Being Together, After Nonprofitization

Abstract

Many of the problems Jo Freeman identified in her 1970 essay, Tyr anny of Structurelessness, persist in today s feminist struggles and have been exacerbated by nonprofitization. Concentration of leadership, elit ism, lack of accountability, and lack of transparency in social movement formations have worsened in the past four decades as hierarchical, staffed nonprofits have become the most dominant form for social justice work in the United States. The 2007 anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex, edited by the activist organiza tion INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, raised the volume on the conversation about the problems of nonprofitization for groups and organizations seeking transformative change. With many contributors coming from feminist and antiracist, antiviolence, and prison abolition frameworks, the book provides particular insight into how the rise of non profit norms shifted feminist antiviolence work toward stateand corpo rate-funded forms. Throughout the decades that have led to this unsavory alliance between cops, prosecutors, and antiviolence organizations, those most affected by violence—such as immigrant women, women of color, poor women, indigenous women, people with disabilities, and queer and trans people—have consistently critiqued the criminalization solu tions to violence, naming criminalization and immigration enforcement as dominant forms of gender violence, not solutions to it (see Crenshaw 1991; INCITE! 2006; Munshi 2010). A significant divide is now visible in many of the movements related to these issues in the United States, such as the antiviolence movement