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“When I look at my life, searching…[for] self-recovery, I know that it was learning the truth about how systems of domination operate that helped, learning to look both inward and outward with a critical eye. Awareness is central to the process of love as the practice of freedom.” - bell hooks

Hi y’all. The Georgia Feminist is hitting your inbox for the first time in 2023 by way of me, Uzma, hoping you’re cozy and warm wherever you are reading this right now! We’re taking this chance to think about where we’ve been, thank you for your support, and share a little bit about what’s next for us. 

In 2022, we hosted our first love and justice summer series with a discussion series about major themes in some of our favorite movies, books, TV shows. These included building daily love practices, unpacking our relationships with modern systems like family and work and of course, love. It was wonderful to see so many of your sweet faces on Zoom. Later in the fall we sold some more incredible merch (after a deep and major merch ethic conversation) on behalf of incredible organizations like Carolina Abortion Fund, The Cottage, and ARC Southeast as well as for our operating costs. We were able to donate 70% of our total proceeds from our event series and merch sales and give each of the organizations $547! Thank you so much for your support. 

Of course, we rallied around these organizations following the devastating Dobbs decision, at a time when many of our community members in the South needed resources the most. Our event series, outside of supporting resources for these organizations, also became a soft place to land for many of us grappling with the impact of the Supreme Court’s decisions, and we remembered the nourishing power of community outside of school and work, rooted in shared values and commitments to each other. We hope to have more of these events in the future to continue supporting the organizations at the front lines of protecting justice in places where it is most compromised, and also to continue to build community, imagine, and practice for the world we want to live in together. Stay tuned for the announcement of our next book series, led by me, as we study love and how to practice it more deeply! 

 My name is Uzma, and I’m the resident sociologist at the Georgia Feminist, (you’ve already met Missy, our resident historian, and Savannah, our resident rhetorician). I wanted to share some of our thoughts about the nonprofit industrial complex with you, how it contributes to harm, and why we ultimately chose to be a nonprofit anyway—and how we’re thinking about nonprofits differently so we can better center community. 

The world is a scary place. It has been for a long time. It was scary when the baby feminists that currently make up The Georgia Feminist huddled around a Tate Student Center desk discussing how one of the nation’s oldest and largest public universities didn’t have a women’s center in 2013 (and to this day still doesn’t). It was a scary place when we came back together to sell our shirts in 2020, amidst a pandemic, to support voting access disproportionately denied to people of color in Georgia. It continues to be a scary place right now, with access to safe abortion in jeopardy, with hate crimes that continue to perpetuate white supremacy that is allowed to thrive in this country. It continues to be a scary place amidst global, ongoing wars. We were a small and feisty group of undergraduate students in 2014, and we came together in part because we were scared, and when you’re scared, all there is to do sometimes is reach out a hand and hope someone is there to hold it. 

Almost a decade later, our small group has grown up into what is colloquially known as “adulthood,” and our once-tiny student-led movement has become a tiny non-profit organization with fully fledged 501c3 status. We developed a mission grounded in the tenets that drive us toward healing: 

1. Hope is a discipline - Mariame Kaba; 

2. Community is where the ground is. - adrienne maree brown; 

3. Love as the practice of freedom. - bell hooks; 

Dear Georgia Feminists,

Today, we launched our newest collection of Georgia Feminist merch. We're so excited to share these shirts, sweatshirts, buttons, stickers, totes, and mugs (!) with you, and we wanted to drop you a quick note about why this collection is so special to us.

Hi fellow Georgia Feminists,

It's been a rough few days, but one of the things we've been coming back to is the importance of community and mutual aid — of building a version of the world that we want to see and live in.

With that in mind, we've decided to center our summer work on the idea of Love & Justice. We're working to support each other and build community together.

Sometime in 2013, while I was an undergraduate student at the University of Georgia, I joined a group of counter protestors on my lunch break. We wanted to ensure students and staff walking through a busy area of campus would not feel isolated beneath the towering anti-choice signs with which a pro-life group was demonstrating. I picked up a sign and found a spot alongside the other counter protesters to hold it. It read: “How can you trust me with a child but not a choice?” 

