This page provides a report of Feminism in London 2009.
For me, the first sign that this was a feminist conference with a difference, was the queue. Firstly, the fact that it was spilling out of the building and secondly, that it was so diverse in terms of age, race, aesthetic tastes and (even) sex, that any passers-by would’ve had their preconceptions about what a feminist was squished in a second. Because although the overcrowding did lend a certain degree of chaos to the day, it showed that feminism in London is a tangible force – not the dream of a few disillusioned revolutionaries arguing over terminology in anoraks! (I only say this because whenever I mentioned FiL to my friends, they shot me looks that made clear this was what they imagined!).
Once this force had settled itself in the hall, stand-up comic Kate Smurthwaite introduced the two key-note speakers: Beatrix Campbell and Susie Orbach. Beatrix Campbell is an award-winning writer and broadcaster focused on politics, gender and class, and Susie Orbach is a writer, psychoanalyst, and activist. Both said how thrilled they were to be there, and spoke with real enthusiasm and energy.
Campbell said we were living in a new historical era, one of ‘neo-patriarchy’, and that ‘women like all of us have never existed before.’ Although not making it completely clear what she meant by this, she did go on to say how equality wasn’t enough: institutions have changed ‘a bit’ but it is still women, in the great motherhood/work debate, that are seen as the problem. New equality legislation and procedures are so convoluted and mystifying that hardly anyone ends up using them. What we needed was to put pressure on institutions to adapt to women’s needs, or, as she elegantly put it, for public time to be ‘synced’ with women’s time. She also talked about the need for women and feminists to address the contemporary culture of masculinity, particularly considering how, with knife crime scares, etc, the public so often links it to violence. In her work with young offenders, she found that many of these young men saw violence as a type of public martyrdom, feeling a strong need to subject themselves to pain.
This provided an interesting accidental link with Orbach’s speech about the assault on women’s bodies by the worldwide beauty and diet industries. The diet and beauty industries, which rely on failure and low self-esteem to survive, are ‘selling body insecurity throughout the world.’ More and more American women are opting for labiaplasty, Iranian women for nose jobs, and Chinese women for leg-lengthening operations so that they can feel they are taking part in the ‘developed’ western world. ‘Women as they are,’ said Orbach, ‘are an endangered species,’ and body hatred should be seen as an act of violence against women. This was a far more worrying view than Campbell’s, but from the gasps and nods and awkward glances, it was clearly one most – if not everyone – in the hall had already felt. I was left wondering what it was about our culture that drove young men to commit violence against others and young women, against themselves. Was it simply that glamour sells? Or, that this neo-patriarchy is not so new, or it is that it is so new it is something completely different, or …
My head spinning with questions and hope and fear, I remained in the main hall for the Racism and Sexism panel. The speakers were: Yasmin Rehman, Director of Partnerships and Diversity with the Metropolitan Police Service; Ego Ahaiwe, the Young Women’s Development Worker for the Lambeth Women’s Project; Shahida Chowdry from Million Women Rise and Akima Thomas, clinical director of the Women and Girls’ Network. The panel was chaired by Femi Otitoju, the founder and Training Director of Challenge Consultancy. Each speaker related their own experiences to their activism in different ways. Yasmin Rehman spoke about the frequency with which she was pigeon-holed into talking about ‘faith’ and ‘ethnic’ issues rather than about women’s wider experience of culture. She found debates over the hijab a distraction from the important issues, and stated that a woman should have a right to wear it if she wants to – faith is a matter of choice.
Ego Ahaiwe began by getting the audience to chant, ‘One woman, one voice, one love.’ It took a few tries before we could say it loudly and confidently enough – a sign that confirmed my suspicions that no one was quite sure exactly what was at stake in this discussion, or if they were, how to go about whatever ‘it’ was. Ahaiwe then gave an interesting account of the oral history projects she is involved in, archiving the experiences of black women activists in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly Olive Morris, who was a driving force behind a variety of campaigns, from squatting to the black panthers, before her death in 1979. She highlighted the importance of asking who’s archiving and why and for whom. She believes that we need to look to the past to see how women combated the same problems we’re facing now.
