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Negotiating Activism: Women of Colour Crafting
Antiracist Feminist Organizational Change
by
Sobia Shaheen Shaikh
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto
@ Copyright by Sobia Shaheen Shaikh (2013)
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Negotiating Activism:
Women of Colour Crafting Antiracist Feminist Organizational Change
Doctor of Philosophy 2013
Sobia Shaheen Shaikh
Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto
Abstract
Starting from the standpoint of antiracist feminists in Southern Ontario, Canada, I
examine the everyday social organization of antiracist feminist activism. Using key
concepts from institutional ethnography and other critical research methods, I explore
how women of colour activists engage, contest and modify existing social relations
within women’s organizations to craft antiracist feminist organizational change. I
describe how women of colour negotiate their antiracist, feminist and social justice
commitments in ways which both respond to, and are constitutive of, contradictory social
relations within women’s organizations.
An analysis of in-depth interviews with women of colour activists reveals
dialectic processes of accountability in their everyday antiracist feminist practice.
Activists are accountable, on the one hand, to hierarchical relations within the daily
practices of women’s organizations, and, on the other hand, to other feminist, antiracist
and social justice activists. I describe how relations of accountability, named respectively,
organizational accountability and activist responsibility, socially organize women of
colour’s everyday experience of antiracist feminist activism. In particular, I argue that
organizational accountability must be understood as relations of hierarchical
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answerability within the organization that extend outside the organization, while activist
responsibility needs to be seen as the relations by which activists become accountable to
other activists in the enactment of an explicitly antiracist feminist praxis. I describe
further how women of colour creatively and consciously do antiracist feminist activism
by mobilizing and negotiating both sets of relations of accountability to develop antiracist
feminist social and organizational change. I highlight the importance of everyday activist
work by revealing the ways women of colour seize the potential for crafting antiracist
feminist change through relations of accountability. Significantly, this study offers a
conceptualization of everyday antiracist feminist activist practice as a negotiation of
relations of accountability.
Key words: women’s organizations, antiracism, feminism, activism, social movements,
intersectionality, institutional ethnography, political activist ethnography, organizational
change, critical research, organizational accountability, activist responsibility
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Acknowledgements
I need to begin by expressing my deep gratitude, debt and love for Dr. Roxana Ng. Every part of this project has been touched by her and I am indelibly changed
because of her presence in my life.
Relationships are the foundation of my academic and activist work and, in particular, this
dissertation. I hardly know how to express the depth of the gifts that people in my life
have (knowingly and unknowingly) imparted to me and to this project.
Thank you to the women of colour who participated in my research and for
sharing with me your ideals and experience. Your commitment to antiracist feminist
praxis has guided me throughout the writing of this dissertation. Thank you to antiracist
and feminist academics on whose ideas I have been nourished intellectually and
politically. Thank you to women of colour and activists whose commitments to
combatting inequity and oppression in its various interconnected forms are my
inspiration. Thank you also to my mentors from Sociology and Equity Studies, OISE and
McMaster who taught me that politicized praxis is messy, necessary and possible.
Thank you especially to the members of my doctoral thesis committee, Dr.
Roxana Ng, Dr. Kari Dehli and Dr. Njoki Wane whose support, insight and faith in me
and this project were crucial. Kari, I am grateful for your mentorship, guidance, kind
rigour and theoretical insight, and especially for your support in the last few months of
the defense process. Njoki, your imparting of antiracist vision and Black feminist praxis
was pivotal, and your encouragement, crucial to my academic pursuits as a racialized
scholar. Thank you also to my external examiner, Dr. Chandra Mohanty, whose
groundbreaking academic and theoretical explorations inspired me to imagine a different
sort of activism. Your thoughtful and detailed engagements with my ideas offer me
enthusiasm to continue my activism/research. I am also grateful for the excellent
feedback, guidance and conversation of my internal examiners, Dr. Kiran Mirchandani,
Dr. Rupaleem Bhuyan, and Dr. Charmaine Williams—I take your gifts with me.
My relationships with my family were the pillars on which this dissertation was
built. Thank you to my parents, Kausar Sultana (mom) and Parwaz Muhammad (dad).
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My father instilled in me a love and appreciation for education and academic pursuit.
And, while I doubt he would ever imagine my work would take this turn, I am grateful to
him. My mother’s love, patience and embodiment of womanhood (in all its complexity)
sustain me. Her experience instills in me a deep desire to uncover, understand, unpack
and show the strength of women of colour in their everyday crafting of new possibilities.
My brother, Suleman Shaikh, and my sisters, Sanober Hashmi and Summera Dar,
are other pillars in my life—I am strong because you are who you are and stand by my
side. Without siblings, I doubt that I could have become an activist and academic
engaged in meaningful dialogue, debate and learning—navigating complex relationships
with my peers. From you, I learn tact, diplomacy, negotiation, acceptance, self-defense
and how to defend others, understanding for other points of view, and love.
I have three other ‘sisters’ to thank: Samina Shaikh who teaches me the true
meaning of compassionate and unconditional friendship, and brought to my
consciousness the importance of a praxis of everyday love—without your vision and care
(given freely to both Sarik and I), I would not have been able to pursue those dreams that
are now vital to who I am. And, Morgan Gardner, whose love and presence in my life is a
constant reminder of what it means to be a committed activist-scholar, mother and
friend—thank you for sharing with me your loving insight and helping me to imagine
hope, connection and transformation in the drudgery of academic work. And, finally,
thank you to Shahina Shaikh with whom I have parented side-by-side our three collective
kids and whose company, practicality, intelligence and everyday care enriches me.
Thank you also to all of my activist/academic friends, especially, Anne
O’Connell, Teresa Macias, Vannina Sztainbok, Shaista Patel, Tom Hamilton, Gerry
Thomas, Cynthia Ott-Thomas, Delores Mullings, Eve Haque and Brenda LeFrançois. I
would not be the activist academic had it not been for your presence in my life. Thanks to
my faculty/staff colleagues at York, Memorial and U of T; also to my thesis coaching
group, Bev, Candis, and led by Cathy Rodrigues; to activists with whom I have worked
with over the years, especially, Lynn, Betty-Anne, Cathy, Jim, Drummond in Whitby-
Oshawa; and to a organizers that I have worked with over the years. Thank you also to
my students at York and Memorial, and especially, to my co-researchers, Melissa Chasse,
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Savina Sengupta, Aileen Verkuyl, Amanda Cramm and Kinnon McKinnon. Thank you
also to Krysia Lear and Siphiwe Dube, whose editorial support was invaluable.
Thank you to my nieces and nephews, for (re)teaching me humour and the
importance of play and questioning: Aaseyah, Adeel, Ahsan, Aimen, Ayah, Easa, Emily,
Ferhana, Hayley, Humza, Imran, Maria, Manahil, Mikaela, Rukhsana, Saffi, Sakeena and
Sidra. A special thank you to Sidra Shaikh, Saffi Shaikh and Mikaela Clark-Gardner,
whose friendships to Sarik, Sanaa and I continue to be cherished. Thank you to my
cousins (especially Uzma and Tallat), aunts and uncles, and to my ‘othermothers’ and
‘otherfathers,’ especially, Aunty Nasra, ‘Grandma’ Jean, and ‘Grandpa’ Ron. Thank you
also to my ‘in-laws’—Huma, Nabeel, Ashraf, Sarah, Dave.
Nigel, my life partner: I love you, and thank you for sharing your life with me, for
giving me the gift that is our daughter, Sanaa, for co-parenting both Sarik and Sanaa, for
listening and not listening about my project, for giving me the space to finish this work,
for building a home, for editing my numerous drafts, for keeping me grounded in
domestic grinds and bliss, and for your love and commitment. It has been a blessing to
share my life with a politicized academic, and I continue to learn from you.
To my children, Sanaa and Sarik: although I am not sure what you will take from
this dissertation (or journey), this project has been shaped in through my everyday
mothering praxis. I began this project because I believed that transforming injustice and
sexist, racist and classist oppression is possible—but not without cross-generational love,
teaching, learning and activism. And, your presence in my life reminds of this.
Sanaa, thank you for the joy that you bring to me. You will neither remember me
completing the last drafts of this thesis, nor the ways your presence—your crawling,
walking, dancing, drumming, singing, talking and your cuddles, kisses and cries—
compelled me to hurry up and finish this so I can come home and play with you.
Sarik, I am ever-grateful that you have walked with me through this dissertation
journey. You were a toddler when I started my doctorate degree, and now you are a
young man. Your presence and affection has sustained me in so many ways, but
especially in my belief that, with love, dedication and commitment anything is possible.
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Dedication
This dissertation is dedicated to my son, Sarik.
Sarik, your life has been shaped by this dissertation in ways that you may not be
able to fully appreciate—and your very essence has shaped this project.
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Contents
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... iv
Dedication................................................................................................................................. vii List of Tables and Figures .......................................................................................................... xi List of Appendices .................................................................................................................... xii
Chapter One: Introduction ............................................................................................ 1
Personal Connections: Antiracist, Feminist Activism .................................................. 2
Social Organization of Antiracist Feminist Activism..................................................... 7
Contextualizing the Study ................................................................................................ 9
Key Terms ........................................................................................................................14
Literature Review: Setting the Stage .............................................................................19
Restructuring, funding, and accountability in the non-profit and voluntary sectors ......... 21
Feminist movement organizations ................................................................................. 27
Antiracist thought and antiracist organizational change ................................................. 32
Antiracist struggle with and within the feminist movement ........................................... 37
Antiracist activism in women’s organizations ............................................................... 40
Personalizing the political and politicizing the personal ................................................. 47
Organization of Dissertation ..........................................................................................59
Chapter Two: Method of Inquiry ................................................................................. 65
Research Framework ......................................................................................................65
Conceptualizing a feminist, antiracist and antioppressive institutional ethnography ....... 67
Institutional ethnography and antiracist feminist activism ............................................. 76
Research Process ...........................................................................................................80
Research questions and recruitment .............................................................................. 83
Introducing the research participants ............................................................................. 89
Interviews and transcriptions ........................................................................................ 96
Data analysis and “writing up” ...................................................................................... 98
Chapter Three: Commitment to Antiracist Feminist Practice ................................ 104
Commitment and Sense of Self ...................................................................................108
“Activism is me” ........................................................................................................ 108
Personal biographies and commitment ........................................................................ 111
Embodying social justice ............................................................................................ 112
Commitments and Everyday Choices .........................................................................113
Choices around family ................................................................................................ 117
Choices around everyday activities ............................................................................. 120
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Negotiating Acceptance of Activism ...........................................................................123
Creating shared understanding of social justice work .................................................. 124
Building on family goals ............................................................................................. 128
Bridging family and activist work ............................................................................... 133
Social Justice Commitments at Work .........................................................................135
“More than a career” ................................................................................................... 136
Evaluating social change outcomes ............................................................................. 139
Empowering women as social change ......................................................................... 142
Teaching and learning as commitment ........................................................................ 145
Chapter Four: Antiracism in Contradictory Spaces ................................................ 148
Connection between Ideals and Practice ...................................................................150
Antiracism and feminism as “naturally” connected ..................................................... 152
Antiracism as historical struggle and education ........................................................... 153
Antiracism as mandated by the organization ............................................................... 156
Antiracism and antioppression as guides to organizational practice ............................. 160
Disconnection between Ideals and Practice ..............................................................162
Limitations in implementing antiracist feminism ......................................................... 163
Organizational experience of racism and racialized discrimination .............................. 168
Disciplining antiracist, feminist, and social justice activism in organizations ............... 174
Disparity and conflict among women of colour’s antiracist feminist practice ............... 182
Chapter Five: Organizational Accountability .......................................................... 185
Accountability, Hierarchy, and Feminist Organizations ...........................................191
Hierarchicalized relations and organizational charts .................................................... 192
Reporting relationships ............................................................................................... 199
Extralocal relations of accountability .......................................................................... 204
Shaping Antiracist Feminist Practice ..........................................................................208
Direct interventions: Hierarchical reporting processes ................................................. 209
Doing “good work” or documenting “good work”? ..................................................... 223
From contestation to conflict management .................................................................. 242
Chapter Six: Activist Responsibility ........................................................................ 254
Antiracist Feminist Activist Responsibility: From the Personal to the Social .......256
Activist Responsibility as a Coordinating Discourse ...............................................262
From personal commitments to activist responsibility ................................................. 266
Non-hierarchical social relations ................................................................................. 273
From the organizational to the translocal ..................................................................... 278
Converging relations of accountability ........................................................................ 279
Chapter Seven: Crafting Social Justice Change ..................................................... 283
Activism, Relationships and Everyday Talk ...............................................................286
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Shift changes .............................................................................................................. 287
Supervision................................................................................................................. 288
Everyday consulting and collaboration ........................................................................ 290
Staff and board meetings............................................................................................. 294
Job and promotion interviews and hiring processes ..................................................... 297
Organizational Documentary Practices and Activism...............................................302
Translocal Activism .......................................................................................................304
Chapter Eight: Summary and Conclusions ............................................................. 311
Dissertation Summary ..................................................................................................311
Conceptual underpinnings ........................................................................................... 312
The research problematic: Commitments and contradictions ....................................... 317
Social relations of accountability and everyday antiracist feminist activism ................. 318
Implications of Conceptualizing Activism as Negotiation of Accountability .........323
Nuancing, politicizing, and reclaiming “accountability” .............................................. 325
Engaging and supporting activist work in non-profit organizations .............................. 328
Furthering a research agenda on social justice praxis ................................................... 333
Last thoughts .............................................................................................................. 338
Appendices ................................................................................................................ 339
Appendix I: Copy of interview guide .......................................................................... 339
Appendix II: Recruitment letter to potential participants.............................................. 340
Appendix III: Letter to be sent to directors of women’s organizations ......................... 342
Appendix IV: Consent form for participants ................................................................ 344
Appendix V: Recruitment flyer ................................................................................... 346
References ................................................................................................................. 347
xi
List of Tables and Figures
Tables
Table 1: Ethnicity of participants ................................................................................... 90
Table 2: Highest level of education achieved by participants ......................................... 91
Table 3: Types of organizations where participants worked ........................................... 92
Table 4: Organizational position of participants ............................................................. 92
Table 5: Location of participants ................................................................................... 93
Figures
Figure 5. 1: Four levels of reporting relationships ........................................................ 196
Figure 5. 2: Organizational chart with umbrella or national organizations .................... 197
Figure 5. 3: Organizational chart with general membership ......................................... 198
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List of Appendices
Appendix I: Copy of Interview Guide .............................................................. 339
Appendix II: Recruitment Letter to Potential Participants.. ............................... 340
Appendix III: Letter to be sent to directors of women’s organizations .............. 342
Appendix IV: Consent form for participants..................................................... 344
Appendix V: Recruitment Flyer ....................................................................... 346
1
Chapter One: Introduction
The main political objectives of antiracist feminists are to shift inequitable power
relations, specifically those based on race, gender, and class, in order to foster social
justice. Those committed to antiracist feminist action strive to make social justice change
more effective, more inclusive, and more empowering within women’s organizations and
communities. In tracing antiracist feminist commitment, this dissertation focuses on how
antiracist feminists do social justice work. Specifically, I examine how antiracist feminist
activism is enabled, constrained, and socially organized through women’s experiences of
the women’s organizations in which they work in Southern Ontario, Canada. The
everyday antiracist feminist work of thirteen activists is analyzed for the ways in which
they mobilize, contest and modify existing social change discourses and practices within
their workplaces.
The primary purpose of this research, tied to the main political objectives of
antiracist feminists identified above, is to map the social organization of antiracist
feminist activism in women’s organizations from the standpoint of racialized women
engaged in antiracist feminist organizational change. The study focuses on uncovering
the links among antiracist, feminist, and social justice ideals and everyday organizational
practices—in essence, this is the problematic1 of the research. Beginning from women of
colour’s accounts of their everyday activist work, this study explores the ways social
1 For institutional ethnographers, the problematic of the research is not the research question or research problem. Rather, it is the possible set of questions, or “puzzles” that are within someone’s or some people’s lived experience (Smith, 1987; Campbell and Gregor, 2002). It is the problematic which is available as the place to begin analysis of everyday lived reality. For the purposes of this study, the problematic, or puzzles, that I explore are the links between social justice praxis and organizational processes.
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change workers articulated and put into practice antiracist, feminist, and social justice
ideals. I show how women of colour negotiated their commitments to antiracist feminism
through existing social relations within women’s organizations and how their activist
practices can and must be understood as simultaneously responding to, and shaping,
social processes in women’s organizations. Furthermore, this study describes how
women’s activism within women’s social services involved negotiating two sets of
relations of accountability, namely, organizational accountability (to hierarchicalized
social relations) and activist responsibility (to antiracism, feminism and social justice).
Activists creatively drew on both relations of accountability to develop and consciously
enact innovative antiracist feminist praxis. In essence, I argue that women’s negotiations
of antiracism, feminism and other articulations of social justice were simultaneously
supported and limited within feminist and feminist-influenced women’s organizations.
Personal Connections: Antiracist, Feminist Activism
The research topic for this dissertation came from my desire to better understand both my
own and other women’s experiences of doing antiracist feminist activism within
women’s sexual health, multicultural and advocacy organizations. At the time, I had
become aware of the ways that activist work permeated racialized women’s lives in
salient ways. I experienced, for example, how the women’s organizations I worked for
often supported my antiracist feminist activism; and yet, much to my dismay, sometimes
the very same people in these organizations dismissed and constrained antiracism
discourses and other forms of expressing struggle against oppression. I also observed that
many women of colour experienced similar disconnections between feminist and
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antiracist politics, and that the tensions arising from these disconnections seemed to be a
recurring aspect of the lives of antiracist feminist activists, myself included.
When I started working on this dissertation, I wondered about the sustainability of
antiracist and feminist activisms. At the time, I was doing antiracist feminist work within
‘multicultural’ settings which included ethnocultural and ‘white’ women’s organizations
(see key terms below). I worked with feminist groups in ‘multicultural’ settings because I
could not imagine spending my energy in either a purely feminist or antiracist setting. I
chose to put my activist energy in spaces that allowed me to deal with sexism and racism
simultaneously. As I met with other women of colour activists who were fighting for
social justice, I asked them how they were handling racism in their organizations. I asked
them about burnout and about how they took up feminism and antiracism in their
everyday activities.
I began to notice that despite our initial excitement at the prospect of solidarity
among women in the organizations in which I worked (due to shared feminist concerns),
change did not materialize in the ways I imagined it would. I was not alone in thinking
this way as many other women of colour activists had similar experiences to mine. For
example, many of the women described how exoticism and favouritism repeatedly
destroyed the tenuous alliances they had formed with each other. So, instead of solidarity,
the activists, myself included, experienced organization leaders trying to organize and
homogenize their individual interests through attempts at ‘responding to the needs of
diversity’ (see Maraj Grahame, 1998). In response to this homogenization, I observed
that many of the activists’ women started to talk about taking a break from activism to
clean up ‘our backyards’ or ‘our families.’ They turned their focus on self-care as a form
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of activism, and then subsequently moving in and out of activism (see Todd, 2002) as a
way to cope with the favouritism and exoticism (read racism) of the women’s
organizations with which they worked. As a result of such experiences, some of the
women I met were disillusioned by the racism of women’s organizations and had ‘left’
the ‘feminist movement.’ Yet when I read the academic literature on social justice, I
found that these experiences, which demonstrated in stark terms the interconnectedness
between the personal and the political, were not given any sustained attention. There was
a disparity in the idealization of solidarity within the women’s organizations, the
experiences of racism within a “feminist movement” context, and the silence of academic
literature in accounting for this disparity.
Although feminist and antiracist scholars do pay some attention to women of
colour’s activism within organizations (such as Agnew, 1996; Brah, 1996, 2001; Kohli,
1993; Morgen, 1995; Ng, 1996; Simonds, 1996; Sudbury, 1998; Transken, 1998), I found
analyses of women of colour’s everyday work in women’s organizations generally
presented in simplistic ways. For example, I found a tendency in activist and academic
literatures to either provide accounts which dismissed everyday activist work as
unimportant and rendered ineffective and irrelevant given the dominance of neoliberal
forms of governance within organizations; or, alternatively, in ways which presented
overstated the possibilities of antiracist feminist activist work. This tendency between
demonizing and dismissing activists versus idolizing or idealizing activists reflects
popular ideas about activists and activism, and something that I was interested in
avoiding (see also K. Smith, 2011).
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I also found that the literature on feminist organizations’ responses to antiracist
organizational change had not paid much attention to the actual, everyday, mundane
experiences of feminist antiracist workers and the effects of their antioppression work
within their organizations (Shaikh, 1998). Therefore, in order to develop a more adequate
understanding of racialized women’s experiences of antiracist feminism, I needed to turn
to the experiences of racialized women as the primary sources for understanding how
they engaged antiracist feminism in their everyday activities beyond the institutional
contexts of the women’s organizations of which they were a part. By doing so, this
dissertation fills in a gap in academic knowledge on women of colour’s activism.
This study adds to our present knowledge about women of colour’s antiracist and
feminist activism and its interrelatedness with their personal lives. By examining the
social relations which shape both the personal and institutional experiences of activism
by women of colour, insights from this study will have implications for women’s social
change work. My goal is to theorize how the experiences analyzed in this dissertation (as
narratives of socio-political change) are embedded in, and constitutive of, social relations
in the broader context of antioppression work. For that reason, the study is most relevant
to individuals, organizations and communities involved with antiracist, antisexist, and
other antioppression work and it contributes to knowledge about social movements and
women as social change agents.
As I describe in more depth in chapter two, I embarked on this study in order to
investigate the social organization of antiracist feminist activism from the standpoint of
women of colour working in women’s organizations. As such, this research draws
heavily from the ontological assumptions of institutional ethnography. Following
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Dorothy Smith’s work, I began with the assumption that women of colour’s lives,
although unique and particular, were enmeshed within complex social relations (Smith,
1987, 1990, 2005). That is to say, I started from the premise that women’s accounts of
their experiences of the interconnections among their beliefs, everyday life, and work
within women’s organizations were socially organized by a complex web of social
relations. Therefore, even though I began from the particular standpoints of thirteen
individual women of colour activists, the objective of my research was always to explore
specifically the social relations of antiracist feminist activism through specific women’s
experiences within women’s organizations. It was never my intention to make the subject
of my study an analysis of the women’s lives. However, women of colour engaged in
antiracist feminist politics within women’s organizations have often confronted sexism,
racism, classism, and other inequitable social relations. So when they have attempted to
put their antioppression politics into practice, they have often found their efforts
constrained and in need of constant negotiation.
Organizational theorists Mills and Simmons (1995) write: “People do not leave
their selves behind when they come to work. The workplace is charged with
emotionality, family concerns, sexuality, worries, hopes, and dreams: try as they may,
persons cannot divorce their selves from the workplace” (p. 96). In other words, as this
dissertation demonstrates, the workplaces of antiracist feminist activists are concrete sites
of struggle available for analysis, where activists’ varied and sometimes contradictory
experiences of activism are central. By studying the link between antiracist feminist
activist work and organizations, I reveal the interplay of antiracist and feminist discourses
in day-to-day practices and the implications of this interplay for racialized women’s lives.
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Social Organization of Antiracist Feminist Activism
Women of colour’s commitments to antiracist feminist social and organizational change
are active rather than simply abstract ideals—that is, they are work, and they take time
and space (see also Nichols, 2008; and G. Smith, Mykhalovskiy and Weatherbee, 2006
for detailed discussion on the notion of “work”). In the case of my research, this
commitment is demonstrated by how these women incorporated their political ideals and
beliefs in personal areas of their lives in ways that made their political beliefs personal.
As I argue, women’s accounts cannot be simplistically understood as idiosyncratic,
specific, or localized experiences of activism; they are socially organized through a
complex web of social relations. In addition, the ways in which women of colour’s
personal commitments to antiracism, feminism, and social justice permeate throughout
their everyday lives is further demonstration of the commitment identified above. The
research participants described how they negotiated antiracist activism in both their
personal and organizational relationships.
As I show, activists brought their commitments to women’s organizations that
were already engaged with antiracist struggle, and in many ways, supported antiracist
feminist and social justice practice. Despite the prospects of rich encounters, women’s
organizations were also spaces in which antiracist feminism was limited. In these ways,
women’s organizations were experienced as contradictory spaces by the research
participants. This dissertation uncovers and analyzes women’s accounts of the apparent
contradictions of putting into practice their antiracist feminist commitments in
organizations. The apparent contradiction between antiracist feminist discourse and
practice was more complex than a simple disconnection between what white feminist
organizations “say” and “do” (to paraphrase Agnew, 1996), or the disjuncture between
8
theory and practice. In fact, I argue that an understanding of antiracist feminist activism
within women’s movement organizations requires that we understand that politicized
struggle is, in itself, a dialectical iteration between politicized praxis and organizational
processes.
A close analysis of activist accounts reveals that at least two dialectical processes
of accountability were significant in guiding the research participants’ everyday antiracist
feminist practices. On the one hand, the research participants described their
accountability to the governance structures of women’s organizations, and, on the other
hand, were responsible to feminist, antiracist, and other social movements. This created,
in effect, a disjuncture between antiracist feminist discourse and practice. I describe how
these two main sets of social relations of accountability, namely, organizational
accountability and activist responsibility, socially organized women of colour’s
individual and collective everyday experience of antiracist feminist activism. In this case,
organizational accountability can be understood to be the formal chains of hierarchical
accountability within the organization which extend outside the organization, while
activist responsibility refers to a form of accountability to antiracist and feminist praxis
which circulated in the organization in a more lateral way.
While I describe both sets of relations of accountability2 separately, activist
responsibility and organizational accountability worked together dialectically to produce
antiracist feminist change. In fact, I show that it was the convergence of relations of
2 I should note here that as my analysis of relations of accountability developed, I became aware that, although activist responsibility and organizational accountability were the most significant in women’s everyday work with/in women’s organizations, there were more than two sets of relations of accountability evident in the research participants’ accounts. For example, the women’s accounts of their everyday activist work also relayed accountability to racialized and diasporic communities.
9
accountability and the dialogue that arose from this process, which created the space for
antiracist feminist change. Indeed, as I argue, women of colour actively mobilized both
sets of relations of accountability to develop antiracist feminist social and organizational
change. I refer to this active mobilization as crafting in order to make explicit the work
that women of colour did to develop and connect to both forms of accountability. It was
through this active and conscious bringing together of accountability to the organization
and to antiracist feminist ideals that social justice work was implemented within women’s
organizations.
Contextualizing the Study
While the interviews for this research were conducted in Southern Ontario in 2004, the
recollections of my research participants bridged at least two decades of prior struggle by
women of colour with and within women’s movement organizations. From the women
of colour I spoke to, it was clear that the accounts they gave in 2004 drew
extensively from their knowledge of the historical gains made by antiracist feminists
throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This historical awareness constituted an
important politicized and practical resource that guided women’s everyday
organizational discourse and practice.
To contextualize my time-focused ethnographic analysis in this section, first, I
briefly describe antiracist feminist organizing in Southern Ontario in the two decades
preceding 2004, the year the interviews were conducted; and, next, I provide some
reflections on the relevance of the findings and analysis found within the dissertation to
contemporary antiracist feminist praxis in women’s organizations. Given the little
documentation available on antiracist feminist articulations of this period, this brief
10
historiography is necessarily partial and incomplete; I have only highlighted a few of
those activist-centred stories and references that were passed down to me by other
activists/academics in Southern Ontario about antiracist feminist struggle.
Many critical moments, debates and incidents definitively transformed antiracist
feminist organizing between 1979 and the time of my interviews. Nadeau’s (2009)
historiography of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) shows
that almost no attention to immigrant and racialized women was apparent in NAC’s
organizational documents until 1979. Antiracist feminist articulations within women’s
organizations (Agnew, 1996, 1998; Nadeau, 2005, 2009; Adamson et al., 1988; Kohli,
1993; Gottlieb, 1993) reflected a broader convergence of antiracist and feminist
organizing within social movement organizations (such as labour [Ng, 1995, 2011],
student [Moses, 2010] and environmental [Gardner, 2003; Srivastava, 2002] movement
organizations). Specifically, a number of events took place that galvanized movements
against racism in Southern Ontario in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1979, three key
events shaped antiracist mobilizing within racialized (namely, Black, Caribbean and
Asian) communities, and were central in catching the attention of labour and women’s
organizations in Toronto: a police killing of an unarmed black man experiencing ‘mental
health issues’ during a domestic dispute (Ng, 1995); a blatantly racist media portrayal of
Canadian universities as being taken over by ‘foreign’/Asian students (Ng, 1995, 2011);
and a threatened deportation of seven Jamaican women domestic workers (Nadeau, 2009;
Silvera, 1993). These events sparked and enhanced public discussions about racism in
Ontario, particularly in social movement organizations. For example, in 1981, the same
year that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was adopted, there was a province wide
11
campaign by the Ontario Federation of Labour called “Racism Hurts Everyone” (Ng,
1995, 2011). Also in 1981, in an address during Toronto’s International Women’s Day
(IWD) celebration, feminist activist Sue Colley advocated that racism needed to be
addressed by the Canadian women’s movement, culminating to a public “raging debate”
in 1983 about whether local and national concerns should share the focus with global
women’s movements at Toronto’s IWD celebration (Pierson, 1995, pp. 365–367).
Together, these events and others propelled antiracist struggle within women’s movement
organizations. The mid- to late 1980s saw increased antiracist activism within the
women’s national coalition organization, NAC (Gottlieb, 1993; Nadeau, 2005, 2009);
notably in 1984, a public exchange between the NAC president, Hosek, and the Ontario
Visible Minority Women’s Coalition (OVMWC) began to openly question and unsettle
NAC’s claims that it represented all women, regardless of race (Nadeau, 2009; see also,
Agnew, 1996).
By the end of the 1990s, it was clear that antiracist feminist activism within
women’s organizations was no longer in its infancy. Alongside the debates within NAC,
the 1990s saw increased antiracist critique and action within women’s service, advocacy,
collectives, media and coalition organizations. Women of colour activists, in solidarity
with white women, made visible and struggled against, racist, exclusionary and
discriminatory practices of women’s organizations (Agnew, 1996; Dua, 1999b; Gottlieb,
1993; Kohli, 1993; San Martin and Barnoff, 2004; Srivastava, 2005). In a key incident in
1993, a nationally broadcasted conflict at Nellie’s Place in Toronto, became the subject
of public discourse, liberal and conservative backlash, and activist discussions (see San
Martin and Barnoff, 2006; Srivastava, 2005). This incensed antiracist activists within
12
women’s organizations across Southern Ontario, and, as some of my interviewees noted,
this event and its aftermath appeared to coincide with increased public surveillance on
antiracism within women’s organizations, as well as more intrusive audits by funders.
Antiracist articulations within women’s organizations reverberated within a wider
assortment of women’s organizations after the early 1990s. Women’s coalition groups,
such as the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH), Ontario
Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres (OCRCC) and the DisAbled Women’s Network Ontario
(DAWN Ontario) became sites of antiracist struggle and organizing. In particular, since
the 1990s, women of colour shelter workers organized with and within OAITH to address
racism within shelter organizations (see for example, Kohli, 1993; OAITH, n.d., 2005,
2011).
While antiracism was becoming institutionalized through women’s organizations
in the 1990s, it was also the case that the 1990s and 2000s brought challenges to
women’s movement organizations. Funding for women’s organizations decreased
overall, while accountability and surveillance by funding bodies increased. These
changes, as I describe in my literature review and in chapter five on organizational
accountability, are part of the contemporary backdrop of non-profit organizations
nationally and provincially (Baines, 2008; Barnoff et al., 2006; Carniol, 2005; Eakin and
Richmond, 2005; Ife, 1997; Kohli, 1993; Mullaly, 2006; Ng, 1996; Richmond and
Shields, 2004; Schreader, 1990; Scott, 2004; Simonds, 1996; Todd and Lundy, 2006;
Walker, 1996). As such, it is ironic, (or perhaps, some of us would suggest, not
surprising, given the rising social and fiscal conservatism of governments and backlash
against antiracist initiatives), that as antiracist initiatives took hold in women’s
13
organizations, federal funds became more difficult to secure for the day-to-day operations
of organizations. For example, federal funding was withdrawn from NAC in 1998 (it had
been funded, in part, by the Status of Women).
Since 2004, there have been more neoliberal attacks on non-profit and women’s
movement organizations’ capacities for activism, political advocacy and organizational
change. For example, the 2006 changes to Status of Women Canada funding consolidated
the federal government’s shift away from education, research and advocacy to ‘direct
service.’ This sent a strong message to women’s organizations that the space for
politicized change work, such as antiracist organizational change, was being narrowed.
My observations (in my capacity as a social work educator, activist and organizational
actor) indicate to me that, at the same time that antiracist praxis is integrated and
institutionalized in women’s movement organizations, non-profit organizational actors
are increasingly scrutinized, surveilled, and micromanaged. This, of course, has
implications on the resources that women’s organizations are able to divert to politicized
antiracist change. Furthermore, where spaces for advocacy, education and activism are
limited, the ways in which organizations do antiracist change seems (on the surface of
appearances) to be taking a backseat to organizational survival. Based on my
observations, I fear that organizational actors have adopted more depoliticized and
neoliberal articulations of antiracism. However, the process of writing this dissertation
has taught me that we cannot underestimate the tenacity of antiracist feminists: in
particular, their capabilities for navigating and negotiating dialectic relations of
accountability through their everyday work.
14
Given the current socio-political contexts of women’s movement organizations,
this study and its findings are timely for those engaged in antiracist feminist praxis. My
study shows that everyday activist practice does indeed matter, and the stories of
everyday activist work matters. Engaging activists’ everyday practice through
ethnographically-informed reflection is an important method and resource for those of us
wanting to understand the strengths, limits and possibilities of activist praxis. In fact, as
the intensification of the “accountability movement” (Carman, 2010) on non-profit
organizations continues, I believe that there is a larger imperative to focus on activists’
everyday accountability work. As I argue throughout this dissertation,
activists/researchers need to pay attention to the dialectic relationship between
accountability to the organization and to politicized praxis. Furthermore, this dissertation
shows the significance of reclaiming and expanding of the notion of accountability to
include answerability to social justice praxis and communities with whom we struggle
against oppression; perhaps, this reclaiming is, in itself, an activist act.
Key Terms
The following definitions are meant to outline briefly some of the specific ways I use
some key concepts and terms throughout this dissertation.
Accountability (social relations of): Accountability in this dissertation refers to generalized activities in which people monitor and make answerable other people’s words and actions. While much of the literature on accountability in organizations refers to forms of formalized and institutionalized forms of answerability and monitoring done by those who hold more resources and power, or by those in charge of governance, or are somehow implicated in relations of ruling, in this study, my use of the word accountability is broader than that. Michael Power (1997) states that people “are constantly checking up on other, constantly monitoring the ongoing stream of communicative exchanges and accounts that make up daily life... It is through the giving and monitoring of the accounts that we and others provide of ourselves,
15
and of our actions, that the fabric of normal human exchange is sustained” (p. 1). Power’s definition of accountability is most useful for my study as it implies that accountability must be understood through people’s everyday courses of action (see also Strathern, 2000), hence I use the words ‘social relations’3 of or ‘relations’ of accountability to capture the same (see below for definitions of activist responsibility and organizational accountability). While this dissertation analyzes two sets of social relations of accountability, in fact, the data that I analyzed suggests that there are multiple relations of accountability which shape and are shaped by antiracist feminist activist praxis. Activism: In this study, the word activism denotes the actual work that women do within their settings to make some sort of change to reflect their political commitments. In fact, while there is a tendency to romanticize and/or demonize social justice activist work (and activists), I disrupt these binaries by defining activism as also encompassing mundane doings of women committed to intersectional analysis of social justice in which they bring together their actions with their social justice ideals. In the case of antiracist feminist activism within organizations, I focus on the everyday activities that women engage in to minimize the effects of racism within their organizations or communities. I use the word “activist” as a shorthand way to describe women who are engaged in activist initiatives within and outside their organizations, both in paid and unpaid positions. Some of the women did not necessarily call themselves activist, and instead spoke of themselves as community workers, advocates, shelter workers, health care workers, volunteers, and so on. However, during the recruitment process, all of the women identified that they were engaged in antiracist, feminist, and/or social justice activist work with (in) their organizations. Activist responsibility: I describe activist responsibility as the social relations through which activists become accountable to other activists to enact an explicitly antiracist feminist praxis. Within and across women’s organizations, these social relations, in effect, create a form of accountability I call antiracist feminist activist responsibility or, as I refer to it throughout this dissertation, activist responsibility. Activist
responsibility is the socially organized process of accountability that guided the women’s everyday enactment of their commitment to and practice of social justice, feminist praxis, and antiracist work, both within (intra) and outside (extra) their organizations. In effect, activist responsibility crafts antiracist, feminist, and antioppressive praxis through concrete, everyday work within women’s organizations. Antiracism: Antiracism is a critical, political discourse on race, racism, and continuing racializing of social groups for differential and unequal treatment. Central to
3 See below for definition of social relations.
16
antiracism analyses are power relations in the form of “colonization, cultural and political imperialism which are juxtaposed to simplistic notions of racial difference based on skin colour and natural difference” (Dei, 1996, p.25). Explicitly, with this perspective, issues of race and social difference are issues of power and equity, rather than simply matters of cultural and ethnic diversity. As such, antiracism moves beyond a narrow preoccupation with individual prejudices and discriminatory actions to examine the ways that racist ideas are entrenched and unconsciously supported in institutional practices (James, 1996) such as in the women’s organizations in which my research participants were engaged. All of the women I interviewed saw themselves as engaged with antiracism within their organizations, and worked to reduce, prevent, and stop exclusionary and racist practices within women’s organizations. However, the words to describe antiracism varied from organization to organization, and the research participants described their involvement with not only those initiatives which were explicitly and politically denoted as “antiracist,” but also those activities which were called multicultural, culturally sensitive, and ethnic/ cultural/ or racial diversity-related initiatives. Antiracist feminism:
I use the term antiracist feminism in terms consistent with both the activist and academic Canadian literature on antiracism. There is a diversity of antiracist feminisms which need to be acknowledged, and I include in this category: British
black feminisms4 (Brah, 1996; Mirza, 1997; Sudbury, 1998); Black, African and
Caribbean feminisms and womanisms (Bobb-Smith, 1999; Dua, 1999b; Hill Collins, 1998, 2000; hooks, 1984; James, S. M., 1993; Wane, 2002); Asian,
Latina, Chicana and Mestiza feminisms (Ang, 2001; Anzaldùa, 2003; Brah, 1996; Jeffery and Basu, 1998; Moraga and Anzaldùa, 1983; Narayan, 1997; Sandoval, 1991; Trinh, 1989); Third World and transnational feminisms (Ang, 2001; Mohanty,1998, 2004; Ong, 2003; Suleri, 2006); postcolonial and anticolonial feminisms (Brah, 1996; Smith, A., 2006; Smith, L., 1999; Spivak, 1988); Aboriginal, Indigenous and Native feminisms (Grande, 2003; Maracle, 1996; Stasiulus, 1996; Smith, Andy, 1997; Smith, A., 2006; Smith, L., 1999); and other feminisms based on racialized women of colour critiques.
4 In the context of the United Kingdom, black feminism (where the b is usually uncapitalized) is a political-intellectual movement through which women who were racialized as non-white—such as women from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East—self-consciously and intentionally developed coalitions to confront racism, sexism, and other relations of oppression (Mirza, 1997; see also Brah, 1996). The term black feminist was contested by racialized women themselves, significantly by women with African heritage, who advocated reclaiming the label Black feminist and argued for an Afro-centred Black feminism (with the B capitalized) in keeping with Black feminisms or womanisms in North America (Brah, 1996; see also Sudbury, 1998).
17
Feminist, feminist-influenced or women’s organizations: Women’s organizations refers to those organizations that primarily work in direct service, advocacy, or activist capacities for and with women. These include health clinics, sexual assault centres, coalition organizations, advocacy organizations, and support groups which centre on women and/ or women’s issues. These settings may or may not be explicitly feminist, although, for my research, I focussed on those organizations in which there was some explicit engagement with feminist principles. I use the terms feminist organizations and women’s
organizations interchangeably, because all of the organizations in which the participants worked were influenced by feminist preoccupations. I add the word mainstream to denote those organizations that were not set up historically for specifically immigrant or racialized clientele, and/or did not have any specific antiracist or multicultural agenda when they first started. Elsewhere, these sorts of organizations have been called white women’s organizations (see Srivastava, 2002). In my work, I focus on the antiracist work within mainstream and/or whitestream (Denis, 1997; Grande, 2003) women’s organizations. Non-white women / racialized women / women of colour: The terms “non-white” and “women of colour” are used interchangeably to denote the women who are “racialized” as not white, either by others, themselves or through their own experiences. All of these terms present difficulties because they implicitly or explicitly centralize “whiteness.” I sometimes add “non-white” to the term “women of colour” to make explicit that “white” is also a racialized colour. My use of “non-white” would include those women who are phenotypically “white” as long as they themselves identify as racialized and/or their experiences of racialization lead them to take up issues of race within women’s organizations. I use the word “racialized” to explicitly denote that this construction is an ongoing social process, as opposed to something fixed or inherent. Organizational accountability: I use the term organizational accountability to describe the relations of hierarchical accountability, or answerability, to an organization’s formal administrative, bureaucratic, and governance processes and policies. Regardless of people’s politicized commitments, organizational accountability organizes people’s everyday work. Therefore, in order to be able to express and put into practice their commitments to antiracism, feminism, and social justice, for example, the research participants were made answerable to the functioning of their organizations through textually-mediated and hierarchicalized relations within their organizations’ managers. Hierarchicalized reporting relationships between workers and managers shaped how these women engaged their antiracist feminist practice and extended accountability to the extra-organizational bodies and policies, such as government funding agencies.
18
Local, extralocal and translocal: In the case of this research, local refers to specific settings or the field of action (for example, within women’s organizations), where antiracist feminists do their activism.
Institutional ethnographers use the term extralocal to refer to how the local may be coordinated through power (or ruling) in the interests which are situated outside of the local setting (Campbell, 2002; Smith, 1987, 1990, 2005).
I use the term translocal to refer to social relations that coordinate antiracist feminist activism across different local settings. I make the distinction between translocal and extralocal because translocal relations may include relations of ruling, but not necessarily so. My use of the notion of translocal is both as a descriptor of common social relations of activism across settings, and as an indicator of the conscious coordination of social justice praxis across settings.
Praxis and Practice: ‘Praxis,’ a central concept in the Marxist tradition, is understood herein as a method of engagement with the world whereby the knower engages in a constant process of to-ing and fro-ing between action and theorization or reflection. Praxis involves combining theoretically-informed practice and practice-informed theory. Many feminists see “praxis” as politically important, as it stresses the premeditative thinking that guides the strategic actions of those who challenge oppression Code (2000). In this dissertation, “praxis” is used to denote self-reflexive practice.
Relations of ruling: In this dissertation, I use Dorothy Smith’s (1990) definition:
[T]he total complex of activities differentiated into many spheres by which our kind of society is ruled, managed and administered. It includes what the business world calls management, it includes the professions, it includes government and the activities of those who are selecting, training, and indoctrinating those who will be its governors... These are the institutions through which we are ruled and through which we, and I emphasize this we, participate in ruling. (p. 14).
Social relations:
In this dissertation, the term social relations refers to people’s doings that create sequences of action; these courses of action link with, coordinate and are coordinated by other people’s everyday activities to create what institutional ethnographers refer to as social organization (Campbell, 2002; Smith, D., 1990, 2005). Moreover, social relations constitute and are constitutive of people’s everyday activities, discourses, and institutional relations. In the context of this research, everyday activist work is analyzed to examine how antiracist feminist activism coordinates and is coordinated.
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White feminism: In contrast to antiracist feminism, white feminism or whitestream feminism (Denis, 1997; Grande, 2003) refers to the majority of Western feminist writing and action that has been produced by white women which either ignores race and ethnicity or treats these as accessories to the basic definitions of woman and feminism (see Agnew, 1996, p. 12; Stasiulis, 1990, p. 282; Srivastava, 2002). Many antiracist feminists use the term white feminism as a critique of feminism’s exclusions of race in its analysis, and the racist and exclusionary practices that feminist activism sometimes occur.5 I support Brah (1996) when she comments:
I argue that categories such as ‘black feminism’ and ‘white feminism’ are best seen as non-essentialist, historically contingent, relational discursive practices, rather than as fixed sets of positionalities. They are both inside and outside each other’s field of articulation (p. 14).
Feminism, even white feminism, is a heterogeneous movement. There are different political and ideological viewpoints such as liberalist, socialist, radical, Marxist, and so on. Each of these engages different approaches to the analysis of racism within society and the “feminist movement” itself. Still, arguably to varying degrees, these different, but traditional, strands of feminism have contributed to racism within the movement itself. Despite the dangers of homogenizing these viewpoints, racialized women have critiqued the white feminist movement for its role in maintaining racism within its work to end gender oppression.
Literature Review: Setting the Stage
In the following review I examine the current academic literature on antiracist feminist
activism in order to better account for the contexts in which antiracist feminists do social
justice work. I focus on the literature that helps me and my readers to be able to consider
more fully how antiracist feminist activism is enabled, constrained, and socially
organized through social relations of state funding and accountability within the varied
5 In Canada, the ideas of “white” and “black” feminism may be less appropriate. Stasiulis (1990b) argues that as the black/white dichotomy that is frequently assumed to structure the racist and gendered oppression of women does not take into account the unique experiences of women of First Nations, Innu, and Métis descent, Francophone women, and of some women from Europe who have been racialized (p. 290).
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contexts of the non-profit sector; women’s organizations; antiracist, feminist, and social
justice praxis; and everyday lives of racialized women. In addition to providing the
readers with a context of this study, I foresee this review of the scholarship being relevant
for activists engaged in everyday antiracist feminist struggle; for people engaged in
politicized action against racism, sexism, and other relations of oppression within
community and social service organizations.
In fact, as the review demonstrates, as a crucial part of the process of reflection
and critical analysis, a useful place to begin a critical reflection of social justice activism
is through an examination of the academic–activist literatures, which describe, prescribe,
and proscribe the relations in and through which activists operate. Specifically, in order
to understand the contexts in which antiracist feminism is enacted, I propose that
particular attention be paid not only to the literature on the socio-political contexts of the
non-profit and voluntary sectors, but also the histories and preoccupations of the feminist
and antiracist movements, the debates and tensions within feminist organizations, the
history of antiracist feminist organizational change, as well as the everyday lived
experiences of racialized activists politicizing and personalizing activism.
The review highlights those studies that have contributed to knowledge about
antiracist and feminist activism by women of colour and its interrelatedness with their
personal lives. It focuses not only on the organizational contexts in which antiracist
feminist activists “do” their work, but also those contexts that help us to understand
women’s experience of navigating social relations in order to enact their politicized
visions in holistic terms. In other words, it is not only the organizational context that
gives activism its meaning, but also what happens outside the boundaries of the
21
organizations for which antiracist feminist activists “do” their work. In an attempt to
foster a holistic understanding of the social relations that shape antiracist feminist
activism within women’s organizations, I review a number of interconnected scholarship
related to antiracist feminist activist work within women’s organizations. In this review
such scholarship or literature includes writing on: (1) activist work in community and
social service organizations and the restructuring of the non-profit and voluntary sectors,
(2) the background on feminist organizations, (3) antiracist thought and antiracist
organizational change, (4) antiracist struggle with and within the feminist movement, (5)
antiracist activism in women’s organizations and, finally, (6) I look at the literature which
explores the relationship between activism and the personal.
Restructuring, funding, and accountability in the non-profit and voluntary sectors
Antiracist feminist activist work in Canada needs to be understood in relation to the
challenges faced by community and social service organizations within the non-profit and
voluntary sector in this country. The literature suggests that the main challenges are
related to economic and social restructuring, as well as restructuring of the service
organizations themselves. For service organizations, the social and economic conditions
often make survival difficult, and providing services and support for clients is a constant
struggle. Education and advocacy on issues which directly concern an organization’s
constituents and the ability to participate in social and political change also suffer during
socio-economic restructuring. There is overwhelming evidence that the restructuring of
the non-profit and voluntary sectors, which include women’s community and social
service organizations, has affected the viability and overall health of non-profit and
voluntary sector organizations since at least the 1990s (Scott, 2004; see also, Baines,
22
2008; Barnoff et al., 2006; Carniol, 2005; Eakin and Richmond, 2005; Ife, 1997; Kohli,
1993; Mullaly, 2006; Ng, 1996; Richmond and Shields, 2004; Schreader, 1990; Simonds,
1996; Todd and Lundy, 2006; Walker, 1996).
The literature also shows that despite the gains made by antiracist, feminist, and
other social justice advocates in highlighting and addressing inequity and oppression in
the Canadian context, the space for social and organizational change is becoming more
limited. Non-profit organizations have had to focus their energy and resources on their
very existence (Barnoff et al., 2006). Fisher and Shragge (2002), for example, suggest
that activism success may be just as important as other factors in explaining the
diminished impact, thus pointing to a paradox. They note:
Over the last 30 years the contribution of community organizations as a force for social change has dramatically diminished. Paradoxically, this has happened partly because of their success… The strength of these groups rests in their origins as grassroots, democratic movements with the capacity to mobilize locally and to find innovative ways to address social problems… Finding support from governments, foundations and local sources, community organizations have turned inward to build networks of service and ameliorate social and economic problems…Alongside and related to these changes, these organizations have become less engaged in making demands for social change and have diminished their role in mobilizing citizens to engage in struggles at the local level.
In many cases, this reduced space has meant that antiracist feminist activists have had to
navigate more carefully their politicized action.
Furthermore, most Canadian non-profit and voluntary organizations continue to
rely heavily on state and external funding for their survival (Eakin and Richmond, 2005;
Richmond and Shields, 2004; Schreader, 1990; Scott, 2004), and this has created
instability, particularly for community and social service organizations. A comprehensive
study on the non-profit sector (which consists of hospitals, universities and social
23
services) undertaken by Statistics Canada in 2004 entitled, The Satellite Account of Non-
profit Institutions and Volunteering, reported that government transfers constituted 51.2%
of the non-profit sector’s revenue (Eakin and Richmond, 2005). Most government
funding was provided to universities and hospitals (almost 80%), and the remaining 21%
was provided to community social services organizations (Eakin and Richmond, 2005).
Provincial governments are primarily responsible for funding social service-oriented non-
profit organizations, while the federal government provides fiscal transfers to the
provinces (Richmond and Shields, 2004). For instance, in Ontario, social service
organizations received 89% of their funding from all three levels of government
(municipal, provincial, and federal) in the 1990s (Richmond and Shields, 2004). For
social service organizations, thus, this means a significant level of accountability, and
thus vulnerability to pursue goals other than that of the government.
Moreover, federal and provincial funding across Canada has been retracted from
the voluntary sector, by way of cutting core funding and replacing it with program/project
funding (Richmond and Shields, 2004; Eakin and Richmond, 2005). In Ontario, for
example, the restructuring of the funding regime began to transform and renege on its
previous long-standing commitments in the mid-1990s. The state started shifting
accountability from itself (for maintaining a strong social safety net) and began handing
the responsibility down to the individual, community social services and NGOs
(Richmond and Shields, 2004; Ife, 1997; Carniol, 2005; Baines, 2008; Barnoff et al.,
2006). As a result of such changes, administrative reporting increased exponentially for
organizations, leaving little formal space for actually advancing social justice, and
24
created instability for non-governmental actors, as well as the clients of social service
organizations (Carniol, 2005; Ife, 1997, 2000; Barnoff et al., 2006).
Several researchers have shown how the autonomy, structure, goals, and day-to-
day workings of non-profit organizations have been adversely affected by changes in
state funding (see Ng, 1996; Kohli, 1993; Schreader, 1990; Simonds, 1996; Walker,
1996; Barnoff et al., 2006; Todd and Lundy 2006; Richmond and Shields, 2004; Scott,
2004). For example, Scott (2004) offers empirical evidence that divergent funding
policies, laborious reporting practices, and regulations avert key priorities and goals of
organizations. Scott’s insights on the effects of funding practices on redirecting and
averting key organizational priorities are particularly relevant to the progress that
antiracist feminist activists have made. Specifically, antiracist, feminist and other social
justice goals become marginalized (and seen as peripheral) to the survival of the
organization, as the everyday work of keeping the organization funded and viable in this
hostile environment often supersedes organization’s politicized work. In addition,
academics and organizational actors have expressed concerns that the emergence of a
new funding regime for non-profit and voluntary organizations is changing the capacity
of organizations for long-term sustainability and progress in an increasingly competitive
and volatile funding environment (Baines, 2008; Carniol, 2005; Ife, 1997, 2000; Mullaly,
2006; Richmond and Shields, 2004; Scott, 2004).
In addition, feminist activists and theorists have documented the contradictory
effects of government involvement in women’s movement organizations, which has both
facilitated and limited the social justice work of women’s organizations (Acker, 1995;
Adamson et al., 1988; Arnold, 1995; DasGupta, 1999; Ferree and Martin, 1995; Maraj
25
Grahame, 1998; Morgen, 1995; Mueller, 1995; Ng, 1996; San Martin and Barnoff, 2004;
Schreader, 1990; Scott, 2004; Shaikh, 1998; Simonds, 1996; Staggenborg, 1995; Todd
and Lundy, 2006; Walker, 1996). This literature calls into question the ability of
women’s organizations to pursue social justice goals while their very viability is
threatened by changing government funding policies. Schreader (1990), for example,
argues that while state funding “co-opts” politicized activities, state funding also “needs
to be recognized as a legitimate gain for women, and evidence of the impact of struggle”
(p. 196; see also Kohli, 1993; Moses, 2001; Ng, 1996; Smith, K., 2011).6
Other studies show that activist efforts of women and women’s movement
organizations are depoliticized by of state support and funding. For example, Gillian
Walker’s institutional ethnographic analysis of reports authored by those within the
battered women’s movement in the 1970s in Ontario, describes how local feminist
community struggles were taken up by the state. Her findings suggest that state funding
within the battered women’s movement ultimately resulted in the marginalization and
delegitimization of women’s voices and initiatives (Walker, 1996). Similarly, Todd and
Lundy (2006) have more recently argued that the issue of violence against women has
become depoliticized, personalized, and largely situated in the criminal justice system,
despite the early success of 1960s and 1970s of feminist organizing. Todd and Lundy
(2006) describe the government’s response as engaging women’s organizations in a
“consult and study” process, while providing minimal funding and choosing to place
emphasis on legislative and policy changes.
6 Moses (2001) coins the term “mutual determination” to express the dynamic relation between social movements and the state in his analysis of Canadian student struggles for student aid and low tuition fees.
26
Indeed, there is growth in the literature which documents how accountability to
state (both governmental and extra-governmental) funding bodies poses challenges to
community, social service and feminist movement organizations in their struggles to
combat inequality based on gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and disability (Agnew,
1996, 1998; Brah, 2001; DasGupta, 1999; Ku, 2003; Nichols, 2008; Maraj Grahame,
1998; San Martin and Barnoff, 2004; Shaikh, 1998; Sudbury, 1998; Transken, 1998;
Todd and Lundy, 2006). For example, Roxana Ng (1998), Kamini Maraj Grahame
(1998), Naomi Nichols (2008) and Kristin Smith (2011) have each described how
people’s everyday work within a variety of non-profit settings (respectively, an
immigrant women’s employment agency, a woman’s organization, civil sector
organizations and social service organizations) are shaped by funding regimes and state
preoccupations (see also DasGupta, 1999; Schreader, 1990; Walker, 1996). Nichols
(2008), in particular, argues that activists’ everyday work, despite their own beliefs and
values, becomes subsumed through relations of accountability to funding bodies (see
also, Rankin and Campbell [2006 ]for a discussion of similar processes in hospitals; and
also, McCoy [1998] and Dehli [2010], for a discussion of accountability practices in post-
secondary education).
Community and service organizations actors have responded to the restructuring
described above in a variety of ways. There is literature that documents how
organizational actors, particularly those on the front lines of service delivery, resist
current bureaucratic and institutional arrangements in organizations through their
political commitments to social justice and antioppression discourses (Baines, 2007,
2007; Barnoff et al., 2006; Barnoff and Coleman, 2007; Bransford, 2006; Smith, K.,
27
2007; see also Carniol, 2005; Ife, 1997, 2000; Mullaly, 2006; Sudbury, 1998). This
literature demonstrates that professional and activist commitments can be actively
mobilized as a response to the restructuring of social service organizations in Canada.
Baines’ edited volume on politicized social work, especially, highlights the everyday
activist actions of social service and social workers committed to antioppressive practice
(Baines, 2007; see also Incite!, 2007). In particular, Kristin Smith’s chapter in the volume
describes the “stealthy” ways in which front-line social workers resist and challenge
restructuring (Smith, K., 2007; see also Smith, K., 2011).
Collectively, these studies provide a context and backdrop for understanding the
socio-economic relations that antiracist feminist activists navigate as part of community
and social service organizations. It is evident from the literature highlighted above that
the proliferation of spaces amenable to the articulation of social justice discourses within
the community and social service organizations sector has been limited, subsumed, and
hindered by government funding policies. Despite such limitations, however, community
and social service organizations offer concrete spaces of struggle against racism, sexism,
and other relations of oppression.
Feminist movement organizations
Feminist and feminist-influenced women’s community and social service organizations
not only face constraints in the broader social and political contexts identified above, but
also face unique, internal challenges and opportunities.7 In many ways, feminist women’s
organizations are unique because of the links to other social movements; the legacy of
7 Not all organizations where research participants worked were explicitly feminist. However, all of the organizations had explicitly feminist missions and/or histories (see Key Terms).
28
politicized feminist struggle has meant that, in many but not all cases, feminist and
feminist-influenced women’s organizations remain open to other social justice struggles
as well. While the link to other social justice movements has proven fruitful for the
feminist women’s organizations, it has also created tensions within and outside the
feminist movement as whole. That is, women’s organizations are contentious and
politicized places in which antiracism can be articulated and heard, but also hotly
contested (see Nadeau, 2005).
Consequently, although there is no consensus on what exactly constitutes a
feminist organization, there is a generally accepted recognition that feminist
organizations tend to work towards democratization more than most mainstream
women’s organizations (Ferree and Martin, 1995). Traditionally, feminist organizing is
predicated on the critique of the hierarchical, masculinist or “malestream” organizations
(see white feminism in key terms) (see also Adamson, Briskin and McPhail, 1988; Ferree
and Martin, 1995). In many feminist organizations the “ideal” is that there is no hierarchy
or formal leadership, all tasks are rotated, decisions are arrived at through consensus, and
small groups are preferred to ensure direct participatory democracy8 and collective
decision making (Agnew, 1996; Simonds, 1996; Morgen, 1995). Despite the pursuit of
such an ideal, hierarchies and factionalism emerge; these hierarchies within women’s
organizations most often reflect the unequal privilege between women based on race,
class, generation, disability and other social relations (Agnew, 1996; Simonds, 1996).
8 Tom Hayden was the main author of the Port Huron Statement (1962) where participatory democracy was first coined. The Port Huron Statement was important as it was the founding document/manifesto of the new left in North America (SDS, 1962).
29
Historically, many feminist organizations have attempted to make decisions
through collective and/or consensus models. Since most of the early consciousness-
raising feminist groups were small and homogenous groups, collective and consensus
models of decision making were easier to coordinate and manage. However, in larger
groups, where there are more differences to account for in terms of experience, goals, and
knowledge, collective decision making is more difficult to achieve, particularly when
addressing issues of diversity and oppression. Because of the difficulties around a
consensus model, for some feminist organizations, there has been an excessive focus on
internal processes to achieve true consensus which interferes with action to end
oppression (Acker, 1995). Some critics of consensus and collective models of decision-
making models have also argued that this focus has not allowed exploration of other
forms of decision making, and has prevented feminists from critiquing the consensus
model. Moreover, this singular focus has helped to generate fear of conflict within the
feminist movement and its organizations (Adamson et al., 1988).
In similar fashion to other organization, feminist organizations also have debates
over organizational structure, direction, and form. Some of the debates includes decisions
about the structural identity of the organization (coalition, multi-issue, or single-issue
organization), the size of organization (most feminist organizations, except for ones like
the National Action Committee on the Status of Women )NAC), are small, despite the
desire to build a mass movement), and whether organization needs to be heterogeneous or
homogeneous (Adamson et al., 1988).
Conflict is common among feminist organizations despite shared social justice
goals (Mueller, 1995; Agnew, 1996; Srivastava, 2002; Adamson et al, 1988,). In addition,
30
tensions have ensued around leadership, as feminist organizations have increased in size
and complexity (Simonds, 1996). Feminist organizations have also suffered from, and
also been propelled by, intergenerational differences and tensions, as well as their
exclusions based on race, sexuality, class, and disability (Simonds, 1996; Whittier, 1997).
These tensions have particularly shown up in debates about how women’s organizations
personify feminist ideals. For example, many women have engaged in internal struggles
in which liberalism and radicalism collided. On the one hand, most women believe in the
structural integrity of the democratic process (voting, writing to elected officials, and so
on). Yet, on the other hand, this belief contrasts with their sense that the “system” simply
does not have women’s best interests at heart. These often conflicting liberal and radical
views are distracting factors within organizations, particularly when issues of
organizational form and values ideology clash (Simonds, 1996). In her study of women’s
health organizations in the U.S., Simonds describes conflicts which ensued around
organizational form (hierarchical vs. collective), decision-making modes
(bureaucratic/autocratic vs. collective, consensus), relative power between workers and
administration (unequal), and oppressive policies and processes (primarily charges of
racism).
Additionally, many feminist organizations—particularly those that are deemed
explicitly pro-choice, politicized, or radical—have been subject to increased scrutiny and
criticism by the public and the state (Gottlieb, 1995; Morgen, 1995; Nadeau, 2005;
Simonds, 1996). For the women engaged in activism, such increased scrutiny and
criticism has resulted in a high level of emotionality, causing personal and organizational
instability, in the forms of high turnover, burnout, and low morale (Srivastava, 2002).
31
Morgen and Simonds, for example, both found that their research participants
experienced intense and often contradictory feelings when working at women’s health
clinics (Morgen, 1995; Simonds, 1996; see also Srivastava, 2002). Both researchers
found that workers often felt intense hope, exhilaration, and personal empowerment
along with feelings of deep pain, stress, and demoralization. Morgen notes that events
such as antifeminist protests, (threat of) violence against feminist organizations, legal
battles (even small ones, such as obtaining clinic licenses), are stress-producing for both
workers and administration of feminist health clinics (Morgen, 1995). In social and health
service organizations, along with increased regulation, there has been an increased
preference for hierarchical organizations (Simonds, 1996). New economic pressures have
led to organizational change, which has meant more hierarchy, bureaucracy, and
decreased political autonomy, in direct conflict with feminist organizational goals
outlined earlier. As a result, these changes have created more internal division and
conflict within feminist organizations (Morgen, 1995).
In essence, due to the political nature of the feminist movement organizations, it
is impossible for many activists to see their work as “just an ordinary job.” External
factors (such as funding contracts, socio-political contexts, changes in regulations for
organizations), combined with internal struggles spawned by the difficulties of
implementing feminist ideology in organizational practice, have been extraordinarily
strenuous for feminist organizations (Simonds, 1996; Transken, 1998). As I discuss
below, it is within the highly politicized and emotional spaces of women’s organizations
that antiracist activists have articulated their struggles.
32
Antiracist thought and antiracist organizational change
Antiracism and antiracist organizational change are an important arsenal in everyday
activist work in addressing racism through and within community and social service
organizations, and in particular within women’s organizations. Antiracism activists
analyze, develop, and implement organizational antiracism initiatives as a way of dealing
with institutionalized racism through highlighting how individuals and groups experience
differential power and degree of representation within organizations (James, 1996).
Processes of change informed by an antiracist approach prioritize the needs of members
of minority groups when attempts are made to rebalance the power within organizational
structures. While people of colour have had long histories of struggle against global
colonialism and racism, antiracism as an explicitly politicized practice and discourse has
been part of the landscape of Canadian race relations since the late 1980s (Dei, 1996).
