When I (re)entered the community sector in Aotearoa New Zealand as both academic and activist, I was met with a community sector facing immense contemporary challenges for survival. My initial discussions with community members, as I have mentioned in Part I, highlighted a growing despair at the lack of ‘bite’ of the sector and concern for the ways it had become subservient to the power of neoliberalism. Nevertheless, there was still a strong sense that activism continued to be a vital dimension of the community sector and without some form of activism or advocacy that the community sector was failing to live up to its social promise. In both my conversations with people in different parts of the sector and in the collective, I observed that being part of the community sector was also a deeply cherished aspect of the self. Activist identity was often intimately interconnected with the community sector, but the influence of neoliberalism on the sector had caused many of my participants and colleagues to question whether this sense of ‘activist’ was lost. The community sector, including the collective, was grappling with a possible loss of radical social change and outsider activism.

During my conversations with a broad range of community sector activists, before I started volunteering with the collective, I eagerly gathered their perspectives about the community sector and its role in social change. Most of the issues raised by my participants seemed familiar to those I’d already encountered in the academic literature. My participants enthusiastically told me about the immeasurable and positive contributions the community sector made by supporting communities across our country. Kelly described this well when she told me:

The tales my participants shared with me, however, were always enmeshed in a palpable concern regarding the vast difficulties facing many community organizations in Aotearoa New Zealand.

In my discussion of two of the ways we can understand the role of the body in anti-violence activism, I have highlighted that a heightened awareness of our bodily vulnerability unsettles our gendered identities. I now want to explore how the unsettling of identities was taken in a radical direction by my colleagues: understanding women as vulnerable bodies. The formulation of women as vulnerable bodies, characterized by an inherent corporeal vulnerability to violence, proved to be an extremely unsettling formulation, not only for me and my colleagues, but for other women and non-binary folk who came into contact with this formulation when I shared early iterations of this work with the collective, at conferences and in other academic settings. In particular, this formulation seemed unsettling as it appeared to run counter to the decades of activism that emphasized women's empowerment and work towards the celebration of women's bodies as powerful and agentic. The centricity of bodily vulnerability to anti-violence activism for the women I worked with, however, was a striking and salient theme and one that reverberated with activists working on other issues.

In my attempts to come to terms with the implications of my colleagues’ formulation of women as vulnerable bodies and the importance of this formulation for anti-violence activism, I found Butler's conceptualization of vulnerability insightful. Butler (2011b: 200) outlines vulnerability as having a twofold meaning:

Drawing on Butler's conceptualization of vulnerability, I interpreted my colleagues as not only trying to recognize women's physical vulnerability to others, but also that they were attempting to underscore that we needed to cultivate the capacity to be moved or impressed on by women subjected to violence. Positioning women as vulnerable bodies accentuated the pressing need to promote institutional and domestic protection of women. Throughout my time with the collective, I too was moved by my own exposure to my colleagues and our activism with victims, and eventually came to understand women's dependency on one another and the social conditions that produced women as vulnerable bodies.

In a square in central Sydney on a warm evening in late November 2018, one rose is laid for each woman killed by domestic violence this year in Australia. So far, there have been 63. Different country, I think, same rotten feeling. I am practised at citing such numbers: 137 women are killed every day by an intimate partner around the world; one in three women in my home country of Aotearoa New Zealand will be subjected to violence at the hands of their partner; LGBT+ folk are at least twice as likely to be subjected to sexual violence by an intimate partner than their heterosexual counterparts, but are less likely to seek help for fear of discrimination. The numbers are practically etched onto my skin. There is a pressing need to create a more just world for women and gender minorities. The numbers alone support that conclusion. But the numbers, while shocking, can feel impersonal. The jolt from numbers can quickly pass. A moment of disbelief, or pain, or maybe even anger. Then gone. Violence might as well be woven into the very fabric of our societies. It is vital to see that each number is a person, and each person is a history; a community; a society; a story. I carry these stories in my bones.

Yet, I cannot think of the dead without remembering those who work to find them justice. They stand before me laying roses as pedestrians pass by to signify that these deaths are a social shame; they march in the streets with placards stating ‘I can't believe I still need to protest this shit’; they sit with victims in the family court; they meet with government representatives; they sit around tables in cold, damp offices making collective decisions; they demand workplaces take responsibility for their employees. Mostly, I think of the buzz of an open-plan office first thing on a Friday morning. I think of my voluntary work alongside one collective of feminist anti-violence activists. I think of women shouting to one another. Laughing with one another. Having serious whispered conversations. Closing doors.

It took me a long time to comprehend the sheer force of will and bravery it took my colleagues to stake a claim to a feminist activist identity in the collective. This revelation came as somewhat of a surprise given that the collective defined itself by a feminist anti-violence standpoint. Like many anti-domestic and sexual violence activist groups that grew out of the women's liberation movements in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s, the collective was founded on a second wave feminist approach to gendered violence (Else, 1993; Connolly, 2004). This history was still influential, and the collective continued to express a commitment to feminism in their everyday activism. The collective was also understood to be feminist by our communities and other community sector organizations. As my voluntary work brought me into contact with a wider range of stakeholders, however, I became increasingly aware of the complexities of identifying as a feminist activist in the context of the community sector. There was the possibility of having our charitable status revoked (Elliott, 2016) as well as the fear of losing government funding for claiming a political status of agenda (Grey and Sedgwick, 2013b). Additionally, my colleagues told me stories of other people and organizations not wanting to associate with us on the basis of our political commitments. For example, a private sector organization refused to work with us as we were ‘those bloody feminists’ and we received regular backlash online for our feminist stance. For our aim as a group of anti-violence activists to end gendered violence, productive relationships, access to funding, and influence with the government were important; but so too were our feminist politics and principles.

At the same time as I was becoming more aware of the complexities of feminism in our various relationships in the community sector, I was engaged in formal interviews with some of my colleagues. In all the interviews my colleagues shared stories with me about their identities as feminist activists. I was struck by the difficulties they expressed in being recognized by their colleagues as feminist activists. Within the collective, as well as with stakeholders, it appeared that being a feminist activist was permeated by complexity.