BY Sunshine Fionah Komusana
Reflecting on feminist Leadership through a class analysis of the feminist movement(s)
On March 26, 2023, eleven Ugandan feminists gathered to break bread, read and analyse feminist texts, and be in community with one another. The gathering took place on a Sunday, so, in jest, we named it Feminist “Church”.
Feminist Church continues today, meeting almost every month or every other month. Together, we explore questions such as:
- What does it mean to gather outside systems that have historically defined belonging and exclusion?
- What shifts when we center care, trust, and imagination in how we organize?
- How do we sustain practices of liberation beyond moments of crisis or resistance?
We were asking ourselves these questions because, like many young(er) feminists, our entry point into organizing had been through working in and with feminist or women’s rights organizations. We carry many wounds and scars from those experiences.
At our first gathering, we read Toni Morrison’s 1979 Barnard College commencement speech, “Cinderella’s Stepsisters,” in which she writes,
“I want not to ask you but to tell you not to participate in the oppression of your sisters…I am alarmed by the violence that women do to one another: professional violence, competitive violence, emotional violence. I am alarmed by the willingness of women to enslave other women. I am alarmed by a growing absence of decency on the killing floor of professional women’s worlds. You are the women who will take your place in the world where you can decide who shall flourish and who shall wither; you will make distinctions between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor; where you can yourself determine which life is expendable and which is indispensable.”
We related deeply to her alarm at the violence women can do to one another. It spoke to the ill treatment we had experienced at the hands of our feminist leaders and elders, while also forcing us to confront our own complicity in creating and sustaining toxic (yes, this word is overused) movement spaces.
For the last three years, despite ebbs, flows, and logistical challenges, we have experimented together with what it might look like to nurture an alternative space for our feminist labor(s) of love.
But … It is still labor. When we talk about feminist leadership, our imaginations often remain captured by the hierarchies and power structures we see in civil society organizations and the legal and funding ecosystems they exist within and report to. Anything outside those structures, Feminist Church being an example, is still vulnerable to the tyranny of structurelessness.
Outside projects, reporting, conferencing, advocating, rinsing and repeating, feminist work is also the work of building, nurturing and sustaining community. Akin to Cinderella’s endless list of chores, this work is mostly invisible. It receives slave-like wages, if it is paid at all, and like washing dishes in an African home during an event, it is also endless.
So the question becomes: Who is doing the feminist dishes?
I am tempted to milk this analogy for everything it’s worth, and to ask who benefits from that labor. As feminists, we understand social reproduction; we understand that it is feminized and classed. Yet the interaction of class within feminist spaces is complex by design.
When in 2023 younger feminists in Uganda talked on social media about mistreatment, unpaid labor and good old abuse in the workplace at the hands of revered feminist leaders in even more revered institutions, the conversation quickly turned outward, with many feminists demanding silence in the name of protecting the “movement,” to the extent of calling the process, which was dubbed the “NGOExhibition”, the work of anti-rights groups. It would be laughable if it were not dangerous.
I would love to go into a full-blown analysis of class here, but Marxist feminists have already done that work for us. What I would like to offer is my own reflection as both an observer and participant in the feminist movement, and a former young feminist who worked at one of the institutions named in the #NGOExhibition.
The absence of reckoning, for me, was indicative of our refusal to see ourselves as perpetrators and arbiters of harm towards each other, because our class politics are yet to catch up to our feminist politics. When an executive director of a feminist organization is happy to take home a $5000 dollar salary in the same economy where her program officer is making $500, if at all, while said officer does all the dishes without question, we have to ask, who is our feminist work for?
It’s impossible to exhaust all the nuances of salaries and salary scales in a single reflection, and it’s only one example of how we replicate class inequalities even as our political work is, among other things, about addressing historical and apparent inequalities.
Salaries within NGOs are merely a proxy for how class politics play out within our movement (I’m cognizant here that civil society organizations are not the full extent of the feminist movement). There are many examples of how class relations migrate into our organizing. For example, when drivers, cleaners, interns and volunteers are not part of our office/event lunch budgets; when the labor done by domestic workers inside our homes as feminists is invisibilized, uncompensated or poorly remunerated, while we speak about and theorise unpaid care work and social reproduction; and, the gravest sin of all, when work/action done by grassroots (I hate that word), queer, and sex worker movements does not receive the resourcing it needs, and we do/say nothing about that, or make no attempts to share resources.
There are many examples, but there is a word limit. Yet class remains an unacknowledged conversation, a gaping blind spot in feminist organizing.
Feminist Church reflects on this directly:
“The feminist movement in Uganda, like many around the world, has not been free from tension. Sometimes it has mirrored the same systems we fight: hierarchies, gatekeeping, competition, and silence around harm. Movements that should be liberatory have, at times, made it hard for queer people, sex workers, or working-class feminists to belong. Those fractures taught us something: solidarity isn’t something you can just say; it has to be lived, again and again, in how we show up for one another.”
We cannot untether feminist leadership from class and class solidarity. Otherwise, leaders, or those in positions of power within our movements, will continue to reproduce the harms of Cinderella’s stepsisters (I really want to call it bad manners). So, perhaps the answer to who is doing the dishes should be that all of us must take turns at the sink, the tap, the compound, or wherever dishes are washed in our different contexts. But taking turns is only part of the answer. We must also notice whose labor has already been treated as naturally available, whose work remains invisible, and who has been expected to sustain everyone else without the same recognition or resources.
This question feels especially urgent as we witness, in real time, the dissipation of the institutions and NGOs that gathered us and scattered us in equal measure. Adrienne Maree Brown in Emergent Strategy, calls us to the work of transforming ourselves in order to transform the world. I believe in us and our ability to conjure new worlds free of inequalities, one dish-washing turn at a time.