Mind the Gap

Unison is holding a Reclaim the Night march on Friday 1st September at 9pm in Cardiff. The march starts at Transport House on Cathedral Road, goes through the centre of town, ending at the Nye Bevan statue on Queen St after about an hour.

Their statement says: All groups are at risk on the streets at night and we march to demand the right to live without the fear or reality of rape, violence and harrassment whatever our age, gender or sexuality. We take back this night to win the day. This march is connected with the Cardiff LGBT Mardi Gras festival on Saturday but is open to everyone.

I know it’s a bit of a strange time of year for a Reclaim the Night March, but it’s a very strange time of year for a Mardi Gras too!

Help get the word out about The Carnival Against Sexual Violence.

Hat tip: Sour Duck’s link blog.

Our Feminism and LGBT politics discussion turned out to be one of the best events we’ve hosted so far. Ten people attended and we had a very respectful and productive dialogue. Together we identified the main tensions we have experienced between feminist and LGBT politics and tried to come up with some ways forward. Please be aware that the views expressed in this post are those of people in the group and not necessarily my own, although I agree with much of what was said.

First, it was agreed that both feminist and LGBT politics have become a great deal more complex and fragmented since the 1970s and 80s and that the complexities must be acknowledged if there is to be progress.

The Trouble with Lesbians

Some lesbian feminists observed that they seem to spend a lot of time working on issues which more directly effect the lives of heterosexual women, such as abortion and reproductive rights. While it was acknowledged that these issues impact upon the lives of all women, tension emerges when lesbian feminists feel that straight feminists do not fully engage their problems in return. More spaces should be created for dialogue between heterosexual and lesbian feminists to talk about the different issues that effect them on equal terms.

Much concern was expressed about the continuing use of the “butch lesbian,” within anti-feminist rhetoric, as a stick to beat all feminists and create division. As soon as a woman takes up a visibly feminist position, she is open to being associated with the monstrous “ugly, hairy, man-hating dyke.” It was acknowledged that this stigmatising strategy has been quite effective in encouraging younger heterosexual (and some lesbian) women to disassociate from feminism. We need to counter antifeminist lesbophobia, but we need a much more effective and widely available feminist media and more grassroots activism in order to do this. The lack of such a media and the decline in activism was a recurring concern all evening.

The damage done by the feminist sex wars of the 1980s was duly noted. Although some of the fall out was due to misunderstandings of radical feminist analysis, it has to be acknowledged that many lesbians abandoned feminism when they perceived radical feminists to be telling them that they must not enjoy their sexual practices anymore. Some even believed that feminists were telling them to give up sex. Radical feminism therefore needs to be revisited. The radical feminists in the room were particularly concerned that radical feminism is often regarded as a monolith and an exclusive body of thought which does not engage other areas of feminist thought. Radical feminists do not all agree with one another and radical feminism has positively influenced other forms of feminism as well as LGBT politics and Queer Theory.

The trouble with Gay Men

No gay men attended the discussion!

While it was agreed among those present that many gay men are excellent feminist allies, it was felt that there is still a woman-hating gay male culture out there which is extremely problematic for feminists. Sadly young gay men often seem to be drawn into this culture in the process of forming their own identities.

It was also felt that gay men do not always appreciate the fact that homophobia is misogynistic, insofar as it is expressed as hatred of the feminine in men, or violent disgust at men taking up a sexual roles perceived to be female. In this area, gay men and feminists have much common ground for activism. Again, it was felt that there is a need for more dialogue between feminists and gay men and more attempts should be made to find common ground for action on both sides.

The Trouble with Bisexuals

“Nobody likes bisexuals!” This is definitely a problem.

It was explained that lesbians sometimes become angry with bisexual women when they refuse to acknowledge their access to heterosexual privilege, although it was also acknowledged that many now do.

One of the biggest problems for bisexual feminist women is the media depiction of “trendy” bisexuality in which female bisexuality is represented as a performance to entice male attention. This narrative does not even acknowledge bisexuality as a valid sexual identity, positing it instead as an aspect of heterosexuality. The narrative may in fact be all about de-fusing the serious challenge to heteronormativity which bisexuality presents and it needs to be more effectively countered.

