Aspiring to a politics of alliance: Response to Sylvia Walby's 'Beyond the politics of location: The power of argument in a global era'

Ann Phoenix’s “Aspiring to a politics of alliance” replies to Sylvia Walby’s “Beyond the Politics of Location: The Power of Argument in a Global Era.” Walby argues that feminist theory risks giving social location too much weight and reasoned argument too little, while insisting that equality and difference be considered together across questions of recognition, redistribution, and transformation. Walby’s abstract points to democratic procedures, postcolonialism, development indicators, and suffrage as practical settings for that debate. Phoenix’s title shifts the question from whether feminism can move “beyond” location to what it takes to build an alliance across it.

The distinction matters because social location is not just a personal identity to announce before speaking. Histories of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation shape what becomes visible and whose experience is treated as general knowledge. Yet a politics that treats every position as sealed can make collective judgment seem impossible. A useful FemRes reading of Phoenix’s title is to understand alliance as a relationship still being made, not a sameness already discovered. Shared claims must remain open to argument and revision, while the terms of debate also need scrutiny: who sets the categories, who is asked to prove an experience, and who has the power to answer back?

This reading changes what solidarity asks of a coalition. Adding different voices to a shared platform is not enough if its concepts and priorities remain fixed by those with the most institutional authority. Nor does recognizing difference suffice when questions of resources, representation, and transformation remain untouched. Alliance has to hold two tasks together: make claims that can travel beyond one location, and let differently situated participants change the claim, its evidence, and its political destination. The works recorded in Phoenix’s bibliography—including writing on racialized boundaries, diaspora, Black British feminism, and Black women’s organizing—place this problem in histories and institutions, not only in personal identity.

“Alliance” names a task, not a ready-made procedure. A coalition can celebrate difference and still distribute credibility, speaking time, and material power unevenly. Conversely, refusing any claim that reaches beyond one position can leave institutions and large-scale structures beyond critique. The harder question is how to make generalization answerable: state where a claim comes from, expose its reasoning to challenge, and revise it when excluded experience reveals its limits. Disagreement then becomes part of feminist politics rather than evidence that collective action has failed.

Read Phoenix with Rita Felski’s neighboring “Being reasonable, telling stories,” which offers another route into the issue’s debate over argument and narrative, and return to Walby’s article, the response target. These are distinct interventions in one published conversation, not a single settled consensus. See the publisher record for Phoenix’s paper and the FemRes guide to Felski.