Visionary Feminism 101

by Ella Grim

art by Sam Paisley

Spare Rib’s 101 articles aim to provide approachable yet complex introductions to different feminist movements, principles, theories, and ideologies, as well as cultural phenomena, that require nuanced explanations of history, present manifestations, and future approaches. In the past, topics have included Sex vs. Gender and Cultural Appropriation in the 20F Confinement Edition and Casteism, 20th-century Feminist Movements, and Marxist Feminism in the 22S Apparition Edition.[1]

Introduction

         Sometimes, I look around at all the brokenness and hardship in the world and feel small and somewhat powerless. Does anything I do have tangible impact? How do we even know where to begin? What is the right approach to social change? How can we work toward a future where people and planet are safe and cared for? Is it hopeless?

         When these questions start to swirl, I often turn to the philosophies and writings of key feminist thinkers who have grappled with them before me. Many of these feminists have left us — in the form of essays, poems, speeches, science fiction novels, podcasts, and more — frameworks for thinking through these issues and blueprints for a better world. These theorists most often fall under a category of feminist thought termed Visionary Feminism by bell hooks and others.

         I’m writing this article to share what I’ve learned about Visionary Feminism, both from these thinkers and through conversations with other feminists on campus, over the past four years. I hope this article serves as a crash course introduction to some basic principles of Spare Rib’s feminist ethics, as well as presenting some new frameworks for action to be considered and adopted in the future, when I’m no longer around. 

This article is long. Some parts were written with first year students or younger feminists in mind, knowing that we sometimes gloss over the basics of feminist history and intersectionality. Some parts are my own synthesis of readers I’ve found most helpful in understanding Spare Rib’s impact and vision. Some parts discuss these principles in action. You don’t need to read everything. Skip around and find the parts that interest you most, or that you need to hear the most!

Defining Feminisms

Defining feminism is tricky. The Oxford English Dictionary gives it to us as “advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex,” but this definition fails in a few key ways.[2] First, it fails to move beyond “the female sex” in naming the people who feminism, in its healthy manifestations, advocates for. These people include a wide diversity of gender and sexual identities that “female sex” or even “Assigned Female at Birth” (AFAB) do not properly encompass. Second, this definition hinges feminism on the struggle for “political, social, and economic rights.” Many past and some current feminist movements engage in struggles for specific rights — like the vote, birth control, bank accounts, abortions, pay equality, etc. But defining feminism based solely on the establishment of certain rights ignores the long history of feminist thought that 1) understands the necessity of winning certain civil rights and at the same time is 2) deeply skeptical of the system in which those rights are afforded and calls for radical social change toward a world where all people, regardless of identity, have foundational rights that cannot be taken away.

         “Feminism” is often modified with adjectives to help clarify the specific strand of feminist thought being referred to. Some of these modifiers include Black, White, lesbian, choice, “Third World,”[3] anarchist, trans-exclusionary,[4] Indigenous, Eco-, Marxist, and, of course, intersectional, among many others. Each of these “types” of feminism has its own set of values, visions, key texts, and important figures or groups. Some of them do include advocacy for equality of the sexes, but most go far beyond that basic dictionary definition to envision an end to oppression of not only women, but all people. Spare Rib refers to itself as an “Intersectional Feminist Magazine.” Intersectional feminism draws its name from the work of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a legal scholar who coined the term “intersectionality” in 1991 to articulate the intersection of racial and gendered bias faced by Black women, since she found that “although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and an antiracist practices.”[5] Intersectional feminism adopts Crenshaw’s legal framework to help think through the ways identity — race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexuality, disability, class, nationality, etc — inform people’s lived experiences and the discrimination they face. Intersectional feminists work against white feminism — a framework that ignores or tokenizes all experience except the white, typically class privileged, and typically straight woman in its work for social change.[6]