Such a sign certainly fits within the broader genre of “My Body, My Choice” language, which has been one of the most widely used slogans in the United States to demand access to reproductive healthcare. These protest slogans can be powerful. It’s a way of claiming bodily autonomy – a way of saying I am here. This is my body. With it, I will do what I want. The rhetorical question in the sign I held also works to call out the irony of state-sanctioned forced pregnancy in the U.S. through increasingly repressive legislation. At its core, though, demanding choice is a demand about individual agency – it assumes that agency is something we all have equally, that by simply being human we can make choices. But any “choice” we make is always constrained, always contingent upon the social and political infrastructures that absolutely determine who can and cannot exercise individual agency. Put simply, “choice” has only ever been available to some, and focusing on individual decision-making erases greater demands for societal, structural issues that are required to be addressed if we want to ensure that everybody can make choices for their own bodies, their own lives. That is the core problem with choice. 

With the recent Supreme Court decision released on June 24, 2022, which means we no longer have federal protection for abortion access up to the point of viability, it’s more important than ever that we ensure our messaging is maximally powerful and maximally inclusive for everybody who will be differentially affected by this repressive legislation. As an activist and a PhD candidate studying rhetoric and communication, I am acutely aware of the power of social movement rhetorics - the messages, tactics, and strategies used by groups to champion issues of significance. For decades and decades, feminist social movement scholars before me have made compelling arguments about why messaging matters so much, especially in social movements for access to reproductive healthcare. Of course, this also entails thinking about the kinds of messaging that does not work; “choice” is one such example.

Myth Two: Black soldiers fought for the Confederacy

Hi everyone! Today’s myth is something I see a lot when people who love the Confederacy and/or Confederate flag want to deny accusations of racism, and deny that the Civil War was fought over slavery. They point to the alleged existence of Black soldiers fighting on behalf of the Confederacy to argue that Confederate heritage and Confederate pride groups are actually honoring Black veterans as well, provided that they fought on the “right” side. 

Kevin Levin has written an entire book about this myth. If you don’t want to read it, perhaps a 12 minute video would suffice? He argues that the Black Confederate narrative “emerges in response to…people in the Confederate Heritage Committee worried about not being able to celebrate their Confederate ancestors without having to deal with the issue of slavery and emancipation...[with this idea of Black Confederate soldiers] they can balance out the moral scales.”

Hi Georgia Feminists, 

This was supposed to be a newsletter with a great debunk from Missy. It’s still that (keep reading), but last night’s news was enough that we wanted to pause for a minute and create a space for grief, love, and thought. 

The Georgia Feminist was founded as a community of care and support. When we started selling t-shirts and blogging in college, we were trying to fill a void. (Fun news: UGA still doesn’t have a women’s center.) We’re a full-blown non-profit now, and that means we’ve been thinking very intentionally about what we do with our actions and our money. The one thing we keep coming back to — today more so than ever — is that no activism, no advocacy, is possible without a strong community where we support each other. 

On September 8th, 2021, a massive statue of Robert E. Lee was removed from his pedestal in Richmond, Virginia, over a year after the governor first ordered its relocation. Removing the False Cause of white supremacy Lee still stands for, however, is a harder feat. And now, those who dedicate themselves to this task are facing increased pushback, resistance, and even dismissals from their places of employment. 

Photo credit: The R.E. Lee statue is removed in Richmond, Va. Time Magazine, https://time.com/6096224/richmond-robert-e-lee-statue/. Steve Helber, Getty Images.

Last winter, we sold 368 Georgia Feminist shirts and sweatshirts to raise money for some really great causes. We’re happy to report that we’ve made donations to all six organizations, and that we’re planning our next steps. This year, you can expect to see a lot more from us, including a newsletter, new projects, and new ways to get involved. If you want to stay in touch, you can find us by signing up here. And if you want to make sure you get emails from us, you can add thegeorgiafeminist@mg.buttondown.email to your contacts.

Going forward, you'll get 1-2 emails/month from us. (And our next one takes a deep dive into the myths and misconceptions of Southern history!) But right now, we wanted to share this important update with you, since it's been a while since you've heard from us. Since our shirt sale in Jan. 2021, we've been hard at work setting up as a honest-to-goodness non-profit and making donations to some great organizations with the revenues from the sale. We're going to be sharing more updates on what we're planning next as an org soon, but for now we wanted to share the honestly amazing donation numbers with y'all. Thank you so much for your support of these great organizations!

Winter 2021 Shirt Updates