A letter to Beyoncé

They say that all people in the world are six connections away from each other. TERAZ POLIŻ decided to see if this hypothesis also applies to feminist pop culture icons. It started like this: Dorota Glac’s partner at the time knew a sound engineer who worked on Beyoncé’s tour. Dorota was heavily influenced by Beyoncé and had been introducing the whole team to the meanders of the artist’s music for a long time. The girls therefore decided to ask the sound engineer to pass the letter to the pop star. It expressed their appreciation for the artist and asked her to support TERAZ POLIŻ’s work for women in Poland.

The collectively-edited letter was packed into a pink gift bag along with the team’s t-shirt and delivered to the airport, from where the sound engineer was going to depart for a big international adventure. When asked about the further fate of the letter, the TERAZ POLIŻ team members were unable to answer whether it ever reached Beyoncé at all. One thing’s for sure – they didn’t get a response.

While reading the draft version of the letter shared with the archive readers, I was amused, touched and sad at the same time. Although a belief in the power of transnational alliances between feminist activists shines through from the text, the comments in the margin show an acute awareness of the power imbalance between a grassroots, niche, precarious creative group and a mainstream artist who makes millions from each album.

Would it be possible to form an alliance between Central and Eastern European anti-capitalist feminists and a representative of liberal American feminism? The story of the letter to Beyoncé provides a better understanding of how the intersectional nature of social exclusions makes it difficult to build solidarity among women – although we each experience gender discrimination, we have different class origin, race and geopolitical locations, so our goals are often different.