Most of the Canadian discourse which attempts to understand, explain, and
alleviate racial and cultural inequities has been focussed on "race relations,” "cultural
sensitivity,” "multiculturalism,” "integration" (which to some means assimilation) and
some concepts of "cultural/ethnic pluralism” (Dei, 1996). Multiculturalism and related
policies have been criticized (by antiracist critics) for not alleviating racism or
discrimination despite their ideals of tolerance and equality (Abu-Laban and Stasiulis,
1992). Further, multiculturalism policy has been seen as reifying "otherness" and
contributing to the label of inferiority to "other" (different) "ethnic or racial" backgrounds
(Abu-Laban and Stasiulis, 1992). Several writers claim that multiculturalism
homogenizes differences between and within cultures by only focussing on symbolic
ethnicity (see for example, Nadeau’s [2009] critique of white multiculturalism in feminist
organizations). Multiculturalism is also seen as a tool for masking socio-economic
33
inequities between and within ethnic groups, thereby denying each sub-group political
and economic status (Abu-Laban and Stasiulis, 1992). Other researchers have found that
despite serious shortcomings of multicultural policies in many areas, in fact, it has met
real cultural needs. For example, Abu-Laban and Stasiulis (1992) maintain that despite its
shortcomings, multicultural policies at least make some ideological space for discussion
of racial and ethnic inclusion (see also Nadeau, 2005).
The discourse in Canada, as it has in the United Kingdom, seems to have
‘progressed’ from multiculturalism to antiracism (Dei, 1996). Antiracism is a critical,
political discourse on race, racism, and ongoing racialization of social groups for
differential and unequal treatment. Central to antiracism analyses are power relations in
the form of “colonization, cultural and political imperialism which are juxtaposed to
simplistic notions of racial difference based on skin colour and natural difference” (Dei,
1996, p. 25). Explicitly, with this perspective, issues of race and social difference are
issues of power and equity, rather than simply matters of cultural and ethnic diversity.
Although culture and ethnicity are important factors, these social differences are
constructed to account for differential and racist treatment of groups or individuals in our
society. As such, antiracism moves beyond a narrow preoccupation with individual
prejudices and discriminatory actions to examine the ways that racist ideas are entrenched
and (un)consciously supported in institutional practices (see James, 1996), including
those of women’s organizations.
However, antiracism has been critiqued by antiracist feminists, who caution
against the focus on racism without acknowledging the interrelatedness of different forms
of oppression (Agnew, 1996; Jhappan, 1996; Bannerji, 1995; Ng, 1993). As Jhappan
34
(1996) argues, since patriarchy and capitalism have been constructed on an international
racial hierarchy, neither can be understood without realizing the fact that we are all
implicated in oppressive socio-economic and political relations at global and local levels.
Jhappan notes that in setting up a white/non-white dichotomy where whites are the only
ones who oppress and receive privilege based on race, culture, ethnicity and class is
reductionist.9 The dichotomy denies hundreds of years of human history where non-white
cultures have also been the perpetrators of oppression (Jhappan, 1996). In practice,
antiracism which is essentialist assumes that individuals are personally responsible for
racism and thus, denies the culpability of structures and ideologies in the formation and
maintenance of racism (Jhappan, 1996; Stasiulis, 1990). Additionally, as gender
essentialism homogenized all women and all men, race essentialism denies the diversity
within groups of whites and non-whites (Jhappan, 1996). This is troublesome because it
presumes that there is one voice of colour, and that only individuals who have
experienced oppressions of sexism and racism have unique perspectives on oppression.
Although it is crucial to recognize the similarities among women of colour for
political organizing, in practice, an essentialized antiracism may have negative
repercussions for the women’s movement. Jhappan argues that this presumption has been
used as an excuse for complacent ignorance and reluctance for white men and women to
involve themselves in issues of racialized oppression and privilege (Jhappan, 1996; see
also Ng, 1993). In addition, this perspective limits women from developing
commonalities within the struggle against sexism, as well as racism and classism, and
may also lead to an inert telling of stories instead of moving toward transformative
9 Essentialism is defined as a belief in the true essence of an individual or thing that is irreducible and unchanging.
35
change (Jhappan, 1996). In addition, some writers have noted that, in its practice,
antiracism is like other discourses of culture, race and diversity. Macey (1995), for
example, reflecting on the British antiracist movement, cautions that antiracism is not as
fundamentally different in the actual practices of how this work is conducted in the day-
to-day practices. She too points to the fact that the movement continues to define the
“other” as non-white, instead of looking deeper into the roots of racial oppression, and in
particular, to its links to class oppression.
Despite these critiques, antiracist organizational change has been an important
arsenal in everyday activist work in addressing racism through and within community
and social service organizations. As I show through my research, antiracism was key to
the women’s everyday work as they sought to put into practice their antiracist, feminist,
and social justice beliefs/values. Antiracist organizational change has been resisted in a
number of ways, and, at times, and organizations who have tried to engage with issues of
diversity, racism and other oppressive processes end up only peripherally dealing with
issues of managing diversity in a workforce and for their clientele, and the strategies they
used encouraged conformity at the expense of expression of diversity (Mills and
Simmons, 1995). Despite the resistance in organizations, the activists I worked with also
demonstrated creativity in their engagement.
Some of the creative engagement was a direct response to the blockage of
antiracist initiatives through things such as denial of racism, non-recognition of all
structural barriers, lack of resources, white privilege, classism, racist procedures and
narrow definitions of the organization’s role. Henry et al., 1995) outline various common
forms of resistance against antiracism by organizations:
36
1. Reluctance to create an antiracist vision [particularly a formalized, specific one]
2. Lack of commitment [including such actions as watering down formal studies' findings, vague statements, reactionary timelines to develop policies, using labels such as "managing diversity" and "cultural awareness,” setting of unrealistic goals, appending antiracism to other plans late in process]
3. Inadequate policies [that lack specificity and clarity vis-à-vis goals, objectives and implementation strategies]
4. Inadequate training [for instance, stopping training in "cultural sensitivity,” which may not really address issues of racism]
5. Lack of representation [often even proposed race-conscious measures obtain lots of hostility]
6. Limited access to goods and services [resources and access to power structures such as media]
7. Absence of sanctions [against perpetrators of racism and racial harassment] 8. Lack of individual accountability [for racism or racist acts] 9. Structural rigidity [active maintenance of status quo] 10. Ineffective monitoring and evaluation mechanisms [impossible because
goals and objectives are often vague] 11. Insufficient resources [given to antiracism initiatives] 12. Tokenism [most used resistance strategy by organizations] 13. [Only] Minority change agents [roles limited in power, evoke personal
resistance and suspicion] 14. Lack of organizational accountability [i.e., because of bureaucratization] 15. Limited public accountability [government and community consultations
seen with suspicion because of lack of results] (p. 282).
Antiracist feminist activists within women’s community and social services I interviewed
often met resistance to antiracism in the forms that Henry et al. lists. Many of Henry’s
forms of resistance to antiracism infused the accounts of the women of colour I spoke
with in particular. Even in organizations whose goals were explicitly to reduce racial
oppression, the women often found themselves in situations where their antiracist
initiatives were impeded.
In summary, antiracism activists have developed and tried to implement
organizational antiracism initiatives as a way of dealing with institutionalized racism
(James, 1996; see also Johnson, 1996; Minors, 1996; Tator, 1996). Key values and
37
premises of antiracism on organizational change rest on the belief that "organizations
should change, can change, even wish to change, and sooner or later will be ready for
change" (James, 1996, p. 7). “Racial and ethnic minority group members,” along with
others, can challenge through political action, the status quo and influence change in
order to fully participate in society (James, 1996, p. 7). The impact of antiracist
discourses on the processes of organizational changes is ongoing. As external and
internal systems change and evolve, so do organizations.
Antiracist struggle with and within the feminist movement
Although women of colour have always been involved in feminist movements, it was not
until the 1980s that racialized women began to collectively voice concerns about racism
and exclusion and to take an explicitly antiracist stance (Agnew, 1996). Many authors
argue that feminist movements at the time were inadequate in their fight against racism
due to several factors: a narrow definition of women's issues, racist ideologies, the racist
roots of feminism itself, white women’s reluctance to relinquish power, and feminism’s
stress on the primacy of sexism above all other oppressions (Agnew, 1996; Bannerji,
1995; Hill Collins, 2001; hooks, 1984; Jhappan, 1996; Leah, 1991; Nadeau, 2005, 2009;
Razack, 1998; Spelman, 1988; Srivastava, 2002; Williams, 1991).
Despite feminist protest against the exclusion of a female perspective in modern
philosophical thought and masculinist notions of the “essential human,” essentialism has
plagued feminist thought. Feminist theories and practices have been dominated by the
stereotypical perspective of the “essentially” white, heterosexual, able-bodied, urban
dwelling, middle-class, university-educated woman (Agnew, 1996; Jhappan, 1996; see
also Spelman, 1988). This pseudo-universality of woman apparent in feminist literature
38
assumes a decontextualized relationship with other social relations, where women of
colour have been rendered invisible as a result. If non-white women are noticed, they are
given an interpreted status by those in control of discourse (namely, by white women and
men). By focussing only on white women's interests as universal interests, the feminist
movement has been able to gain and keep leadership in the hands of white, middle-class
women (Bannerji, 1995). Bannerji suggests that white feminism can never be free of
racism because of its racist roots. She writes that in order to rid white feminism of racism
we need to deconstruct imperialist ideologies, institutions and economics, including every
mundane aspect of social life (Bannerji, 1995).
By isolating gender from all other social relations, feminist essentialism created a
myth of an abstracted woman. White feminists gave primacy to sexism over racism in
their theories, ideologies, and practices and through this, maintained white supremacy.
Classical feminist analyses of oppression often focussed on gender in isolation from race
and class without any explanation of why gender was always more significant than
ethnicity, race or class (Agnew, 1996). Racialized women were further marginalized by
the so-called antioppressive theories because of the lack of gender distinction in race
analysis and racial distinction in gender analysis (Agnew, 1996). Similarly, a lack of
gender and race analyses in class analysis existed historically. In her documentation of
union struggles against racism, classism and sexism, Leah (1991, p. 166) shows how
these struggles were compartmentalized so that women of colour's issues around sexism
and racism were isolated and not adequately addressed. According to Bannerji (1995), if
Canadian women of colour were to develop their own theories around oppression, they
would show that the organization of racism would be a way of forming class relations.
39
And moreover, the class formation that would emerge would be fully gendered. The
women of colour I spoke to indicated that they were already taking up and, in fact,
embodying Bannerji’s projected future through their activism in feminist organizations.
According to antiracist feminists, women of colour have not participated in, or
benefitted, from white feminism because of the unquestioned racism due to the primacy
of gender within this movement. Women of colour continue to point out the flaws in, and
struggle against, the assumption that women are equally oppressed. They denounce the
utopian myths of “sisterhood” and, as a result, the women's movement has become more
reflexive on issues of race, class and gender and the links among these (Agnew, 1996;
Srivastava, 2002). Women’s movement activists increasingly acknowledge the integrated
nature of women's multiple oppressions and show a desire to develop antiracism (Agnew,
1996). Antiracist feminists, therefore, have created some space within the women’s
movement to struggle for antiracist change. These debates highlight some of the tensions
that need to be navigated by antiracist feminists.
One particular response to the critique of essentialism within the mainstream
feminist movement has been to emphasize diversity, particularity and self-representation
or the “politics of difference” (Bannerji, 1995, p. 70). However, different experiences of
women have generated different identities and, unfortunately, hindered women from
understanding one another (Agnew, 1996, p. 62). Further, women of colour have been
fearful that sympathetic white women may speak on their behalf, thereby suppressing
their voices again (Agnew, 1996). In this sense, ‘difference’ has actually become another
way of establishing otherness and ascribing “white, middle-class” identity as the norm.
This politics of difference debate has had the positive effect of recognizing different
40
kinds of oppression, but has also led to fragmentation of communities and an over-
emphasis on identity politics (Agnew, 1996). Bannerji (1995) adds that the politics of
difference also invented multiple political personalities within one subject which has had
the adverse effect of depoliticizing race issues in feminism.
Antiracist activism in women’s organizations
When feminists of colour attempt to address exclusions based on race within women’s
organizations, their efforts are often contentious. On the one hand, feminists suppose that
women have common oppression and that we must come together as “sisters” in order to
combat heteropatriarchy. On the other hand, women realize that in coming together, there
are critical differences among us based on our personal experiences, political convictions,
and our “lived histories” (see Downe, 2006). Andrea Smith (2006) sees these differences
resulting from histories of colonialism, slavery and Orientalism. In spite of the fact that
struggle and transformation are the goals of feminist activism, several authors argue
further that women in feminist organizations tend to shy away from conflict and change
(Acker, 1995; Adamson et al., 1988; Arnold, 1995). These contradictions have led to
critiques by racialized feminists who highlight the (inequitable) power structures of
feminist organizations based on race and class privilege (Adamson et al., 1988).
Most organizational conflicts, such as who will lead and how decisions will be
made, are exacerbated in the context of antiracist organizational change. Some of the
challenges of addressing racism within organizations stem from decision-making
practices and organizational forms unique to feminist organizations. For example, many
feminist organizations are built on personal and community networks. Since community
and personal networks rarely exist between people of disparate social locations, diverse
41
feminist organizing remains difficult for feminist organizations (Acker, 1996,). This is
particularly the case when women from communities where there is little race or class
diversity—such as wealthy neighbourhoods or certain socially homogenous areas—come
into contact with women who live and work in socially diverse communities. Often, as
Agnew (1996) argues, the relatively classed and racialized homogeneity of some
women’s informal collectives has meant that racialized women have either found it
difficult to become part of informal networks, or become tokenized within such groups
(Agnew, 1996). Furthermore, the lack of well-defined procedures in feminist networks
and organizations disadvantages those outside of informal networks (Agnew, 1996). At
times, feminist commitment to equal distribution of power has led to a refusal to critically
analyze how power is exercised within these organizations: power and leadership shift
from individuals to factions within the organization.
There are several studies which describe the process of antiracist feminist change
within different types of women’s organizations, namely, coalition groups such as NAC
(Gottlieb, 1993; Nadeau, 2005, 2009), women’s health clinics (Morgen, 1995; Simonds,
1996), violence against women organizations and shelters (Agnew, 1998; Kohli, 1993;
San Martin and Barnoff, 2004; Scott, 2000), women’s centres and advocacy groups
(Maraj Grahame, 1998, 2000; Transken, 1998), as well as multi-site studies of antiracist
feminist organizing (Agnew, 1996; Srivastava, 2002, 2005; Sudbury, 1998). These
studies offer insight into the successes of antiracist organizing within women’s
organizations and also some of the challenges faced by organizations and organizational
actors.
42
Despite stated desires to become antiracist, some feminist organizational practices
are characterized by "everyday, common-sense racism" such as claiming to speak on
behalf of all women, asking racialized women to participate in “our” [read: white]
organizations and (un)intentionally assuming leadership roles in women’s organizations
(Agnew, 1996; Nadeau, 2005). In particular, conflicts around antiracism ensue because of
the discrepancy between what some white feminists say or do, and the ways in which
their words are understood and experienced by racialized women (Agnew, 1996; see also
Nadeau, 2005, 2009; San Martin, 2004; Srivastava, 2005). White, middle-class feminists
have been accused of using white privilege to identify problems and propose solutions in
ways which privilege the white, middle-class women (Agnew, 1996; San Martin and
Barnoff, 2004; Srivastava, 2005). Although more subtle, even the labels by which
feminists (white and non-white) refer to racial differences among women take the
dominant group as a point of reference and this reflects the ethnocentrism of the West
(Stasiulis, 1990). For instance, the label of “women of colour” denotes the fact that white
women do not have a skin colour and yet women of diverse racial backgrounds continue
to use it.
Attempts to include or organize women of colour in women’s organizations are
often difficult because racism is so embedded, subtle and difficult to detect (Agnew,
1996, 1998; Maraj Grahame, 1998; Nadeau, 2009; Morgen, 1995; Simonds, 1996;
Sudbury, 1998). As Nadeau notes through her analysis of the antiracism work of the
National Action Committee on the Status of Women, “white multiculturalist normativity
is ... a subtle exclusionary practice which is pervasive... [and] difficult to detect and even
harder to unsettle” (Nadeau, 2009, p. 8; see also San Martin, 2004). Furthermore, Maraj
43
Grahame (1998) observes in her institutional ethnography of a U.S. mainstream
organization’s attempts to include women of colour, that assumptions made about
immigrant women as “unorganized” was determined by widely-held misperceptions
about racialized women. Specifically, Maraj Grahame found that there was a mismatch
between what the organization considered “organized” and the actual realities of women
of colour. She also notes that the issue for women of colour was not that they were absent
in the white women’s movement, but that white women were uninvolved in the issues of
women of colour. Maraj Grahame further argues that many of the organization’s workers
held the “ideological” belief that “Asian” women of colour for example, were
unorganized, lacked leadership skills, and faced barriers to participation. These constructs
were based on extralocal determinants such as academic and popular discourse, public
policy and activist perceptions of the funders’ priorities.
At times, then, feminist organizations become embroiled in controversy either
from factionalism or from the distrust that emerges as women from different racialized
and classed backgrounds work together to challenge entrenched oppression. Although
feminist organizations may want to address racism, the activism that arises occurs in a
context of relative recent personal and painful conflicts over race and class issues
(Gottlieb, 1993; Kohli, 1993; Morgen, 1995; Nadeau, 2005; Simonds, 1996; Srivastava,
2002; Transken, 1998). Gottlieb, for example, argues that the NAC erupted in conflict
when it attempted to diversify. Such attempts included women of colour caucuses with
direct access to the executive’s decision-making process; public education and taking
antistate stands on important issues for women of colour and Aboriginal women; and
internal evaluation of organizational structures (Gottlieb, 1993). While antiracist
44
feminists saw gains within NAC, the antiracist process had a cost. As white,
heterosexual, middle-class women were asked to give up their privileged leadership roles,
hostilities ensued. Furthermore, NAC’s antiracist and antiheterosexist activism directed
against the federal government resulted in subsequent state funding cuts (Gottlieb, 1993).
As a result of the complexity identified about, women of colour activists choose
to engage with women’s organizations and, at other times, disengage. To that end,
women of colour choose to articulate their political concerns through a variety of ways:
within pre-existing or new coalition groups (Agnew, 1996; Gottlieb, 1993; Nadeau, 2005,
2009; Srivastava, 2002; Sudbury, 1998); within autonomous antiracist feminist
organizations; or within ethno-specific, racialized, or immigrant organizations (Agnew,
1996, 1998; Bobb-Smith, 1998; Ku, 2003; Sudbury, 1998; Transken, 1998). Ku (2003)
notes that immigrant women make choices to work within feminist or immigrant sector
organizations depending on their experiences of racism and sexism. She also shows how
these choices are not fixed; for instance, some women work in both white feminist
organizations and immigrant sector organizations (see also Sudbury, 1998; Bobb-Smith,
1998).
As it may be, antiracist feminist activists may find support for their politics in
coalitions, but this is often difficult. Feminist coalitions are difficult to achieve even
without the added pressures encountered when racial and ethnic diversity are introduced.
When feminist coalitions do exist, the inclusion of different politics (for example, liberal
and radical feminists), means that the different organizational cultures that arise hinder
concrete goals. Small issues become major issues because of arguments about symbolic
representation of the group's identity and ideologies. Coalitions and umbrella groups
45
often have difficulty in establishing a common identity for collective action. It is ironic
that in attempts to establish a common identify and a common front, the exact opposite
results: fragmentation and decreased unity (see Arnold, 1996).
Agnew warns that coalitions need to be developed through the inclusion of
different perspectives. But the goal of a coalition cannot be based solely on integration
and inclusion, as this does not focus attention on the different social and political contexts
in which feminist theories and struggles are conceived and enacted. A coalition program
overly focused on integration and inclusion leads to tokenism, race bias in processes and
ultimately discord over issues such as leadership and distribution of power. Agnew
(1996) believes that coalitions often wrongly impose a common identity upon women
whose boundaries are determined by the dominant group – and this is a main source of
conflict. Srivastava (2002) suggests that nevertheless, coalitions may indeed be an answer
to addressing racism in the feminist movement. The antiracist process is inherently
fraught with difficulties over antiracist organizational change within white feminist
organizations, so we cannot expect any coalition to have complete harmony and unity in
all areas.
Furthermore, as studies that document autonomous antiracist feminist organizing
indicate, there is development of a more nuanced understanding of antiracist feminist
activism such as the relationship between biography and activism. Sudbury (1998) for
example documents the struggles of autonomous feminist black women’s organizations
in the United Kingdom.10 She argues that women’s activist work needs to be seen within
different arenas of their lives, such as their relationships with white feminism (and with
10 See discussion about black feminism within the definition of antiracist feminism in “Key Terms.”
46
women’s organizations), black communities and men, the state, mainstream political
debates, and international movements. Similarly, Bobb-Smith (1998) documents how an
alternative women’s movement was formed in Canada to reproduce a Caribbean brand of
feminism with a strong antiracist thrust. Such scholarship admits to the frailty and
complexity of negotiating the integration of an antiracist framework within feminist
organizations.
Antiracist feminism within autonomous feminist organizations and ethno-specific
organizations is not without its troubles. Ng’s (1998) study of an immigrant women’s
employment agency offers an empirical example of how relations of ruling direct
activists work within autonomous organizations. She describes how the category of
‘immigrant women’ was produced and reproduced by the labour of the workers. Ng
discusses shows that the struggles of the agency worked both to accommodate the
demands of the ruling regime and, at the same time, resist them. In addition, in her
analysis of an autonomous antiracist feminist organization in Northern Ontario, Transken
(1998) argues that the activism of the organizations was hindered by two things: the
political agendas of funders and outsiders and by the organization’s core activists who
lost their sense of vision and solidarity during the course of the organization’s life. She
advocates that antiracist feminists invest more time and energy exploring meaning-
making, meaning-sharing, trust and faith in a long-term vision (see also Scott, 2000).
In other words, while feminist organizations are important sites of struggle for
antiracist change, they are also contradictory spaces in which antiracist feminist action is
both supported and limited. In spite of the challenges of antiracist struggle within the
feminist movement generally highlighted so far, and within women’s organizations
47
specifically, it would be inaccurate and politically paralyzing to presume that antiracist
organizing has not mattered within the women’s movement. Almost all of the studies of
antiracist struggle within women’s movements describe how racialized women have
succeeded in challenging the status quo of race relations in both small and large feminist
organizations. Women of colour exercise power in a myriad of ways to name oppressions
and to define the conditions of their participation in feminist struggles dominated by
white women (Agnew, 1996; Nadeau, 2009; San Martin and Barnoff, 2004; Srivastava,
2002, 2005). As I discuss in the next section, women of colour’s successes and
commitments to shift the power within women’s movements and organizations cannot be
understood without considering the relationships and connections among politicized and
racialized identities, subjectivities and experiences.
Personalizing the political and politicizing the personal
The literature that addresses how the personal is politicized and the political is
personalized in the context of activism adds to our ability to critically analyze activist
work. The literature points to the fact that, as individuals, we act because our sense of self
is implicated in political action and the fact that our political actions affect us in profound
ways. As Siegel (2002) notes, since the late 1960s, the slogan “the personal is political”
has changed the way we “think about the relationship between public and private life” (p.
2). So it is not surprising to find that feminists developed theories and practices focussing
on the implications of the personal to the political, and the political to the personal
(Hanisch, 1969/2006; Lee, 2007; Siegel, 2002). As the literature shows, everyday
antiracist feminist activism within women’s organizations cannot be understood without
unpacking the links among politicized action, women’s subjectivities and emotion (see
48
for example, Bannerji, 1995; Brah, 1996; Kohli, 1993; Morgen, 1995; Ng, 1998;
Simonds, 1996; Smith, K., 2011; Srivastava, 2002; Sudbury, 1998; Wing, 1997), multiple
identities (see for example, Alexander and Mohanty, 2001; Brah, 1996; Ku, 2003;
Sudbury, 1998; Transken, 1998) and personal relationships (see for example, Alexander
and Mohanty, 2001; Hill Collins, 2000; Narayan, 1997; Sudbury, 1998; Transken, 1998).
While the first commentaries on “the personal is political” such as those by
Hanisch (1969 /2006), signified specifically that women’s personal troubles had political
dimensions, feminist theorists have since taken up the slogan in a myriad of ways, while
stressing the interrelatedness of the political and the personal nonetheless (see also Lee,
2007). Antiracist feminist theorists argue that activism and how it is experienced, is not
separate from social relations. Essed (1996) notes: “For women, everyday life can be a
site of political struggle. The kitchen, living room, or doorway of a school becomes a
political space where women ... exchange family stories, as well as consult with each
other about the future of the children in school” (p. 97). This is no different for women
who engage in political struggle with and within women’s and antiracist movements.
Similarly, in the context of black British feminism, Sudbury (1998) notes that
activism is at once personal and political and needs to be conceptualized in six
multidimensional arenas: individual, family, community, the local, national and
international. Sudbury states: “These arenas can be divided into those that are internal to
the black communities: the individual, the family, the community and those which
engage with mainstream power structures: the local, the national and the international”
(p. 60). Sudbury further insists that social change work must include not only collective-
based organizing but also development of personal empowerment. Her definition of
49
personal empowerment includes self-confidence, personal education and economic
development. Sudbury notes further: “An alternative understanding of the need for
personal growth and confidence building is that many black women need a space in
which they can distance themselves from the onslaught of derogatory and hostile
representations and experiences which are a commonplace within British society...” (p.
61; see also Alexander and Mohanty, 2001). In arguing for a more comprehensive
understanding of personal growth, Sudbury and others highlight the salience of paying
attention to the interrelatedness of different aspects of politicized action or the political.
The literature on social movements also provides insight into the significance of
the relationship between the personal and the political. There are three overlapping
strands in this literature that show how the political becomes personal and the personal
becomes politicized. The first strand of literature shows the ways in which women’s
subjectivities and emotions are linked to politicized action (Bannerji, 1995; Kohli, 1993;
Morgen, 1995; Ng, 1998; Simonds, 1996; Srivastava, 2002; Sudbury, 1998; Wing, 1997).
The second strand of literature describes how identity is linked to politicized action
(Alexander and Mohanty, 2001; Blackford, 1998; Bobb-Smith, 1998; Brah, 1996, 2001;
Downton and Wehr, 1998; Glass, 2009; Hill Collins, 2000; Ku, 2003; McComiskey,
2002; Melucci, 2003; Mohanty, 1998; Narayan, 1997; Sudbury, 1998; Whittier, 1997).
This literature describes how a person’s identity and personal biography affects her/his
activism, on the one hand, and the ways a person’s involvement in a social movement
shapes her/his identity on the other hand. A third strand in the interrelated literature
explores ways political action is linked with women’s relationships, most notably, with
mothering/parenting (Abbey and O’Reilly, 1998; Bobb-Smith, 1998; Childers, 1998;
50
Fox, 1998; Hill Collins, 2000; Jenkins, 1998; Jetter, Orleck and Taylor, 1997;
McComiskey, 2002; Narayan, 1997; Smith, K., 2011; Sudbury, 1998; Yeoman, 1998).
Brah (1996), for example, describes the interrelatedness of identity, subjectivity,
social relations and experience. She suggests that ‘subjectivity’ is the site at which we
make sense of our world. Identities, on the other hand, “are inscribed through experiences
culturally constructed in social relations” and that they are not unitary or fixed (p. 123).
In other words, subjectivity includes the ways that we react or feel about the world,
whereas identity is where we see ourselves as part of a collectivity. Since identity and
subjectivity are inscribed through experiences, a focus on activists’ everyday activities
allows us to uncover and understand the ways in which politicized and social identities
and subjectivities intersect. Brah’s analysis, therefore, provides a basis from which to
understand the literature which examines the effects of activism on activists’ emotions,
identities and relationships.
Moreover, antiracist feminist theorists such as Bannerji (1995), Ng (1998) and
Wing (1997) describe how social change work in different settings has psychic effects, or
effects on one’s well-being, beyond the immediate workplace; social change work places
a big toll on activists’ personal lives. Activist work is both personally liberating and
personally draining and morale-lowering at the same time. Drawing from Frantz Fanon’s
proposition that decolonization is a violent process, Bannerji (2005) describes her own
experiences and personal costs of being an academic teaching antiracism and resisting
oppression. She notes:
And yet I chose to do this violence to myself. Because I choose to de-colonize, to teach antiracism ... it distorts me or us. Because anger against the daily ordinary violence and anger of racism distorts us ... So, yes I disassociate. The mediation of my anger cuts me into two. But here in my
51
actual, immediate work of teaching, I am not silent. At least not that (pp. 105-6).
Ng also alludes to the costs of the embodied experience of teaching and learning critical
education: “As we engage in critical education, this dynamism is what excites us at the
same time that it makes us sick when we go against the grain” (1998, p. 2). Wing (1997)
similarly discusses the costs of racism and resisting it as “spirit murder.” While these
writers have discussed the psychic effects of antiracism within teaching, it has
implications for understanding antiracism within a variety of settings; specifically, these
authors direct us to contextualize the ways in which politicized action can be deeply
intimate, with far-reaching psychic and embodied repercussions.
Several authors also describe emotional processes within women’s organizations
when they work towards an antiracist politics, and these studies describe some of the
personal costs to white and racialized activists (Morgen, 1995; Simonds, 1996;
Srivastava, 2002). This is not surprising, given the emphasis of feminist politics on the
notion of “personal is political.” For example, Simonds (1996) and Morgen (1995)
describe in detail, antiracist processes within women’s health clinics in the United States.
Both researchers document the high emotional tenor, conflict, and racism of the staff and
administration in the different clinics they studied. Morgen (1995) suggests that for
relatively privileged women, antiracism meant pain, shame, anger and defensiveness as
they were forced to recognize their complicity with dominant social relations of power
(see also Fellows and Razack, 1998).
While explicitly politicized antiracist organizational change is emotionally
charged for white women grappling with issues of power and privilege, women of colour
often find themselves bearing a disproportionate emotional burden for antiracism. The
52
original idea of the personal is political did not take into account that race and class
influence how power is shared within organizations (Agnew, 1996), or how the
differential effects of racism and antiracism have an adverse impact on racialized women
(Kohli, 1993; Srivastava, 2002). Kohli (1993), for example, describes shelter workers’
racist, anti-Semitic, classist, and homophobic treatment and disempowerment in
contradiction to the discourse of empowerment of women within women’s shelters. She
describes shelter workers’ experience of being abused, dismissed, and silenced, and
argues that this is the price that is paid by people of colour who refuse to be tokenized or
exoticized by contradictions of the ideology of feminism and of feminist collectives.
Similarly, Srivastava (2002) argues that the organizational processes of managing
emotion, based on the feminist principle of the personal is political, is cause for
“emotional strain” for antiracist activists. By analyzing the antiracist “moment of
confrontation” in organizations, Srivastava describes how the emotional expressions of
white and non-white women are organized by racialized and gendered processes.
Further related to subjectivity and emotion, the relationship between identity and
politicized action and understanding women’s antiracist feminist organizations is the
attempt to make sense of why and how people enter and participate (or leave) particular
social movements (see Becker, 1960; Glass, 2009; Downton and Wehr, 1998; Hunt and
Benford, 2004; Kanter, 1968; Martin, 2009; Melucci, 2003). A key aspect of the social
movement literature on activism and identity is the notion of collective identity and its
role in sustaining social movements. In their review of social movement literature, Hunt
and Benford (2004) identify collective identity as a precursor and product, essential to
53
collective action for movements.11 Other authors such as Maddison (2004), Glass (2009),
and Melucci (2003) put forth a position I share: they propose that collective (and for that
matter, individual) identity be seen more as a process rather than a thing to be studied.
Melucci (2003) argues, for example, for an actor-centred analysis of social movements in
which collective identity needs to be understood as a process, through which a unified
actor is created, simultaneously creating a social movement (see also Maddison, 2004).
Glass (2009), taking up Melucci’s actor-centred idea of collective identity as process,
argues that individual or collective identity is not possessed by people, but is the actions
that people take, which she calls “identity work” (see also Reger, 2004; Barry, 2007;
Downton and Wehr, 1998).
While much of the literature on collective identity and its role in influencing
participation in social movements focuses on the production of sameness, antiracist
feminist theorists focus on the paradox of the sameness of difference. In her essay on
“difference,” Brah unpacks another aspect of collective identity relevant to antiracist
feminist organizing, namely identification with “difference” as part of one’s identity. In
linking this to politicized mobilization, Brah (2001) argues that:
political mobilization is centrally about attempts to re-inscribe subjectivity through appeals to collective experience. Paradoxically, the commonality that is evoked can be rendered meaningful only in articulation with a discourse of difference (p. 474).
11 Current definitions of collective identity are traceable to Karl Marx’s belief about how widespread working-class consciousness of ruling class exploitation was essential for collective revolutionary action. In order to move towards a collective action, a collectivity must be formed that has common goals, values and identification. Furthermore, mutuality and solidarity must be evident within the collectivity. Social psychologists have defined collective identity as being a product of interaction and sociocultural structures (Hunt and Benford, 2004).
54
Like Melucci (2003), Brah (2001) understands identity as a process, and suggests that it
is more appropriate to speak of identity as discourse, meanings and memories that can
form the basis of identification within a given context. She describes the complexity of
the links between personal biography and collective history, and argues that collective
identities partially (and often strategically) erase the multiplicities of others within the
same subject.
Like other social movement literature which highlight the ways in which personal
biography and entry into social movements are linked (see Blackford,1998; Gardner,
2003; McComiskey, 2002; Todd, 2002; and Whittier, 1997), antiracist feminist activists
also theorize the ways early family experience and collective history affects politicized
identity (see for example, Alexander and Mohanty, 2001; Bobb-Smith, 1998; Brah, 1996,
2001; Downe, 1996; Hill Collins, 2000; Ku, 2003; Mohanty, 1998; Narayan, 1997;
Sudbury, 1998). Ku (2003), for example, traces the pathways to activism of women of
colour in the immigrant services sector and argues that early experience in the family and
community were entry points into activism (see also Narayan, 1997). Bobb-Smith (1998)
affirms the same point in historicizing a Caribbean brand of feminism in Canada and
argues that “home” and “community” learning based on a shared collective history is the
key way of learning resistance and feminist independence for these particular women of
colour (see also Mohanty, 1998 and Narayan, 1997). Following suit, the analysis of the
links between politicized action and personal relationships within communities and
families also forms the backdrop of this dissertation.
As I have noted already, activism cannot be seen as separable or detachable from
women’s everyday lives. Women bring their activism to their personal relationships and
55
their personal relationships affect their activism. For example, feminist theorizing on
mothering/parenting (Abbey and O’Reilly, 1998; Chandler, 1998; Childers, 1998; Fox,
1998; Jetter, Orleck and Taylor, 1997; McComiskey, 2002; Yeoman, 1998) and Black
and antiracist feminist theorizing on community and other-mothering (Bobb-Smith, 1998;
Hill Collins, 2000; Jenkins, 1998; James, S., 1993; Narayan, 1997; Sudbury, 1998) help
us to understand motherhood as a site on which feminist activism occurs. In particular,
the literature on community and other-mothering highlights the fluid boundaries between
feminist and antiracist activist subjectivities and their link to family and community (for
example, see James, S., 1993; Jenkins, 1998).
Such analyses point out how, for example, relationships with parents, family and
community may also limit politicized action even while it encourages it as noted above.
Transnational, Third World, and antiracist feminists discuss the ways in which feminist
and other forms of politicized action are sanctioned from within their own families,
communities and nations. Alexander and Mohanty (2001) write:
Women’s bodies are disciplined in different ways: within discourses of profit maximization, as global workers and sexual laborers; within religious fundamentalisms, as repositories of sin and transgression; within specifically nationalist discourses, as guardians of culture and respectability or criminalized as prostitutes and lesbians; and within state discourses of the originary nuclear family, as wives and mothers (p. 501).
Since women are considered responsible for the well-being of family and often seen to be
the site of the preservation of tradition and culture, women’s articulations of resistance
are seen as threatening and sanctioned. Women are sanctioned in many ways: through
(threat of) violence, silencing, othering, isolation, ostracism, sexualization, as well as
through dehistoricizing, dismissing and minimizing of the historicity of women’s
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activism (Alexander and Mohanty, 2001; Anzaldúa, 2003; Dutt, 1998; Hussain, 1994;
Jeffery and Basu, 1998; Mohanty, 1998; Narayan, 1997; Shaheed, 1998).
Narayan (1997) argues that Third World feminists should not internalize these
sanctions and see themselves as outside of their own culture. Ostracizing and minimizing
has meant that they have struggled with being defined outside of their communities, and
thus seen (by others and themselves) as inauthentic. The issue of belonging, ostracism
and cultural authenticity, Ku notes, are particularly thorny for immigrant activists in
diasporic communities because it means a loss of credibility in terms of organizational
roles as an activist speaking for “the community.” She argues that activists within the
immigrant sector who claim to be speaking on behalf of the community must claim
insider status or risk being marginalized (Ku, 2003). Thus, for feminist activists from
racialized, immigrant, and diasporic communities, belonging and authenticity are always
being negotiated. Furthermore, she argues that understanding immigrant women’s
activism requires that we acknowledge and unpack the competing identities within their
roles as activists.
However, as Sudbury (1998) notes, it is precisely some women’s experience of
being “an outsider” that frees women to think and act in more critical ways (see also
Blackford, 1998). 12 Sudbury argues further that women who are somehow displaced
from their communities are often those who are the strongest advocates against sexism, as
their displacement in effect liberates them from their communities. For example, she
notes that women who were brought up outside of established black communities and
12 Based on her study of girls’ socialization in families where one parent was disabled or chronically ill, Blackford suggests that those families which were affected by life transitions, such as immigration, illness, or divorce, are those that offer opportunities for their daughters to think more freely and act in different directions (Blackford, 1998).
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were the only black child in their school, women who were taken into the care system or
brought up by white foster or adoptive parents, women who had come out as lesbians and
women who had defied cultural expectations by dating ‘outside,’ had all experienced
social ostracism and become emotionally strong in the face of rejection. In this sense,
Sudbury echoes Ku’s observation that attention needs to be paid to the effects of
competing identities of activist women of colour precisely their experiences are
influenced by a multiplicity of factors, including those of community and belonging that
might not affect mainstream, white activist women in the same way.
In summary, the preceding literature review has provided a synopsis of the
scholarship that directly informs my study of women of colour working in or doing
antiracist feminist activism. I have reviewed the interconnected literature that not only
contextualizes this study vis-à-vis the academic literature, but also provides an overview
of the social relations through which women of colour navigate their antiracist feminist
work. I started with a description of tensions in Canadian non-profit and voluntary
organizations and concluded by reviewing the literature on the relationship between
activism (as the political) and the personal.
Given the complexity of contexts in which antiracist feminists act, as I have
described in the literature review above, no wonder that antiracist organizing remains a
struggle. Unlike the common charges made against and within activist circles that we
have to do more or that politicized action makes little change, it is clear from the
literature that everyday activism makes a difference. In particular, everyday antiracist
feminist activism through and within women’s organizations has had a profound impact
on, and within, the non-profit sector organizations, feminist, antiracist, and other social
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justice movements, women’s organizations, and racialized communities and
organizations, as well as within women’s lives and families.
Therefore, by broadening our understanding of activism as a process of struggle
rather than simply an identity or acts, we are encouraged to stop and systematically
reflect on the gains that are continuously made within all intersecting arenas of public and
private spheres of activism. While, as activists, we need to continue being critical of the
ways in which those gains of ending oppressive social relations in organizations are
eroded, appropriated, dismissed, captured, and stalled within current restructuring of
funding and accountability regimes, we also need to shift our gaze towards evaluating the
quality of our everyday struggle. As the literature analysis above has shown, it is the
struggle towards antiracist, feminist, and antioppressive politicized actions, not the
simple arithmetic of gains and losses, which is the source of activist power.
For those of us engaged as antiracist feminist activists, the insights of the
literature provide us a number of opportunities for activist reflection. First, antiracist
feminist activism must be understood in relation to the concrete ways in which social
service and community organizations are funded by, and thus made accountable to, the
state. Activist work is constrained and limited by funding and accountability regimes.
Activists need to pay attention to the literature that warns of the ways activist ideals can
be subsumed and reconstituted within dominant economic frameworks. The message is
clear: We must reflect on these processes and be attentive to how they affect us. This
applies also to the ways the state reconstitutes social justice ideals, as well as to the ways
racist relations subordinate women of colour.
59
Second, we should also remember that in spite of dominating frames that shape
our struggles, the successes of the antiracist and feminist struggle are also made extant in
the literature. The single most obvious sign of success is the fact that antiracist feminist
activism is ongoing and alive, despite the history of essentialism and racism within
women’s organizations. This is in part due to the history of the women’s movement
critique and the self-conscious attempts to redress power inequities within organizations,
as I have noted already. Sustained collective politicized action of antiracist feminists is
the key to uncovering and fighting racism within women’s organizations. In particular,
the literature reminds us of the importance of being attentive to uncovering social
organization of activism through attending to the actual everyday activities work of
activists and how these both sustain and limit politicized action.
Organization of Dissertation
The purpose of this study is to examine the social organization of antiracist feminist
activism within women’s organizations. Drawing from the research participants’ accounts
of their everyday work and lives, I explore how women of colour negotiate their
commitments to antiracist feminism within existing social relations (both formal and
informal) of women’s organizations. This dissertation is organized in four main parts: a)
the conceptual framework of the study, including an outline of the study’s goals, key
terms, scholarly and activist literature, ontological underpinnings, and the method of
inquiry (chapters one and two); b) the definition of the problematic of the study from the
standpoint of women of colour activists, namely, the disconnection between antiracist
feminist commitments and practice (chapters three and four); c) an exploration of the
social organization of everyday antiracist feminist activism through an examination of
60
dialectic relations of accountability (chapters five, six and seven); and d) a discussion of
the implications of conceptualizing everyday antiracist feminist activism as a negotiation
of relations of accountability (chapter eight).
In my first chapter, I situated myself and my research questions within academic
and theoretical debates through my definitions of key terms and literature review. This
chapter provided an orientation to the study, through an overview of the layered contexts
within which antiracist feminist organizational change efforts are enacted.
In chapter two, I outline the method of inquiry of this research, beginning with a
discussion of its ontological and epistemological underpinnings. I explain the method of
inquiry, namely institutional ethnography, and my research process, and introduce the
research participants. Finally, I discuss some ethical and epistemological contributions
and limitations of this research process.
In chapters three and four, I map out what constitutes the problematic of this
study. That is, I describe moments of disconnection (or “disconnect” as I often call it)
between the ideals of antiracist feminism and the practice within women’s organizations,
despite women’s obvious social justice commitments and the success of the antiracism
movement within women’s organizations and movements. In chapter three, I focus on the
participant’s experiences of the everyday work of putting into practice their
commitments. In chapter four drawing on the activists’ accounts of their everyday work, I
show how antiracist feminism is simultaneously supported and limited by the
organizations in which the women worked.
More specifically, in chapter three, I describe the richness of women’s
commitments to antiracism, feminism, and social justice and show that these
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commitments are more than abstract commitments to social justice, antiracist and
feminist activism; they are commitments to activist practice. I show how women of
colour’s commitments to antiracist feminist social change are active and must be
understood as social, rather than simply personal. I further argue that women of colour
make personal these commitments by negotiating antiracist feminism within different
facets of their lives. By describing women’s everyday work of politicizing the personal, I
show how women of colour brought antiracist feminism to their definitions of self, their
decision making and their daily activities. Chapter three also includes examples of the
negotiation of antiracist feminist activist commitments as personal within women’s
everyday activities. This chapter maps the ways in which women’s commitments are
actively brought and negotiated within all facets of women’s lives, including women’s
organizations.
In chapter four, I discuss the context within which this study primarily took place
and describe more specifically the ways in which women of colour’s commitments to
antiracism and feminism were often received in women’s organization. Building on the
notion of negotiation, I describe the institutional processes within women’s organizations
through which women of colour navigate. I argue that women’s organizations are
contradictory spaces in which women of colour negotiate their commitments to antiracist
feminism; that is, women’s organizations are sites from which antiracist practice is both
supported and also limited. On the one hand, I describe how antiracist feminist activists
continued to draw on the successes of antiracist feminist activism of the 1980s and 1990s;
on the other hand, the women’s accounts show that there continues to be a disconnect
62
between feminist movement organizations’ stated desire to put into practice feminist and
antiracist ideals and the actual practice itself.
Significantly, chapter four lays the foundations for detailed discussions in later
chapters of social relations of accountability and of how women craft social change.
Specifically, I show how contradictions between antiracist feminist ideals and practice
must be seen in relation to dialectic processes of accountability in the organization in
question. I describe, briefly, two sets of intertwined social relations of accountability in
the organizations: organizational accountability and activist responsibility. Formal
organizational accountability or organizational accountability refers to accountability to
the organization’s formal administrative, bureaucratic, and governance processes.
Antiracist feminist activist responsibility, or activist responsibility, is the socially
organized process of accountability that guides the women’s everyday enactment of their
commitment to and practice of social justice, feminist, antiracist work. The former is
discussed in chapter five, while the latter is described in more detail in chapter six.
In chapter five, I argue that antiracist feminist social change is framed through
organizational accountability through institutionalized relations of ruling. Organizational
accountability shapes antiracist feminist activism, through the struggle over the
definitions and terms of implementation of antiracist feminist ideals. Specifically, I argue
that hierarchicalized social relations filter the contestations around definitions of
antiracist advocacy through the priorities of management connected to extralocal forms
of ruling. More specifically, I show how formal processes of organizational
accountability, such as reporting and supervising, documenting practices and managing
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conflict, transform political and social critiques into individualized concerns which have
to be managed or controlled.
In chapter six, I show how the women transformed their commitments into social
relations of activist responsibility through everyday interactions with others committed to
antiracism, feminism, and social justice. I describe activist responsibility and the ways in
which it transformed women’s personal commitments to social justice, feminism, and
antiracism into social processes of accountability. I show various ways in which personal
commitment to activism became a social responsibility. Then I argue that activist
responsibility functioned as a coordinating discourse, rather than a regulatory one, as in
the case of organizational responsibility. Specifically, I show how it led to forms of social
and political accountability at the level of women’s subjectivities, everyday talk and
practice, interpersonally, and translocally.
Chapter seven describes how women of colour’s conscious acts of negotiating
change within women’s organizations must be understood through social relations of
accountability within and across organizations. I argue that women of colour crafted
antiracist feminist activism by mobilizing relations of activist responsibility through
hierarchicalized relations of accountability within their organizations. They consciously
drew on existing relations of organizational accountability to develop innovative and
effective antiracist feminist practices in their seemingly mundane, everyday work in
organizations. In doing so, antiracist feminist activists seized the potential for change
through both activist and administrative discursive practices; this potential occurred at the
junctures of negotiation between organizational accountability and ‘activist
responsibility. I show how women of colour consciously and actively crafted an antiracist
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feminist practice by using both institutionalized forms of accountability and
responsibility.
In chapter eight, I conclude by discussing the implications of conceptualizing
antiracist feminist activism a negotiation of relations of accountability to activist practice,
pedagogy and research. I argue that by ethnographically exploring mundane, everyday
ways that women of colour antiracist feminist activists actively counter inequitable
relations of power, not only deepens our analysis of social change, but also provides
direction for activist praxis.
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Chapter Two: Method of Inquiry
This chapter describes the research framework, method of inquiry and research process in
order to provide a context for understanding the contents of this dissertation. The chapter
also reflects on and considers the implications of this research process within larger
projects of feminist and antiracist knowledge production. To these ends, I outline the
ontological, epistemological, ethical and political underpinnings of my method of
inquiry. Next, I describe the research process, beginning from how I came to this research
and the research questions and, more specifically, how I participated in the process of
producing this study, including recruitment of participants, data collection, transcription,
data analysis and writing phases of this research.
Research Framework
This research project is firmly located within critical, interpretive, feminist, antiracist and
antioppressive traditions of qualitative research (Brown and Strega, 2005; Carroll, 2004;
Denzin and Lincoln, 2003; Kirby and McKenna, 2004; Moosa-Mitha, 2005). As an
antiracist feminist activist, my primary goal as a researcher is to gain knowledge about
the world in order to be able to engage in critical conversations about democracy, race,
gender, class and social justice (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003). Kirby and McKenna (2004),
critical researchers who advocate “researching from the margins,” note that:
What knowledge we are able to observe and reveal is directly related to our vantage point, to where we stand in or world. Our interaction with the social world is affected by such variables as gender, race, class, sexuality, age, physical ability, etc. This does not mean that facts about the social world do not exist, but that what we see and how we go about constructing meaning is a matter of interpretation (p. 71).
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It is from my own interaction with the social world, as an antiracist feminist activist, and
as a racialized woman of colour, that this research has come to be actualized.
An antioppressive approach to research includes a diverse weaving of critical
theoretical and political positions. Potts and Brown (2005) define “antioppressive theory”
as “an extension of Marxist, feminist, and most predominantly, critical theory... In
addition, poststructural and postcolonial thought, feminist, indigenous, queer, and
antiracist theories have contributed to our understanding of antioppressive approaches”
(p. 259; see also Moosa-Mitha, 2005). My research takes into account exclusions based
on gender, race, and class inequities that exist in research and public discourse.
In particular, my research is informed by critical researchers who use feminist,
antiracist and antioppressive theoretical frames and understand knowledge as 1) socially
constructed, 2) produced relationally, 3) situated, 4) contextual, 5) changing over time,
and 6) politically produced (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003; Kirby and McKenna, 1989/2004;
Moosa-Mitha, 2005; Potts and Brown, 2005; Ramazanoğlu, 2002). Carroll (2004) argues
that the advances in social research of the 1960s were made “in the broad praxis-oriented
strategies of social inquiry” emanating from intellectual movements such as Marxism,
feminism, postcolonialism, and post-structuralism (p. 1). The main research interests of
these intellectual movements are to create social change and accompanying “heightened
reflexivity concerning identity, culture, and life” (p. 7). Carroll outlines five critical
research strategies, namely, dialectical social analysis, institutional ethnography, critical
discourse analysis, participatory action research, and social inquiry as communicative
reason. My method of inquiry, or as Carroll calls it, research strategy, is informed by
concepts from institutional ethnography.
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Conceptualizing a feminist, antiracist and antioppressive institutional ethnography
My research draws heavily on Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnographic method of
inquiry. Smith (1986), as well as other feminist sociologists who have developed
methodologies which stem from the ontology of women’s standpoint, attempts to counter
male-dominated academic assumptions apparent in many non-feminist research
methodologies. Feminist research tries to rectify two major concerns: 1) the exclusion of
women from history and scholarship and 2) the undervaluing of women’s activities vis-á-
vis men’s activities. Many feminist researchers stress starting from women’s own lived
realities and cultivating women-focussed ways of knowing as a political project.
Similarly, my research question is an explicit attempt to uncover the links between the
activist sphere (assumed to be public) and the sphere of family (assumed to be private).
Tomm (1989) suggests that feminist political activism and feminist research,
particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, went hand-in-hand (see also Smith 1986, 1990). One
of the major struggles of feminist researchers during this period was to critique the
academy’s androcentrism, while at the same time work within it. This struggle has led to
critical feminist scholarship and the development of a unique feminist perspective and
methods on which my research is founded. For instance, Reinharz (1992) suggests a list
of research tools which feminists may use in their research, namely: interview,
ethnography, survey and statistical format, experimental, cross-cultural, oral history,
content analysis, case studies and action research. These research methods, by
themselves, are not necessarily feminist. However, as Reinharz notes, the ways feminists
take up their politics within these methodological traditions make them distinctively
feminist. In addition, in this dissertation I strive to include some of the preoccupations of
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feminist research in aiming to create social change; addressing inequities among knower
(participants in study), researcher and reader at every stage in the research; developing a
critique using non-feminist scholarship; and focussing on an analysis of interlocking
oppression (Reinharz, 1992) as a way of further broadening the scope of feminist
research methodology.
According to Smith (1986), the aim of institutional ethnography is to explain
“institutional relations determining everyday worlds and hence how the local
organization of the latter may be explored to uncover their ordinary invisible
determinations in relations that generalize and are generalized” (p. 160). In Smith’s work,
the concept of “social relations13” is key and is an analytical device which magnifies “the
social courses of action of which” social relations are constituents (1990, p. 150). She
(1990) makes clear that
A sociology for women should not be mistaken for an ideological position that represents women’s oppression as having a determinate character and takes up the analysis of social forms with a view to discovering in them lineaments of what the ideologist already supposes that she knows. The standpoint of women... is rather a method, that, at the outset of inquiry, creates the space for an absent subject, and an absent experience that is to be filled with the presence and spoken experience of actual women speaking of and in the actualities of their everyday worlds (pp. 106-107).
Smith’s concept of standpoint should be distinguished from (other) feminist standpoint
theorists (such as Haraway, 2004; Harding, 2004; Hartsock, 2004; Hill Collins, 2000;
Jagger, 2004) who take up “the standpoint of women” through an ontological lens which
gives women an epistemic privilege through feminist re-interpretations of Hegel’s
“master and slave” relation (see Hartsock, 2004). D. Smith (1986) insists, rather, that the
standpoint of women gives us an entry point into a particular set of social relations to
13 See also “Key Terms” in chapter one.
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study how women’s lives are shaped. For Smith, a “standpoint” creates “space” for “an
absent subject” (consistent with feminist thought), and the ontological shift is in studying
what Smith calls relations of ruling to understand how our lives are socially organized.
My study also starts with the goal of creating space for “an absent subject,”
namely women of colour activists and their experience of activism and feminist
organizations. My goal is to determine, as D. Smith (1986) suggests, the following:
“[H]ow does it happen to us as it does? How is this world in which we act and suffer put
together?” (p. 154). Although I privilege women’s narratives in this study, it is not their
lives per se that I study. Like Dorothy Smith, I intend to link the private preoccupations
of women’s day-to-day lives to institutions within “relations of ruling,” where the
concept of ruling relations
refer[s] to the total complex of activities differentiated into many spheres by which our kind of society is ruled, managed and administered. It includes what the business world calls management [sic], it includes the professions, it includes government and the activities of those who are selecting, training, and indoctrinating those who will be its governers... These are the institutions through which we are ruled and through which we, and I emphasize this we, participate in ruling. (Smith, D., 1990, p. 14)
This method of inquiry, namely examining activists’ lives from the perspective of
relations of ruling through women’s lived experiences and narratives thereof, is activist-
oriented because it guides us in how to act in order to make social change: The
knowledge crafted through this examination contributes further in the ability of activists
to practice their craft. Smith observes in this light that, “We want to know because we
also want to be able to act directly” (Smith, D., 1990, p. 34).
In spite of the strengths of feminist theoretical and methodological frames
outlined above, I felt some hesitation in adopting them completely and uncritically when
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I first started my research because I feared that I might somehow reproduce the racism of
other feminist theorists and researchers. The inadequate treatment of racism,
ethnocentrism, white privilege, and classism by so-called second-wave feminist
academics and activists has been well documented by many non-white and white
feminists (for examples, see Agnew, 1996; Bannerji, 1995; Hill Collins, 2001; hooks,
1984; Jhappan, 1996; Leah, 1991; Moses, 2010, Srivastava, 2002; Williams, 199). As
feminists have had to struggle to find their own spaces within male academic institutions,
women of colour too cannot assume that all feminist methods will be able to incorporate
issues of race and other forms of social difference.
In particular, I was unsure about the complete validity of Carroll’s (2004) claim
that institutional ethnography is a critical research strategy, that is “the most coherent and
influential research strategy stemming from feminist and antiracist [my emphasis]
activism of the 1970s” (2004, p. 9). Smith’s work (1986, 1990, 200) pays scant attention
to antiracist theorizing. Despite this, her work holds great power for developing an
analysis of a multiplicity of racialized, gendered, and classed social relations that is of
relevance to an antioppression researcher like me. However, I found affirmation in the
fact that other antiracist feminists such as Roxana Ng, Didi Khayatt, Himani Bannerji,
and Kamini Maraj Grahame use institutional ethnography to interrogate processes of
racialization. Ranero (2011) has more recently combined institutional ethnography and
critical race theory convincingly.
An antiracist feminist perspective must address the intersectional social relations
of sexism, racism and classism and other social differences if it is to critically analyze
experiences of oppression without subsuming any of these under one another. This
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intersectional conceptualization of injustice incorporates the understanding that we must
look at linked oppression in ways that are multiplicative, rather than additive (Merhotra,
2010; Murphy et al., 2009; Razack, 1998; Spelman, 1988; Wing, 1997). Additionally, it
is important to “explore [social oppression] in a historical and site-specific way... as they
come together to structure [oppressed people] in different and shifting positions of power
and knowledge” (Razack, 1998, p. 12). In this sense, relations of gender, race and class
are seen as mutually derivative of one another and serve to reinforce one another
(Bannerji, 1995, 1999; Brah, 1996; Hill Collins, 1998; Razack, 1998; Spelman, 1988).
Through an intersectional lens, one can easily see how individuals and groups can be in
subordinated social locations at the same time that their locations reflect race, class,
gender or other forms of privilege.
Razack (1998) expresses this situation when she states “we cannot undo our own
marginality without simultaneously undoing all the systems of oppression” (p. 14).
Critics such as Razack insist that social relations of race, class and gender are
fundamentally interlocked. Similarly, Brah (2001) writes:
It would be far more useful to understand how patriarchal relations articulate with other forms of social relations in a determinate historical context. Structures of class, racism, gender and sexuality cannot be treated as ‘independent variables’ because the oppression of each is inscribed within the other – is constituted by and is constitutive of the other (p. 459).
Other theorists make explicit that racism, sexism, anthropocentrism, classism and other
relations of oppression are linked (see my earlier work [Shaikh, 2000] for a review of
conceptual models of linked oppression). The emphasis on the interconnection between
the various matrices of oppression is important to highlight because concepts such as
social relations do not necessarily show that anthropocentrism, racism, classism, sexism,
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homophobia and other relations of inequitable power are processes inscribed in everyday
practices and need to be understood as processes, as relational, and as contextual (see the
definition of social relations in chapter one).
Ng (1993) asserts that racism, sexism, and classism need to be understood as
social relations and series of processes, not as theoretical categories. She argues that
sexism and racism are based on systems of inequality, premised on notions of superiority
of race and gender over others. These premises become embedded in ordinary, everyday
types of actions, on which capitalism has, and continues, to develop (Ng, 1993). Racism
and classism are embedded through the domination of one race and class over others,
which become ordinary, everyday types of actions, which further constitute gendered
social processes of domination and subordination. Sexism and capitalism further
constitute racialized processes of domination and subordination. Unless one looks at how
these social relations reinforce one another within power relations, one cannot understand
how these processes affect women’s everyday life. An antiracist feminist research
framework in which relations of power are understood as processes, as situated and as
active, such as this dissertation privileges, further deepens my analysis of the
interconnectedness of racism, sexism, and capitalism. Dorothy Smith’s (1987, 1990,
2005) method of inquiry, transposed into an antiracist feminist theoretical perspective,
uncovers some of ways the ideas and processes of doing antiracist feminist social change
work actually organizes the lives of activists.
As such, when I began this project I intended to develop an antiracist feminist
research framework that integrates politics explicitly but without being limited by
preconceived conclusions regarding the racism or sexism of the activist research
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participants. I began with the standpoint of non-white women within a specific and
dynamic historical and political location. George Smith (1990) would suggest that this
ontology is useful for people whose interests do not coincide with the relations of ruling.
However, it is precisely because we are all embedded (albeit differentially in terms of
interests) and participate within relations of ruling that our lives can become a beginning
point of analysis of social relations. By examining non-white women’s experiences of
activist work, I began to uncover the social relations that shape their experiences.
Through this form of research I was able to trace a common set of relations, and discover
how these relations shape the experiences of individuals. Women of colour’s particular
and individual experiences became the entry point into that common set of relations.
George Smith (1990) contends that as a political activist he is able to use
institutional ethnography in his political strategies to address issues that are important to
gay people without becoming trapped by speculative accounts. He explains:
Rather than critiquing the ideological practice of these politico-administrative regimes as a method of determining of how things happen, activists usually opted for speculative accounts. The touchstone of these explanations was the attribution of agency to concepts such as ‘homophobia’ or organizational glosses such as ‘red tape’... These kinds of explanations preclude understanding how the world actually works. While they have a certain force in organizing political reactions to the activities of a ruling regime, these kinds of self-activating conceptions obfuscate how things are actually organized (p. 634).
Following G. Smith’s logic, the choice of prioritizing one form of oppression, such as
sexism or racism, or one form of politics, was not made at any preliminary stage. Instead,
by exploring the standpoint of activists, the way that the “relations of ruling” actually
organized activists’ work was clearer.
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My questions and the ways that I directed my research also reflected my
commitment to antiracist feminist goals. My research framework drew from the insights
of researchers-activists-theorists who actively seek connections between social change
and research. Of particular relevance to my work were those who use the strengths of
institutional ethnography to develop an explicitly “political activist ethnography” (see
especially C. Frampton et al., 2005 and Smith, G., 1990). Kinsman (2005) points out that,
both institutional ethnography and political activist ethnography share a “political
commitment to taking up to side of the oppressed and exploited” (p. 133). Clearly, the
notion that social change and research must be tied is not new to sociology (see for
example Carroll, 2004) or to feminism (see Reinharz, 1992; Ramazanoğlu, 2002) or even
to postcolonial and antiracist struggles (L. Smith, 1999; Dei, 2005). Using institutional
ethnography as a method of inquiry as set out by Dorothy Smith, political activist
ethnographers have extended the notion of a “sociology for women” to a sociology for
social movements and social change (most notably, drawing from George Smith’s
writings).
George Smith (1990) argues that Dorothy Smith’s feminist alternative to
sociological inquiry could be used to interrogate social relations with which activists
engage:
Although the social organization of her method starts from and thus takes up the standpoint of women, its ontology and epistemology intends a science of society rather than a form of ideological practice... Her method, consequently, does not depend on the standard categories of feminist research. For this reason it can be used by all individuals who stand
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outside political -administrative regimes intent on managing society14 (p. 361).
George Smith’s project was aimed at developing knowledge of the “political-
administrative” regimes through the everyday practices of political confrontation
(Frampton et al., 2005). Unlike traditional sociology, which defines as central to social
inquiry a “neutral or disengaged stance,” G. Smith points out that institutional
ethnography (drawing from insights of ethnomethodology), begins from the ‘engaged’
stance of those within social relations. In fact, those people who are engaged in political
confrontation can and may act as “an ethnographic resource” to understanding the social
organization of the ‘everyday’ (1995, pp. 18-19).
Kinsman explains G. Smith’s notion of social movement activist as ethnographer
in Gramscian terms by noting:
In a Gramscian democratic sense (Gramsci 1971), movement activists are also intellectuals (with an organic relation to social movements and struggles), researchers and theorists. There is much to be learned from movement organizers and activists and from their confrontations with ruling regimes (2005, p. 134).
Kinsman argues that “social movement life is not separate from research and that
researchers-activists should be careful not to reproduce these untenable and illogical
binaries of “theory/research, theory/practice and research/activism” (p. 134). As an
14 Although I agree with George Smith’s assertion that this method of inquiry does not depend on the standard categories of feminist research, I cannot think of anyone whose interests stand in all ways outside of these regimes or institutions. In fact, it is precisely because we are all embedded (albeit differentially in terms of interests) within these regimes that our lives can become a beginning point of analysis of social relations. Thus, all experience potentially uncovers social relations, not just those of marginalized people.
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activist-researcher, I was able to integrate my insider knowledge as activist and theorist
with my outsider knowledge of researcher, observer and theorist.
The notion of activists as active researchers and knowledge-producers is a central
aspect of my research. Beginning from the standpoint of women of colour engaged in
everyday forms of antiracist and feminist struggle with organizations, I originally sought
to develop an understanding of how activism was institutionally or socially organized.
