Feminist work is never done: Building the World Otherwise

This essay was commissioned by AAA Diversity Collaborative Architecture at the Architecture School in Aarhus to serve as foreword to their 2024 book BUILDING AND BREAKING – 8 Conversations about Spatial Justice. 

Feminist work is never done. Does this sound familiar? I think it does. It is an observation of past realities just as much as it is a forecast of futures yet to come. Knowing, and insisting, that feminist and queer feminist work is never done is a statement that wraps all into one the feelings of hope, joy, worry, frustration, anger, grief, and gratitude.

Hope, because feminist and queer feminist work is never useless. As the efforts of this work continue, we understand better how the mess we have inherited came about and we also see with more clarity how the mess we have made of the conditions of planet Earth, our shared home, needs to be dealt with. Hope, because feminist and queer feminist work is never done in isolation, it builds on the work of others, who have and are doing feminist and queer feminist work, even if we find ourselves in disagreement with each other. Hope, because feminist and queer feminist work nourishes solidarity, practices how to practice together with many others, including others, who are not humans, who are elements, animals, plants. Feminist and queer feminist work cannot stop at the oppressive boundaries of speciesism. Joy, because feminist and queer feminist work gives pleasure, builds affinities and alignments, and brings new imaginaries how things could be otherwise into the world. Joy, because feminist and queer feminist work insists on turning imaginaries into realities, however messy, dysfunctional, imperfect these new realities may turn out to be. Joy, because feminist and queer feminist work gives reason for celebration and continuation, for strength and endurance, even if our strengths and our endurances are actually, at the very same time, also our vulnerabilities and our weaknesses. Worry, because the work starts from knowing and feeling that things are not all right, that everything will most likely never be all right, that politics cannot be trusted, that states can turn violent, that economies chain themselves to values that despise life and annihilate the very resources for living. Worry, because worry is an epistemic relation to the world we have created and to the planet we live with, an epistemic relation that is formed through understanding that we are inter-connected, inter-vulnerable, and inter-dependent in care. Worry, because worrying together, collective worry, is a remedy against the compulsory individualism of neoliberal responsibilization. Frustration, because the enormities of violence and oppression and domination and power are such that it is easy to feel that one is made to be helpless, that the system cannot be undone, that the structures of discrimination and injustice resurface with agility and keep changing, transforming, even rejuvenating often under the semblance of making things better. Frustration, because so much time and energy, time and energy of one’s own life, time and energy of the lives of many, are invested and only little seems to be achieved. Frustration, because there is constant push-back and hostility. Frustration, because the push-back and hostility can quite easily infect solidarity and alignment and lead to in-fighting and conflicts.

Frustration, because one hears, reads, ultimately always already knows, that the work will have to begin again, the next morning, the next evening, the next day, the next month, the next year. Anger, because one knows that one ultimately ends up provoking anger and thus hostility and push-back by many of those who are in power, in control, and in charge of things. Their anger and hostility, supported by structural power, leads to one’s own deepening anger because the root causes of injustice, inequity, discrimination, and continued violence through exploitation, expropriation, extraction, and exclusion.  Grief, because one knows of many feminist stories of resistance without good endings, one knows that the degrading and death-making conditions of misogyny and gynophobia still exist, one knows that feminist struggles have not been able to save, and safeguard, human and non-human life, care, and planet Earth. Gratitude, because despite of it all, feminist work continues and changes in the most meaningful and beautiful ways over time and across locations.

Review of the book: https://www.indesignlive.com/uncategorized/danish-spatial-justice