Everyday scenes of being unheard, “included” but not belonging, and being conscripted into unpaid affective labor expose how the liberal public sphere (academia, politics, media) is structurally masculinist, demanding not accommodation within its rules but a feminist re-staging of the rules themselves. Linking #MeToo and transnational women’s strikes to theoretical lineages (Honig’s sororal pact, Berlant’s privatized citizenship, Ahmed’s willfulness, Fraser on capitalism, Habermas détourned via Cixous/Debord), the text argues for a common, internationalist feminism that refuses moral partitioning and neoliberal capture while insisting on ‘having it all’—rights, desire, care, and collective justice without reproducing carceral governance.

Feminism is framed as a future-oriented “virtual” project that demands new art-historical concepts—exemplified by the Virtual Feminist Museum and Warburg’s Pathosformel—to read embodied gestures (notably “lying down”) as affective transmissions where abjection, vulnerability, and “corporeal eloquence” become aesthetic modes of political thought. Through Khurana’s and Biswas’s postcolonial feminist practices, the text retools Arendt’s polis/space of appearance and power-as-potential to argue that art can incite political subjectivity and collective action while critiquing Eurocentric body norms, neoliberal exhibition circuits, and reductive narratives of feminism (waves, generational antagonism) that erode the movement’s plural, agonistic, world-making force.