Movement Building Threads
3 Jul 2009
3 Jul 2009
FINAL PLENARY BIG IDEAS
To have the final official words of this incredible Forum is daunting, to say the least. But AWID has had in place a very thorough system to capture the key issues, concerns, and debates of the Forum – a strong team of trackers who have followed different sessions and provided detailed input to us. So the deficiencies of this summary should be ascribed to me, not to AWID. I have organized this overview of the Forum in five categories: Currents, Undercurrents, Seen and Heard, Absences and Silences, and Big Leaps Forward.
Currents - these are the waves that washed over and drenched all of us over the past four days:
An intergenerational way of working is here to stay – getting out of the silos of “young”, “youngish”, “old”, “oldish” and so on – and really grappling with ways of constructing our organizations and movements that harness the power and resources of all feminists, regardless of age.
The strong presence of the language of power and of power analysis in our work. We seem to be overcoming our fear of power, and have embraced it like a lover. This could also be linked to the resurgence of feminism as an ideology for our organizing. There has been a claiming of the “F” word by many people who were uncomfortable with that label even coming into the Forum.
But there has also been a strong inside look at our own use and abuse of power, and to find new ways of relating to power; a recognition of the deep structures of power within our own domain, and the need to explore those, bring them to the surface, and create workable tools to transform our use of power. We have been exploring how to reach out - rather than bringing people in; going into spaces where we are not in command, where we must learn, and become the apprentices.
We have recognized the need for ground rules – new rules of engagement, and to make these explicit, and hold each other to account for them. We have learnt about ways in which this can be done, and how we can begin to adapt them in our own contexts.
There has been a pervasive celebration of the diversity of our movements, and hopefully the leaving behind of the politics of inclusion and exclusion that caused much pain and isolation in the past. “There cannot exist a feminist movement without lesbians and trans people,” a plenary speaker reminded us, and we’ve added to this list: grassroots women, global women, and realizing all of us are differently abled.
We have sensed the joy of many sisters who felt their voices and issues were once on the margins, struggling for legitimacy, whose sessions were now packed to bursting, with people coming in with a real spirit of learning. There is an almost unanimous feeling that this has been a very inclusive space, bringing a wider diversity of movements and feminist actors together than ever before. There was a strong feeling, among younger feminist activists, that not only were they here in numbers and everywhere, but that for the first time, they felt there was a real process of learning and sharing across generations.
There was a strong attempt to really tackle the politics of funding and donor-grantee relationships – and smaller pieces of this was the space for discussing tensions around evaluation and monitoring paradigms, and also how these could be transformed; the space for dialogue, for expressing tensions and frustrations.
Related to this has been the grappling, in different forms, with “NGOization” as a challenge to confront in our movement building – as both a possibility and a handicap. We saw locations where to have an NGO; the very basic right of association has been withdrawn or denied, and other locations where NGOs have become substitutes for movements, or claim for themselves the title of movement, and still others where NGOs are the only spaces from which movements can survive. There is a challenge that we go beyond NGO and define ourselves in some new way. As one sister said, “‘Non governmental organizations?’ Why do we want to define ourselves as “NON” something?!” So there is a real struggle to find new structures for our organizing, a recognition of the way in which the neoliberal agenda has supported a particular type of organizational model to promote civil society
We have been surrounded by laughter, dance, music, by artistic and creative new expressions of all kinds. We have finally made it alright to play, and recognized that this is what makes it possible for us to be in frightening, criminal, oppressive situations, and still survive – to engage in “fun politics”, as our Lithuanian sisters describe it, but also in the “no fun politics” of the men and women in suits. We have learnt how to create very political forms of celebration. Alongside, we have wept, and had our hearts torn apart by stories of increasing violence and depravity.
As Emma Goldman said, “There can’t be a revolution if we can’t dance.” The importance and legitimacy given to discussions of self care, not as self-indulgence, not as whispered guilty conversations about our exhaustion, financial crises, fears about our security and health as we age, but a legitimate conversation about ensuring the sustainability and future of our movements. We are learning to recognize that we have subsidized feminist social justice with our bodies, our minds, and our souls – often by destroying all three. We have finally said, in the words of our ancestress Emma Goldman, that we can’t have a revolution if we can’t dance.
