Sisterhood Is X: On Feminist Solidarity Then and Now Free

In the 1970s and 1980s, sisterhood became a critical concept in the making of internationalist feminisms built on an infrastructure of women's movements, international organizations, and postcolonial states. Perhaps most famously, radical feminist Robin Morgan declared over three anthologies and three decades that sisterhood is, in the present tense, powerful (1970), global (1984), and forever (2003). It was envisioned differently by women of color and Third World feminists who saw sisterhood as a critical praxis of survival in the face of authoritarianism. Today, the moral invocation of sisterhood as powerful and forever is far less viable. So, is sisterhood all bad for twenty‐first‐century feminisms? In this essay, I return to bell hooks's formulations of sisterhood as a pedagogy of political solidarity to ask, what kind of solidarity is possible under the rubric of sisterhood and how might we imagine a global feminist politics of solidarity today?

^“I confront the frustration of trying to begin writing, the worry that I will not find words to say what needs to be said; that I daily lose the capacity to speak in writing” (hooks 1986: 125). bell hooks opens her 1986 article “Sisterhood” by narrating her struggles to write a renewed call for feminist sisterhood. Over the course of the essay, hooks insists that feminists must not abandon the concept despite conflicts about racial difference that felt increasingly insurmountable in the American feminist movement of the early 1980s. For hooks, solidarity in sisterhood was about the affective possibilities of feminist collective and the moving power of mutual care. Even as she critiqued white women's reductive visions of sisterhood that equated women through a common experience of oppression, hooks insisted that more inclusive visions of feminist praxis must be diligently pursued as a radical pedagogy of democratic struggle united across social difference and geographies. Global sisterhood was for hooks “a training ground” (127) where there was no need “to eradicate difference to feel solidarity” (138). hooks's vision of sisterhood animated a uniquely feminist vision of political solidarity that confronted overlapping structures of gender, class, and racial domination.

Challenged by the vexed labor of writing in today's alarmingly authoritarian moment, I see in hooks's reflection on the project of sisterhood an invitation to reflect on the possibilities and failures of feminisms past and present. What are the stakes of taking up hooks's project of sisterhood today? Sisterhood seems out of sync for the politics of our present. Much like bell hooks, I am struggling to write, not finding the words to adequately express how we think solidarity in our moment almost four decades later. Yet, in the current moment of vaccine imperialism, climate catastrophe, and gender policing, truly transnational feminist solidarity feels more necessary than ever.

Today, the notion of sisterhood appears more romantic, nostalgic, and naively optimistic than politically useful. It seems almost impossible to imagine how one might convincingly argue for feminist unity through sisterhood in these alarmingly authoritarian times, when the vocabulary of womanhood and family has been so effectively repurposed by gender-policing advocates to unjustly exclude trans and other gender nonconforming people from political and social life. The urgency of bell hooks's pleas feel distant, the fury of her demand for collective action wholly unconvincing.

Rather than solidarity through global collectives, more often, in a time of endless pandemic, political protests for racial justice, and violent majoritarianism across the world, the refrain one might hear from a feminist today is “I am tired.” Tired of false claims to equivalence between forms of oppression, fatigued by expansive carceral state institutions that seem irredeemable, exhausted by reactionary politics that propagate biological determinism, racial inequality, and religious majoritarianism for authoritarian ends. It is a time of exhaustion produced by unrealized promises of women's equality half a century after global movements for women's rights and continued frustrations with the persistent failures of political and social institutions to sustain childcare, health care, state services, and fair wages. Collective visions feel incompatible with the tiring temporality of never-ending crisis that organizes today's politics of precarity.¹ This exhaustive mode of feminist critique converges with increasingly pessimistic conceptual visions of minoritized lives that produce “no futures” and few viable alternatives to the failed project of liberal humanism, a melancholia that has dominated much of critical theory since the 1990s.

Yet the 1970s concept of sisterhood was a wholly different mood. Sisterhood offered an optimistic foundation for new internationalist feminisms, an ideal concept that envisioned real widescale structural change for women through the possibilities of collective action that reached across borders. Sisterhood was a vision of an explicitly feminist solidarity, an international feminist coalition that went above and beyond the masculinist politics of solidarity of the international Left to fight against masculinist authoritarianism. These new feminist imaginaries sought to build a complex infrastructure that linked autonomous women's movements to policy change at the level of states, nongovernmental organizations, and international governance structures like the United Nations. Feminist sisterhood emerged in this moment as a critical language of alliance, friendship, coalition, collectivity, and liberation based in aspirations for ideals of women's equality and gender justice that shaped a new agenda for feminist internationalism.

What was imagined in the global sisterhood of the 1970s and 1980s? What are the enduring effects of these definitive projects of global sisterhood from the era of women's liberation? And what is the place of a politics of transnational solidarity fifty years later? Situating the vexed history of global sisterhood and its fate as a “bad object,” this essay meditates on the history of global sisterhood to imagine the limits and possibilities of feminist solidarity now.² I trace this vexed genealogy to evaluate the modes of feminist solidarity made possible and foreclosed by the concept of sisterhood. Revisiting coalition in our moment now, fifty years later, may offer new avenues for feminist sisterhood for the twenty-first century through the subversion of normative kinship and biologically deterministic ideas of cis womanhood. Perhaps, instead of treating sisterhood as the relic of an exclusionary past, we might reimagine a politics of sisterhood for today.

