Write What You Love: Friday Night Lights
Team BadRep were sent a writing prompt last month: What is your favourite film or TV series, and why? If it’s what you’d call ‘feminist-friendly’, what about it appealed? If it isn’t, how does that work for you, and are there nonetheless scenes, characters and so on that have stayed with you and continue to occupy a soft spot for you as a feminist pop culture adventurer?
Alright then, Friday Night Lights (the film, not the TV series). It’s the true-ish (true in as much as any Hollywood adaptation of real events is ever true) story of the 1988 Permian Panthers, a highschool American football team based out of Odessa, Texas. Based on the book of the same name by H.G. Bassinger, it’s really quite an amazing depiction of the levels of pressure placed on young players in a town that has nothing else going for it. Odessa is the sort of town where you get into college with a football scholarship, or you stay there and live out the same life your parents did.
It might be a somewhat unusual choice for this site, given that it’s focused entirely on the macho-tastic world of American football, and features less than a handful of female characters – all defined by their relationship to one of the males (the coach’s wife, the quarterback’s mother) – who get maybe 10 lines in total. But stick with me here, because the film does raise a few issues worth discussing.
First up, let’s just cover why this film counts as a favourite. American football, more than perhaps any other sport, is self-mythologising. It builds up a grand narrative, spins out legends, and casts itself as something more than just a bunch of millionaires in armour running into each other. Go watch a highlight video, or an episode of America’s Game, which shows the story of each year’s Superbowl winner. Everything about them, the way the footage is cut, the music, is all part of narrativising the events, making myths. And Friday Night Lights captures that perfectly.
Part of the reason the film captures that feeling so well, and part of what makes it a good film (other than some excellent cinematography and casting) is the soundtrack. The film is almost entirely accompanied by the work of Explosions in the Sky, a sweeping instrumental act native to Texas, where the events take place. Take a listen to this and tell me it doesn’t make you want to go do something grand.
But enough of the fanboying. Let’s look at the issues this film brings up.
The first interesting thing the film handles is issues of race. Texas, particularly the smaller towns, is not well known for its progressive attitude towards racial equality. So when the championship game turns out to be against the state’s first all-black team, Dallas Carter, this is a big thing. And you know what? It’s handled pretty damn well. It can probably best be summed up with one particular quote. The coaches and assorted hangers-on of both teams have met to discuss where the game will take place, and how it will be adjudicated to ensure fairness. Asked about referees, the Panthers’ coach suggests hiring a team of officials. Asked whether these zebras1 will be black or white the coach replies “I believe a zebra’s got about the same amount of black stripes as he does white ones.”
It’s not just the coaches. The players on the Panthers are a pretty varied mix of black, white and Latino. It’s hard to say how much of this is credit to the film makers, and how much is merely a reflection on the make up of the real life team the events are based on. What is definitely to their credit though is the way these characters are handled. The film makers resist the temptation to give us Male White Lead #27b and make the entire film about the quarterback. Instead we get equal screen time devoted to several of the characters (with the arguable show-stealer being Derek Luke as star running back James “Boobie” Miles). It’s nice to see.
The second issue we get in the film, which I’d argue is relevant to basically everyone, is the pressure placed on young people and the struggles of forming an identity. In the context of the film this identity is mostly about defining yourself as a person beyond what your town expects of you as a player. But the basic principle applies to any youthful deviation from accepted norms, which is probably something a fair few readers here have experienced. Telling the world you identify as a feminist might not immediately seem the same as telling your dad you don’t care that much about football, but I think the film does a nice job of showing the universal pressures of youth that tie both experiences together.
Being the champions is basically all the town cares about. On game day, everything shuts down as people leave their workplaces to go watch the game. It’s made clear to the coach that if they don’t win the state championship he should probably think about finding a different down to live in. Win and you’re a local god, lose and you’re a pariah. The alcoholic former-champion father of one character captures this particularly well, kind and caring when the team’s winning, drunk and abusive when his son makes a mistake. How does someone grow and learn to be themselves faced with that?
It’s a good film, it raises some interesting points, and it gives a fascinating look into the life of small town Texas. And for all that it shows the darker side of football, it’s still the film that made me go out and start playing, so it has to get some credit for that.