Often, in staff meetings or during late night conversations about our praxis, Spare Rib staff members have brought up the limits of intersectional feminism as a term we use to describe ourselves as an organization. Intersectionality is a framework we use, but not the only framework or theory we have used to build our community, reference often, and use to build our organization and movement. It is also hard to articulate how to best practice intersectional feminism. It is based on the theory of intersecting identities and respect for those identities, but the question of “How do I DO intersectional feminism?” is often answered only by a call for awareness of identity factors and respectful discourse around identity that doesn’t speak for those whose identities we do not hold. Awareness and respect of intersectionality are critical to positive work in the feminist movement, but they do not provide a clear direction for action, which is needed for true social justice and the end of sexist oppression worldwide. This is where visionary feminism becomes a useful frame for defining our work and explaining our methods.

The Origins of Visionary Feminism

The term “Visionary Feminism” was coined by bell hooks, in her book Feminism is for Everybody. hooks writes:

 “At the very start of the [United States] women's liberation movement visionary thinkers were present dreaming about a radical / revolutionary political movement that would in its reformist stage grant women civil rights within the existing white supremacist capitalist patriarchal system while simultaneously working to undermine and overthrow that system. The dream was of replacing that culture of domination with a world of participatory economics grounded in communalism and social democracy, a world without discrimination based on race or gender, a world where recognition of mutuality and interdependency would be the dominant ethos, a global ecological vision of how the planet can survive and how everyone on it can have access to peace and well-being.”[7]

I invite you to read that paragraph again and bask in hook’s beautiful articulation of a vision of a better world. Participatory economics. Communalism. No discrimination. A dominant ethos of interdependence. Planetary survival. Peace. Well-being.

  hooks places Visionary Feminism’s evolution at the start of the US women’s liberation movement in the 1960s. It is true that this was an era when an abundance of visionary feminist thinkers were working. Critically, this was also an era where they had access to platforms of distribution for their ideas via small magazines, underground and woman led publishing houses during the Women in Print movement, and mass media technologies. However, as I have engaged with feminism and activism while at Dartmouth, I’ve found echoes of hooks’ definition across many strands of feminist thought across a broad span of time.

I see visionary feminist articulations in the writings of French revolutionary Louise Michel, a schoolteacher, poet, and leader in the Paris Commune of 1871; who was clear and adamant in her critiques of power, rights-based change, and the need for structures of community care by and for the people. I’ve seen echoes of visionary feminism in the writing of Emma Goldman, a U.S. anarcho-feminist from the early 20th century, who refused to be swayed by the narrow vision of her contemporary Suffragist movement, instead calling for the abolition of marriage and traditional family structures. I’ve seen it in the writing of the early 20th century poet I study, Genevieve Taggard, who has entire poems dedicated to envisioning a better future. I see these principles reflected in many Black feminist and lesbian feminist theorists from the later half of the 20th century — from hooks to the theorist and poet Audre Lorde and the science fiction writer Octavia Butler to the lesbian-feminist Furies collective and other radical lesbian magazines. These feminists were forced out of the mainstream movement because of their race or sexuality and made up their own theories outside the societal constraints of their straight, white counterparts in the mainstream women’s movement. I see echoes of visionary feminist thinking everywhere in our contemporary literary and theoretical landscapes, from writer and activist adrienne marie brown to climate speculative fiction anthologies to poets like Franny Choi and Layli Long Soldier.[8]

In lieu of giving you yet another reading list of my favorite visionary authors, I want to use this space to propose an (incomplete) set of principles that I see undergirding visionary feminism. These principles have been drawn up out of my reading of hooks’ chapter on visionary feminism and from many of the books and authors I’ve read over the past 4 years. The intention is not to explain each of these writers and their visions, but to build a framework that can be used to introduce people into these concepts as an addition to an understanding of intersectionality, and with the goal of expanding our accepting and diverse feminism into concrete ways to articulate and carry out action.

Core Principles of Visionary Feminism

Visionary feminism …

1) Is rooted in the material conditions of the present, draws wisdom from lessons of the past, and dreams of a radically better future.

