Sisterhood Is X: On Feminist Solidarity Then and Now

Abstract

In the 1970s and 1980s, sisterhood became a critical concept in the making of internationalist feminisms built on an infrastructure of women's movements, international organizations, and postcolonial states. Perhaps most famously, radical feminist Robin Morgan declared over three anthologies and three decades that sisterhood is, in the present tense, powerful (1970), global (1984), and forever (2003). It was envisioned differently by women of color and Third World feminists who saw sisterhood as a critical praxis of survival in the face of authoritarianism. Today, the moral invocation of sisterhood as powerful and forever is far less viable. So, is sisterhood all bad for twenty-first-century feminisms? In this essay, I return to bell hooks's formulations of sisterhood as a pedagogy of political solidarity to ask, what kind of solidarity is possible under the rubric of sisterhood and how might we imagine a global feminist politics of solidarity today?