Specific Organization: how, why, and to what ends?
by Gustave
Translated by the Center for Especifismo Studies
Things have changed and are probably less unbearable for us today than for women 10, 15, 20 years ago. Still, since (cis-straight) patriarchy continues to structure the lives of each and every one of us, getting rid of its grip remains just as urgent.
This text comes from the need to adopt certain practices in our political action groups, whether formal or informal, public or secret. Here, we’ll focus on the issue of specific organization, like what happens when a group organizes people living with gender-related oppression without the presence of cis men. We’re especially speaking to comrades who are looking for solutions to the patriarchal dynamics running through their collectives, their student associations, their organizations, their coalitions, or their reading circles.
Exclusive vs. specific… Are these two practices equivalent? Exclusive here refers to the practice of organizing people with a common form of oppression separate from the members of dominant and oppressive group(s). Historically, this was advocated by women who wanted to organize without men, but also by Black people who wanted to act in spaces without white people, or by trans people without cis people. Today, the practice of specific organizing is used most often in the context of contemporary queer or feminist practices which are more inclusive of trans realities. This was first used to emphasize the need for spaces without cis men but that these same spaces can intentionally “mix” by being made up of people with diverse gender-related experiences. An example of this practice might be the reading circle from which this journal emerged, where anyone who was not a cis man was welcome.
Origins of the practice
It’s difficult to determine a precise start date when women-to-women organizing practices began, but we do know that, during the French Revolution, women organized themselves in the Society of Revolutionary Republican Citizens, a group active in 1793 that included women who wanted to be considered citizens and to bear arms to defend the republic. In 1871, the Paris Commune was also the site of experiments in feminist organization. It’s especially noteworthy that some of them, called the Pétreuses, were said to have set fire to Paris in the face of the eminent defeat. It was also at this time that the first openly feminist women’s group in France, the Union des femmes, was born. The year 1936 saw the birth in Spain of the Mujeres Libres, an autonomous anarchist organization of proletarian women with 20,000 members that provided opportunities to learn to read and write, to engage politically and to gain confidence in their struggle for liberation. And this wasn’t only in the face of capital, since most of them weren’t unionized factory employees but instead were paid per unit as they worked from home, but also in the face of revolutionary anarchist men, most of whom were reluctant to the idea of gender equality.
These feminist groups didn’t openly claim to be women only, although they appeared to be implicitly exclusive to women. It was in the 1960s and 1970s that the practice of intentionally not mixing was spread to a multitude of organizations and collectives with the rise of feminist and anti-racist movements. Women exclusive organizations became popular not only because they presented themselves as a more effective way to improve the conditions of women, which were finally becoming a priority, these organizations also liberated the voices of their members by allowing them to share stories about situations of oppression they had encountered in their private lives. Organizing themselves collectively and autonomously eventually led to a transformation of their consciousness and allowed them to become political subjects.
In Quebec, the experiments with these forms of organization have occurred on a smaller scale of organizing: the 2012 strike crystallized feminist anger against sexist dynamics in activist spaces but also against widespread and normalized sexual violence. There are many examples: the women’s committee of the ASSÉ as well as feminist collectives (Alerta Feminista, the Hystériques, the Gamines, the Harpies, etc.). It’s also important to include on this list the demonstrations by the Hyenas in petticoats, which was a specific group (“en mixité choisie” in French) that participated in the 2015 strike, is also noteworthy.
Currently, there’s a wide range of projects by mixed groups: from graffiti collectives such as Douceur Extrême to the wheat pasting collectives against femicides that have spread all over the world, and also to initiatives such as B-QAM’s gender specific Tuesdays, UQAM’s bicycle repair committee, or the Black Flag Combat Club’s cis-men-free classes…
And then there’s also the informal versions: the mixed-gender caucuses formed on the job, the texts and group chats created in a hurry, the evenings of watching movies between gurls or whining, crying, screaming about the cisheteropatriarchy, or laughing or smashing windows or whatever.