2)Actively works to undermine and overthrow the dominant, violent white supremacist, capitalist, heteropatriarchal systems of oppression that shape society and the world, instead of simply fighting for equal rights within the existent oppressive systems.

3)Recognizes the importance of mutuality and interdependence in our movement work and communities. Community and community care is centered.

4)Does not lose sight of hope for the future.

5)Uses dreams, daydreams, visionary thinking, speculative fiction, and radical possibility to imagine a better world. These tools form the foundation for the strategies and tactics used to bring change to communities.

6)Embraces a plurality of strategies and dreams up many blueprints for anti-capitalist, anti-racist, equitable futures, which are context and community specific.

7)Commits to change, flexibility, and adaptation, so that movement work and actions are relevant to and rooted in present moments.

8)   Includes ecological visioning for planetary survival and mutual flourishing of humans and all other living beings.

9) Strives for true peace and well-being for everyone. All people are incorporated into liberated community.

10) Does not prioritize the “rights” or comforts of some people over the survival of other people.

11)  Visionary feminists must take individual accountability and understand their place in the current dominant systems of oppression, while working to overthrow those systems.

12) Always includes space for rest, healing, reparations, play, joy, creativity, care, and love.

Visionary Feminism in Action

Listing out principles is simple; it’s harder to understand how to apply those principles to our lives, our communities, our organizing, and toward the world we want to live in and pass to future generations. I’ll give a few examples here — from my own life, from Spare Rib, and from past campus organizing movements — to conceptualize it on a personal level and for this campus.

         The world-changing work of visionary feminism is at its best when applied to communities and groups, but that sort of work struggles to be successful when aspects of visionary feminism aren’t applied in individual changemakers’ lives. One person cannot by themselves overthrow patriarchy, or solve global warming. But if we begin to commit to visionary feminism principles in our personal lives — especially aspects like accountability, inclusivity, interdependence, rest, healthy boundaries, flexibility, creativity, and dreaming — we build a foundation for existence that can and will spill over into how we interact with and build beloved communities.

For me, a lot of this work happens in my writing, especially in my journaling practice, where I spend a lot of time pondering how I am showing up in the world, and how I want to shift how I show up. I also love lists, and have recently found it to be a useful practice to take some time to write down lists of creative and self-care practices that embody how I want to show up in the world, so I can reference it in moments where I’m tempted to doom scroll. Reflective practices might look different for you! Maybe you record voice memos for your future self. Maybe you have a creative or artistic process that you use to visualize your struggles, goals, and achievements. I know a brilliant feminist who does a lot of this visionary and self-processing work via long conversations with her “council” of trusted friends. You’re likely already incorporating a practice into your life that can be bent toward visionary feminism, if you’re willing to start asking yourself how you show up, how you want to show up, and begin to chart steps toward that future self.

Visionary feminist principles have also been playing out in my own life recently as I’ve had to learn to ask for deeper support from friends and set boundaries across many realms of my life in order to cope with worsening chronic illness and chronic pain. Understanding visionary feminist frameworks from my readings and activism work has been hugely helpful as I’ve struggled with external and internalized ableism, as well as the rapid pace of life at Dartmouth. When I’m feeling alone in what I’m experiencing, I turn to writing like Alice Wong’s Disability Intimacy or Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s The Future is Disabled for guidance. When I’m frustrated with my body for its fatigue, or its inability to carry a heavy box, or its inability to stand and march at a long protest, I remember that in the world many others and I vision for the future, deep rest, tending to physical and emotional needs, and interdependence between communities in order to achieve equitable existence are my ideals. If the world I want to live in is one where everyone is given the time, space, and support they need to care for their bodies, it’s much harder to be cruel to my own self and body for needing that care and rest. I’ve also found good wisdom in Tricia Hersey’s manifesto, Rest is Resistance, for navigating a visionary feminism reframe of rest, care, and community.

The ideals we hope to someday see in all our communities do not yet exist. But practicing mutuality, asking for support, setting personal boundaries, and allowing ourselves time to rest helps normalize these core aspects of visionary feminism on smaller, personal scales, scales which can then be scaled up to community and organizational settings and practices.

