The library’s open — so read like a feminist
I recommend a book written by two African feminists to a client I am working with. They are keen to try new approaches to ‘transform’ their organisational culture. They work for a large, powerful, European non-profit organisation and they are concerned that the workplace culture seems ‘stuck’ in old, harmful patterns. “I’m keen to learn from what feminists in the global south have to say about all of this,” this client tells me. “Can you recommend something?”
The book I suggest to them is precious to me — I come back to it regularly and its lessons unfurl in different ways, depending upon where I am at in my life. I regularly press it into the hands of my feminist friends. We share it with participants attending our 12-week feminist leadership programme. This book gives me hope that we can build organisations that aren’t driven by capitalist logics, and that we can do our best work when we are brave enough to show up in a way that truly values people’s humanity. The book has taught me ways for bringing what is often in the shadows in our organisations into the light. I cherish all it has taught me.
A few weeks later, I go back to this client and ask them what they thought about the book. She tells me, “Honestly, I’m just not sure how much our organisation can get out of [this book]. It feels really abstract — I just can’t imagine how any of this would work here. I wish it were just a little bit more practical.” This is not an unfamiliar reaction. I get similar responses from readers in the global minority world, particularly when I recommend articles I like related to the topic of intersectional feminism. When I do this, I often get a variation of the following response: “Don’t you have any more examples about what intersectionality looks like in practice? This is still too theoretical and I can’t see how to translate this into my context. I need some case studies from organisations that are more like mine. This is also too long — what are your top three takeaways from this paper/article/book?”
At first, I took these types of reactions to heart — I earnestly searched for new texts that would be more ‘acceptable’ to these readers. I asked, “What types of materials would our clients or participants in our feminist leadership programmes find most useful?” But this began to feel like the wrong way to react. I started to feel frustrated. It took me a while to identify exactly what underpinned my irritation. It wasn’t simply that some people didn’t like the texts that I loved; that’s their prerogative, after all. It was this: many of these people were reading the texts, mostly written by feminists from the global majority world, in an extractive way. They were there to mine these articles — written from the peripheries of power — for knowledge that would be useful to them in their far more powerful international organisations. They dismissed anything that did not speak to them in the register that they were used to. There was a tinge of arrogance that told them to critique a piece of writing, often on the unspoken basis that it was not written for them. Perhaps worst of all, these reading practices tended to instrumentalise the works of feminists of colour — and these texts were discarded when the writers refused to do the work that the white readers needed to do themselves.
I have concluded that power dynamics not only affect the way we read, they can also seriously stunt us as readers. What a sad, diminishing and, let’s face it, colonial way to read if our primary motivation is to scour a text for all the ways it can serve us. Thinking back to requests that I sum up entire texts in quick takeaways, I wondered whether neoliberal capitalism has made our reading cultures a form of resource extraction that must be done in the quickest, most ‘efficient’ way.
I do not have all the answers. I do not study the politics of reading or the politics of knowledge production. I am on a journey to understand how I can read in a more meaningful way than I currently do, but some lessons I have learned include:
· Being more reflexive in my approach to reading. I ask myself, who am I in relation to this text? How does my context, position, purpose and history relate or not to what is being written about? How is all of this affecting my reactions to the text? In what ways might I be expecting myself to be the author’s primary, expected reader?
· Being more curious about what I am reading — have I taken time to fully understand where the writer’s ideas come from? What is their context, their material reality, their history? What do they know? Where do they know from?
· In what ways am I expecting the writer to spoon-feed me? How might I need to take ownership of my own learning journey to expand and build upon the insights the author is sharing with me? This is particularly relevant when it comes to readers who are not affected by intersectional inequalities trying to grapple with understanding intersectionality.
· Avoiding ‘check-box’, superficial modes of reading. Yes, you might have read the black feminist canon — but have you really read it? We all need to… Slow. Down.
· How have I been accountable to the author in the ways in which I’ve read, disseminated and critiqued this text?
· Being hyper-vigilant about practising the politics of citation. The feminist writer Sara Ahmed reminds us: ‘Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us to find the way’. With this in mind, the precious book mentioned at the beginning of this article is Hope and Rudo Chigudu’s wonderful Strategies for Building an Organisation with a Soul. Please read it.
In her brilliant book, How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo gives us some reading advice. We would all do well to heed it. She urges us:
“to read like a free, mysterious person who was encountering free, mysterious things; to value the profound privacy and irregularity of my own thinking; to spend time in my head and the heads of others, and to see myself shimmer in many worlds — to let many worlds shimmer, lively, in me.”
Leila Billing is co-founder of We Are Feminist Leaders, an initiative that supports individuals and organisations to apply feminist approaches to their ways of working.
