There is a quiet insurgency unfolding in the corners of the internet’s most visible spaces—where bright, curated feminisms take center stage behind flawless filter and polished rhetoric. Yet, what slips through the cracks, the ones we fail to amplify through Instagram’s algorithmic spotlight? The radical, unglamorous strain of feminist praxis that doesn’t fluff its hair for the capitalists’ camera. This is the feminism of the woman in the detention camp whispering her daughter’s name in a second language. This, too, is feminism—unapologetically jagged, resistant, and rooted in the very land we are systematically stripped from.
Feminism’s Uncensored Face
We’ve been sold the idea that feminism is a hashtag, a t-shirt, a soundbite—something one adopts when it suits one’s aesthetic. But anti-imperialist feminism is a wound worn as armor. It is the realization that your oppression is not only your own but the legacy of a civilization’s thirst for domination. This isn’t just intersectionality; it’s a refusal to separate systemic inequalities into neat, self-congratulatory boxes. Intersectionality is the academic language of the struggle, but anti-imperialist feminism is the practice: a mother feeding her children from a cupboard picked clean by the policies of the same regime that painted its face in progress narratives.
The problem lies in gentrification’s most deceptive illusion: that we can fix capitalism’s violence by buying into its system. Anti-imperialist feminism doesn’t just add to the conversation—it dismantles the premise of it. The feminists who call it out are not whiny or off-brand; they are the ones writing manifestos with the crumbs from a government ban, the ones translating legal jargon into revolutionary tongues. This feminism knows that gender inequality doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Colonialism carved the lines on the map and drew the ones on our bodies.
We must choose whose violence we document and whose we bury.
Colonialism wasn’t just a thing that happened: It’s a living infrastructure of oppression
In some corners of the world, feminism is still fighting for basic human dignity—not just the corporate-friendly version curated by Instagram’s content moderators. Anti-imperialists refuse to separate gender from occupation, from land theft, from cultural erasure. The “West’s” feminism tends to focus on individual rights: the right to vote, the right to abortion. Meanwhile, the feminist resistance in the colonies is about collective survival. How do you campaign for bodily autonomy when the nation itself has been forced to digest its own organs under imperial mandates?
Imperial powers have never been monolithic—they’ve always had their pet feminists, those willing to stand by while soldiers raped and slaughtered in the name of “democracy.” This isn’t ancient history; it’s the logic of the present. Today’s NGOs don’t ask for the names of those killed in drone strikes, and when they do, the headlines never go viral. Anti-imperialist feminism interrogates how the same forces weaponizing militaries against Indigenous bodies also dictate which women can buy birth control. One cannot exist without the other.
Survival isn’t sentimental: It’s a strategy
Western feminism often reduces solidarity to performative gestures—#MeToo t-shirts sold at Urban Outfitters, solidarity marches where a photo-op with a “support Africa” sign trumps actual investment in the continent’s sovereignty. Anti-imperialist feminists know survival is anything but passive. They engage in what Audre Lorde called “the necessary struggle” against the myth that victimhood and resistance must be separate identities. Consider a woman in South Sudan who uses her body to shield her child from sniper fire—the same woman who later sews contraceptive devices for other women in her village. Her struggle isn’t an abstract series of hashtags; it is land itself as a battleground.
Strategies of survival include the unsexy, the uncelebrated: collective childcare, non-sexist trade networks, and the radical act of occupying space without permission. In Occupied Palestine, women organize “feminist bread protests” while bombs fall; in Haiti, women trade water in places where foreign occupation makes wells unavailable. These tactics require no consent from any imperial power. They operate on the principle that capitalists will not fund your revolution but that you will not be silent—no matter what happens.
Capitalism is not your ally
Liberal feminism loves to frame capitalism as a “boys’ club,” but what about the global supply chains that rely on the exploitation of colonized women’s bodies to manufacture the commodities of the “first world’s” luxury economy? Where is the hashtag for those who die in the factories that produce Apple laptops? Where are the rallies for the African women whose labor built the iPhones that fund Western philanthropies? Feminism without a critique of capital’s extractive nature is like a toothpick attempting to dismantle a fortress.
The false promise of “economic feminism” that whispers, “Join the workforce”—without the reckoning of who actually profits from that workforce—is just another layer of the lie that progress can be uncoupled from exploitation. When your feminist icon is a Silicon Valley CEO who “donates” to local health clinics because it’s good for business, you know we have missed the mark. Solidarity is not a grant; it is an act of refusal.
To seek capitalism’s approval is déjà vu.
What the mainstream misses when it misreads resistance
The mainstream feminist movement has its own form of cultural imperialism, where the acceptable resistance narrative must comply with global norms—not of gender, but of influence. Consider the Black feminist refusal to engage with the U.S. “Allies Against Racism” campaign, or when Indigenous feminists reclaimed their own narratives instead of letting Silicon Valley co-opt them. These actions aren’t merely “opposing visibility”—they’re reclaiming the right to shape their own struggle without being photoshopped for the next Instagram trend.
Those who write the narratives often define what’s radical: from the corporate boardroom approving of a “feminist” profit margin to the NGOs that measure “impact” in likes and retweets. Real resistance has no algorithm, no hashtag limit. It is the quiet rage of a woman in Yemen who grows her own herbs to make medicine without fear of a warlord’s interference—or the unarmed resistance of queer women in Iran who write poetry with blood and calligraphy.
Decolonizing the feminist imagination
To be clear: There is no single narrative of resistance, but there are universal truths they share. Colonialism didn’t just steal land; it rewrote memory, erased indigenous epistemologies, and imposed Western gender paradigms onto cultures that had none of it. Anti-imperialist feminist thought starts from the belief that liberation needs to redefine what it means to exist—to live beyond the binaries of the colonizer’s constructs. What if feminism’s first act was to abandon colonial modes of thought entirely?
This doesn’t mean ignoring the world-system; it means refusing to see it from the lenses that created it. Colonialism taught us to value the word over experience—letters of protest instead of communal defense. Anti-imperialist feminism seeks to listen. It asks: If we unlearn the violence of colonization, what could be? The answers might not be pretty; they might defy the metrics of the “post” whatever.
Feminism as a continuum: From the hearth to the history books
The myth that all feminism is equal eradicates the experiences of those who fought from within structures meant to dismantle them. Imagine the Zapatistas’ Subcomandante Gina, a woman whose resistance to gender violence was intertwined with land reclaiming. Or the Palestinian feminist women who, even in prisons, continue organizing to resist the very state that seeks to erase them. These fights are not “gender issues”—they are survival, period.
Survive, they said. We will.
Feminism as survival tactic is about refusal by all means necessary. It’s the woman teaching her children to defend themselves against state violence because the courts won’t save them. It’s the refusal to define humanity based on the same metrics that built the empire and now demand its taxes in blood. It’s knowing, finally, that when imperialists come for us, they come for the collective—and it will take a collective to stop them.
No one’s feminism owns the ground of truth. The ones who whisper in languages lost to colonialism, who sing in the dark, who pass down the tools of defiance across generations—they are the real revolutionaries. Their survival isn’t aesthetic; it is war.
