What is Femtorship? With special guest BJ Weaver.
Dear friends,
Lately, we’ve been thinking about femtorship.
Not mentorship as a ladder. Not expertise as something handed down from above. Not the quiet pressure to become more polished, more productive, more acceptable.
Femtorship feels different.
It is a feminist practice of accompaniment. A way of learning beside each other. A way of making space for the questions, contradictions, and unfinished parts of creative life.
Femtorship can look like an artist sharing what they know without pretending to have everything figured out.
It can look like a friend reading your draft with care. A collective holding the shape of a project when one person is tired. An elder offering context. A peer asking the question that brings you back to yourself.
In feminist creative practice, knowledge does not only live in institutions, credentials, or finished work. It lives in kitchens, studios, archives, WhatsApp threads, community spaces, movement gatherings, and long conversations after the event is over.
Femtorship asks us to notice how we are formed by each other.
Who taught us that our work mattered? Who gave us permission without needing to be asked? Who helped us unlearn the rules that made our voices smaller? Who showed us that care can be a method, not an afterthought?
This is also a decolonial question. Because many of us have inherited systems that separate teacher from student, artist from audience, theory from lived experience, and value from relationship.
Femtorship interrupts that separation.
It reminds us that creative practice is not only about individual expression. It is also about responsibility, reciprocity, memory, and repair.
To be femtored is to be witnessed in process. To femtor is to offer what we can without ownership. To practice femtorship is to believe that collective change begins in the ways we listen, share, cite, gather, and make room.
A few questions to sit with this week:
- Who has femtored you, formally or informally?
- What did they make possible in your creative or political life?
- Where are you being invited to offer care, context, or encouragement without control?
- What forms of knowledge do you carry that were never named as expertise?
- How might your creative practice change if you treated relationship as part of the work?
We also created a FREE downloadable PDF Femtorship Discussion Guide to help you keep the conversation going. You can find it through our website.
If this reflection stirred something, stay close.
WTF: The Other F Word Dispatch is a space for feminist creative practice, collective change, decolonial thought, community, care, and artist-led expression.
We’ll keep sharing notes, questions, and invitations for those making work inside and alongside feminist worlds.
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