An Introduction
By Barb LeSavoy, PhD
The Feminist Manifesto: A written or spoken, usually public declaration of an individual or group’s ideas, principles, purposes, and intentions. Manifestos are often political and subversive in nature and convey emotion.
I am thrilled to pen this essay for the Journal of Engaged Research as an introduction to a curated collection of feminist manifestos authored by brilliant students enrolled in my spring ’22 feminist theory course. Brilliant is an under-qualifier. The authors are Smart. Inventive. Kind. Curious. Brave. Semesters later, their words and imagery continue to move me in significance and import. Readers are in for an incredible ride as they discover what these authors know and ways they craft this knowledge into compelling arguments for feminisms and feminist equality. But I am getting ahead of myself.
I often get ahead of myself when teaching feminist theory. It’s the excitement I feel being close to foundational and emerging feminist thought. I cannot get to the page quick enough or speak my words fast enough to match my brain swell. In this all too rapid, sometimes precarious intellectual transfer, I stumble a bit in efforts to convey the gravity and magnitude of feminist knowledge as it impacts me, my students, the world. As a class, we meet once a week for 2.75 hours across a fifteen-week semester. This translates into 795 minutes lived collectively over a quarter of a year. It is a generous slab of time that is never quite enough. What if we miss something? What if what we miss is something? What if what we miss is everything? While a race against the clock is one driver in my feminist theory teaching, the feminist manifesto is my end-of-semester pause. It is a strategic assignment that asks students to reflect on feminist knowledge acquired across the course and to use this knowledge to inform what we do. In words and sentences, the feminist manifesto is a powerful stop. It fuses together a semester of theoretical dialogue into a textured, diverse tapestry of feminist agency. As feminist theory to praxis, the feminist manifesto is our chair at the table, our voice in a crowd, our call for change.
Feminist thought provides the foundation or building blocks to feminist manifesto writing, so the theory needs a fair mention. I structure my feminist theory course in a way that introduces students to feminist theorists as the thinkers situated within schools or classifications of feminist thought as the theory. Tong and Botts (2018) note that feminist thought as interdisciplinary and intersectional goes against or resists boxes of theoretical classification. I agree on this point and explain in instruction ways that different schools of thought can intersect despite being discrete in theoretical definition. I am however glued to theoretical classifications because of the important feminist meaning and analytical boundaries these schools of thought provide: Liberal, Radical, Black, Psychoanalytic, Existential, Marxist, Lesbian, Queer, and Postmodern are the main theoretical frameworks that I include in instruction. These theoretical schools provide the scaffolding behind or within which I situate the theorists, primarily Western feminist thinkers from the late 18th century to the present, distinguishing among waves and diversity in feminisms and feminist praxis. In application then, my feminist theory course considers the value of producing and mediating feminist knowledge, explaining gender inequalities, developing strategies for social change, and forming a basis for personal and political decision making.
As the manifestos evidence, this theoretical framing to feminist thought extends a versatile toolbox to apply feminist knowledge in expansive ways. This breadth in utility is rich in contemporary innovation despite the long and well-established history to much of our foundational feminist thought. Each semester I reread feminist thinkers who I have studied and analyzed countless times, and each semester, I theorize new layers of meaning. You can consider the early first wave liberal treatise of Mary Wollstonecraft (1782), the intersectional second wave Black feminisms of Audre Lorde (1984), the midcentury existential philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir (1949), the second wave radical disruption of Shulamith Firestone (1970), or the postmodern third wave queer theory of Judith Butler (1990) and rediscover nuances of knowledge that recurrently shift in time, place, and conflict. That we bring our lived experiences into the feminist classroom and into feminist thought adds depth and dimension to knowledge that might otherwise lay flat. There is emotive agency embedded here. That gender and racial inequalities persist. That reproductive rights are eroding. That heteropatriarchal dominance is pervasive. That LGTBQIA+ folks face mounting prejudices incite a politic of discontent that engenders much of our feminist discourse. Whether it is classroom dialogue or written responses, I am often stymied in finding adequate words to express the profound impact students’ unique theoretical interpretations provide.
Words and images are power. This rhetoric rings true in feminist thought and in the feminist manifestos to follow where authors choose a social problem and interrogate that problem using feminist thinkers framed by feminist theory. Anger, sadness, care, and discomfort are examples of useful emotions to tap when formulating a feminist issue to argue, and subversion and disruption as a push pack to power and dominance are examples of useful platforms to place a manifesto argument. As a genre, the manifesto is unapologetic, demanding, incisive, and critical, so contention in response to political and social tensions around us generates an array of timely and important feminist compositions. Authors deploy text, art, media or a combination of these as they craft and shape their theoretical positions. Some of the manifesto topics that comprise this volume include: Battling the Binary; Decolonizing Feminisms; Reproductive Justice; Black Feminism; Trans Equality; LGBTQIA+ Human Rights; Feminist Voice as a Seat at the Table; Craftmaking History and Gender Performance; COVID 19, Betty Friedan, and the Feminine Mystique; Constructions of Motherhood; Dear Christine de Pizan; Women and Body Hair; The Shining Meets Feminism; The Mirabel Sisters and Expressions of Beauty; MeToo Feminisms; Menstrual Equality; and the list continues. Individually, the manifestos are moving polemics; as a collection, they are a feminist revolution.