For some reason bisexual theory and activism has lagged behind feminist, lesbian, gay, transgender and queer theory and activism. It was agreed that all feminists should support bisexual feminists in the production of bisexual feminist theory within the broader feminist galaxy and, as always, we need more dialogue between the different groups.

The T-Word

One of the biggest arguments between transsexual and transgendered women and “women-born” feminists continues to be fought over the creation of separate spaces. While it was generally agreed that “woman” is largely a socially constructed identity category (which does not make it any less deeply felt), most of the “women-born women” in the room argued that they do require some separate spaces. This is because being born into the female role means you have certain shared experiences with other people born female. It was also explained that some women who have experienced rape and sexual abuse do not feel comfortable discussing these experiences with people who were born into the male category.

There was only one transgendered woman at the meeting and she explained that she often feels intensely anxious about entering even inclusive feminist and women’s spaces, because it is very hard to know how she will be received there. Although she respected people’s rights to set up exclusive spaces for certain reasons, she felt it was very important that there should be more inclusive spaces for discussion. She personally did not feel comfortable in local transsexual and transgender groups for various reasons, including the lack of feminism she had found there. She also observed that many FTM and MTF transsexual and transgendered people have themselves experienced rape and sexual abuse before or after transitioning. Where are they to go for support if there are not adequate services in the local area and they are excluded from feminist and women’s groups/services? It was agreed by all that transsexual and transgender women are also particularly vulnerable to misogynistic, homophobic violence.

Transgender feminism must be developed and there must be places for dialogue and support between transsexual and transgender women and “women-born” women. Sexual violence against transsexual and transgender women needs to be more widely acknowledged and discussed within feminism. FTM transsexual and transgender people must also have a place in the discussion, not least because they also have had the experience of being born into the female role.

General issues

Some people felt that mainstream LGBT politics has taken an alarmingly heteronormative turn and abandoned feminist analysis in the pursuit of heterosexual privilege without always considering the political implications of that agenda. While no one denied an individual’s right to have a civil partnership, much concern was expressed about the lack of questioning currently taking place. As one lesbian feminist in the room put it, “In the 1970s we looked at marriage and asked what is this thing? Why do we have it? What is it doing? How is it implicated in the oppression of women?” Raising such feminist questions in LGBT fora now often attracts intense hostility because so many people have so much invested in the marriage campaign. While we had no solutions to this problem, we felt it important that those of us with questions continue to ask them.

Conclusion

The need for more dialogue between different groups was reiterated over and over again all evening. It was felt that feminism and LGBT activism have become too fragmented and compartmentalised. While we must acknowledge the necessity of “picking your fight” and the very real need for separate spaces for different groups, we must also start coming together more to build bridges in the fight against oppression and create a vision of the kind of world we’d like to see for everyone.

I’ve been trying to write a feminist post about my experiences of growing up within organised religion and have found my feelings on the subject to be surprisingly complex. There’s anger, even trauma, but there’s also a strange sense of gratitude. Although I reject what I was taught by organised religion, it’s played a vital role in forming my personality and I wouldn’t be the political person I am today if I hadn’t been raised a Roman Catholic. My upbringing gave me a legacy of guilt and a tendency to take too much responsibility for just about everything, but it also sowed the seeds of resistance and taught me a lot that has been useful.

Catholicism and Women

“For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.” Timothy 2:14

“I hope therefore, my sisters, that you will reflect on what I have called the ‘genius of women’, those fundamental inborn qualities of yours, so that you can value them yourselves and also let them have their fullest expression in the Church and in the world around us … It is in Mary that the Church sees the most complete expression of all that makes up womanhood … she described herself as the Lord’s handmaid, and she accepted the vocation of wife and mother in Nazareth.” Pope John Paul II, ‘A Letter to Women.’

