Nothing Worth Doing is Done Alone: On Friendship and Feminist Organising*
Feminist Duration Reading Group 
Concept: Helena Reckitt and Sabrina Fuller
Composition and editing: Sabrina Fuller
Contributors: Joan Anim-Addo, Olivia Berkowicz, Angelica Bollettinari, Rosie Cooper, Kezia Davies, Flora Dunster, Haley Ha, Taey Iohe, Alexandra Kokoli, Lucy Lopez, Laura Malacart, Kim McAleese, Gabby Moser, Sara Paiola, Helena Reckitt, Sasha Roseneil, Ehryn Torrell
Commissioned by Annette Hans of Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof for a collaborative project with Anne Meerpohl / HFBK Hamburg (the Hamburg art school) around feminism, care and friendship.
Women tend to take special care of their relationships with one another. Yet until the second wave feminist movement of the 1970s few accounts of friendship’s importance for women existed. Building on this revaluation of women’s affectionate bonds, this podcast explores friendship as a vital force in feminist organising, community-building, and practices of mutual care. Through the voices of seventeen contributors, and the texts and projects they cite, a polyphonic account of friendship as a political practice emerges. Contributors explore friendship as a plural space of interaction through which women have found mediation between themselves and the public domain. They reflect on how bonds of friendship nurture acts of alliance, resistance, and reciprocity, in which participants both listen and feel heard, see and are seen.
Friendship operates as a key principle within the Feminist Duration Reading Group. Befriending earlier periods of feminist activity and feminisms outside the dominant canon, the group fosters a mood of intimate exchange where references and citations became shared resources.
Recorded at the end of year marked by Covid-19, during which many people have felt isolated and anxious, “Nothing worth doing is done alone” reconsiders the importance of sharing and holding space, collective thinking and reading. It also celebrates the sheer pleasure of being together.
Contributors include regular FDRG participants and collaborators as well as people who have hosted recent meetings within institutional and domestic settings. Also featured are excerpts from recordings of FDRG sessions at the South London Gallery and Hypatia Trust in Penzance.
The FDRG is grateful to Delpha Hudson for her recording of “Feminist Readings” which she organised at Hypatia Trust in January 2019
*the podcast’s name comes from “Everything Worthwhile is Done With Other People,” a 2019 interview with Mariame Kaba by Eve L Ewing, referenced in the contribution by Lucy Lopez
www.feministduration.com/

References

Joan Anim-Addo, “Activist-mothers maybe, sisters surely? Black British feminism, absence and transformation,” Feminist Review, no.108 black british feminisms (2014): 44-60.

Khairni Barokka, Indigenous Species (London: Tilted Axis Press, 2016).

Svetlana Boym, “Scenography of Friendship: Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and anchovy paste,” Cabinet, Winter, Issue 36 Friendship (Winter 2009–2010) https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/36/boym.php

CCC, https://taey.com/ccc

Adriana Cavarero, “On the Outskirts of Milan,” in Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1997), 55-66.

Lia Cigarini and Luisa Muraro, “Politica and Pratica politica,” Critica Marxista, no 3-4 (May-August 1992), 3-4. 

Céline Condorelli, The Company She Keeps (London: Book Works, 2014), 

https://celinecondorelli.eu/text/the-company-she-keeps/

Céline Condorelli, “Notes on Friendship”, Mousse 32 (February 2012), 222 -227.

Eve L Ewing, “Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile is Done With Other People,” Adi Magazine, Domestic Dissonance, (Autumn 2019), https://adimagazine.com/articles/mariame-kaba-everything-worthwhile-is-done-with-other-people/

Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” Mask Magazine, the not again issue, (January 2016), http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory

Johanna Hedva, “Get Well Soon!” (2020),https://getwellsoon.labr.io/

Jane Jin Kaisen & Guston Sondin-Kung, The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger, HD Video 16:9, single channel. 72 minutes. Colour / B&W, 2010

Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, “More Women Than Men,” in Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, eds. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1991), 110-11.

Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, Sexual Difference: A Theory of Socio-Symbolic Practice, trans. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: The University of Indiana Press, 1990), 30-31.

Naomi, Petra, Jane, Julie, Rachel, Kate, Jane, Lucy, and Nicole, "Finding Each Other at School," in Spare Rib Reader, ed. Marsha Rowe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 595.

Sasha Roseneil, “Foregrounding Friendship: Feminist Pasts, Feminist Futures,” in Kathy Davis, Mary Evans, Judith Lorber (eds) Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies (London: Sage, 2006), 324-343.

Alice Walker, The Alice Walker Collection: Non-Fiction (London: Hachette, 2013), 17.

Bronwen Wallace, "People You'd Trust Your Life To" in People You'd Trust Your Life To (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990), 149-169.