Shahida Chowdry implicitly addressed this issue by describing how her experience of growing up in the Borsal Heath district of Birmingham, a notorious red light district, at the time of the National Front resurgence in the 1970s, led to her involvement in activism. Akima Thomas talked about the anxieties she feels about her psychotherapy work; has she become a ‘professional’ feminist, removed from ordinary women’s experience? Does therapy focus on the symptoms of violence at the expense of the causes, making the political personal, rather than the personal political?
Two strands, then, seemed to be emerging: the importance of learning how to identify and challenge the injustices of one’s own experience, and the difficulties of how, having gained some degree of power to do so, one can continue to help others do the same – i.e., not to be blinded by this privilege. However, the Q & A session immediately veered away from the issues raised by the speeches, with a comment by a white woman complaining of her feelings of alienation amongst non English-speakers on buses. Later on, someone made the perceptive riposte that racism results from our inability to understand each other; if we refuse to look at the reality of another’s experience, we can easily become scared of them. White women, like men, need to examine their own privilege. A similar point was made towards the close by Shahida Chowdry: we shouldn’t become trapped by ‘isms’, but should focus on uncovering the truth of women’s experience. Ego made the point that this is painful and dangerous.
Thinking back to an earlier comment by a white feminist who asked what hand-outs she could devise to make her organisation’s work more relevant to black women, and feeling, as the speakers were clapped and everyone hurried to join the lunch queue, that there was a huge amount that had been left unsaid, and not necessarily for good reasons. It seemed to me that this is something white feminists need to address: do they want to go through the motions of reaching out to women of other races or will they really go through the pain and the fear that is necessary to create a space that can join these different experiences? And what was the meaning and cause of the tension bristling just beneath the surface of the entire talk? I was glad to hear that Million Woman Rise (along with the Women and Girl’s Network, Roshni in Nottingham, Stepping Stones in Birmingham, Challenge Consultancy, Women Healing Women, the NUS and Feminism in London) is going to organise a workshop day to explore such issues.
During the lunch hour I made a tour of the stalls. I was impressed by the variety of organisations and by the friendliness of the volunteers. The feminist ‘subvertising’ photo exhibition at the back of the hall particularly grasped my attention, as it did for many others, probably because it related so directly to those gaps in our everyday lives so mundane that we rarely view them critically. Yet all over the world, people are actually doing things whilst waiting for the bus, walking past billboards, etc: from stickers saying ‘this is sexist shit’ stuck over plastic surgery ads in London, to Sydney, to Barcelona, to New York. The exhibition was put together by Lisa-Marie Taylor. While she doesn’t condone or condemn subvertising, she provided free marker pens for illustrative purposes and cards saying ‘You have just offended a woman. This card has been chemically treated. Your prick will fall off in three days,’ for women to give out to men harassing them. The cards were the idea of the feminist activist and academic, Catherine Mackinnon, who was delighted for them to be used at FiL. Lisa-Marie is planning to set up a website, so if you have any ideas, please get in touch.
After lunch I went to the What’s Wrong with Prostitution Panel. Chaired by Finn Mackay, founder of the London Feminist Network, the speakers were survivors Rebecca Mott and Anna Travers, and Denise Marshall from the Poppy Project. Anna Travers spoke first, reading a moving poem asking us not to pity or condemn, but to empathise with and understand her experiences as a prostituted woman. She talked of the knock-on effect these experiences have had on her children, and her work with Mothers Against Violence in Leeds, and her plans to make a ‘Grand Truth Auto’ computer game, to counter the normalisation and legitimisation of prostitution and violence young boys experience when playing Grand Theft Auto.
Denise Marshall punched holes into many common assumptions about prostitution; agriculture, not prostitution, is the oldest profession in the world, so it can be changed. And the common plea on behalf of men too inept to get sex in any other way is clearly ridiculous – people must learn how to function! Coming from a family steeped in prostitution, she said there was no debate as to its legitimacy, and the tiny minority of high-class prostitutes who choose and praise it as a ‘career’, do the rest a huge disservice.
