The lonely activist: On being haunted

Abstract

In our six-nation comparative research project examining how women of colour activists in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen and Madrid organise and mobilise against austerity, against the far right and for migrants’ rights, we found activists experiencing intense feelings of loneliness in their work. Emotional turmoil in activist spaces is to be expected since activists are mobilised to action precisely because of the deeply felt emotions about a particular social problem. However, we argue that activists’ loneliness is a structural alienation born out of the operation of white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, queerphobia, ableism and xenophobia not only in wider society but especially in activist spaces. Women of colour activists are made lonely by the unspoken power relations effectuated through emotions. In trying to negotiate the feeling rules of their activist spaces, we argue that much of women of colour’s emotion work is doomed to failure because many activist spaces are constituted by taken for granted dominations to which many women of colour activists are unable and unwilling to reconcile their feelings.