National Network for Equitable Library Service

Social movements across North America have suffered from the rise of neoliberalism. Feminism in particular has not been able to call itself a structured movement since the 1990s with the end of National Action Committee on the Status of Women. Instead, feminism and other social movements have survived in a grassroots, disjointed manner. While the work of transition houses and crisis centres, student movements and gender studies departments, Indigenous woman-led land defence, BIPOC anti-racist organizing, social media campaigns and much more continues to claim and develop feminism, as a social movement feminism lacks purposeful structure. As a result, feminism has become prey to individualism and outsourced to digital platforms that seek to make money off harassment and acrimonious debates. Feminist identity and political demands are more and more in vogue, so much so that it seems that everything can be called feminist: from anti-abortion activists to the Prime Minister of Canada. This book argues that liberal, individualized feminism can be made accountable through a formal movement structure to bring sense and practice to ongoing feminist thought and action; this kind of formal movement structure plays a critical role not just in creating social change, but also in building leadership, feminist practice, innovation and debate.