The Promises of Sisterhood

The politics of sisterhood gained momentum in a time of uneasy optimism as people struggled for civil rights and decolonization and mobilized under the promise of a novel global egalitarianism. Sisterhood was part of a new lexicon of anti-imperial internationalism that began to flourish in the shadows of world war, colonialism, and segregationist politics around the world. Internationalism offered a new vocabulary of possibility, of future unity in “one world” that transgressed national, linguistic, and economic divides and reflected a new horizon of decolonization. As Toni Morrison beautifully renders this moment in her critical essay reflections from the 1990s on global politics, the language of alliance across decolonizing geographies was “less like categories of historical trends than yearnings” (Morrison 2021: 6). Yearnings for a new world order based in aspirations for international equality and novel political possibilities for civil rights and true democratic participation, where the darker peoples of the world, newly liberated, would rise together and imagine the world anew.³ The language of longing for international alliance would “corral the earth into some semblance of unity” (6) and reimagine “human destiny” (6) through radically equitable futures.

The idea of sisterhood in global feminist movements was part of this broader aspirational vocabulary of solidarity. In this new vision of global rights, political movements appropriated the language of the family to make an argument for collectivity, from the lexicon of kin terms that became the grounds for anticolonial nationalism to the intimate idioms of family in the Civil Rights Movement. It was reflective of a longer tradition of feminist critiques of the masculine language of “brotherhood” in the international left from the time of the French Revolution's fraternité to the domain of men's politics in the Communist International. In the term “sisterhood,” women allied the feminist movement with larger left politics of collective action and claimed an essential place in the global political family.

Yet, even as it grew in popularity, sisterhood was vigorously debated in the emerging global feminisms of the 1970s. In feminist speeches, protests at conferences, and a flourishing world of feminist writing, minoritized activists and intellectuals from around the world questioned the often reductive and romantic language of sisterhood of the new global feminisms promoted by American women. Notably, in spaces like the UN International Women's Year conferences and international feminist collaborations, international women critiqued American activists, including Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Robin Morgan, who imagined themselves as the sole bearers of an enlightened vision of global sisterhood.⁴ At the first UN conference in Mexico City, Betty Friedan declared America to be the origins of the global women's movement and proclaimed white American feminists to its primary leaders to the New York Times: “We are our sister's keeper.”⁵ As Nima Naghibi (2007: 83–84) recounts, Friedan's visit to Iran the year before in 1974 was equally fraught, turning into something of an Orientalist dream of sisterhood where Friedan proclaimed her love of Iranian caviar and basked in the adoration of elite Iranian women and the shah himself. The discourses on sisterhood through the universal oppression of women were met with animated critiques built on long-term resistance by women of color and colonized peoples to white feminist collusions with British and American imperial projects.⁶ The history of sisterhood had long been entrenched in a troubling colonial imaginary that utilized the language of kinship to fortify racial domination and the gender policing project of empire.⁷ For women of color, the sisterhood of the 1970s bore the marks of this racist colonial history.

Despite their critiques of its use, women of color feminists did not reject the idea of sisterhood itself. Rather, they saw radical possibilities in new structures of social practice and theory that looked to collective sociality to undo overlapping structures of oppression for women. Sisterhood was reimagined through organizations of writers like “The Sisterhood” with members like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, feminist political organizing against gender violence and women's deaths culminating in the Combahee River Collective, and the extensive writings of Black women and women of color in anthologies and women of color collections.⁸ Indeed, sisterhood was the basis of that bridge of mutual care across communities among women of color. Cherríe Moraga, in the 1981 preface to This Bridge Called My Back, narrates her personal journey across the racist geography of Boston, into the underground, and her refuge in Barbara Smith's home, where Smith declares that they are sisters. For Moraga that sisterhood was a profound and ongoing labor of care: “I earned this with Barbara. It is not a given between us—Chicana and Black—to come to see each other as sisters” (Moraga and Anzaldúa [1981] 2002: xlv).

Audre Lorde extends this line of thinking in her vision of sisterhood, proclaiming sisterhood to be the work of explicit alliance across oppressed Indigenous, colonized, and Black women to sustain the possibility of living: “we are sisters, and our survivals are mutual” (Lorde 1986: 7). Women of color feminists like Lorde saw in the concept of sisterhood the radical potential of social autonomy for women of color to persist in the face of authoritarianism perpetuated by structures of patriarchal and state violence intent on disappearing and killing women. While they offered trenchant critiques of white sisterhood's complicity in systems of racism and global class subordination, women of color saw in minoritized sisterhood the possibility of survival. In this line of thinking, sisterhood was an orientation toward one another other as women of color feminists, based in a chosen sociality of people who had explicitly built a set of shared values. The sisterhood across Black and other women of color offered a radically different imaginary for worldmaking as these activist intellectuals continued to invest in the political concept of sisterhood as a radical vision of social liberation based in a radically alternative sociality against white heterosexual patriarchy.

