Many South African women live in fear due to the high levels of gender-based violence (GBV). Moreover, one in five (21%) women in South Africa who have intimate partners, have experienced physical violence by their partners. More significantly, black women are identified in South Africa’s parliament report as the most vulnerable group to intimate partner violence due to their unemployment status, which is at an alarming rate of 30%. In 2021 and the first quarter of 2022 there were 902 cases of femicide, and 11,315 were sexual assault cases committed against women.However, People Opposing Women Abuse (POWA) is not convinced of the statistics as they believe that these do not provide a true reflection of women’s plight. They do acknowledge, however, that these statistics offer a glimpse of the seriousness of gendered violence in women’s everyday lives.
Therefore, it is critical to create spaces for dialogues to engage with the numerous ways in which gender-based violence affects women in the community. Visual methods and creative arts have been central to African social life and cultural construction even before colonialism took hold of African lives. We, therefore, draw from these methods to engage and reflect on the everydayness of GBV.
A work of art
Addressing social challenges through creative arts
Visual methods offer the vocabulary to often unspoken atrocities and traumas that people have experienced in their lives. Gender-based violence is a global challenge dubbed the parallel pandemic affecting communities alongside Covid-19. In a context such as South Africa where the unemployment rate is very high, many women stay in abusive relationships as alternatives do not appear to be in place. Therefore, it is critical to create dialogues, awareness, and empowerment opportunities where women can engage on alternatives and possibilities for better and safer lives. Visual participatory projects offer an opportunity for collective reflection, creating spaces for solidarity, and thinking differently about challenges confronting women. One such visual method is embroidery. Artworks such as embroideries force people to pause and reflect on the perpetual injustices and challenges confronting us daily. Furthermore, artistic visual images such as embroidery are useful tools that can be utilised to represent people’s reflections of their everyday experiences. Embroidery has the potential to contribute to how we make meaning of everyday realities, and how we can imagine the possible transformation of society. Gender-based violence has become an integral part of our lives — it has become part of ‘the everyday’, and it is therefore important to pay attention to this everydayness – the taken for granted; and how these have detrimental effects on the functioning of individuals, families, and ultimately, the whole society.
A call for action
Visual methodologies such as embroideries precipitate social change. They facilitate the co-production of knowledge in contexts where social injustice occurs. When shared publicly or disseminated on wider public platforms, such creative images have a wider reach, aiding critical awareness of the varied forms of oppression and sometimes raising awareness on the ways in which women internalise oppression knowingly and sometimes unknowingly. With embroidery, there is space to look beyond the perceived hopelessness where women are perceived as victims who do not have the power to change their circumstances. Instead, embroidery also highlights how women resist with the courage and determination to change their circumstances. Furthermore, embroidery offers the opportunity to highlight structural violence and inequalities (for example, patriarchy, unemployment, poverty, lack of access to proper education and health systems) that directly impact people’s everyday encounters. Women coming together to make embroideries that show how gender-based violence makes a home in all aspects of women’s lives, at the personal, the collective and the structural level, is a plea for action. The coming together further allows women to analyse policies and laws on GBV and how that affects their everyday lives.
Women’s embroideries in communities may also serve as props for public community dialogues. With the various themes that the embroideries highlight (e.g. being hassled in the streets, domestic violence, being accused of witchery, human trafficking, substance abuse, to name a few) we come together as academics, school learners, and community women at various places and platforms within the community to engage on what these themes mean to all of us. We come together to share stories of survival — share networking and referral processes — to speak about possible steps that could be taken by the communities themselves and how the government can take women’s concerns and recommendations forward to effect relevant policies on GBV.
Conclusion
It is clear that gender-based violence affects all of us either directly or indirectly. Therefore, the call for action is a challenge to all of us to play our role in the spaces we occupy. We should refuse to keep silent in the face of injustice and instead hold each other accountable and collectively work towards sustainable outcomes. From the micro to the macro level, attention has to be given to how gender-based violence affects us. After all, Women’s rights are human rights!
This blog post explores the Gender and Education Association 2021 funded research project titled Embroidery as a visual methodology that carves a bridge for dialogue, led by Professor Puleng Segalo.
A BSA Early Career Forum Regional Event Monday, 6 June 2022 10am – 5pm Brunel University London, Kingston Lane Uxbridge UB8 3PH
Proposals for oral presentations are invited for this BSA Early Career Forum supported one-day in-person event which will drive fresh conversations around the intersection of race and social class within the sociology of education and beyond. In recent years, post-racial ideologies that deny the existence of structural racism has gathered pace in the UK.
At the same time, race- and class-based inequalities have been pitted against each other. These discourses not only fail to grasp the complexities of the issues in hand, but actively deflect attention away from the way racial and classed inequalities within education are interlocked and co-constituted. The COVID-19 pandemic too has laid bare the deep seated racial and classed inequalities in contemporary Britain, which pose challenges to existing sociological frameworks.
Against this backdrop, it is more relevant than ever before to bring together both established and early career sociologists working on the intersection of social class and race to reflect on the current state of affairs, showcase ongoing research projects in the field of education, build networks and further our collective struggle for a more just and equal society. Oral presentations must engage with issues of race and class as they are constructed, represented and experienced in diverse educational settings.
