the revolution will not be exhausted

I’m confronted with an irony, as I sit to write this piece about the Center for Feminist Futures, and the feminist future of care and work. I am recovering from a COVID-19 infection I got from my child a few weeks ago, just after moving to a new city and a job at a new university. I am tired. I have been ruminating over whether I have long COVID. I should be napping, but I am writing. I am hurriedly writing towards the distant horizon of the feminist future where collective rest is abundant and even rigorous, so vital to the sustainability of intellectual life that it has its own section on our CVs. ‘But did she take time to rest and feel re-energised?’, they will ask during academic personnel reviews. ‘Did she facilitate her colleagues’ ability to rest?’.

Just a few months ago, I was chairing a Gender and Sexuality Studies department at UC Riverside, where all my colleagues and I were exhausted. A few of us had an ongoing text thread we used to celebrate each other’s accomplishments—with a lot of dancing woman, fire and cocktail emojis—and also to rant and cry about what felt like the impossibility of balancing our own mental and physical health, our political commitments and organising work, our writing and teaching and the increasing demands of the university during a time of shrinking resources, a global pandemic, rising fascism, record-breaking heat and annual local wildfires (sobbing and brain explosion emojis). Now, I am the chair of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) and a grateful member of the mothership, UCSB’s emergent Center for Feminist Futures. My current colleagues, like my previous ones, are wonderful people and brilliant and prolific scholars, and they, too, are living with the hallmarks of our time: multiple COVID infections, student trauma and aggression, unending university bureaucracy, lack of affordable housing and childcare, doxing and other forms of online harassment from the public, general overwork due to insufficient staff support and racism, homophobia, transphobia and misogyny in the academy and in the world.

One of my colleagues circulated the CFP for this themed issue about Feminist Futures to our faculty, and we delighted in its resonance with the conversations we are having here in Santa Barbara. We also asked, who among us has the time to write something in response to this CFP? The quarter had just begun and everyone was already busy, at best, and worn out, at worst. As I am not teaching this quarter, I volunteered, made some tea and began to think about the feminist present and its relationship to the future.

We are living in an anxious time, marked by great uncertainty and numerous crises. How do we respond? On the one hand, we know we must act. On the other hand, we are depressed and anxious, and this exhausts us. As individuals, it is very difficult to balance these conflicting states, but as collectives—such as in feminist academic spaces—we can take turns pushing forward and stepping back. This piece illuminates the often-immobilising tension between crisis-driven urgency and crisis fatigue that many of my colleagues and students and I experience. I gesture towards the possibilities of a both/and approach in which feminist scholars pool emotional resources and practical capacities in feminist departments, research teams and other academic spaces. Doing this allows each of us to step forward and back as needed, harnessing the power of the collective to act with urgency and also retreat due to emotional and physical fatigue. Both/and is also an embrace of non-disposability, a commitment to the well-being of our feminist colleagues even as they/we must step back or draw boundaries around our productivity due to stress, illness, disability and exhaustion. It allows us to acknowledge both the sense of urgency that the world’s steady flow of apocalyptic news elicits in the university and ourselves (the calls for innovative, resourceful, nimble, solutions-orientated, do-more-with-less, all-hands-on-deck multidisciplinary strategies that maximise institutional resources to solve today’s problems …), and the periods of rest, withdrawal, care, doubt (I’m so tired, should I just leave the academy?) and refusal (no, I will not serve on another committee) that build resilience and nurture intellectual and political creativity.

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Feminist scholars at UCSB launched the Feminist Futures Initiative in 2019, motivated by a sense of urgency about the precarious state of the world alongside the clarity about the possibilities for a different future—a feminist future—that invests in mutual care and collective liberation. The work of the Center is to shape public discourse about the crises of our time by illuminating the central role of feminist research in any meaningful efforts to address global fascism, the climate crisis, war and militarisation, development and human rights, labour and economic justice, aging and disability, white supremacy and state violence, technology and surveillance, internet security and reproductive justice and bodily self-determination. We create spaces of intersectional and intergenerational feminist dialogue and experimentation, where new visions of the future emerge and circulate locally, nationally and globally.

Building the Center is a dynamic and collaborative process. In the past three years, we have worked on multiple fronts, hosting high-profile feminist thought-leaders (Roxanne Gay, Anita Hill, Tourmaline), as well as smaller symposiums and lectures on Black feminist futurity, post-Roe organising, trans artistic practice, the criminalisation and dehumanisation of immigrant families and more. Drawing on all available tools to build the future otherwise, our conversations span academic disciplines, generations, geographies and histories.

