Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking

Abstract

Two anarchist women from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, Alexandra David-Néel and Lily Gair Wilkinson, combined their politics with radical engagement in walking. In both the literal sense, moving their bodies along the earth, and the figurative sense of calling on peripatetic tropes to express their ideas, they found walking to be a constitutive element of freedom. This paper brings the ideas of Whitehead and other process philosophers into conversation with material and semiotic dimensions of walking and with anarchist politics. In the political lives of Wilkinson and David-Néel, I see struggles to live anarchist lives, lives into which one could walk.

The push toward institutional control: Structural violence and youth in Hawaiʻi

“…It also refers to how they want to understand their positionality, and how that impacts their lives, their stories, their visibility, and their place in the world, or a time or moment in their life. When discussing location and its importance for women, many feminist theorists begin by looking at the body (Butler, 2015;Ferguson, 2017;Rich, 1986). In her discussion of the politics of location, Rich (1986) outlined her attempt at trying to locate herself.…”

Minor Perambulations, Political Horizons: Comment on Kathy Ferguson’s “Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking”

“…But Whitehead also writes: “in every consideration of a single fact there is the suppressed presupposition of the environmental coordination requisite for its existence” (1938, 9, in Ferguson, this issue). In the case of life histories from which we draw lessons for transformative praxis, both the facts and the suppressions that they entail assume a political valence.…”