Mimi Thi Nguyen investigated the pitfalls of the intimacy that shaped the [riot grrrl] movement, pointing out that situating one’s politics within the story of self-transformation leads to neglect of structural critiques of inequality and oppression. “Working on” one’s own racism and privilege via written confessionals became a primary mode of antiracist activism for many riot grrrls, and often configured racism as one big miscommunication rather than institutional violence. As Nguyen points out, this sort of personal revolution comprised of “everyday work on the conscious self, especially through therapeutic techniques of self-examination, confession, and dialogue” is an aesthetic form very much in line with “neoliberalism and its emphases on the entrepreneurial subject.”

Pan in Jacobin

One of the strengths of Beyond the Fragments, then and now, is that it captures so much of the significance and organizational self-reflection not only of Women’s Liberation groups and activity, but of black groups and LGBTQI groups, while highlighting an understanding of the need and difficulty of bringing these “fragments” together. As Wainwright wrote in her 1979 introduction, “If workers were simply up against bosses, women up against the sexual division of labour and sexist culture, blacks against racial oppression and discrimination, with no significant connection between these forms of oppression, no state power linking and overseeing the institutions concerned, then strong independent movements would be enough.”

Power in Jacobin.