My research not only documents how activism was organized through extralocal relations
of ruling (as most institutional ethnographers focus on), but also maps activists’
negotiations of these within a local setting. My work focuses on the “social organization
of opposition, resistance and transformation – of the sources of agency that can bring out
social transformation” (Kinsman, 2005, p. 136), something that Kinsman argues is
underdeveloped in political activist ethnography and institutional ethnography. By
focussing on antiracist feminist change within women’s organizations, I am able to
highlight the local ways in which the everyday work of opposition, resistance,
transformation, and accommodation occurs within social movements and social
movement organizations. Such insights also provide clues regarding the possible future
direction of these movements and organizations.
Institutional ethnography and antiracist feminist activism
Throughout my research, I was directed by Dorothy Smith, standpoint and postcolonial
theorists who look at linking the everyday of experience and the ways that our world
around us is organized through social processes of race, gender, and class (such as
Bannerji, 1995, 1999; DeVault, 1999; Mohanty, 1998, 2004; Ng, 1993, 1996, 1998).
Feminist sociologists such as Smith (1986, 2005) have developed methodologies which
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stem from the ontology of women’s standpoint in attempts to counter male-dominated
assumptions apparent in many non-feminist research methodologies. Many feminist
researchers stress beginning from women’s own lived realities and cultivating women-
focussed ways of knowing as a political project. For example, Dorothy Smith’s method
of inquiry specifically takes the private preoccupations of women’s day-to-day lives and
links them to institutions within relations of ruling. In my own research, I take up the task
of uncovering the links between the private and the public, in the questions I wished to
answer. This particular approach signifies more than simply taking up of a feminist
slogan (see Siegel, 2002) – it is grounded in the ontological materialist belief that
people’s lives are shaped by social relations.
As I have already mentioned, my research journey began from my lived
experience as an antiracist feminist activist. I began this project from the standpoint of,
and from the experienced worlds of, antiracist feminist activists to guide my inquiry.
However, without an explicitly antiracist feminist stance, which questions the ways in
which difference is manifest in social relations or racism, sexism, classism and other
forms of oppression, I was fearful of perpetuating the same forms of exclusions and
assumptions that other researchers have made. Of course, all people are positioned in
relations of race, gender, class and other forms of social difference: but I was interested
in the specific ways that these are manifest within the lives of racialized women. It was
with this interest in mind that I began with the standpoint of racialized women within a
specific and dynamic historical and political location. Although Dorothy Smith does not
explicitly identify that beginning from the standpoint of racialized people also uncovers
the social relations which coordinate their lives, as George Smith (1990) suggests, this
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ontology is still useful for other populations in society whose interests do not coincide
with the relations of ruling.
My study applied a number of specific analytical principles from institutional
ethnography which allowed me to uncover a social organization of activism. First and
foremost, is the concept of social relations, which allowed me to understand how
activities in which people engage in different contexts are actually connected despite the
assumption to the contrary. Smith (1990) argues specifically that, “The concept of social
relation... is an analytic device isolating in the phenomena, … the social courses of action
of which they are constituents” (p. 150). The focus on “courses of action” as found in the
everyday activities of people, is central to institutional ethnography, and allows us to
explore the social organization of a particular phenomenon from any entry point. In this
sense, as a materialist concept of sociology, social relation results from various courses of
action and, as such, reflects an ideological perspective and is not free of specific
intentions.
As I have already stated, the “standpoint” of women of colour and the everyday,
is salient in my research. Smith uses Marx’s classic concept of “ideology” as expressed in
the German Ideology, to argue that ideology is not abstract, but is found in the everyday
activities and “work”15 of people and is coordinated, organized and shaped by broader
social relations (Smith, D., 1986, 1990; see also Wang, 1998). Further refining the
concept of ideology, D. Smith (1986) argues that women experience a “bifurcated
consciousness” (p. 7); whereby disjuncture arises between women’s experience of the
15 The concept of “work” is related to the notion of social relations as “courses of action.” According to institutional ethnographers, all human activity may be considered work, as it takes time and energy (see Nichols, 2008; and G. Smith, Mykhalovskiy and Weatherbee, 2006 for detailed discussion on the notion of “work”).
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everyday and generalized understandings of knowledge (p. 49). Disjuncture is thus what
becomes available to institutional ethnographers to uncover relations of ruling:
[Institutional ethnography] offers an analysis that shows how a disjuncture can arise between the world as it is known directly in experience and as it is shared with others, and the ideas and images fabricated externally to that everyday world and provided as a means to think and image it (p. 55).
Disjuncture and bifurcated consciousness, therefore, were key concepts through which I
was able to use to analyze a social organization of antiracist feminist activism within
women’s organizations.
Specifically, by studying the interplay of activism and feminist organizations, I
was able to observe how the local ‘workplace’ becomes a site of social and institutional
relations and the place where we bring our subjectivities, identities, and experiences. My
work departed from Smith’s institutional ethnography in that I not only looked at how
activism was socially organized from the top-down, but also how activists shaped this
social organization horizontally. Although this was not something that I initially set out to
determine, the guided conversations I had with racialized activists of colour meant that I
could not ignore the active and seemingly intentional shaping of social relations within
women’s organizations. My choice to focus my analysis on women’s concrete and actual
activities, meant that I became aware of local and translocal (including extralocal)
relations.
Additionally, my research departed slightly from that of other institutional
ethnographers in that I chose to focus more intently on the social relations within a local
setting rather than seeking to study how relations are linked to textually-mediated
extralocal relations. Initially, I intended to focus my analysis on tracing extralocal
relation; as my work proceeded, however, I found the richness of women’s accounts of
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local relations compelling and illustrative of how activism was socially and institutionally
organized. In other words, I used institutional ethnography to study the (relatively) lateral
social relations within women’s organizations in order to understand the social and
institutional organization of antiracist feminist activism within women’s organizations.
This choice was not made at the beginning of my research, but arose as I began to see the
ways in which women’s activist work was coordinated dialectically through relations
within and among organizations.
This observation was in contrast to the assumption that I began with, namely, that
activist work was limited by relations of ruling, and that activists resisted these relations
in order to do antiracist feminist work. In attending to the women’s everyday work of
doing antiracist feminist activism, I found that my (implicit) binary assumptions of the
relationships between concepts of ruling versus ruled, limited versus enabled, activist
versus administrative and so on were challenged when I attended to women’s everyday
work and the “social.” For example, as I mapped the social relations, I realized that the
binary of local and extralocal was inadequate to analyze what was before me.
Furthermore, I realized that local relations were not separate from extralocal relations of
accountability. Yes, I saw women as being organized by relations of ruling and as active
participants (sometimes self-consciously) in relations of ruling (see, for example, chapter
five), but I also saw women actively resisting, strategizing and crafting antiracist change
in spite of, and in order to, transform those relations of ruling.
Research Process
The impetus to focus on women of colour engaged in antiracist work for this project
came from both my own experience as an antiracist feminist activist and from witnessing
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other women’s struggles with feminist organizations. I saw and experienced how activist
work in feminist organizations intertwined with racialized women’s personal lives. In
many ways, this research was about coming to understand my experience as a woman of
colour and as an activist working with/in women’s organizations. The motivation to do
this study evolved from my own experience as an antiracist feminist activist navigating
complex and contradictory relationships in my own work environment. Therefore,
defining myself as a feminist, antiracist activist is a meaningful journey which shapes my
identities, my experiences, my relationships, and my world-view; this, however, does not
mean that this is all that I am/was.
In articulating the above stance, I wish to highlight that all research studies are
informed by people’s social location, knowledge and experience. Indeed, as feminists
who have questioned the myths of “objectivity” in historically traditional scientific
research (Harding, 2004; Smith, D., 1986, 1990, 1999, 2005) have demonstrated,
“objectivity” is subjective. In the same way, this current study is a product of my own
location, experience and knowledge. The very questions I ask are informed by my
experience (my social history), my social location (including the different identities I do)
and my knowledge (experiential, political, academic and social).
I came with several commitments to the research process. My primary goal was
quite simple: to make antiracist feminist action more effective, more inclusive, and more
empowering within women’s organizations and communities. Implicit in this goal was
excitement, critique and hope: I believed that organizations offer unique spaces for
antiracist and antioppressive social change work; that activism was not easily done or
accepted within organizations; and that there was hope to make effective change. These
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commitments came from my lived everyday experience as an activist, family member,
researcher, student, and so on. The knowledge, experience, and location that I brought to
the research were multi-layered; not only did they inform the beginnings of this research
process, but also every aspect of the research process. My very use of language and
analysis of social relations of privilege and oppression were a result of my engagement
with, and influence by, academic-activist spheres of knowledge. Not all women of colour
who have experienced racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, or ableism would identify
these in similar terms that I have; nor would they desire to study their experiences in the
form of a sociological doctoral thesis. Clearly, my particular set of experience,
knowledge and location shaped the commitments and “conceptual luggage” (Strega and
Brown, 2005; Kirby and McKenna, 2004) I brought to the process of research itself.
As an activist-researcher, I have attended to feminist notions of self-reflexivity,
“conceptual baggage” (Kirby and McKenna, 2004), and “conceptual luggage” (Strega,
2005) at all stages of research. Through attending to the politics and ethics of the research
process, my actions and decisions in conducting this research, from the proposal to
writing up stages, have been both fulfilling and challenging. For example, I often
reflected on my interest of studying “activists” and wondered about whether or not this
was a politically sound decision. Through both internal “dialogues” and discussions with
other researchers studying social movements, activism and social change, I explored
whether or not my research was the most useful for women of colour doing activist work.
I wondered whether my research would be perpetuating the same injustices as other
researchers in the field studying activists.
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Some of the more pertinent questions were as follows: Who was this research for?
How would it be used? If I was to detail women’s everyday lives, could it not be used by
those who women of colour were organizing against? Could it be used to discredit
activists striving for social justice change? And, yet, when I spoke with women who were
activists, they could see the importance of looking at the links between activism and
organization. I have not completely come to terms with this contradiction. However, the
internal “dialogue” process of questioning the implications of studying activism guided
my actions in conducting the research. I chose institutional ethnography as a method of
inquiry because it fit into my criteria of a research paradigm with the potential for social
change. This method of inquiry also allowed me to start from women’s standpoints as
active subjects. It shifted the research gaze to the “social” as the object of study rather
than objectifying women of colour and their lives.
Research questions and recruitment
This research explores the social organization of activism and how antiracist feminist
activism is negotiated through organizations. The questions that this study addresses are:
1. How is antiracist feminist activism with/in “mainstream” women’s organizations socially organized?
2. How are antiracism, feminism, and social justice enacted, developed and
integrated in the daily work of women of colour who are committed to antiracist feminist practice? My primary research strategy was to conduct in-depth, semi-structured qualitative
interviews with women of colour who work within women’s organizations or groups in
Southern Ontario, Canada. From March to November 2004, I conducted in-depth
interviews with women of colour working in shelters, sexual assault centres, drop-in
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centres, and women’s businesses in urban, suburban and rural areas within Southern
Ontario.
I recruited and interviewed 13 women of colour engaged in changing
organizational processes to become more responsive to racially and ethnically diverse
clients, constituents or staff in women’s organizations in Southern Ontario. The
participants I chose:
• identified as women of colour; • were or had been engaged in paid or volunteer positions with a women’s
organization(s) engaged in a process of antiracist change; • were or had been involved in organizational antiracist or multicultural
change work; and, • worked or lived in Southern Ontario.
These recruitment criteria were based on my research goal of studying the social
organization of antiracist and feminist activism. I chose to focus on racialized women’s
experience of activism and women’s organizations because I wanted to see the ways in
which processes of gender and race play out in their narratives.
I acknowledge that other activists (including men of colour, white men and white
women) also engage antiracist, feminist and other social justice work, and are committed
to do this work within their organizations. It is not my intention, therefore, to dismiss the
political importance of the antiracist and feminist activism done by these other groups.
However, the particular experiences of a racialized woman resisting oppression may be
different from a woman who negotiates through relations of ruling privileged by her race,
gender and class. My decision, as many decisions are, was a political one: I focused on
women who are racialized as non-white or as women of colour because I was particularly
interested in exploring the experiences of women of colour as subjects within a larger
feminist social movement discourse in which narratives of women of colour are relatively
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absent, and where instead of being regarded as agents in such contexts, women of colour
are usually seen as recipients or tangential objects of a larger social movements. I was
interested in how intersecting relations of racism, sexism and classism enter into the lives
of women who are minoritized based on both their race and gender.
I also chose to recruit women working within women’s organizations who were
engaged with antiracist and feminist change processes in organizations. By “women’s
organizations,” I mean those organizations that are non-profit service-, advocacy- , or
activist-oriented which see themselves as part of or influenced by the broader feminist
movement. These organizations include health clinics, sexual assault centres, coalition
organizations, advocacy organizations, and support groups. I recruited and interviewed
participants from February to November 2004. I contacted women’s organizations, such
as women’s shelters, rape crisis centres, health clinics, coalition organizations, advocacy
organizations, and support groups for the names of any antiracist activists who might be
potential participants. Beginning with a few of my own contacts and knowledge of
organizations in Southern Ontario, I contacted organizations that I knew might be able to
help me make contact with activists of colour working within women’s organizations. I
also asked other researchers and activists I had contacted for suggestions of individuals
and organizations I might approach. Finally, I used several lists I obtained from the
internet to get in touch with diverse organizations in urban, suburban and rural settings.
In total, I contacted approximately 75 organizations directly — and approximately an
additional 30 through coalition networks.
Initially, I sent an email letter to women’s organizations in Southern Ontario
requesting their help to locate potential participants. The email letter was addressed to
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directors and/or supervisors of the organization (see Appendix III), requesting that the
director post and/or distribute flyers or forward my letter to members of their
organization. The package I emailed to the organizations included copies of a recruitment
flyer (see Appendix V). A week later, I contacted the organizations again through a
follow-up phone call. I used the original letter I sent the organization as a telephone script
to answer any questions. Very few directors responded to these emails until I made a
follow-up phone call. Most often, I would be asked to send the email letter and flyer
again.
I then decided to change my tactics, and first phoned the organization to ask to
speak with the director. During our conversation, I got permission to send her (and
sometimes others) the recruitment letter and flyer. In some cases, I made an additional
follow-up call or email to see if the letter had been posted, or if she had any information
about who I should contact. In some cases, the person I spoke with offered to participate
in the study. In several cases, they were able to provide me with names of activists of
colour (either affiliated with their organizations or those they knew from other
organizations) that they thought could participate in the study. A few activists responded
to recruitment flyers and/or forwarded emails. I emailed all 21 potential research
participants the recruitment letters (Appendix II) and then followed up through phone
conversations.
In the end, two women did not meet the recruitment criteria and five women
decided that they could not participate due to time constraints. One woman decided not to
participate because she felt “burnt-out” and did not “wish to educate white feminists any
longer” (personal phone conversation, March 15th, 2004). Of the women I spoke with, I
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was able to schedule interviews with 13. During our initial conversations, several women
asked questions about me (including a request for my biography), my political
background, and experience, and about the research (including three requests for the
interview guide and consent forms before the interview). Most of the women I spoke with
were initially concerned with the length of the interview and whether they would have the
time. A few of the women also offered their insights about my chosen topic, my choice of
the words “racialized” and “women of colour,” and “activist.” One woman and I
discussed whether she was eligible for the study as she had no family here in Canada; we
agreed that she was and she agreed to participate. Several women who I spoke with also
indicated that they were interested in exploring further the links between activism,
family, and organization.
In contrast to assumptions in standard research that the data collection begins at
the stage of the interview, my experience of the recruitment process was that it offered
information about the social organization of activism (as I describe below). This was
particularly true because the focus of analysis in institutional ethnography is not the
peculiarities of individual lives, but how activism is put together. Although I can only
speculate about how women of colour made the decision not to contact me about the
study, the women that I spoke with and chose not to participate gave me some insights
into the politics of recruitment and self-selection. Most of the women who declined to
participate in the study cited lack of time as a reason not to participate. This mirrors what
I heard from the women I did manage to speak with, whose everyday lives are busy.
However, I also found out through several conversations during the pre-interview
stage that women’s choice about participating in the study had to do not only with time
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constraints, but also political reasons. I have already highlighted the woman who declined
to participate because of her feeling burnt-out and that she did not wish to educate white
women any longer. I identified as an activist of colour; however, my topic was about
doing antiracist work within white women’s organizations. Women of colour, some of
whom chose to participate and others not, also questioned “why” I wanted to study this
topic. Although I answered this question in a personal way, showing my insider
knowledge, I sensed general wariness about being interviewed by someone who was not
clearly situated as an activist. I did not interview anyone I knew personally before the
interviews. I was also questioned by several potential and actual participants about the
purpose of my research. One woman, who chose to participate, requested that I send her
my bio to determine what my political alliances were. A couple of women only agreed to
participate after I discussed my political reasons for the research.
Thus, my “insider” status and alliances had to be proven. In a few cases, this
insider status was clearly evident by the fact that their name was given to me by another
activist. In most cases, however, I spoke with women between 10 and 60 minutes before
they agreed to participate. In these sessions, it was not a matter of me pleading or cajoling
women, but women who wanted to know about me and my research before they made the
decision. Some of the reasons that women cited for participating were that they: were
interested in the research focus; wanted to talk about family and personal dimensions of
activism; were curious; needed to discuss their mixed feelings about antiracist practice;
were looking for support around issues of racism; were interested in doing a master’s or
doctorate and were interested in experiencing the research process and interview; were
looking for guidance and advice about pursuing further social work education (I hold
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social work degrees); wanted to support a woman of colour (me) doing her doctorate;
wanted to help a university student; wanted to talk about experiences of activism; and,
felt political or personal connection with me during the recruitment process.
Introducing the research participants
In the following section, I give a summary of the research participants, each of whom, as
I have already noted, identified as racialized and/or as a woman of colour and doing
antiracist feminist activist work in at least one woman’s organization in Southern
Ontario. First, I do so by highlighting some general information about the participants
(specifically, their ethnoracial-cultural self-identities, ages, education, the roles and types
of organizations they worked in). I then describe each participant individually.
Ethnic, racial and cultural self-identities: In the “data” sheet and throughout the
interviews, these activists identified as women of colour and activated diverse (and fluid)
notions of their “ethnicities” and “cultural communities.” Of the thirteen women I spoke
with, six identified as African and/or black, five as South Asian and two as (East) Asian.
Additionally, one woman identified as being racially mixed, another identified as being
“Western,” and another having “granola roots,” having been (partially) raised by two
different families. All of the women identified as being parts of “communities of colour.”
The six women who identified as African and/or black also identified various
ethnicities, nationalities, and regional differences. Three women identified as being from
the Caribbean or as being West Indian, Jamaican, and/or Barbadian. Two women
identified as being from the African continent, namely Cameroon and Nigeria. One
woman identified as being African-American. All spoke English, and some identified as
speaking Ibo, Cameroonaise, and French. Only one woman identified as Christian.
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Of the five women who identified as South Asian, four also identified as Indian
and one as Pakistani. Within these categories, women also identified as Punjabi (two) and
Madrasi as ethnicities and linguistic groups. Other women identified being able to
understand and/or speak French, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, and Madrasi. They also identified
as Catholic, Christian, Sikh, Muslim, agnostic and atheist. The two women who
identified as (East) Asian also identified as Chinese and South Korean.
Ethnicity N
African/ Caribbean/ Black 6
South Asian 5
East Asian 2
Biracial 1
Table 1: Ethnicity of participants16
Ages: Of the women I spoke with, two women were in their late 20s (26-29), two
in their early 30s (30-34), four in their late 30s (35-39), two in their early 40s (40-44), 1
in her late 40s (45-49) and two in their mid-50s (53-55).
Education: All of the women I spoke with had completed high school. One
woman had earned a college diploma. Ten women had at least one bachelor’s degree. Of
these ten women, two women had master’s degrees. Two women also had social work
and education degrees. Two women were also enrolled in master’s degree programs and
one woman was enrolled in a doctoral program.
16 Note that in some cases, the participants identified with more than one ethnic, racial and cultural identity.
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Education N
Undergraduate College/University 6
Graduate Education 5
Secondary Only 2
Table 2: Highest level of education achieved by participants
Types of organizations: Many of the women I spoke with worked with more
than one women’s organization. For the purposes of my interviews, I focussed on those
organizations that were “mainstream.”17 Three pairs of women worked or volunteered in
the same organization. Two pairs worked in the same organizations, with similar sorts of
organizational roles; in one pair, one of the women was interviewed about their role in
the shared organization, and the other woman only touched on the organization in which
she volunteered, but worked in another women’s organizations (which was the primary
organization on which I gathered information). The sorts of organizations with which the
women worked or volunteered were as follows: shelters (7), sexual assault centres (3),
drop-in centre for marginalized women (2), public education organization (2), and
women’s collective. Although the focus of the interviews was on “mainstream”
organizations, many of the women were also centrally involved in other (antiracist
feminist) organizations which were women-centred and ethno-specific or multicultural or
ethnoracial, including: art-poetry women’s groups, ethno-specific crisis phone line, and
counselling centres. All of the participants were/had been involved with other sorts of
social service, health and community organizations through work before their current
17 See definition of “women’s organizations” in chapter one.
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organization or were concurrently with more than one (i.e., volunteering or working at
multiple organizations at time of interview).
Type of organization N
Shelter 7
Sexual assault centre 3
Drop-In centre for marginalized women 2
Public education organization 2
Women’s collective 1
Table 3: Types of organizations where participants worked18
The official position titles that women held were also varied and included, front-
line/direct service staff and program/project coordinator (5), executive or assistant
director (7), and board member (4). Again, a few of the women held more than one
position; for example, one woman was both front-line staff member of a shelter and an
executive director of a different organization.
Position N
Front-line Staff/Coordinator19 5
Executive/Assistant Director 7
Board Member 4
Table 4: Organizational position of participants20
18 Note that some participants worked at more than one type of organization. 19 I have collapsed frontline staff with project/program coordinator because all of the program coordinators I interviewed were also providing direct service and/or education, and were not considered part of the management team. 20 Note that some participants are identified as occupying more than one position.
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Geographic communities: All of the respondents had worked or were working in
Southern Ontario in rural/ suburban (7) and large metropolitan communities (8). Some of
the women worked/had worked in more than one community. (Regions: Guelph-
Wellington, Hamilton-Wentworth, Durham, Greater Toronto Area, York, Ottawa-Hull).
Throughout the dissertation, I discuss each of the research participants in relation
to each of the chapter topics. However, the reader may note that within the chapters, there
are inconsistencies in the emphasis I have placed on certain voices and accounts. While I
have been attentive to ensuring that all of the women’s voices are captured throughout the
dissertation, when writing up my analysis I found that some interviews revealed much
more than others, and that some accounts more readily showed how activism was socially
organized within local settings. In addition, some participant quotes have been
intentionally repeated across the dissertation chapters to illustrate that women’s
commitments, organizational contradictions, as well as social relations of organizational
and activist accountabilities are, in reality, interconnected. The data analysis and
representation processes involve both teasing threads apart and weaving them together.
Region N
Urban 10
Rural 2
Suburban 4
Table 5: Location of participants21
21 Note that some participants worked in more than one locale.
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Meet the participants: Please meet Lodge, Catherine, Mishka, Aj, Francine,
Freddy, Tuffy, Sharmila, Soni, Kimberly, Maria, Theta, and Cee.22 For the sake of
anonymity in the following section, I only included basic facts about their ages,
“household” configurations and their positions within organization as they were at the
time of the interviews. I have listed the descriptions of the research participants in the
order that I interviewed them.
Lodge was a 37-year-old front-line counsellor and supervisor at two shelters for
abused women servicing suburban and rural surrounding communities. She was also
involved in provincial and regional antiracist and ethnocultural coalition groups. She was
married to a male partner and had two boys, one in his late teens and the other who was
10 years old.
Catherine was 41 years old, single, and had a 7-year-old son. She worked at a
shelter for abused women in suburban and rural areas. Her community work included
being a board member of a local community advocacy group, counselling, and doing
public education with a family counselling organization and volunteering in ethno-
specific and faith-based groups.
Mishka was 38 years old, and, at the time of the interview, considered herself
single, as she was in the process of re-evaluating a relationship with a male friend. She
was an executive director at a drop-in centre for homeless women in an urban area and
the director of a province-wide advocacy coalition of immigrant women. She had also
22 All of these names are pseudonyms; one of the pseudonyms was chosen by me at the request of the participant, and the rest were chosen by the activists. The pseudonyms sometimes reflect the participants’ ethnicities, but most often do not.
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worked as a community organizer, group counsellor, and multicultural worker at a
women’s shelter in an urban area.
Aj, 40 years old, was a front-line worker at a women’s shelter for abused women,
a community antiracist consultant, and the executive director of a multicultural women’s
centre in a suburban area. She lived with her three teenage children and husband.
At the time of the interview, Francine was working at a drop-in centre for
homeless people. However, our interview focussed on her work five years before the
interview, as a board member of a woman’s shelter for abused women. She was 45 years
old, married to a female partner, and worked and lived in an urban area.
Freddy, who was 38 years old, was a program coordinator with an organization
primarily focussed on public education about domestic violence. She had two children
(ages 6 and 11), was married to a male partner, and lived in an urban area.
Tuffy was 55 years old, had two teenage boys and was single. She was an
executive director of a woman’s service organization in a suburban area. She oversaw
several programs including community recreation programs, early childhood programs,
and shelters for homeless women and women affected by violence.
Sharmila, aged 36, was a manager of a woman’s business. She was also active in
working with antimilitary, queer, antiracist and social justice groups. She lived in an
urban area.
Maria, 30 years old, also lived in an urban area with her female partner. She was
working as a health researcher, a student, and a board member of a local sexual assault
centre. She had also been a counsellor in women’s shelter.
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Soni, who was 26 years old, had worked primarily with sexual assault centres and
multicultural counselling centres in several suburban and urban areas. At the time of the
interview, she was working in a collectively managed sexual assault centre as a program
manager.
Kimberly was a 30 year-old public educator and program coordinator/supervisor
with an organization which focused on antiviolence education. She lived in an urban area,
and was involved with a male partner who did not live with her.
Theta, who was 28 years old, and her male spouse lived with their 3-year-old
daughter in an urban area. She had been a front-line worker in a shelter for homeless
women and was, at the time of the interview, an assistant director of the women’s
programs within a large service organization. Theta was also a board member for a sexual
assault centre.
Cee, aged 55, was a student and the executive director of a woman’s shelter in an
urban area. She lived with her 15-year-old daughter and her brother. Her experience
included years of advocacy as an antiracist educator. She also had a daughter in her mid-
20s and granddaughter, who lived close by.
Interviews and transcriptions
The interviews took from 2 hours to 6 hours to complete (in two cases, the interview
itself was broken up over two days). Instead of directing the interview as a formal
question and answer sort of interview, the interchange was more like a guided
conversation in which we explored the ways that activism affected each activist’s life
(refer to Appendix I to see the interview guide).
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The women and I decided on the suitability of the interview venue. In all cases, I
travelled to women’s homes or workplaces. The interviews took place in women’s homes
(4 interviews) and workplaces (8 interviews), and in one case in a restaurant close to the
participant’s workplace. During one interview we started off in a coffee shop, but we
were unable to continue because of the inadequate quality of the audio-recording (too
noisy), and we conducted most of the interview in her workplace. In all cases, women
consented to be interviewed and audio recorded and signed informed consent forms
(Appendix IV).
At least ten of the women indicated that they were pleased with the interview
process, as they had an opportunity to reflect on their own lives and activist work. Two
women indicated at the onset of the interview or during the interview that they chose to
participate because they did not have any (safe) place to discuss issues of activism and
family. Three women indicated that they wanted to participate in the research because
they were either engaged in academic or community research projects and wanted the
experience of being participants, or were interested in future academic work themselves.
Each interview was transcribed from the audio-recordings. Although I initially
intended to transcribe each interview myself, before each subsequent interview, I was
diagnosed with severe tendonitis right after my first interview (as a result of non-
dissertation related typing and data collection during a paid research assistantship). I
decided, instead, to listen to each interview twice before the next interview. After all of
the interviews were completed, I also received support from my partner in the
transcription of all thirteen interviews.
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Data analysis and “writing up”
Perhaps the most daunting and exciting part of my thesis journey was the process of
interpreting and presenting the insights of the transcriptions. My data analysis and writing
were not linear processes, and I chose to write-up my results and data analysis
simultaneously. This process took many twists and turns, stops and starts, both as my
understanding of the research process developed and deepened and, as well, as ‘life’ (that
is, family joys and responsibilities, work opportunities and obligations, health and healing
concerns and activist projects) took over. The eight years that have elapsed between my
initial data collection (the interviews) and the finished product (the dissertation), has
further complicated the twists and turns of my interpretation and presentation of the data.
On the one hand, this brings into question the relevance of my data and analysis for today
(this is something that I take up explicitly in my conclusion). On the other hand,
throughout these past few years, I have stubbornly remained engaged with the data and
its interpretation and have used various opportunities as an academic researcher, social
work and women’s studies instructor, mentor of activists and students, and activist to
deepen and confirm the relevance of my analysis.
I should note here too that in the process of analysis and writing, my research
focus changed. Although I set out initially to examine the connections between women’s
activism within women’s organizations and their relationships with their families, in the
end, the focus of my analysis placed antiracist feminist activism in women’s
organizations and their navigation of relations of accountability in the foreground. The
data on women’s relationships with their families became secondary and as a background
to women’s antiracist feminist commitments. My decision to do this was a difficult one,
but necessary, as the data I collected on women’s accounts of antiracist feminist activism
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within organizations was much richer than I expected. So I felt compelled to move my
analysis in this direction and explore this data as this is what the data itself suggested to
me. And, while I felt disappointed in not bringing the same depth of analysis on the
interview data which explored family relationships, it was the tensions among women’s
commitments to antiracist feminist activism, women’s activist work in organizations, and
the relationships with their families which led me to the analysis of accountability.
I engaged several layers of data analysis throughout this ethnographic research
process. Each step of the data gathering phase, from recruitment to transcription to
reading the transcriptions all gave me familiarity and opportunities for analysis about the
social organization of antiracist feminist activism. I made a series of “data collection
notes” before, during and after my interviews. Also, after each transcription I made
further “impression notes.” My reading, re-reading, making notes, entering into
“conversations” with my data, and comparing interview transcripts, making “data
analysis notes” were all opportunities for me to make sense of the women’s accounts.
I used multiple ways to manage the 400 plus pages of transcription. The
interviews were first coded by hand and coloured pens. The initial codes became a set of
questions, puzzles, and threads from the women’s accounts that I wanted to understand
more deeply, and became the subject of my data analysis notes. I then attempted to
organize the interview data with a software program for qualitative data (N6). However,
after using the program with over half of the interviews (seven interviews), I abandoned
this because I found that although the program allowed me to manage several codes in
minute and complicated ways, it did not help me to see the data in terms of social
relations. The program directed me to think in terms of categories and themes rather than
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through understanding more deeply how things happen the way that they do, or in terms
of social relations as processes. In hindsight, perhaps had I already had more experience
with institutional ethnography I might have been able to adapt the software program.
Instead, I chose to analyze the data to, first, further develop and refine my problematic
and then, second, to focus on women’s everyday work and the social relations through
which this work was articulated.
In the various readings and re-readings of my transcripts, I was able to compare
and contrast the women’s accounts. In the first few rounds of readings and note-making, I
tried to hear the women’s accounts as holistically as possible. Initially, my impression
and analytical notes were more reactions to the accounts than a full-fledged analysis. As I
got to know the data and my knowledge deepened, I could actually “hear” better what the
women were saying. Some of the women’s accounts began to speak ‘louder than others.’
I heard more clearly those voices which elicited my emotional responses. I came to
realize that these reactions and responses were a result of my being immersed within the
very discursive practice that I sought to understand, namely, antiracist feminist activism.
Dorothy Smith calls this process “institutional capture” (2005, pp. 155-157; DeVault and
McCoy, 2002), and for institutional ethnographers, this is something to be avoided.
However, for me, these instances became analytical resources and opportunities for
furthering my understanding of the accounts of antiracist feminist activism. I used my
reactions self-reflexively as a place to interrogate more deeply the social organization of
activism, and this was only possible because of my engagement with this discourse.
After I felt confident that I “knew” the interview data well, I focussed on accounts
which described women’s everyday activities and work, that is, their “courses of action”
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(Smith, D., 1986, p. 150). Like other institutional ethnographers I focussed on the
participant’s accounts of their everyday work within women’s organizations (see Nichols,
2008; G. Smith, Mykhalovskiy and Weatherbee, 2006). Analyzing the everyday work of
women’s accounts as courses or sequences of action allowed me to assemble and weave
together a nuanced understanding of work processes within organizations. For example,
although most of the women worked in different organizations, and different sorts of
organizations, I came to pay attention to how one woman’s account of work connected to
another’s everyday work account. Although I did not initially intend to do so, the focus
on the accounts of work allowed for a comparison of the research participants. This also
allowed me develop a nuanced understanding of how people’s courses of actions
overlapped and connected to other people’s courses of actions. For example, I noticed
that several women discussed the problems with “documentation” in their everyday work,
but, depending on women’s direct experience, these problems were different – and this
became one of the puzzles that I tried to understand. By assembling together women’s
accounts of documentation, I was able to understand organizational courses of action. In
fact, my choice to interview women with different formal roles (i.e., direct service
workers, managers, directors, board members) within women’s organizations allowed me
to produce an understanding of how different work processes were put together. So, for
example, I was able to see how documentary processes within organizations were
activated differently (or similarly) depending on one’s position in the organization. In
hindsight, had I realized that this would be an analytical resource, I would have
interviewed direct service workers first, then managers and directors, and finally, board
members.
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As my research continued I started to apply the notion of disjuncture to make
sense of what I was seeing in order to explain the gaps between what women did in their
organizational work and their commitment to antiracist work. During the interviews, for
example, as my interviews progressed, I became more adept at being able to use my
developing understanding of activism to question how women’s organizational work
seemed to be disconnected from women’s antiracist commitments. In some cases, I
invited the participants to make clearer the links between their commitments and their
everyday work. Although the participants sometimes initially had difficulty articulating
the links, I found that in the process of doing so, I was able to elicit richer descriptions of
their everyday work. In addition, I found that in a few cases, where it seemed that I was
challenging women to explore more fully their activist ideals vis-à-vis their everyday
work, a co-constructed analysis emerged. For example, during my interview with Maria,
she described her everyday work of “program evaluation” and I began to explore why
this was important for antiracist feminist practice. Through her (and my own) discomfort,
she was able to uncover both the connections and disjunctures between her everyday
practice as a board member and as an activist. This line of questioning magnified a
disjuncture, and thus, a set of social relations, that I was able to carefully consider when
listening back to the recording and during my analysis.
I also adapted the notion of disjuncture and applied it to my analysis of the
women’s accounts of work processes (that is, their collective “courses of action”) within
women’s organizations. Dorothy Smith explains that disjunctures found within the
standpoint of women resulted from “bifurcated consciousness” (Smith, 1986). As I
analyzed the interview data, I saw many examples of bifurcated consciousness within the
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participant’s accounts and used these to delve deeper into uncover the social organization
of activism. During the first close readings of the interview transcripts, I began to see that
the disjuncture or, as I came to call them, disconnection, between the ideals and practice
of antiracism within women’s organization, were expressed in a variety of ways within
women’s accounts. The disjunctures first appeared to me as women’s inability to
articulate, or to enact, antiracist politics within their everyday work. But as my analysis
deepened, I realized the disjunctures were better understood as an expression of
bifurcated collective consciousness that was socially organized through two different but
connected sets of discourses and preoccupations, namely the social relations of
accountability to the organization (and its functioning, governance and administration)
and to antiracist feminist praxis.
By intentionally assembling women’s accounts of everyday work from women in
different positions within women’s organizations (for example, from the standpoint of
women doing everyday work as front-line workers, managers, executive directors and
board members), I was able to analyze specific courses of action. For example, in my
analysis of documentary processes within women’s organizations, I could see that women
from different positions in the organization spoke about “case notes” in ways that were
similar (such as seeing them as cumbersome, but available as a resource to social justice
ideals), but also dissimilar (for example, as being unnecessary versus necessary to social
justice ideals) (see chapter five). These disjunctures, or disconnections, became the
problematic that I explored in my research analysis, and, in fact, is the focus of my later
chapters.
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Chapter Three: Commitment to Antiracist Feminist Practice
This chapter describes the centrality of antiracist feminist work from the standpoint of
women of colour activist and examines women’s accounts of their everyday work of
putting into practice social justice ideals and their commitments to antiracist feminist
practice. This examination allows us to understand how women actively bring their
commitments to their work at women’s organizations, and to understand the richness of
activism in women’s lives. The conversations with the women of colour revealed that
they actively brought their commitments to antiracist feminism into all facets of their
lives in ways that were both deeply personal and political. Their commitments to social
justice, antiracism and feminist activism were more than beliefs in abstract ideals; they
were expressed actively through everyday activist practice. These women engaged in an
active and self-reflexive process of politicizing the personal and integrating these
commitments to their sense of selves, everyday routines and choices, and their
relationships.
As subsequent chapters also show, women of colour’s political commitments
were socially organized through engagement with antiracist feminist activism within and
across women’s organizations. A close examination of women of colour’s commitment to
antiracist feminist activism reveals how they actively made personal their political
commitments. Moreover, this chapter shows how women put into practice their antiracist
feminist activism in ways that took time and effort. Furthermore, this chapter highlights
the degree to which women’s politicized commitments were integral to their identities,
subjectivities and experience as racialized women. However, before delving into this
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analysis, a short note on commitment and social movements is necessary for further
setting the context of my study.
Social movement literature highlights the centrality of activist commitment to the
production and sustenance of a social movement (Becker, 1960; Glass, 2009; Downton
and Wehr, 1998; Hunt and Benford, 2004; Kanter, 1968; Melucci, 2003; Zurcher and
Snow, 1981). For example, in an early social movement text, Kanter (1968) defines “a
person’s willingness to carry out the requirements of a pattern of social action [within
social systems such as organizations] because he or she sees it as stemming from his or
her own basic nature as a person” (p. 502). However, most contemporary social
movement theorists focus on collective identity and see commitment as part of collective
identity (for example, see Glass, 2009; Hunt and Benford, 2004; Melucci, 2003). Much of
the academic work looking at the notion of commitment focuses on understanding why
social movement actors choose to enter into, and continue working with, social
movement organizations and collective action (see for example, Becker, 1960 and
Kanter, 1968). This literature also focuses on the personal attributes and experience of
activists (see, for example, Downton and Wehr, 1998; Smith, K., 2011; Whittier, 1997),
including the implications of activism on “the personal” (see, for example, Jetter, Orlick
and Taylor, 1997; McComiskey, 2002; Morgen, 1995; Simonds, 1996; Srivastava, 2002;
Todd, 2002; and Whittier, 1997).
As the women’s accounts of their activism in my research showed, women’s
commitments to antiracist feminist politics were personal, and their so-called “personal”
lives were political. The slogan, “the personal is political” (Hanisch, 1969/2006; Lee,
2007; Siegel, 2001), while historically and politically significant, does not quite capture
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all the complexities of activism in women’s lives, nor does it address the work that
women of colour do in intertwining their politics within their lives (see for example,
Glass 2009 who describes the “identity work” of feminist activists). Notably, consistent
with feminist literature which highlights the interrelatedness between politicized practice
and women’s everyday lives ( Alexander and Mohanty, 2001; Bannerji,1995; Brah, 1996;
Hanisch, 1969/2006; Hill Collins, 2000; Kohli, 1993; Ku, 2003; Lee, 2007; Morgen,
1995; Narayan, 1997; Ng, 1998; Siegel, 2002; Simonds, 1996; Smith, K., 2011;
Srivastava, 2002; Sudbury, 1998; Wing, 1997), some feminist organizational theorists
have argued for a nuanced look at the ways emotions and commitment are linked within
political praxis (Morgen, 1995; Reger, 2004; Simonds, 1996; Srivastava, 2002; Sudbury,
1998).
Morgen (1995), for example, argues that the “politics of feeling” are key
dimensions of activist commitment through her ethnographic study of feminist, class-
based, and antiracist activisms in women’s health organizations. For Morgen, political
commitments, which are tied to women’s subjectivities, are rooted in the experience of
injustice and oppression. She writes that:
[P]olitical activists are motivated by political ideologies, but they are also driven by political commitments and feelings that include anger and other emotions rooted in the experiences of oppression and injustice... (p. 228).
Similarly, for the women of colour who took part in my study, antiracist feminism was
more than just a “job” (Simonds, 1996, p. 13; Sudbury, 1998; Transken, 1998) and they
actively politicized the personal and personalized the political.
Antiracist feminist activism allowed women to bring into negotiation the
complexities and contradictions of their identities, subjectivities, and experiences, all of
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which are dialectically constituted through social relations (Brah, 2001). Brah (1996,
2001) argues that, paradoxically, it is only through discourses of difference that
politicized identities and subjectivities are formed to allow for collective mobilization. As
such, women’s politicized identities as antiracist feminist activists cannot be seen as
separate from their various intersecting identities. Furthermore, the participants’
commitments to antiracist feminism were racialized and gendered insofar as women’s
identities as women of colour informed their responsibility to act to alleviate racism,
sexism and other relations of oppression. Each participant’s identities (for example, as a
Black woman from the Caribbean or as an intersexed person), subjectivities (for example,
feelings of belonging with other ethnoracial communities), experience (for example, of
racialized discrimination or of gendered sexualization), and historically and
institutionally-mediated social relations (for example, heteropatriarchy within schooling)
were not separate from their commitments to antiracist feminist activism. In particular,
the women’s identification with antiracist feminist activism was often integrated with
their very identities and experiences as a result of being positioned within relations of
race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, and disability. These commitments were
articulated through intersectional relations of oppression and privilege, and, as I show in
the latter chapters of this dissertation, produced a politicized form of accountability
through which women’s activism was enacted.
This chapter draws on the women’s accounts of their lives to show their work of
politicizing their everyday activities. It examines how women of colour brought antiracist
feminism to their definitions of self, to decision making and to personal relationships.
The first section shows how the women’s sense of self was closely tied to their
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commitments to social justice. The second section explores how these commitments
affected women’s choices, particularly how they chose to spend their time and energy.
The third section describes the ways women negotiated acceptance of their commitments
within their relationships with family. The fourth section discusses women’s everyday
work of bringing their commitments to women’s organizations. I describe how women of
colour actively brought their commitments to social justice into their everyday lives in
ways that take up time, energy, and material resources.
Commitment and Sense of Self
The research participants relayed a sense that social justice, activism, antiracism, and
feminism were inseparable from their sense of self and their identities. The integration of
the personal and political was conveyed in the research participants’ reflections on the
importance of antiracist feminist practice to their identities and subjectivities. The women
described a myriad of ways they identified with antiracism, feminism, and activism. In
this sense, the women’s political commitment to antiracist feminist practice was felt as
personal. Importantly, their very sense of self was closely tied to their activist beliefs and
commitments (see Brah, 2001; Kanter, 1968; Barry, 2007; Holeman, 2007; McComiskey,
2002; Todd, 2002). The women’s accounts revealed this personal commitment in a
variety of ways, particularly through the connections they made between their
commitments to social justice and their identities, personal histories, analysis and feelings
of responsibility to make social change.
“Activism is me”
Some women described antiracist feminist practice as central to their very sense of self in
very direct terms. For example, when asked to draw a family chart, Lodge, a front-line
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shelter worker and shift supervisor, drew herself at the centre in a “me circle” and drew
her family members who were “most dear” in concentric circles around the “me circle” to
signify those who were most important to her. She then wrote the names of her children,
her partner, parents, and extended family, each at variable distances from the circle that
represented her. After some thought, Lodge also wrote the name of the manager of the
shelter at which she worked in her representation of family. She explained that her
manager was an integral part of her life, and someone that she considered a part of her
family.
Moreover, when asked where she would put her activist work in relation to her
family chart, Lodge’s answer showed how closely she identified with her activist work:
So I guess I put my work in this in the sense of like what that means to me. I’ll think I’ll put it – oh gosh – it’s bad (laughing) [pausing to think]. I’m going to put my work like [pause] close…I think my work means a lot to me... [Pause]. My work is me – really.
Lodge’s process of deciding where to put her activism in the circle was revealing as well.
Her statement, “oh gosh – it’s bad” and her several pauses relayed a sense of discomfort
at the realization that she so closely identified with her work, that it was her, and how she
positioned her work so close to her, even closer than her family members.23 Although not
all the women asserted that “my work is me,” they all closely and personally identified
with their political commitment to antiracist feminist work.
Like Lodge, Mishka was deeply invested in her activist work, both as a result of
her paid work as the director of a homeless women’s drop-in centre and through her
(unpaid) involvement as a founding member of a provincial advocacy group for
23 I take this up again later in this chapter.
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linguistically and racially minoritized women. In reflecting on how her work affected her
life, Mishka revealed that it was central.
Ça prend toute ma vie... Et euh, ça prend énormément de la place dans ma vie. Beaucoup, beaucoup de place... [It takes my whole life... And it takes an enormous place in my life. A lot, a lot of place...]
Mishka not only referred to the actual time, energy and physical space that she used
through her involvement with these organizations, but also the importance of her
commitment to social justice and activist work. The centrality of this commitment to
social justice for Mishka was evident as she spoke about how her work took up her whole
life.
Theta, an assistant director of a shelter, spoke about how antiracism was a key
part of her survival. She recounted her experience at an antioppression workshop where
she was asked to reflect on the meaning of antiracism:
[The facilitator] asked a question “what does antiracism, antioppression mean for you?”, and went around the room … And I said, “It’s about my survival.” Like, antiracism and antioppression is essential to my survival. For me I can’t live with racism around me unless I have these things to protect me. Like the knowledge on how – to protect me and to help protect other people. So the practice and the beliefs and the values that are antiracist are really essential to me surviving.
For Theta, then, antiracist and feminist values, knowledge, and practice were extremely
personal and important for protecting herself and others from racism and oppression in
her everyday life. She relayed the importance of antiracism, not just in the context of
women’s and social service organizations, but to her very security. She clearly connected
her politicized beliefs and practices in combatting racism to how these were manifest
throughout her life.
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Personal biographies and commitment
Many women connected their commitment to social justice to early memories of their
families and communities – a practice also common in feminist academic literature
(Blackford, 1998; Bobb-Smith, 1998; Ku, 2003; Mohanty, 1998; Narayan, 1997; Smith,
K., 2011; Whittier, 1997; see also, Abbey and O’Reilly, 1998; Childers, 1998; Fox, 1998;
Hill Collins, 2000; James, S., 1993; Jenkins, 1998; Jetter, Orleck and Taylor, 1997;
McComiskey, 2002; Sudbury, 1998; Yeoman, 1998) and to other “meaningful life
experiences” (Smith, K., 2011, p. 87). In particular, antiracist feminist commitment was
tied explicitly to the research participant’s early biographies of racialization, gendering,
and other intersecting relations of oppression. From this perspective, antiracist feminist
activist commitment, thus, cannot be understood outside of relations of oppression.
Theta, for example, who identified as biracial, talked about how her early experiences of
racism occurred within her family. She said that her family denied issues of race and
racism, which had made antiracism both important in her life and challenging to put into
practice:
Yes, well my mother perpetuates racism, my – so does my father and brother... And then how, how to live outside of that – or to be a member of family like that and to not do that. It’s a challenge.
Other participants made similar observations regarding the connections between their
pasts and early family relationships to their present social justice beliefs and values. This
was particularly poignant in showing the importance of social justice work as central and
integral to whom they were.
Through their early experiences, often as youth, women of colour developed their
social justice analysis (see Smith, K., 2011). Theta, for example, described how
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witnessing her parents’ inequitable divorce and her brother’s teasing about her femininity
allowed her to become conscious of herself as a girl and young woman. She spoke at
length of how this affected her consciousness as a feminist, and how it was this analysis
that she brought to her work: “I came in [to this work] with a feminist analysis to my
work… I was very clearly definitively feminist by the time I was 17 and I realized that.”
In similar fashion, Cee, a director of a women’s shelter, spoke at length about how her
father’s union organizing in the Caribbean made an impact on her understanding of
activism. With pride, she talked about how her father’s union activism shut down “the
whole island” and also talked about the tensions within her family of origin around
activism. In making links between her father’s union activities and her own activism and
work, she made explicit the importance of activism to herself that was a result of early
childhood experiences.
Embodying social justice
One woman, while uncomfortable with the “activist label,” spoke about embodying
activist values. Maria, a board member of a sexual assault centre, in contrast to the other
participants, was ambivalent about identifying as feminist or antiracist, or for that matter,
as an activist, despite her long-standing involvement with shelters and sexual assault
centres.
It’s interesting, though I find that, that sense of needing to identify ...as a feminist...I don’t think the terminology comes up and I actually find, you know, the older I get and I just feel like it’s less relevant for me...
She talked about how feminism and antiracism was more than a label or identity, but as
an embodied analysis:
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I feel like I’ve embodied the values... I think it just becomes part of you. It does become something that is a little bit more intrinsic, I think... So I mean I think having that analysis, and I think once you have that analysis, it doesn’t leave you.
Despite expressing her ambivalence about being labelling herself a feminist, Maria’s
discussion of how her analysis was embodied clearly captured the centrality, indeed the
“intrinsic” nature, of her commitments to feminist analysis.
Another feature of Maria’s reflection was the degree to which she felt responsible
to antiracist and feminist practice.
I mean I think that’s the good thing about knowledge. I mean now you’ve got this knowledge, this understanding and the flip-side of that is that ignorance is bliss. I mean if you don’t have this analysis then you don’t really have to care about it.
Like other women, Maria’s feeling of responsibility to social change was important.
Women of colour often talked about how their commitments to social change meant that
they were compelled towards social justice practice.
The women’s commitments to antiracism, feminism, and social justice were
central to their sense of self. Women of colour actively connected their identities,
personal histories, analyses, and feelings of responsibility to their activism. The next
section shifts from exploring the ways women expressed the inseparability of their
antiracism commitments to their sense of self to investigating how these commitments to
antiracism were activated in women’s everyday choices.
Commitments and Everyday Choices
The women described how they integrated their commitment to antiracism, feminism and
social justice in their lives through their everyday choices (see also Downton and Wehr,
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1998; McComiskey, 2002; Melucci, 2003; Whittier, 1997). They spoke at length and with
ease about how the choices that they made in their everyday lives were part of their
commitments to putting their beliefs into practice. The women said their decisions around
how to spend their time and energy was shaped by their social justice commitments. This
was evident through their accounts of the range of places into which they brought their
commitments, the complexity of their decision-making process and the detailed and
passionate ways they discussed how they made everyday decisions.
Downton and Wehr’s (1998) research on activist commitment and sustained
pacifist commitment, or what they call “persistent pacifism,” was consistent with the
findings of my research. Downton and Wehr argue that activist commitment meant that
peace activists creatively organized their lives so that they could stay politically active.
For instance, they chose jobs that gave them flexibility in their schedule and sometimes
this meant less remuneration; or, some activists postponed marriage or were living in a
peace commune, which meant that some responsibilities were shared freeing up time for
peace activism (Downton and Wehr, 1998). These choices showed the degree to which
peace activism intertwined with activists’ everyday lives.
In the context of the present study, an exploration of the participants’ choices
revealed that commitments to antiracism, feminism and social justice were made active in
their everyday lives. Significantly, women spoke about the ways they decided on their
everyday activities, indicating that their choices were filtered through their commitments
to activism. These choices ranged from the significant (whether to have children and
what sort of work to do) to the seemingly mundane (such as clothing, leisure activities,
and food purchases). Although each research participant spoke about the varied and
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decidedly political ways they brought forward their commitments to social justice in their
choices, it was clear that they put their ideals into practice through these sorts of everyday
decisions as well. That is, through seemingly pedestrian, but conscious decision-making
processes and choices these women of colour made personal their political beliefs.
The women identified their choice to work in women’s organizations as part of
their enactment of their commitment to social justice. They spoke about how their choice
to work within women’s organizations had financial, temporal, and emotional costs; costs
that were indicative of the importance of their commitment to social justice, feminism,
and antiracism. In particular, the women discussed how their choice to work within
women’s organizations had financial repercussions, not only for themselves, but also
their families (see also Downton and Wehr, 1998).
Tuffy, a director of a women’s service organization, spoke about how she wanted
to work in a women’s organizations, despite the fact that managers working in women’s
social service sector were often under-paid relative to other sectors. She noted:
One does not do this work to get rich, by any stretch of the imagination. And there’s sometimes that I think if I had made other choices around career, I would be better prepared financially when [my children] march off to university… but you know I still am not regretful of the choices that I have made. One of my managers here has a sister in senior management at a bank and she frequently says that you know her sister works about a tenth of what I do and makes about ten times more money. And she uses that as an example of how inequitable our society is. But I wouldn’t want to be her sister and I don’t have any aspirations to be rich – I want to be comfortable and I am.
Similarly, for other research participants, the commitment to social justice meant that
they chose to remain in tenuous as well as relatively low-paying jobs.
Several women said their choices to remain in activist work had serious financial
implications for other facets of their lives and financial dependence. Soni, for example, a
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director of a sexual assault centre, spoke about the economic insecurity of remaining in
the non-profit sector:
But again because of the work that I’m in – in the non-profit, it’s very non-secure field, you know, those are definitely economic, economic concerns that are at the forefront in terms of that, you know. I mean having chosen the field – not very profitable field. I mean I’m not here for the big bucks I mean [laughs], clearly right? [laughs]
Soni’s work as a director was not a permanent position, and she had worked in a number
of women’s organizations in contract, or “non-secure” positions. Her somewhat glib
comment and laughter, that she was not in this field “for the big bucks,” was an allusion
to her commitment to work in the non-profit sector doing antiracist feminist work despite
such financial limitations.
Moreover, Soni’s choice to work in this field meant that she was more dependent
on her family.
But, you know, I’m not making big bucks, and that is a reality in my life that… impacts my dependency on my family, impacts my dependency on my partner, my male partner who’s in [a lucrative] industry who’s, you know, making six figures… I mean if I was making six figures, my family chart may look differently, you know, and who I ally with and who’s in my inner circle might be different as right so.
She alluded to the graphic representation I asked her to draw when she described her
family, and suggested that those she considered family might have been slightly different
if she was not an activist, or if she had been more financially secure. In particular, she
suggested that had she made more money in her activist work, she might not have relied
so heavily on male members of her family, and, instead, developed closer ties with other
activists.
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Some of the women also discussed the advantages of having paid employment on
their ability to work on other activist and community projects. Kimberley spoke about
how, although she did not make a lot of money as a part-time community educator, her
paid work allowed her to offer her time and energy, as well as her apartment, as space for
her work with other “grassroots” women’s organizations:
This was my first full-time job, the first solid job for me that corresponded with my political concerns. So that it is the most significant part [laughs] because I need money…I’m only here 4 days a week… So I have the privilege of getting paid from this work, I’m trying to share my resources from this work with others, through volunteering and being involved and contributing to other grassroots initiatives without any funding. I have a two-bedroom apartment and I often open it up for gatherings to support other grassroots initiatives.
Kimberley saw her paid work as an opportunity to work to enact her commitments to
feminism, antiracism, and social justice. Even though her position was only part-time, she
was able to use her resources in ways which further supported her commitment to
grassroots organizations. Thus, having paid employment in line with her “political
concerns” facilitated other forms of activism with racialized communities.
Choices around family
Several participants spoke about how their choice to become parents was related to their
life circumstances; that is, whether they would have children and when to have children,
were contingent on their activist work (see Downton and Wehr, 1998; McComiskey,
2002; Sudbury, 1998). Soni spoke about how her choice to work as an activist had
implications on whether, when and under what conditions, she would choose to have
children. Soni, Kimberly, and Sharmila all said that children would limit the amount of
time that they would be able to give to activism and paid work. Mishka, similarly,
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decided that she was not interested in having children of her own because it would mean
that she could not spend time working with community organizations, both in paid work
and as a volunteer.
Freddy, a community educator, spoke about how working as an activist in
women’s organizations with low pay affected her choice to have children. Freddy lived
with her two children and spouse. She talked about how her marriage allowed her some
financial freedom to have both children and to continue her activist work:
If I hadn’t, I hadn’t always had someone to support me - have a second income – I … would not have had children, would not have chosen to have children cause I couldn’t afford them and, you know, continue doing this work you know. And you’re kind of hanging on and living from pay cheque to pay cheque – I think the fact that I actually – I - as one of my colleagues says, “you married very well.” So I have married well, I don’t think I really would be able to do this – I live a very nice life.
When asked whether she would have continued the work if she had not, as she put it
“married well,” she answered in the affirmative.
Yes, I think I would have still chosen to have done this work but I think that I would have had to have lived in some form of very gentile poverty to keep on doing this work.
Freddy clearly connected her commitments to social justice and the life choices she
made.
Some women described how their commitments to justice influenced their
parenting styles. Freddy spoke about how her family’s needs for childcare needed to be
balanced with her political commitments. She began by talking about the difficulties
raising children on her own:
I think that part of it too is that you know, people get into this whole thing, it takes a village to raise a kid ... [I don’t have family close by] and neither
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does my husband. And it’s interesting too because when we had an opportunity to move back to ... our home town. But, last September, where we actually had family around and all I could think of was now we’re managing eight other people to help us look after our kids and it’s just easier doing it on our own than managing other people – you know.
Freddy went on to explain why it was particularly difficult for her and her husband to rely
on family support for childcare, despite her understanding that it took “a village” to raise
children:
Also, I mean you have different generations of people who have different ways of raising kids and you know. I think part of it is what drives me crazy about my family and how they view my kids is that – they just spoil them to death – and it drives me nuts, you know? “You don’t need to buy my children more clothes, you don’t need to do this, you don’t need to do that”...I always said [to] my Chinese aunties and my extended family that retail is not a recreational activity and they say like this is their whole life – they go out and they shop... And my father in-law... he’s kinda of like watching you know, reality TV shows right. You know, “I don’t think my children really need to watch American Idol”... “I don’t think my children ever watch television”... My kids are in the tyranny of the play date and every activity known to man – at least with my kids – these are not activities that I make them do – they choose them. You know, they ask to do these activities.
Freddy’s comment that her and her partner’s families had “different ways of raising
children” was another example about the ways Freddy brought her political commitments
into her parenting.
Interestingly, Freddy’s critique of her aunt’s propensity to shop and her father-in-
law’s TV-watching habits, were not just a comment on different ways of doing things,
but also exemplified the ways Freddy negotiated her own political commitments to
reducing her children’s exposure to consumerism, for example. As well, Freddy’s last
comment that her children were busy with play dates and activities that they chose was
also significant. In addition to an implicit critique about shopping and TV-watching,
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Freddy’s account offered a resolution to what may be appropriate leisure activities,
namely “play dates” and “activities.”
Choices around everyday activities
The activists that I spoke with discussed the multitudinous ways their commitments to
social justice affected seemingly mundane everyday decisions that involved family
members. Francine, a community outreach worker and past-board member of a woman’s
shelter spoke about how most of her social life revolved around her family and her work.
She reflected on why she chose not to spend very much time with her friends:
I think primarily it’s ur that it’s not just not my character – for example I can’t imagine spending half an hour or hour talking on the phone with somebody who isn’t my partner. I think also it’s a function of where I put my time and that is another, I guess, for me anyway, causality of being an activist that is I’m spending all my time around my work, my different work, my paid job, extending into my evenings and then on top of that have various volunteer things.
Several women talked about the ways their work affected their needs and rituals
around physical and emotional health. Soni, in particular, tied together not only her need
to develop more intentional self-care routines in her life but also how her politicized
analysis affected the sorts of leisure activities she wanted to engage in:
I think [that my activism has] impacted on my personal life because I didn’t have the self-care implemented as much as I would need. So I think I learned that along the way... And also what’s happening is change is happening but also you’re seeing at the same time – you’re seeing – I can’t watch Julia Roberts any more, I can’t – like things you could do with your friends, you know, you’re stressed ... you go watch a movie with your friends, you could do that, [but] those things are a lot of work because you’re watching Julia Roberts and you’re like, “Oh my god, look at the patriarchy, look at the racism, and look at the power.” And it’s making you angry, so it’s not really self-care right?
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Soni’s description of why she couldn’t watch “Julia Roberts any more” provided insights
about the degree to which activist commitments were integrated in her choices about
leisure, as well as connections with friends and self-care. Although her need for self-care
and her connections with friends were important, her politicized reaction to certain sorts
of popular movies made it impossible for her to enjoy certain sorts of activities.
Soni was also adept at explaining how her commitments to social justice and
activist work permeated other activities, and her accounts also clearly highlighted the
intertwined nature of her identities as a Muslim, South Asian, and woman of colour. For
example, Soni chose to dedicate much of her time educating herself about local and
global affairs related to women and Muslim women. When asked to describe an actual
workday, Soni gave a rather dense answer that showed how something as mundane as
getting ready for work was oriented towards her commitments to antiracism, feminism,
and social justice:
So I usually get up very early in the morning. I get up usually around five. I read the newspaper, I turn on the radio, because I do public ed [education], you know, I’m the media contact person. Anyone can contact me anytime of the day so I need to be aware. And it’s just something that I keep aware – so anytime there’s murders, you know, things like that – I’m on it. You know I’m always looking for unfortunately, you know the way, you know, we get our issues on the agenda. If a woman’s been raped and murdered the night before, then I go on the news, you know, I’m going to be in there getting rape on the agenda and, you know, sort of utilizing that so, you know, I read and I, you know, I connect, of course, I’m very connected to what’s happening globally in terms of war – Muslim women, you know, and all of that so, you know, I read the newspaper, then I commute an hour to work and listen to the same news that I read, I listen it on the radio.
Soni’s paid work required her to be aware of current news items, so her day began with
becoming aware of everyday events related to sexual assault. Her commitments to
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antiviolence advocacy also included her commitments to “Muslim women” in ways
which connected her antiracist and feminist concerns.
Soni’s self-understanding as a racialized antiracist feminist woman meant that she
continually made choices to further integrate her activism within many facets of her life.
Another example was when Soni described how she made choices about dressing for
work:
And I oh so I get up in the morning and do that I very rarely – I eat breakfast, you know, I mean I grab a coffee and muffin or bagel or something and, you know, a shower I put my clothes on. The other thing about actually working in this [suburban] region is that, you know, I know that I can’t walk into a meeting wearing saris. Can’t walk into them wearing shalwar kameez, you know? I have to be very careful about how I dress. I dress fairly Western to begin with so that’s not much of a personal life change for me, but I know it’s something I’m definitely conscious of. I have to look professional. It’s something that I can’t do because although nobody would verbally, you know, admit that, but the way you’re treated and the way that you’re tokenized and that kind of thing.
For Soni, then, wearing the appropriate clothes was important if she was to be seen as a
credible activist. She saw her decision on whether or not she was going to wear Western
outfits or a sari or a shalwar kameez (South Asian outfits) as being part of looking
“professional” and being taken seriously.
And … so in terms of deciding on what clothes to wear … I mean if I’m going to be on the news that day, you know, I mean it’s in our policy to dress appropriately. To me a woman wearing a sari looks just as professional – actually more professional than somebody wearing, you know, some suit that they bought… Certainly when I was working in [an urban city] it wasn’t the same thing I had to be concerned about, you know, I could wear whatever it was – so those things I’m concerned about here when I’m going to meetings [in this region]… I have to consider my dress, because I’m the face of the organization, so that face has to look good.
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Soni’s restatement or explanation of the idea of “professional” showed the degree to
which her analysis guided not only what she did, but also what she said. The choices that
Soni made, as well as the complex way she made explicit her decision making, are a
feature of women’s enactment of their commitments.
The women’s choices of where to work, where they could not work, where to
live, who to involve in their children’s parenting, how to parent, what leisure activities
they might engage in, and what to wear were linked to their commitment to social justice,
feminism and antiracism. These commitments were made active; that is, they were
enacted through women’s decision-making processes—women of colour considered the
implications of their choices to their politicized beliefs and identities. Through their
choices, then, women of colour connected their commitments to social justice with their
everyday practices.