- Zebras being a nickname for referees, due to their black and white striped tops. [↩]
Yet More Game of Thrones Talk
Alright, so here’s one last, slightly late poke at Game of Thrones. Things that are worth discussing but which didn’t fit in the main recap at the end of the series. As with last time, there may well be spoilers ahead.
First up, there’s something interesting about the way the series presented sexuality. Straight sex was shown in abundance, with not one episode going by that failed to meet HBO’s Mandatory Nipple Quota. That said, very little of it was what you could consider “ordinary” – instead we get an array of incest, non-consent and prostitution. We never see Ed and Catelyn Stark together, or any of the show’s other (non-sibling) couples. The closest we have is Danaerys and Drogo, and by the time their partnership becomes less disturbingly non-consensual we pretty much stop seeing them as well. Straight sex, then, is abundant but somehow always unpleasant.
Renly and Loras: soon to vanish from the screen faster than you can shave an armpit.
Homosexual acts are distinctly less common in the series. Between female characters we get some slight implications with Danaerys and one of her serving girls as she learns how to please Drogo, a scene that is noticeably less graphic than the straight scenes in the show. The one time we are shown things by the same standards is a particularly unusual scene. The focus throughout is pretty much entirely on Lord Baelish as he instructs two recently arrived prostitutes. The scene is somewhat reminiscent of moments from (link is not worksafe) American Psycho, where Bateman does much the same, the sex a mere sideshow to his monologue. It places the male character directly at the centre of the scene and becomes almost parodic as Lord Baelish informs one of the pair to “be the man” in their actions.
And lastly, gay male pairings. We get one, and it’s an interesting one. On the one hand, it’s significantly more overt than it is in the books. Where the books give us a few sly remarks and implications from people, HBO pretty much flashes a giant neon “HEY GUYS, THEY’RE BONING” sign. And yet nothing is actually shown, only implied by sound effects, and the pair are then immediately written out for the rest of the series. Yes, they leave in the books as well, but given that HBO has already shown willingness to make changes, why not go a little further and develop them more fully? Certainly, HBO hasn’t shown a problem showing male relationships in past titles – see Michael Hall and Mathew St. Patrick in Six Feet Under, for example. So why the shying away this time?
Next up, issues of race. These have been widely discussed across the internet (see for example this, which we recently linked to), so I won’t go into it too much here. In summary, the handling of race is fairly disappointing and the presentation of the Dothraki never rises much above the Savage Other. The one key comparison that really illustrates this, and which is worth talking about in a little more depth takes place in the first episode.
Viserys simply can't *cope* with all this awfully tiresome uncivilisation.
The Starks, as we are first introduced to them, are going about the business of executing a deserter from the Night’s Watch, the brotherhood that guards the great wall in the North. It’s all shown as very grim and honourable, in that way that the Starks are throughout the series. No one takes any joy in it, but it’s a necessary task and the younger Starks learn a lesson about duty and suchlike from watching this poor chap get beheaded. Later we see the marriage celebrations for Danaerys and Khal Drogo. It’s a wild party with dancing and public sex. A fight breaks out over one of the women, ending with the disembowelling of the loser. Two public deaths, two very different contexts. When the (very, very white) men of the North kill someone it’s honourable and we sympathise with them. When the Dothraki do it it’s savage and lets us know that they’re Not Like Us. And that’s a problem.
Lastly, a minor character worth discussing: Lysa Tully, sister to Catelyn Stark. She’s an uncomfortable character, and a hard one to depict tastefully. If Cersei Lannister has something of the manipulative Lady Macbeth to her portrayal, Lysa Tully is entirely caught in the moment of “out damned spot, out I say!” Driven into a state of paranoid mania following the death of her husband, and with an entirely inappropriate relationship with her sickly son, there’s just something awkward about the implications of her character. As with a few others (notably Hodor), it’s a character that it’s hard to see how HBO could have done right without massively deviating from the source material.
Okay, that’s the last I’m going to say on Game of Thrones until season two rolls round. In the mean time, book five is finally out after a generation-long wait, so there’s that to get through between now and next spring.
Just in case anyone hasn’t seen this rather gratifying piece of graffiti, I’m borrowing the Found Feminism mic to extend its reach.
@annarchism on Twitter took this shot on Mill Road, Cambridge.
