Building Complex Liminal Coalitions and Sacred Feminist Futures

Introduction

I have always lived in layered and complex spaces—between traditions, between people, between parts of myself. I am a mystic who learned to lead from the spaces in-between, an academic who seeks precision, a body marked by illness, love, and survival. These experiences taught me something that feminist movements today are still struggling to learn: those in-between places are sacred, and real leadership comes from honoring them.

Across today’s global feminist movements, activists, artists, and scholars are grappling with how to build solidarity without flattening difference. Too often, feminist spaces have erased the realities of race, class, ability, colonial history, and embodiment—imagining that gender alone can unite us.

In this paper, I offer an alternative way forward: a feminist political practice that is educational, creative, collaborative, and healing. These four pillars—education that centers lived experience, creativity that embraces ambiguity, collaboration that moves beyond fixed identities, and healing practices of rest, ritual, and resistance—form the heart of a sacred, coalitional feminist vision.

Throughout this paper, I explore this possible feminist future, realized through liminal coalition-building that provides new perspective, resilience, solidarity, and resistance.

Structural Exclusion in Feminist Politics

Feminist theory needs to account not just for visible violence, but for the quiet, slow ways power harms bodies over time. Michel Foucault (2003) teaches that modern power decides whose lives are valued and whose lives are left to wither. Power operates in hospitals, borders, welfare systems, and public health policies, regulating life itself and excluding those the state looks to control.

Debility

In The Right to Maim, Jasbir Puar (2017) introduces the concept of “debility” as a form of slow violence that wears down bodies. States intentionally target bodies, not leading to death, but disempowering, containing, and making less-than. Puar writes, “Maiming is a goal of biopolitical control, not an accident or excess of it” (p. xvii). Control is gleaned through the policies that strip people of access to care, the public health gaps that disproportionately affect racialized and colonized people, and the psychic warfare embedded in the everyday life of disabled and queer populations — leaving certain lives permanently vulnerable. In Puar’s framing, the state manages populations through the calculated withholding of wellness. It is not interested in whether we live or die, only in whether we are usable.

As someone who has lived in a body shaped by chronic illness, cancer, and the residual effects of abuse, I recognize myself in Puar’s framework. My medical journey has not been one of wellness, but rather a fight for care and survival. In addition, my skin not only (barely) holds me together; it also carries the historical violence and generational horrors of slavery, Nazism, patriarchy, and more. I inherited wounds from both sides of history and have added my own scars to the map. When Puar asks us to consider who benefits from this architecture of debility, I feel the weight of that question deep in my bones. And I also wonder what it means to build something beautiful within a body the state considers broken.

Global Solidarity and Flattening Difference

Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s (2003) work in Feminism Without Borders warns against the dangers of imagining women's struggles as universal. Western feminist discourses have too often erased difference, portraying women from the Global South as voiceless victims needing rescue while feeding the “savior complex” so often embedded in these conversations. Real solidarity must start from understanding difference, not assuming sameness.

Even the most promising ideas about solidarity can lose their power when reduced to buzzwords. Jennifer Nash (2019) points out that the term “intersectionality” has often been watered down inside academic and nonprofit spaces, stripped of its radical Black feminist roots. Tina Chen’s (2005) Double Agency reminds us that identities and solidarities are messy and entangled, shaped by history, violence, and survival. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994) show how globalization does not bring people together equally—it creates uneven sites of power and struggle.

Such exclusionary examples are pervasive. For instance, Western feminist movements often overlook Latin American abortion rights campaigns, treating them as separate from broader feminist struggles. We see them when Indigenous women fighting for land sovereignty are marginalized under the label of "environmental activism" rather than recognized as leaders in feminist resistance. And we see them when global NGOs, often based in the Global North, claim to speak for women everywhere while ignoring the lived realities and leadership of grassroots organizers in the Global South. These patterns show that without a commitment to honoring difference, feminist politics risks reproducing the very hierarchies it claims to oppose.

Planting Seeds for a New Movement: Complexity as Foundation

Where Puar focuses on the political management of damaged bodies, Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) theorizes from inside the body itself, naming it not only as a site of pain, but as a fertile ground for spiritual and social transformation. Anzaldúa’s mestiza is not fractured. She is multivalent, holding paradoxes without collapsing into despair. Her consciousness is forged in the fires of contradiction: race, sexuality, class, language, desire, exile. And rather than resolve those contradictions, she makes a home in them.