Negotiating Acceptance of Activism
The women discussed, at length at times, their commitments to social justice vis-à-vis
their personal relationships with their children, parents, siblings, partners, and extended
family/friend networks (see Downton and Wehr, 1998; Todd, 2002). In their discussion
on activist commitment, Downton and Wehr (1998) suggest that support from family and
friends, as well as nurturing positive relationships with fellow activists were key factors
in sustaining activist identity. Similarly, Todd (2002) discusses the salience of friendship
in the lives of feminist community organizers. Throughout their accounts, the participants
in my research study described how they negotiated acceptance of their feminist and
antiracist ideals with those whom they had significant personal relationships. Sometimes
the women found support from their partners, parents, children, siblings, and close
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friends; many had to deal with resistance. Women of colour’s everyday accounts showed
how the women negotiated their commitments to social justice in three ways: through
developing a shared understanding of social justice ideals, by building on common family
goals and by engaging in activities that bridged their personal relationships with their
activism. They negotiated these commitments in ways that connected the personal and
political, thus illustrating another way in which the women lived out their commitment to
social justice.
Creating shared understanding of social justice work
The women worked hard to bring their feminist and antiracist analysis to their
relationships, and doing so in ways that built shared understanding amongst their family
members. Some of the women spoke about how they directly taught significant others in
their lives about their politicized beliefs. Consistent with feminist literature on mothering
as a site of activism (Abbey and O’Reilly, 1998; Bobb-Smith, 1998; Chandler, 1998; Hill
Collins, 2000; James, S., 1993; Jenkins, 1998; Jetter, Orleck and Taylor, 1997;
McComiskey, 2002; Narayan, 1997; Sudbury, 1998; Yeoman, 1998), the research
participants often integrated social justice ideals within their parenting work.
Tuffy, for example, proudly discussed the ways her parenting of two teenage boys
was imbued with certain democratic values and attitudes about women:
You know, my sons and I often talk about my work. They know about working with homeless and battered women. They even tell their teachers and friends about it. I’ve always taught my sons to be respectful to women. Even when my boys were young, I had the basketball net right outside the kitchen window so that I could hear them.
Once, my [younger son] and his friends were talking about wearing a “wife-beater shirt” [an undershirt without sleeves] and I stopped them right there and told them that this was disrespectful, and I wasn’t going to hear more of that [sort of] talk … But you know, I’ve never had any
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problems with my sons treating people with respect, especially women. My [younger son]’s former girlfriend once told me that he was very gentleman-like. So I know that I’ve raised them right on that note.
Like Tuffy, Catherine, a front-line shelter worker, actively taught her child about
her antiviolence work. For her that was an activist act.
And for my son to, he’s amazingly a sensitive child for boy. He knows that violence is not okay. And this is the first year we got our water toy [referring to water gun]. Cause he knows that guns are bad and that mom helps kids [Son is present in the room at this point]… He’s an amazing child. He knows that some shows are bad, too much violence…
The women also spoke about how discussion and conflict with family members were key
strategies for negotiating their commitments.
Catherine spoke about how she stood up to critiques of her feminist parenting by
family members and friends:
And now I’m not hesitant to tell anybody who tells me how I should raise my son and why he shouldn’t be allowed to do certain things, and I’m pretty clear why I believe the way I do. And when the time comes, and he grows up we’ll see what happens, I’ll teach him my best. That’s what my big focus is. ‘Cause a lot of people seem to be like [whispering], “You’re raising him too feminist.” Too feminist. “He’s going to be this,” and “he’s going to be that”…”he’s going to be too feminine,” “he’s going to be gay…”
Catherine’s allusion to the fears of her family and friends that her son would be “too
feminist,” “too feminine” or “gay” was also an instance of negotiation of her commitment
to an intersectional feminism.
In reflecting on the importance of her work, Catherine talked about how she
brought her activist work home. Although she spoke about how her extended family,
particularly her “in-laws” were not very supportive of her work, she also spoke about
how the work she did was clearly part of who she was. She also spoke about how her son
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often helped her to negotiate acceptance of her commitments to feminism and social
justice:
My work is part of who I am. It’s just given – people know me and they know where I stand. I have no two sides to me. My work is just there, like, talking to like my family and all that about some of the women’s issue and it overlaps [with my parents and friends]. But with my in-laws it’s different. It’s very rare I can talk to them ‘cause they are very old fashioned people. I think they realize it’s important, ‘cause my son had made a big difference, he’ll say ‘Mumma does awesome work, like she helps people.’ But they think that women [who leave their abusive husbands] just don’t like their marriage, they leave their husband, they just go. But then I talk about what actually happens and they listen a little bit but I still don’t talk much about it as much as I do to my parents.
For Catherine, not only was her family’s acceptance of her work and politics important to
her and her son, but it also served as an opportunity to enact her politicized visions.
Aj, a shelter worker and director of an ethnoracial counselling centre, spoke about
her husband’s reactions to her complaint that their cultural community group did not
recognize or include women during their events:
Okay that’s what affects me a lot, sometimes I get hyper, I have to hold down myself…My husband says, “Oh this women’s thing has gotten into your head!” Sometimes I make remarks to these men from my community, without biting my tongue! [laughing] He says, “What will they think of me?”, you know that kind of thing... Because even last weekend, I went somewhere [with my husband], like I’m from a culture attaches more importance to men… I was sitting at this event on Saturday and it was totally men. And I said to my husband, and some men sitting with us, I said, “How come there is only men? How come there is no women up there?” But my husband said nothing. And whenever I say anything, he says, “It’s the way our culture is, that’s the way they are. And I say, “and they never change!”… It’s like they always recognize men – it happens all the time. The mentality, they don’t recognize women as much, only men, they recognize all the time…
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Although Aj’s husband complained about her feminist beliefs, Aj described how
her work influenced his thinking about women’s involvement and his work within an
ethnoracial community group:
In fact, when my husband organizes events he does recognize women, and he also raises awareness of that. When he was the president [of the cultural community group], he used to include women and he always said to them, “We have to do that… You have to, push for women equality, you know? So you have to keep that in mind when selecting board of directors.” Because he recruited both men and women on the board. And which was not the practice in the past, you know. So he was saying, “okay you have to do this because it’s not good to present a total group only men, you have to include women.” And he says that I influenced him. Because he was saying in the past before he met me, he wasn’t saying too much attention to women’s issues, but then after you know, he’s prepared to analyze them you know? He’s sensitized on that.
Similarly, other women described having to work within such ambivalent spaces.
Cee negotiated acceptance of her work, particularly with her mother who was less
understanding of Cee’s work than her father was.
My mother never understood. My mother always referred to us as a group of libbers… I think she was [a feminist] and she didn’t know it. Right? And I took a lot of my passion around wanting to help people— I think I got from mum.
Cee connected her passion to helping people as coming from her mother, although her
mother did not ever quite understand her activist work. Her mother often referred to Cee
as a “libber,” in disparaging ways, and would repeatedly ask her to explain her work:
Tell me again? Now, why do you find it necessary to do that [go on marches]? And what do you hope to gain for that?”… So my mum was very well aware of what it is we did and, you know, we would have to go through this whole long story of about what does that mean and what really happens there.
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Cee said she would explain her work in calm and measured ways and continue to give her
information about her activities. Continuing to teach her mother about her work was a
way for Cee to negotiate acceptance.
Ironically, when Cee’s mother was dying, she used Cee’s commitments to social
justice as a warning to the doctor: Cee’s mother told the doctor to be careful about
treading on her right to make decisions for herself, because her daughter, Cee, was a
“libber” who fought for people’s rights:
Yeah, I showed up at the hospital, and when I showed up, she looked at the doctor who was in and she said, “Do you see her? That’s my daughter, that’s the libber that I told you about. And she is here to tell you that there will be no surgery. Tell him, tell him, tell him, there’ll be no surgery.” And I said to him, “Well, there’ll be no surgery.”
Cee’s active work of negotiating acceptance, ambivalent as it was, is characteristic of
many of the research participants’ stories. By actively engaging their families in
discussion about their work, women of colour activists negotiated space in their families.
Building on family goals
Families of activists did not always support the women’s political and personal choices,
but often still supported their work because of common family goals. For example,
although Theta’s mother did not think that her daughter should be an “antiracist” or
“activist,” she still provided childcare for her grandchild. In this context, she supported
her daughter’s choice in paid work, and in many ways, her daughter’s mobility within the
organization from front-line worker to community networker to assistant director of the
shelter (her position at the time of the interview).
Many of the women were able to garner support for their commitments to social
justice as their family members witnessed their success in their fields. Catherine, for
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example, had been estranged from her parents because of past conflicts around issues of
marriage, religion, sexuality and freedom from family norms (see also Sudbury, 1998).
Initially, Catherine’s parents saw her work at the shelter as part of her rebellion, and,
through conversations, Catherine was able to develop some understanding with her
parents. As she noted during the interview process:
My parents are coming around to understand what [my work] is. They used to say before, “It’s a family issue,” but then they saw the work I do and now they understand better. They used to think, “It’s not your problem, something happens in the house, the girl needs to stay there, they need to figure things out.” But now my parents see what I’ve done and what I do, they are very active talking about it too, like what is wrong, and it’s not okay and there’s help for you and you can get help and that kind of stuff.
As her parents began to see her profile rise in their own ethnoracial and geographic
communities, they began to accept her feminist work.
I think it’s getting into a conversation. And I think – in the community, because I’m a so well-known face in the community and in a lot of agencies and Dad has worked with them [in the role of ethnoracial community liaison]. “You’re Catherine’s parents? We know her!” And it’s like, “Yeah,” and he gets really proud, ’cause all of a sudden, people in the community health centre and all these big agencies know who their daughter is. Like, wow. And I was in the paper a few times so it’s like wow so I they, my dad, my parents carry a lot of pride in that.
In other cases, the women negotiated acceptance based on ethnocultural values.
Sharmila’s mother also had reservations about her daughter’s “activist” choices, but
through time and discussion, began to support and be proud of her activist choices:
My parents thought I was crazy. They felt, “”Why are you working? Like why are you – like you’re in high school – you’re trying to do well and you’re volunteering at a human rights group – you’re going to demos? Like what is this about?” They couldn’t get it. They couldn’t get it... They didn’t stop me – but they didn’t understand why I was doing that, why I was choosing to do that … And now I think over years, my mother looks back and she’s been very proud of the work I’ve done right? She can look
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back at it with pride, but back then, she didn’t understand it. But as someone who’s not an activist, but as someone who isn’t politically active – she didn’t see the importance I felt there was. She didn’t understand why it was important. Because her world is either that of you know “who’s getting married,” “let’s go buy this,” you know. Like that’s her world.
Sharmila said she negotiated this support through conversations about her “Indian-ness”
and by describing her work within a women’s organization in terms that allowed her
family to be supportive.
In addition, Sharmila relayed the extent to which her activism was tied to her
identity as a racialized woman. She described how her family came to accept her life
choices, including her decision to be an activist. Her mother often lamented that she had
not chosen to live her life as a married, middle-class Canadian-Indian woman. In
response, Sharmila pointed out that she was more “South Asian” than some community
members who married men of similar cultural and religious backgrounds. She spoke
about how her political commitments to antiracism compelled her to relearn her language
of origin or to wear South Asian clothing.
I always kept very close ties to communities – like I speak the language – not great – but I’ve made an effort to speak it. I’ve gone to India many times. … I wear shalwar kameez. I cook Indian – I’m probably more South Asian than some of my South Asian friends who’ve gone off and married and are in the suburbs. I watch Hindi films – I know more about you know South Asian culture. And this is what kills me, is that you know there’s this notion that if you’re a lesbian and an activist, you’re not South Asian – you’ve abandoned your culture – and I’ve said to my mother so many times, “I’m more South Asian than a lot of these people” – with children, her friends’ children. She says, “I know. I actually do know that and I can see that.” Right? It’s a real contradiction.
Although Sharmila’s mother acknowledged that she was undoubtedly South Asian and
more so than many in her community, it remained a contradiction.
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However, through her achievements, and through remaining close to her South
Asian cultural roots, Sharmila was able to negotiate acceptance of her political and
personal choices. More importantly, she did so without compromising her political and
personal commitments. Sharmila negotiated space by challenging the assumptions of
what it meant to belong as an “Indian woman.” Although activist articulations and life
choices that challenge gendered, classed and racialized assumptions of culture often
define women as not being a part of their communities of origin, Sharmila’s discussions
with her mother made the contradictions in the accepted cultural assumptions visible.
Therefore, in reclaiming parts of their culture, antiracist feminist activists renegotiate
racism and sexism to challenge the assumption that if you are a feminist and activist you
are not truly “authentic.”24
Sometimes women negotiated their commitments to social justice by forging
closer relationships with those who were the most clearly supportive of those
commitments and, at other times, by distancing themselves from those who were less
supportive. For example, most of Francine’s immediate family were involved in some
aspect of community service and political activism. Her father had been a union leader,
her brother, one sister, mother and partner were politicized. However, one of her sisters
was not supportive, and she felt that this was based on fundamentally different political
beliefs between the two. She reflected on the connection between activism and her
relationship with this particular sister:
24 Several feminists from the global south or “Third World” have discussed the ways feminism, queerness and other politicized articulations of identity are defined outside of the authentic citizen and outside of dominant definitions of nation, even politicized anticolonial ones (Alexander and Mohanty, 2001; Brah, 2001; Dutt, 1998; Hussain, 1994; Shaheed, 1998).
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It’s clear that my strongest bonds are with those family members who are involved in activism in one way or another I mean I can honestly say that my youngest sister – is someone whom I don’t have a great relationship with her. And that I struggle with issues of [my] sexual identity with her. That I struggle with her around her choice of partner and various other choices that she has made for herself and she stands out in terms of my other siblings in that she’s not engaged in anything… I don’t see activism in her life at all. We tend not to talk about our work. I guess she’d say I think – my perception is that – that she would probably think – that – I think she would be somewhat disapproving of the group of people I work with... She would be more likely to be somewhat disparaging, very judgmental.
Some women were able to negotiate their antiracist feminism by finding
common-ground through one aspect of their social justice commitments within their
personal relationships. Soni’s father, for example, resisted her feminist activism and work
to end violence against women, but nevertheless, was a source of support in her antiracist
work. While she and her father would often clash around issues of sexism and family
violence, he was an ally in discussions around leftist and race politics. Soni explored this
contradiction by noting:
My dad, he’s kind of like a male antiracist, like he is left-wing. I mean, we agree on a lot of politics. But we don’t – I mean he is, he is a man, um, his politics are impacted by that, he’s very privileged in terms of that, I mean he’s not very good at understanding sexism. He’s not there. He’s understanding racism, but he’s not there with sexism, he’s not there with homophobia and things like that, right? I mean that’s where he is sort –he’s struggling and um he’s also – he’s a patriarch – he’s struggling with sexism, he’s not there with homophobia at all. He’s struggling definitely with sexism I think because of me – and I think because of the women in my family – I think he is but he’s, you know, and he’s been abusive… there’s a kind of a tension, a tension-filled relationship there. And so he can be a source of support depending on what the context is – if we’re talking race and we’re talking about the PC’s coming back in power, if we’re talking about the war and stuff – I mean yeah, he’s an ally in that conversation. But, talking about women’s rights we’re talking about women um, you know, that’s where he – and I think he’s struggling in terms of those things.
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For Soni and her father, antiracist and “leftist” politics were easier as they were built on
intersecting identities as racialized and Muslim, as well as personal biographies of
migration, living in diasporic communities, racism, and family histories of socialist
politics. The negotiation of her feminist and antiheterosexist politics, however, was more
difficult within this relationship. Granted, Soni’s account clearly depicted that this
negotiation was active, and that the politicized discussions between father and daughter
meant that feminism and intersectional analysis of oppression was ongoing.
Bridging family and activist work
The women also often brought in their families into their activist and work activities.
Catherine’s parents, as we saw earlier, were involved in local South Asian community,
multicultural and community health organizations as volunteers and active community
members. Catherine described how her mother would talk about her work to women in
the Sikh community and counsel them to contact the shelter at which Catherine worked:
My dad and mum, they are involved in the community health centre. Dad used to be on the board. So they are, and they kind of involved in multicultural centre and stuff like – so mum does a lot of work for me in the temple, like she’ll, if somebody comes to her with a problem she has recommended a few Sikh women come through shelter. She’ll give out the [shelter] cards, so she does, kind of, help out.
Francine, too, included different members of her family in her activist work. As
we saw, most of Francine’s family members were already involved in various forms of
social justice work. When Francine spoke about her mother’s understanding and
connection to her social justice work, she mentioned that she had invited her mother to
join her community work at a women’s film festival. This allowed Francine and her
mother to connect around her social justice commitments:
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I would say my mum is familiar with, she may not necessarily be specifically knowledgeable about all the different things I do and the different things that I’m involved in. And – in fact this Black women’s film festival I’m organizing now – I invited her to join our advisory committee so – she’s doing that with me. That’s pretty neat… The film festival is black women but also specifically queer women. And I don’t know how comfortable she would feel in representing it that way – to her siblings.
Similarly, many of the women also talked about their partners or spouses who
they brought into their work. Aj said that she sometimes spoke with her partner when she
experienced tensions at her work at the shelter and at the counselling centre. She also
spoke about the ways her partner explicitly and tacitly supported her activist work.
All of the women with children under their care spoke about how their children
were involved in their activist and organizational work. Freddy spoke about how her son
regularly came to her office and helped out during various events. She also spoke about
how the work at the organization sparked him to do his own activist work:
My son enjoys coming to my office – [co-worker]’s son does too – and [E.D.’ name]’s kid did it and [co-worker]’s kids did it when they were younger. If you have to give back to the community day – my son has no problem packing boxes and here – moving things out – doing – that’s how he likes to give back to the community – he has no problem with doing that. And I think that’s a good thing – it’s good for young men to learn – cause we all have boys in here – what women organizations do and what violence looks like and how it’s you know, how it’s not okay and it’s about male privilege. And so you know, then you have my 11- year-old… because we do a lot of antihomophobia work here – [son’s name] went back to school and asked his teacher, who actually is a very out gay man, if they could have an antihomophobia workshop in the classroom.
Freddy linked her parenting and commitments to social justice by making available
educational opportunities through her work.
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Social Justice Commitments at Work
Research participants actively enacted their commitments to social justice in all facets of
their lives, including in their everyday work with/in women’s organizations. As Morgen
(1995) notes:
[D]ebates within health movement organizations about the primacy of race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality in the formation of women’s identities rarely took abstract form. Struggles around difference typically erupted over specific issues: the language of an organization mission statement; development of services that targeted particular groups of women…; support for political coalitions or causes…; and finally, and probably most frequently, decisions about hiring and firing (pp. 223-224).
Women’s accounts of their everyday work consciously and actively included discussions
of how they attended to making concrete their commitments to social justice and
antiracism, no matter their organizational position. These efforts included the time and
energy that they devoted to their organization work, to evaluating their change efforts, to
how they treated their colleagues, clients, and volunteers, and to “challenging” and
educating other organization members on issues of race and diversity (see also Agnew,
1996; Kohli, 1993; Morgan, 1995; Srivastava, 2002; Simonds, 1996; Sudbury, 1998;
Transken, 1998).
In all the women’s accounts, the focus was on putting antiracist feminist
commitments into practice. The women’s initiative to put social justice ideals into
practice within women’s organizations was not just important for the women’s activism
but also to the functioning of their organizations. The work environment defined the
parameters of antiracist feminist discourse and praxis within organizations. Women
assessed the political implications of their political situations, how they would need to
react, what sorts of supports they needed to enlist, the courses of action based on those
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supports, what organizational (formal and informal) policies they needed to address and
what types of extra-organizational supports were needed including how to activate them.
In fact, women’s everyday organizational activities included a high level of self-
reflexivity and political awareness in their strategic planning on how to engage their
antiracism praxis.
In implementing their commitments, the women often engaged in different types
of unpaid work crucial to the success of their political goals. This work was often done
individually, without support from the organizations and at personal financial cost to the
women. Further, the women of colour’s accounts of their everyday experiences relayed
an unacknowledged work process. This work process included women’s attempts to
educate themselves, network, make decisions on how to implement their knowledge of
organization and activism, and negotiate with others.
“More than a career”
The women relayed how they engaged in this “unpaid work” commitment to antiracist
feminist practice in a number of ways. Lodge, for example, made daily decisions to spend
time doing work beyond what she was paid to do by taking work home. She compared
her work in preparing for her group counselling sessions with that of her co-workers. She
talked about how she often spent more time preparing for her weekly group facilitations
than others. For her, doing a good job meant that she would spend time at home
researching and preparing a curriculum:
Because you want to do a good job…I need to be comfortable with presenting information. I need to be knowledgeable around it, I need to come up with new ideas... [Other workers] just go and say, “Oh well, yeah, we can just have a discussion, you know, for the group, okay, we’ll
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just have a general discussion.” For me, I have to be able to have the discussion, but I need to be able to offer something.
Becoming more knowledgeable and well-prepared reflected not only Lodge’s desire to be
a good front-line shelter worker, but also the antiracist feminist commitments and
political analysis that she brought to her work.
As she noted further during the interview:
I need to be able to say, so socially this is always affecting us. What we get from society, how society views this? You know? Politically, how’s that? What can we do? You know? So it makes sense to women, to connect them, you know? So it’s showing how the system, and how really society socialize to oppress poor women, or marginalized women and linking those — you know? So women can better understand, because we do a lot personal stuff — “oh he’s this, or he’s that or whatever he’s abusive.” But let’s talk about … how it’s different for men in society and different for women, and why we think this way and stuff like that.
Lodge’s desire to connect women’s individual experience to social and political
issues was personal. She spoke about how her own experience as a Black woman was
integral to her commitment to fight oppression:
I think it’s yeah because I know what it is to be on the other side. You understand? I know what it is to experience some other stuff that these women experience. I know what it is. And so when I do my work, that’s what I bring to it, I think… So I guess it’s the passion that you want to see things done right for all people. I honestly know oppression is wrong. I know that depending on how I present myself in society - I’m treated a certain way. Even though I know, that as a professional person I can call up and I can advocate for that women on the crisis call, but [when I call for myself] it’s a different response. If I have to go out for myself to do it, they treat you like crap! So I know that — so that’s what I bring to the work. I know these systems. I know.
Lodge brought her experience as a woman and someone who also experienced racialized
discrimination to her work. Based on these intersecting forms of experience, she was
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committed to supporting women who experienced similar forms of oppression and
discrimination within their daily lives.
Mishka, too, described, in terms of commitment, her paid work as a director of a
homeless women’s drop-in centre and her volunteer work as the director of an immigrant
women’s advocacy group. In response to my question about the importance of what I
called her “career,” Mishka replied that her activist work was more than a career to her
(see also Morgen, 1995):
On peut appeler ça carrière, mais moi je vois pas ça comme carrière... Moi, je pense qu'il y a des choses qu'on doit faire dans la société et que personne ne va les faire –seulement ce que nous qui pouvons le faire. [You could call it career, but I don’t view this [work] as a career… For me, there are things we have to do society and nobody will do them [for us] — it is only us that can do them.]
She then elaborated and spoke about how her fundraising work as a director of a
homeless women’s drop-in centre was connected to her struggle to secure services and
resources for marginalized francophone women:
On ne peut pas attendre comme une organisation de femmes on peut pas attendre que le gouvernement vous dit, “Oh voilà l'argent prenez allez faire ce que vous voulez.” Il faut se battre pour avoir les services en français. Moi je trouve très important il faut se battre… [As a women’s organization, we cannot wait for the government to say to us, “Here is the money you need, do as you like.” We must fight for services in French. I find it very important to fight…]
Mishka’s insistence that she continue to fight for resources was based on both her
experience as a racialized, francophone woman and politicized commitment to antiracist
feminism.
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She connected directly this fight for appropriate services to how she, as a black
immigrant francophone, had to fight for services, despite the negative labels attached to
social service clients and personal costs. She linked this fight to her feminist beliefs:
Alors et moi en tant que femme en tant que femme noire en tant que femme immigrante en tant que femme noire immigrante francophone unilingue, il faut tout le temps se battre à chaque fois… Oui ça c'est pas toujours agréable parce que, la réponse n'est pas toujours positive. On te traite de toutes sortes de noms, euh féministe machin machin alors féministe ça devient une insulte n'est-ce pas? Je me considère féministe si c'est comme cela qu'on peut le determiner dans le sens où euh/ moi je me bats pour les droits des opprimés quelque part, alors ça peut être une femme ça peut être un homme mais un homme qui est, qui est handicapé un homme qui est lise dans ses droits euh ça peut être un enfant ça peut être n'importe qui. [So, as a woman, as a black woman, as an immigrant woman, as a black immigrant, unilingual francophone woman, it means that I fight all the time … Yes, it’s not always fun, because the response isn’t always positive. And they give you all sorts of labels, feminist whatever-whatever. So feminist becomes an insult, you know? I consider myself feminist if it is how I define it, in the sense that I do fight for the rights of the oppressed, so it could be a woman or a man, but a man who is handicapped, or it could be child or whomever else.]
Mishka’s and the other women’s expenditure of time and energy was tied explicitly to
their identities as racialized women with intersectional identities. As her quote
exemplifies, Mishka tied her commitments to fight (“se battre”) for others’ rights and
against oppression, regardless of the personal costs, to her racialized, gendered, and
francophone identities, subjectivities and experiences.
Evaluating social change outcomes
Women of colour explicitly reflected on how their everyday work was linked to social
change. They self-consciously assessed the importance of their work by considering
whether it made a positive impact on the women they supported in their organizations.
For example, Theta, who had recently changed her position in the organization from that
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of front-line worker and community educator to assistant manager, did this when she
described the differences between her two positions. She said that although she liked her
management work, she missed the front-line work because as a manager, she found it
harder to see whether her work had a direct and positive impact on women’s lives:
It’s just so new that I’m really struggling with what it is exactly that I like. I know I don’t dislike it, but it’s much harder in this work to see what impact or positive changes you’re having in women’s lives.
Theta’s ambivalence about her work had to do with her commitment to making sure that
her work within the shelter was oriented to making “positive change” in women’s lives.
However, her commitment to feminist and antiracist practice did not disappear
when she became a manager. Although she missed the front-line work, she had decided
to take the new position because of her “vision” to provide better services to women of
colour:
What I do I like about it is, I like being in a place where I can have some decision-making power. It’s just harder to make that impact happen and to see it. So I’m reconnecting to my vision right. So I have a particular vision about how things should be, how we should work, how women should be supported in this community and I want to make sure that that happens and so I figure with this position I could do that in some way.
The primary goal of her work was to make positive changes to women’s lives and this
connected to her vision grounded in her commitment to antiracist feminist change.
In addition to assessing their own work vis-à-vis social change, the women
frequently made assessments on how their organization did or did not promote social
change. For many of them, this willingness to critique was part of their commitment to
reflecting on social justice practice. Sharmila, a manager, offered this critique of her
organization’s work of addressing multiple oppressions:
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We haven’t hired anyone with a disability, so that is something that we certainly need to do more work on. Our organization physically is not set up to um easily accommodate that. We have an organization — our building is on two different levels and there’s no elevator — and we cannot afford to put in an elevator. We’ve looked into it seriously. Class is certainly an issue as well and over the years, we’ve definitely had people from different class backgrounds but the nature of the organization — it’s hard to say — but I’d say class is something that we could do better on — as well, in terms of hiring more working class women.
Sharmila did not only evaluate her organization’s practice vis-à-vis antiracism and
feminism, but instead relayed an intersectional analysis of oppression. Sharmila’s
evaluation of her organization in putting into practice its intersectional analysis points to
the degree to which antiracist feminists continued to develop their own and their
organization’s politicized practice. This was a common feature of activist’s work –
reflecting, critiquing and evaluating their own attempts to put into practice their ideals.
Kimberley, too, spoke about the ways her everyday actions at work had the
potential for inciting social change. In articulating her commitment to her belief that
different forms or processes of oppression were linked, she described the importance of
assessing one’s actions in relation to whether they truly made a difference to feminist and
antiracist social change. Her example of how she intervened in her organization’s
decision to purchase fair-trade coffee showed the ways in which she not only put into
practice her beliefs, but also how she assessed everyday actions vis-à-vis broader social
change.
Kimberley also brought her belief in the importance of examining interlocking
oppression to her work. She described in detail what that meant to her:
I’m against classism, racism, and sexism, and I’m concerned about environmental issues and I believe in an integrated feminism.… I’m trying to be more environmental and I advocated for fair-trade coffee at this office although we have to pay like double sometimes, but I believe that
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we cannot support only one cause, ignoring other causes. Like we cannot be racist to be feminist, we cannot — we cannot destroy the environment — nature and environment because we are doing feminist work — cause every oppression is integrated. I mean … we are not actually gaining anything. We may satisfy our funders and get more funding next year, but we may not gain anything actually overall …
Through her lens of integrated oppression, Kimberley evaluated her organization’s
success not simply in terms of surviving or receiving more funding, but also in terms of
the potential for social change and what she called “holistic politics” or integrated
feminism. She conceded, though, that holistic politics were difficult to attain, but seemed
committed to making decisions around her work and everyday life to ensure that she
brought this commitment to bear on her whole life.
By attending to a simple issue such as purchasing fair-trade coffee in the office,
Kimberley brought her whole set of commitments to her everyday work – a process she
described as “micro-activism.”
I may get my pay cheques and pay my rent et cetera, and have enough money to go and get groceries, but overall I may not actually support a good cause, but with this integrated and holistic politics, it’s so hard [laughs] to um, you know, to command my daily life. Sometimes I’m lost… So you always have to challenge yourself — question what you can do and what is the best — in the situation in the context — to challenge unfair power dynamics. So it’s hard and I know I cannot do a lot, I cannot do everything.
In describing her commitment to an integrated feminism, Kimberley showed how her
antiracist feminist beliefs were connected to other forms of social justice.
Empowering women as social change
Another way in which women of colour relayed their commitment to antiracist feminism
was through assessing their interactions of how they treated their clients, volunteers, and
co-workers. For the women that I spoke with, treating people with respect and dignity
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was part of their political commitment to shifting inequitable power relations in their
organizations. Kimberley demonstrated how she treated people with respect by relating
an incident where a volunteer complained about being mistreated at an annual general
meeting. Although her co-workers were upset with the complaint and dismissed the
volunteer’s concerns, Kimberley spent time with the volunteer to understand what had
gone wrong from the volunteer’s point of view.
For example one volunteer was complaining very aggressively to me that some people were very snobby to her and she didn’t get enough food. It was at our 25th anniversary event. And all my staff members were very upset by it. Cause what happened was that people asked her if she needed a break, if she needs food… She was at the registration table. But she’s not the kind of person who is able to say yes or [to] express her needs all the time… But I sat with her — the volunteer, for one-hour and talked about it and I mean I tried to engage her in communication and okay, “What was lacking? And what could have been done differently at that moment.”
Kimberley’s decision to spend time and energy understanding the volunteer’s perspective
came out of her desire to not only support this volunteer, but more importantly out of her
desire to put her commitment of treating people with respect into practice.
For Kimberley, this was significant step in the process of inculcating a culture of
dealing with her colleagues and volunteers in ways that shifted power relations:
I’m trying to be egalitarian as much as possible with my colleagues and volunteers. I try to support each volunteer for example and I try to learn about their life. And I don’t always use one type of measurement to evaluate people. I’m trying to make myself flexible… around my way of judgment, my evaluating others and work. I’m trying to look into the context of each person, each project, um and it — any kind of work. So when I have issues with other people for example I also want to look at the context; how it happened.
Similarly, Soni also spoke about her management style as being less hierarchical
and more democratic than that of some other managers and its impact on her staff:
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And that’s something I’ve also seen in [Name of diversity staff 1] for example, she is so upset that she’s losing her job here … I don’t think she’s dependent on this position in terms of that [income]. But I think for her, she had her own struggles as an immigrant women and this job has really helped her to move on from that — immigrant ‘helpee’ kind of identity? I mean she said to me something um we were talking and she said um you know, “Soni, this is first time somebody told me I have skills, and, you know, wherever I go and wherever I work I will always compare every manager to you, because I know what it feels like to have a good manager.” And now I know — and she — and she did a self-evaluation and she wrote in there that, “I really worked well with this unconventional and unhierarchical supervision style.” You know and she’s going to carry that with her — with her anywhere she goes now.
Soni spoke about her supervisory style with pride, and linked her work as a manager to
her commitment to antiracist feminism. Her work as a supervisor made a difference to
her staff in direct ways, as it allowed them to become more individually empowered to
challenge some of their internalized racism.
Soni also brought her commitments to social justice work in the way she hired
people and supported her staff:
So that was where my strategy was in terms of hiring my staff. [Name of diversity staff 2] is somebody who I knew would be a shit-disturber, she didn’t have a lot of background in VAW [violence against women] work um but I mean that’s something I had brought to them, that would be okay — that’s something she would learn right. So she’s —you know, her role has been to shake-rattle and roll and she’s done that.
She spoke about how her work as a supervisor was linked to her political vision, and
discussed how she created a process which allowed personal and organizational
transformation to occur.
So that’s something I’m also very proud of like that, you know… I mean that’s part of the work that I do, as I manage. I do managing: I vision, I [build] structure, and in that structure this is what I’ve created in my staff … They then will go and take these feminist ideas, forward.
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That is, in both instances cited above Soni demonstrates clearly her commitments to
antiracist feminism and social justice through direct practice of non-normative
management decision-making processes.
Teaching and learning as commitment
Another key aspect of activist work for the women of colour in the context of feminist
organizations was teaching and learning about racism, racialization, oppression and
antiracism, feminism and social justice. The women regularly discussed how teaching,
challenging, and learning were part of how they activated their antiracist feminist ideals,
Soni spoke about how her position as a manager allowed her to teach other women of
colour, in her case South Asian women, about feminist struggle. She highlighted that part
of her supervisory work was to create opportunities for social change and the translation
of feminist concepts across language and culture.
So that’s part of it too for me as my role as a manager that’s part of the work, right, training [Name of diversity staff 1] and working with her and talking across language and learning how to translate Western feminism into South Asian concepts. Never mind the language but how do you challenge the concept [of patriarchy]? Right?
In similar fashion, teaching and learning was an important aspect of the work that
Aj did with co-workers. She spoke about how challenging her colleagues on their
behaviours, language, and assumptions were an important part of her integrative
antiracist feminist analysis at work:
Challenging people [other staff] on their behaviours. Or calling people on things, you know, because sometimes you know, it also, it depends on way you tackle it. Sometimes when people see you challenge people they become defensive — it can generate a poisoned environment. So one needs to be careful the way, just like you look through it more of education.
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Aj also spoke about advocating on behalf of clients at the shelter, which involved
educating and challenging her co-workers, especially those who were not familiar with
other cultures:
And it also happens with clients. Clients are ignorant. And for some clients, being in the shelter is their first time. They are interacting with women from different cultural backgrounds so we hear women making up racist statements, remarks, like about food, around women who are cooking — “It’s smelly”… You know that kind of thing? So you have to do an education piece with them. So… you cannot change somebody overnight. It could take some time to you know, it requires some ongoing work. But they have to start at some point. To everything, education you know is the key.
Some of the research participants spoke of how they had learned when challenged
by others in their organization. This openness to being challenged and learning from it
was indicative of women of colour’s commitment to antiracist feminist change. For
example, Sharmila reflected on how she learned how to manage better through being
challenged:
Certainly over the years, I have been taught by different staff about things about how I was managing that could be problematic. There’s an example of a previous staff person, another black women who worked about six years ago. And we do a sort of once a year thing at our organization — that requires extra staff to be brought in. We asked her sister to come and work with us and at the end of the day we were calculating what we owed people and there was a question about how much owed her sister, how much money we owed her sister. And we were talking about that in front of her. And the staff person called me at home later on that night and called us on you know what she said was, “You know you really need to understand what it means for us as black women to be treated like this. Like you know when you are talking about issues around money you know there’s a real historical — but also present way — were made to feel like we’re just collecting welfare.” I think that’s what she said — and that “there was a way it can be disrespectful — like the way you know you were talking to my sister about the amount of money that she was owed — that was disrespectful.”
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In addition to teaching Sharmila how to be more attentive to historicized racist practice,
this example also guided her future managing practices.
In other words, Sharmila remained committed to putting this new knowledge into
practice and taking responsibility for her newly acquired analysis.
And I called — you know we took responsibility for that — and apologized for that. So that was certainly a moment that has stuck in my mind for years in terms of you know understanding people’s historical but current positions in the world — right. And, I think yeah, I felt that we had dealt disrespectfully with her — but if we had a question about how much we owed her — that we could have dealt with that on our own — without her being present. Definitely.
For women of colour, then, education was the key to putting into practice their antiracist
commitment within their organizations, while also being part of their activist practice.
In summary, women of colour brought their commitments to social justice to all
facets of their lives. They did so in active ways, and in ways which took up definite time,
space and energy. By making active their commitments, the women indicated the degree
to which these commitments were made personal. Women of colour’s close identification
with feminism, antiracism and social justice was brought to bear on their definitions of
self (and their intersecting identities), processes of decision making and personal
relationships. However, as the women’s accounts also attested, the women’s
organizations were sites of contradiction that both facilitated and limited the putting into
practice of antiracist feminist ideals. In the next chapter, I explore these contradictions in
more depth by attending to two things in particular. First, the women’s descriptions of the
ways their organizations were able to connect antiracist feminist ideals with everyday
practice; and second, the ways everyday organization practices were not connected to
these ideals.
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Chapter Four: Antiracism in Contradictory Spaces
While feminist organizations remain important sites of struggle for antiracist change, they
are also contradictory spaces in which antiracist feminist action is both supported and
limited. On the one hand, the women of colour in this study were successful in
articulating an antiracist feminist politics through women’s organizations. On the other
hand, however, they experienced resistance, silencing and painful conflict. The accounts
provided by the women I interviewed for this research indicated that they found both
support for and resistance to their efforts to put into practice their commitments to
feminism, antiracism and social justice. Women’s organizations were thus often tension-
filled and contradictory sites or spaces of struggle. An analysis of the women’s accounts
revealed that they were able to do or enact social change because they negotiated their
commitments to antiracist feminism through the contradictions. In doing so, the women
in my study both responded to the prevalent social relations in women’s movement
organizations and also shaped these relations.
While scholars have described tensions between organizations’ stated antiracist
goals and everyday antiracist practice (Agnew, 1996, 1998; Gottlieb, 1993; Kohli, 1993;
Maraj Grahame, 1998, 2000; Morgen, 1995; Nadeau, 2005, 2009; Scott, 2000;
Srivastava, 2002; Simonds, 1996; Sudbury, 1998; Transken, 1998), this has not prevented
the successful mobilization of antiracist critique. Agnew describes the organizational
contradiction as a “discrepancy between what they say or do and the ways their words or
actions are understood and experienced by women from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean”
(Agnew, 1996, p. 9).
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Similarly, in her study of antiracism and emotion in social movement
organizations, Srivastava (2002) describes some of the tensions between antiracist visions
of equity and practices of racist exclusion within progressive social movements:
[T]he tensions between visions of equity and practices of exclusion that both constitute and corrupt social movements. On the one hand, progressive social movements – those founded on notions of egalitarianism – have challenged oppressive power relations... On the other hand, when activist have their moral visions challenged by accusations of racism, we see that when activists have their moral visions challenged by accusations of racism, we see that there is just as likely to be an entrenchment of the exclusionary practices that prompted the challenge in the first place. As a result, antiracist changes have been unevenly realized and actively resisted by women’s movements and community organizations... (pp. 2-3).
Srivastava’s analysis of the moments of antiracist confrontation expands Agnew’s (1996)
claim that women’s organizations and other social movement organizations or groups
which champion visions of equity and inclusion are contradictory. Specifically, in her
study, Srivastava (2001) highlights how accusations of racism prompt defensiveness and
re-“entrenchment” of racist practice within progressive social movements and
organizations.
In a similar vein, in her work on diversity in universities, Ahmed (2009) also
analyzes what she calls the “paradox” of the success of “diversity” programs.
Specifically, she describes how her hiring as a racialized woman was seen as an
indication of the success of the organization’s commitment to diversity. She argues that:
“Diversity becomes about changing perceptions of whiteness rather than changing the
whiteness of organizations” (p. 45). Furthermore, she argues that recognition and voicing
of ongoing racism by racialized antiracist activists “is constantly blocked. Organizations
wanted to talk about diversity rather than racism. Diversity becomes a technology for not
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hearing” (p. 47; see also Ahmed, 2007a, 2007b). For each of these scholars cited above,
“tensions,” “discrepancies,” and “paradoxes” are part and parcel of antiracist feminist
struggle, but also indicators of the success and disconnect between antiracist theory and
practice.
This chapter, alongside the previous one, outlines the problematic of this study: it
explores the apparent contradictions, tensions, and paradoxes of antiracist feminist praxes
within women’s organization. Beginning from the standpoint of women of colour, I make
visible the apparent disjuncture between antiracist feminist ideals within women’s
organizations and the actual organizational practice. Specifically, I describe the successes
of antiracist feminist activists in creating space that facilitated social change. I then
discuss the ways in which antiracist feminist activism was also limited within women’s
organizations. This chapter lays the groundwork for detailed discussions in subsequent
chapters of antiracist feminist praxis as dialectically produced by accountability to
organizational processes and responsibility to politicized action.
Connection between Ideals and Practice
The participants brought forward their commitments to antiracism in organizations which
were already enmeshed in antiracist feminist and social justice change. This was certainly
an indication of the success of historical antiracist feminist activism, as I have already
pointed out. Although not all of the organizations where the women worked were
explicitly feminist, the organizations were influenced by the legacy of feminist struggles
and put into practice feminist ideals, concerns, and preoccupations. The research
participants made it explicit that their organizations had already been affected by larger
discussions of race, racism, and racialization within the broader feminist movement.
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Antiracist feminists working in women’s organizations mobilized the insights of
feminist theorists from diverse perspectives who have convincingly argued that ending
gender oppression is only possible through attending to the ways that oppressions are
interconnected (Bannerji, 1995; Brah, 1996, 2001; Crenshaw, 1991; DasGupta, 1999;
Dua, 1999b; Eichler, 1999; Fellows and Razack, 1998; Gaard, 1998; Gardner, 2003;
Grande, 2003; Hill Collins, 1998, 2000; hooks, 1984; Lorde, 1990; Maracle, 1996;
Merhotra, 2010; Mirza, 1997; Murphy et al., 2009; Mohanty, 1998, 2004; Ng, 1993,
1989; Razack, 1998; Shaikh, 1998, 2000; Sudbury, 1998; Wane, 2002). These
discussions were part of the everyday landscape of women’s organizations. It was clear
that the struggles of women of colour were successful in shaping feminism and feminist
organizational practice both materially and discursively by convincing members of
women’s organizations to take notice of racism and how processes of racialization were
interconnected with other relations of oppression such as those based on gender and class.
As I have argued earlier, in the review of the literature of antiracist feminist
organizing, it is important to attend to the successes of antiracist feminism within
women’s organizations. The accounts of the research participants relayed how antiracism
and feminism were connected in women’s organizations in four significant ways. These
are that: 1) antiracism and feminism were “naturally” connected; 2) previous gender-
centred struggles allowed antiracism to develop in women’s organizations; 3) antiracism
was simply part of the formal structures of women’s organizations, and; 4) antiracism
infused and guided the everyday practices of women’s organizations and their staff
members. It is precisely through their accounts in which the participants described the
connections between feminism and antiracism that we can see the ways in which the
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racialized women’s historical agency has indelibly affected the broader women’s
movement; that is, that antiracist feminists have had historicity.
Antiracism and feminism as “naturally” connected
Despite women’s different experiences of participating in antiracist activism within
women’s organizations, the participants in this research echoed an ideal of feminist
organizing where antiracist and feminist struggles were seen as inseparable. Several of
the women revealed their understanding that antiracism and/or antioppression was a
natural or usual part of women’s organizations and movements. Lodge said for example:
I think it’s like, within, like, any kind of feminist organization, I guess like, you think feminist, you think about racism, antiracism, antioppression work.
Whether the women spoke of an “integrative antiracist feminist” practice,
“intersectionality,” “antioppression,” it was clear that they alluded to a practice which
took up the ideas that racism, sexism, and other processes of oppression were linked.
Theta cited academic literature in reflecting on her relatively early foray into
feminism when she spoke about how, for her, antiracism and feminism were connected.
She noted:
I came in with a feminist analysis to my work and approach to my work and then and some antiracism, some antioppression analysis as well, cause for me um, for me feminism is antiracism-antioppression work. It was anyways initially, when like I was 17, I started … reading bell hooks, you know, so they were integrated for me, those ideas anyway. So, then I went to women’s studies and I got more of that same stuff right?
Although very few of the women made explicit references to particular theorists, all of
them alluded to formal and informal education and/or workshops where they were
exposed to, and subsequently developed, integrative antioppression analyses.
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The women also spoke about how their work allowed them to discuss antiracism
and antioppression as natural extensions of their feminist work. For example, Freddy
pointed out that within her organization discussions around oppression and privilege
came up as a consequence of working together:
Yeah, I think that in terms of how we work together because we’re beginning the process of having to plan more programming together … discussions around oppression and power and privilege do come up naturally.
In elaborating on these discussions on oppression and so on, Freddy alluded to women’s
willingness to educate their co-workers on various forms of oppression through
workshops and training and by challenging people’s language and behaviour on an
everyday basis. For Freddy, it is noteworthy that these discussions were a natural part of
her and her co-workers everyday work. The naturalness of the discussions indicated the
success of the antiracist and other social movements within feminist organizations.
Although much of the recent literature on feminist organizations focuses primarily on the
limits of the struggle against racism (Agnew, 1996, 1998; Srivastava, 2002), it is
important to pay careful attention to where antiracist feminists have made gains.
However, the assumption that women’s organizations are natural spaces for engaging
antiracism and antioppression discourses means that the history of antiracist and social
justice struggle is often easily overlooked and taken for granted.
Antiracism as historical struggle and education
Several of the research participants alluded to the history of antiracist struggle,
particularly those who had been engaged in these struggles within the feminist movement
and feminist organizations for some time. Women’s stories of these struggles normalized
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antiracist feminist social change and pointed to historical success of antiracism in
women’s organizations. For example, Sharmila gave a sense of this struggle and its
outcomes through her historical account of antiracism in her organization and its
connection to the feminist movement.
Sharmila began by stating that her organization was similar to others in North
America, in that it had started to develop a race-consciousness despite its history as a
white-run organization:
Like any women’s organization in North America, there’ve been very large issues around race — that have come to the fore. In our organization, it was very much a white women’s-run organization, I’d say for the first 15 years — from the seventies to the mid-to late eighties.
In her account of the history of antiracist struggles within her own organization, she made
connections to the broader women’s movements history of antiracism:
And then in the mid-to late eighties, like in many other women’s groups, women of colour started to take more of centre-stage and they started to become more involved in the organization and challenge the white women on their racism and how they ran the organization um so this led to certain conflicts within the organization but more women of colour being hired. And we’ve had a shift over the last 10 years, where the organization now is primarily staffed by women of colour but with a very large base of people coming in who are women of colour, First Nation’s women, um white women as well. But and there have definitely been conflicts around race and representation over the years, and continue to be so, I would say.
Sharmila’s last sentence in the above citation highlighted that historical tensions and
successful struggle around race and representation remained controversial within her
organization.
Francine gave additional insight to the discussion through her account of the
struggle to incorporate antiracist change at the women’s shelter where she was a board
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member in the mid-1990s. She talked about being recruited as part of an initiative to
increase the number of women of colour on the board of directors:
There was not particularly much antiracism before that time. I think that when I first started, there had been a number of issues of racism that had evolved up to a point I was actually asked to join [as a board member]… Actually, there had been a whole scale resignation of the board, possibly around the issue of race. I can’t say that exactly, except, that I know it was primarily women of colour who were being recruited for this new board. And I remember joining with a new slate of women, and most of them I had met before as well. It wasn’t an entirely women’s of colour board, but certainly, I think compared to what I’m used where typically there was a few women of colour before it was different than that there were a critical number — critical mass of women of colour.
This “critical mass” allowed women of colour to integrate antiracism within the everyday
policies and practices of women’s organization. This was challenging as the board was
accused of having a “particular agenda.” Francine elaborated on this:
Well maybe it’s easier to think about what our agenda actually was, as opposed to what we were perceived to be doing. We definitely wanted a change in the organization, you know. We definitely wanted to have it more — to sustain a racially mixed board um a racially mixed staff that was supported. We wanted to do antiracism work in the organization. We wanted that to inform everything we did, all the policies that we wrote — we wanted to — definitely, we wanted to make structural changes in the organization.
By making clear the goals of the board, Francine’s account made explicit the historical
legacy of women of colour’s activism which, as Sharmila put it, “took centre-stage,” in
making antiracist change. In particular, Francine’s discussion showed how women of
colour struggled to make structural gains and to guide organizational practices.
Aj talked about how the shelter where she worked provided antiracism training
for their staff through consultation with activist women of colour. Aj discussed how this
training helped to alleviate some of the tension around racism:
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Okay, they [other staff] are always open, because we always have these trainings. One thing we, the organization why it’s like this presently, staff and management are receiving antioppression workshops, … [which] was a recommendation that was given to the organization. By focus groups sessions with women of colour. Yeah. I know, for the staff — four or five years, they been doing this training every year or every other year. That training helps. I know that at one time I had big issues and I thought, “it’s race and discrimination,” but not anymore. Because people are like sensitive you know that kind of thing and people are like very aware of race issues.
Aj’s observations that the people in her workplace had learned from the ongoing
workshops was similar to other women’s narrations about some of the gains (albeit
tentative, as I describe later in this chapter) of antiracist struggle within organizations.
Antiracism as mandated by the organization
The success of antiracist struggle was apparent also in women’s accounts that relayed
how management took up antiracist change. Significantly, all but two of the organizations
in which women of colour worked had explicit antiracist and/or antioppression policies or
action plans. Most of the organizations also had antiracist/antioppression or diversity
outreach committees and some of the organizations had diversity-related programs. All
had ongoing antiracist or antioppression training sanctioned or encouraged by (other)
board members, directors, and managers. In fact, the women spoke about the ways in
which antiracism was, in some cases, mandated by the organization.
Lodge, for example, described how antiracist and antioppression training was
required as part of her regular work as a front-line shelter worker:
But still we’re always having ongoing education in regards to violence against women issues…Antioppression is a must. Some things is mandatory and the antioppression training, group facilitation training. You have to do it … antioppression especially. Antiracism is a must.
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Although her description of how mandatory training was decided upon and who made
those decisions was unclear, it was evident that antiracism/antioppression were
considered part of the shelter’s regular work. The fact that antioppression training was
mandatory signaled the degree to which antiracism was part and parcel of the shelter’s
mission.
Catherine described another example of the salience of antiracism and
antioppression discourse in the everyday operations of women’s organization, when she
spoke about its place in her organization. Catherine told me that a white manager had
introduced antiracism about three years earlier:
Because the boss years ago, decided that’s it. “We’re gonna go antiracism, antioppression.” And then we did, we totally went that way — so there was no medium point.
Catherine’s comment about antiracism as coming from “the boss,” and not just any boss,
but a white woman, was noteworthy because it signified that members of the
management took antiracism seriously, at least at the level of policy and training.
During our conversations, the activists often discussed issues of “diversity” and
“diversification” to relay the readiness (or lack thereof) of women’s organizations to
integrate feminist analysis with antioppression and antiracism. Soni, for example, talked
about her organization “being ready to diversify”:
I came on to the team in January and I came on to, you know, diversify the organization. I managed [both] the public ed program and the diversity outreach program… The informal sense was that we were going diversify and we first going to start with the South Asian community and this was going to best practices…That’s what I had come on board with, you know, and that’s why I actually took this position.
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At least half of the women’s organizations had a committee or program that dealt with
diversity or community outreach.
In addition, most of the organizations had a formalized committee or program, as
part of the board’s functioning. Theta, for example described her organization’s antiracist
and diversity work:
We have Diversity Communities Outreach Program and when I first started on the management committee, I was part of that. And, well we do have an antiracist action plan.
Theta also spoke about being increasingly called upon by her colleagues and supervisors
to do the antiracist work in her umbrella service organization:
So I mean lots of organizations are caught into antiracist work, but now I’m being increasingly called upon to do this work. It was already important to women’s services, but ... now it’s something that the [umbrella organization name] is looking at now, doing. So it’s something we’ve looked at in women’s services but it hasn’t fully evolved I would say. You know, we don’t have a policy or anything so that’s — and I mentioned the size of the organization. It is huge — and with lots of different perspectives and lots of different focuses — we work with women — there’s services that — centres that specifically focus on youth right like… So, for the larger organization is looking at the issue of antiracism, and now it’s being brought. We are starting to talk about it. Um at a bigger-and larger level…. Well it’s just — so there [in the women’s services] — some of it is very unstructured talk — as you would expect, right? Then we have actually have the workshops.
Theta’s organization was atypical from other participant’s organizations in that the
organization was only just “starting to talk about” antiracism at the level of the umbrella
organization. Additionally, Theta described the fact that women’s services, including the
shelters which she managed, had already been doing antiracist work, albeit not in a “fully
evolved way.” Theta further described how the women’s “unstructured talk” and
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“workshops” were part and parcel of the organization’s antiracist action plan and central
to the umbrella organization’s mandate.
Mishka also spoke about the importance of diversity to the director’s and board
members’ visions of the organization at all levels. She said that at first, there were very
few immigrant women in this organization and that this had changed during the two years
she was there:
Il y a très peu de femmes immigrantes à part [name of organization] … quand j'ai commence. Je ne s j'étais pas là au début, mais il faut dire que la directrice qui était là qui a commencé le centre avait cette ouverture au niveau de la diversité, au niveau du des services, au niveau du personnel, au niveau de des resources. Ça c'est la vision qu'elle a -- féministe et diversifié. Beaucoup, beaucoup, parce que c'était diversifié où il y avait du personnel lesbienne il y avait il y a toutes sortes de diversité à l'intérieur de l'équipe…Même le conseil d'administration avait cette vision là donc. Ça a continué. Et l'autre chose aussi c'est que la communauté immigrante francophone comment ça augmentait . Et on commence de plus en plus à reconnaître l'éducation et l'expertise de ces personnes là… [There were very few immigrant women part of this organization when I started. I wasn’t there at the beginning, but I should say that the director was open to having diversity at the level of services, personnel and resources. It was this feminist and diversified vision that she had. Definitely, definitely, because it was diversified within the organization, including lesbian and diverse staff within the team… Even the board of directors had this vision and this continued. The other thing was that the immigrant francophone community was also growing. And we began to increasingly recognize the education and expertise of these people.]
Mishka said that it was because of this vision and direction she was able to continue with
her activist and community development work.
In addition, Mishka spoke about how her paid work as a counsellor and outreach
worker allowed her to develop her community links and to create a new advocacy
organization focused on immigrant francophone women:
Il y avait beaucoup d'ouverture en fait de manoeuvre de travail dans ce que je voulais travailler, par rapport aux femmes immigrantes, la raison pour
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laquelle je me suis impliquée beaucoup beaucoup dans la création du [name of provincial advocacy group]. Parce que, il y avait pas d'organisation provinciale pour les femmes immigrantes et … Et moi, quand j'ai commencé à travailler à [name of organization], je faisais la liaison communautaire avec des groupes de femmes, mais il y avait pas d'argent, il y avait personne qui pouvait prendre des dossiers. Alors moi ce que j'ai mis beaucoup de développer le [name of provincial advocacy group]. Alors… l’organisation euh m'a donné cette flexibilité. [There was a lot of opening for me to be able to do the kind of work I wanted to do for immigrant women, and this was how I was able to do a lot of work in the creation of the provincial advocacy group for immigrant women. Because there was no provincial organization for immigrant women and it was me who became the community liaison to connect women. But there was no money and no staff to be able to do so. So, it was me who became very involved in the development of the provincial advocacy group. So, the organization gave me this flexibility.]
In terms of actual resources of time, the shelter with which Mishka worked allowed her to
develop this advocacy organization because of the success of antiracist feminism and the
director’s and board members’ desire to “diversify” the organization. As Mishka pointed
out, the provincial advocacy group could not have functioned without this support.
Antiracism and antioppression as guides to organizational practice
In another example of success, Freddy suggested that with more visible diversity
discussions of antiracism emerge “naturally”:
I think in our organization we work really hard organizationally to work in an antioppression model — so an example of that is that in the women with disabilities project, an in the deaf women project, we’re talking about deaf women that are lesbian, we are talking about trans, we’re talking about younger and older, deaf women, I mean they tend to be young deaf women, um because the coordinator is a young deaf woman, but there’s a real effort towards inclusion and accommodation and understanding — within the women of disabilities you have women with different kinds of disabilities — you have women that are lesbian, women that are straight, um older women, younger women, women that have been institutionalized, not institutionalized, you are talking about newcomer women.
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Freddy also spoke about how people working within her organization collectively worked
to develop their anti-oppressive practice:
Within the immigrant women’s group, we work across different communities. We really, really work hard around homophobia. One of the big ones among a lot of the women that we work with have been the areas of things like homophobia and and you know, trans L-G-B-T-Q, and so we’ve worked hard to train. We’ve done a lot of work around awareness building around women with disability issues — we have women with disabilities and deaf women in the immigrant and refugee women’s program… I think it, I have to say it’s not a constant, so much a constant struggle, I think in our organization. It’s a constant movement forward towards integrating what we know and sharing our knowledge.
In this sense, then Freddy argued that in the context of her organization the success of
antiracism and antioppression was not seen as ‘struggle’, but as “moving forward.”
Sharmila’s organization, too, benefitted from the successes of the antiracist
feminist movement. She talked about how an antiracist feminist analysis was integrated
in her daily work as a manager:
Depending on what kinds of partnerships that we make with other community groups, we are always looking at you know who are they, what are their sort of race politics. [We look at] the kind of material that we carry, the resources that we have at the organization are very much a part of our philosophy, of being an antiracist organization and also I would say the political stands that we take as an organization, very much reflect our stand. We’re an organization that has um a mandate to support liberation movements um across the globe, be they you know movements for justice with you know First Nations’ people, Palestinians, um people of the African Diaspora, so those are things that, we put our names on certain things as co-sponsors.
In similar terms, Maria described how antiracism infiltrated everyday practice
within the board and the whole of her organization.
We do have an antiracist action plan, so it must be — that’s the starting place for everything that we do, so yeah, we do all those policies in place.
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It’s very explicit, it’s something that infiltrates every part of the organization, we ask it at interviews. I mean it’s very much present. But, you know, I think that things like that are, you know, and I think, well how do you evaluate that?
As the example above show, it is possible to evaluate specific ways in which women’s
organizations attempted to put into practice antiracist feminist ideals. In fact, the attempts
point to an ideal aimed at an integrative antiracist feminist practice and action of, moving
from policy and intention into program evaluation, evaluating hiring decisions, and
shifting interpersonal dealings with clients and co-workers. In this way, it was clear that
the momentum and gains antiracist feminists have achieved in the past were still in the
process of being propelled and recreated within women’s organizations.
Disconnection between Ideals and Practice
Despite the successes of antiracist feminist activism of the 1980s and 1990s, a disparity
continued to exist between feminist movement organizations’ policies expressing
integrative feminist and antiracist ideals and the actual implementation of those ideals.
The research participants revealed that they continued to struggle for integrative antiracist
feminism in their organizations, even when the agencies gave explicit and tacit support
for antiracist feminism. The disconnection between the ideals and lived experience of
antiracist feminism relayed in the women’s accounts was consistent with the academic
and activist literature that critiques feminist organization members’ inadequate attempts
to address racism (Agnew, 1996, 1998; Gottlieb, 1993; Kohli, 1993; Maraj Grahame,
1998, 2000; Morgen, 1995; Nadeau, 2005, 2009; Scott, 2000; Srivastava, 2002; Simonds,
1996; Sudbury, 1998; Transken, 1998).
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The space of disjuncture between antiracist feminist ideals and practice, or
inability to achieve antiracist feminist praxis, is an important one to look at because it can
provide us with clues on how antiracist feminism is institutionally organized and how
women negotiate this disjuncture. Women relayed the disjuncture between the ideal of an
integrative antiracist feminist practice and their lived experience in a number of ways.
These included the ambivalence they felt about the progress of antiracism in women’s
organizations; their direct personal experience of racialized discrimination and; their
experience of being sanctioned for calling attention to racialization and racism.
Moreover, a comparative analysis of the women’s accounts of antiracism in women’s
organization revealed the range of ways women of colour took up and understood
antiracist feminism in their organizational contexts.
So far, I have discussed four areas where antiracist and feminist praxes were
connected in women’s organizations, I will turn now to examining how antiracist and
feminist praxes were disconnected in women’s organizations. The discussion that follows
is divided into four areas under the subheadings of: limitations in implementing antiracist
feminism; organizational experience of racism and racialized discrimination; disciplining
antiracist, feminist, and social justice activism and; conflict among women of colour’s
antiracist feminist practices.
Limitations in implementing antiracist feminism
Although women acknowledged the explicit and tacit support for antiracist feminist
ideals within their organizations, they also spoke of facing difficulties in developing
antiracist politics within their local settings – an example of the contradictory nature of
their organizations. Self-reflection on their experience of progressive change in their
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organization revealed certain ambivalence toward putting antiracist feminist ideals into
practice. On one end of the spectrum there was Tuffy’s organization, which did not have
a formal policy on increasing the diversity of the organization, although, as she wistfully
put it, people in her organization had “a strong knowledge that it’s the right thing to do.”
Tuffy reflected, in particular, on the progress of her organization’s record on
diversity and the improvement it had made over twelve years. She said that, although the
board was “supposed to be representative of the community,” it had fallen short:
Our board of director is made up exclusively of women – 18 years and older. The board is supposed to be representative of the community – it’s getting better – however what we have not done a very good job with – until recent years, being able to recruit a diverse population to the board table — diverse from the point of view of economics, diverse from the point of view race, religion, ethnic background what have you. We have at points had a board that was completely made up of white women – and I used to sit in a room with them and say, “There’s you’all and then there’s me.”
Interestingly, despite the acknowledgement that antiracism was the “right thing to do,”
Tuffy expressed ambivalence around implementing antiracism in her organization:
I haven’t found anything to prove this wrong but I think that shelter workers are some of the most progressive thinkers in terms of work forces anywhere. Now you know that makes for a whole variety of difficulties because when you got a whole bunch of progressive thinkers, then they always want to go outside the box. And like I said to my 17-year-old the other day you know, he was talking about rules at school and I’d ended up in the principal’s office with him and he was right, in this particular situation. But I said to him, “You know, the difficulty is that you know rules aren’t set for the few; they’re set for the many. And if you don’t have rules, you’ve got anarchy. And then you’ve got chaos, and then you know, everybody’s going in a different direction and you have no order at all in your society.” And I think that’s one of the things that happens inside shelters sometimes is that we’ve got such progressive thinkers, that nobody wants any rules. But the reality is, is if you don’t have some — you know and I’ve seen rules and guidelines, I mean they’re not hard and fast in my way of thinking, if you don’t have some guidelines, by which everybody operates then you got pandemonium. I’m well aware of the challenges that shelters have face, so that’s a huge challenge. That does
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not mean by any stretch of the imagination that we run away from the challenge, that we don’t have an obligation to try and meet that challenge, it just means that we have to recognize that there are going to be issues, inherent in trying to implement a different philosophy or a different way of thinking.
Tuffy was ambivalent about putting antiracist feminist principles into practice in here
organization because she was afraid of managing the conflict, and “pandemonium” as she
put it, that she felt may ensue. She referred to some women’s organizations within
Southern Ontario as “imploding” as a result of conflict around issues of race and
racialization and was worried that this might happen to her organization as well. Despite
this worry, Tuffy did take small, incremental steps to introduce antiracism within her
organization, particularly in collaboration with other “sister” organizations.
