In GSWS 398W, Reema Faris and the cohort of students explore many forms of feminist creative expression and self-expression with a particular focus on polemics. As part of their experience in the course, students write, workshop, and peer edit three substantial portfolio reflections. The intent behind these written pieces is to offer students an opportunity to respond to the course readings and seminar discussions that they find the most compelling. In their portfolio reflections, student share what they're learning, how they are being affected by what they're learning, and demonstrate how engaged they are in the process of editing, refining, and polishing their written work for maximum impact and effect. As evidenced by these blog posts, they demonstrate the relevance of their work, the meaningfulness of their inquiry, and they emphasize the ongoing and perpetual need for folks who believe, care, and dream, to make noise, to raise their voices, to have difficult conversations, and to work towards change that uplifts all of us.
In Need of Anger: A Reflection on Rants, Polemics, and Manifestos
By Lari de Souza Burry
I did not come into this course needing to be convinced that anger matters.
I came in already knowing that anger is how I survived.
What I did not have was language.
Or rather 鈥� I had too much language in my body,
And not enough words for how it moves in the world.
This is not the anger that explodes and disappears, but the kind that lives in the body. The kind that presses on the chest, sharpens the tongue, and refuses silence even when silence would be easier. Anger of too many lived experiences in systems that ask me to be patient, grateful, quiet, while they violate, dispossess and erase; to then demand politeness in return.
So anger is not new.
What is new is learning their names.
Before this class, I did not know how to distinguish between a rant, a polemic, and a manifesto. I just knew that sometimes words come out jagged, repetitive, breathless. Sometimes they come out sharpened, deliberate, unwilling to compromise. Sometimes they want to gather others and shout, "Enough鈥攍et us unite and fight!"
This course is giving me language for what my body experiences 鈥� the anguish of oppression; of language and anger that goes beyond survival and toward liberation.
In the first week, we talked about historical patterns of domination, about how power repeats itself, reshapes itself, hides itself in respectability. We also talked about silence 鈥� how it can be resistance, but also compliance. That distinction stayed with me. Because for many of us, silence has never been neutral. Silence has been imposed. Silence has been survival. Silence has been demanded in exchange for safety that never fully arrives.
Learning about polemics is helping me understand why emotional writing is so often dismissed. Rants are labelled irrational. Polemics are called aggressive. Manifestos are called unrealistic. And yet, these forms have always been central to feminist struggle. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when politeness had already failed, when asking nicely had not stopped violence, control, or exclusion.
Emotion was not the problem 鈥� it was the catalyst.
I am learning that a rant is how anger first leaves the body. It is spoken. Repetitive. Uncomfortable and uneasy. It does not ask for permission and that is exactly why it is so accessible and yet so dismissed.
A polemic, on the other hand, stays with the anger and sharpens it. It argues. It creates friction. It refuses and exposes the illusion of neutrality.
A manifesto gathers voices. It declares intent. It calls for action.
I am also learning that none of these forms is superior to the others. They answer different needs. And we need all of them because oppression never arrives in a single form either.
Reading 鈥淎re Women Human?鈥� made something click for me. Dorothy L. Sayers does not beg to be included. She does not soften her critique to make it more digestible. She simply refuses the premise that women exist to fulfill a singular function (Sayers, 1938/2005). That refusal felt familiar to me 鈥� not necessarily loud but deeply radical. To insist on being seen as human first is already an act of resistance in a world that profits from categorizing, sorting, and reducing us to commodified labels and objects.
Charlotte Shane鈥檚 (2018) 鈥淣o Wave Feminism鈥� put words to my long-lived frustration of Western, liberal, white feminism. A feminism that often feels empty, exclusionary. Branded. Individualized. Comfortable.
Shane names how feminism has shifted from a movement into a label 鈥� something people are, rather than something people do together. It stopped 鈥� very early on 鈥� threatening systems and started negotiating with them.
And what stayed with me most was her refusal to pretend that there is a clear-cut next wave waiting for us.
