Over the course of a week and four events, Silver Press examines freedom through the lenses of collective liberation, bodily autonomy, reproductive justice and feminism.

Who makes decisions about what you can do with your body? Who is considered human? How can a feminist politics of the body connect with frameworks of freedom from violence, domination and war? Now, these longstanding questions have become starkly defined as matters of life and death.

What if justice and care for a collective body – not the sovereign individual – was the starting point for bodily autonomy, and includes those who are marked as different, under siege or no longer with us? As Amia Srinivasan articulates, what would it mean to have a politics that does not flee from vulnerability and dependency?

People are coming together – in protest, community, mutual aid and learning – in response to misogyny, climate catastrophe, political regression and genocide. ‘we shape ourselves with the force of each other’ is a title drawn from poet Sarona Abuaker’s collection Why So Few Women On the Street at Night (the87press), which considers, among other things, ‘palestinian-ness as a queer dimension’. This series of dialogues, performances and readings explore how we articulate and fight for justice and make spaces for mourning, listening, remembering and reading together: how we shape ourselves, with the force of each other.