“Feminist Suffering” and “Aftermath Solidarity”: Repairing Female Solidarity in the Wake of a Friendship's Fall

Abstract

In my experience, the end of a female friendship came to symbolically represent the erosion of female solidarity as (I thought) I knew it. In this paper, I first present an evocative autoethnographic narrative that foregrounds the emotional toll of losing solidarity with a close childhood friend. This is followed by a theoretical discussion that interweaves my own feminist reflections with those emerging from conversations with an intimate public of women. Through this highly reflexive feminist approach, I conceptualize “feminist suffering” as a critical lens for understanding how women's relationships can shift from supportive alliances to rivalry or superficiality under the interplay of multiple systemic pressures. In response to it, through and thanks to the conversations with an intimate public of women, I introduce the notion of “aftermath solidarity”: A revived affective form of solidarity that re-emerges from the erosion of intimate female bonds as a mode of dialogic feminist resistance and repair.