As heteropatriarchal capitalism continues to force us into consumerism and compliance, we are finding that our struggles are being siloed and separated by physical as well as virtual borders.

And with the additional challenges of a global pandemic to overcome, this divide-and-conquer strategy has been favorable for the proliferation of exploitation across many areas.

Yet, From September 1 to September 30, 2021, Crear | Résister | Transform: a festival for feminist movements! took us on a journey of what it means to embody our realities in virtual spaces. At the festival, feminist activists from across the world came together, not only to share experiences of hard-won freedoms, resistances, and cross-borders solidarities, but to articulate what a transnational form of togetherness could look like. 

It is this togetherness that has the potential to defy borders, weaving a vision for a future that is transformative because it is abolitionist and anti-capitalist. Spread out over a month, across digital infrastructures that we occupied with our queerness, our resistance, and our imaginaires, the festival showed a way to deviate from the systems that make us complicit in the oppression of others and ourselves. 

Though Audre Lorde taught us that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, Sara Ahmed showed us that we can misuse them. Because we had to make space for assembly, in spite of all the other demands on our time, it became possible to imagine a disruption to the reality of heteropatriarchal capitalism.

Now, if we understand assembly as a form of pleasure, then it becomes possible to make the link between transgressive pleasure and transnational/transdigital resistance. Between the kinds of pleasure that challenges borders on the one hand, and queerness, campiness, land and indigenous struggle, anti-capitalism, and anti-colonial organizing on the other. 

This issue attempted to capture a sense of how the festival’s exercise in assembly took on multiple shapes and imaginations. Beyond direct collaborations with some of its speakers and dreamers, we brought on a plethora of other voices from the Global South to be in conversation with many of its themes and subjects. Below is a map of some of the festival’s panels that most inspired us.