Shaila Shah

Shaila Shah moved from India to Britain in the 1970s. She identifies as a Black lesbian radical feminist, with anti-imperial and socialist political beliefs. She was a co-founder of the mixed collective which produced and published the internationalist feminist newspaper Outwrite. The newspaper lasted for six years between 1982 and 1988. The idea for the publication arose at the Women’s Liberation Movement conference in 1979, where the need for a feminist periodical written by and for Black and Third World women (as described by the collective) was first aired. The key aim of the collective was to carve out a space in the media which could be shaped by Black women themselves, to challenge the ‘white feminism’ and racism of the British women’s movement at that time, champion early LGBT rights and ensure that international causes were being represented.

As such, Shah was a key contributor to the Black Women’s Movement that was mobilizing in Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s. Along with other Black lesbian feminists, such as Pratibha Parmar, she drew attention to modes of oppression relating to race, class and sexual discrimination that affected South Asian women in intersectional ways. A significant moment for the formation of Black lesbian feminist group politics in Britain was the Conference of the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) in 1981. Shah has since described feeling isolated at the Conference, detached, as a Black lesbian, from the predominantly white majority of women attending. Out of this experience, Shah created the Black Lesbian Group and realized the urgency with which they had to produce Outwrite.

The first issue of Outwrite was timed to be released with International Women’s Day in March 1982 as a gesture of their commitment to a global feminist movement. Shah has written about her work for Outwrite in her article ‘Producing a Feminist Magazine’, in which she explains the difficulties of setting up a functioning newspaper from a low skills base, and balancing researching news stories, writing articles and managing distribution. Shah also participated in the groundbreaking issue of the Feminist Review in 1984, ‘Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives’. She was part of a conversation with Gail Lewis, Pratibha Parmar and Carmen Williams entitled ‘Black Lesbian Discussions’, which was recorded and published in the issue and is still available to view online.

Scottish poet Jackie Kay, who was Poet Laureate of Scotland between 2016 and 2021, and a prominent feminist and anti-racist activist of Nigerian descent, described her meetings with Shah and her subsequent experiences in OWAAD and the Black Lesbian Group in her poem ‘A Life in Protest’.