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Feminist methodologies impel us to explore connections that are not always evident. And they drive us to inhabit contradictions and discover what is productive in these contradictions. Feminism insists on methods of thought and action that urge us to think about things together that appear to be separate, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.

Section Eight: Feminism and Abolition, from which this passage is taken, draws attention to the fundamental feminist principles influencing Davis’s thinking. Davis explains that feminism teaches us to explore the hidden mechanisms of power or control that link things, people, or ideas that appear distinct or disparate. It insists that we interrogate what it means to say social expectations are “natural.” Davis’s understanding of what feminism requires leads her to center the fight for trans equality, for example, and to question what people think is or should be “natural” to women. Feminist methodologies provide ways to see through, and thus dismantle an ideology’s constructions.

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