Debates
The practice of gender specific organizing has certainly been and continues to be the subject of political debate. It’s sometimes criticized for the perceived risk of becoming an end in itself, a practice whose sole purpose would be to group women together on the simple basis that they’re women, to relate to each other and interact without any real strategic political aim.
Others criticize certain tendencies of specific organization for essentializing sex and promoting a transphobic agenda by excluding trans people from membership as a way of reinforcing their conception of a feminine essence. This effectively implies that being a woman comes down to a question of genitals and the ability to bear a child, a vision that is not only harmful to the lives of trans comrades but is also politically uninteresting since it doesn’t bring issues of gender into question.
For us, it’s important to defend an anti-essentialist stance that’s opposed to the conception of “woman” as a distinct category with immutable and intrinsic characteristics. However, we are convinced that the category of “woman” does exist, that it’s historically constructed and structurally reinforced, and that it generates a number of different material consequences related to credibility, ease in speaking, sexual violence, domestic violence, family structures, maternity, access to gender-affirming care, mental load, wage inequalities, medical mistreatment, etc. So, there is a contradiction in specific organizations. We’re disgusted by the fact that gender categories exist, but at the same time, we cannot close our eyes to this fact and continue our lives and our struggles normally. This categorization generates real difficulties, which have different intensities for different groups of people and which are influenced by other material factors such as class, racialization, sexual orientation, gender, neurodivergence, or physical health status.
Organization
So, this practice of specific organizing comes out of real needs, and more often than not, it’s not an end in itself but a way of responding to different problems of “mixed” organization since, even though our political action groups are “far left”, they’re still susceptible to cis-hetero-patriarchal dynamics.
Guys are always the ones speaking in the assemblies. There’s only one cis man on the food committee. He’s barely read half of one of the books, but he’s able to talk about it with much more ease than me who’s read the whole thing twice. I got into politics because of a dude who was hitting on me. He ended up getting himself canceled. But my own involvement in that kind of group also gets questioned, some people think I’m being forced to adopt ideas that I’m actually freely choosing to defend…
From our understanding, these dynamics can be weakened precisely because they were historically constructed. If we want to get rid of them, we must oppose the concrete practices of the structure reinforcing them. If our groups and social spaces aren’t immune to the more subtle manifestations of patriarchy that we’ve mentioned and that take place in public, they’re also not immune to the dynamics of seduction, sexual violence, or domestic violence, including the ways an aggressor, because he or she has a lot of friends, can do some fancy maneuvering to be let back into the space, even though no transformative and transparent process of justice worthy of the name has been initiated with them and the victims.
I hate men. Not every single man individually, but the category “man” that keeps producing them and fucks everyone up, them included. I hate them but I don’t know what to do with that hatred. At least we can get together and organize us gurlies to build safe-spaces to vent to each other and strengthen our capacity to exist as political subjects.
Patriarchal dynamics give us all the reasons in the world to want to get free from them for the short time we’re working on a project, or at a meeting, or having a graffiti night out… There’s no denying the temptation to describe these as “safe-spaces” since anywhere without cis men can make us feel good on a personal level. They’re not only more pleasant but also tend to be safer inherently:
When I’m in a gender specific group, I’m pretty sure I won’t be dragged into heteropatriarchal dynamics of seduction, that my words will be more likely to be listened to and valued, that my experience will be taken seriously, that I won’t be intimidated by how easily they express themselves, that I finally won’t have to be upset just to vent about the sexist attitudes of a classmate…
However, only understanding specific spaces as safe-spaces®, and only valuing their function as offering protection, prevents us from learning from them. These spaces involve a range of difficult feelings and emotions, so we can’t expect to always feel good there. The practice of specifically organizing doesn’t necessarily guarantee “security” since it also implies confronting oneself, failing, working, realizing for the umpteenth time that it’s difficult for me to express my ideas with confidence in front of a group, the fear of judgment makes me feel like I’m leaping into the void, even in this femme specific reading circle, I feel immobilized and confined to silence in the corner by the judgements of others.