Special K is one of those things I’ll happily eat for breakfast, or if I feel like eating cereal. The berry edition is kinda okay. The Special K diet, on the other hand, is about as special and remarkable as white in a snowstorm, especially when you realise that you’ll get a more interesting bunch of flavours from taking your hungover colleague up on the offer when they dare you to shove your own face into the shredder tray at work and explore whether it can double as a food trough. The entire diet is marketed towards going down a jeans size as fast as is humanly possible for £3.89. (I have already mastered going down four jeans sizes without paying any money. I just walk out of H&M and into M&S.)
But! Aside from the fact the diet is as useful and realistic to genuine lasting weightloss – or healthy living – as wearing a loaded fruit bowl on your head, and aside from the fact that these ads are flagged squarely at certain kinds of gendered insecurity that make me go “Shine? Shine on fire, Kellogg. Right on fire“, a quick look at some history of Special K’s posters is an interesting little trip to go on.
Because it didn’t used to hang quite this way, ironically. Kellogg launched Special K in 1955, when my mum was toddling and the NHS was just hitting a ripe old age of seven. It was, Kellogg’s big proud blue-and-white “history site” informs me, “the first high-protein breakfast cereal ever offered to consumers.” Two years before, they’d launched “melba-toasted PEP flakes”, which … yeah. The Fifties. I don’t even.1
Here’s a Special K poster from that era, in which the elderly, man and woman alike, are DISCOMBOBULATED BY THE SHEER IMPACT OF KELLOGG’S NUTRITIONAL PROMISE. However, neither of them are particularly bothered about dress sizes at this particular historical juncture. (There’s been a War on, you know.)
There is something distinctly strange about the vintage poster looking kinder to women as consumers than the now-poster, is what I’m saying. Especially given our common habit of dissing our idea of the Fifties as some sort of comparative hell for that hackneyed GCSE-textbook concept, “the role of women”. Holding forth in the pub, you might crack one about how ads like Special K Lady look like they fell “out of the 1950s”, until you remember that in the 1950s they were just ditching rationing and things like bananas were riveting news. So maybe nobody wanted to goddamn well eat any more cardboard than they really bloody had to. This is not to say that things were better then (I also found an ad showing a bikini-clad woman trying to touch her toes with the slogan IT’S TIME FOR JELLO) but they’re not really much better at all now, are they, which gives me quite a bit of uncomfy pause for thought. Yes, following on from (in the UK) the Ministry of Food and Doctor Carrot and all, there was a real focus on nutrition, convenience foods, and how (or whether) these could be combined – and I mean, yeah, Kellogg were good at playing with that, with slogans like Teen-agers welcome a new protein cereal that helps you have – A FINE BODY. But it wasn’t quite “Is your man off checking out a peppier model? Never mind The Second Sex! Give dinner the shove! Subsist instead on Special K until your tastebuds fair expire from unparalleled wheaty boredom, and a prevailing vague suspicion that life really should, by now, be a bit more fun.”
Hurrah for you, therefore, Cambridge-based graffiti warrior. You are hereby awarded one BadRep salute, and we have dedicated breakfast in your honour.
Not a cardboard flake in sight.
- For more cereal posters, check out the hall of fame here. The 1960s was even less sensible, with the launch of a poster proclaiming NOW – ICE-CREAM IN A NOURISHING CEREAL. Age of extremes, guys. Age of extremes. Even Coco Pops have not yet gone that far. [↩]
Crowdfunding Feminism
No doubt most of you will have heard of Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform for creative projects. If this were a newspaper the headline would probably be “Move over boys” or “The feminists are coming” or something like that because I’m going to point out that there are some feminists using it.
Kickstarter
I like Kickstarter because of its pleasing by-the-people-for-the-people ethos and the fact it gives independent filmmakers, writers, musicians and artists a chance to make their ideas a reality. It’s all very ‘open’ as they say. In fact Open Source blog says this:
The beauty of Kickstarter is that it bypasses the traditional channels artists would need to navigate in order to fund a project. Here funding depends on community participation rather than closed-door gatekeepers. The individual investments can be small and spread among those who care about that project’s success.
What we have here of course is also a fantastic opportunity for political or minority groups to get unpopular projects off the ground, projects that would never be able to attract funding from traditional investors (who tend to be of the wealthy white male variety) because they can’t see the ‘market’ for them.
