Fermenting Feminism as Methodology and Metaphor

This article proposes the possibilities of fermentation, or microbial transformation, as a material practice and speculative metaphor through which to approach today’s transnational feminisms. The author approaches this from the perspective of their multiyear curatorial experiment Fermenting Feminism, looking to multidisciplinary practices across the arts that bring together fermentation and feminism in dynamic ways. The article outlines ten ways in which fermentation is a ripe framework for approaching transinclusive, antiracist, countercolonial feminisms. As the author takes up these points, drawing from scholarly and artistic references alongside lived experience, they theorize the ways fermentation taps into the fizzy currents within critical and creative feminist practices. With its explosive, multisensory, and multispecies resonances fermentation becomes a provocation for contemporary transnational feminisms. Is feminism, with its etymological roots in the feminine, something worth preserving? In what ways might it be preserved, and in what ways might it be transformed? The author proposes that fermentation is a generative metaphor, a material practice, and a microbiological process through which feminisms might be reenergized—through symbiotic cultures of feminisms, fermentation prompts fizzy change with the simultaneity of preservation and transformation, futurity and decay.