Like all collaborative, paradigm-shifting projects, building a research centre takes considerable energy and work. Building a new future will take everything we have. As interdisciplinary feminist studies scholars, we are attending to an increase in student crises (housing and food insecurity, rising anxiety and other mental health challenges) while also working with fewer resources—lower salaries, less research funding, less staff support, older facilities, less legitimacy and institutional power— than many of our colleagues in the sciences. How do we hold the tension between the absolutely vital role of care—not just of our students and comrades, but of ourselves—as we undertake the work that lies ahead? Black feminist writers and organisers at the helm of the healing justice movement have made clear that care and resilience are collective, not individual, projects. Abolition is a feminist issue because people in crisis need care, not cops (Black Lives Matter, 2021). Pleasure is a feminist issue because, for people systematically denied access to care and pleasure for generations (not only healthcare, but rest, joy and healing opportunities), these are movement resources that build resilience—the material of pleasure activism (brown, 2019). Embodiment is a feminist issue because people cannot heal from centuries of patriarchal, white supremacist violence and trauma without embodied healing practices. ¹ Rest is a feminist issue because exhaustion is structural and generational, and rest is resistance (Hersey, 2022).

We set our intention to continue building the Center for Feminist Futures in a way that energises rather than exhausts.

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When I was a grad student we joked about the aesthetics of Women’s Studies professors, our mentors. Some of them wore chunky jewellery and flowing, printed trouser sets from Chico’s. They listened to feminist folk music and voted for almost anyone who was a woman, even if she was a disappointing liberal. They were labour organisers in their youth, and were bisexual, or lesbians who had once been with men. We studied every sign of their personal lives outside of the classroom not just because poking a little fun at them helped take the edge off the power imbalance between us, but because we were looking to them for guidance about how to actually live a feminist life, about how to survive the academy in a way that didn’t grind us down. We were looking for signs of their full humanity. But this information wasn’t always forthcoming, and many academic friends my age have shared with me that feminist care practices, and holistic approaches to mentorship, were remarkably absent from their experiences with feminist faculty. Some of these faculty were brilliant but quite emotionally reserved and reclusive, or women who’d been made highly cautious and guarded by the racism, misogyny and homophobia of the university; some were women who were perhaps overcompensating for their male colleagues’ inappropriateness with students by instituting what they understood to be good feminist boundaries. We also heard rumours about—and caught glimpses of—the pain our feminist advisors were experiencing as a result of the devaluation of their scholarship by their colleagues, deans and disciplines. In many cases, our advisors did not talk to us about this pain (to protect us? to maintain their own dignity?), even though it was as instructive as how to write a CV for our future as feminists in the academy.

Looking back, I now suspect that our curiosity about the personal lives of our feminist mentors was also aimed at uncovering how they cared for themselves, and how they thought we, as young feminists, should care for ourselves. Now I am a Feminist Studies professor (the name change, itself, is for another essay) and no doubt subject to a new generation’s stereotypes, many of which will be true. I suspect that who we are now, as feminist scholars, tells us much about where we are headed in the future.

Here’s what I see. We wear mostly black and are devotees of Octavia Butler and the Brown sisters’ How to Survive the End of the World podcast because we feel like it really is the end of the world. ² We identify as queer and trans and spend our salaries on rent or mortgages we cannot afford and also on an incredible amount of body work and psychotherapy, medical care, drugs (cannabis, hallucinogens and prescriptions), support for family back home and sessions with intuitives, astrologers and healers of all sorts. Increasingly we demand money—not just visibility or prestige—for intellectual labour because our salaries are not enough. Young scholars among us, in negotiations, ask for things that Deans find outrageous, naïve and demanding. What they think is hubris (a Black queer humanist asking for the kinds of resources white male scientists have long received), we see as survival. We are keenly attuned to the transactional nature of the university, the way our identities and knowledges add value in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) reports and service obligations. We ask to be renumerated.

