In an era defined by exhaustion, acceleration, and relentless demands for performance, gentleness often appears as a luxury, or worse, a weakness. It is dismissed as apolitical, sentimental, even indulgent. Within feminist discourse, the dominant emotional register has long been one of anger, and rightly so. Rage has been a necessary tool for survival. It has carved out space, demanded attention, and forced oppressive structures to reckon with their own brutality. But there is another form of resistance that does not shout but sustains, does not demand but defies. That form is softness.
To be soft in a world that hardens you is not surrender. It is a refusal. It is a disruption of the script that says strength must look like detachment, stoicism, or domination. In the architectures of patriarchy and capitalism, the body is not allowed to break, and the heart is not allowed to ache. These systems demand performance: resilience as endurance, productivity as worth, emotional distance as power. Softness undermines all three. It insists on being porous, open, vulnerable. It challenges the glorification of burnout, the fetishisation of emotional invulnerability, and the narrative that survival necessitates self-erasure.
Audre Lorde’s articulation of self-care as a political act, rather than a commodified ritual, provides a radical lens through which to understand softness. She writes, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Her words are often quoted, but less often internalised. For Lorde, care is not an individualistic retreat from the world. It is a conscious act of rebellion against systems that seek to erase Black, queer, disabled, and marginalised lives. To be soft, to nurture, to protect one’s interiority, is to survive in a world built for one’s disappearance.
The feminist theorist Sara Ahmed deepens this understanding by suggesting that emotions are not simply interior experiences but also public, political practices. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed writes that emotions “stick” to bodies, narratives, and institutions. They shape how we navigate the world and how the world navigates us. Softness, in this sense, is not an affect without consequence. To choose softness is to reposition oneself against dominant emotional economies that privilege detachment, ambition, and emotional endurance. It is to make room for other kinds of affective relations that prioritise care, presence, and connection.
Cultural texts often reflect and prefigure the political potential of gentleness. Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) offers a cinematic meditation on the often-overlooked force of domestic life and emotional generosity. Rather than situating political agency solely in rebellion or transformation, the film locates it in care, in sisterhood, in the ethical labour of tending to one another. The characters are not naïve or weak. They are layered, self-aware, and deeply committed to imagining a world where emotional honesty is not punished but honoured. Beth March, in particular, becomes emblematic of a type of strength that is often rendered invisible. Her kindness is not a product of ignorance or passivity. It is a conscious decision to meet the world without armour.
This aesthetic and ethical commitment to softness echoes in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Long dismissed as a children’s story, the book is a deeply political critique of the adult world’s obsession with logic, hierarchy, and conquest. The fox’s assertion that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly” refuses the epistemologies of detachment that underpin patriarchal and capitalist rationality. To know someone, in this universe, is to allow oneself to be tamed. It is to risk vulnerability. The Little Prince is not sentimental. He is radically attentive. He listens, asks questions, and insists on seeing beyond appearances. In this, he becomes a model of relational intelligence that challenges conventional hierarchies of value.
Softness, then, is not simply a personal aesthetic. It is a political choice. It is a way of resisting the dehumanisation that accompanies systemic violence. To remain soft in a world that rewards indifference requires clarity, not confusion. It demands that one continue to feel, to empathise, to extend oneself even in the face of overwhelming cruelty. This does not mean that softness must be uncritical or endlessly giving. Boundaries are not antithetical to care. Rather, they are what make ethical softness possible. A politics of gentleness requires that we be discerning about where our care flows and who benefits from it.
One of the key failures of contemporary discourse around softness lies in its commodification. The so-called “soft girl” aesthetic, proliferated through curated Instagram grids and melancholy selfies, often empties the concept of its ethical or political weight. Softness becomes a brand. It is stripped of context, struggle, or solidarity. In this iteration, softness is no longer resistant. It is passive. It is consumed. A feminist politics of softness must resist this aestheticisation and instead return to intention. Why do we choose to be soft? For whom? In service of what?
This is especially urgent in activist spaces, where emotional labour is disproportionately borne by women and marginalised individuals. The behind-the-scenes care work like holding space for grief, managing interpersonal conflict, de-escalating tensions, is often feminised and rendered invisible. Yet it is foundational. Without it, movements collapse under the weight of their own urgency. The work of sustaining collectives, of protecting one another, of nurturing futures, requires gentleness. Rage may fuel the fire, but softness keeps it burning.
This is not to argue that softness is always safe. In fact, it is often punished. To be gentle is to risk being misunderstood, dismissed, or exploited. But this risk is precisely what makes it powerful. It opens space for complexity. It refuses binary categories of strength and weakness, radicalism and complicity. It makes room for nuance. And in doing so, it offers a feminist future that is not just about dismantling what exists but about imagining what else might be possible.
When we speak of liberation, we must also speak of livability. What kinds of people are we becoming? The political must be livable, and the livable must include the right to feel, to rest, to be held. A revolution that cannot hold tenderness is not one that will last. It will reproduce the very violence it seeks to escape. Softness is not an afterthought. It is the infrastructure of another way of being. In moments of personal and collective collapse, softness becomes a form of resistance that is not reducible to individual coping. It is a way of remaining human. When institutions fail and systems crack, it is often the softest gestures that sustain life. A hand held. A meal cooked. A body rested. These actions are not trivial. They are what keep us tethered to one another. They are acts of refusal. They say, I am not afraid to feel. I am not afraid to care. I am not afraid to love.
The feminist future does not only rage. It rests. It writes poems and braids hair and makes soup and stitches quilts and names the pain and does not flinch when it arrives. It understands that survival is not the end goal. Flourishing is. And flourishing is impossible without softness. To be soft is not to be without teeth. It is to choose not to bite unless absolutely necessary. It is to know that you could, and to decide instead to speak. It is to rage and then return, to fight and then hold, to persist and also to pause. This balance, this refusal to flatten oneself into either passivity or aggression, is what makes softness the most enduring form of resistance. In choosing softness, we are not choosing ease. We are choosing a mode of living that refuses cruelty even when cruelty is the currency of the world.