Key Dates: • Deadline for submission of abstracts (300 words): 2nd May 2022 • Decision communicated by: 9th May 2022 • Date of the event: 6th June 2022
Please send 300-word abstracts (with 50-word bio-note) and enquiries to Dr Utsa Mukherjee (utsa.mukherjee @ brunel.ac.uk)
Confirmed Keynote Speakers: • Prof Sally Tomlinson (University of Oxford and Goldsmiths University of London) • Dr Pere Ayling (University of Suffolk)
[Please Note: The event will take place at the Uxbridge Campus of Brunel University London with a possibility for remote participation, if needed]
Schooling continues to be a very important site where gender relations and sexual politics take place (Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Mac an Ghaill, 1996; Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 1996; Lesko, 2000; Renold, 2005; Ringrose and Renold, 2012; Mendes et al, 2022). This book explores the role of education amidst persisting gender inequalities in education and schooling. This book will present theoretical explorations, case studies and emerging research mapping out some of the oppressive sexist and patriarchal cultures affecting the educational lives of young people today in educational settings and across various national contexts. The book will also offer an opportunity to host an international forum on contemporary thinking on education and the inequalities that characterise processes of education around the world. The chapters will provide a modern look into education, looking at pressing gender and sexuality issues in educational sectors, including schooling. In previous works a critical feminist approach has been suggested for education (Weiler and Arnot, 1993; Walby 1997, Ng et al, 1995; Ringrose 2013), yet, it is important to continue to explore the shifting issues and concerns of the feminist theoretical debates in order to help shape future feminist agendas better suited for our changing international educational landscapes.
Crucially, the book also poses critical questions needed to frame education differently: Can schools be redefined to be more inclusive? Should the school be more accountable for instilling a sense of political agency in students so that students feel confident in challenging inequalities? Are there any ways in which schools can open up more opportunities to challenge toxic student and staff cultures? What modes of student collaboration and resistance enable an ethical response to the inequitable distribution of common rights at school? What concepts can be utilised beyond traditional concepts to better address gender inequalities in schooling? The book seeks to pose these critical questions and through its contributions help rethink education and learning beyond the curriculum, and in a way that appeals both to modern schooling, and our popular imagination on education.
Emergent inequalities in gender are associated with the interpretation of gender identities as binary opposites. This book will present scholarly challenges to these binaries which continue to uncritically construct idealised femininities and masculinities as the only possibilities to enact gender, and as necessarily oppositional. In doing this, the book is contributing to the discourse of, ‘deconstruction of binaries’, best understood through feminist scholarly research and theory (Kristeva 1981; Sedgwick, 2008; White et al, 2017; Youdell, 2006). Consequently, the book will develop its themes guided by some of the critical questions posed previously but with a focus on contemporary formations of gender identity.
In this way the book aims to illustrate how education is an important physical, material and ideological site for understanding and challenging stubborn gender inequalities. Contrary to postfeminist discourses that claim gender equity has been achieved and therefore feminism is redundant, the book positions itself within existing research outlining how gender issues and power cultures have in many cases changed from plain to more insidious inequalities (Ringrose and Epstein, 2015). The notion of education is also expanded in this book, with a focus on more alternative forms of education, such as, youth activisms, creative pedagogies and media research. The book will provide conceptual as well as pedagogical contributions which will help students and educators understand current debates and issues around gender, whilst also reflecting critically on the role of education in turbulent times.
Extended abstracts may be related to, but not necessarily limited to the following themes:
Feminist, material and affective ontologies in education
Heteronormative cultures in education
Innovative feminist pedagogies
Black feminisms in education
Gender activisms – case studies and empirical studies
Gender and sexual identities in education and schooling
Young people as agents of change
Acts of school feminisms
Gender and sexuality extra-curricular learning
Social media and digital activisms and education
Deconstructing institutional power relations
Problematising gender relations in education
New ontologies of gender and sexuality
Acts of school resistance as social justice
Repositioning extra-curricular learning in education
Emerging queer activisms in education
Theorisations against patriarchy in education
Extended abstracts of 700 to 1,000 words (inclusive of citations) are invited for selection; please email jbustillos-morales @ brookes.ac.uk to submit your abstract. Submissions should be made in Word format by 1st July 2022. Please ensure the document has the following details.
Title of chapter
Theme under which chapter is submitted
Name of author/s
Institutional affiliation
Email address – with designated corresponding author, if there are multiple authors
Brief Bio (max. 250 words)
Any other additional links or URLs relevant to authors’ bio and chapters (i.e social media campaigns, websites etc)
Suggested timeline:
Call for Chapters submission: July 2022
Acceptance of contributions: August 2022
First submission of full chapters: February 2023
Editor’s first feedback on full chapters: April 2023
Reviewed chapters sent back to editor: June 2023
Editor’s second feedback: July 2023
Second submission of full chapters: September 2023
Full manuscript sent to publisher: December 2023
Editor details: Dr Jessie Bustillos Morales Senior Lecturer in Education, Oxford Brookes University orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3355-6617
This Special Issue of the European Educational Research Journal is led by EERA’s Gender and Education Network, and it is on the theme of gender, intersectionality and educational research, a topic which was a focus of the Network at the 2019 ECER annual conference. It will feature papers from early career and established researchers.
Race, class, and gender were once seen as separate issues for members of both dominant and subordinate groups. Scholars now generally agree that these issues along with ethnicity, nation, age and sexuality and how they intersect are integral to individuals’ positions in the social world (PH Collins 2006; Arrighi 2001; Collins 1993; Cuadraz, G. H., & Uttal, L. (1999). Ore 2000; Rothman et al.2005; Weber 2004) Scholars using the intersectional approach will socially locate individuals in the context of their ‘real lives’ (Weber 2006). They also examine how both formal and informal systems of power are deployed, maintained, and reinforced through axes of race, class and gender (Collins 1998; Weber 2006). Research using the intersectional approach broadly extends across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
Understanding of the cumulative impact of structural inequalities arising from gender, race, class, disability and LGBTQI+, on educational institutions and student and staff participation, experience, and achievement within education, requires that intersectional perspectives are further developed (Fuller 2017, Showunmi 2017, Lumby 2011). Historically, critical researchers, especially feminist and race scholars, have decried the inability of the educational sector to challenge power hierarchies and undermine the dominance of white, masculine, heterosexual and ableist knowledges and practices. These reproduce the negative intersecting effects of gender, race, class, ethnicity, disability and LGBTQI+ (hooks 1989; Abu-Lughud Soziologin 1991; Kandiyoti 2002; Narayan 1993; Skeggs 1997; Smith 2012). However, there are a myriad of reasons why intersectional understandings have not successfully challenged the status quo. Arguably we lack the core theories to enable us to engage with the complexity of dominant processes and develop effective transformational praxis relating to different forms of intersectionality (Abbas, Taylor and Amande-Escot, 2019).