And almost everywhere, we have seen the practice of recognition – of affirmation – and of showing up, which our poet told us, is the only truth!
Undercurrents:
Most of us have felt safe in this space and appalled at those who entered it with their own agendas and tried to make it unsafe. The safety of this space is being threatened by those who have come not to listen and understand, but to judge and condemn other ways of being, other ways of expressing our infinite capacity to love and be loved. Some have come here with an evangelical agenda, to save the souls of sisters they believe are lapsing from their faith, or going straight to hell because of the choices they make.
This is where the rules of engagement become vital. We would remind these sisters that we have worked very hard to open this space, to make it safe – that at one time, even people like them – and me - were excluded because they were black or brown, because they were Southern, because they were activists; we remind them that some of us cannot talk about our issues safely anywhere else, and we will not allow ourselves to feel constrained and silenced here. We are not asking that you all agree, but we demand that you listen and respect, even if you cannot accept or understand.
While we have all embraced the vital importance of intergenerationality and celebrated the presence of a huge mass of young women at this meeting, there is still tension around how much we are walking the talk. Seven hundred pink scarves* have been handed out by the Young Feminist Activism program team, and almost everyone has worn them every day, but only 7 women over 35 showed up for the multigenerational dialogue today.
There has been a subtle shifting of paradigms:
There has been a coming of age – a growing maturity – in feminist movements, reflected in more confident challenging of each other – the opening up of new strategic possibilities; we have become less self-indulgent in the telling of our stories; or we tell our stories now with a clearer sense of purpose, we have moved from self pity to self reflection and analysis
But in some ways, we are still caught in binary thinking – it’s grassroots or global, younger or older, sexuality or poverty – so we must still push ourselves to transcend these binaries and build more embracing frameworks that will not be either about “either”, or about “or”.
Finally, there has been a serious grappling with hidden power, especially within our own structures – with the deep structures in all our relationships, organizations, issues, and movements. We don’t know quite how to unpack them as yet, much less what to do about them, but there is real and potentially creative tension about this.
Seen and heard
I now quote:
“When we speak we’re afraid that our words will not be heard or welcomed; but when we’re silent, we’re still afraid – so we might as well speak.”
This is something that another sister took very seriously when she said, in the very first plenary, the word “C.U.N.T.!” Creativity, Unity, Numbers, and Time….
“We can’t protect the rights of women in our own movements and organizations, but we keep asking the outside world for our rights.”
“Do we only communicate with the least different from among the different?”
“Where and when is the lesbian caucus?” “What do you mean? This whole conference is a lesbian caucus!” And a straight woman asks, “Why are you being so exclusionary?!!??!!”
“Look at what you’ve been part of creating – the most incredible counter geography to globalization”
“You’ve come a long way, baby: the 1993 AWID Forum keynote speakers were two guys from WB and US Aid; in 99 they wanted Hilary Clinton, not Marilyn Waring. You’ve come a long way baby.”
“Building movements is like a relay – it’s about knowing how to hold the stick tightly in your hand, not letting it fall down, but also knowing when to pass it on, and to whom to pass it on.”
Absences and silences:
A huge absence, if not a silence, that many of us experienced was a stronger stream of discussions around economic rights, and the implications of the implosion of the neoliberal model and the structures it put in place. There can’t be a revolution if women can’t eat, find water, or work.
As gender advocates and women’s rights activists working to improve the lives of women and their people worldwide, there was need for a much stronger focus on alternative development models, and a strong sense that that vital discussion has been missing at this Forum, except in isolated bits and pieces.
But even more, we were largely silent about the need for a more intersectional analysis of how the macro economic situation influences and impacts on everything we have talked about here – from conflict, to disability, to fundamentalisms, to sexuality. This is the absence, in a sense, of analysis of the powers that invade all our lives on a daily basis. We need to find ways of bringing the alternative feminist macro paradigms into the center stage of all our discussions, linking the macro-economic reality to all our debates.
The role of the media in shaping the world, in forming attitudes to feminism and feminists, in controlling public perception and opinion about the issues we care about has also been somewhat weak – for instance, the fact that little 13-year-old Ayesha from Somalia, who was stoned to death in front of 1000 spectators recently, was reported as being 23, because, the media said, she looked much older. How do we tackle the mainstream media as another pervasive macro reality?
