Feminist organisational principles

In this essay on feminist organisational principles, we trace the development of key feminist concepts and illustrate how they are instantiated in feminist practices of governance, drawing on scholarly treatments, social movement organising and other institutional settings. We begin by sketching concepts of power and empowerment, showing how the feminist understanding of these concepts, which draws on ideas of embodiment and social structures, undergirds feminist approaches to politics and governance. As we trace the development of feminist organisational principles, we show how feminist theory and practice have worked together to offer models of intersectional, post-colonial organising, models that draw on descriptive representation and self-organisation as mechanisms to counter the distorting effect of power on deliberation, particularly to counter the silencing and marginalisation of subaltern groups. An emphasis on the politics of presence (descriptive representation) and self-organisation ground a feminist commitment to autonomous social movements as avenues for transformational political change.