There are three areas that are pertinent to transforming educational systems through intersectional approaches and where there are promising existing bodies of research to build on. They are relevant across Europe and to all educational sectors: from early years to all types of post-compulsory education. Firstly, in relation to exucational leadership, we need to increase the number of people with lived experience of combined intersectional inequalities at all levels of education. Senior positions are dominated by White men, and Black women have the lowest representation of any ethnic and gender group (Lumby 2011). In addition, LGBTQI+ and people with disabilities are virtually invisible publically and in the research literature regarding leadership (Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, 2017 Lee, 2020). Secondly, a wealth of research suggests that pedagogies and curricula that are inclusive, inspiring, and representative of diverse students, their cultures, communities, and ways of knowing, are needed if future generations are to succeed in building equity from their intersecting identities and positionalities (Abbas, 2019). Change and social justice cannot be achieved unless we understand how intersectional lenses can enrich and inform praxis. Finally, how do we understand and prevent the marginalisation of critical intersectional knowledges in research and teaching? It is important to focus inclusively on each marginalised group in the context of intersectionality. In the past, Black women, LGBTQI and those with disabilities, for example, have been neglected in relation to all of the fields we have identified.
We would like to invite researchers, theorists and evidence-based practitioners to submit discursive papers that engage in issues regarding the development of intersectional approaches. We are interested in papers that generate new analytical, critical and methodological perspectives. The aim is to highlight ways of combating the role of education in generating and increasing inequalities.
The following themes are relevant:
Exploring the combined effects of forms of inequality in education
The role of curricula and pedagogies in challenging the dominance of whiteness, ableism, masculinity, cis-genderism and other structural inequalities
The value of broader or narrower notions of intersectionality
How insights into intersectionality can effectively tackle the marginalisation of critical and equalising knowledges within educational contexts
Intersectional approaches to gender, race, disability, sexuality, socio-economic backgroundand leadership
EXPECTED DATE FOR SUBMISSION FIRST FULL DRAFTS:
January 2022
References
Abbas, A. (2019) ‘Tackling intersecting gender inequalities through disciplinary-based higher education curricula: A Bernsteinian approach’ in Taylor, Amade-Escot and Abbas (eds) (2019) Gender in Learning and Teaching: Feminist Dialogues Across International Boundaries. Routledge.
Abbas, A., Taylor, C. & Amade-Escot, C., 26 Apr 2019, Introduction: Debates across Anglophone and European Didactics traditions in Taylor, Amade-Escot and Abbas (eds) Gender in Learning and Teaching: Feminist Dialogues Across International Boundaries. Routledge.
Arrighi, B. A. (Ed.). (2001). Understanding inequality: The intersection of race/ethnicity, class, and gender. Rowman & Littlefield.
Collins, P. H. (1993). The sexual politics of black womanhood. Violence against women: The bloody footprints, 85-104.
Collins, R. L. (1998). Social identity and HIV infection: The experiences of gay men living with HIV.
Collins, P. H. (2006). Sisters and brothers: Black feminists on womanism. The womanist reader, 57-67.
Cuadraz, G. H., & Uttal, L. (1999). Intersectionality and in-depth interviews: Methodological strategies for analyzing race, class, and gender. Race, Gender & Class, 156-186.
Fuller, K. (2017). Women secondary head teachers in England: Where are they now?. Management in Education, 31(2), 54-68.
Weber, L., & Fore, M. E. (2007). Race, ethnicity, and health: An intersectional approach. In Handbooks of the sociology of racial and ethnic relations (pp. 191-218). Springer, Boston, MA.
Ore, T. E., & Kurtz, P. (2000). The social construction of difference and inequality. Mayfield Publishing.
Rothman, S., Lichter, S. R., & Nevitte, N. (2005, March). Politics and professional advancement among college faculty. In The Forum (Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 1-16).
Showunmi, V., & Kaparou, M. (2017). The challenge of leadership: ethnicity and gender among school leaders in England, Malaysia and Pakistan. In Cultures of Educational Leadership (pp. 95-119). Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Weber, L., & Fore, M. E. (2007). Race, ethnicity, and health: An intersectional approach. In Handbooks of the sociology of racial and ethnic relations (pp. 191-218). Springer, Boston, MA.
Developing ‘hybrid’ workshops for online feminist consciousness raising: Reflections from our work with the Malaysian Youth Council
by Dr Syafiqah Abdul Rahim (Malaysian Youth Council) and Dr Hannah Walters (UCL)
Two youth researchers in different time zones login to a Zoom meeting. For one, it is 6.45am, rainy and still dark, as she sits alone in her living room in Glasgow waiting for the meeting to start. For the other, it is 2.45pm and a warm Kuala Lumpur afternoon, where she anxiously waits with other members of the Malaysian Youth Council secretariat, head buzzing with the thought of technical issues and other members’ expectations of the event ahead.
Working together over a distance of over six thousand miles, they have spent the last few months preparing to hold a hybrid event aimed at bridging the material and virtual worlds in an effort to create a safe space for feminist discussion and consciousness raising activities with members of different Malaysian youth organisations from across the country.
