I was coming out of a lecture that I was giving to IDS masters’ students on struggles against anti-gender backlash by women’s groups when I saw the news: 15 Palestinian medical workers brutally killed and buried in a mass grave by Israel. My blood boiled, and I wished that I could do something tangible to stop the latest wave of the genocide that Israel had been committing for the better part of two years now. I’ve done all that I can to fight against the genocide – attending marches, signing petitions and sharing information on social media, but it still doesn’t feel like enough. What else could I do to send my solidarity to all Palestinians?
Solidarity. That word made me pause and ruminate. What does it mean in practice?
Returning to the theme of the lecture I had given (on backlash and strategies against this), I thought of all the women’s groups and movements we had been working with over the last five years through the Sustaining Power for Women’s Rights (SuPWR) project. The idea, discourse and practice of solidarity was rife across all 16 of these women’s groups. There is a clear relationship between solidarity and (collective) power – one could say that solidarity is essential for gaining and sustaining power; and ‘power to’ build solidarity is one of the key strategies that women’s groups use to counter backlash against them. Strength in numbers, as they say.
So, is solidarity the glue that holds these groups together within themselves – the necessary element to bring groups together, the essence of building cross-sectional and intergenerational alliances – or something more?
Building a Solidarity Network
IDS, the Arab Institute for Women (AiW) at the Lebanese American University, Gender Sphere and Independent Consultant, Jana Vasil’eva have recently collaborated, with the support of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), to establish a Community of Practice (CoP) called the Solidarity Network (SN). This network brings together a cohort of grantees from six IDRC projects who are researching gender backlash across different contexts, encompassing Asia; Latin and South America; the MENA region; and West Africa. Our aim in building the Solidarity Network is to establish an interconnected global web of individuals and organisations supporting women’s and LGBTQI+ rights that are countering gender backlash.
While the term ‘solidarity’ is in the very name of project, we initially held off on defining of the term, instead, wanting to collectively understand what solidarity meant for SN members. Of course, some clues of our initial understandings of ‘solidarity’ could be found in some of the words we used in the SN objectives:
• Recognise who to build solidarity with;
• Reflect on strategies to build solidarity;
• Restore faith in each other through healing care and support; and
• Recreate feminist and queer alliances across fractures.
But how did this translate across various contexts? What did the term ‘solidarity’ mean to our network members?
Defining solidarity
In our first SN virtual meeting, we asked members of our network to think of one word that comes to their mind when they think of ‘solidarity’. Network members added these to a word cloud, which included the terms: care, support, action, power, unity; allyship; sharing; love; understanding; empathy, participation.
No big surprises there, except for one – the word ‘care’ was the most frequently associated terms with solidarity. Why was the focus on care in relation to solidarity a surprise to us? We care for our family, our friends. We also care about some causes and issues – in my case, the Palestinian cause was on top of my list.
But the ‘care’ in solidarity has a slightly different connotation. This ‘care’ signifies the emotional, affective and aesthetic labour that goes into building movements, and this has messy, political underpinnings that are often disassociated with the term care. Solidarity could then be understood as the outcome of the articulation of this care labour, which in turn builds collective power.
But like power is not benign, and care is messy and political, building solidarity is also not without conflict and contestations. Especially in the field of gender and sexuality, extreme polarisations and fractions have arisen even within movements and people These polarisations are fanned by the gender backlash actors, who loathe and feel threatened by solidarity.
This polarisation can only be rectified through a productive encounter between these deeply polarised factions – an encounter marked by a restoring of faith, healing, and building architectures of care that would help repair and restore collective energies.
In other words, building solidarity would entail embodied, situated and feminist ethics and practical action of care, that would counter the depletion, disillusionment and dissensus characterising the contemporary feminist and queer landscape. Sending solidarity to all people of Palestine and other colonised lands then means sending hope, resilience and love. It means to continue resisting, to practice a feminist ethics of care in writings and deliberations, always raising the issue, and not giving in to the disillusionment that Israel and its allies would have us feel. It entails continuing to fight with whichever tools one has control over – in my case with a pen – well, laptop; but also, with intentionally practicing care as an ethos, a principle, a code of conduct. It signifies that your fight is my fight, and your dreams are my dreams.
A journey of care-ful solidarities
In the Solidarity Network, we are starting our journey precisely through the praxis of care, recognising the tools of backlash; restoring feminist energies through connections, reflecting and amplifying strategies to counter backlash; and thus, recreating care-ful feminist alliances and solidarities.