Some awesome feminist projects
Have a search on Kickstarter and you’ll find all kinds of socially conscientious and community projects about race, sexuality, disability, class and yes: gender. In fact Ms Magazine in the US have started a regular Feminist Booster Club feature on their blog to spotlight different feminist projects deserving of support.
And it works. One example is the fantabulous Womanthology project which has managed to fully fund itself in a matter of weeks:
Womanthology is a large scale anthology comic showcasing the works of women in comics. It is created entirely by over 140 women of all experience levels… The purpose of the book is to show support for female creators in comics and media. There will be multiple short stories, how to’s & interviews with professionals, and features showcasing iconic female comic creators that have passed, such as Nell Brinkley and Tarpe Mills. A Kids & Teens section will also be included, showcasing their work, and offering tips & tricks to help them prepare themselves for their future careers in comics.
Of course it helps that the project has the support and involvement of a number of big names (for geeks anyway) such as Gail Simone, Bonnie Burton and Neil Gaiman. But still: awesome.
A project I’d been following for a long time before it was at the Kickstarter stage is The Illusionists:
The Illusionists is a feature-length documentary about the commodification of the body and the marketing of unattainable beauty around the world.
The film will explore the influence that corporations have on our perceptions of ourselves, showing how mass media, advertising and several industries manipulate people’s insecurities about their bodies for profit.
Having followed its development over the last couple of years I think its going to be a corker. And it’s not quite at its funding target yet, so you know… *cough* stump up! *cough*
Microloans for women in the developing world
The idea of crowdfunding has taken off in a big way over the last couple of years, and it’s often linked to the microfinance initiative in development, particularly in relation to empowering women.
There is something quite thrilling about using Kiva or another platform to give funding directly to a woman in Kenya or Nepal to help her start a business. And of course you get your money back so you don’t have to lose any time worrying whether genuine altruism really exists.
However it’s worth bearing in mind that even though you may be helping one woman, her family and maybe her community (which is nothing to be sniffed at!) spreading capitalism to every corner of the earth isn’t necessarily the best way to help women as a group. Microloans don’t do much to tackle the structural causes of poverty and inequality. In fact they don’t always help individual women.
Don’t stop giving, but think about giving to projects that will also help women protect themselves from violence, disease and discrimination while they run their business.
On Getting Hurt and Being ‘Pretty’
I have an ambition – I want to join the London Rollergirls. I’ve got my skates, I’ve got my tiny shorts and my fishnet tights, but some of the safety gear did give me pause for thought. Kneepads, elbow pads, wristguards, a boil ‘n’ bite mouthguard, and my old purple cycling helmet wasn’t allowed: no, I needed a heavy-duty ‘skating helmet’.
When you’re biting down on a piece of hot plastic you boiled in a saucepan, making sure to follow the instructions to the letter, carefully pressing the chewy, artificial tasting stuff around each of your teeth in turn, it’s hard not to wonder, what if I get hurt?
What if you get hurt? asked my mother, when I told her. My mother and I have an arrangement. She’s had both hips replaced; I’m allowed to tell her to slow down and be careful, and don’t start climbing up ladders and repainting your bathroom when you’re supposed to be recovering from major surgery. In return she’s the only person in the world allowed to tell me not to walk down dark big city streets alone at night, without getting a lecture on third wave feminism. We live in different cities. We worry about each other. I find myself filled with filial guilt that starting roller derby will worry my mother.
My dad was a boxer, as was his dad, and his dad before him. My great granddad was, apparently, a boxer who boxed illegally on the streets of Liverpool. Made a good living from it, I hear. My granddad’s house was full of my dad’s boxing trophies, and my dad would point at professional boxers on our TV and claim to have fought them in his youth. I have no doubt that, were I a boy, I would have been encouraged to be a boxer too.
I also have no doubt that, because I was a girl, I wasn’t. My suspicions are corroborated by the appeals to my vanity which came from both parents when I suggested the possibility. “But you’re so pretty,” they said. “Don’t you want to look pretty?” I did want to look pretty, I agreed. Even my heroes Jean Grey and Catwoman looked pretty when they were kicking ass; I didn’t want to lose that.1
When, as a child, my nose was broken in a non-boxing related incident, I was as terrified as my parents that I would have a ‘boxer’s nose’. It’s still a bit weird-looking, to be honest.
