Mind the Gap

If you like academic feminism, check out Chora, a new blog hosted by Thirdspace (journal for emerging feminist scholars). It looks set to be interesting.

I’m a little behind with all the carnivals, so I thought I’d catch up with a general carnival link dump.

The 16th Feminist Carnival will be at Welcome to the Nuthouse on June 7th. Get your posts in by June 5th. The special topic is feminism and disability.

The 5th Radical Women of Color Carnival will be at Fabulosa Mujer on June 4th. Posts in by June 2nd please. The special topic is grassroots activism.

Abyss2Hope is starting a Carnival Against Sexual Violence on June 1st.

If queer is your thing, don’t forget the Carnival of Bent Attractions on June 10th. Posts must be in by June 2nd.

Vegan Kid is hosting the next Big Fat Carnival on June 6th. Topics of special interest are fat and sex and gender.

Carnivals past.

The 1st Erase Racism Carnival is now up at Ally work.

Here at mind the gap we thought it might be nice to get a little online debate going and so we’ve decided to mix a few discussion points in with our usual posts to encorage debate. mind the gap was originally set up, in part, as a space where people could explore all kinds of feminism and related issues. So in the spirit of this, all comments and views are welcome, from what ever feminist perspective you are coming from, although we won’t publish any that are outright rude.

We have quite a nice gentle one to warm up with;

Why is it that in action movie franchises, the man pretty much always stays the same, but the women always change for each film (think James Bond)?

I’ll try and think of a more spiky issue for next time but intill then Ladies, gentlemen, you have the floor.

I know we really should do our own research, but we’re incredibly busy at the moment: Naiades is in the middle of a house move, Siberian Falls is revising for finals and I’m facing a viva. So I don’t feel too bad about requesting our readers’ help with our group’s discussion nights again.

This week the topic is “Socialist Feminism.” If anyone has spotted or written any posts, essays or articles on this subject, please could you let us know about it in the comments or drop us an email? It needs to be fairly short and accessible to people who dobn’t know much about socialism. So far I’m thinking about using something from Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class, but it would be good to have something British as well.

The discussion nights are going well, but we’ve been shamefully bad at writing posts about them. The ones we’ve done on women in the media, pornography and post feminism will all make interesting posts if we ever get round to it.

Lots of debate about feminism and sex work going on at the moment.

For the criminalization argument see Emma’s post on Gendergeek. For the legalization argument, see sofie’s post at Volsunga and Louise’s post at the new Stroppyblog (it’s great to see you blogging at last Louise!).

The above posts take radically different perspectives on the issue and are very well argued and articulate with interesting comments attached. The issue of gay and lesbian sex work seems to have been left out of the narrative (as usual) and I’d like to write something about that if I get a chance, but I’m tied up in serious schmacademia this week!

If you’ve written a post on sex work, from any perspective, feel free to mention it with links in the comments here.

We’ve had a busy week on the feminism front here in Cardiff. If you remember, back in November we ran a poster campaign and a petition on the streets of Cardiff and throughout the 16 days of action to elminate violence against women.

Yesterday all the work finally began to come to fruition when we got to present the petition at the National Assembly for Wales.

Just to recap, we asked people to petition the Assembly to:

Fund more campaigns in the South Wales region to raise awareness within the general public about rape and violence against women, in all its forms, in the UK.

Provide more funding for local rape crisis centres and other organizations that deal with violence against women.

Improve the court systems. Currently in the UK, one in twenty women over the age of 16 has been raped. Only 1 out of 5 rapes are reported to the police. Fewer than 6% of rape cases reported result in a conviction.

In the end we got 243 signatures, which we don’t think at all bad for a small group on a controversial issue.

Leanne Wood, the Plaid Cymru AM for Social Justice and Equality has been supporting our group from the beginning and arranged for us to hand the petition over to Edwina J Hart, the Minister for Social Justice and Regeneration.

Six members of Mind the Gap made it on the day and we were delighted to welcome a representative from South Wales’s Older Feminist Network. Meeting older feminists is always great because they get so excited to find that there actually are younger feminists in existence and campaigning.

We were given the opportunity to make a presentation and talk through the issues with Edwina Hart and Leanne. Both are strong feminists and fully support our petition. We were surprised and thrilled when Edwina offered to reconvene in three months time and give us feedback on the petition. She says she will raise the issues with the assembly and seemed pleased to have something to show them. We came away from the meeting feeling encouraged by the enthusiasm we were met with and that we had been taken seriously.

We talked a lot together afterwards which I’m sure will form the basis for future posts. The experience has really helped us clarify our thoughts about rape and on what we want to do as a group on this issue. We agreed that activism must not be limited to work on the criminal justice system although that is essential too.

We feel that an enormous shift in social attitudes to rape is necessary and would really like to focus on proactive educational and public awareness work around this issue.

Everyone agreed that it was pretty shocking for us to be bringing a petition of this nature to the Welsh Assembly in 2006. We really should have come further than this by now.

Today is Blog for Radical Fun Day.

From our manifesto

To encourage new networks of friendship and mutual support among members, time will be made for fun events such as socials, outings and film nights.

The other day I e-mailed a group member to ask whether she thought we should give our discussion night meetings a more formal structure. Her reply somewhat surprised me. She said she thought the informal conversations and the “joking” was one of the best things about the group.

Then, the other night, after the Post-feminism discussion, I was dithering at the bar with a wad of cash in my hand trying to decide which bottle of wine to buy. Siberian Falls grabbed me and cried, “For the love of God just get some wine!”

It’s about time we blogged about fun because the Mind the Gap group has an insatiable appetite for fun. Sure, we spend time in serious feminist discussion (also a kind of fun) and we spend time on serious activism (again fun in it’s way), but what do we do most of the time?

We have a bloody good fun feminist time of it that’s what.

We’re always in bars. We drink a lot. While in the bars drinking, we laugh loudly, talk outrageously about feminism and bang on the table shouting “Well what I think …” We joke all the time. We joke about feminism a lot and we talk about sex a lot. Despite our blog’s appearances we really don’t take ourselves too terribly seriously in our non-cyber existences.

While I haven’t viewed the emphasis on carousing as a waste of time, neither have I asked myself if it’s a feminist or radical activity. Now, I’m going to come out and say that I think it is. Why?

Because feminism is not generally associated with fun
Because women are not really supposed to have fun just for themselves
Because most women police their behaviour around men and the women they’re encouraged to compete with
Because women restrain their laughter in the prescence of men and the women they’re encouraged to compete with
Because women often don’t feel safe to say what they’re really thinking

We’re not perfect by any stretch of the imagination and there are always tensions in groups. But, I think we’ve gone some way towards creating a space for feminist fun, a space in which women feel relatively free to laugh, shout, talk dirty and say what they really think. This is important.

Fun is also a feminist issue because it builds friendship. And friendship is a feminist issue. Friendship among women and their male allies is radical because women are not really supposed to be friends with one another, and they’re certainly not supposed to be friends with men on equal terms. In refusing to compete and sell each other out for the attention of men, we work to break down patriarchal norms.

So, you see, it’s all to the good, all part of the Mind the Gap feminist agenda. Naiades and Siberian Falls I will see you on Saturday for some radical Dr Who watching. At the same time, perhaps we can have a chat about presenting that rape petition.

Today is the day to Blog Against Disablism.