These diverse, often contrasting visions of feminist alliance and internationalism through sisterhood have been largely disappeared from today's political movements. As Morrison mourns, the “globalization” of the 1990s obliterated the possibility of the unifying internationalisms that shaped political imaginaries from the 1960s. Even as the 1990s saw the flourishing of transnational women's organizations that utilized a rhetoric of sisterhood, the material possibility of autonomous feminist movements across borders became increasingly tenuous.⁹ Globalization cynically appropriated the language of aspirational global unity and repackaged the ideal of “one world” for capitalist ends in the form of new transnational markets, the global expansion of multinational corporations, and an increasingly dominant sector of internationally funded nongovernmental organizations. As these rapid changes unfolded in the 1990s, transnational feminist theorists extensively documented globalizing labor economies and gendered migration that increasingly fortified systems of labor exploitation for migrant and Third World women through the guise of egalitarian internationalism.¹⁰ Demands for solidarity transformed in the early 2000s as political movements for rights faced new challenges in endless wars, the retraction of state social services, the growth of the transnational NGO complex, and the rapid increase of private for-profit ventures in the domains of public health, education, and labor.

The Anthology of Sisterhood

Perhaps the most prominent feminist to utilize the language of sisterhood from the early 1970s was the writer and radical feminist Robin Morgan, whose anthologies on sisterhood shaped an era of feminist publications in the 1970s and 1980s. Morgan's sisterhood represented a decisive shift in the global politics of feminist solidarity. Morgan declared over three volumes and more than three decades that sisterhood is, in the present tense, powerful (1970), global (1984), and forever (2003). Sisterhood, in Morgan's formulation, was a universal concept with endless potential, endowed with political potency, reaching an all-encompassing geography, and, in her estimation, a project spanning all of time. Morgan, through her projects on sisterhood, fortified an exclusionary politics of global sisterhood in three ways: first, she positioned America and American women in a position of epistemic authority on global women; second, she proposed that women were a political idea predicated solely on demographic, biologically essentialized difference; finally, she insisted sisterhood was a project of equivalence based in the universalist, comparative study of women across races, classes, and geographies.

Robin Morgan's sisterhood volumes began in 1970 with the first edited anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement. The 1970 volume, a compilation of prominent women's writings from the movement, was a key text for the emerging American women's movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Most significantly, the anthology launched Morgan's career as a feminist writer and editor of the Sisterhood series, a speaker at radical feminist rallies and conferences, and a leading public voice who eventually came to edit Ms. magazine.

Morgan's introduction to the Powerful volume, “The Women's Revolution,” is striking for its declarative tone, beginning with the opening sentence: “This book is an action” (Morgan 1970: xiii). In the framing remarks, Morgan paints a picture of her own radicalization and growing consciousness to the oppression of patriarchy, which she links to the experience of giving birth to a child and her own growing sisterhood in women's liberation organizations that showed her the truth of women's oppression of women through statistics. These facts, she says, opened her eyes to the truth of the condition of women in all of history (xv). As Morgan declares, she, herself, was the culmination of a whole history of women's oppression, the origins of her rage: “I couldn't believe—still can't—how angry I could become, from deep down and way back, something like a five-thousand-year-buried anger” (xv). Consciousness was an epiphany realized through the knowledge brought by sisterhood, and those who denied the fact of women's oppression colluded with patriarchy to sustain their own oppression: “To deny that you are oppressed is to collaborate in your oppression. To collaborate in your oppression is a way of denying that you're oppressed—particularly when the price of refusing to collaborate is execution” (xvi).

Through these condemnations of women's complicity with their own oppression, Morgan narrated the triumphant history of the new movement for women's rights in the late 1960s, women who had attained true consciousness. And as she told the triumphant story of early women's liberation, Morgan posited women's movements as the sole site for truly revolutionary politics. In the first Sisterhood anthology, Morgan introduced a theme that emerges again and again in her personal papers and publications, the moral certitude that her visions of sisterhood and her position as a primary leader in the movement was the only way to save the world: “More and more, I begin to think of a worldwide Women's Revolution as the only hope for life on the planet” (Morgan xxxv).

The introduction to Sisterhood Is Powerful is filled with triumphant language about Morgan and her position as a symbol of women's new revolutionary consciousness. Even as she insisted on the transformative power of sisterhood, Morgan's framing is striking in the clear absence of any definitional language to explain what constituted this essential term of sisterhood. It was a given for Morgan. It would continue to be treated as a given in Morgan's Sisterhood anthologies that followed. Indeed, over the course of three anthologies, Morgan never states what exactly sisterhood is. From the introductions of the volumes, we can infer it is a relationship solely based in a biological notion of cis women and their common history and experiences as women. She asserts and reasserts the biological nature of womanhood by linking biological motherhood to sisterhood. Her perspective on sisterhood as the biological reproductive capacity of women is animated in the long poem that closes the introduction to the Sisterhood Is Powerful volume: “Our sister earth/Our children that we made in Our own holy Bodies/at last we are beginning to be shrill as banshees/and to act” (xxxix). Sisterhood names the sociality of women's solidarity and was formed through the rage of a new collectivity in pursuit of women's liberation.

