Disrupting Disciplinary Norms and Advocating for Feminist Solidarity through Coalition Building, Healing Justice Lineages, and Collective Care

Disrupting Disciplinary Norms and Advocating for Feminist Solidarity through Coalition Building, Healing Justice Lineages, and Collective Care Kimberly Williams Brown (bio) Liza Taylor's Feminism in Coalition: Thinking with U.S. Women of Color Feminism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2022 Cara Page and Erica Woodland's Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2023 Marquis Bey controversially says that anybody can be Black. By that, he means that there is a particular politics that makes one radical that usually has little to do with the skin in which a person is born. Race, of course, matters. We know this because nations have been disseminated in the name of racism, and racial capital hierarchies run the world and have material consequences we observe. But, more importantly, to undo racial capitalism, Bey calls us, as do Liza Taylor, Cara Page, and Erica Woodland, the authors of the texts under review, to understand how racial identity is an approximation to politics that must always be mitigated by a radical consciousness of lineage, history, and collectivity. To be abolitionist in one's politics means more than just addressing the prison industrial complex (PIC). It means understanding that the PIC is one cog in the machine of systems that incarcerate, immobilize, and make sick those of us sitting at the margins. These thematic connections cut across both texts. Methodologically, both texts combine textual analysis with interviews, conference presentations, and personal experiences. Both texts, especially Healing Justice Lineages, call for the reader to engage all her senses and her entire being. To heal is to understand the source of pain and trauma and to work to address that source by creating a plan for unlearning unhealthy coping mechanisms and relearning healthy ones, including understanding how the oppressive systems we were born into may be abolished. In Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety, Cara Page and Erica Woodland take us on a journey to [End Page 309] deeply understanding the collective healing lineages that have always existed in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities and from which healing-justice practitioners have pulled. In Feminism in Coalition: Thinking with U.S. Women of Color Feminism, Liza Taylor hopes to heal a discipline rife with discursive understanding of coalition as ontological unfixedness. Political theory, she argues, has exclusively relied on a Marxist orientation that insists on a single axis for analysis of oppression—class. Taylor's work is to introduce to political theorists the work of women of color feminists, who, since the formation of the union and the twin evils of slavery and settler colonialism, have called us to understanding multi-issue coalitions as essential to practical moves of justice to upend oppression. Taylor deftly points to Rosa Luxemburg, whose interpretation of historical materialism disavows the rigidity of Lenin's interpretation and therefore articulates a more fluid and unpredictable sensing of class rooted in the experience of lived struggle. Both texts do the work of healing lineages, although only one text is named as such. Both texts draw on the commitments of lived experiences in Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities that sustain us through struggle, resistance, and a willingness to work across differences. If Feminism in Coalition is the theoretical underpinning for a call to action for collective strategies of freedom, then Healing Justice Lineages is the praxis that makes the theoretical foundation come alive. Feminism in Coalition disputes the "crisis" of post-Marxist left-oriented politics asserting that coalition necessitates an anti-capitalist orientation and a material understanding of what it means to build justice movements across difference. Healing Justice Lineages is a call to action to those who want to build long-term infrastructure for collective care and safety outside of carceral strategies. Page and Woodland reinforce this by saying that the book is also a call to action for those who can never have liberation without collective strategies to transform trauma, which is intergenerational, collective, and historical (7). Taylor, arguing in chapter 1 of Feminism in Coalition against Laclau and Mouffe in their text Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), disputes the claim...