Transcript: Nothing worth doing is done alone: on friendship and feminist organising.

Sabrina Fuller and Helena Reckitt 2021

 Sounds of people coming together for a meeting.

 0:13 Helena Reckitt …….out loud. So one of the things we do is we don't expect anyone to have read anything in advance. 0:20  We just say come and we read out loud together. We tend to do it a paragraph at a time, kind of going round.

 0:27 Hayley Ha  There was something different about reading this in the space created by the bodies of women, in sitting in circle with others, reading it out loud and reading this text in different languages, all accentuated in our accents and cadences and listening to each other and staying in silence in between of not fully knowing sometimes and understanding it. And there was different kind of quality to this coming together and feeling even validated, and taking a confidence and not having the answer yet, and even taking different interpretations and being okay with that,

 1.03 Laura Malacart I have belonged to women's groups that have come together in the spirit of mutual support as intellectual exchange, professional support. These groups, just like the duration reading group, gather as a circle. We cannot underestimate the power of this device, nor its ancient origins.

 1.21 Helena Reckitt Reading together, we become intimately familiar with texts which have often been marginalized and unvalued. At the same time, we get to know other members of the group, appreciating the different timbres of voice, accents and the cultural and regional experiences that they reflect, along with the insights that participants bring to sessions.

 1.42 Gaby Moser It's this idea of textual exchange, of trading writing, or of reading alongside one another that to me, is a vital part of feminist praxis as a form of care.

 1.55 Helena Reckitt I find that reading together often brings out nuances and insights that I missed when I previously read the text alone.

 2.02 Gaby Moser To read together, whether it's at a distance or out loud together in the same room, is a way of thinking together, and it's also a way of creating a network of citations that can help support one another's future thinking.

 2.16 Kezia Davis When I first moved to London, the group provided me with a space to share and discuss feminist texts in a way that felt discursive rather than combative, and provided me with a sense of familiarity in a very unfamiliar time in my life.

 2.30 Gaby Moser I think that reading and writing have been central activities for many of the historic feminist groups I'm inspired by. The Milan women's bookstore collective, for instance, began their first meetings by sharing the works of their favourite women novelists and then using the language of these books to craft narratives of their own. Friendships with other women were essential to the lives of the authors they chose, and friendship between women became the key political practice that the collective pursued in seeking what they called symbolic freedom. As the collective writes, personal friendship is the product of, quote, the irrepressible need to find a faithful mediation between oneself and the world. It is perhaps for this reason that women take care of their friendships and are more expert in the art of giving shape to a friendship. End quote.

 3.24. Olivia Berkowicz, Angelica Bollettinari I'm thinking about Celine Condorelli, practice of thinking and writing when she says that to formulate thoughts, when she needs to say or write something, she finds her position by navigating a whole set of different materials that she has collected, references, books, voices of writers that inspire her also friends and collaborators, all these friendly voices in my head she says, which become allies in her process of thinking and writing, so that she speaks through a multiplicity of voices.

 4.02 Helena Reckitt The impetus behind the Feminist Duration Reading Group grew from a desire to learn about Italian feminisms, a body of practice about which I was almost completely ignorant, but which I craved to know more. The process that I initially undertook reminds me a bit of how some of my enduring friendships have developed an initial flash of attraction, the search for clues and information about the focus of my new fascination, followed by the pleasurable process of becoming familiar, getting close.

 4.35 Flora Dunster A couple of years ago, I picked up a book titled People you'd trust your life to by a Canadian author named Bronwen Wallace, and thinking about feminism and friendship, Wallace's book really changed the way I kind of conceptualize, I guess, or think about what those two words mean in relation to each other.

 4:59 Rosie Cooper Feminist friendship is for everybody. In friendship we can be the way we want the world to be, full of love and motivated by it. Feminist friendship is present, challenging and loving, with space held for difference, a place to hear and be heard, to see and be seen. It's a place for change to happen, a place where we can open up and learn.

 5.22 Flora Dunster But I think what the book and what the story made very apparent to me is a kind of feminism predicated on friendship, which maybe wouldn't call itself a feminism, which I suppose is sort of a feminism of the everyday friendships which are forged through duration, and the sort of hardships and struggles that come out of duration, the sort of experience of living a life, and which, kind of, coalesce around a solidarity, or a comradeship in terms of thinking through the experience of living under certain, I suppose, hegemonic ideas which feminism ultimately responds to.

