What Does the Future of Feminism Look Like?

In March, I’m teaching my Feminist Poetics workshop for a second time. This workshop came from my desire to learn about feminism—the historical movement led by women to increase women’s rights—and its juxtaposition with poetry.

Every time I teach a workshop for a second time, I revisit the material and try to look at it with new eyes. When I first wrote the materials in 2021, I was focused on educating poets on such a big topic and giving women writers the power they needed to create in a pandemic world. I shaped the workshop around the four waves of feminism, with each week including exercises to allow attendees to write poems inspired by and in conversation with women writers.

A Feminist Poetry Reading Primer: Writing with Our Foremothers
DATE: 4 Weeks Starting March 4, 2024
TIME: Asynchronous, Self-paced via Writing Workshops Dallas
Price: $299
From Plath to Sexton to Lorde to Walker, women are the backbone of experimental poetics. In this class, we’ll read the work of popular feminist poets and write our own poems inspired by their work. Audre Lorde said, “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” By celebrating the work of the women who came before us, this workshop will explore how to dismantle the patriarchal conventions of poetry by diving into the canon of women poets. Each week contains a "History of Feminist Poetics" that draws on feminist poetry throughout history. From the Riot Grrrl to Roxane Gay to Sappho, this class explores women and feminist poets from across the globe.

The landscape was dark for women in 2021, in a pandemic world where, according to the Pan American Health Organization, the frontline workers who ended up contracting COVID-19 were 72% women, women were responsible for 80% of at-home chores, and domestic violence hotline calls shot up 40%.

I believe in the power of writing to educate and create empathy, so I poured most of my feelings about these statistics into this workshop.

So much has happened on the feminist front in the last two years, from the overturning of Roe v. Wade to Taylor Swift and Beyoncé’s record-breaking tours to the Barbie movie to Bridgerton to an increase in women heads of state across the globe (UN WOMEN).

In preparing for my March workshop, I’m thinking more than ever about the future of feminism. Not the least because now, more than ever, Feminism has been co-opted by many groups with ulterior motives.

What is the future of feminism in a world where the term has become a dog whistle for hate groups?

And how can we combat that—through the power of poetry?

The State of Women in 2024

Every few years, the Commission on the Status of Women takes place in March, where representatives of member states, UN entities, and NGOs contribute. The theme for 2024 is “Accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective.” The Review theme is “Social protection systems, access to public services and sustainable infrastructure for gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.”

The last session was in 2019. The Commission’s report touched on the importance of preventing violence against women, the negative impacts of sexual harassment in private and public spaces, the importance of public services and infrastructure, the struggle for pay parity, and even the importance of preventing climate change. The report also explains the human rights and fundamental freedoms of women:

“…every person is entitled to participate in, contribute to and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, and that equal attention and urgent consideration should be given to the promotion, protection and full realization of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.”

This is wordy, but essentially, women’s rights are human rights.

Heading into 2024, we are still living in a world where sexism is rampant, where women do not have adequate social safety nets across the globe for dealing with poverty, job loss, mental health issues, or economic shocks, where disasters impact women disproportionately, where equality is indeed necessary—if not for you, than for another woman.

Feminism is many things. It is a historical movement. It is a lens for examining the world. But ultimately, the goal of feminism is to address these inequalities. Most importantly, it’s a term we can use to imagine a world where all humans, regardless of gender or sexuality, have equal rights. These are things that still matter. We still need a term for them, but how we view language constantly shifts.

Equality Does Not Equal Privilege; Another Person’s Freedoms Do Not Diminish Your Own

“When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

While updating my workshop materials, I have struggled to find new perspectives on feminism that aren’t actually hiding a trans-exclusionary or conservative point of view.

I truly believe the co-opting of feminism by far-right groups is its biggest threat yet. Writers like Carrie Gress (author of The End of Woman) argue in a slippery slope that “There’s no place left to see what womanhood is, so enshrined have we made the male model and the neutral notion of person, human being, or individual. In our envy, women have been erased.” But it only takes reading Gress’ book description to see that the true anxiety is the “hulking ‘trans women’ [who] thrash female athletes” and “Mothers [who] abort their baby girls.”

