This year I asked some of the team to give a shout-out to a relevant project, organisation or intiative.

Image via dryicons.com

Sarah J: I’m being a bit cheeky and flagging up something that the charity I work for are doing for International Women’s Day. Womankind Worldwide is hosting a virtual march around the globe to celebrate the international women’s movement, raise awareness of the incredible work our partners do and remind feminists in the UK that we’re part of a powerful, global force for change.

We’ve added an interactive map of the world to our website, with a counter showing how far the march has travelled around the world and how many people have taken part. For everyone that signs up the marker moves 10 miles forward. We need about 2,500 people to get all the way round!

Please stop by www.womankind.org.uk/world to join the march, and show our partners working for women’s rights in Africa, Asia and Latin America that you are with them. You can also leave a message of support for the activists we work with on our Facebook page or by sending us a tweet (@woman_kind) – we will pass all of them on.

Sarah C: JOIN ME ON THE BRIDGE! On 8th March, Women for Women International are asking you to join them on the bridge. All kinds of bridges. All around the UK (there’s a list of events here). Why bridges? Well, it’s about building bridges – geddit? – and proclaiming messages of peace. They are inviting everyone to come and participate or register their own event. I love events like this that reach out across the whole world and make connections. As well as events structured around a good pun.

The key thing for me here is that S word, solidarity. I often rail against the idea that all women need to do such-and-such a thing because they are women or assigned-female-bodied, cos that’s, you know, sexist. But that people – of whatever shape or gender – could get together and show support for women around the world, for a couple of hours, at least? That’s drawing attention to inequality. And as they’ve put it on their Mission Statement: “On International Women’s Day, 8 March, thousands of people will show that they are with the women of Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan and other war-torn countries.”.

Hannah: The organisation I’d like to give a big shout-out to is Southall Black Sisters, an organisation by and for Black and Asian women which began in 1979 in the aftermath of the death of Blair Peach (an anti-facist protestor who died from police violence). Since then SBS has changed and expanded its remit to fit the needs of those around it – specifically as advocates of womens’ rights, supporting women suffering from domestic violence and campaigning against religious fundamentalism. The role of SBS as a support group especially for ethnic minority women is especially important as women of colour often face different pressures (see their forced marriages campaign) and specialised services are needed.

Southall Black Sisters first came to my attention at a London Feminist Network meeting in 2010 and they’re regulars at Fawcett Society gatherings and marches, too. Their speakers have always been bright, warm, engaging and utterly unwavering in their points, unfazed by the battles they have ahead. Working at grassroots level, the SBS have their fingers on the pulse and report to people in power – they have been invited to speak at the Home Office and the UN.

In 2007 SBS faced funding cuts from Ealing Council which would have closed all SBS’s operations. The council claimed argued that their services were no longer necessary due to ‘Social Cohesion’ – SBS fought this in the high court citing the Race Relations Act and their victory has set a legal precedent for other ethnic minority support groups facing cuts – an especially important victory as so many charities and support networks are squeezed and so many women and ethnic minorities feel the force of the cuts deeper them others.

Me (Miranda): Following on from that, I’m gonna get on my political crate for a moment here too and mention that International Women’s Day has its roots in socialism. It was founded by Clara Zetkin under the name International Working Women’s Day. It came from the labour movements at the turn of the twentieth century, and in a year when government cuts have put women at a twenty-five year high for unemployment figures, I think this is something that it pays to bear in mind. Opposing these cuts – to our NHS, to our jobs, to our libraries, to our working lives – is vital as far as I’m concerned because they enforce and underline systemic inequalities and limit our power to do something about them. Denise Marshall handed back her OBE just over a year ago on this very point.

All of which is to say: nope, Dave, SHAN’T “calm down, dear” and my recommended Thing I Am Doing is probably “yelling at Parliament about these cuts at every possible opportunity” because I believe that absolutely is a feminist issue – the NHS for example is a major employer of women, of whom I am one, aside from the obvious issue of service cuts! In terms of being more specifically-IWD, there’s also the Women’s Resource Centre, and as has been well documented, I really dig the Red Pump Project over in the USA.

• What are you doing this IWD?

This post is delivering on that request – I got several of our mixed gender team on board, so you can see some of our feet here rocking various shapes and styles of red shoe from the subtle to the spaceboot. (Yeah, those are mine. I have no taste and proudly revel in it.)

But I also wanted to scribble a few notes about HIV as a feminist issue and our own battle to save our National Health Service. I have much less know-how about HIV in the USA, so I’ve bolted on some UK-based rambling to go with my more general cheerleading.

Shoes, Shoes, Shoes

On the most basic symbolic level, shoes are about Going Places. Michele Roberts’ short story Your Shoes, so beloved of GCSE anthologies nationwide, is about a missing girl who has flown the nest, leaving behind an unworn pair of shoes which seem to speak of unspent potential. Waiting For Godot – a play where no one goes anywhere – opens with a lonely visual of a worn-out pair of boots that no longer fit. Nancy Sinatra’s had enough; her boots are gonna walk all over you.

