comfortable with orderly, structured procedures. In contrast, radical NGOs and indigenous leaders seemed more at home with processes deemed “inefficient” by others’ and were more emotionally expressive. Ultimately, the coalition split along those lines.

Harrison and Risager (2016: 846) similarly found that Danish participants in a transnational protest against the European Central Bank reacted emotionally according to ‘their own criteria’. Nevertheless, the intense experience of coalitional protest, including repression by authorities, changed participants as their assumptions about ‘acceptable forms of activism and organization unravel and are reshaped’. Whereas initially clashing cultures led them to feel ‘out of place’, the experience led them ‘to finding one’s place in the mass protest event itself’ (Harrison and Risager, 2016: 846). Participants across organizations shared an adversary which, in turn, facilitated the formation of collective identity, an important component of coalitions. In other words, emotion culture and its transformation through experience can facilitate or impede the formation of coalitional collective identity.

Similar emotion cultures, conversely, can promote coalition. Ransan-Cooper and Duus (2018) find that anger at a shared adversary motivated a politically diverse coalition between Australian farmers and environmentalists opposed to coal-seam gas. Although anger sparked the coalition, the ‘joy’ of community interaction maintained it. Norms of politeness in the rural community and active emotional labour by participants allowed them to avoid confrontation. In this case, a shared emotion culture provided a basis for relatively harmonious coalition across political differences. In contrast, in the transnational global justice movements, political agreement often was insufficient to facilitate harmonious coalition in the face of diverging emotion cultures.

Intersectional feminist coalitions

The 1970s and 1980s feminist movement in the Americas and Europe included deliberately separate organizing by Black, Latina, Asian, Indigenous, working-class, and lesbian groups, as well as often-difficult coalitions and organizations with participation across these lines (Breines, 2006; Predelli et al., 2012; Reagon, 1998; Roth, 2003; Roth, 2005). Coalitions among different groups of women of colour have also long been fraught, from 1960s and 1970s pan-ethnic groups like the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), to efforts in Britain and Europe to expand ‘political blackness’ to include all racialized minorities (Ohene-Nyako, 2019; Springer, 2005). Differences of race, class, and sexuality between White women and women of colour and among women of colour continue to challenge multi-racial, coalitional feminist organizing (Bygnes, 2013; Cole and Luna, 2010; Evans, 2016; Evans and Lépinard, 2019a; Lépinard, 2014; Luna, 2010; Luna, 2016; Predelli et al., 2012; Springer, 2005; Thun, 2012).

Coalitions typically form through ties between leaders (McCammon and Van Dyke, 2010), but as we have seen, this is less likely when the ties carry negative feelings. Histories of marginalization by predominantly White feminist organizations led to negative feelings among feminists of colour. As Asian-American feminist Kathy Gong wrote after a 1981 conference, it ‘stirred up a lot of anger in me. Anger towards my white sisters, and toward sisters of colour, for seeing me as white, not coloured enough, or not seeing me at all’ (quoted in Breines, 2006: 183).

Commitments to reproductive justice brought together some of the most persistent multi-racial coalitions (Luna, 2010; Zavella, 2017). Luna’s important (2010) work illustrates how such histories shaped a coalition between SisterSong, a women of colour reproductive justice organization, and predominantly White feminist organizations around a national US march. Longer-term SisterSong members felt betrayed and mistrustful from their experience of previous marches, in which women of colour had not been included as speakers. In contrast, younger members’ more recent ties to White feminist organizers did not carry the same negative history. They were thus more willing to enter into coalition. The key emotional dynamic here is the emotion attached to network ties. Partners’ feelings about each other, such as mistrust, disappointment, and betrayal, were a major challenge to reproductive justice coalitions. Feelings of anger, fear, guilt, or shock on the part of White members, as well as moral emotions of (dis)approval from all sides, emerged in planning meetings (Luna, 2010). These experiences, in turn, set the emotional stage for new interactions around the Women’s March.

