2026 National Women's Studies Association Workshop - Being Wild: Abandoning the Master’s Tools and Coming Home to Ourselves

Our era demands disembodiment and a subdued consciousness. How might we more wildly inhabit ourselves, our bodies? Fatima Ife, in Maroon Choreography, writes, "I refuse the choreographed apparatuses of coloniality, its methodologies, its origin stories, its naming rituals, and its movements." This interactive session includes individual and group singing, movement, and guided creative writing. Co-conveners will play guitar/sing songs (tributes to Tina Turner, Sinead O’Conner, and Hiba Abu Nada) and move with our wild feminist ancestors – bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Academia demands that we leave our bodies at the door, abandoning our radicality and wild ways of being. We’re told that our bodies impede knowledge production, and we’re rewarded when we forget them, tightly control them, or order them—futher deadening our spirits and creativity. Academic classrooms echo patriarchal needs for the tamed bodyminds, further erasing feminist wildness. We hope that participants will leave wilder than they came. Come and recover your wildness! 

This session offers a gathering space for wild feminist imaginings. We move towards a wildness that’s unknowable, and thus able to sustain unfathomable, sensuous, and liberatory forms of living. Together we’ll shepherd each other towards (re)activating our collective wildness. We’ll facilitate a discussion about the ways in which we’re tamed by patriarchal structures in the classroom, and how that taming dulls us–making it impossible for us to think, let alone dream and build together, wildly. Undergirding this is the notion that women/femme/female wildness is dangerous and disruptive. This session's objective is to give space to things we feel we can't say out loud, out of fear of being too wild or too out-of-place. We root in theoretical frameworks of Black Feminisims, Erotics, Feminst poetics, and abolitionist pedagogy.