Most importantly, we understand that we are each other’s comrades in surviving the institution and the often racist, homophobic and transphobic cities and towns in which our universities are located, and as such, our relationships, as feminist colleagues and sometimes friends, are interdependent. When one of us is driven to their edge by institutional betrayals, imposter syndrome, years of devalued work or departmental conflict, illness, personal tragedy and/or global disasters, we go on walks outside together, deliver groceries, give guest lectures, encourage sabbatical, share resources, remove the burden of service work, babysit, loan money, drop our academic personas, drink beer together and otherwise figure out ways to allow for the exhausted among us to step back. We do this even though encouraging our colleagues to step back sometimes means more work for the rest of us—with fewer people to teach and mentor students, or more service work landing on the shoulders of the few. But our eyes are on the long future, knowing we all, eventually, will take our turn needing retreat.

Once, in my mid-20s, I attended a civil disobedience training for activists in Los Angeles in advance of what was expected to be a violent clash with riot police at an upcoming demonstration. The trainers taught us to drop to the ground in rows, hunch over and protect our heads from the beatings of the cops’ batons and then swarm in such a way as to constantly rotate which handful of us was closest to cops. By learning to move this way, we were learning to provide moments of respite for all of us and to evenly distribute the cops’ beatings across everyone’s backs. Perhaps it is odd that I think of this often as I chair the Department of Feminist Studies, but I understand this careful attention to our collective work, rest and resilience, this both/and relationship to struggle and rest, as central to feminist leadership.

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We labour for the feminist future, reimagining work itself as a site of care, because we know that without intersectional feminism there is no future. Let me be concrete about what I mean by that. First, I mean that the defining civil and human rights movements of the modern era—movements that were helmed by men who fundamentally shaped how we understand foundational concepts like justice and safety—are now being transformed by feminists, especially feminists of colour, who are attending to their unfinished business. For instance, in 2014, Black feminists Patrice Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi brought a data-driven critique of prisons and policing into mass public consciousness, introducing abolitionist questions (do prisons and police actually increase public safety, for everyone? If not, what is the alternative?) that had never before been raised in the mainstream media. These ideas were sparked, in part, by the first Critical Resistance conference, held at UC Berkeley in 1998, where another feminist, Angela Davis, introduced the concept of the prison industrial complex, exposing the profit motives of the carceral system and invoking a new future in which justice and accountability addressed the root causes of human suffering through relational and structural transformation. Other movements about crises in which the connection to gender isn’t immediately transparent, like the climate justice movement, have been similarly built upon the ideas and labour of feminists. Greta Thunberg has mobilised thousands of climate feminists around the globe, introducing a young and popular audience to ideas that began with Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies, Jacqueline Patterson, Donna Haraway and many other ecofeminists who have radically transformed how we understand the human relationship to the Earth. The point here is that the greatest paradigm shifts of the last few decades, made accessible to the greatest number of people through creative use of social media, were feminist projects.

Second, I mean that feminism has the unique power to mobilise people for global structural change: a power that will be vital as we face a precarious future. We know this because the women’s march of 21 January 2017 is estimated to have been the largest global mass mobilisation in human history. And yet students, parents, university administrators, employers, politicians and many others wonder about the relevance of feminism. It’s astonishing. Only white supremacist patriarchy has the audacity to question the ‘real-world applicability’ of a movement that produced the world’s greatest political mobilisation. Even some of us feminists, me included, rolled our eyes at the pink pussy hats. In my view, they were an uninspired and insufficiently serious way of mobilising feminists by invoking femininity and female anatomy, akin to pink ribbon campaigns calling for us to ‘save the boobies’ rather than speak about the devastation of breast cancer directly. But knowing what I know now, about the end of Roe, the enduring popularity of Trumpism, the rising power of fundamentalist religious movements around the globe and so on, it feels absurd not to support and build on the Left’s feminist impulses, however designed for mass appeal they may be. A longing for gender justice is simmering there.

The feminist future requires that we have an exceedingly capacious understanding of what’s possible and effective, and this is precisely what necessitates a both/and approach, not only to the synthesis and interplay of work and non-work, but to the multiplicity of movement tactics. In 2017, we needed both pussy hats and a critique of them—to mobilise us, and to move us towards our growing edge. ³ Today, we need to do the work of building a sustainable future and we also need serious rest. What models do we have for this? How do we rest in the face of grave problems and impending doom? How, in the university, with its ‘publish or perish’ mantra and the speed-up of administrative work, do we maintain our reputations (or self-image) as good scholars and colleagues while taking care of ourselves, our families, our students, each other?