Big leaps forward:
Going forward, we have a few “simple” tasks for our movements:
The reframing, shifting, and creation of new trajectories of feminist analysis and practice such as the use of theatre, music, art, of self care, putting our sisters on trial as they did at the African Feminist Forum, of the survival strategies of women keeping movements alive in the face of crises, conflict, and persecution.
The vital importance of mobilizing and organizing strategies that are the foundation stones of movement-building – we will go forth and think and act much more clearly and strategically to reach out to our constituencies, build bridges across constituencies, and act, intergenerationally and intersectionally, to strengthen our collective power and the power of our movements.
The Forum has been an incubator – or the chrysalis as the The Labyrinth of the Butterflies** would have it – that has given birth to:
1. The Young Feminist Fund – which was born right here at the 11th AWID Forum!
2. A new political strategy by South African feminists for interrogating and challenging the political culture in South Africa – and the possibility of forming a women’s political party!
We are going to seriously address ways of making our organizations, movements and work truly inter-generational – not simply paying lip service, but actually struggling together to realize this goal.
We are going to grapple with our own deep structures of power, and struggle to create better rules of engagement that enable us to treat each other well, and harness our diverse strengths and experiences without the kinds of hierarchy and dominance and exclusion and aggression that has damaged us individually and organizationally in the past.
We are going to take the macro economic environment seriously by challenging ourselves to understand it better, and bringing the struggle of women for food security, livelihoods, safety and bodily integrity into our work, no matter where we are located in the spectrum of issues.
We are going to learn to recognize the forces that divide us from ourselves, as Pregs Govender reminded us, and from each other; we are going to fight to overcome all forms of “elimination”.
In fact, we are about to begin the next great feminist uprising – so sisters you have a choice: are you going to be part of it?
To have the final official words of this incredible Forum is daunting, to say the least. But AWID has had in place a very thorough system to capture the key issues, concerns, and debates of the Forum – a strong team of trackers who have followed different sessions and provided detailed input to us. So the deficiencies of this summary should be ascribed to me, not to AWID. I have organized this overview of the Forum in five categories: Currents, Undercurrents, Seen and Heard, Absences and Silences, and Big Leaps Forward.
Currents - these are the waves that washed over and drenched all of us over the past four days:
An intergenerational way of working is here to stay – getting out of the silos of “young”, “youngish”, “old”, “oldish” and so on – and really grappling with ways of constructing our organizations and movements that harness the power and resources of all feminists, regardless of age.
The strong presence of the language of power and of power analysis in our work. We seem to be overcoming our fear of power, and have embraced it like a lover. This could also be linked to the resurgence of feminism as an ideology for our organizing. There has been a claiming of the “F” word by many people who were uncomfortable with that label even coming into the Forum.
But there has also been a strong inside look at our own use and abuse of power, and to find new ways of relating to power; a recognition of the deep structures of power within our own domain, and the need to explore those, bring them to the surface, and create workable tools to transform our use of power. We have been exploring how to reach out - rather than bringing people in; going into spaces where we are not in command, where we must learn, and become the apprentices.
We have recognized the need for ground rules – new rules of engagement, and to make these explicit, and hold each other to account for them. We have learnt about ways in which this can be done, and how we can begin to adapt them in our own contexts.
There has been a pervasive celebration of the diversity of our movements, and hopefully the leaving behind of the politics of inclusion and exclusion that caused much pain and isolation in the past. “There cannot exist a feminist movement without lesbians and trans people,” a plenary speaker reminded us, and we’ve added to this list: grassroots women, global women, and realizing all of us are differently abled.
We have sensed the joy of many sisters who felt their voices and issues were once on the margins, struggling for legitimacy, whose sessions were now packed to bursting, with people coming in with a real spirit of learning. There is an almost unanimous feeling that this has been a very inclusive space, bringing a wider diversity of movements and feminist actors together than ever before. There was a strong feeling, among younger feminist activists, that not only were they here in numbers and everywhere, but that for the first time, they felt there was a real process of learning and sharing across generations.