I cracked a tooth last year. In a restaurant. At a business meeting. I played it cool, got drunk, laughed about it (even when one of the authors I was with tweeted about it), then got home, saw the big black gap where my front tooth should have been in the mirror and cried and cried! Could barely smile at my own boyfriend for the two weeks it took to get a false tooth put in.2 I cannot begin to imagine what a blow to your self-esteem real, serious external injuries can be. Burns, scars, facial disfigurement. Charities such as Changing Faces are doing a lot to combat this stigma, but as a society we’re not there yet.
There is nothing wrong with wanting your child to be pretty – ‘pretty’ or at least ‘conventional-looking’ people have an easier life, in lots of respects. There is nothing wrong with wanting, yourself, to be ‘pretty’. (Common misconception about feminists, that.)
Technically, my false tooth was cosmetic surgery. Not life-threatening, not a source of pain when the old tooth is gone completely, not a medical condition. But I damn well wanted that cosmetic surgery. And there was small difference between me having that done, and an older woman replacing what she’s lost by having botox on her forehead. I don’t think I’d ever have botox, but I’m not going to condemn anyone for wanting it. How could I, as some magazines do, laugh at the ‘false’ breasts of an actress when part of me, when a part of my appeal (my smile) is false?
So yes, it is okay to want to be pretty. I can worry about getting seriously hurt, but I can also worry about suffering a cosmetic injury, (for instance, breaking my nose again,) without being ‘unfeminist’. I don’t need to feel bad that eight year-old me decided not to be a boxer, nor do I need to feel bad that, starting a dangerous sport, I am still a little afraid. This might seem obvious to some of you, but it took me a little while to not feel guilty about feeling this fear.
However, none of this changes the fact that society still finds it much easier to deal with men getting hurt than with women getting hurt.
I once had a conversation with a very sincere ex-co-worker about how when they’re talking about British soldiers on the news, if a woman soldier has died or been injured, it makes him furious. Angry that girls are allowed to go to war, angry that her family let her, angry that she wanted to go. He doesn’t have the same reaction to male soldiers. Historically and even now, the reaction of men to the death and injury of female soldiers is used as a reason why women shouldn’t go to war. (Which seems like such utterly backwards logic to me. If the men can’t deal with it, aren’t they the problem?) In the UK, among many other things they’re not allowed to do in the military, women still can’t fight on the front line. So much for equality in the workplace, I guess.
It’s understandable, if you look at the messages we’re fed every day. Don’t hit girls, save girls from danger – that’s the message pop culture gives us. So what does the hero do, if the girl’s willingly putting herself in danger? Get angry, as above, or try to persuade her otherwise?
If, as a woman, you start a dangerous sport, or make another decision that seems like it could damage your health (I remember the reactions from friends and family when I briefly wanted to join the police force), you will meet with a lot of resistance. I doubt that many men have to face the same concerns from their loved ones when they start a sport like boxing or rugby, even though there’s danger of death, serious injury, and the fact that no one seems to come out of these sports with their looks intact! Just ask rugby player Daryl Gibson’s nose or boxer Evander Holyfield’s ear. But it’s much more acceptable for a male sports celebrity to wear his scars with pride than for a woman to do the same.
If you’re a woman and you want to do something dangerous, you will meet with resistance to the idea. This resistance might come from a well-meaning place, from those who love you, it may even come from inside you. It’s okay to listen, but it can be useful to interrogate how your gender plays a role in the dialogue.
- In fact, the only time I’ve ever known a comic book superhero to have her looks compromised by kicking ass was when Emma Frost had her nose broken by Sublime, in Grant Morrison’s New X-Men #118. As the X-Men’s resident high-class rich blonde bitch (well, it’s true), she’s also one of the only superheroes I’ve ever known admit to having plastic surgery, and therefore the ‘reset’ button could be pressed and Emma could be drawn with a perfect nose in all following issues. [↩]
- Team BadRep’s editor Miranda only managed to get me out of the house by promising me alcohol and telling me the missing tooth made me look like a lady pirate of the high seas. [↩]
Fausta and her mother in The Milk of Sorrow
There are times when I’m glad I live in such a blinkered cultural bubble, with only a dim grasp of global politics. Case in point: while I was enraptured by Mysterious Cities of Gold in the 1980s, the real-life land of the Incas – Peru – was being torn apart by a bloody internal conflict between communist guerrilla army the Shining Path and government security forces.
