If We Can Imagine a Feminist World, We Can Build One
A Conversation with Margo Okazawa-Rey and Elif Sarican, guest editors of “Rage, Struggle, Freedom,” a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online
On December 4th, The Scholar and Feminist Online released its newest issue “Rage, Struggle, Freedom” guest edited by feminist scholars and activists Margo Okazawa-Rey and Elif Sarican. Okazawa-Rey and Sarican together make for a vibrant intergenerational and transnational pair: Okazawa-Rey was a founding member of the Combahee River Collective and now works on issues of militarism, armed conflict, and violence against women; Sarican is a young writer, researcher, and activist in the Kurdish women’s movement. Their mutual respect and admiration reverberates through their collaboration on this issue as well as in their conversation below.
The journal issue, launched with an online conversation featuring Okazawa-Rey, Sarican, and , is a transnational feminist intervention in and critique of the global rise of militarism, state violence, and structural abandonment. Thanks to Okazawa-Rey and Sarican’s vision, the issue interrogates the mechanisms that prevent our flourishing—or “thrival,” as they say—while providing a look into the possibilities of another world. Before its release, Kitzke talked to Okazawa-Rey and Sarican about how the issue came to fruition, how to examine the “culture of killing,” and what work must come next.
Kelsey Kitzke: Tell me about the process for putting the idea for this issue together. How did you first meet? How did you come to this idea?
Margo Okazawa-Rey: Well, I was approached by [former BCRW director] Premilla [Nadasen] to find out if I would be willing to edit this special issue. At the time I thought, Sounds great but by myself? Yikes! Coincidentally, I ended up with Elif as a participant in an antimilitarism webinar organized by Professor Vanessa Thompson at Queen’s University in Canada. And of course I had not heard much about the Kurdish Women’s Movement and learned so much from Elif. That was our first meeting. After that you, Elif, said to me, “Can we do something together?” And then later I said, “Why don’t we co-edit this issue?” That’s my recollection. What do you think, Elif?
Elif Sarican: Well, I think the one thing that happened in between—which I’m not surprised you missed because I know you don’t like to talk about yourself very much—is that after this webinar that Vanessa organized, Margo sent me an email saying, “Hey, I have a radio show. Would you like to come on?” And I was like, “Wow she’s so cool. She has a radio show. This is amazing.” And after we did the radio show together, even though we didn’t know each other so well, for me it just felt like, I want to continue talking to Margo.
In the webinar and in the radio show we discussed some of Margo’s work, which is the feminist non-aligned movement, and what the Kurdish Women’s Movement has been developing more concretely in the last five to ten years but a bit more practically in the last five years which is World Women’s Democratic Confederalism. We discussed what both of those mean—feminist non-alignment and World Women’s Democratic Confederalism—and we realized that actually there’s a lot of overlap, as there often is with points of struggle. So I said we should just continue to have conversations. And then this issue came along and it just felt like the perfect way to bring that in and get other people’s ideas on some of the areas we were thinking about and discussing.
MOR: In other words, it was love at first sight—for me. And it was beautiful that two people from different geographical and social locations, and different generations, could come together in such a lovely way to produce not simply this journal but a way to imagine a different kind of world together.
KK: That’s a great story. On the title of the issue, Rage, Struggle, Freedom: those are such powerful words. They feel sequential to me: first there is rage, then there is struggle, and then freedom. Was that your intention?
MOR: You talk about this Elif. This was your brain wave.
ES: You’re right that for me it is sequential. Actually I think a lot of the work that we’ve tried to put into this issue demonstrates that they can be sequential and exist at the same time. So they exist in parallel as well. There isn’t a cutoff from rage to struggle to freedom. If we want to see a different world and we believe in that, then we have to believe that the rage, the struggle, and then the freedom can come now, and they can come together. For me it is as sequential as it is coexisting.
MOR: A kind of a spiral. That we go deeper as we move through these various processes. I don’t see it as linear at all either.
