Undoing the world together: feminist facilitation as play, care, and revolt

This article examines the workshopped practices of Hybrid Women, a transnational feminist performance collective working between the UK and Italy, through Sheila Preston’s notion of critical facilitation. We argue that Hybrid Women’s workshops function as laboratories of feminist praxis in which facilitation is enacted as a relational, performative, and politically implicated practice, rather than a neutral technique. Framed through the metaphor of carnival as a c/littoral zone – a tidal, porous space of becoming – the paper explores how play, risk, and care are mobilized to unsettle fixed identities, pedagogical hierarchies, and neoliberal demands for coherence and outcomes. Drawing on four main works by Hybrid Women, Building a Boat for Tempestuous Times, Songs of Sirens not Semen, C/littoral Fleure (all 2023), and Dirty Places-Clean Spaces (2025), the article foregrounds workshopping as a mode of collective enquiry that stays with contradiction, discomfort, and excess.