"The concept of "home" has a complex and sometimes convoluted history within Third World feminism. In an oft-cited essay on coalition politics, for example, feminist activist and artist Bernice Johnson Reagon argues for the importance of not confusing home and coalition. According to Reagon, coalitions need to be understood as unsafe spaces, defined by the presence of strangers and characterized by the dictates of survival: "The only reason you would consider trying to team up with somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that's the only way you can figure you can stay alive." In the space of coalition, subjects feel "threatened to the core," as though they might "keel over and die." It is for these reasons that "you can't stay there all the time." In contrast to coalition, Reagon characterizes home as refuge-the space of sameness, a potentially nurturing place where you "act out community" and "decide who you really are." Yet even here, she acknowledges that such spaces of enforced homogeneity (what she characterizes as "the barred room") can become destructive." Read in light of Reagon, Moraga's "dream of a unified Third World feminist movement" reflects Moraga's misreading of feminists of color as signifying "home" rather than a coalition. Echoing Reagon's depiction of coalition as a form of survival, Moraga argues that this diverse group of women "are not so much a 'natural' affinity group as women who have come together out of necessity." Yet despite offering a more contentious definition of community, Reagon's essay underproblematizes the concept of "home" itself. Written for a workshop at the West Coast Women's Music Festival, her remarks were given in the context of a black feminist speaking about coalition to a group of mostly white women; given the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Reagon characterizes coalition as the "monster" that "never gets enough" and "always wants more." This depiction highlights the burden of representation that feminists of color often feel doing coalition work in predominantly white environments. Yet Reagon's language of coalition sustains a dichotomy of community that leaves little room for the pleasures of difference. Instead, the encounter with the unfamiliar is something with which to make peace rather than from which to take satisfaction. In contrast to home-where there exists at least the possibility of nurturance-Reagon depicts coalition in strictly instrumentalist terms, as a burdensome and disagreeable necessity. While understandable, such a reading of home works to sustain myths of community that equate sameness with sustenance and solace. The strength of Reagon's analysis lies in her capacity to celebrate the necessity of an agonistic feminism that challenges the idea that women share a common experience simply by dint of being women. As she notes, "wherever women gather together it is not necessarily nurturing. It is coalition building."" Here, Reagon highlights a difficult reality: the work of democratic politics can be demanding and unpleasant. Encounters with heterogeneous others are often frustrating, exhausting, and fraught with misunderstanding. In its call to welcome such challenges, Reagon's analysis enriches contemporary democratic theory. But what would it mean to refuse Reagon's demand that we "not confuse" home and coalition? What if we complicate the very idea of "home"?"