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

Abstract

In “Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking,” Kathy Ferguson identifies rich and unexpected connections between anarchist feminists, walking, and Whitehead’s process philosophy. In attuning readers to resonances between the physiological and sensory complexity of walking, and the latter’s role in the lives of anarchist feminists Alexandra David-Neel and Lily Gair Wilkinson (and Ferguson’s own), her essay sheds crucial light on the concept of process for political thinking and what the everyday process of walking might mean for political praxis. At the same time, I argue that the anarchist feminist walking praxes of David-Neel and Gair Wilkinson depend in some degree on disavowed white supremacist frames of reference. Moreover, Ferguson’s circumscription of the politics of walking to exclude situations of coercion and vulnerability correspondingly raises the question of what and for whom the politics of walking is for. I suggest that a radical politics of walking must not only open its horizons to nonvoluntary, threatened, and resistive perambulatory modes and the histories that they carry, but avow these feminist anarchist ancestors’ disavowals along with their achievements as part of a living radical lineage.