The dominant Catholic ideology coming out of the Vatican teaches that women belong to men: their sexual, reproductive and labour capacities belong to men.* The cult of the virgin tells you much of what you need to know, insofar as it encourages Catholics to venerate, as the ultimate woman, a submissive virgin/mother. Women should be virgins until they marry and then become mothers, because motherhood is woman’s natural role. It is therefore impossible for church teaching, in its current form, to posit women as owners of their own bodies or reproductive capacities. This is why popes really can’t cope with contraception, even when disallowing it and encouraging female submission to men means that vast numbers of people die of AIDS. Within marriage, women are not even supposed to refuse their husbands’ conjugal “rights.” Women who don’t marry still belong to men. If they become nuns, they are symbolically “married” to Jesus. If they don’t become nuns, they should join the hordes of women who spend their lives serving parishes and slaving after priests. The ideology is both patriarchal and paternalistic, for the Catholic church is a world in which numerous celibate “fathers” (who stand in for God himself) tell the women under their authority what they should do, think and be. Now, the priests would, of course, object to my interpretation of Catholic teaching and argue, like all good patriarchs do, that they love women and are only seeking to protect them …in their best interests. But patriarchy is not the only problem. The Catholic Church also has a serious problem with raging misogyny. Until Vatican II women were not even allowed on the church sanctuary.

* I’m paraphrasing a famous feminist here but I can’t remember who, so if anyone recognises it could you tell me who said it in the comments.

Women in CatholicismHowever, women’s responses within the church are often complex. As a teenager, I got heavily into religion and the pro-life movement, but I certainly did not experience my religiosity as submission to men; I experienced it as an act of resistance. All around me, girls my age were having miserable, often abusive, sexual experiences and I was absolutely determined not to join them. At the time, I didn’t interpret my resistance as a symptom of my nascent lesbian-feminist subjectivity, but I knew I was not going to have sex with those boys. It is terribly sad that the Catholic Church was the only place I could find protection during this period in my life. Some feminists are not going to like me for saying this, but I am grateful to the church for giving me a much needed reason to resist when my peers were telling me that I must have sex by the time I was 14. The reason to resist should have come from feminism, but the only feminism that was available to me was the sort that says young women will have sex, therefore the best thing to do is provide plenty of contraception and show them how to get abortions. I wasn’t happy about that either. This is why I think many feminist responses to the Christian abstinence movement are over simplistic, insofar as they fail to see any attractions within that ideology and view the young women who sign up to it as passive victims of patriarchy. Of course young women have sexual desires, but this does not mean they all want to accept sex on the (unequal) terms on which it is being offered to them by boys and men. Women will not be truly and fully free to have sex until we are truly free to say “no” to sex and that freedom is not yet culturally accepted or recognised. I’d hazard a guess that most young women in our culture still feel intensely pressurised to have sex with men. As far as the abstinence movement is concerned, it’s really all about preserving “clean” women to have sex with men in marriage, but how many young women sign up as a temporary protection? I would be very interested to hear if any other women reading have used religion as a protection in a similar way. I wish there had been more positive avenues of resistance open to me, but I have no regrets about my decisions.

As to my involvement in the pro-life movement, I don’t regret it either, although I feel embarrassed at my immaturity and youthful acceptance of sexist oppression. The pro-life movement taught me a lot, not least about debate. In training us to argue, they gave us a good grounding in the use of rhetoric to make points and persuade. I also left with an understanding of the pro-life ethic, which I think the pro-choice movement generally lacks to its detriment, but that’s another post.

So, although it taught me that I should submit to male authority, the church also handed me seeds of resistance which have since germinated in all sorts of directions. I left the church when I was 17 because I began to realise that a. I was a young lesbian in a terrifyingly homophobic environment and b. I could never adhere to a patriarchal religion with a somewhat voyeuristic father/god in charge.

Nobody’s Handmaid“A national network of women who believe that the gospel speaks about freedom from oppression and calls women to full participation in all aspects of life and the church as a matter of justice.” Catholic Women’s Network.