In this blog post we discuss the aims of the workshop, the methods we developed to meet these aims, and where we see the project going in the future. In doing so we hope our work will speak to some of the challenges other youth, gender and education researchers have met since the outbreak of Covid-19 and consequent shift to online spaces for so much of our educational lives in recent times. More broadly, we hope to contribute ideas and strategies for educators, activists and researchers to make the most of online spaces – a way to bring a sense of real-worldness and materiality to a virtual space, in particular around the use of arts-based and participatory methods.
Themes and goals of the workshop
The current project started with a simple conversation around the place of feminism in Malaysian youth movements. We were cognisant that, in spite of its focus on intersectionality, Fourth Wave feminism as a movement for the most part remains entrenched in ‘Western’ ideas of gender and equality. We were curious as to how contemporary feminist debates were mobilised in Malaysian youth groups, and which issues were important to these young women and girls. It was out of these discussions came our plan to design an event that was part-consciousness raising, part-creative, participatory workshop.
To this end we defined the broad theme of ‘What it’s like to be a girl in a youth movement’ for the event. We hoped this question – aimed at encouraging participants to interrogate their gendered experiences within their youth activism – would serve as a catalyst for consciousness-raising discussion and activities around feminism. We wanted to define a safe space which would allow participants to: discuss their feelings around their gendered experiences and standpoints; discuss their feminism/feminist identities; and/or facilitate feminist consciousness raising for those new to feminist theory and movement. Simply put, we hoped all participants (including organisers) would leave the event with a renewed energy and investment in their feminist identities as part of their broader youth activist work, regardless of whether these ideas were relatively new or well embedded in their practice.
Based on these principles, we developed a module guided by the following key statements:
Feminism as an everyday practice
Feminism is for everybody
We wanted to ‘normalise’ feminism and emphasise the idea that feminist work can be part of routine, everyday activities and interactions which promote solidarity between women and girls, embed an ethos of support and care, and raise the profile of feminist causes. In doing so, we hoped to modify preconceived notions around what feminism is/means, and what kind of people feminists are, for participants. This served to (in part, at least) eschew problematic images of feminist-as-man hater, feminist-as-angry, feminist-as-dogmatic – commonplace ‘backlash’ narratives worldwide, which one of us had witnessed in the Malaysian context through the online scrutiny of young women who ‘called out’ sexism on social media. At the same time, we wanted to make it clear that we can all be part of a feminist cause without the need to take part in public modes of feminist politics, such as marches, protests, public discussions, campaigning, training and so on. Simply put, we hoped to encourage the feeling that feminism is for everybody, that feminists are just like me and you, and that the barrier to entry into feminism as a meaningful political movement are low, i.e. can be enacted as routine; in the everyday.
During the event, this took the form of sharing and prompting for examples of feminism as an everyday practice. We shared feminist memes and gifs; we discussed how solidarity could be as simple as a supportive text to a friend; participants raised and made visible examples of feminism in action in their own work (including those who might not have identified as feminist). We believe that this was an effective consciousness raising activity which served to make feminism both palatable and accessible, while still maintaining the meaning of the movement: equality and solidarity for and amongst women and girls.
Bringing the virtual to life – finding real-worldness in online spaces
We did not want to replicate the online events we had seen elsewhere. It was important to us that the event felt interactive, and that the participants were partners in co-producing a safe space for feminist discussion. Consciousness raising activities were thus designed to probe our – both participants’ and facilitators’ – relationships with and understandings of feminism, feminist activism, and how gendered inequalities impact our lives. Taking this a step further, we developed a range of strategies designed to make the discussion feel less hierarchical, and encourage open communication between participants. We encouraged participants to use the chat box to respond to ideas raised, and to use the stamp function on Zoom to draw attention to items of interest on the screen.
Alongside these tactics for breaking down the artificiality of online spaces, we also wanted to bring in a sense of materiality. To do this we developed a poster-making workshop by creating craft packs which we sent out to participants in advance.
The packs contained hard backing paper, craft paper, scissors, glue, washi tape, glitter, pipe cleaners, stickers, pages from magazines pages and felt-tip pens. We also included items in line with an ethos of self-care and feminist caring practices, including face masks (one clinical, one sheet mask) and hand sanitiser.
A strategy was adopted from the YouTube ‘unboxing’ trend, whereby all participants who had been posted the pack were asked not to open it until the event. Opening it together, all at once, gave the event a sense of being not only linked by the material sense of touching, feeling and engaging with the same materials, but also that we were working in a shared realtime.
Following the discussion, we all opened our packs together. The enthusiasm in the space was tangible, as participants excitedly opened the package to discover the contents.
We shared some images of simple feminist posters as inspiration, and discussed the ethos of DIY projects and ‘craftivism’ in feminist movement. Listening to a feminist-inspired playlist, broadcast via Zoom, we began making our individual posters.
So, what did we learn and what’s next?
This was our first hybrid workshop and it taught us about the specific value of a feminist ethos in online spaces. Everyone, participants and facilitators, were working hard to be present in the virtual meeting space, and to build real connections online – in spite of our shared awareness that sometimes, as with many virtual events, we can feel like disconnected faces on a screen. We learned valuable lessons in the construction of a safe space to discuss feelings around sexism, feminism and gendered experiences, as well as a space in which to energise and inspire each other in our broader activist work. We were required to navigate the competing public and private spaces at work in activist circles, and respect these barriers when discussing complex, sometimes sensitive topics. This included considering the nature of sexism at work in activists’ lives, and the relationship these experiences had to their broader feelings about activism.
We felt the posters that came out of the event demonstrated a keen awareness of specific feminist issues arising in participants’ lives. People explored body image issues, femininity, gender in workplaces, as well as broad themes of solidarity and sisterhood. Posters were as diverse in design as the topics discussed and there were many innovative and creative responses to the brief. Some made TikTok videos of their poster-making, sharing these online and bringing the virtual back in! More broadly, we felt the hybrid nature of the workshop, with physical craft packs and the tactile experience they facilitated, altered the feel of the event. It allowed for a greater feeling of connection between us all, and a sense that we were working in a shared space, with the same tools.