Lodge also reflected on her own and other organizations’ struggles toward an
antiracist feminist practice:
… any kind of feminist organization, I guess like, you think feminist, you think about racism, antiracism, antioppression work. I know about a lot of agencies say they do it, but for our agency we try to do it, because of all the different issues. And a lot of times, you know, we see it against where we go wrong in a lot of stuff. Then we know we need to be able, if we’re saying, you know, it’s diverse and, you know, we need to provide service for all women and children, then we need to be trained to deal with all women and children, in regards to cultural perspective and all the other stuff.
Lodge connected her organization’s antiracist feminist ideals of providing service to all
women, specifically around cultural diversity, to other organizations who “say they do”
(see also Agnew, 1996) antioppression and feminist work. She relayed that despite the
intention of the members, her organization did not always achieve their antiracist feminist
goal to provide a full range of services to all, despite cultural origin.
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Agencies implemented antiracism feminism to different degrees and in different
ways. This was evident in Aj’s comparison of the efforts made by the shelter where she
worked as a front-line staff and those made by the counselling centre for racially and
culturally diverse women where she was the director. She said that both organizations
worked from an “integrative antiracist feminist perspective,” but each was “quite
different” in how they put this perspective into practice:
This [counselling] agency is quite different, because this one started from that. You know, that it’s something you already built-in. And for the fact that I’m here, it helps you know. So I maintain it, you know, make sure the organization runs like that. Now for the fact I say, the majority of us are like women of colour, you know. So, from the other agency it’s quite different because you have turnover. You know and whether it is practiced it depends on who ever is working there at that point, you know … And also with a large number of staff it is so difficult, because we may get three or so staff who are practicing, working from that framework.
While Aj acknowledged that both organizations worked from the same antiracist feminist
framework, she indicated that the counselling centre was more able to put into practice an
antiracist feminist vision. She attributed a number of factors to this difference, and, more
specifically, to why it was more difficult to develop an antiracist feminist praxis at the
shelter, namely: the (relatively lower) proportion of racialized workers; the (higher)
amount of turnover; the (lower) proportion of workers who actually worked from an
integrative perspective; and that she was not the director of the shelter, but was the
director of the counselling centre (and thus, implied that, the embodied and politicized
identities of leadership mattered to antiracist practice).
Aj’s description of the differences between the two organizations where she
worked included a critique of the shelter workers’ practice, citing, in particular, that many
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workers who were supposed to incorporate an integrated antiracist feminist practice at the
shelter did so inconsistently:
And you have other workers who are not applying it in their work, women, you know that kind of thing so you see it’s so challenging…. It’s all like inconsistent in the way we behave with women of colour. Or it is something unintentional, you know, sometimes it happens, or the way it will be perceived… because sometime it could be ignorance, somebody who doesn’t act in a certain way, little things people may be doing. Without knowing they’re offending other people. Or that other people feel this way you know. So to them it may be okay. There’s nothing wrong with it. But for the other person, maybe, yes. You can see there’s something in it…
Aj spoke about her co-workers being “inconsistent” in their behaviour towards women of
colour and, by extension, in their antiracist practice (see also Agnew, 1996; Srivastava,
2002; Ahmed, 2009 who all describe discrepancies, tensions, and paradoxes of antiracist
feminist practice).
Sharmila offered a similar commentary on her organization’s members’ practice
of integrated antioppression analysis. She commented that even though all the employees
and management members brought to their work a multi-oppression analysis, not
everyone practiced it.
But even though all of us come from a multi-oppression analysis, it doesn’t mean that we all practice it, right? I mean everyone who works at this organization does come in with a sense of multiple forms of oppression — looking at different issues around diversity. But in practice, it can be something else.
Like Aj, Sharmila’s reflection on the fact that organization’s mandate to work from a
“multi-oppression analysis” did not necessarily mean that all members of the
organization actually put into practice the ideals. Although diversity of approaches may
be valued in a particular workplace, the spirit of Sharmila’s comments was more of a
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critique and pointed to the fact that no matter what an organization’s stated politicized
vision, there were limits to ensuring that all organizational actors did, indeed, attend to
and put into practice commitments to an intersectional analysis of oppression.
Organizational experience of racism and racialized discrimination
Although not all of the women discussed explicitly their personal experiences of
racialized discrimination or racism within women’s organizations, a few women did talk
about these. Given most of the organizations’ antiracist goals, the women’s accounts of
racialization, racism, and discrimination was an indication that these ideals had not been
adequately put into practice. Lodge spoke about an experience of discrimination at a
women’s shelter where she had worked at as part of her training as an addictions
counsellor.
Three years ago, I did some placement here in [a different shelter in the region]. It was very oppressive. No person of colour there. They didn’t train me well. They didn’t even have me really do a placement. … This, at the time was another volunteer, a white woman, and then she end up take me on. And they have like a program there that they start peer support program. And that was to train people to go out in the community to support people in the community that experience violence or people that leave the shelter or whatever. And then that’s how I went through that peer support training. And they trained me. That’s how I get training. But the organization themselves didn’t tell me that I could do this. They just had me do photocopying. You know, photocopy this, photocopy that. Clean up this, clean up that. Yeah. That’s what they do… And then I applied for relief there, and they still wouldn’t hire me.
Unlike Lodge, some of the women who described a troubling experience within their
organizations were reluctant to label their experience as racism per se. However, they
acknowledged that resistance to antiracism had played a part in their experience of the
disjuncture between the organization’s desire to address racism and to integrate diversity,
and their everyday experience of resistance towards antiracism.
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Mishka, for example, remarked:
Je pense que, il y avait – malgré que, au niveau de la direction il y avait la volonté d'intégrer la diversité, à tous les niveaux il en demeurait [une résistance] pas moins ce qu'il y avait des individus à l'intérieur de l'organisme. Tu peux pas dire qu'ils étaient qu'elles étaient racistes, mais on sentait une certaine résistance. [I think that, there was, even though at the level of management there was a desire to integrate diversity, at all the levels, there remained a resistance, no less with the individuals within the organization. You couldn’t say that they were racist, but you could sense a certain resistance.]
Mishka distinguished between the management’s and organization’s direction and her
everyday feeling that there was some “resistance” to integrating immigrant women at all
levels of the organization. While she downplayed the issue of racist discrimination, she
explained further that there was a certain lack of acknowledgement of the abilities of
immigrant women:
On sentait une certaine, la non-reconnaissance de la capacité des femmes immigrantes. Ils remettaient parfois en doute, ah c'est que il fallait que, je travaille plus fort tu réfléchisses deux fois plus tu sois/ génie dans ta façon, pour convaincre la personne que t'es capable de réflêchir. Mais je peux dire que c'est vraiment racisme. [It feels like there’s a certain lack of recognition of the abilities of immigrant women. Sometimes it feels like we have to work twice hard, be twice as smart, or be more innovative to convince someone that you are capable of thinking. But I can’t say that it is really racism.]
Similarly, Kimberley spoke about the difficulties she experienced in trying to gain
support from the administrative staff.
I sometimes need someone else to do administrative assistance.… So sometimes I consult the E.D., you know, “Can I give this work to these people, is it alright?” The E.D. says, “Oh sure, it’s their job.’ And I do it, then they’re so offended … and they yell at me sometimes … but I cannot get everyone’s shit for [laughs] example — cause I’m not the garbage can, I’m not a drum for everyone to beat, yeah. And when I try to raise my voice to be, to just to get respected by others, then I’m hearing … that I
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have power and control issues. In a way it’s true, because I want to be respected.
Kimberley’s attempts to be respected and heard in the organization meant that she was
accused of “having problems” with power and control. She rationalized that racialized,
gendered and ageist discrimination affected her authority in the organization, despite the
fact that the organization was less hierarchical than others:
I mean, we are — except for the E.D — theoretically we are all equal to each other in terms of our position. But I’m the youngest staff here, that, and also I … have relatively small body, and … and I can easily be ignored, or put-down. Cause I experience it every day, even on the street car, and everywhere, it’s not an issue only here, but I experience it everywhere else, so I’m trying to be nice and gentle all the time, so sometimes I don’t seem like very firm or … assertive.… I’m not sure if it’s racism or racialization, but [laughs], maybe. And also East Asians in general, don’t have a big body, and they are not very expressive and they seem to be quiet. It varies from person to person, but…
Soni also described her interactions with one staff person and her experience of
facing discrimination at her current workplace and other women’s organizations:
I’ve been here a year but, it’s so done, you know, diversifying an organization, encountering racism, it’s just, like, so done. I mean there have been many times that I’ve encountered many white oppressors — feminists, you know. We have a woman here who’s the finance coordinator who’s quite oppressive — whose name is [financial coordinator’s name]. I’ve met many [financial coordinator’s name]s in my life before. It’s nothing new to me — nothing new to me to have to explain my culture and to educate around antioppression and challenge people. That part is not new. If there’s anything I’ve learned about me, how do I negotiate myself — steady, through those moments and, you know, which I’ve — I also think I’ve done before I came here too. So I mean that’s why I’ve survived this long.
Soni attributed the discrimination that she faced to her perceived (and actual) radicalism:
Well, she’s HR, she’s money, money is power within the non-profit, right? She controls funding, and also she’s been here for 12 years, she’s been the longest in the agency, so she carries with her the history of the
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organization. And she’s white, middle-class and she’s highly privileged, she’s heterosexist and all those things in one. And she doesn’t like my politics. She’s indirectly told me that. For example, she doesn’t like the fact I have these posters up on the wall. They are, there nothing really unusual. They’re nothing highly radical. They’re — I mean any women’s organization you can walk into and you can see these. But these are the most radical thing in this organization, let me tell ya.
The women of colour also spoke about racialized discrimination among women of
colour. Aj, for example, described her challenge to colleagues who would make remarks
about racialized men. Aj suggested that the reason that some of her colleagues continued
to make such comments had to do with what she called “internalized racism”:
Sometimes, within women of colour, there is this dynamic too, that they may say things that are inappropriate. Thinking because it’s coming from them [as women of colour], it was okay. I will still challenge them, just like I will do for a white woman. And so one thing I noticed this also for women of colour have — what do you call it? They have…umm… internalized racism too — some of them you know. So, people, who like… things happened to them over the years, you know like they believe, for instance, they may say, you know, some of them may think, for me it could be, to be recognized or to get ahead, I have to identify with white culture. Or we hear them putting their own culture people down. Or saying the same things that other people will say about them, that is racist or offensive, you know? So, like I know a South Asian women saying “Paki” before, that kind of thing… Some women, I hear them say, “I don’t like to go out [with men of my culture or race].” I have a staff, one of my colleagues, that was said, right here years ago when I was working at [the shelter I worked at], she said to me, she was born in England, from Indian descent, she says to me, during a shift change, that she’s only going out with black or white men, not with Indian men. And I said to her. “Can you tell me why?” And she gave me, the reason she gave, I said to her, “That’s internalized racism, you know, you have to look at yourself, you know maybe you have to try to link with a man from your culture, because you may find someone who is not, you know that kind of thing.” And you also hear people say different things. Or hearing a black women saying “You shouldn’t go to black people’s clubs, because they are pigs,” that kind of thing. And I said, “What are you trying to say? You’ve internalized racism.” It’s not right because she thought she could get away from the remark because she’s a black woman whereas if it was a white woman who made that comment, everybody will accuse her of racism.
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Aj described how some of her colleagues, despite being women of colour and antiracist
feminist activists, also participated in patterns of racialized discrimination.
Several of the research participants also alluded to their experience of racialized
discrimination, not only by white women, but also by women of colour within women’s
organizations. This discrimination existed despite the stated goals within the
organizations to eliminate racism. Another example of this was Francine’s account of
some of the human rights challenges faced by the board that she was a part of:
I remember a number of issues and conflicts around equity issues. So for example, one of the managers, a Caribbean black woman was in serious conflict with an African woman from the continent. And the issues were specifically um identified as racialism. The front-line worker from the continent specifically complained about being treated differentially and unfairly because she was a woman from the continent. In another situation – she complained of being referred to in disrespectful ways and I think that what was critical for us [members of the board], was that one of the issues that the front-line continental African worker had identified was, again she was being differently treated, than other workers. And I seem to remember that one of the examples – the difference between them – that she raised was around work assignments. Um. I think she might have responded to a job posting within the shelter for another position um and that as a result of a competition, she, she may not – she was not awarded the position and felt that it happened because of the conflict that she was having with the manager. And so it, it then, it wasn’t just about um something intangible in that, you know, I feel someone is not being nice to me for this reason. I feel that I’m being spoken to in a different way than other people. The issue, the primary issue is being complained about was something very tangible that, you know, I applied for this job, I felt that I was more qualified. I certainly had enough seniority and yet I didn’t get the position. And that was what was obligated us to respond.
Francine’s example echoed another participant’s account. Catherine, a South
Asian shelter worker, felt that she was discriminated against because of a combination of
racialized discrimination and favouritism. Catherine spoke about being denied an internal
supervisory position because of racialized bias (specifically, that Catherine identified as
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South Asian and the person who was hired in the position identified as Black), despite her
seniority over other candidates in the organization.
But for [my manager], she doesn’t want to hurt any black women, so it’s gone WAY on other side…. As far as I’m concerned, I had way more experience and knowledge than this person whom they hired. Because the coordinator was friends with the woman who got it. Yeah, it was a whole big mess. So I know, favouritism because — if they didn’t give me a position and they gave it to [my co-worker], there’s something wrong there. I’ve been there 11 years, she’s been there 5 years — I have way more experience – and I wasn’t offered that position.
During a staff meeting, Catherine pointed out that the organization was not fulfilling their
antiracist and feminist goals. She accused the management of favouritism and hypocrisy.
I just said, I just want them to understand that doing favouritism and doing this work - and how it affects a person - a woman of colour. If they can’t understand that. So it’s like when [this organization] helps somebody out in community as a worker, and then, like you took every opportunity away from me to do this, to be a public speaker and pull the rug under me as a women of colour, an immigrant woman, a single mom, and then you go out and help women in the community. [At the staff meeting] I said, ‘We failed.’
While Catherine’s accusation of hypocrisy, favouritism and racialized discrimination of
other antiracist feminists had little effect on the outcome of the hiring process, her
account described how all racialized women did not benefit from antiracist feminist
practices. As well, Catherine’s account highlights, as other women’s accounts do, that the
integration of an antiracist feminist framework within women’s organizations did not
protect women from racialization and racist discrimination. Furthermore, the women of
colour’s accounts of racism and discrimination within women’s organizations above
signify a departure from the organizations’ stated goals of integrating diversity,
combatting racism and other forms of oppression, and moving towards an antiracist
feminist practice. In addition to speaking about organizational experiences of racism and
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racialized discrimination, women spoke about the ways they were disciplined when they
raised these concerns on their own or other women of colour’s behalf.
Disciplining antiracist, feminist, and social justice activism in organizations
The women spoke of another limiting factor in implementing ideals: being disciplined
when they raised these concerns on their own or on another woman of colour’s behalf.
Although most of the organizations in which the participants worked or volunteered were
engaged in actively implementing antiracist change, when racism, tokenism,
ethnocentrism or white privilege was critiqued the participants were subject to forms of
silencing, shaming and disciplining. Ahmed (2009) describes a similar sort of experience
with antiracism and diversity work within universities within the UK. As she puts it:
The organisation becomes the subject of feeling, the one who must be protected, the one who is easily bruised or hurt. To speak of racism is to introduce bad feeling. It is to hurt not just the organisation, re-imagined as a subject with feelings, but also the subjects who identify with the organisation, the ‘good white diversity’ subjects, to whom we are supposed to be grateful (p. 47).
This outrage, indignation and defensiveness was not uncommon in women’s
organizations, particularly in those who were most positively engaged in antiracist
struggle (see also Srivastava, 2002).
For example, despite Aj’s statement that antiracist training in her organization had
sensitized her colleagues to issues of diversity, culture, and racism, she described an
incident in which she had come into conflict around diversity with a white colleague.
When Aj advocated for serving food from diverse cultures at a party, a colleague had
reacted to being challenged around the food selection.
So what happened this Christmas we are coordinating the food for the Christmas party … so there is this [mainstream] restaurant they wanted to
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order food from. … And considering the fact that a lot of our clients have been women of colour, so I was proposing that the food wasn’t multicultural, that we try to, because you have these women from these cultural groups that they will not like the food. So you know that, I noticed she [a co-worker] was trying to block the cultural foods, then I got angry – I reacted, I said to her that we must prepare cultural food, because a lot of our clients are women from various cultural backgrounds so it’s okay, bring the other food…. We will eat that [from the mainstream restaurant], but we have to also bring other too.
As Aj began talking about issues of diversity and race, her colleague began to cry and
accused Aj of calling her “a racist”:
She was saying that I called her a racist, which I didn’t. But that was her understanding that I did. But I didn’t call her that… I said to her, no, I didn't call you racist you know, I was saying to you we have to understand that women from other cultures like that [different] food. So we went to meet our manager and I told her what ever happened, I said to her do you think that you know because I presented my views in this area, ‘Does this mean that I call her a racist?’ She said, “No.”
This conflict lasted for months and Aj felt that it was because her colleague was
embarrassed about neglecting to be mindful of diversity.
Even though Aj’s manager supported her in raising the issue of the need to
accommodate individual cultural food preferences, Aj experienced a protracted conflict,
leading to a formalized mediation process.
But she [co-worker] was still emphasizing and it went on for months! [laughing] So I’m giving you an example. She felt bad because I raised the issue, you know and now she’s feeling so bad, that she never thought of it. Instead of accepting it, she was trying to make me — look bad … but I picked up on it you know and challenged her in front of everybody. So she was embarrassed; so now she wants to attack me back you know? And so, then we had to do the conflict mediation…. And after all these things, you know, conflict mediation.
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For Aj and other women, a protracted conflict could be seen as a form of disciplining
which meant that there were emotional consequences to raising concerns around issues of
diversity.
Some of the participants described being disciplined for pointing our racist
practices, even when the organization itself had stated antiracist goals and were engaged
in antiracist practice. For example, Lodge was disciplined for protesting when a black
woman who had been a resident/service user of her shelter was asked to become part of
the agency’s board. Although Lodge was actively engaged in the organization’s work to
diversify, she criticized the board’s lack of attention to its own policies, which prohibited
past service users from becoming volunteers within the organization until several years
had passed:
On the board, now we have a black woman that was a [past] resident [of the shelter]. And for me I just find it so exploitive. The way they, she got on… There is actually a policy which says you cannot be part of the organization right away after you are a resident…. From my understanding they never have a service user, even volunteering, like on front line or crisis line.… It was really very yucky.
Lodge also described her anger at what she felt was racialized tokenism when the
president of the board asked this black woman to be a board member.
And I know, sometime it’s good to get that opportunity to be part of the board [for women of colour]. But I know she have no voice there. I know how it is, in this, in a white-dominance organization. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are. We know, [new immigrants might] still be a doctor and they come and they have all this education and they’re driving cab. So we [new immigrants] sit there and even though we have these brilliant ideas of how to do. Because it’s not reflecting what these white people think or how they do. Then they’re not going to listen to you anyways. … Because the conversation that she have with the [past service user and new board member], asking the woman, saying that, “Oh well, we need diversity on the board.” And that’s what the woman tell me. I was freaking mad, I was mad for just that comment itself. Well, yes you wanted tokenism! I was
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upset about it… Because the woman [past service user] said to her [the president of the board], “Like I just come to Canada, I don’t know anything about Canada. I don’t know how things is done here.” And she [the president of the board] said, “No it’s ok, we just need diversity.” ... And I was really, really mad. Like there’s no other diversity in Guelph.
In addition, Lodge objected because once she was on the board, the past service user
would not be able to access counselling services that Lodge felt she needed. In particular,
Lodge was upset by the fact that the past-resident’s need for service was ignored by the
board:
And it just for me was so yucky. Because I know I was working with her, doing a [counselling] group in the community. And I know she wanted to be in that group, but she couldn’t. She’s struggling still accessing the group. But if she access the group, she won’t be able to be on the board. And they’re asking her to be on the board. And then she has no support now. So what’s the process? Do they try to connect her without a support. No, that didn’t happen.
After Lodge raised this issue with her manager and accused the board of racism
and tokenism during a meeting, the president of the board called her to confront her:
Well, I bring that out to my manager, my manager did support me, a lot in that. And then I think, well,… I guess the E.D., maybe follow up and stuff, but then the president of the board called me. She was mad at me for saying it was not okay. It was like, ok, so if we’re supposed to try to change, where do we start, like you know. She was so mad at me! She was like, how dare you accuse me of exploitation… I don’t even remember. She asked me to write a letter of apology for saying that this wasn’t right what she did. And yeah, she said, “You have no right,” the conversation was more than that. She was telling me how I should have handled it. Like, if I heard this from the woman and I wasn’t ok with it, then I should come back and ask her. This woman [the president of the board], like she never talked to me before. You know, I don’t know her. She’s telling me, oh well, I should have follow up with her to see if it was true. Like I’m going to believe a white woman’s word over this woman I spend so much time supporting.
Lodge felt that as a result of raising this issue with her manager, she was at risk of losing
her job:
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I was very, very mad. To me, it was very exploitive and I said that. And she tell me I need to write a letter of apology. I didn’t. Like I thought I was going to lose my job! I was about to do it. So then I talked to my manager, [name]. She’s so amazing. I talked to her and she said ok, I’ll deal with it, and then she ended up the heat. Cause I did talk to her. And she did the other follow up and however... [sighed] I know... Yeah, yeah. I thought I was going to lose my job.
Lodge did not lose her job; however, being subjected to direct attack as a result of
her antiracist critiques was upsetting, particularly because of her organization’s progress
in implementing antiracist ideals in its policies, in interactions among colleagues, in
workshops and changing discourse within the work environment to reflect culturally and
racially sensitive practices with clients and so on. In spite of this progress, when Lodge
challenged board practices and accused the board of racism and racialized tokenism, her
antiracist critique was not only blocked, but she also became subject to discipline by the
board members. Specifically, her critique that the means through which the organization
attempted to diversify were tokenistic and racist, meant that feelings of hurt, indignation
and anger came to the fore (see Ahmed, 2009; Srivastava, 2002).
Similarly, in one case, a sexual assault centre decided to close down the “diversity
program” because of the challenges it faced as a result of antiracist activism. Soni was
clear that the board closed the program down because of the successes that she and her
staff were making in changing the racial composition of organizational members, and
pointing out and addressing racism in the organization. The board made this decision in
spite of the program being fully funded.
Soni described her incredulity by noting that:
The agency is going through um huge issues of conflict — huge changes that are happening in the organization around the diversity program and antioppression. The conflict is around that. The program is actually ending, which is an issue because we have core funding. And what board
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in their right mind gives up core funding? My goodness, I mean normally non-profit struggle with funding!
She further indicated that the program was going to be closed down because of a
“backlash” to policies and practices she had advocated as a manager.
And making changes around time sheets, making changes around how we evaluate staff and… being a voice, being a constant voice [against oppression] in the agency around things like that right? And … not putting up with bullshit, you know. So this was backlash, this was strong backlash to women of colour raising their voices. And of course the staff had also at that point acknowledged there was racism in the organization.
Soni said that because the women of colour staff discussed openly that they felt unsafe
discussing their experiences of racist discrimination within the organization, they were
going to lose their jobs.
The two staff, the other two women of colour had voiced that they had experienced issues of racism and discrimination, they had voiced that already months before. So, the agency was already acknowledging these were some issues that we need to work at… We have clinical session every week where staff talk about, you know, critical issues, an external person comes in and works with us. The women of colour had identified and they had identified that the clinical space is the only safe space for them to talk about these issues, and that they can’t just talk about them at the staff meeting, you need a facilitator, you need it to be a safe environment, blah, blah, blah right? So that safe space was taken away, and the diversity program was shut down. And that was the backlash that was the solving of the problem.
Soni continued by describing how the board then targeted her and other racialized staff
by closing down the programs that she oversaw. She suggested that it would have been
difficult to get rid of her because she was part of the management team.
Soni also described some other repercussions of her antioppressive practice. She
gave an example of how she and a white colleague were disciplined for voicing their
concerns about racism and oppression within the organization:
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And now then now the problem they are left is me, because I’m in management and it’s not going to be easy to get rid of me. So now it’s, you know, I’m definitely targeted, me and myself and of course [volunteer coordinator], who’s the volunteer coordinator, who is a strong ally in this um and has put herself on line and has also been very much attacked and threatened and been called a traitor for taking our side, you know. She’s actually been called that, a traitor. [The other two staff have said that] I’ve brainwashed [volunteer coordinator], I mean [volunteer coordinator] is a women who’s like 50 plus like way over 30 years working in this field. It’s like, you know, I mean I don’t have the ability to brainwash [volunteer coordinator] unless I put maybe one of my foreign mystic spells on her [laughs].
In some cases, even managers who self-identified as antiracist feminists, also
disciplined their staff for calling attention to issues of racism in the organization. Recall,
for example, Tuffy who was concerned with “pandemonium” that might result from
antiracist feminist activism. Another example of this was shown through Cee’s account
of encountering antiracist critique as the director of a women’s shelter.
Cee was frustrated by a conflict among the staff around a holiday party. The
conflict was marred by racialized divisions between white women and women of colour,
to the effect that the women of colour were going to boycott the holiday party. According
to Cee, this boycott was not due to current tensions, but based on issues from several
years ago:
It was all around having to organize a stupid little thing [lowering voice] around a holiday party. I remember hearing at one point in time, from one of the black staff, “Do you remember when we had a party and none of them [white women] came — and I said, “None of who? Those people are not even here anymore, so, big deal, none of them came.” And I said, “Unfortunately, you didn’t deal with that then, you’re not going to do deal with it now. Cause you’re not going to deal with it on my watch.” Well it is little and petty. Because if they don’t want to go, they just don’t go. You just don’t go around talking about it, you have people now, not talking to other people who are already not talking to other people. Because of what? Now, now what is this issue really about? I said, “You know, my struggle around this, is that when I came here, there was this similar kind of um tension and claims, right?” And I said, “Somewhere along the line I was, I
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was somehow convinced that it was really them. I said those people are not even here anymore! And what I’m seeing is, I’m seeing the same kind of tension, you know what I mean and the same issues and all of a sudden, you know, you’re talking about something that happened years ago. I wasn’t here, none of those people are no longer here.” And so, so like, what is it, this is a bigger issue…. So then that poses a larger question for me: Can change really occur with people who have um historic knowledge and issues?
Cee dealt with this by asking her staff not to discuss these issues at the shelter, as she felt
it was poisonous to the feeling in the shelter, particularly to the residents.
She suggested, very emphatically, that those who did speak about the issue would
be disciplined:
I have no interest in the way you deal with it, but here is my position. You do not make it an issue of discussion, in common places in the house. I mean not talking about it in public. It’s like, the residents are here, it’s not like they don’t know what’s going on. I’m going to put a gag order on you. You’re going to stop or this is what’s going to be happening.
This resulted in a challenge by one of the staff of colour, who contacted the union to
complain about Cee’s threat of discipline.
And then she went to the union and so the union rep called me. And I said well I said, “You know, I’m clear on what I can discipline employees for, what I cannot discipline them for.” I said, “However, my greater concern is what happens to the poisoning of the work environment right? And what certain behaviours can lead to.” And she said, “Oh well, so what? So what if there’s disrespect for and hurt each other’s feelings, so what?”
Cee’s role as a manager meant that despite her own biography and commitment to
antiracist feminist practice she found herself pitted against other women of colour and the
union in her attempts to manage, silence, sanction, and discipline workers for racialized
conflict.
The degree to which antiracist feminist practice was limited in the organizations
as discussed above is apparent in the ways in which women of colour activists were
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sanctioned, silenced, disciplined, and threatened by others in the organization for raising
concerns about oppression and racism. Clearly a disconnection between the women’s
organizations’ desire to diversify and the actual practice of this diversification was a
burden that antiracist feminist activists bore in personal ways.
Disparity and conflict among women of colour’s antiracist feminist practice
As was evident in Cee’s account in particular, conflict sometimes existed among
antiracist feminists’ naming of the parameters of antiracist feminist practice and action.
The research participants in this study, although committed to antiracist feminism and
social justice, exhibited contradictory beliefs and approaches to antiracist feminist
practice. This was evident within the individual accounts of the women, as well as when
their accounts were compared. The women relayed the disjuncture between the ideal of
an integrative antiracist feminist practice and their experience through the range of ways
they took up antiracist feminism in their organizational work and antiracist work.
The women did not all share the same understanding of what it meant to integrate
antiracist feminist ideals within their organizations. Francine talked about how women of
colour responded to the new board’s initiatives to integrate antiracism within the shelter
in the 1990s, indicating that women of colour took varying positions on the board’s
antiracist feminist organizational change:
And I know that even those women of colour who supported the board did not feel empowered enough, there were shelter staff who didn’t feel empowered to support the board openly with their [white] co-workers. And certainly there were other people who said nothing – and really didn’t know what they felt. And other people of colour who open challenged the board.
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Although Francine did not speak to the specific reasons for the front-line shelter staff’s
reactions to the board’s initiatives, her account made clear that women of colour had a
range of reactions to the board’s interpretation of antiracist feminist practice (including
tacitly or actively challenging or supporting).
Catherine came into conflict within her organization, not only as a victim of
racialization in her organization, but also by contesting the parameters of antiracist
feminist practice in her organization. She said that when the management of the
organization decided to do antiracism, “we totally went that way — so there was no
medium point.” Although this example shows the degree to which antiracist feminism
was successful in women’s organizations, Catherine’s comment that “there was no
medium point” suggested that she did not necessarily share the “boss’s” enthusiasm or
interpretation of antiracist feminist practice.
Catherine also challenged her manager’s implicit belief that that being antiracist
meant that black women were more authentic antiracists than other women of colour and
could not be challenged.
It doesn’t matter, you can still challenge me as a woman of colour — that doesn’t make you racist, but that’s where she [my manager] is, so. So that’s – I don’t for what reason, what happened there – I’ve no idea, there’s a one staff who shouldn’t be working there — like she has no basic skills to be a counsellor. She’s a black woman — everybody has complaints. I went and I said, I am not dealing with this woman my shift — rather give me shift alone – than putting this person — I have to take responsibility for her insulting women — nothing happened — nothing. So that’s, I don’t know, so for me that’s not antiracism.
Such contradiction within women’s organization was seen through disparity among
women of colour antiracist activists, including conflict over the practices of antiracist
feminism through everyday activities integral to women’s organizations.
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Highlighting this internal conflict and disparity among women of colour’s
antiracist feminist practices is important because antiracist feminist practice was not a
monolithic or static discourse, but was constantly shaped through antiracist feminist
struggle. Women of colour, through their everyday actions, were part of the struggle to
define the parameters of antiracist feminist practice through their organizational work.
Additionally, the tensions, paradoxes, contradictions, discrepancies, disparities
and conflicts that women faced in putting into practice antiracist ideals was, in fact, an
indication of ongoing politicized antiracist feminist struggle. The apparent contradictions
in women’s organizations cannot be understood simplistically as either the failure of
women’s antiracist feminist activism or white women’s ways of resisting antiracist
change. Rather, they need to be seen as part of the antiracist struggle within the context of
organizations that is dialectically produced through everyday politicized praxis and
organizational processes. The disconnections, paradoxes and tensions were created by
separate but intertwined relations of accountability. As I describe in the next two
chapters, the research participants’ accounts showed how antiracist feminist activism was
shaped by both forms of relations of accountability. In actual fact, antiracist feminist
praxis was shaped by multiple relations of accountability, but this dissertation explores
two distinct and intertwined sets of social relations: namely, activism shaped by
accountability to organizational functioning and governances (organizational
accountability) and activism shaped by antiracist feminism (activist responsibility).25
25 See “Key Terms” in chapter one for definitions of accountability, organizational accountability, and activist responsibility.
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Chapter Five: Organizational Accountability
While women of colour negotiated their commitments to antiracist feminism within
feminist organizations, these negotiations were shaped by specific social relations that
exist within women’s organizations. An examination of the research participants’
descriptions of the organizational processes in place at their work places revealed that
formal organizational accountability shaped26 their antiracist, feminist and activist work
by both supporting and limiting it. By formal organizational accountability or
organizational accountability, I mean accountability to the organization’s formal
administrative, bureaucratic, and governance processes and policies. In order to bring
their commitments to antiracism, feminism, and social justice into practice, women were
made answerable to the functioning of their organizations. That is, antiracist feminist
activism was socially organized through textually-mediated and hierarchicalized relations
of accountability within their organizations. Hierarchicalized relationships between
workers and managers shaped antiracist feminist practice and also extended
accountability to the extra-organizational bodies and policies. In this way, everyday work
within the organizations was also oriented to these extralocal relations.
That accountability processes and discourses are central to non-profit
organizations’ everyday work is a point I already elaborated on in the literature review
earlier. The not-for-profit sector, as a whole, has seen a rise in expectations of
accountability, which, several researchers argue, is a result of the downloading of
responsibility for the welfare of people to individuals and community organizations
26 By “shape,” I mean that antiracist feminist was socially organized through organizational accountability in ways that supported, limited and disciplined antiracist feminist.
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(Richmond and Shields, 2004; Hanlon et al., 2007; Ife, 1997; Carniol, 2005; Baines,
2008; Barnoff et al., 2006). Related to this is the observation that the state has
successfully shifted the gaze away from its unwillingness to take responsibility for the
welfare of people to more scrutiny and pressure on non-profit organizations (Fisher and
Shragge, 2002).
In addition to an increase in reporting and instability in non-profit organizations,
organizations have faced increased scrutiny due to an increase in public discourses of
non-profit scandal, inefficiency, wrongdoing, ineffectiveness, and corruption. Public
administration theorists have named this increase in interest on accountability of non-
profit organizations as the “accountability movement” (Carman, 2010). Other critical
social theorists argue that this movement towards an increase in accountability is part of a
definitive and generalized social and cultural shift towards an “audit society” (Power,
1997) or “audit culture” (Strathern, 2000; see also Miller, 2001; Rose and Miller, 1992).
In fact, Power (1997) argues that our society is characterized of what he terms an “audit
explosion” to refer to a “set of attitudes or cultural commitments to problem solving”
focused on accountability and audit (p. 4). Despite the cultural shifts towards increased
discourse and emphasis on accountability, some authors note that the concept of
accountability has been widely used, but inconsistently defined (Hoeffer, 2000; Mayhew,
2008).
The academic/non-profit sector literature on accountability primarily focusses on
the relationship between funding bodies and funded organizations within the non-profit
sector, and its links to the growing concerns about public accountability (Choudhury and
Ahmed, 2002; Hoeffer, 2000; Mayhew, 2008). Studies of non-profit accountability are
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diverse, and include such focus as implications of accountability on the funder–fundee
relationship, the reasons for increases in accountability practices within organizations, the
effects, costs and benefits of reporting on non-profit organizations, different types of
accounts, reports and evaluation, developing more efficient reporting processes, and so
on (Benjamin, 2008; Carman, 2010; Choudhury and Ahmed, 2002; Hanlon et al., 2007;
Hoeffer, 2000; Mayhew, 2008).
Accountability usually means being held to account by, or answerable to, a
recognized authority; it may also mean a willingness to endure scrutiny (Benjamin, 2008;
Choudhury and Ahmed, 2002; Mayhew, 2008; Miller, 1997). As I described in the “Key
Terms” section of chapter one, I use the notion of accountability in more general terms,
whereby relations of accountability refer to people’s actions of providing and monitoring
of accounts as part and parcel of their everyday interactions. Thus, relations of
accountability include formalized and institutionalized relationships (such as those
between funder and fundee), but not solely. Power (1997), for example, writes, that
accountability and auditing or, as he puts it “checking up on each other” is not just a
matter of technical tasks, but rather needs to be understood as ideas in a cultural
orientation to “institutionalized checking and trust” (pp. 2-3). As I further explain below,
Power’s broad understanding of accountability as both being grounded in practice (as
“technology”) and at the level of discourse (as “programme”) helps to explain increased
attention to accountability across sectors and different types of organizations (1997, pp.
6-7; see also Miller, 2001; Rose and Miller, 1992).
Miller’s (2001) analysis on calculative practices (such as calculating costs and
rates of return, creating and comparing budgets, and so on) as technologies of governance
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extends the understanding of accountability and accounting as practice and ideas; for
Miller argues that calculative practices in organizations create the self-regulating and
self-monitoring calculative self (see also Rose and Miller, 1992). Taking up Miller’s
notion of the calculative self, Dehli (2010) argues that the repetition of such calculative
processes within neoliberal government of graduate education is constitutive of social
relations and individual subjectivities:
…the repetition of these sorts of practices entails forms of power and subjectivity whereby individuals are recruited into particular modes of self-scrutiny, reflection and performance... What is insidious about these practices and the rationalities that legitimise them is that they are constitutive of relations and subjectivities.
Dehli’s work (and that of other critical accounting theorists) reminds us that forms of
accounting and audit are not neutral and that they shape the very subjectivities of those of
us engaged in non-profit organizations.
Several institutional ethnographies provide descriptions of how everyday work in
organizations is socially organized through extralocal relations of accountability in non-
profit organizations (McCoy, 1998; Ng, 1998; Nichols, 2008; Rankin and Campbell,
2006). For example, McCoy (1998), who looks at accounting practices in post-secondary
education, shows how accounting, as part of relations of accountability, organizes the
everyday work of those working in colleges:
Accounting, rather than being a simple matter of neutral record-keeping after the fact, plays an active conceptual role in setting the terms in which organizational activities can be thought, discussed and evaluated. At the interface between organizations, accounting categories work to align one organization’s work processes with those of others (funders, creditors, customers). This is especially prevalent in relations of accountability, where grant recipients, state funded agencies, and company subsidiaries report on their activities through documents prepared using accounting
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categories and procedures imposed by the more powerful organization (p. 396).
McCoy argues that accounting procedures imposed by the more powerful organization
set the parameters of what can be articulated and, thus, acted on, within specific
organizations. Moreover, although McCoy studies accounting in colleges, her work is
important because she describes how relations of accountability subsume and orient
people’s everyday work and interactions with other people doing different everyday work
within non-profit organizations (McCoy, 1998).
Similarly, drawing on McCoy’s institutional ethnographic focus on
accountability, Nichols (2008) describes how accountability to funding bodies shapes
everyday activist talk, work and preoccupations. She argues that those organizations that
are unable (or unwilling) to articulate their work in terms that funding bodies deem
“accountable,” such as “measurable outcomes,” or “a proven record,” are deemed
unaccountable, and thus unable to sustain themselves. Activists working in funded non-
profit organizations, like other non-profit organizational actors, thus orient their everyday
talk and practice to align with those of funding bodies, even when their politicized
commitments lie outside of and contrary to those of the funding bodies. In effect,
Nichols’ study supports Dehli’s (2010) idea that accounting and accountability discourse
and practice shape activists’ very subjectivities. Together, these studies offer support to
my finding that social relations of accountability shape everyday antiracist feminist work
within non-profit organizations.
While the focus and findings of critical accountability and auditing studies
provide a rich backdrop to my research, this chapter analyzes relations of accountability
within the organization (albeit embedded within technologies of government and relations
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of ruling), rather than among funders, fundees, and public perceptions. The literature
which critically analyzes accountability and auditing practices allows me to understand
how social relations of accountability permeate within the local settings of women’s
organizations. For example, although the relationships between funders and women’s
organizations, particularly through funding contracts (Nichols, 2008), have implications
for everyday work in the organization, including antiracist feminist activism, I use the
insights of these studies to understand how relations of accountability (as I defined
earlier) are found within the everyday work of antiracist feminist activists within
organizations.
Following, the central argument of this chapter is that the antiracist feminist social
change work of my research participants was framed by organizational accountability.
Organizational accountability shaped (that is, limited and supported) the emancipatory
potential of antiracist feminist activism through the struggle over the definitions and
terms of implementation of antiracist feminist ideals. That is, although front-line workers
were successful in negotiating space for antiracist feminism within organizations, the
hierarchicalized social relations filtered the contestations around definitions of antiracist
advocacy through the priorities of management connected to extralocal forms of ruling.
More specifically, managerial and administrative discursive practices subsumed antiracist
and feminist social critiques. For example, the accounts of my research participants
highlighted how formal processes of organizational accountability, such as reporting and
supervising, documenting practices and managing conflict, transformed political and
social critiques into individualized concerns which had to be managed or controlled.
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In expounding on the argument described above, this chapter is divided in two
parts. First, I describe general features of organizational accountability in women’s
organizations which shape all organizational practices (regardless of politicized
intentions). Second, drawing further from the accounts of activists I interviewed, I show
specifically how organizational accountability shaped antiracist feminist practice within
women’s organizations.
Accountability, Hierarchy, and Feminist Organizations
The women’s descriptions of their organizations revealed that social relations of
organizational accountability were central to the everyday workings of women’s
organizations. Despite explicit discussions of equalizing power through collective
processes of decision making within feminist movement organizations (Acker, 1995;
Adamson et al., 1988; Agnew, 1996; Arnold, 1995; Ferree and Martin, 1995; Simonds,
1996; Kohli, 1993; Morgen, 1995; Mueller, 1995; Nadeau, 2005; Scott, 2000), women
described how their organizations had to compromise (although not altogether abandon)
on their collectivist, consensus building, and democratic ideals of decision making. This
disjuncture between collectivist ideals of decision making and hierarchicalized social
relations was apparent throughout women’s accounts, but was particularly evident when
they described their organizations through the charts they drew, as well as in their
descriptions of reporting relationships and their references to extralocal influences on
their organizations. In this section I explore the women’s descriptions of organizational
hierarchy and reporting processes which shape everyday work in organizations,
including, but not exclusively, antiracist feminist change.
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Hierarchicalized relations and organizational charts
The women’s descriptions of their organizations indicated that all were hierarchical,
despite the fact that women’s organizations have struggled to maintain collectivist ideals.
Since the advent of ‘second-wave feminism’ in North America, feminists sought to put
into practice their feminist ideals of redressing the power inequities seen to be inherent in
male-dominated, hierarchical organizations. In the ideal feminist organization, all
members share power equitably to ensure direct participatory democracy.27 As a result,
many feminist organizers have insisted on developing organizations which have little or
no hierarchy, no established formal leadership, rotating organizational responsibilities,
decision-making processes based on consensus (Agnew, 1996; Simonds, 1996; Morgen,
1995; Ng, 1998).
In reality, participatory democracy has been difficult to implement and has been
challenged both from within and from without the organization. Feminists have noted
that when feminist organizations attempt to put these ideals into practice, hierarchies,
factionalism and leaders emerge; these hierarchies most often reflect the unequal
privilege between women based on race, class, generation, (dis) ability, and other social
relations (Agnew, 1996; Simonds, 1996).28 Collective and consensus decision making
models are also disciplined by the state. For example, Ng describes how the legal
requirements of setting up a service organization, namely an immigrant women’s
employment centre, meant producing a hierarchy (Ng, 1998).
27 The term, “participatory democracy,” was first used by founders of Students for a Democratic Society in the Port Huron Statement in 1962. 28 See also chapter five where the women of colour discuss some of the contradictions within women’s organizations’ attempts to develop less hierarchical organizations.
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Despite these critiques of, and assaults to, feminist democratic ideals, women’s
organizations in Ontario at the time of my research had not completely abandoned the
ideals of participatory democracy. As chapters four and six describe, women’s
organizations collectively struggled to find ways to increase democratic participation
within hierarchical organizations, albeit in contradictory ways. Women described how
organizational actors continued to use participatory and democratic ideals in their
everyday work with those they supervised, those they worked with, and those they
served.
Although the women in my study described how their organizations did indeed try
to implement collectivist ideals, when asked to draw a visual representation of their
organizations they all described hierarchicalized reporting processes.29 The ease with
which women were able to draw their “organizational charts” and the ease with which I
was able to interpret these is illustrative of “institutional capture” (Smith, 2005, pp. 155-
7; see also DeVault and McCoy, 2002). Smith argues that people embedded within
institutional relations often subsume their own experiences within institutional terms. In
this way, abstractions such as organizational charts stand in for reality and are a means
through which organizational actors come to see, understand, and interpret organizations.
Additionally, organizational charts not only interpreted social relations within
organizations, but guided everyday practice. It was through this abstraction that women’s
everyday work and activist beliefs of participatory and democratic notions of decision
making became subsumed by ruling relations. As I describe later in this chapter, the
29 I did not collect formal organizational charts from any of the organizations. Instead, I asked women to draw or represent their organizations graphically as a way for them to describe their work within the organization.
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hierarchicalized relations of accountability implied in and abstracted by organizational
charts was not just a representation, but shaped the everyday work of antiracist feminist
organizational actors.
In the case of my research, all the women discussed their organizations in ways
which depicted this hierarchy. Each woman named a person’s official job title/position
and/or program, and to whom they reported or were accountable. Lodge described her
organization, as she drew a triangle with the point up, in the following way:
So first you have the E.D. [executive director]. And, yes, it is a hierarchical organization [laughs]. So down here would be one ... I would be right here, two [draws one line through bottom and then second line]. So I would be right here, the team leader. And then we have ... And then you have [above team leader] the residential manager. And then here you’d have the ED, I guess. Umm, up, I guess here, you’d have the management team [above the ED]. That would include the residential manager all the other managers from different program areas...
Lodge’s description and graphic representation made it clear that the organization was
hierarchical in its reporting relationships. This was the same with all of the other research
participants’ descriptions and graphic representations of their organizations.
However, despite the fact that women’s accounts of their everyday work
sometimes contradicted these hierarchical representations, not one of the research
participants graphically depicted their organization in ways other than a formal
organizational chart. As I spoke with the research participants, they often gave a more
complex description of everyday work and reporting relations than the graphic
representations, and/or often described the ways in which their organizations were
spatially organized. For example, before our interview, Soni partially described the
spatial organization to me when we scheduled a meeting on a weekend but did not do so
when I asked her to draw her organization’s chart. Soni instructed me to open the front
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door and walk past the first workspace, down the hall to where she would be conducting
a group. As I walked down that hallway, I saw five empty rooms, with desks, shelves and
chairs, again, presumably workspaces. Yet, when I asked Soni to describe her
organization, she did not describe the workspaces as connected by a hall or as rooms
which contained desks, shelves and chairs; nor did she describe what people would be
doing in those spaces. She represented her workplace within the specialized form of an
organizational chart. She did not even describe the group that she was conducting that
day. The most salient part of her description and graphic representation of her
organization were how people (or groups of people) were connected to one another
through official reporting processes, people’s official titles, and program names.
However, as I spoke with Soni about her and others’ work, a picture emerged
which deepened, and even contradicted, the initial description and graphic representation
of the organization. Early in the interview as she drew an organizational chart, Soni
explained that there were five individual women who made up the organization’s
collective management team. Each member reported to the board of directors monthly on
a rotating basis; this meant, in theory, that each member of the collective management
team was responsible to the board and to other team managers. However, as she
described her everyday work, she explained how one member (the manager of finances
and human resources) had more access to decision making and to board members by
virtue of her politics and access to resources. In other words, the graphic representation of
the organization in the form of organizational chart did not sufficiently represent how the
organization actually worked. Soni’s experience captures what I heard during all of the
interviews I conducted.
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Institutional capture was illustrated well through the women’s descriptions of
their organizations; organizational charts operated as powerful texts which helped
socially organize women’s everyday activities. As I show throughout the chapter, the
organizational charts represented an abstraction in which people’s everyday activities
were subsumed through institutionalized forms of social relations. The following
representations in Figures 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 are amalgams of women’s descriptions and
diagrams of their organizations. These show the centrality of hierarchicalized relations of
organizational accountability.
Figure 5. 1: Four levels of reporting relationships
The configuration of the organizational charts varied depending on: the number of
programs, sites, and organizational members; whether or not the organization was part of
a larger umbrella organization; and the history and philosophy of the organization’s
members on issues of consensus decision making. Each chart that participants drew
Board of Directors
Executive and Assistant Director(s)/ Collective Management Team
Program/ Project
Manager
Program/ Project
Coordinator
Volunteers/ Placement Students
Administrative and Finance Managers
Administrative Staff
Director of Specific
Site/Shelter
Staff
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showed the organization as having at least four levels (see Figure 5.1). In describing their
organizations, women drew the board of directors, for the most part, on “top” of their
representations of organizations. After that they used vertical lines between levels to
indicate a formal reporting process. On the second level, the women often indicated
senior management, usually an executive director, senior director and, in one case, a
collective management team which was comprised of five members, each member
represented “one-fifth of an executive director” (Soni). Generally, the third level
comprised program managers, project coordinators, or directors of specific sites. Many of
the women in this third level did both managerial work and direct service. On the fourth
level were groups of people who were primarily responsible for delivering services. They
generally included staff members, shift supervisors or team leaders and union
representatives, placement students/interns and volunteers.
Figure 5. 2: Organizational chart with umbrella or national organizations
Umbrella Organization/
National Organization
Board of Directors
Executive and Assistant Director(s)/ Collective Management Team
Program/ Project
Manager
Staff Volunteers/Students
Director of specific
site/shelter
Shift/Team Leader
Staff
Program/ Project
Coordinator
Administrative and Finance Managers
Administrative Staff
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General Membership (includes board members, directors/ managers,staff, volunteers, and sometimes service users; as well as interested community members, members of other women's
and social service organizations, funders and government officials)
Board of Directors
Executive and Assistant Director(s)/ Collective Management Team
Program/Project
Manager
StaffVolunteers/ Placement Students
Director of specific
site/shelter
Shift/Team Leader Staff
Program/ Project
Coordinator
Administrative and Finance Managers
Administrative Staff
Five of the women worked in organizations with a larger national umbrella coalition or
organization, and they represented them on the charts as part of their organization (see
Figure 5.2).
Several of the women indicated another level of formal accountability: they
represented their general membership on their organization charts. Board of directors
were generally depicted as directly reporting to the community or “general membership”
(see Figure 5.3). In reality, although not all of the women discussed or acknowledged this
key aspect of organizational governance, all of the organizations were accountable to a
general membership. However, as was evident from many of the women’s descriptions of
their organizations, this level of hierarchy was not directly activate in organizational
activities except in the form of annual general meetings.
Most of the women described their boards as being more involved with setting the
overall direction of the organization, than with the day-to-day workings of the
Figure 5. 3: Organizational chart with general membership
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organization. However, their descriptions varied from organization to organization, and
from board member to board member. Although I only interviewed three women who
were board members of women’s organizations, all of the women I interviewed spoke
about the work of their board of directors, either through their descriptions of their
organizations or the ways in which their work intersected with that of the board of
directors. In all cases, the board of directors were responsible for overseeing the
organization’s overall direction. They were seen as responsible for maintaining
accountability to the community (broadly defined) and funding agencies. They were also
responsible for developing, maintaining and modifying current policies of the
organization. In most cases, boards of directors were also responsible for fundraising.
Additionally, they were responsible for hiring, supervising, and overseeing the work of
the executive director.
Reporting relationships
Women were answerable to their organizations through institutionalized (formal)
reporting processes within their organizations. The women’s organizational charts and
their descriptions of how decisions were made indicated that organizational
accountability within their local settings was coordinated by the reporting processes
between the women and those to whom they directly reported. The lines in the charts
represented, in an abstract way, the reporting processes within the organization. These
processes that were the most significant aspects of the charts because they indicated the
ways in which formally established accountability within the organization was enacted.
Front-line or direct service workers and volunteers were directly accountable to
their supervisors, managers, or executive directors, board members or general
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membership. Executive directors, supervisors, and board members were also subject to
organizational accountability through hierarchical reporting processes within and outside
of the organization in two different ways. First, organization members reported to them,
and, second, they reported to those who were considered their employers (i.e., board of
directors or general membership) as well as to extra-organizational bodies such as
funders and governments.
In conversations with the activists of colour, it was clear that feminist ideals of
collectivist decision making, non-hierarchical leadership and consensus building were
still at play within the everyday “informal” workings of the organization in spite of the
apparent hierarchy within their organizations that set up a formal chain of accountability.
Lodge explained the difference (and indeed, disjuncture) between formal reporting
processes and what actually happened in her organization.
I’m the team leader. On each shift you have someone that’s kind of responsible for the shift. I’m always assigned to front-line staff. We’re all front line, but it’s just that I’m in charge… So, the final decision, if I’m asked to ... Let’s say we have to ask a woman to leave, or we have to, you know, then it should come to me. However, sometimes it just don’t happen that way. People do whatever and then...
Service volunteers were accountable to paid workers, front-line workers were
accountable to supervisors, team leaders or managers, and finally to the executive
director or directors. Although it was typical for organizations, to have only one
executive director, one organization divided this role among several members of a
management team.
In three of the organizations in which I conducted interviews there was an
additional level of accountability as the organization was part of a larger network of
organizations.
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The residential manager and all the other managers from different program areas ... so ... we have the shelter as one of [broader organization name], we have the shelter [name of workplace], then you’d have like the sexual assault centre, still part of [broader organization name], you have like the transition support program or the rural women shelter program is still the same organization. So the management team would consist of the residential manager plus the managers of all the different program areas and the executive director.
The directors or executive director was accountable to the board of directors (sometimes
called coordinating committee or management committee), though the degree of
accountability and reporting structure varied. Most women also spoke about a general
membership to which the organization was ultimately responsible. This chain of vertical
accountability did not stop with the organization. The women also indicated that their
organizations were accountable to extralocal bodies. In some cases women’s
organizations also had a number of volunteers who either were responsible to staff
members delivering services or to particular members of the organization.
The accountability in the organization was circular in some ways, as officially, the
organization as a whole, and the board of directors in particular, were responsible to the
“community” as represented by the general membership. The general membership
included all organizational actors: board of directors, executive director and management
teams, service and education staff, volunteers and service users, funders, and other
members of the community, including people from other agencies. In reality, however,
this circular form of accountability was only practised through annual general
membership meetings and in instances when the organization was in conflict or in need
of support. The circularity in accountability, as I describe in later chapters, was central in
the ways in which activists were able to mobilize and further antiracist feminist and
social justice praxis.
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Most of the reporting processes central to organizational accountability, however,
were socially organized through the work of executive directors. There were several ways
in which this reporting happened: through informal one-on-one meetings with staff
members, within formal (and often textually-mediated) supervisory meetings, through
staff meetings and through a review of documentation. For example, Tuffy, an executive
director, described the ways she informally managed her staff was by “cruising” and
walking through each of the departments as she went to her office.
Actually I start my day over at [the shelter], generally I stop in the front office to say hi to the staff there, pick up the mail, probably more days than not — stop in and have a conversation with the housing director about what’s going on in the building — what are the issues she’s dealing with. You know, the kinda the state of the universe day — a report. I stop in the kitchen talk to the cooking — the housing staff. One of my philosophies about management is that — it’s management by cruising — I walk around and I talk to the people who work here — and I think that’s critical both in terms of knowing who they are and what motivates them but it also gives me the ability to have a better relationship with them — and hopefully them with me so that they recognize that I’m not unapproachable — I think you probably recognize that I operate with something of an open-door policy — which really kind of gets me in trouble but I accept that responsibility, as I think it’s important for staff to know that I’m accessible.
Several other managers and directors also described this kind of supervision style in
which their philosophies of being open was both an articulation of their belief in
attempting to subvert or to minimize the power differentials between themselves and
those they supervised, and also a key part of the ways in which staff members remained
accountable to them.
In contrast to the informal supervision approach described above, both front-line
workers and managers spoke about the one-to-one formal supervision which was done as
a regular feature of their work. Most often, formalized reporting was textually-mediated,
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as it also included a review of documentation such as case notes, reports, plans, and
evaluation.30 For example, Lodge complained about the time that documentary practices
took away from her ability to provide direct support and education to service users. She
also said that her failure to document properly often came up in supervision meetings
with her manager. Tuffy, in her role as the executive director, also spoke about the ways
in which she used text-based “work programs” as a way to support the managers of the
different departments to think through their goals and objectives during monthly
supervisory meetings.
Another key opportunity for tracing reporting was through staff meetings. Both
front-line workers and managers discussed the salience of staff meetings within their
organization’s everyday workings. Cee, an executive director of a shelter, described how
she used the weekly staff meetings and “copious” note-taking to make sure that clients
were receiving appropriate services.
Every week I meet with the team, [including] the counsellors and the children’s advocacy workers. And we have the case management meeting … So I’m a person who takes copious notes — and I think I have a pretty good memory for anything I want to remember. And I take work pretty seriously, you know?
So this week I know that “x” needs — because we’d — you know, she has articulated that that’s something she needs, so she wants to go to an ESL class, she’s, you know, so the children need to be in daycare, she also has um, she has to go to court around some issue with her husband. Okay, whatever. So next week when we meet, do not tell me that she still needs to go to ESL class. Next week, tell me that she is in the ESL class. No, she’s not? Why not? Sure, yeah, she went to court. So what’s happened? What was the outcome of court if she was there for custody like is there going to be another meeting. Has something been decided? What has been decided? And if something was decided, what does that look like for her. How is she dealing with that? And what does she need us to do around helping her, for that particular court decision? …
30 I discuss documentary and textual practices in more detail later in this chapter.
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And yeah sometimes it’s very difficult because you have to keep track of all these things, in addition to all the other things that you do. And that’s why I, you know, do take my note, note-taking seriously because I, you know, I can, you know, I can recall if you told me the same thing last week.
As the director, Cee’s management work meant that her staff remained accountable to her
in terms of reporting on the progress of their tasks. The weekly team/case management
meetings ensured that the staff remained on-task around their everyday counselling work.
Cee’s note-taking facilitated this process as well, as did a series of forms she and her staff
members had engineered over the years. Reporting processes, such as documentation and
other non-documentary forms of supervision, were central to ensuring that members of
the organization were accountable not only to the organization, but to extralocal ruling
relations as well.
Extralocal relations of accountability
While the preceding section highlighted the internal processes of reporting, these
reporting processes within women’s organizations were also linked to social relations
outside of the organizations, and specifically through state funding. As some scholars
have noted, state funding not only shows preferences for hierarchical organizations
(Simonds, 1996), but also makes it mandatory for organizations to organize themselves in
hierarchical ways (Ng, 1998; Nichols, 2008). The everyday work within organizations in
which my research participants worked was explicitly tied to extralocal bodies or
organizations (such as state organizations, funding bodies or agencies, unions, coalition
groups, professional associations, the legal system and so on) (Nichols, 2008; see also
McCoy, 1998; Rankin and Campbell, 2006).
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As the literature shows, extralocal relations, and, in particular, state funding
bodies, affect the everyday work of service sector organizations, including antiracist
feminist activist work (Adamson et al., 1988; Agnew, 1996, 1998; Baines, 2008; Barnoff
et al., 2006; Carniol, 2005; DasGupta, 1999; Ferree and Martin, 1995; Ku, 2003; Maraj
Grahame, 1998; Morgen, 1995; Mullaly, 2006; Nadeau, 2005; Ng, 1996; Richmond and
Shields, 2004; Schreader, 1990; Scott, 2004; Simonds, 1996; Sudbury, 1998; Todd and
Lundy, 2006). Several authors have also specifically addressed the ways in which
extralocal relations, particularly through state intervention, have served to depoliticize
feminist and social justice work of women’s and other community organizations (see for
example, Adamson et al., 1988; DasGupta, 1999; Nadeau, 2005; Todd and Lundy, 2006;
Walker, 1996). Importantly, extralocal relations of accountability have been partly
responsible for the limitations in achieving the participatory goal of consensus decision
making within feminist organizations.
In their accounts of how their work place was organized, the women managers
identified extralocally organized relations that contributed to the hierarchical structure
and organizational accountability. The work within the organizations was monitored, and
had to be accounted for, through regular meetings and textual reporting practices to
government agencies, funding bodies, labour organizations, tax agencies, and so on.
Accountability work done by organization managers was directly tied to extralocal
relations of ruling; it extended everyday internal organizational accountability to external
processes and agencies.
This social relation is visible in Cee’s statement above, where she described how
staff meetings and documentary processes were central to her work in managing her staff
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members. Notably, it was neither Cee’s idiosyncratic way of managing her workers’
everyday activities, nor her commitment to what she called “quality service” that guided
her actions. Cee described how she was subject to accountability through regular
meetings with the organization’s board of directors, funding agencies, and different
government departments and ministries. As the executive director of the shelter, Cee was
accountable to the extralocal, that is, the program’s funders and the municipality in which
the shelter was located, which together prescribed the maximum number of weeks
(specifically six to twelve weeks) that women were allowed to stay at the shelter, for
example.
Whether or not women were directly accountable to external organizations, they
oriented their activist work within the framework of accountability to funders,
government agencies and policy. Most often, this was articulated through the ways they
reported to, or negotiated with, their direct supervisors. For example, Freddy, a
community educator, discussed the ways in which the contract between the organization
and a funding agency directly affected her ability to do advocacy and activist work.
Although she indicated that the executive director of the organization would not directly
discipline her for her politicized activities, she was acutely aware of the ways in which
these could adversely affect her employment and the relationship between funders and
the organization where she worked.
That is to say, as a member of the women’s organization where she worked,
Freddy held herself accountable to the spirit of the agreement between the organization
and its funders:
[With some of our funders] we actually have to sign an undertaking saying that we will not engage in political or advocacy activities…I think we
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can’t endorse a political candidate, we can’t endorse a political party. We can’t be seen as being critical of particular of particular political leaders, or people that are making particular kinds of decisions, so for example, when Ernie Eves was the Premier of Ontario, I don’t think our funders would have taken it very lightly, if I went around saying that Ernie Eves has created a situation or his party has created a situation where women in Ontario have really suffered.
I think that what we could say is public policy has shifted in the last 10 years for various reasons — has resulted in women suffering — there’s the distinction. And I can’t go out and protest on organizational time. I certainly can do it on my private time and I can certainly as an organization that works with them, make a deputation to parliament or to Legislature. You can do that, but you are doing it based on place of research, you know, doing on a place of you know, this is what we’re seeing and how this will impact on our constituents.
Freddy’s everyday work in the organization was affected by the terms of agreements with
organization funders. This was clear in the ways she described the work that she did, and,
in particular, her distinction between “organizational time” and “personal time.” This
distinction indicated the ways in which extralocal relations mediated everyday practices
of those employed within women’s organizations were able.
However, it was not simply the agreement between the organization and its
funders that shaped the kinds of politicized activities that women could engage in, but
also legislation. Organizational influence was also tied to state legislation itself that
defined not-for-profit organizations as “charitable organizations” and, therefore,
apolitical. Freddy elaborated on the issue of advocacy and political activity:
We don’t do direct service, what we do is, we are a public education training community [doing] capacity building — I can’t say advocacy because, we’re not really officially allowed to do advocacy. That means very few women’s organizations are and still can maintain charitable status…
So, apparently like you know we are not really allowed to influence political change — what — but I think the issue is that ...advocacy is often seen as political activity right? And not-for-profits that are not political parties are not supposed to be political activity.
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Accountability processes within women’s organizations, as socially organized through
hierarchicalized reporting processes, were tied to legal and political agreements among
the voluntary sector, funders, and governments. Although the women most often saw
their supervisors and/or own supervision as being individually supportive (or not) to
antiracist and social justice initiatives, the struggle to develop an antiracist feminist praxis
was additionally inextricably tied to extralocal institutions and agendas.
Consequently, reporting processes within organizations mediated and limited the
potential of social justice activism due to their direct link to extralocal relations of ruling.
For example, in order to become incorporated, the Canada Corporations Act (1970)
ostensibly requires hierarchy to ensure accountability. Moreover, the Income Tax Act
(1985) specifies constraints that directly affect the everyday practices of organizations in
relation to their funding, advocacy and political activities (see Nichols, 2008). Such
legislation directly links localized settings and processes of hierarchicalized
organizational accountability within women’s organizations to extralocal bodies and
policies. More specifically, for the activists in the women’s organizations examined
within this research study, these social relations shaped their everyday antiracist feminist
practices in significant ways.