Women’s Marches

Coming together rapidly after the election of Trump to the US presidency, the worldwide 2016 Women’s Marches protested sexism, racism, economic inequality, heterosexism, xenophobia, climate change, and right-wing populism (Berry and Chenoweth, 2018; Fisher et al., 2018; Reger, 2018). Subsequent Women’s Marches and other protests (around, e.g. climate, science, immigration, and gun violence) included overlapping participants and cosponsors, suggesting an ongoing, shifting coalition (Fisher, 2019). Whereas reproductive justice coalitions involved more extended face-to-face interaction, the Women’s March coalition involved distant participants who interacted in short-term planning and mass demonstrations. As in transnational coalitions (Flesher Fominaya, 2015; Kleres and Wettergren, 2017), clashes of emotion culture occurred, along with emotional challenges of intersectional solidarity.

The Women’s March coalition was spurred by shared fear and anger in response to threat. Organizations with diverse priorities united around their ‘mutual sense of emergency’ (Berry and Chenoweth, 2018: 80). Because the threat was broad and fear widely felt, the coalition that mobilized was similarly broad.

Participants’ feelings towards each other reflected similar tensions and histories around race and marginalization as in intersectional feminism. The first challenge for intersectional praxis was the march’s name and organizers. The march was proposed by two White women and named ‘Million Women March’ and then ‘Women’s March on Washington’, which many saw as appropriating the iconic 1963 civil rights March on Washington and a similarly named Black women’s march (Gantt-Shafer et al., 2019). This evoked the emotional histories of women of colour working with White feminists. Quickly, a new, majority-women of colour, organizing team took over, changed the name, and recruited major national organizations from feminist and multiple other progressive movements as co-sponsors (Berry and Chenoweth, 2018). Large women’s movement organizations in the United States, like many in Europe, had positive ties and mutual trust from their long relationships with other movement organizations, enabling rapid mobilization of this broad coalition (Binnie and Klesse, 2012).

Organizers named intersectionality as their ‘guiding principle’ (Gantt-Shafer et al., 2019: 222), but questions of racial inclusivity remained. Local marches grappled with White women’s leadership and how to prioritize intersectionality (Berry and Chenoweth, 2018). Some transgender activists critiqued the signature ‘pink pussy’ hats as promoting a biological view of gender that privileged cisgender women, while some women of colour critiqued the hats as racially coded White (Reger, 2018). These questions were emotionally charged by histories of exclusion and privilege within women’s movements.

In terms of emotions emerging in collective action, the majority-White composition of marches meant that ‘many women of colour perceived the solidarity of white feminism to be displayed in a ‘very superficial way’’ (Rose-Redwood and Rose-Redwood, 2017:648). Participants included experienced activists, including women of colour, and often-inexperienced, more privileged activists who were unfamiliar with intersectionality. These groups had no reservoir of mutual trust to draw from and their interactions often were negatively emotionally charged, with often-younger intersectional activists mistrusting often-older and less-experienced White activists, who in turn felt shame or guilt, along with defensiveness (Whittier, 2018b). Although many participants, across race, ‘felt solidarity was being fostered at the marches’, many were uncertain about whether it would last (Gantt-Shafer, et al., 2019:231–232).

Despite the difficulties of intersectional praxis, the marches produced powerful feelings of solidarity. Rituals like marching together, chanting, and singing, produce the emotions of solidarity: feelings of joy, hope, connection to others, and cathartic grief (Collins, 2014). Mundane feelings of impatience with long waits and difficulty hearing speakers coexisted with the emotions of solidarity but, as Gantt-Shafer et al. (2019: 234) illustrates, rituals could transform these ‘ugly feelings’. At the Washington, DC march, as the ‘mothers of the movement’ (whose Black children had been killed by police) encouraged attendees to say their children’s names, a White attendee exhorted an impatient White woman nearby in the crowd to listen. As she participated, the feeling of impatience was transformed ‘into a new affective intensity of joy and connection’.