We had a few technical hiccups during the workshop, but believe that the feminist ethos of the event supported us to overcome them, with participants jumping into facilitator roles when technical issues occurred, and vice versa. We felt the way others stepped in when we as facilitators were faced with technical issues resonated with a broader feminist ethos of support. It highlighted the importance of solidarity and emphasised a feeling of: “it’s OK when things go wrong”. The less-/non-hierarchical facilitation allowed us to pass around the ‘power’, both in terms of making contributions to the content of the workshop, as well as in the facilitation of the event.
We hope this ethos will continue into our future projects, and currently have two upcoming events :
1) an interactive movie screening featuring dialogue, discussion and debate around themes of feminism and sisterhood; and
2) A workshop on feminism and media, accompanied by an interactive workshop on gif and meme creation as a feminist practice.
For updates on these projects follow @beliaMBM on twitter, Facebook and Instagram!
Critically Exploring Co-production : A special issue of Qualitative Research Journal
The Gender and Education Association have been asked to share this call for papers for an exciting special issue of Qualitative Research Journal on co-production. Guest edited by Harriet Rowley, Kate Pahl, Gabrielle Ivinson and James Duggan, this special issue invites contributions that question whether university structures can accommodate research that is genuinely co-produced, highlight tensions in on-the ground co-productive practices, describe the often circuitous ways alliances emerge, and speculate about the limits and possibilities of co-production.
This special issue invites people who are involved in co-production as practitioners as well as more academic pieces to contribute ideas. The editors envisage shorter pieces together with dialogues as well as asking discussants to reflect on some of the pieces. Experimentation with form is welcome. Initial abstracts are invited as part of this process.
Contributions may cover the following areas:
· Critical enquires into the role of the university in co-produced research projects
· Co-production; research method or socio-political practice
· Ethnography and co-production
· Critical pedagogy and co-production
· Arts practice and co-production
· Creativity and co-productive practice.
· Failure and co-production
· Ethical dilemmas and co-production
Submissions and deadlines
1. 500 word abstracts due 1st November 2020 – these can be sent to k.pahl@mmu.ac.uk .
2. Full papers of 3,000 to 7,000 words due 10 January 2021.
In the UK, the prominence of a number of anti-trans feminist voices in social and mainstream media has led American journalist Katelyn Burns to term anti-trans ideology as ‘the de facto face of feminism in the UK’ – but this belies a history of feminist and trans entanglements and alliances as well as the continued and resilient support of women for trans people to self-identify their gender. In June, the GEA Executive were amongst tens of thousands of individuals and organisations who wrote to the UK Prime Minister urging the government not to rollback trans rights or disregard the results of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) consultation. For now, this show of support appears to have prompted the government to affirm that they will not restrict healthcare for young transgender people. Much more needs to be done however to safeguard and build upon existing protections for trans and non-binary people to ensure they can live their lives free of oppression, restriction and violence.
While the drive to uncover histories of anti-trans feminism offer
valuable insights, scholars and activists have also sought to acknowledge the
fruitful connections that exist between different struggles for gender justice
(Halberstam 2017). Trans and women’s liberation have always been intimately
linked by their struggle to escape patriarchal norms. The term gender (as now
commonly understood) was developed by feminists from work by psychologists on
trans and intersex subjects. Ultimately, women’s and trans liberation are both
concerned with equity of rights and life opportunities, freedom from hegemonic
gender and sexuality discourses and questions of power. Yet, the women-led
social movements that arose during the 1970s have been persistently painted as
inherently hostile to trans experiences, despite many trans and feminist
scholars having challenged this characterisation.
Withers’ work highlights that the grand narratives ‘invoked
within the paywalls of academic feminist theory or the rabid annals of twitter’
rarely do justice to the rich ‘conceptual and lived resources’ produced within
the WLM which contributed to contemporary transfeminist discourse. Drawing on
archival materials, they illustrate how the emergence of ‘women’s culture’ and
women-only spaces was part of the ‘trans-formation of sex’ allowing for
intensified experimentation where the ‘female sex was bent into new, irreversible
shapes’. Women-only networks facilitated practices such as learning ‘how to fix
PA systems, repair faulty car engines, explore the contours of a drum kit, or
mend the plumbing’ which expanded the material politics of the female body and
what it could do, be and become. Significantly, these spaces and networks were
not marked by the same categorical differentiations between cis and trans women
that shape contemporary feminist debates. Withers draws attention to
testimonial and archival evidence that illustrates the presence of trans
activists within the WLM noting, for example, that the keyboardist for the Northern Women’s Liberation Rock Band was a trans woman.
In a special issue on Trans/Feminisms, Stryker and Bettcher (2016) along with Cristan Williams (2016) and Emma Heaney (2016) map the involvement of trans activists in US-based lesbian feminist autonomous organisations in the early ‘70s. They explore, for example, the contributions of the lesbian trans folksinger Beth Elliot, Angela Douglas (the founder of the Transexual Action Organisation) and the trans inclusive politics of the radical feminist lesbian separatist music collective, Olivia Records. In an interview for Vice magazine, former Olivia Records engineer and pioneering trans studies academic Sandy Stone tells her story of living among lesbian separatists in the ‘70s. She details how revelatory it felt to discover ‘that you could be a woman without stereotyping anything, without encountering traditional cis female culture at all’ and travel through a ‘rhizome’ of ‘lesbian safe houses’ from ‘coast to coast and never encounter someone presenting as male, like a wonderful parallel subculture—or superculture.’