Yes, now that I’ve been in specific organizations for a while, where it’s more challenging and more politicizing than just some pajama party or a graffiti session, I’m less interested in the term safe-space, I feel like it’s a bit meaningless and fuzzy and it takes us away from our goals and our needs.
Organization (cont.)
We have to focus our reflections on concrete needs we have because, if we don’t clearly name the needs, a specific organization risks becoming a depoliticizing, essentializing and time-consuming space. From the practices of autonomy in feminist movements, we can identify four axes[1] : discursive, personal, organizational, programmatic. These four axes help to better define the needs that our practice will meet in terms of a specific organization.
• The discursive axis is about the power of reappropriating language in order to redefine oneself with a non-sexist discourse.
• The personal axis comes out of practices in self-awareness or discussion groups, in which participants share personal experiences of everyday sexism or violence in order to develop a common understanding of oppression and create support. The Italian separatist group Rivolta Femminile was in this direction and saw in this practice of sharing as an opportunity to awaken, in women, the self-consciousness necessary to become autonomous political subjects distinct from men. It was also a strategy of Mujeres Libres who used talking circles to “[normalize] women hearing the sound of their own voices in public”[2] so they could gain confidence and participate more fully in political action.
• The organizational axis implies organizing politically without cis men to use the absence of sexist behaviors and words to gain more freedom and efficiency in decision-making. The example of the Hyenas in Petticoats, which militated, among other things, against the sexism of the Liberal government’s austerity measures, was in line with this organizational axis: they had determined that feminist demonstrations were less likely to be usurped by a horde of cis men who believed themselves more capable of taking blows in front of the police. In the current context, a smaller group might decide to organize itself in a specific way without cis men, carving out space to acquire the necessary skill for speaking in public and debating with their peers, like in the context of a meeting for example. Back in the larger mixed space, this could weaken the stronghold that cis men usually occupy in political organizations, as well as the power they implicitly tend to hold in these kinds of spaces.
• Finally, the programmatic axis is about developing plans for changes in social relations as well as the means to make these changes a reality. The various autonomous structures created by women in the Kurdish liberation movement are good examples of this programmatic axis: the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) were founded in 2013, composed exclusively of armed women fighting against the Syrian forces, Daesh and the fascist Turkish state. The aim of the YPJ is to work for the protection of women. For Kurdish women, there’s not only armed struggle, security patrols and women’s academies, but also a women’s village (Jinwar) and even a television channel. They organize themselves this way to avoid limiting themselves to only demanding equality or an improvement in the status of women, “asking a fundamental question: what would the world be like today if women had not been oppressed?”[3] – hence their strong programmatic character. Women’s autonomy in the Kurdish liberation struggle is seen as a creative force for imagining a world where no one is oppressed. For them, organizing autonomously is an essential practice that allows them to build the confidence and solidarity necessary to destroy the patriarchal structures that are present not only among their enemies but also within their own mixed revolutionary political organizations, in which they are also very active. The women’s struggle is understood as inseparable from the broader struggle for the liberation of the Kurdish people and all oppressed peoples. In our context, from within a larger group, we could decide to organize ourselves specifically without cis men to discuss the dynamics we’re experiencing and find solutions to propose in a unified way to the rest of the mixed group.
What’s next
It’s clear the experiences of gender specific organizations are pretty varied and obviously our comrades will have different needs depending on their specific situation. The important thing is to collectively lay out the needs a specific group will address and how these will have an effect on the larger, mixed-gender social movement or popular organization.
We invite everyone who’s fed up with cis-hetero-patriarchy to take up these reflections so specific spaces can be effective means for acting politically and for bringing an end to gender once and for all.
[1] Mayer, Stéphanie. (2014). Pour une non-mixité entre féministes. Revue Possibles. 38 (1). 97-110.
[2] Ackelsberg, Martha. (1995). « Séparées et égales ? » : Mujeres Libres et la stratégie anarchiste pour l’émancipation des femmes. Feminist studies. 11 (1). 63–83.
[3] (2021). Nous vous écrivons depuis la révolution : Récits de femmes internationalistes au Rojava. Éditions Syllepses. P.10.
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