The need for this care has expanded exponentially in recent years, as the university itself has become a site of undeniable precarity. The systemic under-funding of public universities has resulted in slashed budgets, mass shortages of staff, insufficient student housing, larger classes, higher tuitions, greater economic burden on families and elevated student stress (Hamilton and Nielsen, 2021). My own institution, the University of California, has long been considered a world-class model of high-quality public education, but its campuses are all located in cities where students (and faculty) can no longer afford to live. The feminist classroom is now a space not only for ideas but also for basic needs referrals to under-staffed units being stretched thin to meet student needs—for mutual aid, food pantries, crisis counselling, emergency housing, confidential sexual assault resources and more. Feminist faculty are intimately familiar with student despair, which can animate our own. Tenured colleagues have shared with me, in confidence, that they regularly fantasise about leaving the academy and making a ‘critical feminist exit’ (Maldonado and Guenther, 2019). PhD students cry in my office, confessing that they spend days in bed depressed or expressing shame that they are considering dropping out.

This emotional overwhelm and the desire to escape the academy, if only temporarily, is common enough to suggest that it may well be part of the very experience of being a feminist scholar, and yet the shame with which these feelings are expressed speaks to the felt sense that vulnerability and need for rest are irreconcilable with intellectual accomplishment. This need not be so. This month, as I write this piece, two Black recipients of the MacArthur ‘genius grant’ reported to journalists that they are going to use the unrestricted US$800,000 grants to rest and take care of their bodies. Cellist Tomeka Reid told NPR she plans to do less and to ‘have time to, like, breathe’ (Blair, 2022). Writer Kiese Laymon told NPR he planned to find out ‘what makes my feet, my hips, my neck feel better? And I think that’ll help my head feel better. And I want to, like, you know, convince myself that I am worthy of that’ (Lim, Kenin and Kelly, 2022). Both grant recipients refused the capitalist logic that the funds must be used to produce more output, signalling to the public that brilliance and extraordinary achievement is sustained through basic care of the body (what makes our hips feel better) and periods of non-work.

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Recently, the grad students and faculty of the Center for Feminist Futures organised an event called ‘Reimagining Care and Work’ (a panel event with Jigna Desai, Omise’eke Tinsley, Eileen Boris, Alex Mireles, France Winddance Twine and me). The event was inspired by our shared understanding that care is a feminist praxis—a way of living with one another that centres interdependence and collective well-being over profit and productivity. The event was an opportunity to share ideas about how we can ‘put care at the very heart of our lives and politics’ by illuminating care’s essential role in our collective survival, and how caring for, self-care and caring about might be rethought for social justice (Care Collective, 2020). Our discussion also centred on how care helps us reimagine the university as a workplace, beginning with the recognition that what we do at the university is work, subject to the same alarming trends we see across sectors: work speed-up and grind culture, gigification and the roll-back of benefits and job security, remote work (that removes the line separating work from home), ‘wellness’ programmes that don’t actually keep us well and surveillance technologies that track productivity and compliance—even, or especially, in our own homes. Labour strikes and work refusals are vital strategies for addressing these trends, alongside the creation of mutual aid networks, revolutions of rest and, as bell hooks (2000, p. 64) described it, supporting ourselves and loved ones ‘in any efforts to leave work that assaults their well-being’.

In his incisive essay on building durable power in social movements, movement strategist and National Director of the Working Families Party Maurice Mitchell (2022) explains that because we are currently experiencing ‘multiple, overlapping crises’ and numerous forms of precarity, we are vulnerable to interpersonal conflicts and lateral attacks. Because justice work—in which I include university-based feminist labour aimed at social change—is taking place ‘within a general climate of anxiety, despair, and anger without the necessary support to process such massive emotions, individually or in community’, Mitchell (ibid.) argues that ‘recognizing the challenging terrain on which we struggle and grow can allow for more compassion for our comrades as well as clarity about the urgent mandate at hand’. Here Mitchell points to the same dual challenge that sits at the crux of this article and that is vital to creating the feminist future: we are mandated to act, and we must also have compassion for the anxiety and despair that this mandate creates.

The feminist future relies on teaching our students, and ourselves, the balance of working and not working. This both/and approach is how to live a sustainable feminist life. We must model it, talk explicitly across generations about feminist practices of care and be forthcoming about how we live, our daily practices of care and survival. Feminists surviving this era, and building a new future, don’t have time to mess around with overwork and depletion. We are in it for the long haul.