Coalition from the Inside Out: Women of Color Feminism and Politico-Ethical Coalition Politics

Coalitional Pedagogy: Educating for Intersectional Social Justice

“…Reflecting two different approaches to coalition, each class took a different path towards this task. At Loyola Marymount University, for example, Taylor asked the students to begin coalition simulation exercise from a shared political commitment, in the spirit of Bernice Johnson Reagon's appeal to what Taylor (2018 and2022) calls a politico-ethical coalition politics. To find such a shared political commitment, the students' first task was to identify an issue that they would tackle across the duration of the semester.…”

“…theoretical paradigm of rational choice theory for interpreting coalitional behavior. Further, as Taylor (2018 and2022) has shown, early US Women of Color feminist theories of coalition challenge the stronghold that poststructuralist notions of "undecidability," "unfixity," and "indeterminacy" seem to have over attempts within contemporary political theory to theorize social justice activist coalition politics.…”

“…The richest understanding of coalition, we believe, may be located in the work of early U.S. Women of Color feminism, referring to a wide range of scholars whose work first emerged in academic spaces in the early 1980s with the publications of a variety of Women of Color and Black feminist anthologies (Smith 1983;Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983;and Hull, Scott, and Smith 1982). Following Sandoval (2000) and Mohanty (2003), we understand "Women of Color" not as an ontological category describing a certain identity related to being a woman of color, but instead as a way of understanding or analytic (Taylor 2018 and2022). As such, even feminists who are not themselves women of color can engage in key components of what we understand as Women of Color feminism.…”

“…However, whereas Women of Color feminists writing in the 1980s discussed coalition politics as a necessary and effective way for feminists to organize politically, since its arrival in the texts, pamphlets, and anthologies published in the early 1980s, the concept of coalition has undergone several interesting permutations (see Taylor 2015Taylor , 2018Taylor and 2022. For instance, the word "coalition" has been used to describe a method for doing theory in discussion with others, often in the form of published anthologies.…”

“…Despite the varied contexts in which the concept of coalition has emerged as well as the variety of meanings it has come to adopt, one thing remains constant across contemporary feminist theory literature: the concept of coalition seems to offer the way forward for feminism (see Howard and Allen 2000). Indeed, one walks away from this literature understanding coalition as the catchall answer to the variety of challenges and problems feminist theory has confronted since the 1980s (see Taylor 2015Taylor , 2018Taylor , and 2022.…”