To be fair, the Catholic Church is no more monolithic than anything else in this world. Catholic women are not in any way passive, malleable fools and they do not necessarily accept the dominant teaching of the church. Sure, there are still plenty of anti-feminist women and sexist priests, but what the Vatican won’t tell you is that an increasing number of women (and priests) are resisting and that there’s also a growing Catholic feminist movement. In fact, two pro-feminist priests were highly influential figures in my own late teens. While many women like me do decide to get out, there are others who decide instead to stay, resist the dogma, re-interpret teachings and scriptures and try to create a new kind of church. I suspect that much of the anti-feminist rhetoric coming out of the Vatican is actually directed towards Catholic feminism. In the UK they have a newspaper, Omnibus, which many parish priests refuse to sell in the churches. Radical nuns, in particular, are becoming the bane of the Vatican and they’re not too fond of Pope Benedict either (I heard of one who actually threatened to jump off the roof of the convent when he was elected). Energetic, dedicated and courageous, these nuns work on social justice and women’s issues around the world. The Sister’s of the Good Shepherd, for example, dedicate themselves to “restoring dignity and healing the lives of women and girl’s trapped in prostitution in Thailand and India.” Not only do they do the dangerous work of rescuing these trafficked women from pimps and brothels, they offer them a safe livelihood once they’re out. My mother was recently at a Justice and Peace conference and one of the nuns speaking about trafficking in Thailand said that after being in the brothels she wanted to spit on all the men in the street … and pray for them too … of course.

We’ve been asked to help get word out about Ms.’ new “I Had An Abortion” campaign

In 1972, a year before Roe v. Wade, 53 prominent U.S. women publicly declared in Ms. that they had undergone abortions. Among them were Billie Jean King, Anne Sexton, Susan Sontag, Anais Nin and Ms. founder Gloria Steinem. Now, in 2006, with Roe under serious threat, Ms. is relaunching the Campaign with a call for women to sign an abortion rights petition headed We had abortions. Those who have not had abortions can sign separately, insolidarity.

I recently received an email asking me to sign the following petition:

“Subject: Urgent: Stop Channel 5’s Sitcom on Prostitution

Sign the petition. Channel 5 are planning to screen a new comedy, set in a brothel. According to a national press article the show, ‘Respectable’, features women who sell sex to pay for shoe collections and ‘beautiful things’. Click here for more information about the sitcom. Eaves Housing have already written a letter of complaint and Women’s Aid intend to write to Channel 5 too. Eaves have organised a petition and are collecting signatures to show that this is not the kind of viewing audiences want.”

I also noticed the below addition:

“The campaign against Strictly Come Pole Dancing in May resulted in the event being withdrawn - it would be great to achieve such a victory again. Please take a few minutes to sign the petition and forward the details to anyone you think will be interested in objecting.”

I want to say a couple of things here, because I’ve decided I can only post this petition if I also express my anxieties. I feel extremely ambivalent about censorship on principle and I really don’t like objecting to anything I haven’t actually seen. So I’m posting this call in the interests of feminist information sharing, as I’m of the view that people are entitled to make up their own minds about what they should do.

Personally, I find this kind of campaign problematic. On the one hand, I think freedom of speech and artistic expression must be protected but, on the other hand, I live in an area where we have a lot of street prostitution and women get brutally beaten up every week. The fact that Eaves housing and Women’s Aid are objecting means that they’re taking this one very seriously and they know what’s going on out there.

I don’t think people should ever stay silent if something offends them, but I wonder is there a difference between protesting, and requesting that something should be banned or prevented from happening altogether? Frankly, I’m delighted that we weren’t subjected to the horrors of Strictly Come Pole Dancing, but if we’re going to demand that the shows which offend us as feminists are actually stopped from airing, how can we differentiate ourselves from all those people trying to stop the Jerry Springer Opera from being shown on TV, or those who got that play about women and Sikhism cancelled in Birmingham?

No doubt I’ll sound like a wishy-washy feminist to both pro- and anti-censorship feminists, but I just can’t come to a simple conclusion on this issue. It’s so difficult to combine the necessity of protecting freedom of speech with the realities of living in an incredibly violent society.

