That Feminist Nancy

I am certain, without a shadow of doubt, that the feminist world we dream of will only come alive, if we learn to sit with interpersonal conflict, to face it, hold it, and transform through it.

It is a truth that feminists must universally acknowledge: we are organising within a world built on capitalist, white supremacist, hetero-patriarchal foundations. Feminists do not exist outside these systems. We breathe their air, navigate their hierarchies, and sometimes unknowingly reproduce their logic. And as we organise to dismantle these systems, we carry their traumatic residues in our bodies. Our bodies remember what it means to be discarded. Our nervous systems still flinch from centuries of being devalued, excluded, exploited, and silenced.

We are all shaped by trauma; personal, ancestral, and collective.

Isn’t it, then, unsurprising, even inevitable, that conflict finds its way into our movements? How could it not, when we are all, in some way, carrying the architecture of oppression inside us?

Some of us were socialised within families and communities so deeply structured by patriarchy. We then carry these internalised wounds into our movements, and they inevitably collide. 

Others have been shaped by organized religion’s moral control, by colonial respectability, by class privilege, by proximity to power. When people carrying such different inheritances come together to dream of freedom, conflict IS bound to happen. We are attempting to unlearn depravity, to wash off the old and welcome the new. It is not gentle work. It is an arduous, raw, aggressive and conflict ridden endeavour.

So how does this conflict manifest?

It shows up through power.

Power lives in every space we create, whether we acknowledge it or not. Movements are not immune to it. Even in our most radical spaces, power will gather around confidence, around language, around access, around proximity to donors, around who is seen as legitimate and who is seen as difficult. It will hide behind charisma, education, fluency in movement jargon, and even behind the performance of humility.

Have you ever sat in a feminist conference where, despite calls for collaboration and shared space, the same voices seem to fill the room?

Have you noticed how the excellent organising of frontline grassroots feminist leaders is both craved and criticized? How we celebrate their courage when it serves us, yet question their tone, methods, or visibility when it unsettles us, as if we can’t decide what kind of feminist leadership we truly want?

Have you ever wondered how funders often fail to see the lived realities of movements, expecting grassroots organisers to build flat, horizontal structures, while their own institutions are fortified with hierarchy, bureaucracy, and power? If funders can’t do it with the millions they control, what makes them think grassroots organisers can do it with a five thousand dollar grant?

We inherit these oppressive hierarchies from the same systems we are trying to dismantle. They show up in who gets heard, who gets interrupted, who gets the benefit of the doubt, whose anger is tolerated, whose softness is mocked, whose knowledge is valued, and whose labour goes unseen. They shape who gets to rest and who keeps holding everything together in the background.

Hierarchies don’t disappear at the door of a feminist meeting.

Hierarchies don’t disappear just because we name ourselves feminist.

And just because we are frontline feminist organisers does not mean we left our traumas behind once we enter feminist spaces. We carry the memories of violation, exclusion, neglect, and survival into rooms where we are trying to practice care and build justice. Those wounds don’t disappear because our politics are progressive; they move with us, shaping how we listen, how we trust, how we react, and how we interpret one another’s actions. And therein comes the conflict – the friction between our ideals and our unhealed selves.

I name this not to condemn our movements, but to make them more honest.

Conflict is necessary. Conflict is our living politics. Conflict is not proof that we are failing. It is proof that we are trying, trying to build relationships and movements that reach beyond what the world has taught us to be. Conflict is a reminder that we are still awake, still in relationship, still reaching toward something larger. When handled with care and repair, conflict becomes a site of truth-telling, accountability, and movement sustainability.

Conflict then does not have to signal the end of relationships, the punishment of dissenters, the withdrawal of funding, or the scattering of movements. Conflict is also not an opportunity for spectacle. It is not content for gossip threads and entertainment. It does not have to breed cruelty or exile. 

Feminist movements were never meant to be flawless. We were never meant to uphold perfectionism as a value. The work of liberation has always been messy, imperfect, and deeply human. What matters is not that we avoid conflict, but that we meet it with integrity. Repair is how we keep the political personal and the personal political. It is how we stay connected to one another and to the world we’re trying to transform. If we can learn to hold each other through movement tensions, to speak the truth without cruelty, to reject uncompassionate approaches of dealing with conflict, and to rebuild without erasure, then our movements will survive and evolve. Because the feminist world we’re fighting for will not emerge from our avoidance of pain, but from our commitment to healing through it, together.