When trans exclusionary feminists such as Janice Raymond began threatening and harassing Olivia Records, Stone details that she initially ‘felt really protected by the women of the Collective’. However, the unrelenting nature of the attacks and the risk of boycott action led Stone to leave. Following on from Olivia Records, Stone went on to earn her doctorate with supervision from Donna Haraway and in a faculty comprised of legendary feminist academics such as Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldua and Teresa De Lauretis. Stone proceeded to publish one of the founding essays in transgender studies, The Empire Strikes Back: A (post)transsexual manifesto.
A place for trans lives in all feminisms
These
collective and inclusive herstories question the current common understanding
that particular strands of feminism are necessarily trans exclusionary. Furthering
the view that there is no inherent need for tension between lesbian feminism
and trans-inclusion, and calling for a revival of (a trans-inclusive) lesbian
feminism, Sara Ahmed (2017, p. 227) notes: ‘I would suggest that transfeminism
today most recalls the militant spirit of lesbian feminism in part because of
the insistence that crafting a life is political work’. Ahmed’s assertion that
transfeminist texts ‘assemble a politics from what they name’ (ibid), showcases
one of the many commonalities between lesbian and trans feminisms. Both lesbians
and trans people have been rendered menacing and monstrous killjoy
figures within and outside of feminist spaces (see Mitchell and McKinney 2019;
Stryker 1994).
Similarly, and contrary to the popular belief that radical feminism and anti-trans feminism are somehow synonymous (not least due to the infamy of the moniker ‘TERF’), radical feminism does not necessitate hostility towards trans people. Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, two of the most prominent and celebrated radfems, were both supportive of trans inclusion. In 2015 McKinnon stated “I always thought I don’t care how someone becomes a woman or a man; it does not matter to me. It’s just part of their specificity, their uniqueness like, everyone else’s. Anyone who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I’m concerned, is a woman.”
Intersectionality and the category of
‘woman’
In the aforementioned TSQ special issue, Stryker and Bettcher (2016) also credit the intersectional feminist analyses promulgated by US feminists of color in the 1970s and 1980s with laying the foundation for transfeminist theories and practices. They observe that by raising the question of ‘whether “woman” itself was a sufficient analytical category capable of accounting for the various forms of oppression that women can experience in a sexist society’, Black feminists ‘called for an account of multiple “differences” of embodied personhood along many different but interrelated axes’ (Stryker and Bettcher 2016, p. 8).[1] Transfeminist scholars and activists have not only drawn from the work of Black feminists but also contributed their own intersectional analyses to the fight against racism, state violence and other oppressions (Bettcher 2007). Angela Davis recently credited trans and non-binary communities with contributing to abolitionist feminism by demonstrating that it is possible to imagine more socially just worlds that challenge ‘that which is totally accepted as normal’.
Article on Angela Davis in Women’s LibeRATion magazine (1970)
Black feminist and trans scholars have also explored the historical imbrication and interplay between Blackness and transness (Riley Snorton 2017; Bey 2017; Sharpe 2016). Marquis Bey (2018, p. 165) illustrates that the ‘subjective nexus of Black and woman, for example, irrespective of an identified trans gender, also experiences the surveillance and invasion of their bodies going through airport security (e.g hair searches), expulsion from bathrooms, housing discrimination and historical invalidation of their womanhood’. Scholars including Lola Olufemi (2020) and Alison Phipps (2020) have noted the ‘whiteness’ of the UK anti-trans feminist movement. Phipps further suggesting the paucity of British intersectional analysis, relative to the US work noted above, as a contributing factor to the prominence of ‘gender critical’ views in the UK. Dr. Gail Lewis observes how Black women’s work in Britain was denied credibility and respect by white feminists as they entered the Academy and formed women’s studies networks and reading lists.
Continuing to learn from one another
OWAAD poster (1980)
Given the marginalisation of Black British feminist thought within the Academy, it is important to re-visit and learn from the Black and working class women-centred social movements, such as Wages for Housework and the Black Women’s Movement, that thrived alongside the predominantly White and middle class WLM in 1970s Britain. Significantly, these movements did not share the same unease with trans subjectivity as expressed by minority factions of the WLM. Lewis, who was a co-founder of the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) and member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group, highlights that the Black Women’s Movement always questioned limited articulations of gender and notes her surprise at those who have been so troubled by trans* politics. The Black Women’s Movement and Wages for Housework were characterised by coalitional working between contingently autonomous groups, activating ‘an organizational tactic to mobilize across and beyond existing racial, gender, sexual, and class configurations while recognizing the irreducible differences’ (Capper and Austin 2018, p. 449). Wages for Housework, for example, was an international movement comprised of autonomous groups such as Black Women for Wages for Housework, Wages Due Lesbians (now Queer Strike) and the English Collective of Prostitutes.
Transfeminist scholars and activists have turned to the organisational tactics and theoretical interventions of these Black and working class women-centred social movements for inspiration. Dr. Nat Raha, for example, observes how the Wages Due Lesbians campaign provided important insights into queer social reproduction by challenging the heteronormativity within Marxist feminist conceptualisations of unwaged domestic labour. Unlike the lesbian separatist movements referenced earlier, the largely Canadian / UK-based Wages Due campaign did not advance lesbianism as necessarily liberatory in itself. Instead, they noted how economic power continued to shape and limit women’s sexual choices (Caper and Austin 2018, p. 449). Raha draws on the work of Wages Due in order to advance a radical transfeminism and highlight the limits of trans liberalism. Rather than focusing on securing a particular ‘packet of entitlements’ and rights for trans people, a radical transfeminist agenda explores possibilities for common struggle across the intersecting issues of precarious working conditions, transmisogyny and sexism, white supremacy, ableism and sex work. Raha looks to contemporay and historical queer and trans-focused mutual aid support as a strategy for survival and world-building.
