BY Alejandra Sarda
I don’t know if I ever was a “feminist leader.”But I know that, if I can choose, I would prefer never to have been,or ever be, associated with that term.
Before I tell you why, I need to explain where I come from. I was born and spent most of my formative years in Argentina, under authoritarian military regimes and in a heavily leader-focused society. I grew up seeing “Leaders” as men of power who inevitably caused destruction and disaster, but without whom nothing could function. It was impossible to even imagine changes that could benefit people like me and my family without hoping that a Leader would come and make things fairer. We were colour-privileged, being white, but also working class. Oppression, the need for change, and the hope that a Leader would come who would not be killed or coopted were part of my mental landscape from the very start.
The first feminists I met were the female version of the male Leaders of my early years. They were larger than life; they had survived prison and exile, spoke loudly, always knew what to say and how to say it, and could not be disobeyed. The penalty for questioning them was to be seen as a “bad feminist”, someone still in the throes of patriarchy.
In those early years of activism, in the late 1980s to early 1990s, we were proud of our “horizontal” organizations where there were no formal leaders. However, the voice heard through the megaphone, the articles, the meeting facilitation, or the conference stage was usually one,or at the most, two. Confrontations between Leaders were brutal – not very different from what you could see among men in a political party, a union, or a guerrilla group. Many of our feminist Leaders had come from those spaces.
Among those of us who were young feminists then, some followed that path. They mimicked the Leaders and became Leaders themselves. Others ran away from the movement in horror and chose to be activists only in their daily lives and occupations: the teacher who confronts a sexist remark by a student, the doctor who gets the forbidden abortion pill, the mother who sends her son to clean his bedroom, and many others. Still others found corners in the movement where we did not need to be Leaders, or at least not that kind of Leader. I would like to count myself in that group.
One of my jobs these days is research commissioned by a funder on leadership transitions in LBT organizations in Latin America. I have been talking to a wonderful range of activists from different generations who have been, and/or refuse to ever be, formal or informal leaders in queer NGOs and collectives.
This research is bringing many memories back. More than once, I have seen pieces of my younger self in the person I was speaking with.
I am learning a lot about the damages caused by the patriarchal vision of leadership ingrained in us as human beings of the capitalist age. But I am also learning about the brilliant and brave new paths that activists – particularly younger ones – are taking to dismantle that vision.
What I heard over and over again is that when you have a Leader, you have a few problems. First, if you have a weak organization where information, contacts, and decisions lie within one fragile human body and mind, an illness, death, personal crisis, or simply a very attractive job offer may leave the organization “orphaned” overnight, with a group of disoriented people who were never expected to be more than followers.
Then there is the ‘coup d’état ’, or what a Freudian-inclined friend of mine calls “slaying the Father”. This is the moment when a new Leader takes over. In many cases, it is a dramatic event involving betrayals, accusations, and the psychological destruction of the old Leader. I don’t wish this on any activist (fascist leaders deserve it, but sadly it only seems to happen to feminist or queer Leaders).
People have vividly described to me coups they experienced many years earlier. There is a city in Brazil I will never return to because it was there that I suffered mine, more than 20 years ago.
Those who have suffered coups often stubbornly refuse to take on any leadership position afterwards. If we work in NGOs, we avoid becoming Executive Directors. In informal groups, we measure our words and actions so we do not stand out too much. Some of us avoid activism forever afterwards. These are losses our movements rarely acknowledge because many people leave silently.
The blessing is that many of us learned from this pain. We began to think critically about Leadership and explore ways of relating to each other, sharing power, and disagreeing that do not require slaying the other.
Many younger activists are trying out co-leadership between two or more people, rotating positions of power, increasing the flow of information within organizations and groups, and having,literally, more than one megaphone so that many voices are heard during demonstrations. Many were once the silent audience to a ‘coup’, the newest staff member in a suddenly orphaned organization, or the “bad feminist” condemned by a Leader. They are transforming their pain, and the pain they witnessed, into a creative force.
Something I still wonder is whether we really need to be, or to have, leaders at all. What would our movements look like if we actively rejected the idea of “building leadership skills” and focused instead on all of us being nurturers and enablers of each other, happy cells in a collective body, exploring different roles without becoming fixated on any of them?
My dream is that those who are children today grow up to be activists who will never know Leaders.