Shaping Antiracist Feminist Practice
Organizational accountability shaped women’s everyday work as they negotiated
antiracist feminism and social justice goals within women’s organizations; this shaping
meant that women’s commitments to social justice were transformed and subsumed
within the terms of institutionalized managerial and administrative processes. Analyses of
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the women’s accounts revealed that accountability practices contributed to the disjuncture
between their antiracist feminist ideals and practice. The women, whether front-line
service workers, managers, executive directors or board members, made it clear that
accountability could both support and limit their activism.
In what follows, I describe in detail three processes through which organizational
accountability shaped the efforts of antiracist feminism activists particular to my study.
First, I describe the ways in which hierarchicalized reporting processes within the
organizations themselves shaped antiracist feminism through direct interventions by the
individuals or groups of people to whom antiracist feminist activists reported. Second, I
show how documentary practices shaped antiracist feminism; these practices were tied to
the hierarchicalized reporting processes within the organization and extended
organizational accountability from the local to the extralocal. Third, I examine how
women’s attempts to contest and transform racialized processes within the organizations
were reframed into cases of conflict management within dominant managerial approaches
rather than as cases of racism, whether actual or perceived. In these ways, institutional
forms of accountability actually transform antiracist work in ways which compromise the
original intentions of politicized praxis. Together, these three processes show the ways in
which organizational accountability subsumed women’s activist practice within
institutionalized frames of management and extralocally coordinated relations of
accountability.
Direct interventions: Hierarchical reporting processes
Reporting processes within organizations were central to the ways in which the social
relations of organizational accountability managed women’s negotiations of antiracist
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feminist practice. Although women reported that antiracist feminist practice was easier
when those to whom they reported were supportive of social justice ideals, the women’s
accounts revealed that they needed to navigate through hierarchicalized reporting
processes in order to successfully negotiate antiracist feminist practice, most often with
those to whom they reported. Front-line women negotiated their antiracist feminist and
social justice commitments with managers, executive directors, and board of directors;
managers negotiated these commitments with their executive directors and board
members, and executive directors negotiated antiracism with their board members,
funding agencies and other organizations.
Collectively, the women’s accounts indicated that supervisors were crucial in
supporting or limiting their attempts to include antiracist politics in their work. Several
women spoke about some of the difficulties, frustrations, and sanctions they experienced
as they attempted to address issues of race, racialization, and discrimination in the
organization. Sometimes, women were successful in negotiating their political
commitments, and, at other times, frustrated by their supervisors. These negotiations took
place in a variety of ways such as one-to-one formal supervision, one-to-one informal
discussions, group or staff meetings, and documentary practices.
The women participants who had positions as managers, executive directors and
board members revealed that their everyday management work included maintaining
accountability of staff members through hierarchicalized reporting processes. All of these
managers, directors and board members were women of colour and committed to
antiracist feminism throughout their organizational and community practices, and yet, at
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times, their administrative, managerial and bureaucratic work seemed to run contrary to,
or was irrelevant to, their commitments to social justice.31
Although many of the front-line workers interviewed described their supervisors32
as being personally committed to antiracist feminist praxis and social justice, it was
primarily through hierarchicalized relations of accountability that their antiracist feminist
activism was supported. Individual managers, directors, co-workers and board members
who had explicit commitments to antiracist feminist change made negotiations of
antiracist and social justice activities easier; their support was crucial to facilitating
women’s negotiations of antiracist feminist activism. However, as I argue here and in
subsequent chapters, the support from supervisors or managers should not be seen solely
as individual or idiosyncratic to specific managers; instead, the managers’ antiracist
commitments were also socially produced and institutionally embedded within the milieu
of larger antiracist discussions in and among non-profit sector organizations. For
example, while some women spoke positively about their specific managers and how
they “got” antiracism, I argue that managerial support was due to successful mobilization
and institutionalization of antiracist praxis within organizations. In fact, supervisor and
manager support for, or at least acceptance of, antiracist feminist change was made
possible due to hierarchicalized relations of accountability.
31 Max Weber described this dehumanizing process in his study of bureaucracies in the 1920s. He referred to this as being the “iron cage of bureaucracy.” As such, this is not solely a facet of women’s organizations and the state; it’s a much wider phenomenon, following Weber, related to modernization and technical rationalization. 32 Although not all women called those to whom they reported their supervisors, I use the word “supervisor/supervisors” to denote those persons (or group of persons) to whom women of colour directly reported to within the organization.
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The participants spoke about how the support of board members and managers
made it easier for activists to activate feminist antiracist practices among clients. Mishka
described how her supervisor supported her work (as already discussed in chapter four).
Je ne j'étais pas là au début, mais il faut dire que la directrice qui était là qui a commencé le centre avait cette ouverture au niveau de la diversité, au niveau du des services, au niveau du personnel, au niveau de des ressources. Ça c'est la vision qu'elle a -- féministe et diversifié ... Il y avait beaucoup d'ouverture en fait de manœuvre de travail dans ce que je voulais travailler, par rapport aux femmes immigrantes … [I wasn’t there at the beginning, but I should say that the director was open to having diversity at the level of services, personnel and resources. It was this feminist and diversified vision that she had … There was a lot of opening for me to be able to do the kind of work I wanted to do for immigrant women …]
Mishka spoke about how her director’s openness to antiracist feminist praxis provided
ample opportunity to develop her antiracist work. The director’s support, while expressly
politicized, also came in practical form in terms of material resources, including time.
Similarly, Lodge spoke fondly about how her supervisor was truly committed to
antiracist feminist activism. She compared the current support for antioppression work to
experiences she had had in past workplaces, where she experienced racism and tokenism
in relationships with her managers. Lodge believed that her antiracist work was enabled
by her supervisor’s antiracist beliefs and practices. Lodge also spoke about her
supervisor’s past manager, also a white woman, and how she too was central in
promoting antioppressive change within the organization. She noted:
I think my manager, like she so much believes in doing this work. Sometimes, like I don’t even know, it’s too good to be true with her… She is on the antioppression committee of [name of provincial organization]. So she, basically, from through there, she has made the initiative within the organization to do these kinds of things. Her manager before, kind of set that pace. She was like great at antioppression stuff. She was like extreme, like everything, has to be antioppression. She was the first white
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person I’d ever seen like that. And then, she was kind of like close with this woman that is now my manager …
Lodge described how her manager was actually influenced by a past manager who had
been “extreme” in her commitment to antioppression.
In Lodge’s comment we can observe two things of significance to understanding
the importance of supervisory and hierarchicalized reporting processes in women’s
organizations. First, that one manager was influenced by a past manager who had
struggled to “set that pace” of antiracist feminist organizational change. Second, both
managers were involved in the broader women’s movement and coalition groups
dedicated to antiracism work, which also influenced them. I take up this second point
more extensively in the next chapter, but it is important to highlight it here as it helps us
understand why and how antiracist activism within the contexts of these organizations
was more than about individual women’s commitments being put into action. Women’s
individual commitments to antiracism and antiracist organizational change, thus, need to
be understood in relation to the commitments of the broader women’s movement,
coalition groups, and other social movement organizations. Lodge’s appreciation for her
“white” managers’ commitments to antiracist change, which included supporting and
mentoring her everyday antiracist activist analysis and practice, becomes even more
understandable under such analysis.
Undoubtedly, supervisory processes, in conjunction with hierarchical reporting
process were key determinates of antioppressive practices within the various
organizations. In other words, even when women were supported in their antiracist work,
they still had to negotiate space within the social relations of organizational
accountability (see Ahmed, 2007a, 2007b, 2009; Nadeau, 2005, 2009; Srivastava, 2002).
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This was regardless of whether or not there were explicit policies on antiracism,
antioppression, social justice, inclusion and diversity in place. These negotiations often
involved presenting their antiracist work through depoliticized language that was
acceptable within the contexts of hierarchical chains of accountability, the support of
their managers notwithstanding.
Below, for example, Lodge described the ways in which she negotiated and
accounted for her request for a new antioppression training for herself and colleagues:
If you can, how do you say it, explain to your manager, then you can usually go to different sorts of antioppression workshops. Our current manager is extremely good. So, like, if I can say well this would be of benefit for the women ... and once I have the rationale or can say why it is, then it’s fine. Then I’ll get to go.
As part of her everyday work, Lodge negotiated paid time (and other resources) for
workshops and training. She first identified relevant training opportunities through other
community, social, and health service organizations.33 Her next step was to find or
provide a justification or, as she put it, a “rationale” for its relevance to the work that she
was doing with clients of the organization.
Although her supervisor was supportive of antiracism and antioppression, the
hierarchicalized chain of accountability was discernible in Lodge’s discussion. In order to
attend workshops or organize them for colleagues and/or clients, she needed to first get
approval from her supervisor(s). She framed her politicized interest to fit the needs of
“the women,” or ‘the clients.’ Lodge did not frame her “rationale” in politicized terms,
but rather in terms which could be most readily understood within the language and
33 I discuss more in-depth in chapter seven how training/workshops across different organizations were important to social relations of antiracist feminist activist responsibility.
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priorities of the organization. Lodge’s approach to gaining approval to attend and conduct
antiracism training is one example of how organizational accountability worked to shape
antiracist feminist praxis. The accountability in the organization was most evident at the
site of direct supervision. Lodge’s manager did not make decisions in isolation of her
politicized beliefs as she remained accountable to the hierarchicalized structure. The
manager’s work included making sure that workers’ time, and ultimately the
organization’s resources, were used in a manner consistent with the mandate of the
organization.
Hierarchicalized reporting relationships in organizations also meant that when
antiracism was taken up as part of the organization’s mandate, policies and practice, all
staff members were obliged to address antiracism within the parameters set by their
supervisors. Sometimes the women were forced to engage with forms of antiracist
politics that they did not necessarily agree with. Catherine, for example, contested some
of the ways in which the definitions of race and antiracist feminism were implemented in
her organization. Her perception was that her white manager was afraid to challenge
women of colour, particularly, black women, as part of her push for antiracism; this was
an idea which Catherine contested (as we saw in earlier chapters). It was clear from her
description that the push for antiracism came from management, and thus hierarchically
organized. Her contestations were part of her everyday work as a worker committed to
social justice, antiracism, and feminism.
Moreover, Catherine often complained that her supervisor, who was supportive of
antiracist feminist politics otherwise, allied herself with only one perspective of
antiracism.
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Because the boss years ago, decided that’s it — we’re gonna go antiracism, antioppression — and then we did totally that way — so there was no medium point… That was a white boss, three years ago. And now it’s [manager’s name]. But for [manager’s name], she doesn’t want to hurt any black women, so it’s gone way on other side. I say, “No, it doesn’t matter; you can still challenge me as a woman of colour — that doesn’t make you racist.”… So that’s, I don’t know, so for me that’s not antiracism.
Catherine’s complaint was two-fold: first, that the “boss’s” enthusiasm for antiracism was
excessive; second, she did not agree with the racialized ways in which antiracism and
antioppression were enacted. In particular, she disagreed with what she saw as her
managers’ unwillingness to challenge women of colour, specifically black women. She
felt that even though she was racialized as a woman of colour, her articulations of
antiracist feminism were dismissed because they were different than those of her
supervisor’s and her colleagues’. Thus, it was not antiracism itself that she needed to
negotiate with her supervisors, but the particular hierarchicalized relations within the
organization through which antiracism and social justice work was enacted.
While it may not be apparent so far, managers committed to antiracist, feminist
and other social justice ideals activated their commitments through self-reflection,
critique, teaching and learning with staff members, as well as through focussing on staff
empowerment as part of engaging antiracist practices through hierarchicalized processes
of accountability.34 In chapter four I described some of the tangible ways that managers
such as Soni, Sharmila, Francine, Cee, Maria, and Tuffy, brought their commitments to
work. Soni, for example, discussed the everyday ways in which she made articulations of
antiracist critique possible. She described how she hired women of colour and provided a
forum for them to articulate and implement their antiracist feminist ideals within a
34 See also chapter five.
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specific program. She described how she supported the women in finding safe spaces to
discuss concerns about racism in the organization, with an outside facilitator within a
“clinical space.” In addition, she described how she used, in the words of one of the staff
members who reported to her, “an unorthodox form of supervision,” which allowed the
staff to develop, articulate, and implement their own visions of antiracist feminist
activism.
Similarly, Sharmila described some of the struggles she had with supervising her
staff members in ways that were consistent with her role as a manager and with her social
justice politics.35 Like Soni, she described how her work as a manager included
opportunities for staff members to critically reflect on their own antiracist feminist
practice and to offer critiques and feedback to her as a manager. In addition to the
specific and local ways in which antiracist feminist managers supervised staff members,
antiracist feminist and social justice ideals were supported through the hierarchical
structures of the organizations; that is, precisely because of their positions as supervisors,
and thus having access to differential power, they were able to enact social justice goals
through their supervisory relationships.
Managers and board members also used their power within hierarchicalized
positions to develop policies that supported antiracism within their organizations. These
policies included: explicit targets for recruitment of board and staff members to promote
a racially diverse organization; mandatory antiracist and antioppression workshops;
hiring practices which included explicit questions about antiracism and antioppression;
and development of new programs for marginalized and/or ethno-specific communities.
35 See chapter five.
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Francine, a board member, provides an example of how antiracism can be supported from
above. She discussed the ways in which antiracism took a central place in her policy-
making work from developing policies which explicitly outlined a mandate for “a racially
mixed” board and staff members to “structural change” within the organization. As
decision-makers and policy-makers, not only did the women have the authority to
develop and support antiracist and feminist practices, they could also ensure that
members of their organizations were accountable in their everyday work to antiracism,
feminism and social justice through such policies.
While the examples above point to positive experiences of the use of hierarchy,
the women who reported that they had conflicting opinions with their supervisors or
board members around issues of race, racism, and antiracist feminist practice highlighted
most clearly how hierarchicalized social relations mostly served to limit antiracist
feminism activism even though at times there was support. Lodge described a situation
that showed how hierarchicalized reporting processes simultaneously supported and
limited antiracist feminist activism. Lodge criticized the board’s way of recruiting for
diversity.
The problem started when the board asked a current service user, a woman of
colour, to become a board member. Lodge pointed out to her supervisor that this was
against organizational policy which stated that past service users could not be volunteers
and/or board members for a period of two years after they had last accessed services.
Lodge was critical of the board’s actions as it showed a lack of concern for the
vulnerability of the newly recruited woman:
They asked a resident to be on the board. And for me I just find it so exploitive, the way she got on. And I talk about that [to my supervisor and
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in a staff meeting] because I don’t think it was fair. She’s a brilliant woman, right, from her country, she’s an activist. But if you come here as a refugee, and you get help and from the only organization that is helping you, and all of a sudden you’re asked to be on the board. They make the exception for that, because like, usually you have to wait until a few years to get on the board if you’re a service user. So, it’s good that, you know, she got on. I believe she’s capable of doing it. However, I know how it’s going to be for her. And it just for me was so yucky. Because I know I was working with her, doing a group in the community. And I know she wanted to be in that group, but now she can’t because she’s on the board ... She had two young kids. So for me it was very yucky. She’s struggling still accessing the group. But if she accesses the group, she won’t be able to be on the board. And they’re asking her to be on the board. And then she has no support now. So what’s the process? Do they try to connect her without a support? No, that didn’t happen.
Lodge’s critique of the board’s recruitment practice was based both on her concerns
about the politics of appropriate racialized representation on the board and of care for the
well-being of past service users.
More importantly, Lodge, who actively supported the recruitment of people of
colour in the board, was concerned that this particular woman would only be a token
presence, despite her excellent qualifications and expertise:
But I know she has no voice there. I know how it is, in this, in a white-dominance organization. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are. We know you’re still a doctor and they come and they have all this education and they’re driving cab. So we sit there and even though we have these brilliant ideas of how to do. Because it’s not reflecting what these white people think or how they do. Then they’re not going to listen to you anyways.
Women who criticized their supervisors and/or board members were often subject to
discipline through hierarchicalized relations of accountability. Lodge experienced
retaliation from the president of the board who demanded that she write a formal letter of
apology.
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As part of the organization’s hierarchicalized reporting processes, Lodge raised
her concerns with her manager during a weekly supervision session, who then spoke with
the executive director. It was through the hierarchicalized relations of organizational
accountability that Lodge’s activist critique was taken up, and while her supervisor
supported her, the president of the board did not.
Well, I bring that out to my manager, my manager did support me, you know, a lot in that. And then I think, well, the woman from the board, she called me about it. You know, cause it came up, and I guess the ED maybe followed up and stuff. The president of the board called me. She was mad at me for saying it was not okay. It was like, “OK, so if we’re supposed to try to change, where do we start?”… She was mad at me! She was like, “How dare you accuse me of ...” She asked me to write a letter of apology for saying that this wasn’t right what she did…
And yeah, she was telling me how I should have handled it!! Like, if I have concerns after I spoke with the woman [the new board member] and I wasn’t ok with it, then I should come back and ask her. This woman [the chair of board] like she never talked to me before. You know, I don’t know her … And she tell me I need to write a letter of apology. I didn’t. Like I thought I was going to lose my job! I was about to do it. So then I talked to my manager. She’s so amazing. I talked to her and she said ok, “I’ll deal with it,” and then she ended up taking the heat.
As Lodge’s account suggested, paid staff members’ antiracist and other social justice
critiques of such top organization decision-makers as managers or board members meant
that they were at risk of losing their jobs. The possibility of job loss was particularly true
within hierarchical organizations; had the organization functioned as a collective in
making decisions around hiring/firing and discipline, antiracist critiques would have been
taken up through a different set of social relations.
Unfortunately, women of colour who engaged in antiracist organizational change
within hierarchical organizations were vulnerable, as their jobs were at high risk. The
board president’s reaction made Lodge worry about losing her job as a consequence of
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her voicing her concern. Lodge’s worry was a valid one, since it was through
hierarchicalized relations within the organization that hiring, firing and promotion
decisions were made. This form of direct discipline on a paid staff member for her
antiracist feminist critique stifled further critique and placed significant limitations on the
form of antiracist feminist organizational change that was possible within such a context.
When organizational accountability worked to discipline antiracist critique, a
contradiction between women’s activist work and their positions as employees of a
hierarchical organization became apparent. Lodge was indignant that the president of the
board not only disciplined her directly but also told her how she should have handled the
critique. At the root of Lodge’s indignation was that in telling her how she “should have
handled” the critique, the president contradicted what Lodge understood to be part of her
antiracist feminist praxis. In this way, Lodge’s work as an employee of the organization
and her work as an antiracist feminist activist were at odds with one another. This
disconnect was entrenched through hierarchicalized processes of accountability within
the organization, which meant that Lodge’s way of “handling it” was subject to being
personally accountable to her supervisor. The president of the board of directors was able
to reprimand Lodge because Lodge was an employee. Despite her indignation, Lodge
was asked to write a letter of apology, because the president of the board was her
employer. The hierarchicalized social relations superseded legitimate antiracist concerns.
As I discuss in more detail below, dissent or conflict in the organizations where my
participants worked were sometimes managed in ways which did not necessarily support
antiracist critique.
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In fact, in some cases, women’s attempts to develop antiracist feminist practice
within their organizations meant that other programs that might be linked to antiracist
change were also at risk of closure. Through organizational accountability, managers and
directors were directly accountable to the board of directors. Generally speaking most
board members did not intervene in the day-to-day workings of the organizations;
however, if the board did not support the particular articulations of social justice of the
managers and/or of staff members, they had the authority to close down programs.
Soni, for example, described the ways in which the threat of (and eventual)
closure of a program was used to indirectly discipline her social justice work. As a result,
at the time of the interview, the staff members of the program were scheduled to be let
go. Soni attributed the program closure (and ensuing lay-offs) to the conversations about
race and racism that she and her staff members had had within the organization.
The two staff, the other two women of colour had voiced that, had voiced that [concerns of facing racism] already months before. So, the agency was already acknowledging these were some issues that we need to work at. We were talking about them. We have clinical session every week where staff talk about, you know, critical issues, an external person comes in and works with us. So these were already issues that we acknowledged, women of colour had identified, and they had identified that that clinical space is the only safe space for them to talk about these issues, they can’t just talk about them at the staff meeting, you need a facilitator, you need it to be a safe environment. So, that safe space [the clinical sessions] was taken away, and now the diversity program was shut down and the staff are going to be let go—and that was the backlash that was the solving of the problem… What board in their right mind gives up core funding? … I mean normally non-profit struggle with funding!”
And now then now the problem they are left is me, because I’m in management and it’s not going to be easy to get rid of me.
Instead of direct discipline (such as firing) of the diversity program’s staff members, the
board’s solutions were two-fold: first, to get rid of the clinical sessions which offered a
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“safe space” for women to articulate their antiracist critiques with the facilitator; and
second, to close the program, despite, as Soni poignantly noted, that that the program was
fully funded. This sort of discipline which limited certain forms of social justice practice
was possible precisely because of hierarchicalized social relations within the
organization. Clearly, the firing, hiring and closing down of programs may be strategies
which all organizations use to manage dissent, conflict and tensions, regardless of
politics. However, in the context of women’s organizations which claim (either explicitly
or implicitly) their support for antiracist politics, the closing down of programs when
activism is effective poses a unique dilemma for the sustainability of antiracist feminism.
Doing “good work” or documenting “good work”?
In addition to the hierarchicalized reporting processes within the organization, as
discussed in the previous subsection, documentary processes also shaped everyday
antiracist feminist practice. As Smith (1986, 1990, 1999, 2005) and other institutional
ethnographers have shown, people’s everyday activities are coordinated through texts
which link the local to extralocal relations of ruling. Women’s organizations’
administrative and evaluative forms of documentary practice was shaped by and oriented
towards external agencies and accountability processes such as funding bodies, state
agencies, the legal system, labour and human rights laws, and multicultural policies. A
central feature of this textually-mediated extralocal coordination was administered
through women’s documentary practices – a key way in which organizational
accountability was maintained in the organizations.
The women described two main forms of documentary practices within
organizations, namely administrative and evaluative. The administrative documentary
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practices were part of all the women’s accounts, and had to do with the everyday
“paperwork” related to the daily functioning of the organizations. The evaluative
documentary practices were more likely to be described by the managers, executive
directors, and board members. Both of these forms of documentary practices were a
crucial part of the everyday practices of organizational accountability; that is, they were
hierarchical, shaped the relationships between workers and managers, and were also
connected to relations of ruling outside the organization.
Among the research participants’ accounts, a difference emerged when the
women spoke about the relationship between everyday organizational work and
documentation. Specifically, front-line workers reported a tension between
documentation and their activist and service work, whereas managers and board members
often spoke about the centrality and importance of documentation for the functioning of
the organization (see Ahmed, 2007b). Interestingly, all of the women spoke about the
“good work” that was being done in their organizations. Many of the women, in
particular Lodge, Kimberley, Freddy, Aj and Catherine, complained that the sheer
volume and perceived repetitiveness of their documentation tasks took away from their
ability to do “good work” or “quality work.” For women in the front-line, “good work”
meant that they worked within the parameters of their commitments to social justice, their
organizations and to their clients. The women (including managers, supervisors,
directors, and board members) also spoke about valuing the everyday service and activist
work of staff members and managers. However, in contrast to front-line workers’
orientation to doing good work, the research revealed that supervisors’ everyday work
was oriented to documenting this good work. This disconnect between doing good social
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justice work as opposed to documenting good social justice work was evident in
comparing the women’s accounts of their antiracist feminist work with clients, with that
of the work they did as managers.36
Administrative documentary practices were a salient feature of the women’s
accountability work; however, how they approached the work differed according to
whether they did direct service or management work. All of the women discussed the
need for documentary and administrative work; however, each woman’s outlook differed
depending on her position within the organizations. As part of their regular work, all the
women wrote, reviewed or revised the “case note,” “activity log,” “statistical form,”
“intake form” or “daily action plan.” Yet the work related to administrative
documentation was hierarchically organized; that is, the work differed depending on
whether one was providing services or managing those services. Direct service workers
were more likely to write the case notes, fill out related administrative forms, and read
their colleagues’ case notes in order to take some form of action with and/or on behalf of
their clients. Managers, program coordinators and, sometimes, executive directors were
more likely to review these case notes as part of their supervisory work, develop and
“tweak” the forms, and to compile the data or information in a way in which other
organizational actors such as executive directors, board members and external bodies
could review them. Executive directors and board members were most likely to review
aggregated information, both qualitative summaries and statistical analyses, in order to
36 Ahmed (2007b) describes a similar phenomenon in the diversity work within universities in the UK in her paper, “‘You end up doing the document rather than doing the doing’: Diversity, race equality and the politics of documentation.” She describes how the creation of diversity-related documents do the work of showing how universities’ commitment to diversity and race equality; in this way, the documents stand in for the actual work needed to create meaningful race equality.
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evaluate the progress of the organization, report to external agencies and to develop
future priorities of the organizations. Nonetheless, despite the differences among the
women’s hierarchicalized orientations to documentary practices, organizational
accountability shaped activists’ everyday work.
Several of the women described how the sheer volume of documentation meant
that they had to leave other aspects of the work undone. For example, front-line workers
often reported that their everyday work was organized by a tremendous amount of
paperwork, which impinged on their ability to actually do direct service and activist
work. Kimberly, a front-line educator and coordinator of two programs, described her
frustration at trying to keep up with the paperwork. Coordinating her two programs meant
that she could not keep up with the daily administrative tasks she needed to do.
I know I need administrative assistance. I mean I do a lot of it. I keep myself [from asking for] a lot of administration assistance, but sometimes, you know, when there’s training going on every week — I cannot do it, I work here only four days week and I have to, I’m coordinating two programs and there’s, you know, there’s a peak time sometimes, for one program, then, and then, simultaneously there’s something else going on in the other program and I have to manage two programs, then I need help…
While she did not question the importance of administrative documentary processes,
Kimberley acknowledged that the work of coordinating two programs meant that she had
less time for administrative work.
Like Kimberley, Lodge described how the documentation process compromised
not only her commitment to educating and counselling her clients, but the development of
her own analysis as well.
There’s so much time now [for paperwork] and more and more they’re putting together more paperwork, more forms, more this, more - so it’s
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taking away from all like the service, the support that you offer to women. And I hate that.
Although Lodge understood that some documentation was crucial to the functioning of
the organization and important to the women she supported, she questioned the
organization’s need for what she saw as duplication in her documentation work.
If it’s something that I need, I know what needs to be documented [to help women]… So then, okay, for example, if I, if I do just do like a general support with a woman. It could be like — she having like difficult day or something like that. So if I write down okay ‘supported June around issue with partner’, or, whatever, “with the kids,” that’s fine. You write that in the case notes. However, you have to make sure you do some kind of stat or something over there [in another form] — you have to make sure you write-up that you did like a one-to-one or whatever — with her. So all those are different paper that you have to fill out — right? If I contact the police then yes, you have a different form you have to fill out. If you get a call, you have a different form to fill out. If, so there’s stuff that definitely you have to fill out but all, if I’m there, guess what, I find, if I’m there and I’m doing my work, I don’t need to be telling you, okay, I spent 2 hour with this person, 3 hour with that person — you know? Like, it’s in the case note already. Okay, I complete the resource check list [to show that this] is what this woman needs. I don’t understand why it has to be in three or four different places. And I know for stats, they might need some stuff for stats, but —
Women also described how textual practices organized and mediated their
relationships with their supervisors. For example, Lodge described how the issue of
filling out forms (or not filling them out adequately) was taken up in her one-to-one
supervision meetings with her manager:
So sometimes that’s what’s covered in supervision. “Okay, so you didn’t fill out that you did this one-to-one, did you do it?” “Yes, I did it. It’s documented in her file that I did the one-to-one on her issue,” you know. “But you have to remember to fill those out.” Right?
The administrative documentary processes were also tied to the ways in which
organizational accountability shaped conversations between people, as in the preceding
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example between Lodge and her manager. In this way, the relationship between the front-
line worker (Lodge) and her manager was textually-mediated and assumed to be a part of
the ways in which accountability within the organization was managed.
The difference between a manager’s and a front-line worker’s approach to
administrative documentary processes was also evident in Cee’s description of her work.
For managers, administrative forms and documents were not only seen as a way to
manage workers, but also as a way to (ideally) direct the smooth functioning of their
programs. As such, managers spent a lot of time deciding on how different forms of
documentation could best facilitate the administration of their organizations. Like front-
line workers, Cee, an executive director of a shelter, described the sheer volume of forms
that were part of her daily administrative work.
Cee had to oversee the everyday work of the organization which sometimes
entailed having to “revamp” forms and other documents to make them more relevant. In
particular, this involved making sure that the forms actually supported the staff’s work
with the residents.
There are quite a few of them [forms]. We have an “Assessment Form.” and when I say assessment, it’s just that, it’s a history of abuse for women. And I revamped it at one point in time because I wanted people to, you know, after meeting with women, kind of figuring out from the story [what] they had to do with the women: Who, what, where when, what were the issues of priority based on the woman’s story? ... So they have that form. Then, there’s when women coming because women can come at any time during the day or night. We have a basic form which we take basic information — I kind of broke that into, you know, the “Intake and Assessment,” it’s kind of three-part process, you know, they don’t have to do it all at the same time or on the same day… Then there’s the “Task Sheet” in terms of how we keep track of whatever… And then, we have the “Communication Log” and the purpose of it, is that you can write information to the staff coming on shift who you might not necessarily remember to tell everything to or not have enough time to do that. But if there are pieces of information that the staff need to know to be able to do
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their work, then you need to put it in there… Because there’s only certain information that you are going to put in “Clients’ Files,” right? But you want a place where … I let you know what has happened, and something that I might want to flag for you that you need to know.
Cee’s everyday work as a manager meant that she saw administrative documentary
practices as helpful to the everyday functioning of her organization. As the above
statement shows, in actively engaging here antiracist feminist practice through
administrative tasks, Cee broke up the “Intake and Assessment” form into three parts,
which she felt was more consistent with the crisis work associated with the shelter. Her
management work was oriented to responding to organizational processes and
maintaining organizational accountability.
Cee further elaborated on how the assessment of the usefulness of existing forms,
and subsequent creation of new ones, was a key way in which she managed both the staff
and everyday organizational practices.
The staff and I [designed] most forms. When I came [to work] here, and if I didn’t have something to work with, I just designed something. Over time they have evolved, you know, some of them they have scrapped. Or this isn’t working, whatever, whatever … In terms of other places where I’ve worked I don’t think we have that many forms for the staff to do. But how do we use the ones we have? And I’m not into having forms that are not being used. Right, it’s like, does this thing serve a purpose? Is it workable? Or not? If it’s not, then, then we get rid of it. And, you know, sometimes you have something and it suits a particular time and after that, you find that you don’t need it anymore so let’s just get rid of it.
When Cee made a distinction between the forms that the organization needed and those
which “had nothing to do with” the organization, she described how the organizations’
forms were connected to extralocal processes of accountability. Those forms were needed
for internal purposes but also related to external legal and funding requirements such as
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documentation required by the city funders to account for funds dispersed to the
organization.
There’s some forms that we have, that have nothing to do with us, but it’s really part of our funding process whereby you, you know, have to keep check of, the number of people who have spent the night in the shelter, it’s connected to the [location name] that’s gives, you know, women P-N-A, “Personal Needs Allowance” money, the [location name] pays everybody in shelters, $3.25 a day per person, to look after needs like, if you wanted to buy cigarettes… Because while they’re here, we do provide for their other needs. So some of those forms are around that … Then there are forms of “Confidentiality” if women, you know, want us to talk to someone, say it was the CAS [Children’s Aid Society] worker about something, then we require that, you know ...
These extralocal forms of documentation added to the administrative requirements of
staff members’ everyday work and tied their work to external organizations and
legislation.
For Cee, the forms were crucial to the work that needed to be done for the
residents and clients that the shelter served. As the executive director, she focussed on the
overall functioning of the organization and this meant that she remained attentive to how
her staff members were following out administrative documentary processes. As Lodge’s
account illustrated already, some staff members did not fill out forms accurately or
resisted filling them outright. It is not difficult to understand how these actions shaped the
relationship between supervisors and staff members in negative terms. Cee described
some of the frustration that she faced when staff members filled out the forms.
She described the resistance that staff members showed to the administrative
documentary practices as a way of subverting staff member accountability:
Let me give you an example of what has been one of my challenges. I used to do front-line work; I used to be a front-line worker. [Pausing] I came from a system of where, you would do shift changes and they were
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always written. Right? And if there was something that needed to be done, that you wrote it down for the next shift to do. It was written … But when I came here, I created [a form] within the first month or six weeks of being here. It was a form I called the “Daily Task Sheet.” And, you know, we’ve talked about his sheet, this form, and the purpose of it …I know that people still struggle with it. I know that they’re still not using it … But you see one of the things that, in my um, in my process of them, realizing is that you know there is certain degree of accountability, the things that are written… So, people would have “shift change notes.” But they’re not working. One of my staff said, “Well I have my shift change notes on paper that I share with a person who comes on shift, the other staff, then I shred them.” And, I say, “So, like, why would you do that? What would make you think that this other person can recall everything that you have said?” They need the written information to follow… That holds us accountable or unaccountable.
The staff member in question did not give any reason why she shredded the shift change
notes; however, Cee suggested this had to do with the staff member’s reluctance to
become accountable. Cee’s concern about the way in which staff members filled out
forms had to do in part with ensuring that appropriate service was being provided to the
residents, as well as challenging the staff’s lack of compliance as proper compliance
ameliorated further extralocal relations that directly impacted the function of the shelter.
That is to say, her frustration also had to do with the fact that without written documents,
“accountability,” as she put it, was more difficult to achieve.
Similarly, managers were responsible for reading documentation as a way to
understand what was happening within the everyday work of those whom they
supervised. As I described earlier, all of the mangers discussed the ways in which
documentary practices were routine ways in which they supervised their staff members.
Theta, for example, described her everyday work as an assistant director in the following
way:
At work, I spend my day figuring out what is it I’m supposed to be doing and what is it that I have to do — and the difference between the two —
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and prioritize and do all that. And I make phone calls, do interviews, go to different centres and read case notes, talk to the program coordinators, find out what’s happening, try to answer any questions.
Theta’s account of her everyday work was significant as it described, in an off-hand way,
how she used documentation (case notes) to help her supervise staff members. As part of
her management work, the ways in which Theta read the case notes was organized
through social relations of accountability. Although not evident in the above account,
Theta’s reading of the case notes was structured by her supervisory role and part of the
way in which the staff’s documentary practices were scrutinized and ultimately,
disciplined and shaped.
In fact, Theta’s account of the ways in which her work of “tweaking” the forms
on which her staff members wrote case notes described a process whereby she explicitly
worked to alter the language and content of the staff’s case notes, thereby disciplined
their documentary practices. She spoke about “adjusting” the documentation processes in
order to make them “more tight” and more structured in hopes that this would shape the
ways in which staff members wrote about clients so they fit more in line with the
institutional language appropriate to the organization’s work.
So for example I’m working right now on trying to change — it’s not really changing — it’s just adjusting a bit of documentation practices — in our different centres. Just toning [it] up and making it more [pausing to think]. I’m sorry I can’t think of the work, but just more tight, more, more … efficient. Any ways so that’s something I have to do — I get to do. For some reason it has some meaning to me or I think will have some impact on the way people work so I think it’s important. It’s harder to see [than front-line work] because I think the long-term impact I’m helping with the documentation and making it more efficient is that it will… restrain judgmental and unessential sort of information about clients…So that when in five years, a file gets subpoenaed, the staff won’t look like that they’re doing horrible work and not that they are. But, I think what you write and what you read impacts how you think about people. And I want to make sure that — we’re not writing in a way that makes people think or
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work — think about the clients or encourages or perpetuates thinking that’s judgmental about the way clients live their lives. And [staff] will approach their work in accepting people more — basically is what I’m hoping I do. And then in five years if the file gets subpoenaed it won’t have such a negative impact on women’s lives.
Theta’s account was especially telling in a number of ways. She relayed some
ambivalence about the ways in which her “adjusting” of forms had meaning to her work
as a feminist. She hesitated a bit in articulating her rationale on why she had decided to
“tweak” her documentary processes and seemed guarded in what she recounted. I would
argue that, in part, this had to do with Theta’s awareness of the disjuncture between her
feminist practice and her management work. By the end of her description, however, this
disjuncture seemingly disappeared as she was able to reconcile the connections between
her management work and her commitment to her workers and women’s lives.
A third feature of organizational accountability within Theta’s account was the
way in which the “tweaking” and “adjusting” work was oriented to extralocal processes.
Theta said that one reason she wanted to change the ways in which the staff were writing
was that if a file got subpoenaed that the staff would not “look like that they’re doing
horrible work,” and so that the file “not have such a negative impact on women’s lives.”
This dual focus on the staff’s work and the impact of the case notes on women’s lives
were important for staff members and residents of shelters, particularly vis-à-vis the legal
and justice systems. The case notes of shelters were routinely scrutinized through the
legal process, particularly in cases of domestic dispute and custody battles. Women’s
shelters workers are especially aware that case notes are often used to build a legal case
against residents and to discredit individual shelter workers’ documentary accounts of
situations. Theta’s work, arguably, was shaped by her understanding of this precarious
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process. Although she suggested at the beginning of her quote that she did not necessarily
know why she was making certain decisions, her explanation clearly described how her
commitments to social justice were ultimately merged with, or crafted through,
organizational accountability which was in turn connected to extra-organizational
processes.
Most often, front-line workers were responsible for filling out statistical forms or
providing feedback on the forms—this is what I call “evaluative documentary practices.”
Managers, administrative staff and board members, however, were responsible for
creating the forms, monitoring their use, compiling data, using them for reporting to
funders and state bodies, and so on. Women’s descriptions of their work revealed that
evaluative documentary practices were a crucial part of the everyday practices of
organizational accountability. As the study showed, not only were evaluative
documentary practices of the participants hierarchically organized, they also shaped the
relationships between workers and managers and were affected by relations of ruling
outside the organization. Front-line workers spent less time than managers and board
members in working with evaluative documents. Managers and board members tended to
describe in much more detail (than did most front-line workers), the ways in which such
evaluative documentary practices were central to their everyday work of managing the
staff and reporting to external organizations.
Most of the women demonstrated that even though they found the number of
forms they had to fill repetitious, they understood the importance of providing data to
their managers as a routine part of their work. In this way, activists, too, were embedded
within repetitive calculative activities in which they were created as calculative sel(ves)
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(Miller, 2001; see also Dehli, 2000). For example, in her complaint about repetition,
Lodge acknowledged the importance of “stats” as a way to keep track of information
related to the organization’s service: “I don’t understand why it has to be in three or four
different places. And I know for stats, they might need some stuff for stats, but —.” Most
of the workers on the front line understood and participated in relations of accounting,
auditing and accountability tied to external agencies and organizations.
As a program manager, Kimberley was involved in both front-line work and
management, and indicated that she least liked the various forms of documentary
practices in the organization. This was not only a complaint about the volume or types of
documentary processes, but their effect on her commitments as a social justice activist.
Kimberley felt that women’s organizations in general, including her own, needed to
critically examine whether evaluative practices were actually contributing to the larger
processes of social change:
And I’m really process-oriented person and I don’t believe that our work needs to be evaluated based on outcomes, you know, material based outcomes, how many people were trained from my program, et cetera. I look at the process as important as the result. I mean after all we are doing this work for women’s rights, peace in the world, women’s rights for everyone. Then as women who are in the process of building the kind of world, we also want to learn from this and we want to make it more egalitarian and let other women and people in general, learn from how we work and how we involve others. Sometimes you are so much outcome driven … it’s how we survive in this capitalist society. We don’t look at the process, we don’t look at ourselves, how we are doing. Because I consider it so importantly it is painful to me… if the way we work is so different from what we pursue overall like more egalitarian work and system and more space for marginalized women kind of thing. I think we have to work always fast and very outcome driven, goal driven. Then we cannot take time — we just have to run a factory like an assembly line all the time — it’s always assembly line and I don’t like it.
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Kimberley’s critique of her organization’s emphasis on the documentation of “material
based outcomes” came from her political commitments to the process of more global
social change.
Specifically, Kimberley criticized the emphasis on evaluation based on narrow
assumptions of “outcome” required by funders. As she suggested, the requirement for
women’s organizations to show material outcomes came at the expense of activist and
social change work. Kimberley felt that focusing on outcomes was a distraction and left
important discussions about becoming “more egalitarian” and having “more space” for
marginalized women behind.37 While she acknowledged that the focus on outcomes was
important for how organizations “survive[d] in this capitalist society,” she advocated a
different sort of evaluation, one that emphasized the “process” of social change.
In contrast, several of the executive directors and board members I spoke with did
not see a disjuncture between their evaluative documentary practice and their
commitments to social justice. For example, Maria, a board member of a sexual assault
centre, was excited about a program evaluation initiative she spearheaded in her
organization.
And then so there’s the program evaluation committee … And I think the purpose really is just a really a good way to ensure that we have rigour in the programs that we do. “Well, we know that you do good work, but it’s undocumented.” And I think it still isn’t good enough in this climate — it’s not enough to say that “I can believe the women I work with are satisfied, I believe that I’ve really helped somebody.” Like, it has to be more tangible [my emphasis] and I think that’s the purpose. It’s helping
37 Similar critiques have been made within the literature, particularly by some researchers who study extralocal relations of ruling and processes of accountability within a variety of nonprofit organizations (Dehli, 2010; McCoy, 1998; Ng, 1998; Nichols, 2008; Rankin and Campbell, 2006; Strathern, 2000; Walker, 1996; see also DasGupta, 1999; Todd and Lundy, 2006). For example, Nichols argues that activist interests get subsumed, and in some cases, displaced by extralocal text-based processes of accountability of funding.
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— I think it’s just helping women document a little bit more clearly all the really good work that they are doing in a way that’s understandable to outside people, you know, I think for funders…You know, sexual assault centres are always on the sort of — I mean it’s not the same as the shelters — that garner the same sort of recognition or level of support from the broader community ... I mean the government’s been very all over the place — about the value of sexual assault centres — so this in some ways, you know, once we have it all up and running, at least, it gives you someplace to say yes, yes, we do need this.
Maria highlighted the differences in political and funding contexts of sexual
assault centres in relation to other forms of shelters as a rationale for the necessity of the
sort of program evaluation she advocated. Maria’s attempts to document the staff’s “good
[activist] work” in terms commensurate with the priorities of funders and government
agencies implied that women’s service and educational work was, in and of itself,
insufficient unless organizations showed tangible results or material outcomes. In fact,
organizations are regularly required to produce data in the terms dictated by funders and
state agencies in order to be able to compete for resources or to show accountability to
funders, with very little regards to activist or social service notions of good work.
Consequently, this form of accountability, which is linked to notions of ‘best practice,’
‘stakeholders,’ performance targets, ‘outcomes,’ and so on, forms part and parcel of
powerful auditing and accounting discourse (Dehli, 2010; McCoy, 2008; Power, 1997;
Strathern, 2000). As Miller (2001) reminds us, “what is counted usually counts” (p. 382),
and thus what is not counted, disappears from view (see also Smith, 2005).
In this sense, Maria’s work, at least as she described it, was a rational exercise of
translating the women’s work through documentation and evaluation into “tangible,”
discrete, and, numerical factors that translated to funding for the organization. Her
rationale for beginning the program evaluation with the public education program was, in
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part, because it could be most easily translated into the “more structured” “logic model of
evaluation,” which was based on “concrete,” numerical outcomes:
So, we started off [doing a program evaluation with the] Public Education Program because it’s the most structured, it really is much more concrete, you know, how many speaking engagements did you go to? How large is the audience? You know it’s, that program has things you can sort of count and assess much more clearly … So, the program coordinator [of the public education program] knew a little bit about logic models —it’s just a way of outlining your program into sort of discrete pieces. So, the program is public education, but maybe under public education you have two different pieces and in fact this particular staff person does. She’s got, you know, sort of outside education, and then she does um training for volunteers so it’s education for the volunteers and within that you have different objectives. So it’s really helping staff identify, “So, what’s the objective of my education program?” Is it to, you know, maybe she’s targeting high school students — so to inform sort of teenagers about dating violence, so the objective is sort of — to operationalize that in some kind of way — well I want to do five speaks at, you know, high schools um.
So I mean it — it is sort of mapping out in a much more concrete way all the different activities that we doing. Um and then what you’re looking to assess, so I want to be at least five speaks, I want … a minimum audience of maybe this. I want to have evaluations at this number of them, and then different things. I want to keep all this information here, and then this do this sort of type of assessment once a year or something - and it’s very much a work in progress because I think it’s different people do this differently.
So, this generates kind of like matrix of all the different activities. You know, all these other pieces of, you know, the objective and then, you know, how am I going to do this, where am I keep the information, how often. ... It’s really clear if you say my goal is be 25, you know, speaks and then you do 25 speaks, and then you’ve met this goal of, you know, targeting, you know, potentially at risk young women. So it makes it a little bit more tangible.
Making the work that women did in organizations “tangible” through evaluative
documentary practices included the reorientation and mobilization of social justice and
service work into easily digestible bits of information that could fit within standardized
evaluation criteria.
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Program evaluation was a specialized form of reporting that was connected to (but
different from) other relations of accountability and auditing between the staff and
management. In her account, Maria also compared the program evaluation to other sorts
of evaluative documentary processes in the organization, and highlighted connections and
differences from other management-oriented evaluation practices. She said that, unlike
other forms of individualized evaluations (tied to women’s job descriptions), program
evaluation complemented the yearly plans set out by the managers within the
organization.
And, every staff has a job description, every staff has action plans that they do over the year, so we didn’t want it to be a — to be a duplication of what they were already doing so we wanted it to be that — in some ways it was extending their Yearly Action Plan. … So we don’t want it to take the place of, you know, of a performance evaluation— it’s not a performance evaluation, I mean it’s very much, are the goals of your program realistic?
The program’s yearly action plan and performance evaluation of the goals of individual
staff members and managers, which Maria mentioned, were other forms of evaluative
documentary practices that were tied to the hierarchical relations of accountability and
explicitly shaped the relationship between the executive director (and by extension the
board of directors) and individual staff members.
Tuffy, an executive director, used what she called “work programs” to help
individual managers make annual goals and to structure the relationships between her and
her staff members. The documentary practices involved in “work programs” shaped the
relationship between Tuffy and those she managed. According to Tuffy, “work
programs” were a key way through which she ensured that the front-line staff members
were directly accountable to her as executive director.
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We try to work from a place that has work programs attached to budget… Now, we have varying degrees of success with that because you know we’ll start out, I’ve got a couple of draft work programs on my desk right now that um we’re going to take some major revisions because of some major budget considerations… A work program, for example it’s really goals and objectives — it’s almost like it’s — the um — it’s their outcomes piece for a year. These are the outcomes that I am working toward achieving in next year… Some of the steps are measurable, for example if — well the shelter services director for example — I haven’t looked at her work program but I believe her work program includes a statement about implementation of the Girls Program in at least three schools — so that’s clearly measurable. If she succeeds at that or exceeds it, then fine, if she doesn’t, then it’s like well, why didn’t you succeed? You know, what happened? What were all the external, or internal or extenuating circumstances that kept you from succeeding?
The work programs were not only used to translate the manager’s work into measurable
outcomes, but also to evaluate the progress of managers and the staff.
The activities outlined in the work programs of each individual program were
directly tied to specific forms of funding, which inevitably meant accountability to
extralocal institutions. Tuffy described three different programs within the organization
which resulted in the organization having three different sets of relationships with
funders.
For example, the manager of the …Nutrition Project38, her work program is pretty much set by the contract that we have with Health Canada — now we negotiate that contract every year. But whatever we have agreed to do with — you know —whatever we told Health Canada — or Health Canada and us have agreed to do with their money is the work programs.
The Nutrition Project’s “work program” was tied to specific activities (and outcomes) as
set out by an agreement with Tuffy’s organization and Health Canada. In contrast, the
day care centre had more flexibility about the types of activities that had to be reported
because the organization was allotted a set amount to run the daycare centre rather than to
38 Name of programs changed slightly for purposes of anonymity.
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achieve specific outcomes and run certain activities. The daycare program’s funding
arrangement meant that the organization was under less scrutiny and thus had more
freedom to make programmatic decisions that fit its own mandate.
There’s more flexibility [in some programs, such as the daycare centre] as those are programs that you know, we know going into a year — this is how much money we have to spend — this is what they are going to give us for this year so then we have to figure out to do what it is that we want to do with those amount of dollars.
In further explicating the relationship between funding and its effect on
programming, Tuffy suggested that the shelter’s work program also had more flexibility
since the Ministry funded only 80% of this program. She also spoke about the “creative
approach to raising money” as a way of circumventing the limitations imposed by
funding agencies’ demands. That is, fundraising was part of the shelter’s work program:
There is more flexibility in for example, the shelter, um because we get 80 per cent of the funding from the Ministry — we have to raise the other 20 per cent and so part of the work program frequently is that creative approach to raising money — part of the work program as well is looking at ways that we can partner with other agencies to deliver more services or enhanced services to the women in the shelter… Now we don’t have the resources to present those programs, so work at partnerships with [names of other agencies] on an annual basis so that they’re you know ‘x-number’ of spots to kids in our shelter or you know we can you know there are you know some number of workshops and courses a year that they will offer kids in our shelter — that kind of thing.
Creative fundraising, in this case, was done through partnering with other organizations
to provide services to the residents of the shelters.
Managers also performed evaluations in order to assess whether the budgets and
income statements of the program were consistent with each other. Tuffy, for example,
used the financial reports to monitor the activities of the programs she oversaw.
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I think the other ways that I work is through the financial reports that get produced on a monthly basis — every one of these centres is a cost centre and so they’ve got an income statement that comes out on a monthly basis. If, in fact there’s significant variance in one of those income statements — then I’m going to have a conversation with the program manager around — or the program director as the case may be around you know, we need to do some analysis here — why is this falling far short of budget? Um you know, what are the issues here? So that we can begin to look at how to either fix it or get rid of it or something.
Evaluation of outcomes was sometimes part of the financial management of the activities
of each program within her organization. When Tuffy’s staff members deviated from the
budget in carrying out activities, they had a “conversation” with her. In this way, the
work programs were used each month as a way to keep the staff answerable to the overall
financial administration of the organization.
To a certain degree, as the preceding discussion has illustrated, extralocal
relations of accountability among women’s organizations, funders and governments
shaped the women’s need to create more data in order to justify their programs.
Moreover, as shown by some of the accounts highlighted so far, some of the women
questioned the emphasis placed by women’s organizations on outcomes-based models of
evaluation and the evaluative documentation of “good work” and, as a result, identified
disjuncture between this documentation process and the aims of social service
organizations.
From contestation to conflict management
Organizational accountability also shaped women’s everyday antiracist feminist work of
challenging and critiquing organizational practices which were seen as discriminatory,
repressive or exclusionary. Contestation based on antiracist feminist and social justice
critique was often transformed through organizational accountability from reflecting a
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broader organizational limitation that needed attention to conflict between individuals
that needed to be micromanaged instead. This process, in effect, depoliticized antiracist
feminist practice by recasting such critiques into liberal ideological frames that privilege
individualism. That is, social critique was rendered into a contest between individuals and
referred to as ‘personality conflicts.’
As I described in chapter four, front-line staff members’ commitments to
antiracist feminism and social justice often resulted in their contesting organizational
practices that were ethnocentric, exclusionary, and/or discriminatory. Some examples
included Catherine’s accusation of (racialized) favouritism in relation to hiring practices;
Lodge’s critique of board recruitment practices (discussed above); and Aj’s challenging
of practices around holiday events (see below). These instances of antiracist critiques
became subject to conflict resolution processes. Forms of conflict resolution ranged from
informal discussion to union grievances, firing, disciplining of staff members, and
formalized mediation. In similar fashion to the discussion on documentary practices,
antiracist feminist critiques were framed and resolved within the organization through
extralocal processes of accountability to funding agencies, labour organizations and
labour-related legislation and state policy.
Within women’s organizations where there were definite commitments to
antiracist feminism, when conflict emerged around issues of race and discrimination they
were often resolved through relations of organizational accountability, specifically
through hierarchicalized reporting processes, which women often called “conflict
resolution” or “conflict management.” As I show below, women managers, even those
who saw themselves as antiracist feminist activists, became part of conflict resolution
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processes which treated discussion of racism as problematic and peripheral to the
functioning of the organization. This was particularly apparent when comparing front-
line workers’ accounts of contestations with those of managers, executive directors
and/or board members.
The front-line women’s antiracist critiques were often taken up as personal
critiques,39 rather than social ones, and they became subject to intervention meant to
mediate between two individual colleagues. For example, the racialized conflict between
Aj and her co-worker meant that their manager intervened in their conflict. When Aj
advocated for “more cultural food” (her words) at a holiday party, her white co-worker
accused her of calling her “a racist.” The “conflict” began with Aj putting into practice
her commitments to making the organization more responsive to cultural diversity. Aj
described the ways in which her suggestion that diverse food be served at the event was
taken up by her co-worker, who saw Aj’s suggestion (and implicit critique) as an
accusation that she was racist. As Aj noted during our interview, “She was saying that I
called her a racist, which I didn’t. But that was her understanding that I did. But I didn’t
call her that …” After some discussion, Aj and her co-worker approached their manager
who was asked to informally mediate. The focus on the original concern of having more
diverse cultural foods at an event was deflected, and, instead, the focus became whether
Aj had, or had not, accused her co-worker of being racist.
The original issue was glossed over, and the organizational process of conflict
resolution took up the personal “conflict” between co-workers as the primary issue to
39 Mills (1959) similarly discusses the need to connect “personal troubles to public issues” in The sociological imagination. Mills saw this problem – public issues were being treated as “personalized troubles” as a far-reaching problem that was broadly infused in capitalist culture.
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“mediate” rather than the original concern about attending to ethnocentrism and lack of
attention to diversity.40 In keeping with hierarchical social relations, the premise of the
mediation was that there was a conflict among co-workers which needed to be mediated
by a manager. To make matters worse, Aj reported that the formalized conflict mediation
process “took months.” Several theorists have described the ways in which antiracist
critique has elicited strong emotional responses by (primarily white) people in women’s
and other types of organizations (see for example Ahmed, 2009; Srivastava, 2002). What
is significant about this particular example is that conflict resolution or mediation was an
institutionalized response to manage both the original antiracist critique and the woman’s
emotional response to it.
Cee’s reaction to a similar struggle of putting antiracist feminism into practice at
her workplace is also illustrative. Despite her own history and commitments to antiracist
struggle, Cee’s experience of managing antiracist criticisms and what some of her staff
argued was antiracist action, showed the dialectical relationship between one’s own
beliefs and one’s position and responsibilities within an organization. Cee recounted a
conflict that occurred between the views of white and black staff on the subject of a
holiday party. In this case, Cee deemed this racialized “conflict” as “petty.” It was not
clear from Cee’s account how the staff took up antiracist feminist commitments, other
than to resist Cee’s characterization of this conflict as “petty.” Nevertheless her
description of the ways in which she was compelled to react was significant.
It was all around having to organize a stupid little thing [lowering voice] around going to a holiday party…There was a number of black staff who
40 Srivastava (2002) talks about how antiracist critiques become taken up by white staff in emotional ways which deflect from the original issues.
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said we’re not going to go [to the party]. You see, what I mean it’s like, “So what is your beef?”
Then I remember hearing at one point in time, well oh, one of the black staff said, “Do you remember when we had a party and none of them [the white staff] came? And I said, “None of who? Those people are not even here anymore, so, big deal, none of them came.” And I said, “Unfortunately, you didn’t deal with that then, you’re not going to do deal with it now.”… Well it is little and petty. Because if they don’t want to go, they just don’t go. You just don’t go around talking about it [in front of residents]; you have people now, not talking to other people who are already not talking to other people. [Lowers voice] Because of what? ... So, I’m hopeful, at some point in time, you know, it will resolve itself.
Cee’s reaction to this racialized and historical divide was understandable given her desire
to reduce what she saw as unnecessary conflict among groups of white and racialized
staff. However, her example is telling because it illustrates how antiracist critique was
rendered into a personal conflict through relations of accountability within a local setting.
In particular, Cee was concerned with the effects of these divisions and
conversation on residents and newer staff. Cee addressed the issue by using her position
of authority within the frame of organizational accountability to stop discussions and, in
her words, to “put a gag order” on the staff. Unfortunately, such action escalated the
conflict:
I said, “How dare you do this around a party. We’re not going to go there. I have no interest in the way you deal with it, but here is my position: You do not make it an issue of discussion, in common places in the house. I mean not talking about it in public. It’s like, the residents are here, it’s not like they don’t know what’s going on. I’m going to put a gag order on you. You’re going to stop or this is what’s going to be happening [lowered voice] ...” And then she [a staff] went to the union.
In a way, Cee actively attempted to stop discussion about the racialized conflict among
staff as part of her strategy to create a positive working environment for all her staff
members. From Cee’s perspective, Cee’s efforts to minimize racialized conflict and to
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promote shared commitments to the functioning of the organization was part of her
everyday management work.
The next step in the conflict resolution process, however, showed the ways in
which extralocal legislation and policy affected Cee’s intervention as a manager. After
Cee attempted to stop discussion, a staff member went to the union who then intervened
on the staff member’s behalf. According to Cee, the union representative suggested that
Cee’s reaction of telling people to stop talking about the conflict was an inappropriate
form of discipline. Cee became subject to the scrutiny of the union, which meant that
staff could file a grievance against her attempts to discipline staff behaviour and
language.
Well I had a union rep call me and I said, “You know, I’m clear on what I can discipline employees for, what I cannot discipline them for. I said, however, my greater concern is what happens to the, you know, the poisoning of the work environment right? And what certain behaviours can lead to…” And the union rep, said, “Oh well so what? So what if there’s disrespect for, and hurt each other’s feelings, so what?”
This particular form of scrutiny was a regular part of the ways in which women’s
organizations, and particularly the women in management positions, were accountable to
extralocal labour legislation and policy.
In some cases, antiracist critiques within women’s organizations became
detrimental to the organization. In one interview, for example, Francine described how
internal tensions resulted in instability of organizations and threats to their viability.
Francine described how an organization of which she had been a board member became
subject to a series of racialized conflicts, which resulted in the union and funders
intervening. Francine described the context of these struggles as follows:
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A new executive director had just been hired and she was a woman of colour. At least one of the two managers was a woman of colour, and there were a number of conflicts in the organization between the ED and front-line staff … The work place was unionized and [the front-line staff] had filed a number of grievances. The funder … was ultimately brought into the conflicts…
As a result of the number of grievances filed by staff members and managers, the
organization lost its funding and was forced to stop providing services.
As an active member of the personnel committee, Francine described the work
involved in addressing such conflicts. In her description of the conflict management
process she outlined several ways through which social relations of accountability within
and outside the organization intersected to address conflicts within her organization:
As a member of the personnel committee responding to union grievances around a whole host of issues, including for example, I remember a number of issues and conflicts around equity issues. So, for example, one of the managers, a Caribbean black woman was in serious conflict with an African woman from the continent, and somehow the issues were specifically identified as racialism. The front-line worker from the continent specifically complained about being treated differentially and unfairly because she was a woman from the continent. She complained of being referred to in disrespectful ways, she complained about different work assignments.
[The complaints] first became raised verbally, and then it evolved into a formal written complaint … I think that what was critical for us was that one of the issues that the front-line continental African worker had identified was, again she was being differently treated, than other workers.
And I seem to remember that one of the examples — the difference between them — that she raised was around work assignments … She was not awarded the position and felt that it happened because of the conflict that she was having with the manager. And so it, it then, it wasn’t just about um something intangible in that, you know, “I feel someone is not being nice to me for this reason. I feel that I’m being spoken to in a different way than other people.” The issue, the primary issue is being complained about was something very tangible that, you know, “I applied for this job, I felt that I was more qualified. I certainly had enough seniority and yet I didn’t get the position. And that was what was obligated us to respond.
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The above notwithstanding, not all instances of racialized discrimination were taken up in
the same way; those that were linked to extralocal relations of accountability were taken
more seriously. The level of seriousness indicates the degree to which extralocal relations
of ruling directly impacted the enactment of antiracist practices within certain women’s
organizations.
In the example that Francine described for instance, the issue became one which
was institutionalized through the relationship between the union and her organization.
The complaint by the front-line worker that she was discriminated against because of
“racialism” got taken up by the board through a conflict resolution process, and as
Francine described, the complaint was given more importance because there was a
“tangible” concern (in this case, job discrimination), rather than an “intangible” concern,
such as being treated differently. Francine described how the board was “obligated” to
respond because of union rules about seniority.
Notably, Francine made a distinction between the front-line staff’s concern that
she was being treated disrespectfully and one of job discrimination. This distinction was
significant, because the latter – the allegation of job discrimination – was governed by
labour policies and legislation, as well as collective agreements between the union(s) and
the organization.
Because as a unionized environment, competitions were very — you know the process really dictated and directed how people should have access to [the position]. So, you know, if you had, if you were the most senior person and you were — and you were qualified, you had the minimal, minimum qualifications, then every expectation would be that you would then get that position.
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Although Francine had joined the board of directors of this organization because of her
commitments to social justice and desire to implement antiracist politics within women’s
organization, her work as an antiracist advocate became subsumed under her commitment
to the functioning and survival of the organization.
In addition, Francine described how she worked with the personnel committee to
facilitate a conflict resolution process which resulted in another instance of conflict:
At one point I remember specifically working with the committee and the complainant and respondent to facilitate a conflict resolution process. And actually while that process was started the process itself became subject of disagreement and a complaint… One thing that had happened was that while both parties were asked, or given the opportunity to be accompanied through the process by a support person, someone else other than the board members or people who were involved in facilitating or constructing the process. I remember that one of the reasons why the facilitation, the conflict resolution process got bogged down was because the manager insisted that her support person was going to be a man. And the complainant objected and so I think that the complaint might then have gone forward to a more formal union grievance process.
As Francine noted, in addition to the involvement of the union through the legalized
grievance processes, repeated racialized tensions meant that funders to whom
organizations were ultimately accountable came in to ‘find facts’ about the organization
through what was called a “forensic audit.” As a result, Francine’s time was taken up
more and more by administrative processes, and less by antiracist feminist work, and this
illustrates another form of relations of accountability which shaped the everyday work of
antiracist feminists within organizations.
As I have shown so far, extralocal relations of accountability resulting from
antiracist critique and racialized conflict in women’s organizations had detrimental
effects on women’s ability to do antiracist feminist work on a daily basis and their sense
of self (including their embodiment). Ultimately, the resultant debilitation also negatively
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affected the women’s desires to continue their activist and organization work. Francine,
to take one example, decided to leave the board because she was “tired,” as she had spent
a lot of time as a board member responding to external grievances, a “law suit” and a
forensic audit by funders.
We also, one of the other sort of big things that I was part of dealing with was concluding a law suit actually — that had started prior to our board having come on. And that took up a lot of time and energy and very draining…The previous board had been involved in a forensic audit through the [funders] and continued issues that we then that we had to deal with…[The forensic audit] was an audit of … a combination of financial and services um auditing the units of services. How the organization is delivering programs, services. It involved a lot of reporting back to the city on various questions that arose in the course of this process. We were asked what policies we have, do they cover x, y, z issues, et cetera, et cetera…
The forensic audit included not only the auditing of financial documents of a particular
organization, but also the everyday workings of the organization (see also Miller, 2001;
Powers, 1997). Audits such as the ones Francine described invariably had detrimental
consequences not only on the viability and survival of women’s organizations, but also
on the front-line women of colour staff and on the community who was being served.
Disgruntled staff and other community members could (and sometimes did)
request that the funders come in to investigate “conflict,” including conflict which was
based on antiracist and other forms of racialized critiques of organizations. According to
Francine other organizations that had experienced a large amount of antiracist
organizational change had become subject to forensic audits:
Well, let me say that it seems to be [laughing] that audits um follow certain kinds of organizations, so and certain…. Let me put it this way, umm, Nellie’s for example in the days of June Callwood…became the subject of a city audit after women of colour who were on front-line staff challenged the board around some of these very issues raised around race
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and antiracism. June Callwood was accused of being a racist and then all hell seemed to break loose, not just within the organization but these were issues that then carried out um in all forms of media… And there were other shelters where again women of colour, as activists, providing services, usually challenging the predominantly white, or all white board or the white ED. And um because women felt completely disempowered within the organization to be heard they would, as a strategy and as a way of seeking support board would… may have initiated the contact with the city — or it may have been the board that initiated the contact with the city, each trying to further their own positions or agendas. But ultimately when the city comes in, um what has typically happened is that the city withdraws funding. The agency shuts down and a lot of women lose their jobs — those women are predominantly women of colour working in front-line of these agencies.
