Who Did Feminism Leave Behind?

bell hooks argued that mainstream feminism was built by and for middle-class white women, a movement whose victories quietly stopped at the edge of the freedoms for that specific group of women. Boardrooms opened. Prisons didn't empty. The hypothesis was that feminism, left unchecked, would keep solving the problems of the women already closest to power, leaving marginalised women behind.

bell hooks said mainstream feminism was built for women who were already halfway to power. It's been forty years. Does her argument still hold? Has feminism through DEI departments, intersectionality, and Black feminist writers and activists metabolised the critique? Has hooks’ argument become the new consensus or are we perhaps not far from where she left us?

This event brings that exact question on the table: has feminism closed its blind spot, or have we just learned to talk and work around it?

This is not a panel discussion. It is a safe space for an honest and bold conversation to better understand the narratives we surrender to.

About the speakers

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer, organiser and researcher from London. Her work focuses on the utility of the political imagination in the textual and visual cultures of radical social movements, examining the role cultural production plays in materialist resistance and collective conceptualisations of futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021), the forthcoming Against Literature (2026) and a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. She occasionally curates and is a member of the organising team at the Feminist Library based in Peckham.

Sana Afouaiz is a multi-award-winning gender expert, women's rights advocate, and international public speaker who has addressed audiences in over 50 countries at global institutions, forums, and universities. She is the founder and CEO of Womenpreneur Initiative, launched in 2016 to empower women in technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation across Europe and the MENA region, training more than 25,000 women and establishing Belgium's first tech training centre exclusively for women. She is also the author of Invisible Women of the Middle East and was awarded the Amnesty International Award 2025 for her work advancing women's rights.

Tamara Makoni is an inclusion specialist with broad experience in diversity, equity and inclusion and cross-cultural leadership. Her passion for this stems from growing up across 3 continents, and has deepened through study, travel and working with teams in 30+ countries while leading projects for large multinationals. She recently published "Women, Intersectionality & Europe” shining a light on the diverse realities of women across the European continent, not just the EU.

In conversation with Jeta Bejtullahu, Narrative Strategist, Last Kind Words

Jeta Bejtullahu is a narrative strategist known to dig into difficult conversations, with kindness and humour, not to unsettle but to understand where differences lie and what bridges we need to build and cross. She founded Last Kind Words in 2023 to kindly and consciously redesign new frameworks and narratives to fill in the vacuum in this era of narrative war. She is a trainer and speaker on storytelling and creativity - raising awareness about the power of both to reshape political and cultural space.