Engaging in a feminist discourse in 2024 requires paying attention and noticing when the author is truly pushing a conservative agenda behind the guise of promoting “feminism.” And this is happening from all sides—Mennist writers trying to convince women back into conservative dress as a reclamation of femininity while pushing an anti-trans agenda.

You see, cis men threatened by trans women
will always ensure our bodies empty themselves—
our biology obvious and flaccid on the on the bathroom floor
and doesn’t that make me a woman, biologically?
biological woman—
that’s me
— Chrysanthemum Tran, “Biological Woman (after Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman”)

I have a confession: I’m secretly fascinated by the oft-quoted question “What is a woman?” which is used by TERFs to question the idea that if we can’t define someone by their biological parts, then how can we define them? The question fascinates me because I believe it touches on an important point in the current discussion of feminism, which is that, in many ways, gender is meaningless while also being wildly crucial.

“I am a woman because I know myself to be a woman.” —Harley Preston, model, writer, transgender activist, and fashion enthusiast.

For writers, words must have meaning, but they must also have nuance. Language is constantly changing, moving like a river where culture touches it at every bank, shaping it. Refusing to acknowledge that limits us as writers.

This month, my first published poem of 2024 appeared in Kaleidotrope. “Here Be Dragons” is inspired by the idea of they/them pronouns. I juxtapose Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantastic 1986 speech at Bryn Mawr, where she said, “On the maps drawn by men there is an immense white area, terra incognita, where most women live. That country is all yours to explore, to inhabit, to describe”—with poet Oscar Wilde’s quote on Utopia: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”

For me, the country of women is a Utopia that includes an immense terra incognita where women of every background, from trans women to women of color to queer women, feel safe.

In her beautiful meditation on miscarriage, “six weeks,” Victoria Adukwei Bulley writes: “what if I gave you a name, & it made remembering easier. I am a person who tries to keep things. I am a girl, also, who forgets she is a woman nowadays, with a body that does womanly things, at times undoes them, unfastens the sound wuu-man like a cord from around the neck” (Granta).

The undoing of what it means to be a woman is not something we should see as a war on femininity. Like most arguments on the internet, people struggle to hold complexity. Equality through the lens of privilege can feel like oppression.

You know what holds complexity well? Poetry.

Trans poet Figueroa Edidi says, “I believe that it is important to craft worlds that honor the reality of us existing.” I would add that I think we can also craft worlds we would like to see. That reality may not yet make sense to you as a writer. It may not be a place you can see represented in today’s world. But it’s a place you can imagine.

One of the things I love about teaching a workshop on feminism is reading and learning about what women think of the subject. The workshop is four weeks and happens online. Each week, we write poems inspired by women and feminist poets, and those poems are critiqued by class members and myself. I’m always awed by the work of my students and their ability to convey complicated, emotional topics through the lyricism of poetry.

A Writing Excercise to Examine the Idea of Woman

I want to leave you with a writing prompt to try out. Write an essay, short story, or poem on the idea of woman—what it means to you as a word, what images it conjures for you, why you accept or reject it as a term. There are no wrong or right ways to write. For inspiration, you might read the work of the trans poets mentioned in this post and write a poem in conversation with them.

Remember, write what you love and love what you write.

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About the Author

Holly Lyn Walrath is a writer, editor, and publisher. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Analog, and Flash Fiction Online. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Glimmerglass Girl (2018), The Smallest of Bones (2021), and Numinous Stones (2023). She holds a B.A. in English from The University of Texas and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. In 2019, she launched Interstellar Flight Press, an indie SFF publisher dedicated to publishing underrepresented genres and voices. As a freelance editor, she provides editing services for writers and organizations of all genres, experiences, and backgrounds, but enjoys working with new writers best.