 6.10 Rosie Cooper: My feminist friendships are built on kinship, often characterized by bonds whose depth expands the idea of family. Friendship is where community can form. It is a means to build solidarity. We can be a vast network of conspirators rising up together a glittering constellation of interlocking friendships.

 6.32 Alexandra Kokoli: When you first asked me to think about friendship in feminist organizing, I thought it would be very easy for me to find something to read out. But it appears that friendship is more often than not, assumed, rather than explicitly discussed. And then maybe when it is discussed, it's problems and obstacles that become the focus, rather than things running smoothly. In any case, I found this short text, an article published in Spare Rib. It's called finding each other in school, and it's co-authored by Naomi, Petra, Jane, Julie, Rachel, Kate, Jane, Lucy and Nicole.

 7.13 Kezia Davis When I think of feminism and friendship, I think of all the fierce women who have shaped me into the person I am today. I think of the passionate activists, the tireless educators and the inspiring writers and artists. I also think of those who I'm lucky enough to call friends, like those at the Feminist Duration Reading Group and my fellow organizers at Liverpool Sisterhood, who work tirelessly to organize International Women's Day and other feminist actions across the city.

 7.41 Rosie Cooper It's friendship that's kept me afloat this year, the sustained love, generosity and kindness that I have experienced through my friendships has been extraordinary and moving.

 7.52 Kezia Davis I think of those who have supported me and who, in turn, I have supported through abuse and harassment, and I think somewhat depressingly about how many of these feminist friendships are born out of shared trauma. I think about how whenever I've moved to a new city, feminism has always provided me with a way to meet new people with shared values.

8.11 Meeting extract where a woman who is hard of hearing is warmly welcomed into the circle.

Can I just say one thing? Yes, I think it's my age, I guess, but I can hardly hear you.

Everyone: ‘Come in, come in, come in!’

 8:23 Taey Iohe  Earlier this year, I organised a critical reading group with the young Korean curators, called care for collective curatorial practice called CCC. We invited other curators to discuss their projects. We meditated together. We shared our emotional changes during these difficult times. A year before we began, a Korean art student at Goldsmiths College tragically took her own life, we have talked about the experience of surviving December as international students, which can be brutally lonely. CCC was born out of frustration at this and out of the acute awareness of the need to form a circle of solidarity for each other's intellectual and mental well-being with covid and the isolation that it's brought, as well as the many anxieties.

 9.22 Joan Anim-Addo: With COVID, and the isolation it has brought, as well as the many anxieties, I think this is a great moment to remember a very special research group that I was part of in 2003.     It was huge, and mercifully, its subgroups allowed it to function on a human level, and I found a home in the group that we called resisters, playing on resisters, as well as sisters. I want to shout out to all of our resisters.

 9.52 Taey Iohe We questioned how art could relate to this unprecedented time during which the pleasure of art could be seen as a low priority in the threat of health and social stability. However, rendering this experience through the process of artistic creation is perhaps the only way to reconnect ourselves as meaningful lives.

 10.20 Rosie Cooper A good few years ago, someone told me that you build your own art world, and I've held on to - that the folk you find along the way, that you find common ground and shared anger with are so important. Those are the friends you think with, build with and read aloud with.

 10:34 Joan Annim-Ado  In 2003, it was not easy being an only black academic in such a huge group of white feminists as Athena was, but my group resisters worked shoulder to shoulder with me. Since as feminists, we undertook projects that went far beyond the scope of the budget that we were allowed, we managed only by spending a great deal of time-sharing rooms, traveling and working at weekends, but also, in the end, sharing our homes too, for research purposes.

 11.09 Sasha Roseneil It was in the day to day practice of second wave feminism that the project of revaluing women's friendships really took hold and began to affect social change. Activists in the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s initially adopted a discourse of sisterhood to express solidarity between women. Sisterhood is powerful, but it was elective bond of friendship between women that proved to be vital in sustaining feminist communities, collectives, households, projects and political groups. For instance, my research on the Greenham Common women's peace camp and the wider women's peace movement in Britain in the 1980s suggests that through involvement in women's movement activism, women came to revalue friendship with other women. Women involved in the movement formed intense and close relationships with each other, that were very different from friendships they'd experienced with women before.

