043: A New Feminism for Our Unfolding Future

The Future Is A Mixtape

How might feminism be reinvigorated to fully reverse our age of climate chaos and techno-feudalism? Will the next feminist wave be revolutionary enough to address the totality of capitalist cis-heteropatriarchal racism? Sitting on the knife’s edge between despair and hope, humanity picks up a silhouette manuscript of its own death, but which, if flipped over, reveals pages that illuminate a way back to the womb of a better future-possible. If we are going to build a just world for all of us, it must start from a politics that addresses the deep complexity of our collective wounds. So in this second episode in a trilogy on 21st Century Feminisms, Jesse & Matt discuss Zillah Eisenstein’s short book Abolitionist Socialist Feminism: Radicalizing the Next Revolution (2019). This idiosyncratic manifesto (of sorts) swings in synchronicity with the ethos of this podcast as a brief polemic frustrated with the fucked nature of a besotted world of never-ending injustice, while nonetheless stubbornly insisting on radical, anticapitalist and intersectional solutions. As such, Zillah’s voice swims very much in the form and feeling of conversational exchanges—a dialog with her past self and fellow feminists—yearning, groping and clutching onto new ways of thinking that drift into view. The text weaves in and out of many different dimensions at a rapid pace—with a frenetic, anxious energy and a morally righteous indignation—a splicing of many disparate references, experiences, and perspectives into a complex tapestry of exasperated fury. And rightly so. A long, long time ago, we should have already won The Golden Square, and be fluttering into the light of The Utopian Sphere; but alas, here we are instead: still trying to wrest ourselves from this locked, dismal future and leap into a spinning, dazzling and enchanting one. What we must continue to seek out—in the ongoing struggle for human liberation—is a politics that can confront the deep entanglements of compounded hierarchies limiting our collective potential. In order to claim the dignity we all deserve and to unleash the beauty of a shared utopian promise, our unfolding future demands the most radical feminism yet: to dismantle and shatter inequality itself and replace it with boundless love.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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