This Thursday, on Joy of Resistance, Fran Luck will interview Sathi Patel, a key organizer of the TORCH Conference, a radical feminist anti-imperialist conference held in Worcester MA, October 9 - 11, sponsored by the radical feminist collective that publishes the magazine "Total Woman Victory". The conference drew together young women in their 20's and older pioneer feminists for the purpose of forging continuity between generations and "passing the torch" of radical feminism and our feminist history to a new generation.

The following is from a statement put out by conference organizers:

TORCH is a weekend-long radical feminist conference calling on women who recognize the decisive break between anti-imperialist feminism and feminism that serves empire to begin organizing independently. This gathering centers women who understand that institutional feminism has repeatedly proven loyal to imperialist and male supremacist interests. TORCH is a space for women committed to rebuilding feminist politics on clear, uncompromising terms.

TORCH seeks to return feminism to its most radical roots: collective political education, disciplined organizing, and consciousness-raising grounded in women’s material conditions. This gathering is about creating tangible, lasting connections between women.

On the Joy of Resistance program this Thusday, we will discuss:

• What prompted the conference;
• the feminist evolution of the women (most in their 20's), who organized it and why they found it necessary to reach back two generations in order to connect with a history to which they could relate--which resulted in their reaching out to feminist pioneers Kathie Sarachild and Carol Hanisch to lead workshops;
• how the conference almost didn't happen because of three successful attempts to intimidate host sites to withdraw their offers to host it on the day it was to start-- and how, on the second day, an attempted disruption of the conference by violent demonstrators resulted in 3 arrests;
• why the organizers found it necessary to limit the conference to biological women;
• what happened at the conference;
• the organizers' vision of uniting the many branches of feminism into one united movement that can defeat the Right and ultimately male supremacy.

On this show we will open up the phone lines for listeners to call and ask questions and voice opinions on the subjects discussed. Your calls are most welcome.

The number to call to get on the air is (212) 209-2877. Barring unforeseen circumstances, we will start taking calls at about 11:30 AM. If the line is busy, please keep calling until you get through. Please make your comments and questions as breifly as you can, as we expect many calls and want to have as many people get on the air as possible.

Sathi Patel Bio

Sathi Patel coordinates the proofreading process as an editor for Total Woman Victory. Based in Worcester, MA, she organizes with Project Priceless (https://www.instagram.com/project.priceless/) a collective or women surviving prostituting through homelessness and addiction. Already a student of revolutionary Marxism, she found that it failed to answer the sex-class contradictions she witnessed in the street economy--until discovering Andrea Dworkin's book "Intercourse", which sharpened her radical politics by placing women's oppression at the center of the analysis (see links to her articles, below). Sathi is a founding member of Implacable Books, a radical bookshop in Worcester, MA, with a focus on Black radical politics, feminism and anti-imperialism.

See the impact of the development of her incisive and dissident feminist politic through her various essays published in TWV: "The Sex Contradiction" (https://totalwomenvictory.substack.com/p/the-sex-contradiction) and more!