 11.58 Helena Reckitt A key instance can be found in the friendship between two women who gained political consciousness during the Italian feminist movement of the 1970s.  While both women have little formal education, one, Amalia possesses a talent for speaking and writing, whereas the other, the similarly named Emelia, finds it hard to express herself in words, while she constantly attempts to tell the story of her life, which, in her view, has always constituted a ‘no’. Her fragmentary efforts prove unsatisfactory to her, as well as tedious to her fellow students. Finally, her friend Amalia writes down the story of Emelia's life. This event provokes Emelia to tears, carrying around the story in her handbag. She constantly rereads it. Moved every time by her own identity made tangible by that tale. In her book relating narratives, Cavarero uses the example of this example of feminist friendship to highlight the importance played by narration in the gaining of political consciousness, what she calls the process of reciprocal co-appearance. Cavarero writes how the story allows Emelia to move beyond the limiting ‘what’ of her identity: a Milanese housewife, poor, married, childless, to the ‘who’ of her existence, an unrepeatable uniqueness, which, in order to appear to others, needs first of all, a plural, and therefore political, space of interaction .

 13.37 Olivia Berkowicz, Angelica Bollettinari That in Svetlana Boym’s text, Scenography of Friendship, she uses this phrase, which we kind of talked about before that we both liked, which was this fermenta cognitionis. It's like yeast of knowledge. And I'm wondering whether there might be like a significant, like a line between this knowledge, yeast of knowledge thinking business as modes, or sort of like feminist storytelling practice, or like French like political friendship practice together.

14.08 Sara Paiola A different practice in which all of us, women of the movement, recognize ourselves, concerns stepping from the political to the unpolitical. That is the reason why we happily find ourselves in places which are political and not political. For example, bookshops, collectives and houses. We mix political occupation with others that don't have this name, like holidays, work-breaks, love and friendships. We do not say that everything is political, but more to the point that everything can become political.

 14.44 Kim McAleese Perhaps one of my favourite definitions of cultural production is of making things public, the process of connecting things, establishing relationships, which in many ways means befriending issues, people. Friendship, in this sense, is both a setup for working and a dimension of production. The line of thought that threads through the following pages is thus that of friendship as a form of solidarity, friends and action.

 15.13 Olivia Berkowicz, Angelica Bollettinari So Celine Condorelli is looking at 25 years of letters between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy and archival fragments, and she recognizes herself and her way of seeing friendship in in this relationship between these two women, especially in relation to this idea of thinking business.

 15.39 Kim McAleese I think finding ways of sharing space, and I really mean it in the most genuine way, is becoming, for me, an absolute priority, that has partly to do with the fact that everything is pointing us in different directions towards not sharing anything but protecting, which is the opposite. I say this after the Brexit vote from London, but these setups or stagings that allow sharing are actually incredibly political and important, even on a really small scale.

 16.09 Gaby Moser Celine Condorelli has similarly proposed that the shape that feminist friendship takes is that of a support structure, an essentially political relationship, she writes, one of allegiance and responsibility that creates the conditions for thinking. Like Conderelli, I find this notion empowering and liberating because it means, as she goes on to say that, quote: the choices and alliances that we make all the time, like which books to read and refer to, or whom to work and think with are instrumental in the formation of culture. End quote.

 16.48 Olivia Berkowicz, Angelica Bollettinari There's a quote by Mary McCarthy which says it's not that we think so much alike, but that we do this thinking business for and with each other.

 16.58 Gaby Moser And I can think of no more urgent task for feminist work at this moment than creating the conditions for one another to think and to imagine the formation of culture differently.

 17.10 Kim McAleese Having formations of people around and specifically of women and queer people around me has been formative in how I think, and not only how I think, but to borrow the term from Celine Condorelli, how we undertake this thinking business. And she speaks specifically in her book about Hannah Arendt and her really, her really close friend, Mary McCarthy, who was writing a lot of kind of salacious fiction at the time. And these two seemed like really unlikely friends with Arendt, writing about, well, huge political thinking and ideas, and Mary McCarthy, being a kind of New York socialite, and writing a lot about, you know, her love life and her relationships, but the two were so important for one another in thinking through how to make things public

 18.08 Olivia Berkowicz, Angelica Bollettinari: kind of, what were you talking about with the Milan women’s bookstore that is like, kind of being attentive to the sort of asymmetries of power, or like, asymmetrical relationships? And that even in this like egalitarian struggle, or like feminist struggle, that one allows the group to be heterogeneous. They're not trying to, like forcibly, iron out the group's differences, but you allow for it, and you kind of create this structure, as I understand it, for kind of allowing those structures or like differences to be there.

 18.44 Helena Reckitt The feminist duration reading group seeks to move beyond the ‘what’ associated with particular feminisms, which can become ossified and reduced to stereotype, by making these movements freshly present through the act of reading and thinking together. We befriend earlier and other feminisms, and as in the most enduring of friendships, this process can involve asking challenging questions that place these feminist projects and writers under scrutiny and which calls them to account.

