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Complicity and coloniality are not abstract forces, but deeply personal experiences and questions. Through an ethnographic meditation of the 2017 Beirut Workers’ Day March, this paper explores how feminist activists, researchers, and advocates can openly work through moments in which we are complicit in oppression. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of encounter as method, the author reflects on the dynamics of solidarity, sponsorship, control, and privilege at the march, an annual event calling for the rights of migrant domestic workers and an end of the kafala (sponsorship) system in Lebanon, coorganized by migrant domestic worker activists, non-governmental organizations, and feminist communities. The paper contextualizes the encounter by defining the kafala system as a patriarchal state structure, proposes a distinction between “complicit feminisms” and moments of feminist complicity, and explores how coloniality infiltrates individual bodies and collective action. Then, the author relays her experience of embodied privilege and systems of control at the march, as a feminist supporter and volunteer member of the security team charged with keeping protestors safe. This paper builds on traditions of feminist self-critique and celebration, in analyzing the struggles and successes of solidarity between migrant domestic worker activists and feminist communities in Beirut. Complicity is inevitable when our bodies are markers of privilege, even when we are engaged in feminist, anti-racist, and anticapitalist practices. This does not mean that we should uniformly retreat, but that we need to interrogate our good intentions and the way that power is constructed within our bodies, and adapt – tactically, individually, and collectively.

Slowing It Down: Embodied Complicity and the Challenges of Feminist Solidarity at the 2017 Beirut Workers’ Day March