WHO WE ARE:
Photo by Marion Aguas
Asian American Feminist Collective (AAFC) is a grassroots racial and gender justice group based in New York City engaging in intersectional feminist politics grounded within our diasporic communities. We work to interrogate and dismantle systems of racism, imperialism, patriarchy, and capitalism and are deeply invested in abolition, queer liberation, cross-racial solidarity, and collective joy.
Together and with our partners, AAFC curates community events, tells our stories through various modes of feminist media, and provides spaces for identity exploration, political education, community building, and advocacy.
Asian/American feminism is a world-building project of endless love, solidarity, and imagination. The beauty of the Asian American feminist movement is that we can continue to shape and evolve it together, and we need you! Wherever you are on your political journey and whether or not you consider yourself an activist, we welcome you to come to an event, partner with us on a project or initiative close to your heart, and join our community of feminists building towards a brighter and more just future.
CURRENT LEADERSHIP COMMITTEE:
Founding Leadership: Julie Ae Kim, Rachel Kuo, Senti Sojwal, and Tiffany Diane Tso.
We are also grateful to the leadership, ideas, activism, time and labor of Marion Aguas, Connie Cho, AC Dumlao, Jenn Fang, Adrienne Favis, Sarmishta Govindhan, Shahana Hanif, Caitlin Ho, Jolene Hsu, Marilla Li, Aenea Liang, Thahitun Mariam, Eunice Ok, Alison Roh Park, Annie Pei, Samantha Seid, Anique Singer, Annie Tan, Vivian Truong, Diane Wong, Julia Yang-Winkenbach, Stephanie Yim, Kate Zen and also the many people who contributed to the initial call to edit our definition and manifesto document.
WHAT WE DO:
Photo by Marion Aguas
We bring people together! AAFC creates spaces for people to build, learn together, and connect about Asian American identity, politics, and history. We believe that Asian American identity is not a monolith, and that liberation work can happen anywhere, from the streets to our kitchen tables to group texts. To gather together and share in our experiences is a radical act and the foundation of building a movement.
AAFC curates events, panels, and spaces to be together and learn, grow, and organize. We also make zines and other forms of feminist media that center community storytelling and work closely with partner organizations and activist groups though long term and ongoing collective liberation and organizing.
We build on a long legacy of intersectional feminist activism that has deeply informed our politics, from the Combahee River Collective to the Third World Feminist movements of the 1960s and more. We engage in an open and expansive practice of political education through exploring shared radical histories, hosting panels and performances, and fostering spaces for creative expression and imaginative world-building.
Above all, we’re building community power and growing a radical Asian American feminist public.
WHAT WE BELIEVE:
Asian/American feminism is an ever-evolving practice that seeks to address the multi-dimensional ways Asian/American people confront systems of power at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, disability, migration history and citizenship and immigration status. We are indebted to ways Black feminist thought and Third World feminist movements enable us to think and act critically through our own positionalities to address systems of anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, and xenophobia.
OUR HISTORY
In the groundswell of feminist resistance that launched the Women’s March and Strike in January 2017, we yet again saw the exclusion and tokenization of women of color. It became imperative to revive Asian American feminism and activism to ensure political resistance also adequately represented the needs of Asian American women and girls and marginalized genders.
A group of organizers, scholars, artists and writers in New York City came together to create an event series about Asian American feminism focused on intersectional feminist practices for political action. Topics included Asian American feminist politics, histories, and organizing frameworks.
The inaugural leadership committee, Julie, Rachel, Senti and Tiffany, connected through the building of this series and decided to start the Asian American Feminist Collective (AAFC) to focus on building a movement in New York City that focused on using community building and political education towards coalitional and transnational organizing from a feminist lens. AAFC is possible because of the collective work of multiple people in sharing ideas, time, and labor. We officially launched the collective in 2018 and are continuing to learn, build and grow.
Photo by Marion Aguas
WHY ASIAN AMERICAN FEMINISM?
We urgently need intersectional frameworks and practices for political action. Rather than demand inclusion into mainstream feminism, Asian American feminism offers a platform for sharing narratives and histories that speak to different intersections.
We are moved to action from our histories: from our family histories and why we migrated to the U.S.; from knowing histories of U.S. exclusion, because we were seen as prostitutes, as filthy, as vagrants, as spoils of war, as enemy combatants, as terrorists; from everyday moments of racism and sexism where anger rests in our bodies until we reach a tipping point. Because we bring our histories to feminism, an Asian American feminist movement allows us to draw upon our own lived experiences, material conditions, and historical contexts to move beyond narrow bids for national political and economic inclusion and instead push for radical and alternative pathways to justice.