Anyway, you have links, so if you think signing the petition is the right thing to do, go right ahead.

If you’d like to write and complain, letters should be sent to:

Customer Services
Five
22 Long Acre
London
WC2E 9LY

It may also be useful to copy any letters of complaint you sent to five to
Ofcom.

Ofcom
Riverside House
2a Southwark Bridge Road
London
SE1 9HA

This came in via the ukfeministaction list.

feminist fightback - 21 october

FIGHT BACK FOR WOMEN’S LIBERATION

Feminist Fightback is a conference for feminist activists, which will be held in London on Saturday 21 October (venue tbc).We want to build a feminist movement that fights. A feminist movement that is about activism, not just talk; about grassroots campaigning, not just lobbying; about politics, not just lifestyle choices; and about liberation for all, not just equality for a privileged few. The conference will include a variety of speakers, discussion and activist training workshops on themes including sexual liberation, international solidarity and women’s struggles as workers. Planned sessions include:

Pornography, objectification and freedom of speech
Equal pay, low pay and workers’ struggle
Prostitutes: workers or victims?
The fight for abortion rights - planning actions for the next year
Building campaigning women’s groups
Against war, against theocracy - Iranian women fight back

Feminist Fightback is free and open to all; see the Get Involved box for more information on how to get involved. The agenda is a work in progress - check back soon for updates. For more information please email sofie.buckland(AT)nus(DOT)org(DOT)uk.

About ENS WomenFeminist Fightback is being organised by ENS Women, a group of socialist feminists linked to the Education Not for Sale network.

Feeling tired, disillusioned or alienated from feminism?

This article from Dr Katherine Rake, director of the Fawcett Society, might offer some refreshment. I really don’t like the term “third wave” (she’s calling for a more united third wave), because I don’t think women’s activism has ever stopped, but she makes a lot of good points nonetheless.

“So why has feminism always provoked such hostility? Unlike other radical movements, feminism is calling for something many women and men find difficult: a profound change in the power relations between sexes - not only in the public sphere, but also, much more trickily, in the private sphere.

Feminists aim to transform not just who gets the top jobs in business, but also who gets the job of cleaning the toilet at home. Feminists want to change not just who walks the corridors of power, but also who feels safe walking home at night. Feminism is not just about allowing women to lead the same lives that men have for many years; it’s about changing the rules of the game, mapping out a possible future in which activities that do not directly contribute to further swelling the coffers of UK plc, such as caring for family and others, are valued much more highly. It’s about more than tinkering at the edges - and that feels threatening to a lot of people.”

Cheers for the link Paswonky.

The Twenty-First Carnival of Feminists is up at Being Amber Rhea. Lots of good reading there.

The blog’s been a little quiet recently, but there’s plenty going on in the group.

Our rape awareness campaign is developing well. We’ve decided to focus on campaigning for better services for people who have experienced rape and sexual assault, educational work with young people, and a much higher standard of public awareness raising from the government. During the first stage of the campaign we submitted a petition to the Welsh Assembly and now for the second phase we’re aiming to try and get groups and organisiations to sign on and support us.

Our slightly eccentric constitution is being re-written. You should have seen our solicitor member’s face when she read it. She has now wisely taken it away from us to be sorted out and says we have to have an AGM in November.

The topic for the next Mind the Gap zine has been decided and it’s going to be on “sex.” Because working on a rape awareness campaigns can be very depressing at times, we’ve also decided that this zine will be strictly about the wonders of sex. The writing can be about anything to do with sex, but it has to be joyful (and feminist of course). By the way, if anyone would like a copy of our body image zine drop us an e-mail at the address on the sidebar.

We’ve had the postcards photocopied up to A3 and A4 size posters which we’ll be putting up around Cardiff and wherever else we can manage. Any volunteers to take a few beyond Cardiff, let us know.

We’re planning the next round of discussion nights (on hiatus for the summer). So far suggested topics include organised religion, paganism, fairy stories and fashion.

Also, we think we should have more film nights.

And parties, definitely more feminist parties …