There was a strong attempt to really tackle the politics of funding and donor-grantee relationships – and smaller pieces of this was the space for discussing tensions around evaluation and monitoring paradigms, and also how these could be transformed; the space for dialogue, for expressing tensions and frustrations.
Related to this has been the grappling, in different forms, with “NGOization” as a challenge to confront in our movement building – as both a possibility and a handicap. We saw locations where to have an NGO; the very basic right of association has been withdrawn or denied, and other locations where NGOs have become substitutes for movements, or claim for themselves the title of movement, and still others where NGOs are the only spaces from which movements can survive. There is a challenge that we go beyond NGO and define ourselves in some new way. As one sister said, “‘Non governmental organizations?’ Why do we want to define ourselves as “NON” something?!” So there is a real struggle to find new structures for our organizing, a recognition of the way in which the neoliberal agenda has supported a particular type of organizational model to promote civil society
We have been surrounded by laughter, dance, music, by artistic and creative new expressions of all kinds. We have finally made it alright to play, and recognized that this is what makes it possible for us to be in frightening, criminal, oppressive situations, and still survive – to engage in “fun politics”, as our Lithuanian sisters describe it, but also in the “no fun politics” of the men and women in suits. We have learnt how to create very political forms of celebration. Alongside, we have wept, and had our hearts torn apart by stories of increasing violence and depravity.
As Emma Goldman said, “There can’t be a revolution if we can’t dance.” The importance and legitimacy given to discussions of self care, not as self-indulgence, not as whispered guilty conversations about our exhaustion, financial crises, fears about our security and health as we age, but a legitimate conversation about ensuring the sustainability and future of our movements. We are learning to recognize that we have subsidized feminist social justice with our bodies, our minds, and our souls – often by destroying all three. We have finally said, in the words of our ancestress Emma Goldman, that we can’t have a revolution if we can’t dance.
And almost everywhere, we have seen the practice of recognition – of affirmation – and of showing up, which our poet told us, is the only truth!
Undercurrents:
Most of us have felt safe in this space and appalled at those who entered it with their own agendas and tried to make it unsafe. The safety of this space is being threatened by those who have come not to listen and understand, but to judge and condemn other ways of being, other ways of expressing our infinite capacity to love and be loved. Some have come here with an evangelical agenda, to save the souls of sisters they believe are lapsing from their faith, or going straight to hell because of the choices they make.
This is where the rules of engagement become vital. We would remind these sisters that we have worked very hard to open this space, to make it safe – that at one time, even people like them – and me - were excluded because they were black or brown, because they were Southern, because they were activists; we remind them that some of us cannot talk about our issues safely anywhere else, and we will not allow ourselves to feel constrained and silenced here. We are not asking that you all agree, but we demand that you listen and respect, even if you cannot accept or understand.
While we have all embraced the vital importance of intergenerationality and celebrated the presence of a huge mass of young women at this meeting, there is still tension around how much we are walking the talk. Seven hundred pink scarves* have been handed out by the Young Feminist Activism program team, and almost everyone has worn them every day, but only 7 women over 35 showed up for the multigenerational dialogue today.
There has been a subtle shifting of paradigms:
- Breaking the body-mind binary
- Speaking about the best thing about being disabled – unimaginable in earlier times
- The creation of new knowledge and ideas in other than the dominant world languages
- Breaking through the glass ceiling of where the best, most powerful new feminist concepts and strategies are coming from – they’re coming from the South, sisters, they’re coming from young women, they’re coming from struggles that were once on the margins of our movements, they’re coming from the ground, they’re coming from the most oppressive worlds!!
There has been a coming of age – a growing maturity – in feminist movements, reflected in more confident challenging of each other – the opening up of new strategic possibilities; we have become less self-indulgent in the telling of our stories; or we tell our stories now with a clearer sense of purpose, we have moved from self pity to self reflection and analysis
But in some ways, we are still caught in binary thinking – it’s grassroots or global, younger or older, sexuality or poverty – so we must still push ourselves to transcend these binaries and build more embracing frameworks that will not be either about “either”, or about “or”.
