ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a working definition of anarchist-feminism, and proposes an anarchist-feminist analytics of power. Anarchist-feminists have been engaged globally in political organizing and theorizing since the outset of the anarchist movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Anarchist-feminists historically have been concerned with the ‘vexing questions of domestic and economic equality’, arguing along individualist lines that ‘the primacy of complete individual liberty’ in anarchism also applied to women. Male hegemony may better be understood, according to an anarchist-feminist analytics of power, as the tendency to read masculinity as enacting greater power, and femininity as enacting lesser power. Contemporary feminist movements understand sex, gender, and sexuality to be three components of liberatory bodily autonomy. Anarchist-feminists organizing in anti-racist and anti-colonial groups and networks therefore are highly cognizant of the risk of creating informal hierarchies, as horizontal feminist power can often become re-hierarchized along lines of race and colonialism.