From the first Sisterhood volume, Morgan gained a following and key position as a speaker and writer in the American women's movement. Yet with her visibility came more publicity for her hostile vision of feminist politics. In a now infamous event cited as the origins of contemporary trans exclusionary feminist visions of women's rights, Morgan, a heterosexual cis woman married to a cis man, delivered an explosive speech in 1973 at the West Coast Lesbian Conference where she condemned and decried the participation of a transgender woman singer, Beth Elliot, who Morgan called “an infiltrator, a destroyer with the mentality of a rapist.”¹¹ Morgan's speech came just a few years after the publication of the Powerful anthology, which quietly, in poetry and self-narrative, manifested Morgan's biologically deterministic understanding of the subject of women's liberation. Morgan's condemnatory speech in 1973 caused profound discord in the audience, with dozens of women walking out of the performance, while organizers condemned Morgan for her hostile position and dangerous condemnation of gender nonconforming people as outsiders to the movement.

Morgan was one several prominent American women in the 1970s who soon took their feminist projects global, utilizing new international platforms like the United Nations conferences to position themselves as the sole leaders against women's universal subordination. By going global, feminists like Morgan found a new domain to insist on the common oppression of women. Through global women's issues, American feminists projected the urgency of their vision of women's rights in novel culturalist arguments that condemned the pervasive presence of gendered violence, labor exploitation, illiteracy, and postcolonial patriarchy and positioned American transnational feminism as the hallmark of a new era in global rights. It also provided cover for a set of white women who faced increasing scrutiny for their biologically deterministic understandings of women as subjects and insistence on negative understandings of women's victimhood as the sole basis of rights-based advocacy.

The global in this renewed fervor for feminism provided fertile ground for extending the project of sisterhood to be a vast comparative project that extended across geographies. Fertile, because Morgan's turn to global sisterhood sought to explain women's oppression through the metrics of global demography and population that assessed women's worth in and through their fertility that expanded rapidly in the early 1980s. In the introduction of Morgan's Sisterhood Is Global (1984), the influence of demographic measures is clear, with Morgan's introduction framing the project of global sisterhood through the utility of the quantitative demographic studies by country that organized the chapters in the volume. Each woman author represented her nation-state, and each nation's women were enumerated in statistics about women's status. Sisterhood Is Global exalted the structures of knowledge of quantitative social science that had gained currency at the time through new programs on women in international development. Her introduction was a clear display of the crude comparative work of American feminists who used the shock and awe of global statistics of women's deaths and suffering to convince audiences of their unique role as global leaders in combating the oppression of women in the rest of the world.

The Global anthology was voluminous at over eight hundred pages with chapters from seventy countries. Each of the authors was made to represent their country in a comprehensive, representative project for “worldwide freedom for female human beings” (Morgan 1984: xiv). Each country's chapter was framed by a “Statistical Preface” with “usable” demographic information and key statistics from each country to be used by everything from “women's studies, international affairs, development and population issues” (xvi). The preface sections focused on a comprehensive overview of “key stats,” including the sex ratio of the population and other demographic information, including birth rates, death rates, infant mortality rates, life expectancy, and a section on “economy” on women's labor and economic roles. The sections that followed included “Gynography,” which offered measurements and qualitative data overviews on marriage, divorce, contraception, illegitimacy, rape, prostitution, and “traditional/cultural practices” in each country (xx–xxi). The following sections, “Mythography” and “Herstory” offered the history and cultural myths that demonstrated the oppression of women in each nation-state. Morgan later credited herself as the first person to use the term “herstory” as a critique of the androcentric nature of history: “I coined this word half-jokingly in 1968. . . . Now that the United Nations and NASA have adopted the use of ‘herstory’ in official documents, it's probably time to reclaim it (smiling)” (Morgan 2003: xxxixn37).

In Morgan's view, her visionary work of global sisterhood could only be realized in a large-scale project that compared the demographics of women worldwide. Solidarity, in other words, was a project of equivalence through data collection. The popular language of population offered proof of the political urgency of the project of sisterhood: “women constitute not an oppressed minority, but a majority—of almost all national populations, and of the entire human species” (Morgan 1984: 3). This global comparison would offer an omniscient view of all the world's women, a universal comparative perspective that Morgan regularly deployed in her own writings and speeches to demonstrate the generalizable condition of all women's oppression. Demography served as the ultimate commensurate object in Morgan's sisterhood, shaping knowledge that delimited the project of feminist solidarity to research on measurable equivalencies of women's oppression across the world.