Conclusion
We are undoubtably living through a moment where trans lives are subject to unwarranted scrutiny and conjecture; where the historical imagining of trans as threat has reemerged and rejuvenated. That this image is often promoted by a small section of women from within the feminist movement remains disappointing. However, in the prevailing social and traditional media narrative it is easy to overlook the uplifting herstory of trans-feminist alliances which have been integral to the women’s liberation movement and which continue to inform and enrich our understandings; it is easy to overlook the collective struggles endured and the support and solidarity enjoyed. Scholars and activists demonstrate that it is in feminisms’ recognition of difference and shared experience that it is at its most sophisticated and demanding. At its best feminism is a movement that understands its role as a collective liberator of the margnalised and resists being reduced to a parochial border guard preoccupied with reserving womanhood for a privileged few.
Bio
Claire Thurlow is a PhD candidate in the School
of Law and Politics at Cardiff University. Her current research looks at
contemporary feminist reactions to trans identities in the UK. Her wider research
interests concern the intersections and divergences of feminism, queerness and
LGBTQ. She is a white cis-gender queer whose pronouns are she/her.
Kate Marston
is a PhD candidate in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. Her
research draws on feminist posthuman and new materialist theories to explore
young people’s digital sexual cultures through creative, visual and arts-based
methods. She is a white middle-class genderqueer lesbian
whose pronouns are she/they.
References
Ahmed, S. 2017. Living a Feminist Life.
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Bettcher, T. 2007. Evil deceivers and
make-believers: Transphobic violence and the politics of illusion Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist
Philosophy, 22 (3), pp. 43–65.
Bey, M. 2018. “Other Ways to Be: Trans.” Women and
Language 41(1), pp. 165 – 167.
Bey, M. 2017. “The
Trans*-Ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-Ness.” TSQ:
Transgender Studies Quarterly 4(2), pp. 275 – 295.
Capper, B. and Austin, A. 2018. “Wages for
housework means wages against heterosexuality”: On the Archives of Black Women
for Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 24(4), pp. 445 – 466.
Halberstam,
J. 2017. Trans: A Quick and Quirky
Account of Gender Variability. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Heaney, E.
2016. Women-Identified Women: Trans Women in 1970s Lesbian Feminist Organising TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3(1-2),
pp. 137 – 145.
Lugones, M.
2016. The Coloniality of Gender in Harcourt, W. (Eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development: Critical Engagements
in Feminist Theory and Practice London: Palgrave Macmillan
Mitchell, A. and McKinney, C. 2019. Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts,
Feminist Monsters, and Other Lesbian Hauntings. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Olufemi, L. 2020. Feminism Interrupted:
Disrupting power. London: Pluto Press
Phipps, A. 2020a. Me, Not You: The trouble
with mainstream feminism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Raymond, J.
1979. The transsexual empire: The making of the she-male. Boston: Beacon
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Riley Snorton,
C. 2017. Black on Both Sides: A Racial
History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sharpe, C.
2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Stryker, S. 2004. Transgender Studies: Queer
Theory’s Evil Twin. GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies 10(2), pp. 212-215.
Stryker,
S. and Bettcher, T. 2016. Introduction: Trans/Feminisms TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3(1-2), pp. 5 – 14.
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Feminism TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly
3(1-2), pp. 254 – 258.
“I had my first child when I was 13 and dropped out of school. Since I had to fend for my baby, I decided to wash clothes for a living and this is how I got pregnant again. The man I was washing clothes for promised to take me back to school if I had an affair with him.” Says Ruth•, a fifteen-year-old Standard eight leaver.
Ruth’s story is one among many horrific tales of young mothers who reside in the informal settlements of Nairobi. Education is a basic right for all in Kenya, however, it is not enjoyed by most teenage mothers who drop out of school despite the existence of the National School Health Policy and the School Re-Entry Policy and Guidelines that provide for these girls to enjoy their right to education. Implementation and monitoring of the school re-entry policy, the national school health policy, among others is important in curbing the rising rate of teenage pregnancies. According to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey of 2014 (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, 2015), one in every five girls between 15-19 years has begun childbearing or already has a child and approximately 13,000 teenage girls drop out of school every year due to pregnancy. A study by the Population Council highlighted that 70% of out of school girls from Homabay County report pregnancy as the main cause of their schooling status. Numerous factors such as the disharmony between the provisions of the national school health policy and the re-entry policy among others have been linked to this unfortunate state that deprives girls of their childhood and prevent them from exercising their right to education thus compromising their future wellbeing and that of the communities they live in. Furthermore, teenage pregnancy aggravates their vulnerability to poverty, exclusion, and exploitation.
Why teenage mothers need to be in school
‘Kuteguka sio kuvunjika guu’ goes a Swahili saying. Life even after a teenage pregnancy continues and every girl has the right to re-pursue education as far as she can go. Existing evidence points out numerous benefits that accrue to girls and women when they attain an education. According to a 2013 UNESCO study, if all women in poor countries had a secondary school education, child mortality would be reduced by half. Moreover, 60 percent fewer girls under age 17 would get pregnant in sub-Saharan Africa, South and West Asia if they had a secondary school education.
In Kenya, despite the existence of policies that support the re-entry of young mothers back to school, their plight remains dire. The National School Health Policy and the School Re-Entry Policy and Guidelines stipulate the laid – out procedures to be followed if a girl falls pregnant and/or drops out of school. However, implementation has not fully been effected owing to several challenges and barriers, such as lack of awareness of these policies by those meant to enforce them; negative attitudes and perceptions of communities, parents and school personnel against teen mothers; and failure by some school heads to divulge policy provisions for the fear that this might promote early sexual activities in schools.
So what are we doing about this as a society? Nelson Mandela once said that ‘There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than how it treats its children’. ‘If given a chance to go back to school, I will be happy – I want to become a nurse’, says Ruth. For her and other young mothers who are yearning for a second chance at rewriting their narratives, they need the support of all the stakeholders within the education sector.
