Plural Feminisms: Navigating Resistance as Everyday Praxis

This collection of essays explores how individual subjects come to their feminist praxis through autoethnographic and other qualitative accounts, and how they offer resistant and decolonial strategies via reflection on their lived and embodied realities. Drawing on different understandings of feminisms, this volume archives the ways in which we engage with feminisms and imagine the mundane as a feminist site of resistance against multiple and intersectional marginalisation and oppression. Plural Feminisms spurs a discussion on how structural violence is identified and resisted, and the invisible and emotional labour that goes behind this resistance, and documents the resistance strategies feminists employ on a daily basis to survive, and form and sustain dissident kinships, that remain unread, unheard, overlooked, and excluded from dominant discourses of being and becoming. Through autoethnography, feminist, queer and/or trans and genderqueer, indigenous, Black and racialised, disabled and neurodivergent scholars in the academy reflect on their engagement with feminisms as well as their unique resistance methods—embracing and exploring complexities and challenges that both entail. It foregrounds the critical importance of first-person narratives in developing an expansive understanding of what it means to be a feminist, the different narratives and forms that resistance takes, and the socio-cultural value of subversion. This volume reflects on how dissidence looks in the lives of variously marginalised people whose body-minds and ways of living do not conform to the normative. Since spaces are seldom held for their articulations of resistance, and because their ways of knowing are rarely privileged, this book brings together critical and situated knowledges, by having the contributors write about, voice for, and reflect on themselves and their life worlds as an act of resistance in and of itself.