I was only five, of course. But when I watched it again at university (a rite of passage, surely?) only a year after the conflict had wound down, I was none the wiser. In fact, in some senses it hasn’t really ended. The latest reported attack by Shining Path rebels was in April 2010.
Between 1980 and 2000 some 70,000 people died, including huge numbers of civilians. Countless survivors are still in search of justice, including the thousands of women who were victims of sexual violence and humiliation at the hands of soldiers.
Despite this, and the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there is a reluctance in many places to discuss the events of the war and what happened, and many women, especially poor and indigenous women in the Andean areas that were worst effected, struggle to voice the suffering they have endured, to access support and see justice being done.
The Milk of Sorrow
It is this situation that is addressed in Peruvian director Claudia Llosa’s 2009 film, The Milk of Sorrow. The film is based on the book Entre Prójimos by Kimberly Theidon, which collected testimonies from women who had experienced sexual violence, including brutal gang rape (here’s an interview with Theidon). Many of the women Theidon spoke to reported a belief that the trauma they had experienced had somehow been transmitted to their children through their breastmilk. Llosa claims in this Birds Eye View interview that this is a genuine belief (hm…) but either way it is certainly a good expression of the severe psychological damage and lingering emotional distress caused by conflict to individuals and entire communities.
The film follows Fausta, a young woman whose mother was raped during the war, and who believes she has been fed on the milk of sorrow. Another character says that children like her have no souls; they have fled for fear. Fausta is so afraid of her mother’s fate she inserts a potato into her vagina as a guard against rape. Here’s the trailer for the film.
Llosa’s first film is also set in Peru, also deals with sexual violence, and stars the same actress, Magaly Solier. Madeinusa (2006) is on the one hand a bit of a fairytale, about an invented religious custom in a fictional Andean village. But on the other hand it deals with poverty, rape, incest, murder and child abuse. In the village in which 14 year old Madeinusa lives, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday Christ is dead, so there is no sin. Or rather, your sins don’t count. Beautiful scenery, gut-wrenching scenes. It’s bleak – there’s no wholly sympathetic character in the whole film, and even the everyman ‘good guy’ is happy to take advantage of Madeinusa’s teenage interest in him. She emerges triumphant, after a fashion. Here’s the trailer (in Spanish).
Explaining or exploiting?
While I think both Madeinusa and The Milk of Sorrow are stunning bits of cinema, they do make me uncomfortable, as both films and their director have been accused of racism in their portrayal of the indigenous population of Peru as superstitious, vicious and backward. Llosa belongs to the Peruvian white urban elite, and in fact now lives in Spain. The charge levelled at her is that she has used the stories and experiences of Andean women to turn a profit but without showing respect for indigenous communities or involving native people in the project in more than a superficial way. Carlos in DC sees this as emblematic of the inequality in Peruvian society:
I have witnessed the racial and cultural discrimination that our Indigenous peoples face in Peru, especially in the city of Lima where we are discriminated by our accents, ways of living and traditions. At the same time, Lima profits from our cultures and resources.
To me, The Milk of Sorrow symbolizes that racial and economical division exactly. A filmmaker from Lima and her producers from Europe are using the sad experiences and the suffering of our Andean women as a topic for their profitable film.
It’s that old chestnut again: by representing and discussing sexual violence and using real testimonies to inform your representation, are you reinforcing a message of victimhood and exploiting the women whose experiences you use? Worse still, are you at risk of producing something titillating? It’s a tough one even without the dimension of race, which clearly can’t be ignored in the Latin American context (or, well, anywhere really).
The Milk of Sorrow, more than Madeinusa, has served to raise awareness of sexual violence in conflict, and Magaly Solier has also supported an anti-violence against women campaign, so perhaps there’s the social good silver lining.
Lots of impatient IMDb reviews urge people just to enjoy the films as art and stop worrying about the politics. I think that is exactly the wrong approach. Whatever else Claudia Llosa’s films are, they are an opportunity to talk about things which don’t often get an airing; painful, complex things which need to be voiced.