For Morgan, biopolitical quantitative social scientific measures, what would soon be called “indicators” in gender and development language of the late 1980s—everything from sex ratios, marriages, birth rates to life expectancy—were essential to the project of sisterhood between women from across the world. Demography, rather than political coalition or mutual care, was the dominant connective tissue for global feminist research between nation-states in the global condition of women. In a summary sheet in her papers offering “facts on women around the world” from the introduction to the Sisterhood Is Global volume, Morgan cites random statistics from different regions to show the urgency of the global project of sisterhood and the cultural problem of non-West patriarchy. These pages of bullet points offer dramatic facts that would bring attention to the condition of women through their shock value: “Fifty percent of all women in India gain no weight whatsoever during the third trimester of pregnancy, due to poverty. Two out of five women in Latin America work as domestic servants. Ninety-four percent of women in the Sudan are nonliterate. . . . Seventy million women alive today are genitally mutilated . . . ” and on and on.¹² In this vast factsheet, Morgan demonstrates her omniscience about the common oppression of women, arguing for the necessity of this performative game of comparative oppressions. And the intention was clear: as Morgan asked in a rejoinder to Black and Third World feminist critiques of racism, classism, and social differences in the feminist movement at the end of her Sisterhood Is Global introduction: “Are we then really so very different?” (Morgan 1984: 36). For Morgan, there was kinship in common experiences of gender oppression, a sisterhood based in the sameness of women.

Morgan's Global project of sisterhood as a praxis of data collection was realized in the Sisterhood is Global Strategy meeting, what Morgan declared as the “first feminist think tank,” which took place at Hunter College on November 18 and 19, 1984, following soon after the publication of the volume.¹³ Morgan raised over $50,000 (a value that today would be nearly $135,000) for the 1984 institute and more money after for the continuation of the project from a range of donors, including prominent women philanthropists, the United Methodist Church, the Skaggs Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.¹⁴ In her project summary, Morgan declared the Sisterhood Is Global Institute would “develop women-defined tactics” to “improve the situation of female human beings cross-culturally.”¹⁵ The institute brought together authors from the volume, inviting women from across the world to New York City to conceptualize a long-term intellectual project of meetings that continued in the “sisterhood is global” cause. The twenty-five women who were to attend were diverse (ultimately, some did not make it to New York, including an ill Simone de Beauvoir). Women were to represent the nations and regions of Belgium, Brazil, the Caribbean, Colombia, Finland, France, Greece, India, Israel, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, the “Pacific Islands,” Palestine, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Yugoslavia, and Zambia.¹⁶ Yet, while women served as representatives of different nation-states (i.e., the list offered both nation-state and representative names; e.g., “India—Devaki Jain”), Morgan insisted in her opening statement for the meeting that the gathering was unlike any other conferences global women attended. It was not “a UN conference, an international agency seminar” but instead a “unique and autonomous gathering of international women who come together in the sisterhood of our pain . . . ”¹⁷ Each of the respective entries in the published volume offered a country report of the region the author represented. Morgan declared that the Global volume and conference represented all cultures and types of “development,” from the First to Third World.

In this vast project of commensurability, Morgan, the editor and curator of the Global volume and global institute, would play the leading role in the sisterhood. No document makes Morgan's understanding of her role in this vision of global sisterhood through her Sisterhood Is Global Institute clearer than a note that Morgan wrote to herself as a motivational saying to be hung on her office door:

The anthology Sisterhood Is Forever (2003), published almost twenty years after the Global collection, fortified the triumphant vision of Morgan's project of the sisterhood anthology as the primary guiding documents for the feminist movement. As Morgan describes the massive impact of her own anthologies, the Sisterhood volumes were still in demand decades after their production. They were “goddesses, demanding sacrifice on their altars” (Morgan 2003: liv). Forever built on Morgan's insistence that her version of sisterhood would be essential to the freedom of humanity, retrospectively assessing her contributions to the women's movement as timeless. As Morgan proclaims in the introduction, the anthology was to be the sole guidebook for the fate of the planet: “The book that rests in your hands is a tool for the future” (lv). As she closes the volume, Morgan declares that “feminism is the politics of the twenty-first century. In that sense, New World women have just begun” (lv).

Morgan's sisterhood projects promoted cis womanhood as the singular premise of global feminisms. It saw sisterhood as a vast comparative project based in new structures of social scientific knowledge. This knowledge economy naturalized the nation-state as the foundational category of all global research and analysis on women and foregrounded comparative oppression, as measured in quantitative demographic data, as the primary method to create this global sisterhood. By never offering a definition of the term “sisterhood” across the volumes and treating women solely in terms of biological reproduction and demographic fact, Morgan made clear that sisterhood was to be taken as a self-evident term reserved for biologically cis women and them alone. Morgan's demographic argument for a feminist politics saw feminism as a project for cis women by cis women. There is a clear through line from Morgan's public insistence that trans women were not women to her biopolitical understanding of women as population. Women's rights, Morgan declared again and again, shaped the fate of the planet because women were “more than half of the world's population.”

