Nothing Worth Doing is Done Alone: On Friendship and Feminist Organising

Women tend to take special care of their relationships with one another. Yet until the second wave feminist movement of the 1970s few accounts of friendship’s importance for women existed. Building on this revaluation of women’s affectionate bonds, this podcast explores friendship as a vital force in feminist organising, community-building, and practices of mutual care.

The podcast explores feminist understandings of friendship as a plural space of interaction through which women have found mediation between themselves and the public domain. It reflects on how bonds of friendship nurture acts of alliance, resistance, and reciprocity, in which participants both listen and feel heard, see and are seen.

Recorded at the end of year marked by Covid-19, during which many people have felt isolated and anxious, “Nothing worth doing is done alone” reconsiders the importance of sharing and holding space, collective thinking and reading. It also celebrates the sheer pleasure of being together.

Podcast Concept

Sabrina Fuller and Helena Reckitt

Editing and Composition

Sabrina Fuller

Thanks

The FDRG is grateful to Delpha Hudson for her recording of “Feminist Readings” which she organised at Hypatia Trust in January 2019

Title

The podcast’s name comes from “Everything Worthwhile is Done With Other People,” a 2019 interview with Mariame Kaba by Eve L Ewing, referenced in the contribution by Lucy Lopez

Joan Anim-Addo

Re-sisters formed part of a major European pedagogic research group. They supported Joan as lone black academic, and together they gave their own time and resources to produce presentations and publications on interculturality and gender, as well as establishing long-term friendships, supporting each other in personal growth and activism.

Alice Walker, The Alice Walker Collection: Non-Fiction (London: Hachette, 2013), 17.

Olivia Berkowicz, Angelica Bollettinari

This conversation focuses on Céline Condorelli and Svetlana Boym’s writing on feminist friendship as political organisation; on the patriarchal nature of philosophical constructions of friendship; on multiplicity of friendly voices as a resource; on allowing for difference while thinking together; about de and re-constructing exclusionary building blocks and symbolic mediation.

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

Svetlana Boym, “Scenography of Friendship: Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and anchovy paste,” Cabinet, Winter, Issue 36 Friendship (Winter 2009–2010) 

Rosie Cooper

This poetic celebration of feminist friendship refers to love, challenge, listening, space for difference, change, learning, expanded family, community, networks, generosity kindness and support.

Kezia Davies

Kezia describes her feminist influences: activists, educators, artists, writers and writing, those she has organised alongside, those supporting or supported through trauma, and her feminist mother. She reads from the Milan Women’s Bookshop Collective on the need to translate their political practice of relationships between women into social reality.

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.

Flora Dunster

Flora focuses on friendship as a feminism of the everyday: comradeship and solidarity forged from duration, hardship and struggles. She reads from a short story, from a collection which changed the way she conceptualised the meaning of the words ‘feminism’ and ‘friendship’ to one another.

Bronwen Wallace, "People You'd Trust Your Life To" in People You'd Trust Your Life To (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990), 149-169.

Hayley Ha

Hayley describes the different languages, accents and cadences at a reading of an experimental poetic text, undermining binary cultural framing, embracing the unknown and uncertain. She plays a fragment of a film giving voice to Korean adoptees: a work based on kinship between artists, writers, researchers, mothers and poets. 

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

Taey Iohe

The focus is care: the support group Taey and others organised, in response to a suicide, to support Korean students: their mental and intellectual wellbeing and the central importance of artistic creation. She reads about care of our own and others’ fragile bodies as the most anti-capitalist of gestures.

Taey Iohe, Care for Collective Curatorial Practice, https://taey.com/cccJohanna Hedva, “Get Well Soon!” (2020), https://getwellsoon.labr.io/

Alexandra Kokoli

Citing a general assumption of friendship rather than an extensive literature, Alexandra reads from a collaboratively-authored account of a consciousness-raising group at a sixth-form college in the early 1980s. The group discusses their very practical deliberations on whom to involve, how to be inclusive and accessible, and their appreciation of finding each other.

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.

Lucy Lopez

Lucy focuses on care and how our broken and iniquitous systems are exposed: if some of us are not well then none of us are; how care becomes revolutionary, through its emphasis on collectivity, interconnection, alliance, making us aware of different needs, and how working in friendship is ultimately political.

Johanna Hedva, “Get Well Soon!” (2020)

Eve L Ewing, “Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile is Done With Other People,” Adi Magazine, Domestic Dissonance, (Autumn 2019)

Laura Malacart

The significance of collective ancient rituals is described in the power and ancient origins of the circle, the Way of the Council and Red Tent. These ancient rituals are all echoed by feminist gatherings as sites of mutual support, sisterhood, solidarity and dissent and undermine the transactional,  the hierarchical and the quantifiable. 

Kim McAleese

Kim speaks about the definition of cultural production as making things public, the process of connecting things and befriending issues as well as people: about sharing, and friendship across difference supporting ‘this thinking business’; and the importance of holding space for people, slowly, cooking, eating and reading together.

Céline Condorelli, The Company She Keeps (London: Book Works, 2014)

Gabby Moser

Friendship - allegiance and responsibility - as an essentially political practice. Reading and writing together as central to women building a network of citations, a resource for future thinking. The urgent task for feminism is creating the conditions for one another to think and imagine the formation of culture differently.

Céline Condorelli, “Reprint,” Mousse 32, (February 2012): 222-227.

The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, Sexual Difference: A Theory of Socio-Symbolic Practice, trans. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: The University of Indiana Press, 1990), 30-3

Sara Paiola

It is less a matter that everything women do together is political, and more that all their activities can become political, as the excerpt quoted here suggests.

Lia Cigarini and Luisa Muraro ‘Politica and Pratica politica.’ In Critica Marxista. 3-4 (1992).

Helena Reckitt

The principle of friendship plays out in the FDRG. The group befriends earlier, other, forms of feminist practice, while getting to know other participants through the act of reading and thinking together.  The group looks to the key importance of relations between women in the second wave feminist movement, epitomised by the process of reciprocal coappearance developed by members of the Milan Women’s Bookshoop collective, which enabled them to find a plural, thus political, space of interaction. 

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

Sasha Rosneil

Friendship is little studied, interstitial, unregulated - and fundamental to feminism. 1980s Greenham women saw friendship as fundamental to transforming the dominant social relations of gender and sexuality, also as a sustaining everyday pleasure. But friendship can struggle with difference: we have collective obligations to the unloved and uncared for.

Sasha Roseneil, “Foregrounding Friendship: Feminist Pasts, Feminist Futures,” in Kathy Davis, Mary Evans, Judith Lorber (eds) Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies (London: Sage, 2006), 324-343.

Ehryn Torrell

Ehryn describes the FDRG engaging closely with a text proposing a care practice around the politics of togetherness: providing space for kinship and mentorship; addressing black absence from mainstream feminist space - a racialised unmooring that frees feminism from predominately white preoccupations, ensuring that race and racism matter to all feminists.

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