Spare Rib is one such organization, and over the past four years I’ve watched our space develop into one working toward visionary feminist praxis — from the ways we’ve pushed to be more explicit about liberatory politics to how we cook meals together and care for each other when people are sick, sad, stressed, or just need care. Our termly “Rib Talks” meeting — during which we discuss our organization and community, looking for ways to grow, address issues, and best embody our values — is another example of visionary feminism in practice. Previous Rib Talks conversations (in 2022) created the Community Development position on our Exec team, focused on addressing interpersonal dynamics, creating an inclusive space, facilitating conversations around our politics, and navigating moments of harm. During our 24F Rib Talks conversation, we spent time doing a visioning exercise that helped us articulate our favorite parts about the organization, but also aspects that need work. We came up with a list of things we need to improve upon, like better rotation of our exec team so people can take breaks, and things we do well that we want to do more, like distributing political zines across campus to help educate our peers. I’ve seen Spare Rib grow to begin to embody so many principles of visionary leadership and visionary feminism in the past few years. We’re not always perfect in our execution, but my hope is that this work continues to bloom in our space — and to spill over into other campus organizing spaces, as it already has begun to do through the guidance and support Spare Rib has given to other activist spaces around leadership models and community centered base building.

         What does visionary feminism look like on a campus scale? I see echoes of some visionary feminist principles in the 2014 Freedom Budget, where minority students, tired of tokenization and vague institutional commitments to diversity, outlined and campaigned around a list of visions for a more just and equitable Dartmouth.[9] Many of these demands are still unmet, but they chart a clear and reasonable path toward institutional change while refusing to be placated by institutional rhetoric of diversity and inclusion without culture shifts. Visionary feminist principles are at play when student groups representing many different fronts in the struggle for global liberation build community and coalition by sharing meals, attending each others’ protests, and showing up to support strikes, fundraisers, and educational events. Campus visionary feminism also looks like moving beyond the boundaries of the institution in our advocacy work, by collaborating with community organizations outside of the college who share our visions and principles. It is a recognition that, as Lorde puts it, “The master's tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will neve enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”[10] We cannot enact all the changes we want to see in the world via the institution, with policy changes. But we can work toward change within the institution that makes it more livable on the day-to-day, while organizing communities that exist outside the full control of the institution and enact the values we want to build in the world in small ways within those spaces.

         Visionary Feminism in the world outside the Dartmouth bubble is everywhere, if you are looking for it. It is in community gardening and agriculture projects, in grassroots environmental movements in rural areas, and in harm reduction work in big cities. It is most often led by women of color, queer people, and disabled people working to build communities that keep their beloveds safe, or as safe as possible within the world we live in. For example, the grassroots, Indigenous-and-women-led Camp Nenookaasi project in Minneapolis works to help combat the crises of homelessness, addiction, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives through strategies that fit within a visionary feminist framework.[11] The group and their supporters focus on day to day survival for those experiencing homelessness, from building yurts on vacant lots to help people survive the sub-zero Minnesota winters to collecting and cooking food to distribute to providing culturally attuned, supportive environments for addiction recovery. But they are also constantly articulating a vision of the future where all the people in this community are housed and cared for, a future that doesn’t rely on broken municipal and state systems that don’t provide real solutions. In the present, the group is focused on the survival of their most vulnerable community members, but the ways they go about enacting change are grassroots, plural, ever adapting, and visionary. There are other examples of grassroots work like this taking place globally.

Conclusions

We cannot end the carceral state if we cannot imagine a world without prisons and police violence. We cannot solve climate change if we cannot imagine many versions of a livable future. We cannot end injustice if we cannot envision a world where people embrace and learn from difference. We cannot build the future we want to see in the world if we are unwilling to embrace the principles we want in that future in our current reality.

