Feminist Movements: The Role of Coalition, Travel, and Labor in the Third World Women’s Alliance

Abstract This article analyzes the role that travel and labor played in the coalitional activism of the Third World Women’s Alliance, a pathbreaking organization formed by women of color in 1970 and active through 1980. In it, I attend to the alliance’s feminist movements, how its members’ activism and commitments were lived, performed, and embodied. Specifically, I focus on its members’ travel to California to work with the United Farm Workers and to Cuba to work with the Venceremos Brigade. I explore the rhetorical capacity of movement and bodies in motion to transform feminist activism. This capacity—which I term rhetorical fluidity—names the always-ongoing processes of transforming what is possible that accompany that which moves. Understanding rhetorical fluidity and tracing its contours can demonstrate how activists and social movements can harness this latent power as a potential site of energy to sustain long-term struggles against oppression.