“We can be part of a widening when we refuse to be narrowed … We have to create room if we are to live a feminist life. When we create room, we create room for others”.
- Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
The Feminist Therapy Network’s intention is to cultivate the conditions from which a feminist community can grow, a community of therapeutic practitioners that creates room for learning, dialogue, dancing, imagining, protest, creativity, disruption, joy, refusal, writing, solidarity … and more.
Our launch in May 2023 was the FTN’s first offering and we are grateful to everyone who showed up and shared themselves so fully in the beautiful space of Phytology. Part of that time of connection was for listening to your hopes for a feminist community and we have put together some offerings that both speak to those and that align with the ethos and intentions of the FTN.
Over the next year, capacity dependent, the FTN will offer reading groups, writing groups, courses, workshops, seminars, a book club, consciousness-raising groups, council practice and times to just be together. We hope they will inspire and deepen your feminist life and therapeutic work. Yet, it is not our intention to provide community, rather to build it.
Sara Ahmed’s writes on the ‘our’ of feminism: “I think of that our as the promise of feminism, ours not as a possession but as an invitation to combine forces” (2023, p. 246). Building community is a we/ours project – through creating room for each other, we build our collective strength, we combine our forces and generate alternative ways of therapeutic theorizing and praxis.
Building community is a practice of mutual accompaniment and reciprocity. Therefore, we invite you to deeply consider that alongside any events or learnings you wish to join, that you also consider your capacity for helping to build this feminist community of therapists together. And of course, our capacities will vary in accordance with our bodies, resources and the constantly changing conditions of our lives. Yet, as bell hook so beautifully reminds us in All About Love, the building of any loving community requires us to maintain our commitments to each other.
So, if you do have any capacity to commit to the growth of the FTN, we would love to hear from you. Perhaps you have access to an appropriate learning / community space, have IT skills to share, are a community organiser, bake delicious cakes, are financially resourced, trained in transformative justice, have free photocopying, can offer to teach a course/workshop, want to share your feminist research or host a book club. Or perhaps you have an idea for getting involved but are unsure how to realise it. Again, please get in touch.
May we build, grow and breathe together, cultivating loving solidarity and life-affirming practices in service of all beings.