I opened this short essay as introduction to a brilliant collection of feminist manifestos by getting a bit ahead of myself. The excitement of feminist theory, the constraints of time in teaching, and the urgency to bring us into the center of feminist knowledge are pressure points that motor me forward at warp speed. As my words catch up to the page, I can slow down for a moment, and that measured stride offers opportunity for reflection. As I look over my shoulder today and the days leading up to this writing, I find inspiration in feminist movements such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Center for Reproductive Rights that persist anew despite so many cyclical and repeating feminist failures. But feminist failures prevail. White, cis, non-intersectional feminist dominance. Exclusionary feminist politics. Oppressive materialist feminist divides. These discouraging truths to historical and contemporary feminist theories and thinkers are hard to eschew. As lifeblood to the feminist manifesto, I’d be remiss not to mention these feminist shortfalls. Iconic feminist manifestos such as Donna Haraway’s (1985) Cyborg Manifesto, Valeri Solanas’ (1967) SCUM Manifesto, Redstockings’ (1969) Redstockings Manifesto, The Combahee River Collective Statement (1978), or Bikini Kill’s Riot Grrrl Philosophy (1995) as examples, rise out of these societal and feminist disjoints. Tenors of discontent aside, the authors here further my hopes for more enduring feminist futures. Like feminist manifesto thinkers who came before them, the manifesto thinkers in this volume choose to know and act on what they know. In the spirit of feminist movements for gender and social equalities, that choice is the radical feminisms we crave.
I’ll close on a feminist theoretical metaphor that invariably spills into my feminist theory teaching. Some of you know it’s coming. The chair. I’m in love with the chair in form and function, and I have amassed a unique collection of chairs across a seasoned career. Some of the chairs that I own hold meaningful family history, others are artsy with ample cushion and lovely lines, and still others are old and rickety with quirky edge. Regardless of shape or condition, a chair offers us a seat, a place to sit, a call to rest. But the chair is much more than simply furniture. It is voice. A seat at the table. A space for inclusion. A chair is a site to gather with others whether that is across a meal, as a mode for travel, or a place to look out upon culture and the world. A chair is political. It can authenticate identity, legitimize place, and sanction membership. A chair can welcome while also exclude. Importantly, I have not always had a chair. A seat. Voice. Agency. Inclusion. That I have one now, acquired across an ostensibly long and complex reach, makes the chair my feminist manifesto. I invite you to take a seat with me. A feminist seat. Settle in for a spell and engage with the well-informed feminist manifestos in the pages to follow. As you ponder ways to redress broken systems of sex and gender equality, I hope your chair shakes you a bit, that you question what you think you know, that you feel a sense of disruption.
Black feminist thinker bell hooks (2000), who we lost in 2021, argued that being in the center of lived feminist knowledge is liberation. Borrowing from hooks, liberate yourself if only for a moment from life’s restraints as you jump into the center of new and emerging feminist thought. I am thrilled to introduce this diverse and empowering collection of feminist manifestos as intersectional feminist resistance on the cusp of feminist transformation.
Barb LeSavoy, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Women and Gender Studies
SUNY Brockport
References
Bikini Kill. (1995). Riot grrrl philosophy. In W. K. Kolmar & F. Bartkowski (Eds), Feminist theory: A reader, fourth edition (478). McGraw Hill.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.
Combahee River Collective, (1978). The Combahee river collective statement. In Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Ed.), How we get free: Black feminism and the Combahee river collective (15–28). Haymarket Books.
de Beauvoir, S. (1949). A second sex. (H. M. Parshley, Trans.) Penguin.
Firestone, S. (1970). The dialectic of sex: The case for feminist revolution. Morrow.
Haraway, D. 1985). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In D. Haraway, Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature (149–181). Routledge.
hooks, bell. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics. South End Press.
Lorde, A. (1984). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. In A. Lorde, Sister outsider: Essays and speeches (110–114). Crossing Press.
Redstockings (1969). Redstockings manifesto. In W. K. Kolmar & F. Bartkowski (Eds), Feminist theory: A reader, fourth edition (192). McGraw Hill.
Solanas, V. (1967). SCUM manifesto. Verso Books.
Tong, R. & Botts, T. F. (2018). Feminist thought: A more comprehensive introduction. Westview Press.
Wollstonecraft, M., 1759–1797. (1845). A vindication of the rights of woman: With strictures on political and moral subjects. G. Vale.