Feminism in Peru
I’m trying to pay attention to things that are happening in the world wider than London, and especially learning about and learning from the women’s movement in other countries.
Happily, I got to meet women from two leading feminist organisations in Peru – DEMUS and Fepromu – at a Womankind Worldwide event in April, where they spoke about their work. You can watch subtitled films of their talks here and here if you’d like to know more about what it’s like working for women’s rights in Latin America.
There’s also this interesting article about the relationship between development, Western feminism and the grassroots women’s movement in Peru, centred around the network of comedores.
Found Feminism: Patchwork of the Century
This is found feminism only in the sense that I found it entirely by accident. I was waiting to meet my dining companion for dim sum on the South Bank (yes, I know…) and when they texted to say they were going to be another half an hour I went for a wander. Finding myself in the Southbank Centre‘s exhibition about the Festival of Britain in 1951 (it’s in the basement) I was delighted to come across a wonderful artwork, the Patchwork of the Century.
Designed by Lillian Dring with contributions from some of the 80 women who helped to make it (who had no previous experience of needlework) it’s quite beautiful, to my eyes. Even more so when I learned the whole thing was made from scraps of old uniforms, tablecloths and blackout fabric.
It was originally part of a Women of the Century exhibition in Twickenham in 1951, and includes some feminist historical landmarks such as (obviously) women winning the vote, but also the opening of Girton College and women’s contribution to both world wars. Pioneering nurse and humanitarian Edith Cavell has her own patch.
Next time you’re down that way pop into the exhibition and have a look, it’s worth it.
The pro-choice push back starts here
Abortion was legalized in the UK in 1967
Some of Team BadRep were at the pro-choice rally in Westminster on Saturday with 300+ other people including Kate Smurthwaite, Laurie Penny, Diane Abbott MP, Evan Davis MP and Jenny Jones of the Green Party to protest the attempts being made to restrict access to free, safe, legal abortion. Here’s the Guardian writeup and a great slideshow of pictures.
Why were we out in force raising our voice for choice? Here’s a quick rundown in case you’ve missed any of the grim news in recent months… What frightens me most at the moment is that ‘Right to Know’ campaign architects Nadine Dorries MP and Frank Fields MP (guess which party! Go on. Guess) have added amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill to change the law on pregnancy counselling. Their big idea is that abortion providers who offer counselling such as Marie Stopes and British Pregnancy Advisory Service have a ‘vested interest’ in persuading women to have a termination. Because abortion is such a money spinner… It’s a wonder we don’t see more people on Dragon’s Den offering an investment opportunity in a chain of pop-up abortion clinics. Anyway, here’s a post by Education for Choice explaining why this is bollocks, and Abortion Rights give the campaign a dressing down here.
Anti-choicers LIFE were invited to sit on the government’s Sexual Health Forum at the same time that BPAS got kicked off. A new Sex and Relationships Education Council of abstinence and anti-choice organisations drew praise from Secretary of State for Education / evil ventriloquist’s puppet Michael Gove. Nadine Dorries popped up again with a bill proposing abstinence education for girls which passed the first stage vote in parliament. Does abstinence education work? Short answer: no. Long answer: no. Then of course there’s the shocking situation facing women in Ireland (find out more from Abortion Support Network)
It was great to see so many angry people out on Saturday, and hear the inspiring speeches. Lisa Hallgarten of Education for Choice read out a chilling message from pro-choice activists in the US warning us not to be complacent because things are getting really bad across the Atlantic (see this and this, for example) and it all started in the same way it has here: with little laws which chip away at the right to choose.
I was particularly happy that the demo drew support from Queer Resistance, who made the vital point that we must work together cross-cause to protect bodily autonomy, reproductive rights and sexual freedom. This demo felt closer in spirit to the reproductive justice movement I believe we need to build to fight proposals which are spun as pro-woman but are in fact bad news for anyone who doesn’t subscribe to a vicious and controlling version of “family values”.
This demonstration is just the beginning of a grassroots push back against Dorries, Field, Gove and their supporters, and we’re going to need your help. Start by emailing your MP about the abortion amendments and keeping track of developments on Education For Choice’s blog.