It was an irony that antiracist feminist action could lead to the complete shutdown of the
women’s organization. Relations of accountability and auditing, as I described earlier,
were a regular part of the everyday landscape of organizations (Dehli, 2010; McCoy,
1998; Miller, 2001; Nichols, 2008; Power, 1997), and these made a difference to the
ways in which conflict needed to be addressed. In the landscape of the “audit explosion”
(Powers, 1997), conflict which was not “managed” appropriately could mean that
organizations were under increased scrutiny. It was not surprising, then, that executive
directors and managers were concerned about managing dissent within organizations
through internal processes of conflict resolution from within relations of organizational
accountability.
To reiterate, the dynamics of organizational accountability shaped antiracist
contestations within feminist women’s organizations. In particular, antiracist feminist
social change was framed through institutionalized relations of ruling and accountability
within the organization. Organizational accountability not only shaped but also, in effect,
limited the emancipatory potential of antiracist feminist activism. Issues of race and
racism were subject to administrative and bureaucratic forms of accountability, rather
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than addressed through the organizations’ visions of antiracist transformation of social
relations. Although women were able to find support for antiracist change, particularly in
organizations in which managers and board members shared such visions (as part of
mobilization of antiracist feminist ideals), the everyday practices of organizational
accountability shaped and reconstituted antiracist feminist activism. This does not,
however, mean that women did not engage antiracist feminist change in their
organizations. Women actively used the hierarchicalized relations of accountability
within their organizations alongside another form of accountability, namely activist
responsibility. Like organizational accountability, activist responsibility shaped women’s
everyday work within women’s organizations in ways which transformed women’s
individual and organizational commitments to social justice, antiracism, and feminism
into a particular form of accountability. I call this form of accountability activist
responsibility, and it is the subject of the next chapter.
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Chapter Six: Activist Responsibility
In this chapter, I describe another set of social relations of accountability which shaped
the research participant’s antiracist feminist practice. The women’s personal
commitments to antiracism, feminism, and social justice transformed into social forms of
responsibility, where they were made accountable to other activists or people committed
to antiracism, feminism and social justice. In this sense, individual beliefs and choices
became enmeshed in social relations within and across women’s organizations. These
social relations, in effect, created a form of accountability I call antiracist feminist
activist responsibility or, as I refer to it throughout this chapter, activist responsibility.
Activist responsibility was the socially organized process of accountability that guided
the women’s everyday enactment of their commitment to and practice of social justice,
feminist and antiracist work. The interviews revealed that social relations of activist
responsibility shaped the women’s everyday work both within and outside their
organizations. Activist responsibility functioned as a coordinating discourse, embedded
in concrete, everyday practice where it enabled the women to craft antiracist, feminist,
and antioppressive praxis.
I make a distinction between that which is ‘personal’ (i.e., commitment) and that
which is ‘social’ (i.e., responsibility). The social movement literature subsumes
commitment and responsibility (as well as solidarity) under the notion of collective
identity (Becker, 1960; Glass, 2009; Downton and Wehr, 1997; Hunt and Benford, 2004;
Kanter, 1968; Melucci, 2003). However, as I described in both my literature review and
in chapter three, the research participants in my study spoke of their commitments to (and
everyday work of) antiracist feminism and social justice, rather than academic notions of
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a collective identity. Furthermore, as I explained in chapter three, I use commitment to
refer to women’s individual (i.e., personal) articulations of their beliefs and values. I use
the term (activist) responsibility to refer to the ways in which women’s commitments
were made social and accountable through institutionalized social relations within
organizations. In other words, I argue that activists’ commitments were made accountable
(or answerable) to one another, but only because the activists felt a responsibility to put
into practice their ideals. This distinction between commitment and responsibility is
important because it makes visible the ways in which women’s personal values and
commitments to social justice were made social in that women became responsible to
other activists through everyday talk and practice within the social realm (even when the
social realm was an imagined or abstract community of feminists and activists across
social movements).
This chapter describes concrete ways through which the women transformed their
commitments into activist responsibility in their everyday interactions with others
committed to antiracism, feminism, and social justice. I describe social relations of
activist responsibility and show how it led to forms of social and political accountability
at the level of women’s subjectivities, everyday talk and practice, as well as interpersonal
and translocal relationships. I begin by describing activist responsibility and the ways in
which it transformed women’s personal commitments to social justice, feminism, and
antiracism. Then I argue that activist responsibility functioned as a coordinating
discourse, rather than a regulatory one (Smith, 2005), as in the case of organizational
accountability. Next, I show various ways in which personal commitment to activism
became a social responsibility. Finally, I conclude with the reminder that relations of
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activist responsibility did not work independently of other relations of organizational
accountability.
Antiracist Feminist Activist Responsibility: From the Personal to the Social
When I started my study, I anticipated finding evidence of women’s commitments to
social justice, but had not fully reflected on the degree to which these commitments were
enmeshed within multiple sets of social relations of accountability. Contrary to the
dominant conceptualizations of accountability which focus primarily on funding, state
and governing relations of accountability, the women’s accounts showed that, activism
was shaped by overlapping social relations of answerability, responsibility and
accountability. In fact, although I focus on relations of activist accountability within
organizations in this dissertation, women’s accounts showed that their politicized
commitments were shaped by other broader social relations such as those evident in their
families, as well as in their ethnoracial and politicized communities.
The evidence for the existence of activist responsibility as a social process of
accountability within women’s organizations was found throughout the interviews. The
research participants’ accounts of their commitments and everyday activist practice, their
intra- and inter-organization social interactions with other people, and their everyday
organizational change work showed that women felt responsible and were answerable to
antiracist feminist change. Women were accountable not only to their co-workers, clients
and supervisors, but also to other activists or people committed to social justice. This
accountability created a community of activists and a particularly politicized standpoint.
The women’s accounts showed that their activism through and within women’s
organizations was not simply a personal matter. In fact, their activism was deeply socially
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imbued, such that their identities as “activists” were shaped by social relations of activist
responsibility.
Women’s accounts revealed that their commitments to antiracism, feminism, and
social justice were central to their identities and provided meaning to their lives, as well
as a sense of political and practical belonging. In chapter three I described the degree to
which antiracist feminist change was made personal within women’s lives (see also my
literature review in chapter one; specifically, Alexander and Mohanty, 2001; Bannerji,
1995; Glass, 2009; Hunt and Benford, 2004; Srivastava, 2002; Sudbury, 1998;). The
women described how activism was deeply integrated into their personal everyday beliefs
and practices. For example, they often framed how they would make and justify personal
life choices using activist discourse. In this way, they made personal their political
commitments, and in their own eyes and in the eyes of their co-workers, could position
themselves as ‘good activists.’
By way of example, in the rest of this subsection, I explore Lodge’s account in
order to further explicate how activist responsibility discourse works: by discursively
(re)producing women of colour who shape their identities as ‘good’ antiracist feminist
activists; through the formation of a coordinating discourse; by producing a particular set
of work processes (Smith, G., Mykhalovskiy and Weatherbee, 2006); and by embedding
antiracist, feminist and activist ideals through organizational practice. These four
processes were all evident in Lodge’s account, but were not independent of one another;
that is, they were integrated and worked simultaneously. Collectively, these processes
show how antiracist feminist activist responsibility worked by politicizing the personal
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and personalizing the political, thereby socializing the personal and personalizing the
social.
Lodge, as noted before, was a shelter worker who discussed how her political
commitments to antiracist feminism were deeply personal. As we saw in chapter three,
Lodge (and other women) discussed the centrality of antiracist feminist work in their
lives and to their sense of self. Lodge’s comment that “work is me” was one example
how her sense of self was oriented towards antiracist feminist practice. Lodge repeated
this sentiment and described the ways in which she became responsible to put her
commitments into practice, and how this responsibility, in turn, shaped her everyday talk,
thoughts, and familial and collegial relationships. She described how her commitments to
antioppression and, more specifically, antiracism, meant that she was consistently taking
work home, and this impinged on her relationship with her partner/husband:
And now, my partner’s like “I don’t wanna see” me that, you know, political - that active… And [in his job]… you don’t have these extra assignments, like antioppression stuff and additional committees and stuff like that, you don’t – and he would prefer that [I leave work at work]... [My partner leaves work and] he will feel like he can turn off — and I’ll say that to him, “well at the end of the day” —even the accountability
piece [emphasis mine] —“you can turn off your machine and you can go.” But if I’m talking to — ‘cause sometime I’ll be at work late too.
If I’m talking to a woman and she break down like in front of me and she’s crying, like I’m not gonna just push her off and say okay, “Umm [co-worker’s name], can you come talk to this woman”… In the moment, I want to be able to support her, you know? Because if not, I’m driving home, I’m still thinking…but it’s sad… I don’t believe people care as much, so I feel, if I do it, I do it the best, regardless, you know? And it’s not that I don’t trust my team, but especially when working with immigrant or women of colours, or colour or whatever, I just feel that, you know, I have to do it… Activism is work…Well, I don’t think they can ever pay me to do this work the way I wanted to. Like you know – cause we know about [the lack of] funding for programming. I don’t think they could ever pay [me enough]… for things to get done well, especially for something you believe in.
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Lodge’s discussion above shows that her decisions concerning work revolved around
working with and supporting women of colour. In it, she describes the ways in which she
felt that she had to do it, and that she felt responsible to the women she was speaking
with. Her sense of responsibility to activism coordinated her everyday actions and talk,
and, in particular, her description of why she decided to stay at work after her shift had
ended and to take work home.
Tellingly, activist responsibility discourse also coordinated her conversations at
home with her husband/partner. In addition, not only was Lodge’s everyday work
oriented to supporting women, but also to justifying and negotiating these choices to her
partner. By drawing a comparison between her work and her husband’s, she relayed some
of the ways in which her work in the shelter shaped her as someone who was responsible
to women and activist principles. To this end, she described her feelings of responsibility
to her work, the women she supported, and her commitments to antiracist feminism as
“the accountability piece.” Finally, she hinted at the social relations within her
organizational work that impinged on her ability to do her work. One was the dynamics
of shift changes while supporting a woman of colour—“I’m not going to push her off.”
Another was the varied approaches of and commitments to women of colour by
individuals on her team: “I don’t believe people care as much.” Two other sets of social
relations evident in her account were limited funding for programs in women’s
organizations –“they can’t pay me enough” – and the nature of crisis work (which she
described as impinging on her ability to get work done at work and resulted in her taking
work home).
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During her interview, Lodge described the varied ways in which her commitments
to social justice preoccupied her everyday experiences and took time, effort, and energy
in ways that also connected her family space and workplace. She described how she
brought discussions from her workplace into her personal relationships. She also
discussed how she developed a different depth of understanding over time about what it
meant to put her commitments to antiheterosexism and antiracism into practice and
balance. Worthy to be quoted at length, she noted:
The first initial bit, like the first year and stuff it was like kind of a transformation for me…Learning and knowing that things that people say is not okay, in regards to antioppression and antiracism… like always my partner would say something and I would challenge him and I’ll say, “that’s not okay”… So then you just get hypersensitive I think for a little bit where anything my partner do, you know, (laughing) anything, that used to be okay but that’s not okay anymore… I was so passionate about the work …and I wanted to see changes happen right now…At one point, he said, “You know what, if this continues for the next six months, we’re not going to be together.” And I know in a lot of sense it’s not him, it’s me changing… And, so, my partner used to say, “Well, you are doing everything white people want you to do,” – like that how he see it – right But for me, it just makes so much sense that it’s someone umm, if someone have mental issues, you have to be able to make sure you thinking inclusive. And, I work with women mostly, with some lesbians, and like you know so I’ll, now I’ll stop calling him “my husband,” I say, “partner.” And he used to be ticked-off about that, you know? So, he said, “When we went to the altar you didn’t say I take this man for my partner.” That’s what he would say to me (laughing). And yeah, it would just go back and forth…
But I think after a while I kind of see, because for one big thing for me that was like was cleared up. I saw that people [other co-workers are] are not genuinely doing the same thing as I am. So, for example, we have this discussion where we talked about the problems with yin-yang, the problems with the images of black and white in our society… So there was this woman that was so hopping into antiracism, antioppression work.
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And that we discussed, that yin-yang was not good41, because all it’s saying is that black is bad and the good is white right? We get like detailed conversations, like, you know? … At work, we all have that basic understanding that anything in regards to how society is like set up, just different words or how people use things metaphorically, or you know, different signs that represent [the idea that] white is good, and pure and everything and then black is seen as dark, negative, like black cat and black cloud... And because like even though it’s not intentionally saying or directly saying that, people is racist, but people think that way and then because of that they treat people, you know, people of colour differently…
And all of a sudden she [the co-worker] met a new partner and her new partner gave her earring with the yin-yang stuff. And that’s something [she said] she’d never do, but then she makes some excuse to me, like “oh you know, she give it to me because she like it and that you know, just I’m just gonna wear it …” So all of a sudden what you were preaching to me is out the window? Yeah, yeah, so the thing is, we do all this antioppression, antiracism stuff and like a lot of reading and those stuff for just general understanding and knowledge that’s what, you know, that’s what we do, you know? The thing is, for me, I’m thinking, I’m treating people the way I’d like to be treated. And that still how it is, right? So I’ll say ‘partner’ if it’s a gender-neutral term, it’s respectful, it’s not oppressive. So I’ll do it. So when it comes to like the yin and yang, you know that it is oppressive and you [as a co-worker] say it, you know, it’s not me telling you, you read it, you say it and then all of a sudden things change because, oh, wow, somebody you love gave you something …
Now – I don’t change my language completely, but still – for my partner, if I go out with him and you know, in his social circle, I’ll say, you know, “oh, that’s my husband” or “meet my husband” or whatever, because, I kind of separate them, not that I change. But, I try to balance things more.
This account reinforced the degree to which Lodge had integrated personal commitments
to antiracism and antioppression was integrated into her life. Despite her earlier assertion
that her commitment to antiracism was “just her,” the account highlights how putting
these commitments into action was social and embedded within everyday organizational
41 Although it was Lodge’s and her co-worker’s understanding that the image of yin-yang was racist, not all antiracist feminists would argue that this particular image is “not good.” Lodge was referring here to antiracist and poststructural critiques of binaries implicit in discourse which suggests that “white” is associated with positive ideas and “black” is often imbued with negative perceptions.
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discourse and practice and structured co-worker’s interactions with other co-workers,
clients and other members of women’s organizations.
In other words, as Lodge pointed out, it was part of her co-workers’ “detailed
conversations” and “basic understanding” that allowed women to share ideas about what
sort of language and practice was oriented to an antiracist, feminist, antiheterosexist, and
antioppressive praxis. These sorts of conversations were not random, but rather a fabric
of everyday work within feminist organizations. These conversations were constitutive of
everyday shift changes, staff meetings, job interviews, trainings/public presentations,
case conferences and so on. Furthermore, Lodge’s disappointment with her colleague for
failing to put into practice the jointly agreed upon ideas about the racism implicit in
binary images of black and white (she mentions the image of yin-yang), points to the
degree to which activist responsibility discourse was embedded in, and coordinated, the
women’s everyday talk and actions. In particular, whether one was seen as a ‘good’
activist, antiracist, and feminist depended on the judgment of others.
Activist Responsibility as a Coordinating Discourse
Activist responsibility developed both out of the women’s personal commitments to
antiracism and, from the responsibility they felt for putting into practice their beliefs and
identities as antiracist feminists. More specifically, the women’s accounts of their beliefs
and everyday activities revealed that they felt an imperative to put their individual
commitments to social justice into practice within socially mediated contexts. As the
following discussion notes, this imperative to enact individual commitments was
embedded in social relations of accountability within organizations. These social
relations of accountability were part and parcel of women’s everyday and concrete
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activist work. While it may be true that all discourse (particularly politicized discourse) is
social and relational and coordinates people’s everyday practice, my study highlights the
particular and local ways in which activist responsibility discursively coordinated
everyday doings of antiracist feminists working with/in non-profit organization.
Specifically, activist responsibility influenced behaviour not because it constituted
a regulatory discourse embedded in institutionalized relations in the way the
organizational responsibility did, but because it functioned as a form of coordinating
discourse. Activist responsibility discourse guided the everyday actions of women
committed to social justice within and across different organizations to produce a
politicized antiracist feminist activist standpoint. This politicized standpoint meant that
the women were responsible to one another to put their ideals into practice. The
politicized standpoint did not mean, however, that the women simply acted according to
unitary politics or agreed with everything that was called social justice, antiracism, or
feminism. Rather, the women understood and negotiated this responsibility in a variety of
ways.
In terms commensurate with prevalent notions of discourse, activist responsibility
discourse worked at the level of language, thought, ideas, and beliefs to coordinate the
actual work of women as they made antiracist actions and practices understandable and
speakable. Using Smith’s concept of regulatory discursive frames (2005), I argue that
women of colour’s activism was socially organized through activist discursive frames,
which were articulated through, subsumed by and sometimes contradicted larger frames
of organizational accountability. As activist accounts demonstrate, these discursive
frames were produced extralocally in a variety of ways: through academic texts and
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formal education, peer education and mentoring within activist circles, “consultation”
with other activists and community members, public education via the organization,
posters, and organizational advertising, funding agencies, through governmental policies,
provincial coalition groups, and so on. Activist discursive frames were also produced by
the activists themselves, such as through discussions with one another, their public
education, hiring practices, and mentorship.
According to Smith (2005), “Frames are discursive procedures that organize how
something is to be interpreted… Such regulatory frames have a special significance in
regulating how actualities are selectively incorporated into textual realities” (p. 227).
Although Smith is talking specifically about written “texts,” the activist responsibility
discourse I analyzed primarily appeared in spoken, rather than written form. In my
research, this “text” was relayed through spoken language in addition to written language
(such as antiracist policies, manuals, policies, and so on). Nonetheless, activist
responsibility discourse must be understood as a framing discourse in terms described by
Smith. However, I emphasize that activist responsibility discourse should be understood
as coordinating, rather than regulatory, in its framework approach.
For activists, those actions that were not understood within activist responsibility
discourse were not articulated within this coordinating and discursive frame. A variety of
framing strategies were used when activists described some aspect of their lives outside
of activist discourse: they were not articulated; they were explained or rationalized in
ways which glossed over the contradiction; or they were deliberately framed outside of
activist responsibility discourse and framed as tensions or strains between other
discursive frames. The women’s accounts showed how certain ideals of antiracist
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feminism which kept women responsible to enacting antiracist feminism were selected in
women’s everyday talk. Activist responsibility discourse coordinated activism across a
variety of settings, including other activist organizations, social service agencies, public
education initiatives, lobby groups and coalitions, “communities,” governments, funding
bodies, and coalitions.
As part of the everyday work of actively engaging and coordinating activist
responsibility discourse, activists often spoke to one another commonsensically about
“activism,” without interrogating it and understanding its social organization. My
informants viewed me as a feminist and antiracist activist like themselves, and because of
this interpersonal dynamic, the coordinating discourse and the way we assumed common
frames, quickly became apparent. In particular, as I analyzed the transcripts of our guided
conversations, I became attentive to the prevalent way in which activists (including
myself) spoke about activism and activist work. I observed that when we spoke about
activism in the interviews, we used similar language to enter into discussion. For
example, we talked about being “on-the-edge,” or “being inclusive,” or being “process-
oriented” or having “good” or “bad” boundaries. Our common, coded activist language
and shared activist discourse signified our allegiances and enhanced our interaction. Our
shared language allowed me, as a researcher who might otherwise be suspect, to enter the
discursive space of the women of colour activists.
In addition, the shared language on activism (which also assumed a context of
shared activist responsibility) gave me the opportunity to learn how activism was actually
put together through the participants’ everyday work. It allowed me to enter into candid
discussions with activists about their daily lives. In fact, I am certain that had I not
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actively participated in the institutionalized discourses of the women’s movement,
antiracism, and activism, I would not have been able to gain entry into the institutional
aspects of activism in the way that I did. As we discussed their activism, the women
described some of the tensions, realities, and commitments which affected their work.
In general, women’s talk was explicitly oriented to showing their commitments to
antiracist, feminist, and social justice activism, both in belief and in practice. Even when
women did not necessarily share or exhibit these commitments, they explained these in
ways which were consistent with activist responsibility discourse. One interesting way in
which this was evident was through my own interviews. For example, women identified
me as not just a researcher, but also as an activist, with the assumption that I had
“insider” knowledge. The interview, too, was a social interaction process through which
activist responsibility was at play. In several cases, women spoke about how they
“should” do more of some practice that they saw as feminist, antiracist, or activist. For
example, in one interview, Tuffy spoke about not including antiracist principles in her
current position as an executive director as much as she “should, ought to,” assuming that
I was judging her through an activist framework, thus assuming a sense of shared activist
responsibility.
From personal commitments to activist responsibility
In addition to activist responsibility transforming women’s personal commitments to
social justice and being enacted through coordinated discursive practices, many of the
women also described the ways in which their racialized identities, their politicized
identities, and their relationships with activists within their organizations was framed by
relations of activist responsibility. Furthermore, relations of accountability to antiracist
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feminist activism compelled them to activate or put into practice their commitments to
antiracism, feminism, and social justice.
Maria’s account provides an example of antiracist feminist activist responsibility.
As we saw in chapter four, Maria spoke about how her personal identification as an
antiracist feminist and her embodied antiracist and feminist analysis meant that she had to
“care about,” or be responsible for addressing, injustice and oppression. Maria’s
reflection on the ways in which her identity as a feminist and activist depended on
organizational context provides insight into the degree to which this responsibility was
socially produced through concrete and everyday practices within the women’s
organization. Maria, whose paid employment was as a researcher in a health
organization, said that she didn’t “need to” identify as an activist, antiracist or feminist in
the health-related settings, whereas in women’s organizations she did.
It’s interesting, though I find that that sense of needing to identify yourself, really does vary from place to place or organization to organization. I mean it’s a non-issue where I work [in health-related organization]. I mean I’d never sit at a meeting and say well, “As a feminist I think this.” I mean it’s just not part of that realm, whereas, you know, certainly seems more fluid in women’s organization but something like people want to put out there very explicitly, you know, “Are you a women who is identified yourself as a feminist or not?” And that’s important to know … even though I would identify myself as a feminist it’s really in my realm of [women’s organization name] that it really is an issue.
The “need to identify,” which Maria described above, was part of organizationally
mediated social relations of accountability within women’s organizations.
Maria further emphasized that it was in the context of a recruitment interview
within women’s organizations that she most clearly identified as a feminist.
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When I interviewed with them [before I became a board member] and that’s something we talked about, so now people know that’s how I would identify myself, but that’s not something that comes up [in my other workplace].
Maria described how a person’s identification with feminism was “important to
know” within women’s organizations. Identifying as a feminist was important because it
provided the initial basis of solidarity and indication of common values, and it was
through that identification that women’s organizations functioned and developed
common goals. The women were making themselves politically and socially responsible
to one another, explicitly through their feminist identities which implied common values
and goals.
Moreover, women’s responsibility to antiracist feminist activism was racialized
and gendered. As I argued in chapter three, the participant’s politicized commitments to
antiracist feminist were inscribed within and through their racialized and gendered
identities, subjectivities and experiences as women of colour (see Brah, 2001). However,
these racialized and gendered commitments to antiracist practice were also embedded
through social relations of responsibility to antiracist feminist activism.
Theta’s account was one poignant example of racialization within relations of
activist responsibility. During the time that I interviewed Theta, she was trying to make
sense of the connections between her identity as an antiracist feminist activist and her
identity as a woman of colour. Early on in the interview, Theta identified the importance
of antiracism and feminism as key to her survival (also see chapter three). She indicated
that she came to feminism and antiracism when she was 17 years old, at which time she
had read bell hooks, a Black antiracist feminist writer. Theta described with detail the
antiracist work she did as a young woman within various multi-racial youth groups. Yet,
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unlike the majority of the research participants who were well entrenched within
antiracist struggles, Theta was only beginning to explicitly integrate antiracism into her
everyday work in women’s organizations. During the recruitment and interview phases of
this research, Theta expressed ambivalence toward identifying herself as an antiracist
feminist and doing antiracist work. When I first spoke to her over the phone, Theta
expressed discomfort at how she was being “called to” do antiracist work in her
organization. She linked her ambivalence to being, what she called, racially
“ambiguous,” due to her mixed racialized heritage; she indicated that she was not always
identified as a person of colour. Although it would be possible to analyze Theta’s
ambivalence as personal, or through an interrogation of her identity through concepts
such as hybridity, internalized racism and so on, what became clear throughout the
interview was that, in part, Theta’s “ambiguity” meant that she was not sure whether or
not she was authorized to speak as a woman of colour. For her, this was part of her
commitments to antiracist feminist activism which included not wanting to exercise her
(relatively) white-skinned privilege and possibly speak for other racialized communities;
her ambivalence about her authenticity as a woman of colour meant that Theta questioned
her own credibility as an antiracist feminist activist.
Theta’s account of her ambivalence gave me an opportunity to understand the
social dimensions of the production of an authentic antiracist feminist activist identity
and its links with racialized and gendered identities, subjectivities and experience. For
example, although she said she had no problems identifying as a “woman” and
“feminist,” she expressed ambivalence with becoming responsible for antiracist practice
in her organization.
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I’m being increasingly called to do antiracist work at my workplace… I can say I’m antiracist in my practice, in my values and my approach . . . I want to be antiracist, but . . . what’s stopping me? Ok, so, first, I don’t actively connect with women of colour working in this field or doing antiracism work or violence against women work or whatever. In this community, the women I do talk to are not women of colour, so that’s a little part of it. But, white women are talking about antiracist work and doing it, they’re talking about all this and, you know, I’m still having [pause]—it’s still an uncomfortable place to be when you’re not sure how the people in the room are placing you.
Theta identified her lack of connection with other women of colour, and particularly,
other women of colour “doing antiracism in this field” as a reason for her ambivalence
and discomfort with identifying as an antiracist feminist. Theta’s ambivalence revealed
the influence of social relationships in shaping her identity in saying that “talking to”
other women of colour doing antiracist feminist work would validate her antiracist
feminist practice. For Theta, being connected to other racialized activists was important
because it made her feel more authorized to speak about issues of race, racialization, and
antiracism. In addition, Theta’s statement, that it was uncomfortable “when you’re not
sure how the people in the room are placing you,” was in relation to her racialized
identity, and how other activists identified her.
As the organizations with whom she identified were moving towards
implementing antiracist policies and programs, Theta was being compelled by others
(“being called on”), and by her own commitments to antiracist feminism, to participate in
these efforts as a woman of colour, even as Theta struggled with her own racialized and
activist identity. Being positioned as “the” woman of colour at one of the organizations
with which she volunteered as a board member, meant that Theta felt tokenized and
overwhelmed; she was overwhelmed to imagine that she was being seen as “the”
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representative of women of colour—at the same time that she herself was not sure of her
racialized identity.
So I was at a board meeting at the [organization name at which Theta is a volunteer/board member], you know, and we were talking about [the fact that] there were only white women in the [board] room and we have to make sure that we have um— the women who have just left [the board] are all women of colour and— we better replace them with more women of colour, you know.
And, one of the women looked at me— and, [said] “Thank goodness we still have you, Theta.” “So, you’re talking about me?!” I didn’t know, I didn’t know that they ever identified me in that way— I didn’t necessarily understand that— and I am taken aback – “I’m one of your women of colour sitting on?” But oh, like, it was a really odd experience.
All of a sudden, I felt like a token person, but as a woman of colour, and I’ve never had that experience before and then I was— and then I was – I thought, “They think of me as a women of colour?” and then I’d had the experience like I just didn’t know what to do with that…I don’t actually feel like I’m white, but I don’t feel necessarily that I’m [pause] not white either.
The relationship between Theta’s identity and other activists was clear in her account.
How “other” activists saw her, either as a white woman or as an authentic woman of
colour, changed the way she understood and identified herself, both as a racialized
woman and as an antiracist activist.
The issue of authenticity and credibility is more than individual women’s
identities and commitments to social justice. In fact, authenticity is produced by
racialized and gendered social relations, and has implications on how specific women are
seen as credible activists, and thus authorized to speak with and on behalf of other
racialized communities. Ku (2009) describes authenticity as performance. She argues that
there are contradictions of performing authenticity relatively privileged racialized
settlement workers working with settlement agencies:
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For these activist women, being seen as too removed from their community or too established to know the needs of the community challenges their authenticity… Thus the activists have to construct their commitment to their community. Their inauthenticity is made all the more real when some of them have been in Canada for decades so that they cannot claim simplistically that they know what newcomers experience. Secondly, their gender-status prevents them from representing the whole “community” (men too) ... [Thirdly, t]hese women’s identification with their community is doubly precarious in that they are also managers of organizations, and by definition, they are responsible to the state, more so than to the communities they serve. (p. 67; see also Ku, 2003).
Ku’s (2009) analysis focusses on the ways in which women who are called upon to
“represent” racialized and ethnically diverse communities creatively and self-reflexively
navigate perform a politics of difference within discourses of authenticity and
inauthenticity in order to support the work of the organization (see also Ku, 2003).
Furthermore, Ku (2009) suggests that authenticity is organized through
accountabilities to funding agencies, rather than to ethnic and racialized communities, as
the settlement workers’ years of service work “adds towards their credibility as experts
and representatives” (p. 81). My analysis builds on this observation by suggesting that,
indeed women’s construction of commitment is indeed a racialized form of
accountability. However, within the contexts of my interviews, I found that relations of
accountability were not an either/or binary between accountability to funders,
organization, and to community. Although the activists that I spoke with discussed the
racialized and gendered work that they did to ensure that they were “seen” to be
committed to antiracism, feminism and intersectional politics, racialized communities
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and so on, this was not outside of social relations of accountability.42 As I describe in
chapter six, women’s everyday activist work was more than simply constructing and/or
performing identities within overlapping activist and organizational spaces: women’s
everyday work of putting into practice women’s commitments was socially organized by
and embedded within social relations of accountability evident in mundane organizational
practices, such as documentary and hiring practices, as well as through the everyday talk
and interactions with other people.
Non-hierarchical social relations
My analysis above reveals that the women were made responsible to other activists and
organizational actors and made themselves accountable to one another in both the
contexts of non-hierarchical and hierarchical social relationships (as discussed in chapter
five). The women seemed to have a tacit agreement in which they saw themselves as
responsible to one another, to both teach and learn about varied forms of oppression. The
women challenged and supported one another to engage in self-reflexive antiracist
practice. The interviews showed that this form of antiracist teaching, learning, and
consciousness-raising was done across organizational hierarchies and included women’s
questioning and challenging of not only their peers, but also those to whom they directly
or indirectly reported, and those whom they supervised.
Within women’s organizations, conversations about putting social justice
principles into everyday practice were common, and many women talked about these
principles being part of the culture of their organizations. In some ways, the
42 I should note here that Ku’s astute analysis about the contradictions of responsibility to funders versus diasporic/ethnoracial communities implies another set of social relations of accountability to one’s chosen/perceived community; these relations of accountability are also evident in women’s accounts of their activist work in this study.
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characterization of the organizations as being natural spaces through which everyday
social justice work was embedded made invisible the historical and present day work that
activists did to ensure that activist commitments were made central in organizations.
Freddy, for example, discussed how her colleagues shared information with one another
about different aspects of antioppression work:
I have to say antioppression is not so much a constant struggle, I think in our organization, it’s a constant movement forward towards integrating what we know and sharing our knowledge. We spend a great deal of time talking about it— as an organization. And I think one of the major pieces of how we realize this, what does it look like you know, in this organization, what does antioppression look like? How do we evaluate it? How do we value it? How do we talk about it? How do we realize it? … And, it’s certainly coming out from the younger women, but I think that part of it is when you … begin to have diversity within your staff. All of a sudden these issues begin to come out normally— because people begin to assert what they believe is right and these are things that need to come forward and like with.
Freddy further gave an example of a non-hierarchical expression of activist responsibility
during a conversation about childcare, where she described how a co-worker challenged
her language on using the term “special needs child.”
One of my colleagues and I, you know, she called me on something: I said, “Well we provide child care and often I need to have a second child care provider because I’ll have a ‘special needs’ child.” And a colleague of mine, who’s a women with a disability, and she said, “Oh well, I prefer you not use that term.” So we went into a very large dialogue about words like — people are called like, “retard,” and “you’re special needs,” and what those words mean, and the kind of labels people wind up with. It was a really meaningful discussion – but you don’t have that unless you have somebody who has that analysis, and you’re working in an environment, that encourages those kinds of things you know.
Freddy attributed this “meaningful” discussion around disability to both her co-worker’s
personal “analysis” and her workplace, both of which encouraged these sorts of
discussions. These meaningful discussions among colleagues can be seen not only as an
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indication that a tacit agreement of responsibility exists, but also as an expectation of the
everyday work to make tangible antiracist teaching and learning.
“Being called on” one’s use of language was not left only to challenging co-
workers’ language during their work within women’s organizations, but it also included
challenging choices and actions that were seen as “personal.” Freddy described how she
was asked to account for decisions she made outside of her organizational work:
But I have another colleague, that you know, she and I are constantly talking about what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate in terms of language and process and stuff and you know I’m constantly being questioned about you know, my middle-class sensibilities and my propensity to eat meat and all of those other things.
Freddy’s willingness to accept her colleague’s critique was notable because it showed the
degree to which she had accepted being accountable to notions of social justice in holistic
terms. Again, women’s everyday work consisted of “constantly talking” and evaluating
“what’s appropriate and not appropriate;” and this talk was more than idle chatter, but
fundamental to developing an intersectional antiracist feminist praxis.
The analysis showed that even women who were managers or supervisors tried to
develop a management style that was consistent with their commitments to antiracist
feminism and social justice. They actively attempted to shift power between themselves
and those whom they supervised (see, for example, Soni, in chapter four). Sharmila spoke
about the ways in which she implemented her commitments to a feminist management
style by being open to being challenged, or as she put it, “consulted” on her everyday
interactions with staff.
I manage with a feminist antiracist perspective — so this whole idea of consultation, this whole idea of you know really listening to people —really trying to understand and also taking critical feedback — I’ve taken a
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lot of critical feedback over the years— and my approach is not—“you’re full of shit, I’m not going to listen to you – I’m right, you’re wrong. Okay let’s talk about this, and how can I change.” Like the staff person that said “you know your tone is harsh”—I’ve made a very concerted effort over the last few months. And I think that I have but I’ve been very careful about that. So certainly there are times when I feel like saying, “I don’t want to be a feminist manager.”
Sharmila’s willingness to accept and act on “critical feedback” was contingent on both
her personal commitments to social justice and the ways in which she and her staff made
these commitments into a social form of accountability. Her comment that she made a
“concerted effort,” indicates that she needed to devote time and energy (and therefore
work) to ensuring that hierarchicalized social relations of organizational accountability
did not undermine her efforts at being a feminist manager. Although this made her
everyday work more difficult (as she indicated, when she said that sometimes she did not
want “to be a feminist manager”), Sharmila made herself, and was made, accountable to
her staff about her management and communication style through social relations of
activist responsibility.
Actually, Sharmila gave a specific example of non-hierarchical social relations of
accountability when she described how her staff “taught” her to become more attentive to
issues of the lived stories43 of racism:
I have been taught by different staff about things about how I was managing that could be problematic. There’s an example of a previous staff person, another black woman who worked with us about six years ago. And we do this sort of once a year thing at our organization — that requires extra staff to be brought in. We asked her sister to come and work with us, and at the end of the day we were calculating what we owed people, and there was a question about how much money we owed her sister. And we were talking about that in front of her [sister] — and the
43 See Pamela Downe’s discussion on the concept of “lived history of colonialism” (Downe, 2006); see also Andrea Smith on concept of slavery as a pillar of white supremacy (Smith, A., 2006).
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staff person called us at home later on that night and called us on you know what she said was, “You know, you really need to understand what it means for us as black women to be treated like this — like you know when you are talking about issues around money you know there’s a real historical — but also present way in which were made to feel like we’re just collecting welfare”…
And we called — you know we took responsibility for that — and apologized for that. So that was certainly a moment that has stuck in my mind for years in terms of, you know, understanding people’s historical but current positions in the world.
Sharmila’s observation implies that women’s organizations are spaces where women can
discuss how to put theories, values and insights of antiracist and feminist thought into
practice.
In relation to the core discussion of this chapter, Sharmila and her management
team “took responsibility,” not only for addressing what was seen as disrespectful
behaviour, but also for not being attentive to the ways in which contemporary and
historical processes of racism affected individuals. In this situation, teaching and learning
were key components of consciousness-raising; and it was through the social relations of
activist responsibility that antiracist feminist ideals were mobilized. Activist
responsibility was not only part of the embedded discourses and practices within feminist
organizations, but was also a self-reflexive exercise through which women managers
made themselves accountable to more democratic and “consultative” ways of
management. For example, had Sharmila not been personally committed, and, perhaps,
not seen as being personally committed by her staff, it is likely that organizational
hierarchicalized relations of accountability would have led to the staff member’s
concerns being dismissed rather than being taken as a teachable moment.
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From the organizational to the translocal
While the impact of activist responsibility as a social process has been illustrated to be
important at the personal and organizational levels, it also acted “translocally” (Smith,
2005) across women’s organizations and other sites of feminist activism. Personal
commitments to antiracism, feminism, and social justice always had this translocal
dimension.44 In fact, the translocal aspect of activist responsibility was central to the
ways in which antiracist, feminist and social justice discourse gained currency and
importance within women’s social service organizations. In this section, I highlight the
translocality of activist responsibility evident in the women’s accounts.
All participants in the study discussed their responsibility to feminist, antiracist,
and social justice principles within a diverse range of social service/activist organizations.
Most of the women worked or volunteered in more than one organization and discussed
the ways in which their activist work in one organization connected with other work
contexts. Recall, for example, that in chapter three45 I described how Kimberley made
choices to volunteer and work at several organizations consistent with her “political
commitments.” She discussed how she brought her personal environmental values into
her organizational work. Aj, too, who worked both as a shelter worker for one
organization and as an executive director for a multicultural organization, discussed the
ways in which her work in both organizations overlapped. In particular, Aj described how
her antiracist work as an executive director meant that she had more credibility as an
activist within her shelter work. Mishka also described how her paid work at a shelter
allowed her to spearhead a francophone women’s immigrant group outside of work.
44 Please see the definition of translocal in “Key Terms” in chapter one. 45 In the section, “Implications of choosing to work in women’s organizations.”
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Another key example of translocality was the relationship between women’s
commitments to social justice and their involvement with local, provincial and national
coalition organizations such as local caucuses, Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres
(OCRCC), Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH), DisAbled
Women’s Network (DAWN), National Action Committee (NAC), and National
Organization of Immigrant and Visible Minority Women (NOIVMW). The antiracist
work of coalition organizations (such as OAITH, OCRCC) was central in supporting
antiracist work within local settings. For example, most of the participants who worked
with women’s shelter or transitional housing mentioned the antiracist feminist work of
OAITH throughout our discussions. Lodge, Catherine, and Theta described how co-
workers or managers who had been involved in OAITH were leaders in the antiracist and
antioppression work of their organizations. In this sense, as I mentioned above,
transclocality was always part of the very local and extralocal contexts within which
feminist women’s organizations were attempting to enact antiracist feminist discourses
and practices.
Converging relations of accountability
Whether considered locally or translocally, relations of activist responsibility did not
work outside of relations of organizational accountability. So far, for the sake of analysis,
I have described organizational accountability and activist responsibility separately:
where, organizational accountability refers to the ways in which people’s everyday work
becomes answerable to the functioning and governance of the organization; and activist
responsibility refers to the ways in which women’s commitments to antiracism, feminism
and social justice become answerable to other activists with similar ideals. However, in
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reality, the two social relations of accountability do not function separately, nor should
they be seen as somehow opposite or binary. With this in mind, in my concluding
remarks for this chapter and the substance of the following chapter, I discuss how the two
sets of social relations of accountability work together to shape, limit and facilitate
antiracist feminist change and to create tensions and paradoxes within women’s
organizations. In fact, I argue that it is these spaces of convergences among activist and
organizational relations of accountability that simultaneously provide opportunities for
antiracist feminist change as well as threats of being subsumed within and through
relations of ruling.
The idea that there are convergences among people’s beliefs, ideals and
commitments with relations of ruling is supported in recent studies. For example, an
analysis of nursing practice done by Rankin and Campbell (2006) links nurses’
commitments to caring with management discourses which have little to do with caring
for people. They write:
Socialized and trained to care for people, nurses are being taught, coached, and persuaded that it is their professional duty to nurse the organization... In the texts we analyzed we noted references such as ‘efficiency in caring,’ ‘accountability,’ and ‘responsibility’ being used in a double-sided way. They evoked nurses’ own (altruistic) professional ideas while reinforcing nurses’ conception that controlling costs, emptying beds, and rationing their caring attention are legitimate nursing interests of the highest priority...Our appraisal of several professional nursing texts produced exhibits of nurses’ language constructing a kind of idealized image of the profession, the work, and nurses’ commitments, to which nurses, reading it, would expect themselves to conform; we noticed that, at the same time, the language imperceptibly builds in and justifies nurses’ complicity with a ruling standpoint” (Rankin and Campbell, 2006, p. 172)
Rankin and Campbell’s work provides an example of how caring work and nursing ideals
of and commitments to caring get blended, and ultimately captured, within a ruling
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standpoint. In their analysis, they describe how discourses of accountability,
responsibility and caring get collapsed into the interests of management. Similarly,
Kristin Smith (2011) analyzes how discourses of change, transformation and renewal
within neoliberal restructuring discourses mobilized by Ontario provincial governments
through the mid-2000s captured activist social workers’ commitments to transformative
and social justice change within social service organizations. Using the concept of
“affective economies” (Ahmed, 2004), K. Smith (2011) explores how discourses of
transformation and change were effective in quelling activist social workers’ critique, and
argues that the “effectiveness of such discursive repertoires lies in its association with
progressive activist ideals” (p. 17). Both of these studies, although through different
methodological frameworks, describe how subjectivities and identities of nurses (in the
case of Rankin and Campbell’s study) and activist social workers (in Kristin Smith’s
study) get subsumed and captured by neoliberal discourses of restructuring.
In the preceding chapters I have analyzed several examples of how the research
participants were similarly caught in the spaces among relations of organizational
accountability and activist responsibility in ways which both provided space for antiracist
feminist change as well as depoliticized it. Many of the research participants in this study
relayed these tensions and paradoxes through their descriptions of their everyday work.
In particular, in chapter five, in the section called “Shaping Antiracist Feminist Practice”
I described how organizational accountability in the forms of hierarchicalized reporting
processes, documentary practices and conflict management strategies coordinated,
limited and sometimes facilitated antiracist feminist activist work. Recall, for example,
the ways in which antiracist feminist critique was taken up by management and reframed
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as an interpersonal conflict; or, the different ways in which documentation, even when
imbued with activist ideals, became part and parcel of relations of ruling. It was, indeed,
the convergence of (and interplay among) both forms of relations of accountability that
both facilitated and limited antiracist feminist practice, and thus created tensions and
paradoxes within women’s organizations.
The next chapter builds on the notion that relations of organizational
accountability and activist responsibility converge and that antiracist feminists actively
and consciously use the interplay to craft social justice change in women’s organizations.
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Chapter Seven: Crafting Social Justice Change
The main argument of the preceding chapters so far is that women of colour negotiate
their commitments to antiracist feminism within social relations and that their activist
practices respond to and shape social processes in women’s movement organizations.
Throughout this dissertation, I have argued that women of colour’s conscious acts of
negotiating change within women’s organizations must be understood through social
relations of accountability within and across organizations. Specifically, two sets of
social relations of accountability, organizational accountability and activist
responsibility, were mobilized in creating antiracist feminist praxis. Women of colour did
antiracist feminist activism by mobilizing discourses of activist responsibility through
hierarchicalized relations of accountability within their organizations. They consciously
drew on existing organizational accountability discourse and practices to develop
innovative and effective antiracist feminist practices. In doing so, antiracist feminist
activists seized the potential to produce change through both activist and administrative
discursive practices; this potential occurred at the junctures of negotiation between
‘organizational accountability’ and ‘activist responsibility.’ Drawing further on the
notions of juncture and intersection, in this chapter I show how women of colour
consciously and actively crafted an antiracist feminist practice by using both
institutionalized forms of accountability and responsibility. Before making this case,
however, some reiteration is necessary in order to help further set the context of this
chapter’s analysis.
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Both organizational accountability and activist responsibility provided a basis for
antiracist feminist change within women’s organizations. Although most organizations
are characterized by formalized, hierarchical reporting relationships, the women’s
accounts showed that relations of accountability were complex and not always
hierarchical. Supervisors, managers and board members were expected to show their
commitments to feminism and/or women’s issues, intersectionality and social justice. In
particular, activist responsibility mediated the hierarchical relations of accountability
central to organizations. Conversely, activist responsibility did not function
independently of formal processes of organizational accountability, but worked with and
through them. As I described in chapter six, activist responsibility discourse and practice
worked in tandem with, indeed converged with, organizational accountability in ways
that tied organizations to larger institutional discourses. Through this convergence, social
justice work was implemented within women’s organizations and women of colour were
able to craft antiracist feminist change. Convergence of the two forms of accountability
and the dialogue that arose from this process, created the space for antiracist feminist
change.
Women often discussed how they intentionally integrated activist notions into
their everyday work; their accounts made it clear that both relations of organizational
accountability and activist responsibility were being mobilized. Francine, for example,
described her involvement in a new women’s shelter board which was developing an
antiracist praxis. She spoke about the ways in which antiracist change was intentionally
crafted within the everyday practices of the board, and thus through accountability to the
organization and to antiracist feminism.
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We definitely wanted a change in the organization, you know. We definitely wanted to sustain a racially mixed board [with] a racially mixed staff that was supported. We wanted to do antiracism work in the organization. We wanted that to inform everything we did, all the policies that we wrote. We wanted to—definitely; we wanted to make structural changes in the organization. And I know that even those women who supported the board did not feel empowered enough . . . to support the board openly with their co-workers. And certainly there were other people who said nothing—and really didn’t know what they felt and other people who openly challenged the board.
Francine spoke about wanting to have antiracism “inform everything we did …” and to
“make structural changes” within the organization; her account showed intentionality
towards this structural goal. Such intentional injections of antiracist visions into
organizational practice were a significant means by which antiracist policy change
happened. Further, her reflections alluded to change-as-a-process that was mediated
through existing social relations of accountability within the organization, namely those
between board and staff members, as well as among staff (also see chapter five).
As I have also argued in the previous chapters, antiracist feminist activism was
enacted through more than just language, values and discourses; antiracist feminism was
articulated through women’s everyday work and social practice. Most of the women were
explicit about the ways in which their values and commitments were activated in their
everyday work. Women put into practice their commitments with intention. They actively
engaged social relations of organizational accountability and activist responsibility
knowing full well what they were doing. Although the women did not explicitly use the
same terms of accountability that I am using to make sense of their accounts, they did
allude to similar concepts. The women understood that to make change and to ensure
their initiatives would be successful they needed to operate within existing practices of
their workplaces and organizations. To this end, the women crafted change through their
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everyday practices within organizations in three ways: by developing interpersonal
relationships within the organization; by using documentary processes existing within the
organization; and by developing translocal relationships among organizations.
Activism, Relationships and Everyday Talk
As I discussed in chapter six, accountability to antiracism was embedded in
organizational actors and expressed in relations of activist responsibility: women
regularly debated and taught each other about racism, racialism, and social justice –
highlighting social relations of accountability to these issues in particular. In the daily
work of organizations, women were able to make each other accountable to antiracism
precisely because of the history of women’s movement organizations that has allowed for
distinctive practices of accountability by privileging consensus building and other
democratic principles of organizational operation. This history was not simply at the level
of policy, mandate, and/or ideals, but also embedded in the very social relations through
which women’s everyday work was organized.
Women spoke regularly with one another as part of their everyday work in the
organization, and in doing so, they activated social relations of organizational
accountability and activist responsibility simultaneously. Even the most mundane
everyday conversations within women’s organizations facilitated antiracist organizational
change. Everyday work allowed the women to craft an antiracist feminist and social
justice practice and to keep others in the organization accountable to these principles. In
the following section I show how the social relations of organizational accountability,
operating in specific everyday work activities, provided women with spaces for engaging
antiracist feminist and social justice-oriented activism that resulted in organizational
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change. These spaces of transformation could be found in something as mundane as shift
changes, or as important as supervision relationships, consultation meetings about clients
or programs, staff meetings and job interviews/hiring processes.
Shift changes
Shift changes – when one worker ended her work for the day and imparted information
and responsibility to the next worker (who was beginning her shift) - were crucial in the
daily functioning of the women’s organizations as women transmitted information to co-
workers so they could carry on their work. Shift changes were important because social
relations of formal organizational accountability were most visible during this time. That
shift changes offered tangible time and space for women to craft an antiracist and social
justice practice was seen for example in Aj’s testimony. She discussed a conversation
with one colleague of colour during a shift change where she pointed out that they were
showing signs of “internalized racism.”
Because I think women of colour tend to be ignorant…because if it was a white woman who makes the same remarks, everybody will jump on her. But sometimes you can see within women of colour, there is this dynamic too. Sometimes they may say things that are inappropriate. Thinking because it’s coming from them it was okay. I will still challenge them, just like I will do for a white woman…
One of my colleagues during a shift change, that was said, right here years ago when I was working at [a shelter] she said to me, she was born in England, from Indian descent, she says to me she’s only going out with black or white, not with Indian men. And I said to her. “Can you tell me why?”
And she gave me, the reason she gave, I said to her, “it’s internalized racism” you know, you have to look at yourself, you know maybe you have to try to link with a man from your culture, because you may find someone who is not, you know that kind of thing… Or I hear black women [at work] saying, “You shouldn’t go to black people’s clubs because they are pigs, you should…” you know that kind of thing, don’t go out with black people, you know. And I said, “What are you trying to say? You’ve internalized racism.”
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The significance of shift changes as spaces for crafting antiracist feminist change
were not just limited to this example. For example, in chapter six I described Cee’s
frustration at some of her staff’s shredding of shift change notes during shift change; as a
manger, Cee problematized the shredding of the shift change notes as it meant that there
was no documented means by which staff would remain accountable to her/his
supervisor. Lodge, also, discussed her views that shift change and writing shift change
notes limited the time she had for activist work (see chapters five and six). Although
these examples have different emphasis, what they share in common is that social
relations of formal organizational accountability were most visible during this time, and
had a direct impact on the crafting of antiracist feminist praxis.
Supervision
Many of the women also cited formal supervision meetings - when a supervisor met with
those they supervised in order to discuss workplace matters in a semi-structured way as
places where they were able to craft antiracist feminist praxis or were subject to another
activist's crafting. This was true for both women supervisors and those who were
supervised. Formal supervision provided opportunities to share or advocate for antiracist
and social justice-oriented views, to co-create visions of antiracist praxis, and to resolve
conflict.
Lodge, in particular, spoke about the importance of supervision to her antiracist
feminist activist work. She described how she learned from two different supervisors who
were involved with antiracist work of coalition groups during their formal spaces of
supervision. She also discussed several ways in which supervision gave her the
opportunity to put some of her antiracist and antioppressive ideas into practice.
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Particularly poignant was her discussion of how, as a supervisor, she made a case for
attending antioppression workshops during work time, advocated for women of colour
who were being squeezed out of the shelter, and shared with those she supervised her
understanding of appropriate antiracist feminist and social justice language.
On the other hand, Catherine found that when she and another racialized co-
worker had a difference of opinion on how to put into practice antiracist and
antioppressive ideals, she was often confronted by her manager during formal
supervision.
Like [co-worker] and [manager], they talk about work when they get together; I don’t. ‘Cause [manager] would know everything what happened on Friday—when she’s not there. And, it’ll come up in supervision, and I’ll say how do you know about this? And then I say, “Go figure it out!” Because sometimes she [manager] comes agitated already something happen I didn’t agree with—and she’s like, “This is not going to happen,” and I’m like, “who says it?”
For Catherine, thus, formal supervisory sessions were often spaces where she contested
her co-worker’s and manager’s understanding of antiracist feminist practice. Unlike
Lodge who was able to negotiate collaboratively a shared vision of social justice-oriented
work, Catherine’s supervisory relationships were spaces in which she contested her
manager’s vision of antiracist practice.
In a similar vein, Aj also spoke explicitly about the importance of supervision in
discussing “issues” of racism, antiracism, and antioppression. She said, “I talk to my
supervisor, you know. It’s good to get some time to debrief, you go and talk about the
issues, you know.”
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Aj specifically described a situation when she used the space of formal
supervision to attempt to resolve a conflict with a colleague over issues of cultural and
racial diversity.
So I started talking about race issues, so she started crying, that I called her racist! [laughing] … I said to her, “No, I didn't call you racist you know, I was saying to you we have to understand issues you know that women from other cultures, you know, like that food,” you know, so that kind of thing … So we went to meet our manager … I told her what ever happened, I said to her, “Do you think that you know because I presented my views in this area, does this mean that I call her a racist?” She [my manager] says, “No.”
That supervisors held institutionalized power to support or limit antiracist and social
justice initiatives meant that supervisors played an important role during supervision
meetings in making sure that the women they supervised felt comfortable crafting
antiracist feminist praxis.
Everyday consulting and collaboration
Consulting with colleagues, a usual part of the women’s work, was yet another means
that women were enabled to craft antiracist feminist activist responsibility. Consulting
was not always a formal aspect of the women’s jobs, but happened casually in the
everyday processes of going about their tasks. Women regularly spoke with one another
about clients and programs or, as Freddy put it, “consulted with” one another.
When Freddy described her morning and some of the types of consulting she did
in her daily work, it was apparent that much of it involved speaking with her colleagues.
Much of the consulting involved personally and politically supporting one another and
collaborating on projects.
By now it’s 10 o’clock and now I’m starting my work day. So I return calls, I set up any trainings I have to do. I talk to any of the peer educators
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who are having any sort of outstanding issues—and for a lot of peer educators—there are issues around boundaries and so forth. I talk with all my colleagues who need something from me to work in other agencies because the only way we survive in the women abuse field now, is to work collaboratively and collectively46…um if I’m working on a publication then I’ve got to go and go get the publication reviewed, um my work can then—there are staff meetings, and then there are consulting with my poor colleagues who are like, “I can’t find the lawyer to come do a talk with us.” So getting somebody to come in and be the lawyer to have the talk.
Another example of how women used everyday consulting and collaborating to
put forward antiracist critiques was provided by Catherine. By constantly raising
concerns about racism among the other staff, Catherine was able to bring awareness
concerning the ways in which white privilege and racialized discrimination affected her
relationships and work with her shelter residents:
But do you know what’s lacking here? Every time there’s a racist comment made, people [other staff] will say we talked about it—but, I said, “We need to do group every six weeks. There should be one group on what’s antioppression, what’s antiracism, or if there’s racism, what should we do?”
Because there’s a lot of staff—immigrant and women of colour who works [at this organization] and you know pretty clearly when a resident constantly comes and ignores you and talks to another person. So I challenge the women [the other staff]—I’ll say, “if a woman has been talking to me for the last two hours or days and all of a sudden, you come in as a white staff and she just wants you—you need to check in with me. Because that happens on every shift.” And you know who’s racist, cause that women will totally ignore you. But when she has a choice, she’ll ask a white person. So now the staff knows that does bother me. I said, “Unless there’s a personality clash—I’m fine, but if it’s a colour clash, no, I’m not fine with it.”
And now our staff is really sensitive, now they know. They’ll say, “Oh you mean you talked to [respondent’s name] yesterday—oh she’s right here.” I mean, I could see their switch—like they don’t know what to do with me—but this is good cause it took me a lot of years to do that to staff. I said, “Don’t take over—cause you know she was talking to me yesterday. And she asked me the question—I’m working on it. I’m right here in the room.”
46 I will discuss working across organizations again in the “translocal” section below.
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The ways in which Catherine sensitized her co-workers is an example of intentional
crafting, even as she acknowledged that this took “a lot of years.” Through explicit
discussions about racism, “colour clash,” and allusions to white privilege, she described
how she was able to successfully raise awareness about these issues within her
organization.
Another example of crafting antiracist feminist practices that was apparent in
Catherine’s account was when she suggested that a group or meeting be held “every six
weeks” or so by her organization, focussed on exploring “what’s antioppression, what’s
antiracism” or “what to do” when there was racism in the organization. She suggested
this to create what I call a reflexive antiracist feminist practice. That is, as opposed to just
“talk[ing] about” antiracist feminist practice, Catherine’s suggestions was an intentional
attempt to create a formalized organizational space that could keep people accountable to
antiracist practice.
While the preceding examples of consulting and collaborating highlight intra-
organizational contexts, inter-organizational consulting and collaboration also occurred.
The social relations of inter-organizational accountability can be seen in Freddy’s
account where she discussed everyday consulting at both the inter- and intra-
organizational level. Freddy’s account was interesting in that it highlighted how relations
of activist responsibility and extralocally mediated organizational accountability
converged to shape antiracist feminist work. Freddy made the link between everyday
collaboration and precarious funding arrangements for organizations. She alluded to the
reality that women’s and other community organizations were facing in terms of
increased formal accountability to funding bodies which included the requirements of
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ensuring that there was, as Freddy suggested, “little duplication of services” within and
among women’s organizations.
I think that in terms of how we work together because we’re beginning the process of having to plan more programming together, we’re being forced, you know, to work together—discussions around oppression and power and privilege do come up naturally…
Well, not forced, but I think that part of it is that in women’s organization you only have a limited number of resources so we’re beginning the process of how do we work together—is a way of maximizing those resources- and I mean in recent years, women’s services have had fewer and fewer resources—and what we do, we have no core funding to do what we do in our agency, um we only get project money… But everybody runs on project money—there’s only—I’m funded for 3 days a week from the [granting agency 1] and [granting agency 2]. The women with disabilities coordinator is funded for 3 days the [granting agency 1]… We’re not funded for an executive director. And certainly, it’s not funded for a training coordinator, or a finance manager which is the management position, so as a result our executive director is also finance manager and the training coordinator.
Freddy’s use of the words “forced to work together” was surprising given that she had
said the organization staff used collaborative approaches in their everyday work, and
were committed to an intersectional approach to addressing oppression. Even though she
backtracked by saying “well, not forced to,” when I questioned her, her explanation
relayed how collaboration of current organizational practices were oriented toward and
shaped by extralocal relations.
Freddy further elaborated to explain how the being “forced to” work together
converged with activist ideals of collaboration. She gave examples of how the women
collaborated across organizations in ways which allowed women to activate social
relations of activist responsibility through their everyday organizational work:
You know, I like to think that we’re actually very supportive of one another in terms of how we do our work and how we talk about what we do—a concrete example was when the women with disabilities and the
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immigrant women’s program got together and we did a legal workshop. We were hoping to do some cross-training with women with you know, women from immigrant and refugee community for better understanding and learn about the needs of women with disabilities and deaf women. But what it ended up being was—we did a workshop for them on immigration and family law which you know, were areas that they hadn’t looked at before.
In the context of Freddy’s earlier assertion that women’s organizations were being
“forced” to collaborate and work together, Freddy’s account highlighted the way that
social relations of organizational accountability and activist responsibility were
intentionally enmeshed. Collaboration was possible because the social relations of
accountability allowed for heightened communication and a convergence of opinion
among the different organization workers.
Staff and board meetings
Staff and board meetings were other spaces in which women of colour were able to craft
antiracist feminist and social justice change. While most staff and board meetings were
sites of formalized and hierarchical reporting practices, these spaces were used by the
women to publicly craft antiracist feminist and social justice praxis. Catherine, for
example, used staff meetings to raise her concerns about the tokenism and favouritism
she felt operated in her organization. At one point, she spoke of how she used the space
to contest the hiring of a colleague who she felt benefitted from a close relationship with
her white antiracist manager.
It is like I speak up, and I’ll say in the shelter it doesn’t matter… but I’ll take an action. Like I’ll raise shit every staff meeting. I’ll speak up what I think is right … I had way more experience and knowledge than the person whom they hired. No, I don’t understand it and I spoke up in last meeting and I just said, “I just want you to understand that doing favouritism and doing this work—and how it affects a person—a woman of colour. . .”
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As we saw earlier as well, Francine talked about “wanting” to ensure that
antiracist politics infused every aspect of her organization. She also discussed how
raising awareness about antiracist politics among her colleagues was well planned and
intentional, that is crafted:
Usually some of the board members would caucus in advance of the board meetings or you’d have a personnel committee and lots of sharing drafts between meetings um lots of different policy documents. Lots of telephone discussions. Certainly as open and transparent quote-unquote as board meetings were supposed to be, there was lots of things happening in between.
Similarly, other women discussed strategies to mould organizational practices to create
organizational accountability to include antiracist and social justice critiques.
Soni, for example, related how the women of colour she supervised indicated that
they felt “unsafe” in their organization; they used “clinics” to create a safe space to deal
with issues of racism. The clinic sessions involved an outside facilitator who provided
support for “clinical” issues and helped the women of colour create accountability within
the organization. She explained:
We have clinical session every week where staff talk about, you know, critical issues. An external person comes in and works with us. So um these were already issues [about racism in the organization] that we acknowledged, um women of colour had identified. And they had identified that that clinical space is the only safe space for them to talk about these issues, they can’t just talk about them at the staff meeting. You need a facilitator; you need it to be a safe environment.
As a manager, Soni was attentive to her staff’s concerns about racism in the organization.
Consequently, she helped create “safe spaces” by using an external facilitator who was
ostensibly neutral in a setting that was not part of the regular operation of the
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organization. The result appeared to be successful and an effective space to craft
antiracism was mobilized.
Impressively, through these clinics, Soni and her staff mobilized both existing
accountability and activist responsibility practices within their organization. Clinical
meetings were set up for individuals to discuss specific client and community “cases” and
to encourage self- and organization-reflective practice. The choice of voicing concerns
about racism and racialization in the organization at the clinical meetings was strategic in
that the outside facilitator was already hired to support staff to critically engage with
difficult emotional issues which came up in their practice. The facilitator mobilized
another feature of organizational accountability—extralocal accountability. As “an
external person,” the facilitator represented “the community” itself to which the
organization was responsible. The “safety” of an outside facilitator was not simply that
she was seen as objective and not enmeshed in the everyday (racialized and classed)
politics of the organization; Soni and her staff strategically mobilized the scrutiny of an
outside facilitator as an embodied member of the community to which the organization
was responsible, and ostensibly, to the vision of broader feminist community which was
embracing antiracist, feminist and social justice change.47
Similarly, Francine and her fellow board members self-consciously transformed
their organizational context to explicitly include issues of race and antiracism. They were
committed to integrating antiracist and antidiscriminatory practices within all facets of
their work as board members. This included planning and attending antiracism training
47 See also chapter five, where I discussed the success of antiracism within women’s organizations.
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and dealing with race issues and discrimination in multiple facets of their management
work. As Francine put it:
I think some staff were committed [to antiracism] and some weren’t. I remember at that time, antiracism was talked about a lot in different ways– so I remember attending—organizing and attending and all day antiracism um training. I remember board meetings being a place where we did a lot of antiracism training because our board meetings were open, which again was a totally different way of working from the previous board, you know, to open up the board meetings you know. Share financial statements, you know, with front-line staff who’d never had access to these kinds of things before, and encouraging people to come. So, you know, trying to make everything transparent as possible and trying also to bring—you know to get by and bring more people on board, so that it wasn’t just the board that was lobbying for these changes. Hopefully it would be other staff as well…
[We had] lots of meetings um lots of you know in terms of conflict resolution um and um addressing grievances. I think that equity—and antiracism and antidiscrimination became automatic components of these different processes. Not just when we talked about issues of race.