The Limits of Sisterhood

bell hooks's 1986 essay “Sisterhood” was published soon after Morgan's Sisterhood Is Global volume. It offers a clear departure from Morgan's project of sisterhood as commensurability. In her pleas for a return to radical sisterhood, hooks recognized how the sisterhood of white American feminists offered commonality as the sole justification for global solidarity politics. Sisterhood in this paradigm of global feminisms was based in the comparison of women's oppression and promoted solidarity through the social science of comparative development. In critiquing the false and often superficial nature of feminist solidarity politics, hooks distinguished her vision of sisterhood across difference from the language of commonality staged by so many feminists who claimed leadership on the stage of global feminism. As hooks argues in her essay, in line with the labor of sisterhood of Cherríe Moraga in Bridge, “We must define our own terms. Rather than bond on the basis of shared victimization or in response to a false sense of a common enemy, we can bond on the basis of our political commitment to a feminist movement that aims to end sexist oppression” (hooks 1986: 129). In her critique of women as solely subjects of victimization and men as the false “common enemy” of women, hooks builds on key feminist critiques that questioned feminist visions of liberation invested in separatism and state punitive governance that produced women solely as victims and subjects of harm.

Solidarity in sisterhood for hooks required radical inclusion of sexual practices that were explicitly anti-homophobic, aware of class exploitation, and open to other ways of being in one's body: “To build a politicized, mass-based feminist movement, women must work harder to overcome the alienation from one another that exists when sexist socialization has not been unlearned, e.g. homophobia, judging by appearance, conflicts between women with diverse sexual practices” (hooks 1986: 130). Sisterhood in this vision was a practice of intentional ethical consensus, not an epistemological project of equivalence. Nor was sisterhood a superficial declaration of support, a circulated petition with signatures with little public action, or an empty gesture of appearing on the side of good politics. Sisterhood was political praxis, sustained through long-term mutual care. hooks emphasizes the commitment required of such a project: “Solidarity is not the same as support. To experience solidarity, we must have a community of interests, shared beliefs and goals around which to unite, to build Sisterhood. Support can be occasional. It can be given and just as easily withdrawn. Solidarity requires sustained, ongoing commitment. In feminist movement, there is need for diversity, disagreement, and difference if we are to grow” (138). In 1986, despite the failures of the project of global sisterhood to be radically inclusive, hooks reinvested in sisterhood the potential for a vision of feminism shaped by the possibilities of social difference.

Yet, despite hooks's best efforts, by the early 1990s, sisterhood was no longer redeemable as a concept for feminist organizing. In a 1995 essay entitled “Sisterhood and Friendship as Feminist Models,” feminist philosopher and activist María C. Lugones differentiated white women's use of the term sisterhood to obfuscate difference from histories of sisterhood in civil rights organizing among Black women. As Lugones argues, sisterhood was a metaphor for a model of egalitarianism based in the Anglo-American family, a term deployed by white feminists uncritically despite feminist critiques of the patriarchal family. She argued that the use of sisterhood by white women obscured the origins of the use of this term in feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, where white women borrowed from the language of civil rights activism but were unwilling to acknowledge the complicated inclusion of Black women in mainstream feminisms.

Why use a kinship term for feminist social alliances between that had never achieved any sense of equality across racial difference? The use of the concept proved “burdensome to women of color” (Lugones 1995: 137) because the use of sisterhood erased difference under the pretense of inclusion. For Lugones, sisterhood was not viable across regions and cultures, giving the example of the equivalent term in Spanish, “hermana” (138), which she argued had no political weight, unlike terms that implied friendship and companionship. Lugones juxtaposed sisterhood to the concept of friendship, which she argued was more egalitarian and agentive in possibility. Lugones argued that friendship should be the new conceptual framework for solidarity. Friendship offered a kind of “practical love” based in “pluralism” (141) forged by people that was not unconditional but based in a shared ethos of feminist responsibility and mutual care. Yet friendship was not often thought of as a political concept, and few took up the idea of feminist friendship as political praxis in the years that followed Lugones's call.

The pathbreaking feminist theorist Oyeronke Oyewumi took the argument that sisterhood was a failed project even further in the introduction to the volume African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood, insisting that sisterhood could never be a term for cross-cultural alliance because of its formation as a relationship of the Anglo-American nuclear family. Oyewumi asks, why should we desire a cultural idea that is not our own as African women? As she describes, “We must question the very foundation of sisterhood, both as a concept and as a desirable relationship. Undoubtedly a cultural understanding is expressed in the choice of ‘sisterhood’ over other terms to describe relations between white and black women. Race was the first border it had to cross before sisterhood went global” (Oyewumi 2003: 5). White women enforced kinship structures on Black American women and then took that project around the world.

Sisterhood was a false imposition of affective connection, antithetical to what Oyewumi described as African kinship based in motherhood and generational power. She differentiated the sisterhood of Black women in the diaspora from that of African cultures. Providing a different genealogy for sisterhood, Oyewumi insisted that sisterhood symbolized the “(dis)connection” (Oyewumi 2003, 10) between African cultures and the diaspora. Instead, any use of the term among Black women was the result of the history of gendering that was essential to enslavement: “The languages that many of the enslaved West Africans brought to the Americas did not contain linguistic equivalents of the kin terms ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ because many African languages do not express gender-specificity in sibling designation. Though one is unable to establish the exact moment at which the enslaved Africans started to address each other in these terms in the Americas, it is clear that such usage evolved with the experience of slavery and acculturation” (10). Extending this argument about the fundamental difference of gender in the diaspora, Oyewumi critiqued African American feminists like Audre Lorde who romanticized ideas of African social egalitarianism and sexual diversity.