Anzaldúa (1987) teaches us to shift perspectives, hold tensions, and create new possibilities at the intersections. This is not about resolution or simplifying complexity. It is about living inside it, letting it stretch us open. In “La conciencia de la mestiza: Toward a New Consciousness,” she introduces the idea of a “plural consciousness,” one that can “tolerate ambiguity… and shift out of habitual cultural perspectives” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 101).

Though I recognize my struggles in Puar’s theory, I know Anzaldúa’s way of living intimately. I have not lived a life that can be parsed into tidy categories. I am married and polyamorous. While I am pansexual, I do not identify with the word "queer" because I grew up when it was used as a slur. My spirituality is deeply ritualistic, but also fiercely intuitive, embodied, and uncontainable. Like Anzaldúa’s vision, I have learned to build a life that honors ambiguity, not as weakness, but as a cherished wisdom.

This complexity and the richness of varied life experiences has shaped not only my personal values but also my vision of feminist leadership. A sacred feminist politics must be willing to hold contradictions, to make room for ambiguity, and to trust that complexity itself can be fertile ground. Movements rooted in this understanding recognize that liberation is not achieved by sorting people into perfect categories. Instead, it is built by weaving differences into relationships strong enough to survive the tensions of real life.

Can we reimagine our body as more than wounded, more than resilient? Can we move beyond mere survival? How do we lead from our contradictions, dance in the grey areas, and speak truths that make space for other people’s becoming? Anzaldúa writes, “The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended” (p. 102). This is more than theory; it is spiritual practice. It is a road map. It is leadership. It is liberation.

What we carry and what we reclaim is not a burden, but a right: the right to feel profoundly, to question everything, to stand at the border of knowing and unknowing. Embracing complexity in ourselves and in each other lays the groundwork for the healing, collaboration, creativity, and resistance that sacred feminist futures require. In trusting the spaces between certainties, we plant the seeds of a new kind of movement—one rooted in care, creative risk, collective labor, and embodied resistance.

Building Liminal Coalitions

Coalitions built from this space of complexity—what I call liminal coalitions—do not require sameness. They do not demand purity or absolute agreement. Instead, they are rooted in mutual commitment, in the willingness to stay at the table through difference, discomfort, and transformation. Liminal coalitions recognize that solidarity is not a fixed contract but an evolving, relational practice: one that honors difference without collapsing into fragmentation.

A transnational feminist praxis recognizes that solidarity cannot be built upon shared identities or by assuming sameness. As Grewal and Kaplan (1994) remind us, the forces shaping our lives are not evenly distributed; globalization, empire, and migration create layered terrains of struggle. Coalitions built only around shared identity often collapse when complexity enters the room. Real solidarity, the kind that can survive contradiction and difference, demands that we remain relational. True solidarity asks us to listen across histories, to make room for griefs we have not lived, to recognize that no single narrative will carry all of us forward. Honoring complexity is not a detour or a delay—it is the work itself. Sacred feminist futures must be built not by flattening difference, but by weaving it into living forms of coalition.

How do we do this? If we want real coalitions, we need more than good intentions. We need practices that help people show up as whole human beings. bell hooks (1994) reminds us that theory only becomes liberatory when it stays connected to real life. Kemi Adeyemi’s (2019) work on "slowness" shows how Black queer women claim space on their own terms, refusing capitalist speed. And Audre Lorde (1984) teaches that anger, when harnessed with clarity, becomes a tool for transformation, not destruction.

If feminist coalitions are to survive difference rather than erase it, they must be rooted in practices that reflect relational, complex realities: education that highlights lived experience, creativity that welcomes contradiction, collaboration that nurtures transformation across difference, and healing that sustains collective resilience. I offer these as the foundations of a sacred feminist politics capable of meeting this moment and a potential framework for how we might begin to build such spaces together.

Resistance too often stops at the “good ideas” phase. Because we aren’t educating people outside the ivory tower, these brilliant suggestions by hooks, Adeyemi, and Lorde are not leveraged and do not show up in everyday practices. Think of how much further we could progress if we taught and hosted civic storytelling events where marginalized communities tell their stories directly to policymakers; radical listening circles that train people across professions to listen deeply before speaking; and public art projects that make collective memory visible through murals and installations. These practices ground liberation not just in critique, but in how we work, remember, and connect.