A holistic multi-sectoral approach is key to promoting access to education among teenage mothers. The Ministry of Education and other line ministries including the Ministry of Health among others should enforce relevant policies. More so, parents, schools, communities and Non-Governmental Organizations, at large need to come together in their collective responsibility to ensure that all children go to school. Communities and parents ought to support school heads and teachers in their implementation of government policies and encourage dialogue to address the prevention of unintended pregnancies as well as changing the negative perceptions associated with school re-entry.
Sensitization of communities on the provisions of the policies as well as regular guidance and counseling of parents on how to nurture and care for their adolescent children will go a long way in creating a supportive environment.
The discussions around teen pregnancy need to expand from the girl child to include boys as they too are complicit (in situations where it was consensual). It is alarming that even where fellow students are reported to be the fathers to the children born by their schoolmates, in most cases, only the pregnant girls bear the backlash from the school and community. All learners need to have equal access to education opportunities.
Furthermore, development partners and other education stakeholders need to design Interventions and programs that are holistic and responsive to the needs of teenagers and young mothers. Mentorship, guidance and counseling and creating safe spaces in schools for boys and girls to talk about the challenges they face with their sexuality and offering the appropriate knowledge will enable them to make informed decisions.
Ruth deserves a second chance and so do the young mothers in our society- to re-write their narratives, get a good education, break the cycle of poverty and ensure that they secure a bright future for themselves and their children.
•Ruth is a pseudonym
About the author
Catherine Asego is a researcher and project coordinator of the Regional Education Learning Initiative (RELI) that promotes learning and collaboration among 70 organizations in East Africa. She also supports the development of policy and communication tools that partner institutions under the Urban Education Project use in their engagement with the various policymakers in each of the countries.
Catherine is an alumni of the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders (YALI) program, an initiative of the former US President Barack Obama to invest in the next generation of African leaders.
Professor Ringrose won the Distinguished Contributions to Gender Equity in Education Research Award, AERA announced on the 22nd July. Established in 2006, the award recognises individuals within AERA for distinguished research, professional practice, and activities that advance public understanding of gender and/or sexuality at any level in the education community.
Professor Ringrose said: “I am thrilled to be the recipient of this
award. My research uses intersectional feminism to challenge inequity and
to promote positivity, diversity and inclusion in representations and
understandings of women and girls. I have been inspired by researching how
young people trouble gender categories, challenge power inequities and are
creating more inclusive worlds through their own digital feminist and gender
activisms.”
“This year’s award
winners exemplify commitment to the study and practice of education,” said AERA
Executive Director Felice J. Levine. “We are proud to honour their outstanding
scholarship and service to the education research field.”
Professor Ringrose has been the co-chair for GEA for the past five years, supporting the association’s work to raise awareness about gender equity in educational research, policy and practice internationally. The GEA Executive Committee are delighted to see Professor Ringrose’s work on gender equity recognised by AERA, the largest interdisciplinary research association devoted to the scientific study of education and learning in the United States of America.
A virtual awards celebration will take place on 12 September, where the recipients will be honoured for their work.
Following the lead of our colleagues at the Feminist Studies Association, The GEA Executive sent a letter to the UK Prime Minister last week urging the government not to restrict either healthcare for young transgender people or transgender people’s access to free, public facilities. As feminist scholars and activists who work in centres for the study of women and gender, GEA is intimately familiar with the sustained assault against the rights of trans and non-binary people that was unleashed by the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) consultation. Despite 70% of responses to the GRA consultation welcoming the proposals, the government looks set to disregard this show of support in a move that is profoundly anti-democratic.
Along with the majority of respondents to the consultation, GEA actively supports trans and non-binary rights because we believe that all women and non-binary people should be supported to live their lives free of oppression, restriction and violence. We are deeply concerned by Liz Truss MP’s recent comments which appear to reflect a lack of understanding regarding the proposed reforms and the unrelated issue of medical pathways for trans young people. We urge the government to revisit the wealth of evidence that supports the proposed reforms to the GRA and reconsider their position.
In this blog our social media intern, Kate Marston, discusses the GRA debate and de-centring the focus on a small but influential faction of British feminism.
The toxic GRA debate
The consultation period on the GRA was very difficult for trans communities. What should have been a discussion regarding the removal of expensive, bureaucratic and dehumanising barriers to trans people obtaining a gender recognition certificate, became an extended and drawn out assault on trans lives and dignity as though their very right to exist was up for debate. Groups opposing the GRA were given high-profile platforms to scaremonger and spread misinformation about the proposed reforms, often employing hateful and cruel rhetoric. Negative attention in the press appeared to reinforce the harassment of trans and non-binary people in the street as transphobic hate crimes surged by 81% in 2018 – 2019.
As someone who has worked with LGBTQ+ youth for the past eight years, the lack of empathy and understanding along with the outright cruelty shown towards trans and non-binary young people was deeply disturbing. I saw young people I had worked with attacked in the national press simply for standing up for their right to access the changing rooms that aligned with their gender identity, in line with existing equalities policies. Efforts to paint transfeminine people as sexual predators bore striking resemblance to the moral panic of 1980’s homophobia against gay men.
Anti-trans protesters who self-identified as ‘feminists’ were given space to frame the debate as women versus trans people. Meanwhile, feminists who support trans rights were not only ignored by the media but subject to online and offline harassment from so-called ‘gender-critical feminists’ infuriated by their supportive stance.
Writer and comedian Shon Faye observes that ‘the purpose of the debate isn’t to move the conversation on at all […] It’s to have the same debate again and again and again, almost as if that’s a strategy in and of itself, to keep us debating and to keep a question mark over every aspect of trans lives and rights.’ With this in mind, how do we de-centre the focus on anti-trans voices and build towards more trans positive futures? In a follow-up blog post, I begin to address this question by engaging with some of the fraught yet rich herstories of trans/feminist entanglements that tell a story of powers growing together.