Oyewumi offers a key argument against the gender essentialism of white feminist sisterhood. The problem with sisterhood was the way that it imposed gendering as the premise of political alliance. Oyewumi offers a generalized argument against the biological determinism of sisterhood: “In African societies, the question of organizing to attain a political goal speaks to the issue of forming political alliances, and not sisterhood, since group identity is constituted socially and is not based on any qualities of shared anatomy popularly called gender” (19, emphasis added).

For feminists like Lugones and Oyewumi in the 1990s and early 2000s, sisterhood was an irredeemable project. It represented the way that feminist movements had long obscured the problem of racism through universalizing and biologically essentialist language of women's oppression. Beyond its implicit racism, sisterhood, uncritically wielded the negative obligations of kinship, a western vision of the family forced onto other women around the world as a tool of hegemonic political organizing by white American and European women. Perhaps most powerfully, in Oyewumi's analysis, sisterhood was bad because it symbolized a broad failure of political organizing as a gender deterministic project, equating political coalition with alliance through a biological notion of woman. These projects of sisterhood, like the ineffectual international circulation of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues, posited the American feminist vision of universal sisterhood as the sole avenue to women's freedom around the world.¹⁹ In their critiques, Lugones and Oyewumi insisted that sisterhood was a failed project, one exhausted of any of its previous political value. Sisterhood obscured more than it described and offered little intrinsic affective meaning for most of the women in the world. Yet Lugones's idealized friendship and Oyewumi's ideas of alliance through motherhood did not seem to offer a durable political alternative with viability across borders. There appeared to be no effective term to name global feminisms. “I am your friend” did not carry the same conceptual weight as “we stand together in sisterhood.”

As Lugones and Oyewumi cautioned against, imperial sisterhood reemerged once again at the turn of the twenty-first century, this time in the powerful use of gendered language of normative familial roles that would come to play an essential role in the US War on Terror. In 2001, First Lady Laura Bush's radio address in November of 2001 on the Taliban's oppression of women invoked the role of women in the family to argue for what was to become the longest war in history: “We may come from different backgrounds and faiths, but parents the world over love their children. We respect our mothers, our sisters, and daughters” (Bush 2001). Sisterhood's past as a space of possibility for chosen family, for a politics of mutual care, was perhaps forever lost in that moment. Its place as a desirable object for imperial, western, racist feminism was enshrined in US policies of perpetual war.

Sisterhood Is Yearning

So, is sisterhood all bad for twenty-first-century feminisms? Sisterhood was certainly not forever, however much Morgan declared it so just after 9/11 in her 2003 anthology. Today, more than twenty-five years after the largest global gathering of women in Beijing and over fifty years after Morgan's first use of the concept for women's liberation, the moral invocation of sisterhood as powerful and global is almost inconceivable. Sisterhood presents new problems for an inclusive feminist agenda, most glaringly in its long shadowy history as a term of cis enforcement, epitomized in Morgan's biologically essentialist demographics of global feminist solidarity, critiqued by Oyewumi as the Western enforcement of a politics of sexual difference, and later invoked again as Muslim women's victimhood became a primary justification for the US War on Terror.

Yet, in the focus on sisterhood as a failed rhetoric, feminist scholarship may have lost sight of material conditions that did make a moment of yearning, imagining, and debating feminist collectivity possible in the 1970s. These conversations took place in the form of global conferences, feminist anthologies, and the many global networks of collaboration across borders. For almost three decades, there were expansive opportunities for feminists to physically be together, to travel and meet one another, and to engage in unruly international exchanges where tensions and difference took place on a global stage. From her writings and her personal papers, we learn how Morgan's vision of sisterhood was primarily an avenue for her own (exclusionary) vision of leadership, not unlike many of her American peers. But the curated anthology and institute of Global did make possible an international debate about the nature of solidarity like the many UN conferences and workshops at Wellesley College, Barnard College, and more. In thinking sisterhood solely in terms of its universalizing discourse and rhetorical complicity in imperial projects old and new, we may lose sight of critical material shifts that emerged in the 1970s and the massive material retraction of resources from feminist projects that followed this era in the late 1990s and early 2000s through the new global War on Terror. Through the appropriation of the language of sisterhood for governance feminist projects of anti-trafficking and war, the funding structures that underwrote the women of color and global feminist anthologies, the international conference of feminist intellectuals and activists, and the flourishing of feminist publishing houses have been almost completely hollowed out.