There is no fourth wave because we cannot agree on what feminism is meant to dismantle. Not because oppression is over, but because neoliberalism fractured our solidarities and exhausted our bodies, minds and souls, so that too often we are complacent through attempts of survival as much as we are complacent through comfort and privilege. And unfortunately, feminism did not become angry about this 鈥� it became too comfortable. Too complacent.
Week 3 of the course made it impossible for me to separate theory from survival.
Mona Eltahawy鈥檚 (2019) description of patriarchy as an octopus 鈥� with tentacles reaching into the state, the street, and the home 鈥� felt painfully accurate. Patriarchy is not men. It is a system that feeds on misogyny, capitalism, white supremacy, homophobia, religion, ableism, and classism. And it is dangerous not only to those it targets most violently, but to everyone it trains to dominate or submit.
Eltahawy鈥檚 work reminded me that those socialized and/or identified as women are constantly told to wait. To hope. To trust that things will get better on their own. Anger disrupts that fantasy. It refuses patience as a moral requirement. Anger demands immediate change.
The discussion of #MeToo and its whitewashing made me angry and uncomfortable in an important way. Knowing that the movement began with Tarana Burke long before it was taken over by wealthy, white celebrities exposed how quickly systems absorb resistance to make it a tool of oppression. Anger becomes acceptable only when it is polished, profitable, from bourgeois, detached from structural critique.
When Eltahawy writes that anger has always belonged to those who are not rich, not white, nor famous, I felt that in my body. Some people are punished for their rage. Others are praised for misdirecting or discovering it late.
Reading Joyce Green鈥檚 (2024) 鈥淎lways Coming Home鈥� in Making Space for Indigenous Feminism pulled everything into sharper focus. This text does not ask for feminism in the name of inclusion. It challenges its foundations.
It is a reminder to us that feminist values did not begin in Western theory 鈥� they existed long before, in Indigenous, relational and decolonial ways of knowing. Feminism does not precede patriarchy because it has reacted to it; it precedes it because people have always resisted domination 鈥� particularly imperialism and colonization.
That tells me that inclusion without transformation is not justice. It is system management.
And what ties all of this together for me is the realization that anger is not the opposite of care. It is often proof of it. Anger is how we name violation. How we break the silence. How we demand what is ours by birthright 鈥� safety, dignity, autonomy, the right to exist without apology.
As I move through this course, I am not learning to control my anger. I am learning to listen to it.
To understand when a rant is necessary. When a polemic must refuse compromise. When a manifesto needs to gather others and say, 'this cannot continue; it must change!', it must.
Writing has always been how I survive. This class is helping me trust that my voice does not need to be academically softened to be legitimate.
Silence never kept me safe.
It was anger that taught me how to speak.
And feminism, if it means anything at all, must make room for that.
For the refusal to be silent and complacent.
For the revolution, our anger screams and demands.
For the destruction of A.L.L tentacles of oppression.
References
Eltahawy, M. (2019). The seven necessary sins for women and girls. Beacon Press.
Green, J. (2024). Always coming home. Indigenous identity, Indigenous feminism, scholarship, and life. In G. Starblanket (Ed.), Making space for Indigenous feminism (1st ed., pp. 27鈥�51). Fernwood Publishing.
Sayers, D. L. (2005). Are women human? address given to a women鈥檚 society, 1938. Logos, 8(4), 165鈥�178.
Shane, C. (2018). No wave feminism. In J. Eric-Udorie (Ed.), Can we all be feminists? (pp. 1 15). Penguin Books.
Student Bio
Lari (he/him) is a Brazilian born trans man living on the unceded territories of the x史m蓹胃k史蓹y虛蓹m (Musqueam), S岣祑x瘫w煤7mesh (Squamish), and s蓹lilw蓹ta涩 (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as a queer refugee. After a 10-year long journey to finish his BA of Arts in Gender, Sexuality and Women鈥檚 Studies, with a minor in International Studies, he is at his final semester. After graduation, Lari hopes to finish his poetry book as a manifesto to contribute to the multiple and ongoing efforts to decolonialize this Earth before climate collapse.