At a particular moment, about two years ago, while we were still finding our way through the newfound ideas of the chosen family and imagining what it meant to come together as a collective, we found ourselves returning to a simple belief that friendships and shared politics could become the strongest foundation for a lasting endeavour. We were right out of our Master’s courses, and our social sciences education had taught us to imagine the world differently. Our professors, also our heroes in a way, had promised us alternative possibilities and it was this conviction that led us to even think about building a community. Our imaginations of our futures were in sync. The two of us placed a lot of belief in the fact that our relationship was grounded in trust, care, and a shared political imagination. And that everything else could emerge from there rather easily.
But years later, as the term ‘community’ has become one of the defining buzzwords of the moment and we look back at our respective trajectories – not in sync, but distinctly individual—the contradiction feels starker than ever. What was once understood as a process shared between the two of us, now sits against a landscape increasingly shaped by individual ambition.
In times of visibility
Historically, communities were characterised by a sustained sense of purpose. They demanded participation over just presence. They were built through relationships that required time, labour, and reciprocity. Affiliation, if we can call it that, was not simply an identity one claimed but a ‘commitment’ one actively upheld. Perhaps, in a way, commitment gave rise to community, or maybe community cultivated commitment. Either way, the two, in our understanding, came to be inseparable.
Thus, when we talk about community in the present context, it’s almost as if we’ve missed out on the most important foundation of reciprocity that distinguishes community from current forms of networking, consumption, or audience-building, where belonging is often temporary and transactional, with little regard for responsibility.
This dissonance is especially convoluted when we engaged and participated in feminist and queer spaces. We speak of ‘finding community’ and ‘chosen family’ as if they are innately sites of care and safety. For many queer people, they often are. The very concept of chosen families emerges precisely because biological families and dominant institutions fail to recognise or sustain lives that resist conventional order. It’s these sites that offer alternative ways of living and surviving together. But yet, there are times when these concepts are challenged.
In fact, commitment cannot simply be understood as an inherent quality of these spaces, but as something that has to be continually negotiated and practised. How, then, can this commitment be sustained? And what happens when being committed to the collective begins to demand something that conflicts with one’s own needs or direction?
On differences and navigating solidarity
The roots of this essay essentially lie in an evening where we sat discussing the people we know in common, gossiping almost. As individuals working at the intersection of advocacy, media, and feminist practice, we routinely come across groups and collectives doing similar work. What we come across just as often, however, are fallouts, disagreements, and online call-outs within these very spaces.
The gossip slowly grew into rumination, and then into an admission that at various points in our own lives, we too had found ourselves navigating conflict, difference, and the possibility of simply walking away. There was a hint of fear, of saying the wrong thing, of being shunned, of going against the foundational values of what we claimed we wanted to build.
The biggest lie we have been fed about community-building, and any kind of collectivising within feminist spaces, is that its members must agree, that we must all be on board about everything for a collective to hold. That solidarity requires consensus, that shared politics must translate into shared opinions too, and that disagreement is somehow evidence of a failure in the collective. In fact, it is the opposite: a collective is not tested or judged by how easily its members agree, but by what it does with the moments when they do not. Essentially, something we kept going back to in our conversation was the need to remain open to difference while being mindful of the collective as a whole.
At the same time, the differences that arise are difficult to hold back. What does it mean to build something together when the people within it are constantly changing, growing, disagreeing, and moving in different directions? And what does it take to remain committed to one another through these differences, rather than allowing them to become reasons for coming apart? It is in trying to sit with these contradictions that we begin to think about what it actually means to sustain community, not as an absence of conflict, but as the ongoing work of remaining in relation despite it.
On building spaces that last
We approach these questions with an assumption that any kind of community is not a quick antidote to isolation. It is especially not a liberatory space simply because it is queer, feminist or chosen. Our experiences of engagement with similar spaces and systems have made us realise that often these spaces are shaped by the same neoliberal conditions that encourage individualism, emotional exhaustion, and disposability leading to the search for better relationships. Additionally, any space is shaped by the people who inhabit them, bringing with them histories of trauma, unequal power, conflict and learned ways of relating. As a result, chosen families and political communities, can more often than not reproduce the same dysfunctional dynamics that they were meant to escape.
This leads us to more questions: What happens when communities that promised belonging become sites of hurt? When is accountability care and when does it become punishment? If biological families are criticised for demanding endurance at any cost, are queer communities at risk for embracing the opposite?
These questions are not abstract. When we look at the friendships that have lasted around us, there is a quality that often feels absent in so many such spaces and collectives that we now inhabit. The people who stay together are not necessarily the most politically articulate, emotionally aware or ideologically aligned. In many ways, they hold views that we would strongly disagree with, yet they possess something that seems increasingly rare – which is this ability to have difficult conversations without immediately treating disagreements as the end of a relationship. There is space to ask clumsy questions, express uncertainty, apologise imperfectly and continue talking. Conflict is not the basis on which someone deserves not to belong or be heard.
On endurance and sustenance of community spaces
A collective is not made meaningful by the absence of conflict. If anything, conflict is one of the conditions through which a collective comes to understand itself: what its values are, what it will tolerate, what it is willing to negotiate, what it considers non-negotiable, and, most importantly, why it exists in the first place. Yet we seem to have very little language for the space between complete loyalty and complete withdrawal. We are often left with two seemingly available responses – to stay and prove our commitment, or to leave and mark the relationship as irredeemable.
But most of our relationships do not exist at either of these extremes. They are made up of misunderstandings, disappointments, and patterns that we may not recognise until they have already caused harm. To acknowledge this is not to romanticise endurance, or to suggest that people should remain in oppressive relationships. There are moments when leaving is necessary, even life-saving. Rather, it is to ask what happens in the much larger terrain where the question is not simply whether to stay or leave, but how to remain in relation while something is difficult, unresolved, or broken.
This becomes particularly complicated within feminist and queer spaces, where the language of care, solidarity, accountability, and politics can itself become a means of determining who belongs. The very communities formed to resist hierarchies can develop their own hierarchies; spaces created to challenge moral authority can produce new forms of moral authority. Certain ways of speaking, feeling, behaving, and performing politics begin to acquire legitimacy, while others become suspect.
The irony, then, is that in trying to build spaces unlike the institutions we have rejected, we can sometimes reproduce their underlying logics. Thus the more difficult work of collectivising lies in learning to distinguish harm from discomfort, genuine incompatibility from the difficulty of being in relation with people who will never think, feel, or live exactly as we do.
Our experiences of marginalisation profoundly shape how we encounter community, engage in conflict and understand safety. However, shared experiences of oppression do not automatically produce shared practices of care. We still have to do the legwork of understanding how to negotiate disagreement, take responsibility and repair relationships. Identity may explain why we come together but it cannot, on its own, explain how we remain together.
Maybe sustaining a community requires a willingness to stay long enough to learn how to disagree well. To understand that caring involves difficult work and allowing others and ourselves the possibility of change. It is the difficult and unfinished practice of deciding, again and again, whether another way of being together is possible. To commit is to remain accountable to the people through whom community becomes imaginable.
Credit image is assembled by Anjani Chadha using Freepik
