Speech from the other night

This is the text of a speech I did a few nights ago as part of a panel on intergenerational feminism - where I was asked to share some of my experiences. I was really honoured to be part of a panel with three amazing women, and humbled that so many people showed up to listen to us!! Also stoked that intergenerational dialogue is happening, given some of the stuff I say in this speech and in previous posts :)

Kia ora koutou katoa.

Thank you to Ana, the Women’s Studies Association and my fellow panellists for the opportunity to be here tonight.

I want to acknowledge Te Ati Awa as the tangata whenua of this colonised land.

I also want to honour the generations of women who have gone before us. As we are all aware, we have just celebrated the 120^th anniversary of women’s suffrage. I was born in 1993, so 1893 is a date that has always been etched in my mind. The fact that it took the suffragettes 24 years, 31 petitions, and 7 unsuccessful bills, shows that simple things we take for granted today are the product of long years of struggle in the past. I am inspired by the courage, determination and persistence of the suffragettes and also of the subsequent generations who have continued their work, including of course my fellow panellists here tonight. To be part of an ongoing historical struggle across generations is for me a source of grounding and strength.

I think it is important to recognise that I have benefitted significantly more than a lot of women have, from the massive social changes that feminists have achieved. I am Pākehā, I am heterosexual, I am cisgendered (meaning that I identify with the gender than society assumes I am), I am able bodied, and I am a middle class university student. I am confronted by patriarchy when my lecturers make sexist jokes, when they use entirely male authors, when the people we study are men, and when feminist critiques are non-existent. This is very different to the everyday manifestations of patriarchy that a lot of women have to deal with.

My engagement with feminism has largely played out in a university context, but as a friend pointed out to me, that doesn’t mean that I can only make academic or theoretical arguments. I also have experienced, felt, and lived. So I’m going to talk about my experiences with feminism both as a young woman engaging with the feminist movement, and also as a young feminist engaging with the world.

During my first two years at uni I became politically aware in a lot of ways: I joined the Green Party and campaigned for the election, became vegan, went to lots of protests and opposed University cuts. I was also becoming more aware of feminism. I wrote an essay about it for my first year POLS paper, and read the occasional blog on the topic. But it was only around the end of last year (which was my second year at uni) that I really made the connection between feminism as a really interesting academic idea and feminism as a political struggle that directly affected me.

And I think one of the turning points was a women’s weekend for an activist group I’m involved in [for the purposes of putting things on this internet I don’t think its helpful to name names]. I’d always thought this group was pretty good at gender equality. So I was really surprised to hear stories from the women there about the ways in which they were overlooked, ignored and silenced, how they had to fight harder, how they had to look better, how they did more work and got less credit – at every level of the organisation. Individual instances could be put down to chance, or bad luck, or a few sexist men. But hearing very similar stories from so many of these women alerted me for the first time that sexism still permeates deeply in spaces which are doing their best to overcome it.

In addition, my mind was opened by the sessions we had on disability, where we were asked “who isn’t here? Why? What can we do about it?”; racism, where we were told to put our hand up if we’d ever been followed in a shop, and gender diversity, which involved choosing between arbitrary binaries, such as “tea or coffee” to highlight that the categories of “man” and “woman” that society imposes do not fit reality.

The next engagement with feminism that I wanted to highlight is my experience at two very different feminist gatherings this year.

The first was the WSA conference. There were lots of interesting discussions and inspiring people, and I’m really glad I went. But it also opened my eyes to the very different approaches of older and younger feminists. I hadn’t realised that it was a women’s only space until another young woman told me that her feminist boyfriend was not allowed to attend. This was totally news to me – and I couldn’t understand it. I have thought about it a lot since then, and now I do realise the value of these spaces. And that’s because universities were, and are still, deeply patriarchal and women, and especially feminist women, struggle to be heard and to be taken seriously. Whether this continues to justify excluding a really important group of allies, I am not entirely sure.

But there was a more fundamental problem. Women’s only spaces also exclude some of the most oppressed groups. They exclude transwomen, unless they are specially made safe and welcoming (which this conference wasn’t), and they also exclude people with non-binary gender identity. These people are also oppressed by patriarchy, often more so than cis-gender women. When several young women, including myself, tried to raise this on the last day, we felt silenced and ignored. To be fair, talking at each other, across a massive lecture theatre was obviously not the right forum for that discussion to happen, so I am stoked that we are having this panel here today in a slightly more relaxed setting, to continue that conversation.

The other gathering was ClitFEST. Clit stands for combatting latent inequalities together, and it was described as a “trans and cis women centred, DIY feminist festival which is open to people of all genders”. It included panels such as “indigenous feminisms and social movements”, “takataapui, pasifika ways and beyond queer theory”, “intimate partner violence in queer and gender diverse relationships” and “body politics: food, health, fat, disability, class and moral virtue” just to name a few. The speakers were incredibly diverse: in terms of gender identity, sexuality, class, and race – and hardly any were academics. There were still of course issues with the way it was organised and run, and I know people that didn’t attend because they didn’t feel welcome. But overall, it gave me a huge sense of optimism about the potential for marginalised groups to come together, listen, and build resistance.

The final thing I wanted to touch on is feminism in the university. As most of you know, Gender and Women’s Studies was a thriving department at Vic until it was disestablished in 2010. One of the justifications was that feminist stuff was already included in other courses so it was no longer necessary. Well, as an example, the international relations course I did last semester had one token lecture on feminism, most of which focussed on a male author’s analysis of the gender wage gap. I sent the lecturer a very politely worded email explaining why this was totally inadequate – and never heard back.

Down at law school, the situation is even bleaker, and the feminist legal theory paper hasn’t been offered for about a decade. Because 60% of law graduates are now women, it is assumed that we are all equal and everything is fine. In fact, I went to see a panel of female lawyers last week, and while they acknowledged that there are still barriers for women, their solutions were basically to work harder, assert yourself, take all opportunities, look after yourself, and, alarmingly, cull your friends. The only thing that came close to calls for structural change was a mention of how things would be easier if men took more responsibility for childcare. There was no hint of discussion about the legal system as a whole being built by and for an elite group of men and therefore requiring total deconstruction. The discussion was entirely about individual success within a pre-defined system – which I found really disheartening and depressing.

But I’m going to end on a positive note, which is that in the last couple of weeks I’ve been involved in starting up a feminist law students group. I realised that while I’m not marginalised as a woman at law school, I am definitely marginalised as a feminist – and the fact that there is so much energy for this group to exist tells me that many others feel the same. We have heaps of exciting plans to build up our own law school culture by carving out our own social space. Eventually we’d like to smash the patriarchal foundations of the entire legal system – which we’re going to start doing by lobbying for more diverse and critical perspectives to be taught.

So to conclude, there is hope for the feminist movement, resistance is happening, and a young people are engaging with feminist struggle. Young feminists can learn so much from the struggles of the past, and draw inspiration from those who have gone before us. But to remain relevant, feminists need to understand the intersectionality of oppressions and the power dynamics within feminism. We need to stand in solidarity with other social movements and fight for the rights and freedoms of all people. If this was easy we would have already done it already – but that does not make it impossible.

Thank you.