 Kezia Davis 19.18 We have fought effectively against the social poverty of women's condition, we have discovered the originality which goes with the facts of being women, through the political practice of relations between women, by spending time with other women, by loving other women, we have come to value ourselves, but at the moment, we have no way of translating the experience, the knowledge and the value of being women into social reality.

 19.46 Olivia Berkowicz, Angelica Bollettinari And I guess in that way, I just started thinking about sort of écriture feminine a like sort of women's writing and like somehow using these exclusionary building blocks, but like reformulating them in a way that you actually create something different. Yes, what we're saying also makes me think of the practices of the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, especially in relation to this idea of creating new references in the world, or to form a new language, or to use the existing language, but to give it new meanings.

 Ehryn Torell  20:20  Inspired by Joan Anim-Addo text, listening to that text and how it questions the ways in which feminists might conduct, this idea of a care praxis around representation, around the politics of not not the politics of visibility or representation, but actually the politics of togetherness, of how spaces might be created for kinship, spaces might be created for mentorship of one from one generation to another, or those who have experienced something to be able to pass on to other generations, or other women who have not experienced those things. So there would be this real braiding of feminist practices.

 20.58 Lucy Lopez And Mariam Kaba also wrote this year that everything worthwhile is done with other people. She's talking about the importance of collectivity and interdependence in activism, and specifically in black activism, and I think that's a way that we can understand working in friendship, in alliance, everything worthwhile is done with other people, because without them, we can't be truly intersectional. Working alone, we might not fully understand disability justice or trans rights or the intricacies of any particular context, so really, we have to work in friendship. And working in friendship is inherently political.

 Hayley Ha  22:31 And in this interest I had in polyvocality and kinship, continued to later where, with Helena, I had a privilege of organizing a film screening of The Woman, the Orphan and the Tiger by this amazing Korean Danish artist and filmmaker Jane Jin Kaisen. So the film's narrative brings the largely hidden historical accounts of three generations of Korean women from the war times to the post-war periods and onward, narrated by the multiple voices of adoptees in creating their own accounts of silenced history and this narrative and its own elements, and also how it's constructed, really resonated with the integral focus of the reading group and its multi vocal narratives of women in this intensely evocative and haunting sonic voice-over against this slow motion image of woman survivor of the slavery, fainting and giving testimony of the suffering she had to draw. And here's an audio of the intro from the film. (extract from film soundtrack). So again, Jane considers the film as a collective work, rather than just her own, that is based on kinship with other Korean adoptees, who are artists, writers, researchers and poets and some mothers.

 23.00 Laura Malacart And I would add that, since feminist gatherings create an egalitarian context mutual support and growth outside the institution, away from the hierarchical, the transactional, the quantifiable, they operate as an antidote to the destructive impasse of neoliberal society that insists on the individual.

 23.21 Sasha Roseneil Friendship offers feminism a focus on the agentic, non-institutional, emotional and pleasurable aspects of social life. It suggests a different theoretical worldview from one which attends primarily to the structures of gender oppression, to the institutional arenas through which domination, subordination are reproduced. While friendship is never outside the relations of power which shape the social world, neither is it ever fundamentally contained or defined by the core social institutions of family, work and nation. Friendship is characteristically and distinctively interstitial, unregulated, voluntary, chosen and driven by emotion and the pursuit of pleasure.

 23.56 Alexandra Kokoli: There's really no school with girls and women in it, which doesn't need a women's group. When you find each other, it's such a relief.

 Flora Dunster 24.05 Selena Bluestone, Nina Sorenson, Gail Parker, Myrna Summers, lifetime members of the G5 Good Girls Gobbling Gossip Group, which has met on the third Thursday of every month for ages now, no matter what, once a month, one of them clears her house of mate and children buys candles and flowers, and the four of them carry on, all night sometimes, carry on as in certainly to behave reprehensively, to talk volubly, to rail at and less obviously, to keep up, to advance, to move on.

