In Other Words, the Portland feminist bookstore and community center, has announced in a statement on its website that it will close at the end of June. The statement cites reasons including increased expenses and the lack of funds, volunteers, and board members, along with an inability to "reform and re-envision" a space founded on "white, cis feminism (read: white supremacy)" to make it more reflective of contemporary feminism.

As the In Other Words website says, the independent feminist bookstore and community center was founded in 1993, and moved from its original location on Southeast Hawthorne to its Northeast Killingsworth space in 2006. The mission of In Other Words, according to the website, is "to strengthen resistance against a culture of oppression. We seek to create a safer space where women, people of color, queer, trans, gender variant folks, workers, and those who live at the intersections of these identities can organize for self-determination and build a sustainable movement for liberation."

The volunteer-run space gained a national profile thanks to its association with "Portlandia," though In Other Words later made headlines for repudiating the IFC sketch comedy show.

From the start, "Portlandia" filmed its best-known sketches, featuring Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein as humorless feminists operating a bookstore called "Women and Women First," at In Other Words.

But it all blew up in 2016, when members of the In Other Words community cut ties with "Portlandia," and published a blog post on the website (which includes R-rated language) accusing crew members of leaving the store in a mess, noting that being on "Portlandia" didn't make any money for the center, and attacking the show on a cultural level, as having had "a net negative effect on our neighborhood and the city of Portland as a whole."

In Other Words has weathered financial crises in the past, and in 2014, the center put out a call for an infusion of support to save it from closure.

Though In Other Words rallied enough support and volunteer effort to keep going, the statement posted on the center website says the periodic discussions of closing because of lack of money and people "isn't sustainable, especially emotionally, for the people who come here and work to provide this space as a resource to Portland Feminist communities. Even if funds poured in, and masses of people showed up in response to this announcement, we would not continue our tenure here."

The statement continues: "We cannot continue because we know reform does not work. The current volunteers and board members stepped into and took over a space that was founded on white, cis feminism (read: white supremacy). It's really difficult, actually, impossible, for us to disentangle from that foundational ideology. Volunteers and board members tried to reform and re-envision the organization, and have found it unattainable to do, especially with so little resources. We have experienced this as a very real reminder that reform doesn't work. Patriarchy, White Supremacy, Capitalism cannot be reformed and ever serve the people. Abolition is the goal."

Critical Resistance Portland, an organization described on its website as "a small group of dedicated prison industrial complex abolitionists who decided to start a CR chapter in Portland to help magnify and spread the work of CR and local prison industrial complex abolitionists," is working to keep the In Other Words space open as a community center, according to the statement on the In Other Words website

The closing of In Other Words is part of a larger trend of feminist bookstores going out of business. As the center's website says, when it opened in 1993, there were more than 200 feminist bookstores in the U.S.

-- Kristi Turnquist



kturnquist@oregonian.com

503-221-8227

@Kristiturnquist