Today there is a dramatic a shift away from the wide-scale funding for projects of women's solidarity that shaped the expansion “sisterhood” in the 1970s and 1980s. We might take the example of the Ford Foundation. There is much to be said about the complicated work that the Ford Foundation has done in relation to feminisms of the 1970s until the 1990s, from mandating social science research reports on the status of women, to exploitative agricultural development programs, to restricted funding for the first women's studies centers around the world.²⁰ Yet the central place of Ford in the making of many different women's organizations, educational programs on women's studies, and feminist publications cannot be denied. As we saw, the Ford Foundation facilitated the making of Morgan's Sisterhood Is Global Institute. It also underwrote the publication of a wide range of books, including a number of feminist anthologies and publishers that promoted sisterhood from publication houses like The Feminist Press. Ford funded the training and travel of Black women, women of color, and Third World feminists to global venues including the International Women's Year and Decade conferences in Mexico City, Copenhagen, and Nairobi, as well as the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Ford created scholarships and fellowships to fund the education of underrepresented scholars and students, including the establishment of Asian and African women's centers, Black and Latinx scholars in the US academy, as well as Dalit scholars from India who pursued international PhDs.

With rising authoritarianism in the Global South especially, international funding aid has become increasingly suspect, making the feminist internationalism of 1970s and 1980s sisterhood all but impossible. For example, in Modi's India, the Ford Foundation was named a national security risk in 2015 and was forced to exit the region. The accusation of corrupt foreign funding has been a key tool for authoritarian regimes in places like India and Pakistan to critique transnational feminist and rights organizations that fund projects for minority and sexual rights, monitor human rights violations, and protect free speech. No critique is leveled more regularly against sexual rights movements across the world today than the accusation of taking foreign funding or being fed “foreign” ideas of gender and sexual liberation, whether it be with women's marches in Asia, Latin America, and eastern Europe, or the new surge of laws against homosexuality and the criminalization and expulsion of organizations supporting sexual minorities in sub-Saharan Africa.

Today, there is a radically different material world supporting transnational or global causes of gender and women compared to what might have been found thirty or forty years ago. The rapid expansion of NGO sector work has permanently shifted the terrain of feminist organizing. With the Global War on Terror, the Bush administration ended all funding to the UN Population Council in 2001, one of the largest funders of social scientific research on women and a major source for research that used the language of sisterhood and solidarity. Radical feminist causes across borders lost the funding machinery of the 1980s and 1990s from foundations, replaced instead by deeply reactionary privatized anti-trafficking coalitions that promote carceral policies established through a dangerous alliance of American conservatives and women.²¹ We live in a time of profound retrenchment of policy and transnational funding for feminist work. Even with the many shortcomings of NGO feminist efforts, and there are many, there is no doubt that solidarity feminisms have been in retreat for some time with profound material effects for people and organizations across the world.

In this alarming time of authoritarianism, there may be space for a reinvented sisterhood. Maybe, as Morgan declared, sisterhood is essential for twenty-first-century politics, but in a vision of sisterhood that is antithetical to Morgan's gender essentialist vision. This sisterhood would not be nostalgic or recuperative of the universalisms of yore that utilized a developmental language of commensurable oppressions to argue for feminist solidarity. Rather, perhaps the twenty-first-century sisterhood could reflect hooks's challenge to see solidarity as an ethics based in mutual exchange, in Lorde's desire for a sisterhood based in survival, in the affective dimensions of the yearning envisioned by people like Toni Morrison, reflected in the political praxis of hooks, Lorde, Chandra Mohanty, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, M. Jacqui Alexander, and so many others. Sisterhood in our moment now might offer a powerful political platform, one that intentionally reimagines normative kinship structures and explicitly subverts biological deterministic ideas of feminism to uphold transgender and queer living as a key priority in the twenty-first century feminist project.

Or maybe the term sisterhood is unnecessary for today's solidarity politics, a limiting paradigm for movements of marginalized people in the face of inhumanity. Maybe sisterhood, with its checkered past, is officially too bad to be good. Even still, I am left to meditate on hooks's opening lines, struggling to put words on the page, wondering how we are to write in our time of authoritarian violence around the world. I turn again to these debates of solidarity and sisterhood because there is a need in this moment for reflection on a twenty-first-century language of solidarity. For however pessimistic much of our contemporary critical thinking is, that feeling of yearning persists. We see it the undeniable aspirations in political mobilizations now that utilize the banner of feminism to question authoritarianism and make broad demands on the state for minoritized rights across communities. The diversity of these demands can be found in the manifestos of the Aurat Marches in Pakistan, demands of the #NiUnaMenos campaigns that originated in Argentina and spread across Latin America, and in the claim of citizenship itself at protests from India to Sudan. These movements make broad demands through new visions of inclusive democratic participation for the twenty-first century. These movements seek to undo an authoritarian biopolitics of life and death that has so easily objectified and disappeared women, queer, trans, nonbinary people. Instead, they seek to imagine a collective ethics of living.

Perhaps people are no longer moved to collective action with the invocation of sisterhood today. Maybe many never were. Perhaps in the twenty-first century, our yearnings reside in the increasingly narrowing space between “lives” and “matter,” in the declaration of feminist strikes, of mobilizations against the murder of women and trans people where masses proclaim, “not one more,” and in the resonances of Lorde's sisterhood as mutual survival against authoritarian violence. It may very well be that our material, social, and political solidarities were never meant to have one name. Yet let us remember, from this complicated history of sisterhood, there have been, and continue to be, fierce collectives who fight for the possibility of living.

Notes

References