In addition, in keeping with social justice principles, the board members undertook
responsibility to develop a more participatory democratic way of conducting their
business. These commitments then changed the accountability relations of the
organization; specifically, the move towards “open board meetings” provided space for
further antiracism training and discussions designed to bring “other staff” “on board.” In
this way, both sets of social relations of accountability converged to allow for an
intentional crafting of antiracist feminist practice.
Job and promotion interviews and hiring processes
Almost all of the women in the study discussed the importance of job and promotion
interviews in their organization vis-à-vis antiracism and other forms of social justice. Job
and promotion interviews were key moments in which a convergence of organizational
accountability and activist responsibility was evident. Within the organizations,
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interviews for promotions or new hires were already part of the social relations of
organizational accountability. In women’s organizations, staff were typically hired or
promoted by those people who supervised them (such as a manager, executive director or
board member). When board members were hired, it was often the case that a regular
staff member would be included on the hiring team.
Francine discussed the centrality of job and promotion interviews in antiracist
work. Her description gives insight into the ways that activists crafted antiracism within
organization policy and hiring practice:
I think that we added, at the core of the policy, that one of the most important skills we were looking for in new employees was antiracist experience and familiarity with issues. We wanted to stop the relying on, “Well, we’ll train people when they get here” kind of thing. In the organization, previous to me joining it, this wasn’t even something that was considered. It didn’t appear anywhere, the antiracism qualification sets. So I think to give it validity it is important to actually write it in the policy as a specific criteria.
As members of a new board that was interested in developing antiracism within the
organization, Francine and her board members decided to change the organizational
context by employing women who already had antiracism “qualification sets” rather than
training them within the organization, for example. Notably, this practice was also
written into the policy as the board attempted to transform the very relations of
accountability of the organization by establishing antiracist principles in the
organization’s formal hiring policies.
Sharmila also discussed the ways hiring policies and practice centred on previous
experience and knowledge of antiracism, antioppression and diversity. Sharmila and her
colleagues crafted antiracism by influencing organizational policy in determining
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beforehand that antiracism and antioppression were significant criteria for prospective
interviewees.
It’s a definite policy, whenever we do a hiring, we, for the last 10 years at least if not longer—each hiring that goes out um has a statement saying that um women of colour and native women are encouraged to apply and um the interviews. We don’t always interview only women of colour, First Nations women, we do interview white women as well. But we look at issues around race and representation as very much high on our agenda when we do hirings. So for example, we have hired a white staff person in the last year for a full-time position, we did interview other women of colour, but she has a very good, very solid race analysis. That we asked different questions in two sets of interviews to see that…We do scenarios with, say like something that has come up with our client base, an issue around racism that comes up you know white women who comes in who, you know, and says problematic things about women of colour. It could be how that staff, potential staff person would respond. We ask at different times for their definition of race, for their definition of feminism, and if they don’t include other forms oppression in their definition feminism, we know that’s a problem. Like we always look for that… Yeah, and we looked to see you know who are they, who are they in the community, how have they been involved, what sort of things, who are they active with. Because with our work, it’s very important that people know the women’s community.
Although Sharmila and Francine worked in different organizations, their accounts were
similar. The intentional crafting of a social justice praxis within the hiring process meant
that the people interviewed not only had to show an understanding of the position, but
also their knowledge and analysis of an integrated feminism. Also of importance,
according to Sharmila, was that women hired had to have been “active” in “the
community” (see below). This aspect of the activism was a key part of the social relations
of activist responsibility in that it meant that only those women who demonstrated
commitment to antiracist, feminist, and social justice values were hired. In addition,
hiring women who were connected to other organizations in the community meant that
members of the organization were accountable to the greater community as well.
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Soni, another management staff, discussed how she used her position as a
program director to attempt to change the organization through the hiring process. In this
case, Soni hired two women to work in the organization’s diversity program. One of the
women was hired because it appeared that she could help bring change despite her lack of
knowledge of antioppression language.
For example, [diversity staff 1], she’s an immigrant woman, she doesn’t have the language before—she didn’t even know what homosexuality was before she was hired here—so she’s done a lot of the work in terms of learning … antioppression language. But there are so many women can relate to her experience—like she came into the agency . . . worked here and learned about the legal system and like it’s, “Oh my god, I had no idea you had to pay money for a divorce, you can’t just get a divorce?” Like these are the kind of things shocked the heck out of her—So she’s learning—she’s very much learning. And again in the part of helping immigrant women stay employed, so it’s not her that has to do the changing and accommodating. The agency has to accommodate to her; that was more strategic in terms of the agency having a learning process [my emphasis]. That if we are going to hire immigrant women, we need to make changes. We need to think about the way we talk around here.
So that was where my strategy was in terms of [diversity staff 1], and [diversity staff 2] is somebody who I knew would be a shit-disturber, she didn’t have a lot of background in VAW work um but I mean that’s something I had brought to them, that would be okay—that’s something she would learn right—[diversity staff 2], her role has been to shake-rattle and roll and she’s done that.
Soni indicated that her first staff person did not have specific violence-against-women
experience, but was hired because of her (presumed) facility with the community that the
organization was trying to reach. More importantly, Soni envisioned that she would
enable the organization’s further learning on how to accommodate racialized and
culturally diverse staff. The second staff member Soni hired was what she called a “shit-
disturber,” who had already been involved with a variety of activist positions within
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social justice organizations. Again, she was hired with the intention of making change
within the organization.
Women’s accounts revealed that the interview process was also used by
interviewees as an opportunity to craft antiracist feminist praxis. Soni, for example, had
used her own interview to question the politics of the organization for which she
eventually became the manager:
But sort of the informal sense was that we were going diversify …When I was hired—I also interviewed them, because I was not going take a position in which I was going to have to compromise on my radicalism and my antioppression um values in order to be strategic here. And I’ve done that before, where you have to be strategic um and you end up being so strategic that your whole job essentially becomes a political dance, your job is to be strategic—it’s not really antioppression any more, it’s really being, you know, you are becoming the master at being strategic [laughs] and then, you know, the more you get pulled into that, you know, those issues. So I wanted to make sure that was not I was doing, although I knew I had to do a lot of that dancing because of the [geographic] regions I was going to be working with.
For Soni, then, the interview was an opportunity to mobilize social relations of activist
accountability within formalized and institutionalized processes. By interviewing the
interviewers (who represented the organization’s political orientation), Soni asserted her
“radicalism” in order to confirm that the organization was indeed open to antiracist
feminist practice and wanting to diversify, as was suggested by the job advertisement and
discussions with the hiring team.
Crafting antiracist feminism by intentionally institutionalizing antiracist ideals
through hiring and promotion practice and policy intensified what Ku (2009) describes as
the performance of authenticity. While Ku focuses on the construction of racialized and
ethnically different women’s “commitment to their community” as a performance, I wish
to focus this discussion on the everyday work of putting into practice women’s
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commitments and the ways in which these are organized by and embedded within social
relations of accountability. Specifically, I argue that converging and crafted relations of
accountability in hiring practices suggest that, indeed, these relations are racialized. The
conscious rewriting of policy and putting into practice the expectation that potential staff
be explicitly engaged with racialized communities, antiracism, and/or a multi-oppression
analysis meant that racialized women were subject to an intensified relations of activist
responsibility. While antiracist feminist practice may have been intentionally meant to
privilege racialized women in hiring and promotion policies, the expectation that
racialized women also perform an aspect of commitment to racialized and activist
communities meant an additional layer of work to show their commitments to antiracism
and other social justice ideals. For example, all of the research participants discussed the
importance of being involved in a variety of activist roles, particularly with racialized
communities. As I explore in more depth below in my discussion about translocal
activism, this happened at the juncture between organizational accountability and activist
responsibility.
Organizational Documentary Practices and Activism
The following examples demonstrate how social justice was crafted through the everyday
documentary practices within and across organizations. By drawing on the previous
discussion, I further highlight the core argument of this chapter regarding crafting as an
exercise in the interconnection of organizational and activist forms of accountability.
That is, the women were aware of how documentary practices were inscribed in social
relations of organizational accountability (as discussed in chapter six) and wove their
commitments to organizational accountability and antiracist activism through these
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documentary practices. Some of these documentary processes were already alluded to
above, when I described how activists developed, struggled for and wrote antiracism and
antioppression into case notes, official forms, and existing or new organizational policies
such as hiring policies.
As I described in chapter five, several of the managers and board members
discussed how they used documentary processes to support their staff in their “good
work.” For example, both Theta and Maria discussed the ways in which their focus on
evaluative documentary practices (such as program evaluation, personnel evaluation) and
administrative documentary processes (such as case notes, work logs) were connected to
their feminist visions. Francine, a board member, was also very explicit about crafting
antiracist practice within existing relations of accountability through documentary
processes within her organization:
I seem to remember we wrote personnel policy about recruitment and selections and promotion, specifically those things. I think that we made a concerted effort to make the language of the previous policy much more concrete and less subject to discretion.
In making policy much “less subject to discretion,” Francine not only changed policies,
but also made sure that the policies contained concrete expectations of staff and
volunteers, which ensured that discriminatory hiring processes would not continue
unabated.
Lodge, a front-line worker who had complained earlier in her interview about the
volume of expectations within her everyday work, discussed how she used case notes to
support a woman of colour who she felt was being pushed out by other staff members:
And for me, I make sure if a staff wants a woman of colour gone, cause, what will happen, there’s always strategy around when someone wants
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someone to be gone. You’ve always got to be like pro-active. You know [laughs]. So, I’ll come in and I’ll hear, and you get this feeling, this undertone, during shift change, when we’re giving shift change, “we’re thinking about this person needs to be going.” So then by then, once I get that feeling, then I start documenting, I start making my point of duty to talk to that woman. Document, document, document. “What have you done with housing?” Plan with her. So, I discuss housing, suggest she talk to this or that person. Ok, she did follow up. If she talk about her fears about connecting with this agency, I’m putting it there [in the file]. So when I have to talk to the other staff and they say that she need to go because she hasn’t been looking, then I can say, “You know what, maybe it’s the woman don’t like talking to you, or maybe it’s the discomfort she feels about talking. Because she has talked to me about housing. She talked to me about her concerns and how she feel and stuff.” And my manager, she’s going to be like, listening.
As discussed earlier, for Lodge, the daily expectations of keeping logs and case notes
were problematic when they interfered with her passion for supporting women (in
particular women of colour). However, in order to develop specific strategies to support
women, Lodge crafted her antiracist praxis through existing documentary practices
within the organization. Not only did she “document, document, document,” she also
self-consciously and actively attended to her colleagues’ “undertones” during shift
change, placed documentation “in the file” and spoke with her manager. Each component
of her everyday documentary work was part of her crafting an antiracist feminist practice
through everyday organizational accountability.
Translocal Activism
As described in chapters five and six, another predominant feature of both organizational
accountability and activist responsibility was that the execution of either occurred inter-
organizationally, and blurred otherwise distinct organizational boundaries. The term I
ascribed to this process in earlier discussions was translocality. Staff members of non-
profit organizations, especially women’s organizations, regularly consulted with one
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another over client referrals and collaborated on projects, workshops or campaigns. These
consultations and collaborations provided opportunities for women to develop shared
understandings of social justice praxis within an inter-organizational context.
To put it another way, the women not only transformed their own organization’s
everyday work into antiracist feminist activism, but also self-consciously created
translocal opportunities to enhance accountability to antiracist feminist and social justice
change within their broader communities. Making inter-organizational connections was
an important strategy, particularly when local contexts were not responsive to social
change. Specifically, through translocal practices such as consulting across organizations,
volunteering, and/or working in different capacities in organizations, involvement in
coalitions, training and creation of coalitions, the women in my study crafted antiracist
feminist change through both organizational accountability and activist responsibility.
Each of the women discussed in specific terms the way in which consulting across
organizations, or translocally, was part of their everyday work. Freddy, a public educator,
provided several examples of how her work entailed working with different organizations
as part of her organizational work:
I answer any phone calls that may come my way—queries—I consult with anybody in the community that needs to be consulted with. And I’m getting more and more crisis consultations from other service workers—in increasingly complex cases…
So my day is pretty much run like that and I never get anything done that I really want to do. Like, today I came in and I don’t work on Fridays normally, but I came in to actually get a publication out to—oh no it’s 12:39—I don’t think I’m going to get this out to—well I’m going to have to try, but between that I have to go and get a template right out to [name of organization for not-for-profit housing] because I’m doing a presentation to their housing providers—so anyhow my week will be filled up.
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On a day that I’m not doing that—I may be coming to the office really to get stuff together because I’m doing a workshop in the afternoon—or maybe I actually out in a workshop all day um so recently I was talking to—on Tuesday I was talking to the [coalition group for maternal and infant health], so came in, and didn’t answer any of my phone calls, and just spent the morning preparing for a workshop … where I was going in and educating people who were working in family resource and programs and staging plays about women abuse and, “What do you do? How do you deal with it?” …
In doing training within other social service and women’s organizations, Freddy was able
to extend her social justice practice (and be subject to mandates and visions of others’
social justice work).
Several other women, including Lodge and Catherine, also spoke about the
importance of public speaking within their organizational context as part of the strategy
of engaging antiracist feminist practice translocally. The ability to speak publicly
commandeered respect among activists because of its instrumental value for increasing
translocal communications. Lodge saw it as important to her everyday work and worked
to become better at public speaking. She looked up to Harriet Tubman whom she saw as
an inspirational speaker and activist:
I look at Harriet Tubman Ross the other day, I was, I am watching the TV and they were talking about, yeah, her life… And I say, I like to be like her, like that’s who, you know, in some sense, like, I wanted that, well she didn’t have that much education, but she was such an amazing woman, you know? …
You know that’s my goal: I get really uncomfortable about talking, but I want to do public speaking, because I just need to be there, to make a difference and I’m not sure if it’s going to be along, antiviolence work, but it’s going to be some kind of activism…
I look at yesterday at this African woman alliance meeting. I listen to African women [who] say they go in the school and they speak on Black History Month and they didn’t get paid for that. You know? Activism is work.
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For Lodge, public speaking was about activism and “making a difference” because as an
antiracist feminist activist one has to be able to speak across varied contextual differences
in order to bring attention to the systemic nature of racism as an oppressive institution.
Similarly, Catherine spoke about the importance of public speaking and her anger
and disappointment that she was overlooked for a public-speaking position in her
workplace, again highlighting the importance of public speaking for translocal activism:
What I’ve said, like you took every opportunity away from me to do this, to be a public speaker and pull the rug under me as a women of colour, an immigrant woman, a single mom, and then you go out and help women in the community, I said, “We failed.” And that’s all I said…
Public speaking … that’s how we get our funding and we get more clientele and all that stuff right, then more people know about it. So when I did outreach, their program booms, because I spoke with every agency in the community and I brought a lot of immigrant women, because I did the groups … and I did put a lot of effort in to it… And I said, “Yeah, tell me if you are not going to help me to grow and to understand where I’m coming from.”
Catherine’s anger at not being given an opportunity “to grow” had to do with the
importance of being seen in the women’s and social service community as an activist
who was completely embedded within translocal relations of activist responsibility.
One’s success as an activist was measured by one’s ability to be seen as an effective
speaker and thus a vital agent of social movement both locally and translocally.
Being seen as an effective and engaged activist had tangible implications for
women, and was significant for women’s individual careers in terms of hiring and
promotion. Recall, for example, the accounts of Francine and Sharmila, who both
identified that demonstrated commitments to antiracism, feminism and social justice,
particularly to ethno-specific communities, were written into the hiring policies, job ads,
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and interview questions and processes, and were thus significant in considerations for
promotion and hiring.
Institutionalizing activist responsibility through translocal relations also had
repercussions for the organizations with which the women worked. For example,
Catherine made the links between public speaking and the survival of her organization
and accountability to funders—both financially and in terms of increased clientele. Many
staff and board members were attentive to their organization’s credibility as antiracist
friendly (see also Ahmed, 2009 and Ku, 2009). Theta’s fellow board members, as a
related example, discussed the importance of ensuring that women of colour were part of
their board; also, we have seen how Soni used an outside facilitator to discuss issues of
racism; or how Sharmila discussed the importance of her organization’s reputation within
progressive circles. Certainly, therefore, being seen as hostile to antiracism or complaints
about racism would raise concerns to funding agencies, as well as among similar
women’s organizations. To that end, the clear and positive articulation of an
organization’s commitment to antiracist activism was deemed significant by my research
participants if the organization was to have any impact translocally.
Perhaps of greatest import to social service organizations, including feminist
women’s organizations, was that they were accountable to “the community” and their
general membership. This concern for community accountability constitutes another
dimension of translocality. In the context of my analysis, women’s organizations’
survival was predicated on their ability to be seen as importantly engaged with those
communities that they served; and this was a particular condition attached to their
funding at time. This accountability to the community was translocal, as it extended the
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local functioning of the organizational context to the extralocal relations of communities.
The direct working of translocal relations was especially evident in accounts highlighting
that due the fact that the board of directors and management teams (most notably the
executive director) were accountable to their general membership, this was an
opportunity for antiracist feminists within the communities to influence the direction of
the organization. The formalized and public annual general meetings, as one example,
provided opportunities for activists to act on behalf of communities in crafting social
justice praxis.
Soni, for example, made explicit the ways in which her antiracist feminist praxis
included outreach to racially diverse community members as a way of enacting antiracist
feminist change within her organization. She discussed how increasing the number of
general members who were racially diverse and committed to antiracist and feminist-
ideals would facilitate activist change. In the context of being accountable to the larger
community, Soni discussed how her newly minted program increased the membership of
racialized women, and significantly, new service users, within the general membership
and she hoped that this could influence organizational decision making.
The membership is volunteer—like it—because—I mean we function historically as a collective, we’ve been set up a little bit differently but the membership is staff and volunteers, staff and volunteers and volunteers only who have been um, past a probationary period of 3 months, so they’ve signed on, and finished training. There’s a staff training that they go through. And they’ve signed the volunteer contract and then whatever date they signed it, 3 months later they become an official member with voting rights…So it’s those volunteers who have graduated that period and then staff we also get one vote at the Annual General Meeting…
It’s a little bit complex in the way it works because a lot of it is formal, you know, sometimes you don’t get to really examine the nitty-gritty and the practical—right I mean the AGM’s you also have your card and, you know, yeah/nay or whatever [laughing]…That’s really where people get to exercise their vote, there’s really no other forum, unless we have a um, we
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hold a membership meeting um like an emergency meeting—if there’s an urgent issue in the agency or something, which is really, I think, in the history of this organization, has never happened. Not to my knowledge. It might have happened, I don’t think it has. But that’s sort of the only other place where the membership sort of would come in and hold the board accountable right? Cause the board is accountable to the membership.
As Soni’s account above demonstrates, translocal relations of accountability provided
opportunities for the women to craft social justice change in their everyday situations
both within and outside their organizations. That is, together with everyday personal
activist practices, the pursuit of intentional activist accountability dynamically
transformed the women’s organizations in question into accountable institutions of
antiracist practice.
Translocality, then, in the case of the women’s accounts described above, can be
read through the lens of interconnected processes of accountability (organizational and
activist) privileged by my analysis in this dissertation. That is, as I noted in my
introductory remarks, while relations of accountability have been discussed separately in
this dissertation, activist responsibility and organizational accountability need to be
understood in dialogical terms. Furthermore, as I discuss in more depth in my concluding
chapter, my analysis suggests that the social organization of antiracist feminist activism
of women of colour can be understood as a negotiation of relations of accountability
within women’s organizations.
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Chapter Eight: Summary and Conclusions
I have shown throughout this dissertation that antiracist feminist activism within
women’s organizations is socially organized through a multiplicity of relations of
accountability. Specifically, I unpacked two sets of interrelated social relations of
accountability: organizational accountability and antiracist feminist activist
responsibility. I described how women of colour negotiate their commitments to
antiracist feminism within existing social relations inside women’s organizations; and
that their activist practices must be understood as both responses to social relations of
accountability and constitutive of these social relations. Significantly, this dissertation
offers a conceptualization of antiracist feminist activist practice as a negotiation of
relations of accountability; it is the implications of this conceptualization that I explore in
this final chapter.
The chapter is divided into two main sections: a summary of the central
arguments of the dissertation and the salience of these for understanding the social
organization of antiracist feminist activism; and a discussion of the practical, pedagogical
and research implications of these arguments.
Dissertation Summary
The goal of this research was to develop an analysis of the political, personal and
institutional dimensions of politicized action and social change occurring in women’s
social service organizations. To reach this goal, I explored how women activists of colour
understood and practiced antiracist, feminist, and social justice ideals through an analysis
of thirteen interviews I conducted with women of colour activists. Through this process I
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discovered how they negotiated their commitments to antiracist feminism using existing
social relations within women’s organizations. I showed how their activist practices
simultaneously responded to and shaped social processes in women’s organizations. I
also investigated the women’s everyday activist practices as they navigated their personal
and professional lives. This investigation brought to light how critical race, feminist, and
antioppressive theory was enacted through the daily work of antiracist feminist activists.
This summary is divided into three parts: conceptual underpinnings, the research
problematic and social relations of accountability and everyday antiracist feminist
activism.
Conceptual underpinnings
The first two chapters of my dissertation set out the research goals, reviewed scholarly
and activist literature, and proffered my conceptual framework and method of inquiry. I
set out to explore the social organization of women’s organizations from the standpoint
of antiracist feminist activists. I began by posing the following questions:
1. How is antiracist feminist activism with/in “mainstream” women’s organizations
socially organized?
2. How are antiracism, feminism, and social justice enacted, developed, and integrated in the daily work of women of colour who are committed to antiracist feminist practice?
These research questions, as I described in chapter one, began from my own lived
experience of antiracist feminist activism with, within and against women’s
organizations, as well as the reading of academic and activist texts about antiracist
feminist activism. I wanted to understand, from the standpoint of women of colour
activists, how antiracist feminist activism was shaped—simultaneously limited and
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supported—through social relations within women’s organizations. I was intent on
studying the social relations which enabled and limited antiracist feminist activism, and
not on simply studying activist women of colour as research subjects. My initial focus
was first, on how the mundane, everyday work of activists was socially organized, and,
second, how this everyday work shaped the social relations of organizations.
In my first chapter, I situated my research questions within academic and
theoretical debates through my definitions of key terms and literature review. In addition
to describing scholarly debates and perspectives within which my study is situated, the
key terms and literature review provided a nuanced and holistic understanding of the
layered contexts within which antiracist feminist organizational change efforts are
enacted. I looked at interrelated literature on: social justice work within non-profit
sectors, feminist organizations, antiracist thought and antiracist organizational change,
antiracist struggle with and within the feminist movement and, also, in women’s
organizations and, finally, the literature which explores the relationship between activism
and ‘the personal.’
As a whole, this literature provided a context, backdrop and conceptual debates
for understanding the relations that antiracist feminist activists navigate as part of
women’s non-profit organizations. The literature highlighted the ways women’s and
other community and social service organizations provided spaces to struggle against
racism, sexism and other interlocking relations of oppression. The literature described
how these spaces not only subsumed, limited and hindered social justice work, but also
facilitated and supported it. More specifically, the continued struggles of antiracist
activists left tangible effects on the priorities and practices of contemporary women’s
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organizations—but not without tensions, paradoxes and fractures around antiracist
feminist praxis. In other words, the literature provided support to the idea that feminist
organizations are contradictory spaces in which antiracist feminist action is both
supported and limited. In spite of the challenges of antiracist struggle within the feminist
movement, I argued that that the literature indicated that it was inaccurate and politically
paralyzing to presume that antiracist organizing has not mattered within the women’s
movement. In particular, I drew attention to the importance of attending to the
relationships among socio-political contexts of non-profit organizations, histories of
antiracist struggle, sustained collective politicized action, racialized women’s politicized
identities, and everyday activist work in a study such as this one.
In addition to providing context, background and conceptual debates, the
literature also helped me form questions that would help guide my activist inquiry. The
literature often resonated with my optimism as it addressed the possibilities of social
justice activism. Given the largely critical literature on the future of social justice
activism in non-profit organization, I was left with asking the question: can social justice-
oriented organizations and individuals make a difference within the current neoliberal
restructuring of accountability and responsibility? If, as Fisher and Shragge (2002)
suggest that social activist success in non-profit organizations has meant less radical
social change within communities, how should we act and participate? And what should
we act towards? If, indeed, “the revolution will not be funded” (Incite!, 2007), how do we
engage social conditions which often work to capture and depoliticize our social justice
efforts (see also Smith, K., 2011)? In addition to previous discussion, I take up these
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questions further below in my discussion of activism as a negotiation of relations of
accountability.
My method of inquiry, as outlined in chapter two, built on the importance of
attending to women of colour’s everyday antiracist feminist work. In addition to
institutional ethnography and political activist ethnography, I drew from a number of
critical and antioppressive research perspectives (including those from materialist,
feminist, antiracist, anticolonial/postcolonial and postmodern theorists) to develop the
conceptual framework that guided my research. As an activist ethnographer, I focused on
the everyday work of antiracist feminist activists throughout the interviews and in my
data analysis. The focus on the everyday, mundane activities of women was key to
understanding the social organization of activism. Such a focus on the everyday activities
of racialized women was particularly politically imperative as I wanted to be attentive to
the fact that racialized women’s standpoints were often rendered less visible (than those
of other subjects) in dominant narratives about feminism, social movements and non-
profit organizations.
Moreover, my analytic focus on the organization came out of my activist
commitment to map the relations of opposition, resistance, transformation, and
accommodation that occurs within social movements and social movement organizations
(Kinsman, 2005). My research focused extensively on the social organization of social
relations within organizations, rather than just tracing extralocal relations as typical of
most institutional ethnographies. This allowed me to investigate local activist practices
with more rigour than might have been possible if I had I been looking solely toward
extralocal relations. I adapted several concepts and analytic strategies of Dorothy Smith’s
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(1986, 1990, 2005) institutional ethnography to trace the “local” social relations within
activism, and this methodological adaptation strengthened my analysis. For example, as I
have already noted, I focused on the notion of everyday activities or work of women of
colour activists to identify women’s standpoint and the problematic of my analysis; I
used institutional ethnography’s concept of disjuncture and bifurcation within and among
activist accounts of activism in order to explore more deeply the activism; I mapped
social relations as courses of action within the organization and across organizations to
see how one activist account was articulated and connected to another’s; and I looked at
the ways in which texts were mobilized by activists and how these guided activist
practice. In short, I used the concepts and tools of institutional ethnography to map more
fully the more ‘local’ aspects of social organization of activism within organizations -
that is, social relations that appeared to occur outside the influence of the so-called
‘extralocal.’
Adapting many of the analytic strategies of institutional ethnographers allowed
me to develop a more nuanced understanding of how relations of ruling shape the
everyday doings of people, as well as how the doings of people shape other people’s
doings. As a way of analyzing the social organization of antiracist feminist activism, this
nuanced and dialogic understanding of social relations within women’s organizations was
a fruitful endeavour—particularly if my study is read alongside other critical analyses
(including institutional ethnographies) of everyday work within non-profit organizations
in which the focus is tracing extralocal relations (Ng, 1988, 1996; Nichols, 2008; Smith,
G. 1990, 1995; Smith, K., 2011; Ranero, 2011; Rankin and Campbell, 2006).
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The research problematic: Commitments and contradictions
In chapters three and four, I explored the standpoint of women of colour doing antiracist
feminist work with and within women’s social service organizations. My analysis in
chapter three explored the centrality of antiracism, feminism, and social justice within
and outside of the research participant’s workplaces. In particular, I surveyed how
women of colour brought antiracist feminism to their definitions of self, to decision
making and to personal relationships. Through an analysis of the everyday lives of the
women research participants, I found that their antiracist feminist ideals intertwined in all
aspects of their lives and that their political beliefs and politicized commitments were
often personalized. Furthermore, I highlighted the ways in which women’s identification
with antiracist feminist activism were integrated with their identities and experiences as a
result of being positioned within relations of race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual
orientation, and disability. Thus, the participants’ politicized commitments to working to
unravel intersecting relations of oppression were tied to their identities as women of
colour and their experiences of being gendered and racialized. However, in spite of their
personal commitments and the feminist movement’s incorporation of antiracist discourse,
women’s accounts also showed that women’s organizations remained contradictory in
their antiracist feminist praxis.
It was these contradictions of antiracist feminist praxis that were explored more
fully in chapter four. Here, the women’s accounts relayed a number of ways antiracist
feminism was incorporated within the everyday talk, policies, and practices in women’s
organizations. I argued that women’s organizations were sites from which antiracist
practice was both supported, and also constrained. The participants continued to struggle
for antiracist feminism in their organizations, even though antiracist feminist discourse
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was incorporated in the everyday work done in organizations. For example, some of the
women described their experience of racism and racialized discrimination. Women spoke
of experiences of being silenced, sanctioned and pushed out of organizations as a result
of their antiracist feminist activism and because they raised concerns about exclusion,
discrimination, and oppressive assumptions embedded in organizational practice. My
analysis focused on an exploration of the contradictions, tensions, and discrepancies
between the articulation of antiracist ideals and antiracist practice – the problematic of
this dissertation.
Social relations of accountability and everyday antiracist feminist activism
In further elucidating the research problematic, chapters five, six and seven further
developed an analysis of the women’s accounts of their work in women’s organizations. I
argued that the contradictions of antiracist feminist praxis within women’s organizations
ought to be understood in relation to dialogic processes of multiple relations of
accountability in the organization. The accounts of women’s everyday activist work
showed that women were answerable to at least two intertwined, and I argued, dialectic,
sets of relations. The first form of accountability related to the functioning and
governance of the organization, and the second form of accountability pertained to
antiracist feminist praxis. Specifically, I demonstrated that two main strands of
accountability, ‘organizational accountability’ and ‘activist responsibility,’ socially
organized women’s activism and shaped, constrained, and enabled women of colour’s
individual and collective everyday experience of antiracist feminist activism.
‘Organizational accountability’ was defined as the formal chain of hierarchical reporting
relations within the organization (which ultimately extends outside the organization),
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while ‘activist responsibility’ was defined as a social relations of answerability to other
activists which guides those committed to social justice. Both forms of relations of
accountability were social, rather than individual, and both affected women’s everyday
experience as antiracist feminists of colour.
Social service workers were accountable to the functioning and to the governance
processes of their organizations. I called this answerability to the organization, or formal
organizational accountability. This was explored in chapter five of the dissertation.
Antiracist feminist activists reported to supervisors, managers, board members and
funders, including the so-called “community at large.” Organizational accountability
shaped women’s everyday work as they negotiated social justice goals within women’s
organizations. There were four specific features of organizational accountability that I
described in detail in the dissertation. The first worked through the hierarchy of the
organization. In general terms, front-line workers were accountable to their supervisor
and managers; managers were answerable to executive directors and board members; and
executive directors and board members to external or extralocal bodies and organizations.
Second, organizational accountability relied on everyday documentation of workers.
Accountability worked through many texts such as job descriptions, procedures, case
notes, evaluation tools, funding applications and so on. Third, organizational
accountability was shaped by external organizations, legislation and policies, such as
funding contracts, state agencies, the legal system, labour and human rights laws, and
multicultural policies.
Women’s commitments were sometimes transformed into managerial priorities in
ways that did not necessarily create equity and affirm antioppressive change. Sometimes
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women’s commitments marked an obvious shift toward social justice practice; at other
times women’s efforts were nullified or achieved some minor nuanced shift toward
equity and antioppression practice. Through my analysis of women’s accounts, I
discovered three ways organizational accountability both supported and limited antiracist
feminist praxis. In each of these explorations, organizational accountability clearly
supported antiracist feminist and social justice ideals and at the same time depoliticicized
it. Specifically, I explored the tensions between supporting and constraining antiracist
feminist practice mediated through social relations of organizational accountability
within hierarchical reporting practices, documentary practices of organizations and
conflict resolution practices.
For example, in one exploration of conflict management practices, I found that
social justice critiques, especially antiracist ones, were often transformed into a ‘problem’
or ‘personality conflict’ between two or more individuals which needed to be managed,
rather than as a political or social critique. Most often this problem was managed through
“conflict resolution” between individuals, rather than using the problem to uncover, and
thus potentially act to address, historical and material power imbalances. Significantly,
managers (even those who were committed to antiracism) became part of processes
which treated discussions of racism as personal problems and hence rendered peripheral
to the functioning of the organization. The contradiction inherent in dealing with such
sorts of contestations as an interpersonal conflict, rather than a social or structural one, is
that the resolution process did not address issues of power or politics; nor did it address
social or structural inequities.
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Alongside formal organizational accountability, women’s activist work was
shaped by another form of accountability, namely, antiracist feminist activist
responsibility. In chapter six, I argued that women’s commitments to antiracist praxis
were more than abstract ideals, subjectivities, or intellectual theorizing; women’s
commitments to antiracist feminism were made social through relations of accountability,
or more accurately, responsibility to other activists. Like organizational accountability,
activist responsibility shaped women’s everyday work. Women’s personal commitments
and values to social justice were transformed into “social” forms of responsibility.
Activist responsibility influenced behaviour not because it constituted a regulatory
discourse in the way that organizational responsibility did, but because it functioned as a
form of coordinating discourse. This process meant that women’s everyday talk and
practice was made accountable to other activists or people committed to social justice; in
effect, this created a community of activists which made women’s commitments to
antiracism and social justice social, and activists answerable to one another. As such,
activist responsibility refers to both commitment and action or practice of social justice.
Unlike organizational accountability which was hierarchical, activist responsibility
operated in non-hierarchical ways.
I further argued that activist responsibility was mobilized in three distinct sets of
organizational practices of women’s organizations which allowed for social change. First,
relations of activist responsibility were mobilized through organizational practices in
which women were expected to regularly interact, talk, and build relationships with one
another throughout their daily work. I described how activist responsibility worked
through shift changes, supervision, everyday consulting and collaboration, staff and
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board meetings, and, as well, job and promotion interviews. Second, activist
responsibility was mobilized through organizational documentary practices of writing,
reviewing, and applying insights from case notes, mission/policies, funding applications,
job descriptions, evaluations, and work programs. Third, women’s commitments to
activism and their everyday organizational work meant that they were connected to other
women’s community and social service organizations. In this way, activist responsibility
worked translocally; that is, it worked through everyday practices such as coalition
building and sustaining, consulting, attending and delivering training and education
opportunities, and working within more than one organization. The translocality of
activist responsibility was central in social change; for social justice discourse to have
importance and an effect it needed to be seen and used across different organizational
sites.
Finally, I argued that activist responsibility worked as a form of accountability,
but not independently or outside of organizational (or institutional) contexts; it worked
alongside and in dialogue with relations of organizational accountability. I showed how
women of colour did antiracist feminist activism by mobilizing discourses of ‘activist
responsibility’ through social relations of accountability within their organizations. In
other words, activists crafted antiracist feminist praxis through actively working to
institutionalize their beliefs within the everyday practices of women’s and social service
organizations. In chapter seven, I explored how they consciously and creatively drew on
existing ‘organizational accountability’ discourses to develop innovative and effective
antiracist feminist practices. In doing so, I highlighted the significance of this activist
work by revealing the ways in which antiracist feminist activists seized the potential for
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change through both activist and administrative discursive practices. This potential
occurred at the junctures of negotiation between organizational accountability and activist
responsibility.
Implications of Conceptualizing Activism as Negotiation of Accountability
My dissertation explores social justice ethics, values, and analyses in practice and in
organizational contexts. It provides many insights for those involved in social justice
praxis, whether this occurs in women’s and social service organizations, in community
and grassroots organizing or in the academy. Based in ethnographic description, my work
analyzes how antiracist, feminist and other social justice politics were put into practice
and policy. Throughout the dissertation I link people’s commitments to politicized action,
to organizational practices and to social relations of accountability to social change. By
making explicit the interplay between organizational accountability and activist
responsibility, this work offers ways to better comprehend social change praxis. My work
enables a reflexive understanding of the efforts made to achieve progress and the ways in
which our efforts might become de-politicized. Through the lens of organizational actors
in their everyday practice, ultimately this research offers new ways of understanding the
relationships among social justice discourse, organizational practice and women’s
agency.
Many theorists and practitioners argue that community and social service
organizations do not always work in equitable and sustainable ways. Moreover,
marginalized individuals and activists often critique the ways that organizational
practices continually marginalize them. Hence, this dissertation arises from my resolve to
align myself with those that resist injustice and fight oppression. I chose to work with
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those working in social justice work in organizations as this is where I had the most prior
experience. Despite the valid criticisms of activists and academics alike of so-called
social justice organizations, my research shows that such organizations, specifically
women’s organizations can be, nevertheless, spaces in which antiracist social justice gets
enacted or certainly has the potential to be enacted. This dissertation prompts us to ask:
What are the possibilities and constraints of doing antiracist and oppression social justice
work within women’s organizations? And most crucially, how can we support people
who are committed to social justice to do social change work in organizations that are
unsupportive? By continually addressing these questions throughout the dissertation, my
study provides many, often nuanced, insights that have important lessons for those
directly involved to social justice practice.
Although the interviews were done in 2004, the ethnographic content and the
view of activism as a negotiation of social relations of accountability that arises from this,
is still relevant today. In fact, my analysis is even more relevant today given that relations
of accountability have intensified in non-profit organization. Moreover, academic and
public discourse about accountability practices in non-profit organizations has been on
the rise. The increased attention on the “accountability movement” (Carman, 2010), at
the very least, indicates that researchers and theorists are paying more attention to
accountability within organizations. As well, in my teaching and mentoring of those
committed or wanting to commit to antiracism, feminism, and social justice praxis, I am
constantly reminded of the importance of getting students to view social change in terms
of my organizational analysis; they readily appropriate it in their field assignments for
example. I also find that new social workers and students committed to antioppressive
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and social justice practice, although they may use a different language, regularly describe
how relations of accountability at the local level continue to be negotiated in ways which
resist, accommodate, and re-craft existing inequities in organizations.
While further work on the investigations of the accounts of everyday, mundane
social justice praxis in this area is required, it appears that relations of organizational
accountability are intensifying as social workers and social service workers continue to
be further scrutinized, surveyed, and micromanaged. As relations of activist
responsibility are subject to constraint, this opens up new spaces for resistance and
activism. It is clear from my ongoing discussions with activists and social work students
that researchers and/or practitioners committed to social justice ideals need to become
attentive to and intentionally reflective of the negotiation of relations of accountability
within everyday activist practice. Such a position is supported by my dissertation, as well,
the recent literature on accountability and social justice activism.
Nuancing, politicizing, and reclaiming “accountability”
The main scholarly contribution of this dissertation is its description and analysis of the
relations of accountability within antiracist feminist activism within women’s
organizations. At the outset of this research, I did not anticipate that my analysis would
centre on relations of accountability within activist work. While I was aware that
accountability as a phenomenon was an important reality in non-profit organizations, I
did not understand that accountability could be understood in terms of social relations of
activist work. Like most of the studies on accountability, I framed the issue of
accountability in relation to funding/funders in neoliberal political contexts. However, my
study’s focus on ‘the local’ revealed more complexity in this regard, and I uncovered
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other relations of accountability circulating in women’s organizations which had not been
well documented in the academic literature. Analyzing how relations of accountability
were constituted through activists’ courses of action allowed a more nuanced
understanding of transformation, resistance and accommodation of relations of ruling
within women-of-colour’s everyday work. Moreover, making explicit the specific
relations of accountability allowed for a deeper understanding of the social organization
of activism. It is such an analytic focus which challenges me as an activist-researcher to
understand both what we are up against and what possibilities are available for social
change.
In addition, my research suggests that critically evaluating the notion of relations
of accountability is, in itself, an activist act in at least two ways. First, understanding
accountability as work embedded in people’s social courses of action enables us to make
visible the negotiation of multiple sets of relations within activist work. That is, if
activists are to understand activism as a negotiation of relations of accountability, then it
is imperative that activists continue to do the everyday activist work to develop, nurture
and sustain social relations of accountability to antiracism, feminism and social justice, or
as I call it, activist responsibility. The mundane activist work of infusing policies and
practices with social justice ideals, of talking and networking, and of creating coalitions,
may not always produce the desired effects or be without pain. But, without exploring the
ways in which we navigate relations of accountability, we may miss the strengths and
limits of our own politicized action. Second, claiming “accountability” as an activist
project requires broadening our understanding of accountability from being solely about
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the purview of the ruling or governing embedded in common-sensical and academic
knowledge.
Although it may be true that within dominating frames of accountability
importance is placed on that which we can count or audit, my study suggests that
people’s everyday acts within organizations are answerable to more than to the
functioning of the organization, funding, legislation, accounting, and other relations of
ruling. Antiracist feminist activists are answerable to other antiracist feminist activists by
virtue of their chosen (and stated) identification with social justice praxis. Although I am
not at all denying the hegemonic forces of accounting discourse and its role in
maintaining power in the hands of those who rule and govern, I am merely stating that we
can begin to rupture notions of accountability in specific and localized spaces by saying:
Yes, we are funded by funding agency Y who requires flowchart W, but we are also
accountable to antiracist, feminist, diasporic, and racialized communities, antiableist
movements and so on. This sort of rupture in the discussion of accountability makes
visible the current hegemonic relations of accountability that govern our actions, and also
provides an opportunity for activists to reflect consciously on the forms, aims, and
subjects of their accountability. This is not to suggest that relations of accountability
cannot be reorganized through power to further exert control in organizations – but
instead to suggest that paying attention to the successes of activists in inserting
responsibility to social justice within and throughout relations of ruling is warranted.
In the dissertation, I advocated for understanding antiracist feminist activism as a
self-conscious crafting of relations of accountability. Of course, this is not to say that
there are no tensions or paradoxes in the spaces of crafting this change. My argument was
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not that we need to see all antiracist change as always transformative, effective and
moving towards social justice. Rather, I argued that we need to make visible the crafting
that women of colour do in their everyday work. My aim was not to delegitimize the
literature which describes the effects of neoliberalism on the tensions of antiracist,
feminist and social justice ideals and practice. On the contrary, my intent was to
strengthen and complement the claims in this literature, while stressing the need to render
visible the invisibility of antiracist feminist everyday work in organizations.
Although I wish to stress the importance of women’s activist work of negotiating
both sets of relations of accountability, it is also important to note that women sometimes
get caught in navigating these two sets of relations. As I showed in chapter five,
organizational accountability can sometimes subsume and depoliticize activist
responsibility especially when antiracist feminist activism is effective. It is no wonder,
then, that paradoxes, tensions and contradictions are evident within antiracist feminist
practice in women’s organizations. While these contradictions need to be navigated, this
means that activists need to become more aware of, and strengthen, relations of antiracist
feminist responsibility at play within women’s and other social service organizations.
Engaging and supporting activist work in non-profit organizations
As an activist-researcher and social work educator, I often find myself questioning the
ways this research might support my own activism and also the activism of those that I
mentor and teach. On the one hand, I feel compelled to support student and new activists/
social workers in their struggle with and within social service and community
organizations. I believe that it is crucial to nurture students’ own commitments to
working within a social justice frame, which usually means critiquing and questioning
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everyday exclusionary, repressive and discriminatory organizational practices based on
relations of oppression. On the other hand, I also understand some of the personal risks to
students and new activists within the context of current restructuring of non-profit
organizations. Academic literature on restructuring of organizations and social worker
accounts highlight the difficulties of putting into practice social justice ideals within
community and social service organizations. As Scott (2004) and many others have
shown, these organizations continue to be compromised as a result of divergent funding
policies, laborious reporting practices, and regulations. As the literature and my research
make clear, the ability of social service organizations to pursue social justice goals is
strained to the point where their very viability is threatened. As a result, educators and
activists who advocate critical praxis, social action, and transformative social change
with and within social service and community organizations are at crossroads.
Students, educators, and activists can learn much from this study. My research
suggests a number of directions through which activists and educators might be able to
support students and new activists in their attempts to mobilize antioppressive and social
justice ideals. Specifically, understanding activism as a simultaneous and dialectic
negotiation of two sets of relations of accountability makes visible possibilities and
constraints of social justice praxis. Moreover, highlighting activist crafting, that is how
activists creatively draw on relations of accountability to develop and consciously enact
innovative antiracist feminist praxis, stresses that new activist/social workers keep
attentive to opportunities for social change within social service organizations. My
findings highlight how student and new activists who want to challenge inequity within
organizations need to understand the complex social relations of accountability and the
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ways in which social activists continue to mobilize these competing and converging
relations.
My research found that women of colour mobilized their commitments to social
justice ideals by both finding and creating space within organizational discourse and
practice. They intentionally co-opted organizational processes and also worked against
them. Drawing on lessons learned from these practices, I outline three main tasks for
seasoned activists and educators in their work to support activist work, particularly for
new activists, in navigating relations of accountability in organizations.
The first task is nurturing commitment by
• Honouring and supporting activists’ own commitments to social justice values and analysis (regardless of whether these seemingly fit with our own);
• Nurturing and igniting alliances and networks among new student activists, activist practitioners, community members and faculty who are engaged in social justice work;
• Providing lived narratives of hope, possibility and success of social justice in organizations and in social work.
Nurturing commitment comes from a central finding of this research: that while
commitments to antiracist feminist ideals may be personal, they are also made social
through engagement with other activists.
Specifically, this dissertation made explicit how everyday antiracist feminist work
in women’s organizations matters. I highlight the ways in which activists took time and
energy to incite, develop and support their own and others’ commitments to social justice
(see chapters three, four, six and seven). The everyday antiracist work by women of
colour was never done in isolation—it was always done with in consort with allies, both
locally and translocally. For new activist/ social workers, connections and mentorship are
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crucial, particularly in organizations where there is little visible, sustainable and effective
social justice work. As I described throughout my study, learning from women of
colour’s activist work means learning from the ways they maintained and developed
active connections among others committed to social justice both within and outside of
their organizations.
The second task is supporting critique, action, analysis and reflexive critique by
• Encouraging student and new activists to create, recognize and use convergences between activist and organizational priorities;
• Expanding student and new activist capacities to develop social justice change within convergences;
• Advocating for policy development and change, activist research, negotiation, community mobilizing and social action;
• Teaching student and new activists to be constantly attentive to capture and de-politicization of social justice praxis;
• Explicitly taking note of relations of accountability work within organizations as a way to critique and/or re-craft inequitable organizational processes;
• Finding and using opportunities to reclaim and debunk the idea of accountability being only the purview of ruling;
• Promoting activist research conversations among other social justice activists.
The value of supporting critique, action, analysis, and reflexive critique is supported by
the research findings that organizations both limit and support social justice ideals. And
that activists need to be able to use the convergences between social justice ideals and
organizational priorities. Furthermore, my analysis makes it explicit that activists need to
be aware of how relations of accountability may capture and depoliticize activists’ action.
Only through reflexive critique, including more research, that these relations of
accountability might become evident.
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Activists/social workers interested in social justice praxis must learn to attend to
the ways in which our change initiatives can become depoliticized. As I described in
chapters four and five, even those seemingly social justice-oriented strategies can easily
become depoliticized through relations of accountability within organizations (see for
example my discussion on conflict management). In fact, the conundrum is this: to
become effective, social justice ideals need to be captured by organizations (everyday
activist work enables this) – but when social justice ideals get enacted within
organizations they are often become reframed in liberal ideological and other
depoliticized ways, where they are rendered manageable and palatable. Although I do not
believe that we can escape this conundrum, I believe that maintaining the social in social
activism is a way to further identify successes, limitations and to refine our activist
strategies by continuing to find, nurture and support formal and informal conversations
with other activists. By actively reflecting with others about our own interventions within
local settings, we continue to engage in reflection and critique which perhaps we cannot
easily do alone.
As such, the third task for more experienced activists and educators is sustaining
activism by
• Promoting politicized relationships and coalition building with others engaged in activist praxis to strengthen relations of activist responsibility;
• Teaching the importance of working directly in mainstream organizations where relations of activism can be negotiated;
• Making strategic complaints to advocate social change from within professional and regulatory bodies, community “consultation” groups and policy-making networks;
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• Encouraging life-long activist learning (formal education, training, workshops and reading);
• Modelling politicized reflexivity and humility.
My research implies that in spite of the difficulties entailed, educators and activists must
sustain their actions and, ideally not work alone, but within a support network of a
community of activists. Self-reflexive practice is not enough; activists who wish to
sustain activism must do the work of talking about their work with other people
committed to similar political visions, as part of their activist practice. As we know,
many of us are exhausted after engaging in activist struggle—particularly if we feel that
we are alone. Without developing activist networks, activism will undoubtedly drain
individuals, as there is no social basis to sustain it. My study confirms and explores what
many of us already know – that activism is work and that it is less effective in isolation
and that it is the cumulative efforts which sustain a movement within and across
organizations. As such, I believe that, as part of our activist work, we need to support and
build social spaces in which we can learn from each other’s struggles, successes and
limitations. My research shows that racialized women were already finding spaces to
engage others—the next step is make social activist reflexivity an explicit part of our
everyday antiracist feminist activism. While this requires time and energy, it would no
doubt sustain and strengthen social justice work.
Furthering a research agenda on social justice praxis
Through further research, I would like to continue deepening the analysis of social
change work from the standpoint of social justice activists, and to consider more fully
how social change work is socially organized; that is, how social justice practice is
shaped by people’s everyday acts, organizational processes and social policy. I am also
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interested in contributing further to the development of institutional ethnography through
deepening my engagement with other critical theoretical perspectives, namely
postcolonial, critical race, antiracist, poststructural and other intersectional theories.
Building on my doctoral work, I am interested in exploring how activism is
socially organized families, diasporic communities, a variety of non-profit organizations,
and in social work education and practice. I remain engaged in building a deeper
understanding of how social justice theory, feminism, and antiracism are enacted in the
everyday work of community activists, social service workers, managers, and educators.
Mapping the ways that social justice discourse shapes and is shaped by people’s everyday
lives and how the personal and political intersect, will be central in my future research
interests. Below, I describe four different research foci which stem from this dissertation.
The first research focus that I am most keen to pursue is what I tentatively call
Activism in Diasporic Communities. The data for the first phase of this research focus
was collected during my doctoral research. As I described in chapter two, my research
changed focus during the analysis and writing phases. My original project was to look at
the connections among antiracist feminist activism, family relationships and everyday
work in women’s organizations. I decided to focus only on the connections between
antiracist feminist activism and women’s organizations, and this meant not exploring
fully the very link that I set out to understand: the family. This decision was difficult, but
for the sake of analytic depth, I chose to place family relationships in the background. I
hope to conduct a secondary analysis of my data perhaps in conjunction with my
concerns for diaspora, racialized and gendered social relations, and activism. In
particular, I am interested in drawing from the conceptual framework I began to develop
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within chapter three which explored briefly at racialized and activist identity, subjectivity
and experience.
Additionally, my interest in re-engaging the interview data with my original intent
of focus on racialized and diasporic communities is further motivated by my analysis of
relations of accountability. While I did not fully focus on this herein, women’s accounts
showed that women were accountable to more than the functioning and governance of
their workplaces and to antiracist feminist praxis; in other words, there were more than
two sets of relations of accountability within the activist accounts. Primary among these
was the accountability activists discussed to their families and ethnoracial communities.
These relations of accountability were often raised in the interviews where activists
described in detail the ways in which they negotiated these relations (see also Ku,
2009).48
My second potential research focus is to explore more fully the extralocal
relations of accountability which organizes social justice work of activists. As I described
earlier, I made a decision to focus my analysis on relations of accountability within local
settings. While I believe that this strengthened the analysis in the dissertation, I am also
aware that there were opportunities lost in this process. Specifically, I did not always take
the opportunity to ethnographically trace how specific textually-driven practices of ruling
shaped the everyday activist work within women’s organizations. I identified the impact
of weak and unstable funding, and funding application practices for example, but I did
not trace these extralocally.
48 Ku (2009) also alludes to the fact that settlement workers negotiate accountability to organization funders and to their ethnoracial communities.
336
As such, I am interested in pursuing a research project which explores the effects
of extralocal relations of funding on the social organization of women’s organizations. I
have already begun a pilot study called Shifting Priorities—Effects of Federal Social
Policy Priorities on the Social Justice Work of Women’s Non-profit Organizations. This
study, which is at the beginning stages, aims to explore how current federal social policy
shapes the social justice work of women’s non-profit organizations within Ontario. In my
dissertation, I explored only the local effects of funding on antiracist feminist practice. A
key finding, but relatively unexplored in my dissertation and in the literature, was that
writing funding proposals both enabled and disciplined women’s organizations
commitments to social justice. Using institutional ethnography, I would like to extend my
analysis to focus on extralocal relations of accountability within the funding application
process. Beginning from the standpoint of activists engaged in writing the funding
applications, I aim to investigate women’s non-profit organizational responses to the
federal government’s 2006 changes to the funding criteria of the Status of Women
Canada programs. The proposed study is unique as it will examine the experience of
women in non-profit organizations when applying for funds for their social justice work
since 2006. The objectives of this exploratory study are to: a) understand how the
everyday work women’s non-profit organizations are socially organized by the policy
priorities of funding bodies; and b) more particularly, map out how social justice and
advocacy work within women’s organizations is shaped by the process of applying for
funding.
My third potential research focus is on social justice-oriented social work
practice. I am interested in using a similar approach as my dissertation but this time to
337
research the interplay among social work practice, antioppressive and social justice
activism, and social service organizations within racialized social workers’ lives. The
goal of Antioppressive Social Work in Organizations is to extend my research from
women of colour antiracist feminist activists to social work practitioners working from an
antioppressive perspective. More specifically, I am interested in exploring the links
between the personal and political in the lives of social workers.
The fourth potential research focus ties together my research, teaching and activist
interests. I am interested in ways to foster, support and nurture student and new social
workers’ commitments to social justice practice. For example, during my tenure at York
University’s School of Social Work, a colleague and I initiated a project called,
Intersectionality, Pedagogy and Practice—Social Work Education. This project was a
teaching-learning-practice initiative with the goal of critically examining and
strengthening current diversity-related pedagogy within social work education, field
education and practice. We invited social work and community practitioners, field
practicum supervisors, students, faculty, and university staff to attend a full-day
workshop focusing on antiracist and antioppressive pedagogy and practice. The main
objectives of the project include: a) examining relevant teaching and learning issues
related to activism, race, racialization and racism, diversity and intersectionality; and b)
identifying and exploring the challenges of teaching and learning about diversity and
intersectionality in antioppressive social work practice. I am interested in extending the
findings of this initiative into my program of research.
338
Last thoughts
The insights garnered through this writing process offered me a unique opportunity to
reflect on women of colour’s activism, organizational change and antiracist feminist
praxis. My hope is that these insights will be valuable to social justice practitioners,
whatever their context. All I can offer as a researcher-activist is a reflection of activist
work in the forms of narrative of activist voices and an analysis and engagement with
these narratives. I invite others who read my work and engage in practice to consider the
further implications and value of my work.
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Appendices
Appendix I: Copy of interview guide
Draw a diagram of the important relationships in your life, including your family, relationships with people at work, other groups you are involved in, etc. A. Describe your activist work.
• Describe how you became involved with this organization/ community work/ activism/ feminist and/ or antiracist work.
• What is the work that you do in the organization?
• Describe an actual work day.
• How long have you been working in this (and other) women’s organization(s)?
• How did you learn to do your job?
• Describe your interactions with the people you work with (actual examples).
• How does your work affect you personally: i.e. your health, your beliefs, your day-to-day life, your sense of health? (Look for specific examples).
B. Tell me about your family.
• Describe your family; who is part of your family?
• How would you describe your relationships with your family?
• What were your relationships like before you became actively involved in your work? How have they changed?
• Describe what you do when you are not involved in your work.
• What are the ways in which your activist work affect you non-work life?
• How often do you see or speak with different members of your family? C. Describe how your family and activist work affect one another.
• What do your family members know about your work.
• How do you describe your work to them? How would they describe your work to their friends?
• What sorts of discussions do you have with your family about your work?
• What are the ways that your work and relationships with your family overlap? What are the ways that they don’t overlap?
• How do you juggle paid work with family responsibilities? Describe how you organize your day step-by-step?
• Describe a typical day/ week/ month.
• Describe how your daily work is affected by your relationships with your family.
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Appendix II: Recruitment letter to potential participants
[On Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE) letterhead] Date Dear ___________________: I am a student at the OISE at the University of Toronto. I am conducting my doctoral research to study the links between women of colour’s activist work with women’s organizations and their personal relationships. The study titled, ‘Negotiating activism: Non-white women of colour navigating relations of ruling’, aims to examine the ways that women of colour’s antiracist and feminist social change work affects and is affected by their relationships with their own families. Your name was given to me by XXXXXXXXXXXX [name of person, title and organization if applicable] because you may be able to help me with my study. Your decision to participate in this research will remain confidential. This study begins from my own experiences as a community worker of colour and from witnessing other women’s struggles with feminist organizations. I saw and experienced how activist work permeates non-white women’s lives, including in their relationships with their families. During my master’s research project, I did a literature review to explore feminist organizations responses to antiracist organizational change and found absent knowledge about the effects of this work on women of colour’s lives. This study is an attempt to fill this gap in knowledge about how women of colour’s crucial community work within women’s organizations overlaps with their personal lives. I would like to interview you as a research participant in this study. I will be interviewing women of colour who are engaged in antiracist / multicultural organizational change work with women’s organizations, in paid or volunteer capacities. I anticipate that there will be two interviews. The first interview will be arranged at a time and place convenient to the research participants, and will last up to 2 hours. The follow-up interview will be a maximum of 60 minutes, during which both the participant and I will have the opportunity to reflect on the transcript of the first interview. I envision the interviews to be a guided conversation about the ways that your activist work overlaps with your relationship with your family. The following themes will be explored in the interviews:
341
• Describe the work you do in your organization.
• Describe your family’s response to your activist work.
• Describe the ways that your work/ volunteer life intersect with your family life.
In analyzing the interviews and other materials collected, I will ensure that the participants’ identities will not be disclosed. The transcript and tapes will be labelled with numbers and pseudonyms. Each participant will be offered a copy of their transcript(s) and a summary of the research findings when it is available. I encourage any feedback throughout this process. You are welcome to raise questions and concerns with me throughout the project, and may withdraw at any time if you wish. Should you decide to withdraw, the information you gave will not be included in my analysis from that time. I will contact you shortly to see whether you can help me with the study and will arrange for a meeting to discuss my study with you. If you do not wish to participate in the research or to be contacted by me, please email me at: [email protected] or by phone at: (905) xxx-xxxx. If you have any questions at all in the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact me by phone or email. Sincerely, Sobia Shaheen Shaikh, Ph.D. Student OISE/UT Phone: (905) xxx-xxxx email: [email protected] Roxana Ng Faculty Supervisor OISE/UT (416) 923-6641 x 2283 [email protected]
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Appendix III: Letter to be sent to directors of women’s organizations
[On OISE Letterhead] Date Dear ___________________: I am a student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. I am conducting my doctoral research on the links between women of colour’s activist work with women’s organizations and their personal relationships. The study, ‘Negotiating activism: Non-white women of colour navigating relations of ruling’, aims to examine the ways that women of colour’s antiracist and feminist social change work affects and is affected by their relationships with their own families. This study begins from my master’s research, but especially from my own experiences with social change as a community worker within women’s organizations. Based on my own experiences and witnessing others’ experiences, I became interested in the ways that activist work permeates non-white women’s lives, including in their relationships with their families. I would like to request your help in recruiting participants for this study in three ways. First, I would ask you to post the enclosed flyers or to pass these on to whomever you think might be interested in this study. Second, I would appreciate it if you could provide me with names of potential research participants in this study. And, finally, please feel free to give my contact information to anyone (or any organization) who might be interested in this study. I will be interviewing women of colour who are engaged in antiracist / multicultural organizational change work with women’s organizations, in paid or volunteer capacities. I anticipate that there will be two interviews with each participant. The first interview will be arranged at a time and place convenient to the research participants, and will last up to 2 hours. The follow-up interview will be a maximum of 60 minutes, during which both the participant and I will have the opportunity to reflect on the transcript of the first interview. I envision the interviews to be guided conversations about the ways that women of colour’s activist work overlaps with their relationships with family. The following themes will be explored in the interviews:
• The work that women of colour do in women’s organizations.
• Their family’s responses to activist work.
• The intersection between social change work and family life.
343
In analyzing the interviews and other materials collected, I will ensure that the participants’ identities or identifying information about their workplaces will not be disclosed without explicit instruction. The transcript and tapes will be labelled with numbers and pseudonyms. Each participant will be offered a copy of their transcript(s) and a summary of the study when it is available. I will contact you shortly to see whether you can help me with the study and will arrange for a meeting to discuss my study with you. If you do not think that you can help me, or if you need more copies of the flyer, please email me at [email protected] or by phone at (905) xxx-xxxx. If you have any questions at all in the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact me by phone or email. Sincerely, Sobia Shaheen Shaikh, Ph.D. Student OISE/UT Phone: (905) xxx-xxxx email: [email protected] Roxana Ng Professor OISE/UT (416) 923-6641 x 2283 [email protected]
344
Appendix IV: Consent form for participants
[On OISE letterhead] I, __________________________________________, agree to participate in this study called ‘Negotiating activism: Non-white women of colour navigating relations of ruling’. This study aims to explore the links between women of colour’s antiracist and feminist activist work with women’s organizations and their relationships with their families. I understand that I am under no obligation to agree to participate. I understand that, as a participant in this study, I will be discussing the following themes:
• The work that I do in women’s organization(s).
• My family’s response to my activist work.
• The ways that my work/ volunteer life intersects with my family life. I understand that the initial interview will take up to 2 hours. I understand that the interviews will be audio-taped and transcribed, and that I will have a pseudonym and number attached to the tape and transcripts. I also understand, that after the interview is transcribed, the researcher will give me the opportunity to look over the transcript. I understand that the follow-up interview will be a maximum of 60 minutes, during which I might be asked to expand or clarify some of the points that were raised in the first interview. I understand that, as in any conversation about one’s life, there is a risk that the content of this interview might be emotional and/or upsetting. I understand that if I am uncomfortable at any time during the interview, I can inform the researcher that I wish to change the direction of the conversation. I further understand that I can terminate the conversation at any time if I decide not to proceed. I understand that I may refuse to answer any of the questions. If I have concerns about our conversation, I can contact the researcher anytime. I understand that the comments and answers I give will be anonymous unless I specify that the researcher can use my name in connection with an answer or a comment. Similarly, I understand that my name and workplace will be kept confidential. I understand that the researcher will make every effort to preserve my confidentiality and anonymity. I understand that only the researcher (Sobia Shaikh) will have access to the audio-tapes. I also understand that the researcher, the researcher’s thesis supervisor (Dr. Roxana Ng) and supervisory committee (Dr. Njoki Wane and Dr. Kari Dehli) will have access to parts of the transcripts, only if necessary. I understand that the tape(s) of this conversation will be deleted after the completion of the project and that they will be kept in a locked cabinet in the researcher’s home during this time. I also understand that the transcripts will be stored in the researcher’s home computer protected by password. I have read and
345
understood this form. I understand that I will keep a copy of this form. I will be offered a summary of the study when it becomes available. Name __________________________________
Signature________________________________ Date__________________________
Researcher: Sobia Shaheen Shaikh
Ph.D. Student OISE/UT Phone: (905) xxx-xxxx email: [email protected] Faculty Supervisor: Roxana Ng Professor OISE/UT (416) 923-6641 x 2283 [email protected]
346
Appendix V: Recruitment flyer
Are you a Woman of Colour?
Have you been or are you involved with
antiracist organizational change with(in) a
women’s organization in Southern Ontario?
Research Participants Needed
for a study on looking at the links between
women of colour’s social change work and
their relationships with their family....
I am interested in interviewing women of colour for my doctoral
research at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University
of Toronto.
The following themes will be explored in the interviews: • The work that women of colour do in women’s organizations.
• Their family’s responses to activist work.
• The intersection between social change work and family life.
Please contact Sobia at [email protected] or by phone at
(905) xxx-xxxx if you are able to participate in this study or able
to distribute copies of this flyer to other women of colour
activists. I would be happy to answer any questions about the
research and all inquiries are confidential.
347
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