Finally, there has been a serious grappling with hidden power, especially within our own structures – with the deep structures in all our relationships, organizations, issues, and movements. We don’t know quite how to unpack them as yet, much less what to do about them, but there is real and potentially creative tension about this.
Seen and heard
I now quote:
“When we speak we’re afraid that our words will not be heard or welcomed; but when we’re silent, we’re still afraid – so we might as well speak.”
This is something that another sister took very seriously when she said, in the very first plenary, the word “C.U.N.T.!” Creativity, Unity, Numbers, and Time….
“We can’t protect the rights of women in our own movements and organizations, but we keep asking the outside world for our rights.”
“Do we only communicate with the least different from among the different?”
“Where and when is the lesbian caucus?” “What do you mean? This whole conference is a lesbian caucus!” And a straight woman asks, “Why are you being so exclusionary?!!??!!”
“Look at what you’ve been part of creating – the most incredible counter geography to globalization”
“You’ve come a long way, baby: the 1993 AWID Forum keynote speakers were two guys from WB and US Aid; in 99 they wanted Hilary Clinton, not Marilyn Waring. You’ve come a long way baby.”
“Building movements is like a relay – it’s about knowing how to hold the stick tightly in your hand, not letting it fall down, but also knowing when to pass it on, and to whom to pass it on.”
Absences and silences:
A huge absence, if not a silence, that many of us experienced was a stronger stream of discussions around economic rights, and the implications of the implosion of the neoliberal model and the structures it put in place. There can’t be a revolution if women can’t eat, find water, or work.
As gender advocates and women’s rights activists working to improve the lives of women and their people worldwide, there was need for a much stronger focus on alternative development models, and a strong sense that that vital discussion has been missing at this Forum, except in isolated bits and pieces.
But even more, we were largely silent about the need for a more intersectional analysis of how the macro economic situation influences and impacts on everything we have talked about here – from conflict, to disability, to fundamentalisms, to sexuality. This is the absence, in a sense, of analysis of the powers that invade all our lives on a daily basis. We need to find ways of bringing the alternative feminist macro paradigms into the center stage of all our discussions, linking the macro-economic reality to all our debates.
The role of the media in shaping the world, in forming attitudes to feminism and feminists, in controlling public perception and opinion about the issues we care about has also been somewhat weak – for instance, the fact that little 13-year-old Ayesha from Somalia, who was stoned to death in front of 1000 spectators recently, was reported as being 23, because, the media said, she looked much older. How do we tackle the mainstream media as another pervasive macro reality?
Big leaps forward:
Going forward, we have a few “simple” tasks for our movements:
The reframing, shifting, and creation of new trajectories of feminist analysis and practice such as the use of theatre, music, art, of self care, putting our sisters on trial as they did at the African Feminist Forum, of the survival strategies of women keeping movements alive in the face of crises, conflict, and persecution.
The vital importance of mobilizing and organizing strategies that are the foundation stones of movement-building – we will go forth and think and act much more clearly and strategically to reach out to our constituencies, build bridges across constituencies, and act, intergenerationally and intersectionally, to strengthen our collective power and the power of our movements.
The Forum has been an incubator – or the chrysalis as the The Labyrinth of the Butterflies** would have it – that has given birth to:
1. The Young Feminist Fund – which was born right here at the 11th AWID Forum!
2. A new political strategy by South African feminists for interrogating and challenging the political culture in South Africa – and the possibility of forming a women’s political party!
We are going to seriously address ways of making our organizations, movements and work truly inter-generational – not simply paying lip service, but actually struggling together to realize this goal.
We are going to grapple with our own deep structures of power, and struggle to create better rules of engagement that enable us to treat each other well, and harness our diverse strengths and experiences without the kinds of hierarchy and dominance and exclusion and aggression that has damaged us individually and organizationally in the past.
We are going to take the macro economic environment seriously by challenging ourselves to understand it better, and bringing the struggle of women for food security, livelihoods, safety and bodily integrity into our work, no matter where we are located in the spectrum of issues.
We are going to learn to recognize the forces that divide us from ourselves, as Pregs Govender reminded us, and from each other; we are going to fight to overcome all forms of “elimination”.
In fact, we are about to begin the next great feminist uprising – so sisters you have a choice: are you going to be part of it?
Organisation
AWID