 24.36 Joan Anim Addo Now, since the initial Athena research project, which started 17 or so years ago, Giovanna Mina and I have collaborated on several other research projects. We've also watched our families grow up, and we've become solid friends who are still regularly in touch. In short out of the feminist politics that we shared all those years ago, some of us also found friendship. I'm reminded of Alice Walker who wrote: No person is your friend who demands your silence or denies your right to grow. Indeed, over the years, we have grown together, and we are always happy to speak out,

 25.19 Sasha Roseneil As a community and a social movement Greenham cohered as much, if not more, through the emotional ties of friendship, love and sexual intimacy between women, as through shared politics and philosophies. Indeed, a valuing of all forms of same sex, affection, love and care was fundamental to the politics and philosophy of Greenham. This was seen as both part of the feminist political project of transforming the dominant social relations of gender and sexuality and as an everyday life sustaining pleasure.

 25.49 Rosie Cooper As I walked with a friend today, I thought suddenly about all the energy that goes into creating love songs and romantic films. I haven't needed those things this year, but I've needed my friends, and we've loved each other very much.

 26.00 Laura Malacart Women's circles, wherever the accent is placed - on the spiritual, the intellectual, the political, introduce an emancipatory impulse that inevitably creates holistic effect. And just like in the Feminist Duration Reading Group, the holistic imprint means that being complements doing: sharing, eating, drinking, talking or being durational complements, being task oriented, such as reading a theoretical text collectively and through the imprint of individual voices.

 Kim McAleese  26:35  The interactions that I've had with the Feminist Duration Reading Group, it actually really completely changed my way of holding space for people. And I think that there's a real power women being together in a room, having a slow reading of something in a very comfortable setting. And when we did it in Birmingham, we we all cooked together, and we shared a meal, and we really slowed things down, and we read different feminist texts, but 27:14  the act of reading aloud with one another and being able to question and critique and feel like these, you know, texts could be demystified in a room with other people who could kind of 27:32  talk through them with you and help you through them and give anecdotal information, really transformed my way of holding space in the gallery completely.

 27:44  Lucy Lopez It will take all of us. It will take all of us operating on the principle that if only some of us are, well, none of us are, and that's exactly why it's revolutionary, because care demands that we live as though we're all interconnected, which we are. It invalidates the myth of the individual's autonomy.

 28.00 Taey Iohe The most anti capitalistic protest is to care for another and care for yourself. To take on the historically feminised and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring, to take seriously each other's vulnerability and fragility and precarity and to support it, honour it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community, a radical kinship independent society, because one once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other's tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps, then finally, capitalism will screech to its much needed, long overdue and motherfucking glorious halt.

 The meeting finishes by the group reading a poem: Khairni Barokka, Indigenous Species, out loud, in unison.

Podcast References

Joan Anim-Addo, “Activist-mothers maybe, sisters surely? Black British feminism, absence and transformation,” Feminist Review, no.108 black british feminisms (2014): 44-60.

Khairani Barokka, Indigenous Species (London: Tilted Axis Press, 2016).

Svetlana Boym, “Scenography of Friendship: Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and anchovy paste,” Cabinet, Winter, Issue 36 Friendship (Winter 2009–2010) https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/36/boym.php

Adriana Cavarero, “On the Outskirts of Milan,” in Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1997), 55-66.

Lia Cigarini and Luisa Muraro, “Politica and Pratica politica,” Critica Marxista, no 3-4 (May-August 1992), 3-4.

Céline Condorelli, The Company She Keeps (London: Book Works, 2014), https://celinecondorelli.eu/text/the-company-she-keeps/

Céline Condorelli, “Notes on Friendship”, Mousse 32 (February 2012), 222 -227.

Eve L Ewing, “Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile is Done With Other People,” Adi Magazine, Domestic Dissonance, (Autumn 2019), https://adimagazine.com/articles/mariame-kaba-everything-worthwhile-is-done-with- other-people/

Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” Mask Magazine, the not again issue, (January 2016), http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-Theory

Johanna Hedva, “Get Well Soon!” (2020), https://getwellsoon.labr.io/

Taey Iohe, Care for Collective Curatorial Practice, https://taey.com/ccc

Jane Jin Kaisen & Guston Sondin-Kung, The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger, HD Video 16:9, single channel. 72 minutes. Colour / B&W, 2010 

Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, “More Women Than Men,” in Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, eds. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 110-11.

Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, Sexual Difference: A Theory of Socio-Symbolic Practice, trans. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: The University of Indiana Press, 1990), 30-31.

Naomi, Petra, Jane, Julie, Rachel, Kate, Jane, Lucy, and Nicole, “Finding Each Other at School;” in Spare Rib Reader, ed. Marsha Rowe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 595.

Sasha Roseneil, “Foregrounding Friendship: Feminist Pasts, Feminist Futures,” in Kathy Davis, Mary Evans, Judith Lorber (eds) Handbook of Gender and Women’s