KK: That’s great, I love that. The open call for submissions was the first of its kind for S&F Online, which was very exciting for us. We sent it out in June 2023 with a description of the issue as a transnational feminist way out of the current “culture of killing.” In the last year, with the unfolding genocide in Palestine, the view that we live in a world that violently disregards human life has become devastatingly apparent. How has your work on the issue helped your thought and action on this crisis?
ES: I guess what I want to say is that I would reword that question. I don’t think we live in a world that violently disregards human life. I think we live in a world where a few people sadly have the power to disregard a lot of life, but also where the vast majority of humans are resisting that on some level and in so many different ways and in so many different parts of the world. So I actually think that our world overwhelmingly does not disregard human life. I think we’ve ended up in a situation where very few people have the power to be able to dictate the lives of millions of people. And I think that is what we are challenging, particularly as people who believe in a free world from a women’s liberationist perspective, and toward a redistribution of power among other things. And when it comes to violence, part of the narrative of the very few is that all violence is collapsed into one violence. There’s violence, and there’s offensive violence, and there’s self-defense. And if you have to choose between self-defense and annihilation, any living being will obviously opt for self-defense. I think that is what has been clarified for many people, particularly in the last year. But I also think it’s important to believe in humanity and believe that the majority of us do see what violent power has encouraged, supported and aided and abetted—in the last year in particular but obviously for centuries as well—and we are resisting it.
KK: Thanks for that reframe. Final question: What has surprised you in the making of the issue? If this issue had a sequel, what questions would it explore?
ES: I mean, I’ll just say that on a practical level what surprised me is how long it takes from idea to publication for an issue to come into the world. Margo, I would love to hear your thoughts about what it would be if it had a sequel.
MOR: I would like to see a sequel that is really about imagination. What is the world we want to create? Its vision would seek answers to questions like, what would a genuinely secure world look like? What would the principles be? What would schools look like? Very granular nuts and bolts kinds of things. And also values. What would be the foundation on which this new world would be built? And—Elif you know this—how must we transform ourselves? What are the things we need to transform about ourselves so that we can live in the world that we’re going to create?
ES: That last one—how must we transform ourselves—for me is really, really important. And looking at how many movements around the world actually tackle that question would be really, really incredible to see collated in one place. And, to what you said Margo, treating imagination as serious political work.
MOR: Yes!
ES: Imagination as serious political power.
MOR: Yes, Elif!
KK: Yay! Thank you so much for your contribution to S&F. You’ve brought some wonderful work to BCRW and the world.
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Kelsey Kitzke (BC ‘23) most recently served as BCRW’s Post-Baccalaureate Fellow and Graduate Assistant. She continues to work with BCRW on a variety of projects, including the blog’s interview series.
Margo Okazawa-Rey is Professor Emerita, San Francisco State University, an activist, and educator working on issues of militarism, armed conflict, and violence against women examined intersectionally. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network Against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security and is President of the Board of Directors of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). Her recent publications include “Building a Culture of Life: A Conversation on Abolition, Feminism, and Asian American Politics” (Frontiers, 2023); “Two Decades of Feminist Organizing for Genuine Security: Understandings from the International Women’s Network Against Militarism” in Feminist Conversations on Peace (Bristol University Press, 2022); “Nationizing Coalition and Solidarity Politics for US Antimilitarist Feminists” (Social Justice, 2020); Gendered Lives: International Perspectives with Gwyn Kirk (Oxford University Press, 2020); and “No Freedom without Connections: Envisioning Sustainable Feminist Solidarities” in Feminist Freedom Warriors: Genealogies, Justice, Politics, and Hope (Haymarket, 2018). She was also a founding member of the Combahee River Collective.
Elif Sarican is a writer, editor, curator, and translator who collaborates with cultural institutions and universities around the world. As an independent researcher, she has worked on parliamentary inquiries and with artists, curating their archives. Elif is an author of the edited volume She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped the World. She is the Education Manager of Left Book Club, a historic radical publisher in the UK established in 1936.