Feminist Duration Reading Group as Minor Democracy

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Reckitt, Helena. 2025. 'Feminist Duration Reading Group as Minor Democracy'. In: Minor Democracies and Their Infrastructures. Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom 24 & 25 June 2025. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Official URL: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/events/event/49552/centre-fo...

Abstract or Description

Helena Reckitt's talk explored the Feminist Duration Reading Group, a collecrtively-devised reading and events programme that she initiated in 2015 and which she co-organises with a Working Group of seven other feminists and a fluid group of partners and collaborators.

Her talk introduced the group's key focus on reading out loud together as a form of accompaniment that builds intimacy and relational bonds, and touched on issues including the politics of citation and dynamics of entrustment. Exploring the group's creation of a symbolic network of relations, Reckitt discussed the ways in which the FDRG aims to make space in the archive or historical record for matriarchs and mentees alike, creating intergenerational feminist networks.

Reckitt also discussed some of the questions and vexations that have arisen over the group's development. These include the potential risks of instrumentalizing other people's work and ideas. How, in contrast, can we work in feminist ways that are generative and inclusive rather than extractive and cliquey? Or are groups like this inevitably self-selecting and self-reproducing? She highlighted potential struggles over visibility, authorship, and credit, and the deep emotions stirred up by related forms of psychoanalytically-oriented feminist group work.

Touching on questions of intergenerational transmission of feminist practices and knowledge, Reckitt asked "What happens when feminist heroes adopt politics that I/we find problematic and offensive?"

Reckitt raised problematics around the dangers of 'selling ourselves short,' providing free or cheap programme content for institutions that want to tick the feminist 'box,' and asked where care for the public profile of an endeavour like the FDRG builds, as well as detracts from, care for the group.

In conclusion, Reckitt asked Why Does it Work? Or, rather, What works, when it works?

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Talk)

Additional Information:

The workshop was organised by Professor Elena Loizidou, Professor of Law and Political Theory, Birkbeck Law School.

Dr Loizidou announced the Workshop as follows:

Democracy’s infrastructures have expanded. While democracy’s conventional structures (e.g.,houses of elected representatives, courts) and infrastructures (demonstrations, petitions, plebiscites, referendums) are still intact they are simultaneously wavering under the growth of populism, finance and information economies (Vogl). In the 21st century nevertheless, we see the growth of minor democracies (Deleuze) that appear in a variety of forms such as people assemblies, mutual aid groups, and cooperative business (Harcourt). Such minor democracies existed, at least since the 19th century, but their resurfacing and visibility urges us to study their role and effects in our times.

The programme aims to approach this phenomenon with curiosity and openness and ask the following questions:

- Are these minor democracies the ideal or utopian version of our current democratic structures and infrastructures?
- Do they operate as ‘support systems’ or ‘bandage’ (so in ways that are complementary) to our current formal democracies?
- Do they replicate formal democracy’s practices? (e.g., voting, deliberation, etc.,)?
- Do they function as reparative and therapeutic spaces?
- Or are they antagonistic to the formal sites and institutions of democratic politics?