From what we’ve learned about Feminist conflict this semester, one lesson that I’ll take away is that resolution isn’t always necessary/a marker of a successful movement. As we saw in the film that we watched the last day of class, Born in Flames, conflict doesn’t have to be something that only acts as an inhibitor to progress and change, it in fact can be important for fostering dynamic and intersectional movements. Additionally, reading essays from ‘The Revolution Starts at Home’ and ‘Feminist Accountability’ were helpful to me in putting into words concepts that appeared obvious to me but which I didn’t have the language to interpret. In particular, those having to do with methods of disrupting whiteness (in ‘Feminist Accountability’) and the complexities of abuse within activist communities (in ‘The Revolution Starts at Home’) pushed me to think about, in greater detail, the implications of race, social environment, and so on when considering approaches to conflict.
Overall, my understanding of conflict has shifted to be one that is more optimistic, whereas it had previously been to mostly associate conflict with the opposite of what a social movement should be/strive for. The readings in speculative fiction, in our second-to-last week of class, further emphasized this point for me – especially those from Octavia Butler – in that they provided a framework of sorts for discussing and imagining the potential that conflict can have.