Forging gender and racial solidarities at trans-inclusive women’s festivals

Abstract

This article explores the interweaving of successes and failures at trans-inclusive women’s festivals. I analyze conflicts that occurred at the Mystical Womxn’s Magic Festival and the Ohio Lesbian Festival. In the process, I demonstrate that working across racial and gender divides in these spaces is possible but only if we understand that solidarity is processual and relational but also, quite simply, hard work. This labor requires acknowledging that failures are an integral part of the praxis of forging alliances. By failures, I am primarily referring to moments of insensitivity, casual macroaggressions, lack of deep listening, and other common occurrences of harm. Ultimately, I argue that solidarity is a journey not an end point and that a crucial aspect of the journey is grappling with collective and personal failures along the way.

Keywords:

• Solidarity
• alliance
• failure
• trans-inclusive
• vulnerability
• women’s festivals

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all of the festies on the journey toward racial and gender solidarity. I offer this article in sisterhood and siblinghood. I also want to thank Agatha Beins, Diane Fisher, and V. Rosser for engaging with drafts of this article, the anonymous reviewers who offered insightful commentary, and the editors of this special issue for their work and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Womon-born womon is a term used by many lesbian feminists to refer to someone who was assigned female at birth, raised as a girl, and identifies as a woman. This term predates the term cisgender and many who identify as womyn-born womyn reject the term cisgender. For more information please see Currans, 2020, pp. 477–478.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Currans

Elizabeth Currans is Professor and Department Head of Women’s and Gender Studies at Eastern Michigan University. Her research focuses on feminist and queer performances in public spaces. Her first book, Marching Dykes, Liberated Sluts, and Concerned Mothers: Women Transform Public Space (University of Illinois Press, 2017), explored how participants in public demonstrations organized and attended primarily by women claim and remake public spaces. Her publications appear in Feminist Studies, Urban Studies, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theater and Performance, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Feminist Formations, and Social Justice. She is working on a book length ethnographic project about trans-inclusive women’s festivals.