Because many marchers had relatively few ties to other participants and the sponsoring organizations (Berry and Chenoweth, 2018; Fisher, 2019), rituals and the resulting feelings of hope, catharsis, and connection to others were especially significant. Participants’ ‘affective intensities linked disparate bodies [and] constituted the march as a movement’ (Gantt-Shafer et al., 2019: 222). Many marchers went on to participate in multi-issue groups (Fisher, 2019), illustrating how the emotions experienced in collective action (alongside the networks formed) helps emotionally cement connections across movements.

Eventually, debates over intersectionality combined with lack of strong bonds and trust to fragment the Women’s March coalition as debates over Palestinian rights erupted around the 2019 marches (Reger, 2018). Persistent anger and mistrust across race, ideology, and organization combined with the emotions of fear, anger, guilt, and shame that are linked to power inequalities. The strong shared anger towards a common enemy and the feelings of solidarity formed in collective action were insufficient in the long run to transcend the negative feelings of coalition partners towards each other.

Feminists and conservatives opposing pornography

Organizing against pornography by feminists and conservatives illustrates a different interaction of the processes of coalition and emotion (see Whittier, 2018a and 2014 for a detailed discussion). In the 1970s and 1980s, some feminists, including US leaders Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and the organization Women Against Pornography, opposed pornography on the basis that it fostered violence against women. As feminist opposition to pornography gained visibility in the 1980s, long-standing conservative opponents of pornography echoed parts of feminist rhetoric to argue that pornography harmed women. Feminists and conservatives briefly collaborated on municipal anti-pornography ordinances and feminists also attempted (mostly unsuccessfully) to influence federal anti-pornography action by the conservative-controlled US government and in Canada.

Mistrust and negative feelings towards one another, along with power imbalances, prevented substantial coalition between feminist and conservatives in this case. The major axes of power distinguishing antipornography feminists and conservatives were gender and conservatives’ greater political influence. Conservatives cultivated a few women leaders but made no effort at intersectional praxis to navigate gender or political inequalities. Feminists and conservatives were deeply mistrustful of each other. Their few ties were charged with dislike, anger, and fear. As much because of these emotions as their ideological differences, they never formed a formal coalition.

However, they shared strong moral disapproval of pornography, with feelings of outrage, disgust, and grief directed at the pornography industry. Feminists connected these emotions to sexism, while conservatives connected them to the depravity of modern culture. But both sides feared the growing social acceptability of pornography. Even with different underpinnings, moral disapproval strongly motivated both feminists and conservatives to engage in the same campaigns.

The expression of empathy – but not towards each other – also was important to the limited collaboration. Feminists and conservatives expressed empathy publicly towards pornography’s ‘victims’ at hearings before government bodies. Testimony by ‘victims of pornography’ before city or federal government bodies was often highly emotional, following the feminist practice of reducing shame through visibility (Whittier, 2012). Government officials and feminist and conservative activists regularly commented on the difficulty and importance of listening to such testimony. In a typical comment, an official said, ‘I would like to [thank] the people that have shared their stories tonight. I know it was extremely painful for them, for me, [and] for the women to share their stories’ (MacKinnon and Dworkin, 1997: 103, 120). Such ritualized expressions of empathy allowed feminists and conservatives to find limited common ground.

In addition to negative feelings towards each other, different emotion cultures between feminists and conservatives foreclosed affective solidarity. Conservative opposition to pornography was grounded in evangelical Christian culture, which relied on religious ritual, prayer, and traditional gender values. Although conservatives sometimes expressed anger at protests or in print, their anger was often couched in religious terms; sadness or dismay at the decay of secular society was more common. Feminist opposition to pornography was grounded in the women’s movement, expressing anger at men and patriarchy, with a radical challenge to conventional gender values. In sum, their disparate emotion cultures and mutual distrust combined with their other differences to prevent further coalition despite shared moral emotions.