Resist, persist, desist: building solidarity from Grandma Ella through baby Angela to the Women’s March

Abstract

This article brings together geographical and anthropological perspectives to explore how the Women’s March, as an intersectional resistance movement, has opened up possibilities for solidarity as much as it has created fraught spaces of inclusion. Through a black feminist reading of resistance, self-care, and solidarity, we explore this moment of political emergence and connect it to a broader arc of resistance, passed and felt through black women’s bodies and geographies. We employ a feminist narrative empiricism to blend ethnographic retelling with fiction and use the composite character of Angela to highlight the textures and tensions of mobilizing resistance. This narrative, set against the backdrop of the Women’s March, follows Angela, a middle-aged black woman, as she moves through modes of resistance, persistence, and desistance, and as she connects movements spurred by the recent U.S. presidential election to those entangled with past and everyday spaces of resistance traversed by black women. By using our research on race and housing, social mobility, mental health, and incarceration in Central Texas to talk-story to the Women’s March, we historicize the political present and trace the emotions, motivations and frustrations we see transpiring across longstanding and emergent spaces of resistance and solidarity. Through this account, we aim to narratively provoke reflection, and generate modes of reconsidering and remembering that can advance intersectional solidarities.