When Rebecca Mott began to speak, I could actually see the air pulsating. ‘Do not think of it happening to someone far away,’ she had told us, and with the darkly playful power of her writing, we were able to do nothing else: she made us feel, for those few minutes, that we too were that thirteen-year-old, who had already learned that her body was the plaything of other people, and learned to see the free drinks and male attention she received at the ‘clubs’ she went to, as normal and sophisticated. She ended by calling to feminists to listen to the voices of exited women, saying they had been all too often ignored in the past.
Unsurprisingly, the Q&A was lively. All three speakers hit out at the ‘liberal choice argument’ by saying that it is never a free choice because you cannot know the effect it will have on you until it is too late. Many women who are in prostitution present themselves as ‘happy hookers’ as it is the only way to survive. Denise Marshall said she would consider it a valid career choice when it appeared in the careers guide of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. The socially-neutral term ‘punter’ should be challenged, and replaced by a socially deviant one, such as rapist. After all, as Rebecca Mott pointed out, prostitution is just rape ‘on an industrial scale.’ For more of Rebecca Mott’s words, you can visit her blog.
I was a bit too frazzled to make much of a contribution to the Power in Bed workshop, run by Alice Kentridge who is an activist and writer who is interested in powerful conversations and challenging one’s own privilege. However, I enjoyed listening to the stories of those who had a bit more stamina. We had to discuss in pairs how privileges we had affected our sexual experiences, then what we thought power in bed looked like. Later, we shared our thoughts as a group. This was quite remarkable; a group of people who had never met one another sharing so intimately. Hearing from people with very different experiences to me was particularly thought-provoking. (I won’t repeat anything that was said because that was one of the conditions of the workshop, so if you want to know, you’ll have to go next year!).
The closing speeches put the day’s events into a tantalisingly broad context. Marie-Claire Faray-Kele read a message of support from the World March of Women, then Mawete vo Teka Sala, who is the chairperson and co-founder of Moyo wa Taifa (Pan Afrikan Women’s Solidarity Network), with over thirty years activist and campaigning experience, outlined what she considered to be feminism’s challenge in a global context. A global feminist network is needed, she said, to redistribute the control of the planet’s resources, just as women in Africa have worked around civil war to sustain life. To do this, the legal system rather than laws need to be challenged. ‘I will do whatever it takes,’ she declared, ‘to make patriarchy a fact of history in the same way that matriarchy has been one.’
Next, Hannana Siddiqui, joint coordinator of Southall Black Sisters, talked about the funding problems they had faced, as a result of the government’s social cohesion agenda. She described the government’s hazy talk of ‘core British values’ as an attempt at assimilation rather than integration, which gave the implicit message that minorities were to blame for the problems in British society. Lumping race and gender issues together, the cohesion baton erases the need for services that are moulded to the needs of specific groups, something SBS has fought to prove otherwise. In the case of this funding battle, they have been successful.
Finn Mackay, founder of the London Feminist Network, gave a brilliant closing speech; with capitalism in crisis, we must be on our guard against the Right’s claims that equality is for the good times only, and its search for scapegoats. There is nothing new about the subjection of women. Young women are often blamed for the way that they are portrayed in the media, characterised as the generation that has sold out. This couldn’t be more wrong; the generation born into the backlash are fighting back.
Sadly, we did not get to hear what Finn had to say next, because the hall had to be cleared, so she was cut short. Slowly, people milled back out into the square. Talking to a pro-feminist young man who told me he thought ‘patriarchy is old,’ (as in the slang ‘old’, meaning over/dead), I was too exhausted to be able to tell whether I or anyone else had come any closer to knowing what feminism was or should be.
So I will leave you with some of the words of other people who attended the conference, who summed up what they got out of it much more succinctly: ‘this is the first time I’ve been in a room and felt everyone speaking the same language!’ said one woman. ‘Not enough time for everything – a two day conference maybe?’ said another. Others suggested setting up a networking site as a follow-up to the conference, or a ‘speed-dating’ session at the opening of the next one to help people connect with each other. Hopefully many of these suggestions and more will be incorporated into next year’s conference and other events throughout the year. So if you have any more comments or suggestions, please email us at info@feminisminlondon.org.uk.
Clare Fisher, October 2009
An edited version of this report appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of Rain and Thunder, a radical feminist journal of discussion and activism.