We must build with care, mutuality, a rejection of institutionalized structures of violence. We must reject empty claims of inclusion. We must build grassroots movements that are constantly adapting to meet survival needs while creating communities that will build the future we all need to survive long term. We must embrace a diversity of tactics, a plurality of dreams.

This work isn’t easy. It often takes time and high amounts in interpersonal connection and care, things that more masculinist and militant organizing groups often scoff at in favor of rapid organizing work that burns through people like paper. Visionary feminist principles and organizing tactics offer another ethos: one where people and care are centered, no one idea is the idea, and changemaking can take place in many places through many means all at once.

My hope for you, reading this, is that you read more about these movements, historical and present, and begin to build care ethics and visionary feminist principles into your own life. My hope for your communities is that they are deeply, radically caring spaces that take the time to vision for the future while meeting material needs in the present. My hope for Dartmouth is that slowly, activists can build a coalition space based on trust, care, mutual respect that avoids misogyny and racism, and that this space can push the institution toward policies that mitigate harm and hate in tangible ways. And that, as we exist within the violence of this institution as marginalized people and communities, we can find power and hope in each other and in our knowledge that eventually, we will move beyond Dartmouth, out into the world where our changemaking skills will be more useful and effective. My hope for the world is that we survive, and that our survival is not desperate but blooming, mutual, deeply caring, community centered, and gorgeous beyond our wildest dreams.

[1] Maanasi Shyno, “Sex & Gender 101: The Sex Spectrum,” Spare Rib 1, no.1, 20F Confinement Edition, August 24, 2020, https://www.spareribdartmouth.com/post/sex-gender-101-the-sex-spectrum; Maanasi Shyno, “Culture 101: Appropriation,” Spare Rib 1, no.1, 20F Confinement Edition, August 24, 2020, https://www.spareribdartmouth.com/post/culture-101-appreciation-or-appropriation; “Casteism 101: The Specter of Caste in the US,” Spare Rib 2, no. 2, 22S Apparition Edition, March 30, 2022, https://www.spareribdartmouth.com/post/casteism-101-the-specter-of-caste-in-the-us; Arizbeth Rojas “Feminism in the 20th Century,” Spare Rib 2, no. 2, 22S Apparition Edition, March 28, 2022; https://www.spareribdartmouth.com/post/feminism-in-the-20th-century; Camila Bustamente, “Revolution Through a Woman’s Eyes: A History and Manifesto of Marxist Feminism,” Spare Rib 2, no. 2, 22S Apparition Edition, March 27, 2022, https://www.spareribdartmouth.com/post/revolution-through-a-woman-s-eyes-a-history-and-manifesto-of-marxist-feminism.

[2] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “feminism (n.),” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5166776157.

[3] A now outdated term for what we would now call Global South Feminisms or just Global Feminism, feminism that takes its theory and praxis from the knowledge and advocacy of women and others in the global south.

[4] Transphobic, and thus not really feminist.

[5] Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no 6, (1991): 1241–99, https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039.

[6] For a wonderful breakdown of 20th-century feminist movements, white feminism, and the limits of “sisterhood” models of solidarity that ignore difference, see Arizbeth Rojas’ 101 article, “Feminism in the 20th Century,” in the Apparition edition (22S): Arizbeth Rojas “Feminism in the 20th Century,” Spare Rib 2, no. 2, 22S Apparition Edition, March 28, 2022, https://www.spareribdartmouth.com/post/feminism-in-the-20th-century.

[7] bell hooks, “Visionary Feminism,” in Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, (Routledge, 2014), 110.

[8] See the facilitation guide Emergent Strategy. See also the podcast How to Survive the End of the World.; Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, ed. Grist, (The New Press, 2023), https://thenewpress.com/books/afterglow.

[9] You can read more about this activism moment in Dartmouth’s history on the Dartmouth Radical’s website: https://www.dartmouthradical.org/freedom-budget.

[10] Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider, Ten Speed Press, 2007.

[11] See the Instagram account for Camp Nenookassi, https://www.instagram.com/campnenookaasi/.