The red-shoed woman, too, is a woman who dares, who takes the bull by the horns, from Hans Christian Anderson’s thoroughly judgey tale of woe to Dorothy’s ruby slippers. So for me the visual of all our shoes on show is a good way to put the question: where from here? whilst also adding god damn it, somewhere, though. Somewhere good. Somewhere better.)

But I want this post to be more than just flag-waving – after all, since we are not in the US and cannot fully participate in the project at large, it surely doesn’t change much about HIV stigma for us to simply photograph our feet. The arresting visual of the shoes – and the Red Pump Project are running a full fashion show at the end of the month – is a starting point or conduit, like wearing the World AIDS Day red ribbon, to having a conversation. So I’m gonna put a lot of UK links in here too.

Across the Pond

In that post I made I talked about the importance of awareness/prevention campaigns not using a kind of shock tactic to alienate and stigmatise people living with HIV. Without going too deeply into UK/USA healthcare provision comparisons, initiatives like the RPP (excepting the NAT-spearheaded fundraising drives pre-World AIDS Day) don’t feel so common over here. Perhaps because we assume the NHS will carry our HIV testing and awareness needs, but also because services who do take a non-discriminatory approach, like Positive East and the Terrence Higgins Trust are very much up against Tory cuts just now. Unfortunately, this dovetails with the fact that the NHS is facing “reforms” that threaten to stitch it up like a free market kipper, so in drumming up awareness for the RPP I guess I’d also like to talk briefly about the importance of trying, in the UK, to both appreciate the gravity of our own situation, and the commonalities between the areas the RPP is concentrating on – urban districts where people just aren’t talking or thinking openly or inclusively about HIV – and UK equivalents. HIV affects so many people that a lot of UK feminists simply don’t see it as a specific enough issue, but the thing is, it often interacts with more commonly accepted feminist issues such as contraception, sexual assault, and so on in complex and – as far as the feminist blogosphere is concerned – markedly under-analysed ways.

HIV transmission rates, access to support services, and the level of stigma faced by people living with it, all intersect with, and are influenced by, cuts to advocacy, disability benefits, education and healthcare services. And when the latter are in play to the level they currently are in Britain, they mean that existing social inequalities get very heavily underscored. Stigma around living with HIV then gets worse, and this underscores inequalities even further, and you get a snake-chew-tail plughole situation. Stigma is very often doled out in inherently gendered terms, with a load of harmful assumptions about what kind of woman or man would be likely to contract or transmit the virus, so not engaging with it feeds more general problems of racism, homophobia and gendered prejudice. As far as I’m concerned this makes it very much a feminist issue in the same way that issues of poverty, class and race are, and indeed these areas are all affected by HIV in complex ways which keep people in disadvantaged groups one step removed from the care they need, and have a right to access.

In the UK at least, I don’t think enough women, feminists or otherwise, are receiving the information and discussion they need and deserve on this issue, so I’ll always come out loudly shouting for a project like the RPP which encourages a discussion which takes into account the intersections of gender, race and class and their impact on HIV issues.

‘Girlhood in the time of AIDS’

For an illustration of how a lot of ‘western’ mainstream “girl culture” – like teen magazines – has historically displayed an unfortunately privilege-waving “us and them” attitude to the prevalence of HIV, along with some harmfully obtuse ideas about who contracts it, where, why and how, I would recommend the essay Girlhood in the time of AIDS by Nancy Lesko and Elisabeth Johnson, from the book Girl Culture. Reading it – it’s pretty US-focussed – just makes me that much more relieved there are initiatives like the RPP going strong.

As founder Karyn put it in her comment on that earlier post:

One of the main goals of our nonprofit and the campaign is to promote open dialogue, to fight the stigma around the disease, and to share knowledge around the issues so that women are EMPOWERED to advocate for their health and the health of the women in their lives.

I couldn’t agree more.

Back on the UK Front…

It’s important to recognise the power of grassroots projects like this whilst also refuting David Cameron’s position that community-based initiatives are a “Big Society alternative” or in any way an oppositional model to a free national health service. Some NHS Trusts in the UK work in partnership with community-specific schemes such as, for example, the Terrence Higgins Lighthouse projects – a fact this article, for example, which contains a great example of a grassroots HIV activism project, fails in my view to take account of. There are lighthouses and there are ports. Having both is generally not a bad idea. I would not be optimistic about the storm of social inequalities facing either in the event this bill passes uncontested.

Tonight the TUC are declaring a rally at Westminster to make this point again. In the week a doctor was caught on film openly challenging Lansley’s bloody-minded assault on our services in the hospital in which he works, in the week June Hautot cried “Codswallop!”, and as an NHS employee myself, I would invite anyone who is in the area to swing by and raise your voice.

Boots, after all, were made for walking.

Have some bonus daleks on us.