A Vision Forward: Sacred Feminist Futures

We see glimpses of these coalitions already: migrant justice movements that center undocumented queer women, reproductive justice campaigns that link Black maternal health, Indigenous sovereignty, disability justice, and environmental survival. These movements show that coalition is possible, not by denying our particularities, but by meeting across them with humility and courage.

But how do we address liminality and complexity, and how do we keep coalitions from collapsing? Puar and Anzaldúa together equip us to hold complexity not just as a fact of life, but as both political and spiritual strategy. Puar shows us the systemic violence that renders certain bodies disposable, and she demands that we account for the structures that do this work in plain sight. Anzaldúa teaches us how to survive such violence by becoming fluent in multiplicity, by using our wounds as tools for knowing. Together, they help map a path of resistance that is both external and internal, both analytical and spiritual.

For those of us whose lives have been shaped by trauma, illness, migration, and dislocation, this kind of liminal consciousness is not abstract. It is survival. It is the way we learn to move between worlds, languages, and selves, refusing the demand to be one thing, one story, one identity. Feminist politics must be about more than inclusion. We must reimagine the entire structure of how we value life and lay a new foundation as a society. In the face of institutions that prefer tidy categories, liminality becomes a form of resistance: a sacred practice of complexity.

This vision of sacred feminist futures rests on the four interwoven pillars I have mentioned previously: education, creativity, collaboration, and healing. Each pillar offers not only a practice but a politics of resistance.

First, education must move beyond abstract theory, grounding itself in lived experiences and embodied knowledges as well as generously sharing and making information accessible to all. Civic storytelling projects and radical listening circles—practices championed by scholars like bell hooks (1994) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003)—create spaces where marginalized voices do not just speak but shape collective understanding.

Creativity must become public, collective, and sustaining. In line with Tina Chen’s (2005) notion of “double agency” and Adeyemi’s (2019) aesthetics of slowness, public memory projects, murals, and collective art become modes of survival, reclamation, valued contradiction, joy, and ambiguity. This is deeply intertwined with the other three concepts and must be integrated to transcend individual perspective.

Collaboration must resist the demand for consensus and speed. True coalitions, as Grewal and Kaplan (1994) argue, are built through slow, relational meetings and leadership practices that embrace complexity, difference, and transformation, following Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) call to live and organize from the borderlands.

Lastly, healing must be recognized as both sacred and political. In a world that demands endless labor and optimization, reclaiming slowness, ritual, and collective care is revolutionary. Feminist resistance today must begin by refusing the myths of endless productivity and optimization. Refusing productivity is not laziness; it is an act of survival and resistance. As Jasbir Puar (2017) reveals, contemporary power structures do not simply oppress through spectacular violence; they exhaust, debilitate, and demand constant labor from vulnerable bodies. In response, reclaiming slowness, ritual, and collective care becomes a revolutionary practice. As Kemi Adeyemi (2019) teaches, temporal refusal, or slowing down and stepping out of capitalist rhythms, is itself a mode of survival and defiance.

As Audre Lorde (1984) reminds us, caring for ourselves and our communities is not self-indulgence—it is an act of political warfare. Healing spaces for grief, rest, and ritual memory must be cultivated intentionally, resisting the capitalist impulse to erase pain and demand resilience without restoration.

Through these intertwined strategies, our daily practice becomes a living form of resistance. Slowness, storytelling, art, embodiment, and healing are not retreats from struggle—they are the infrastructures of our survival and solidarity. Real feminist coalition work must be relational, critical, and built on accountability, not assumptions. Through our daily rituals and practice of complexity and embracing liminality, our futures grow slowly stronger, the precious seeds of a new world, sprouted in the cracks of the old one we have outgrown.

References

Adeyemi, K. (2019). Slowness as resistance: Black queer women and time. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 25(4), 577–599.

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.

Chen, T. (2005). Double agency: Acts of impersonation in Asian American literature and culture. Stanford University Press.

Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (D. Macey, Trans.). Picador.

Grewal, I., & Kaplan, C. (Eds.). (1994). Scattered hegemonies: Postmodernity and transnational feminist practices. University of Minnesota Press.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press.

Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Duke University Press.

Nash, J. C. (2019). Black feminism reimagined: After intersectionality. Duke University Press.

Puar, J. K. (2017). The right to maim: Debility, capacity, disability. Duke University Press.

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Sarah E. Flynn is an adult learner in the Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies Department at Penn State University. This article originally was written for the course "Sex, Gender & Power -- Feminist Thought and Politics" under the direction of Dr. Andrea Miller. April 27, 2025