#womenspaces

i never said that safe spaces are a 100% guarantee. it's about lowering the risk. yeah, a women-only cafe isn't a utopia, but it's a fortress against the main source of danger.

saying these spaces aren't needed is like thinking,"vaccines are pointless because you could still get sick."

when m*n open their own barbershops, gyms, or clubs, nobody calls it discrimination. it's just "the norm," it's even idealized as brotherhood and solidarity.

but when womyn take one tiny step towards autonomy, like opening a fitness studio or organizing a festival, collective hysteria begins.

by Patricia McFadden, a radical African Feminist from Swaziland/Zimbabwe

highly recommend reading the full article. bits and pieces of it here.

“...The fact of the matter is that space is not neutral territory; it is highly politicized in class and locational terms. The rich live in certain spaces and the poor are systematically excluded from those spaces by barbed wire and electric fences, vicious dogs and poor males in overalls carrying guns in their hands. Space is kept under close scrutiny by the military which declares particular areas of a national territory “no-go” areas to the public, and the ruling classes themselves construct all sorts of exclusionary practices and mechanisms that keep certain groups of people out of ‘their’ spaces. Colonial whites used the state to put in place systems of surveillance that excluded Africans from their spaces through the institutionalisation of “passes” and the extension of license to any white to be able to stop any black person and demand that they account for their presence in a particular place at any time of the day or night.

My retort is that those women who like men so much that they cannot spend any time during the day or night without male presence can set up what are called “mixed” organi-sations, which have a right to exist as all other civil society structures do which enhance human desires and interests in the common good; but not as part of the Women’s Movement. Therefore, to insist that our Movement, which we have struggled to establish, often giving our entire lives to its creation, should become a “gender-mixed space” is not acceptable at all and must be vigorously contested.

Exclusionary practices use space as a key element in the implementation of a specific agenda. The claim that women’s place is in “his home” is an old strategy that mobilizes notions of femininity; locates them in the private, and imposes an ideology of domesticity through which females are socialized to believe and accept that the narrow, male-privileging spaces called “home” are the most appropriate spaces for them to spend all their lives in, breeding and working for “him” and “his family.” This claim is so powerful that millions of women continue to believe it, even when they have been able to leave the home and acquire an education and professional skills that they could use to become autonomous. Still, they return to that space where they become “real” women in backward patriarchal terms; terms which they sometimes choose to define themselves through but which do not have to become the markers of all women, especially in the public which is a common space that belongs to all women and all citizens.

I think that one cannot consider the issue of male intrusion into women’s political spaces without also considering that this demand is always made with the conscious desire to undertake surveillance on what women are thinking, saying and doing. I know that some of my sisters will say I cannot generalize because there are “nice” men who name themselves “feminist” and who are interested in securing the rights of women against patriarchal dominance. At one level, that may be true. There are a few men who are experiencing a new political consciousness through association with women’s struggles for freedom and autonomy. But in my book, such men need to get themselves into a political movement which will mobilize more men to change themselves, especially in relation to masculinity and the hegemony that patriarchal ideology grants all men. In that way they will be better able to support women’s demands and rights for freedoms. Because while “nice” men do support women and “allow” their wives and partners to do activist work, they also influence the politics of women when they enter women’s spaces and interact with the ideas and activism of women within the same framework.

The presence of men in any women’s space has fundamental consequences for women’s sense of themselves and their visions of the future. In my opinion, women cannot afford to be nice about such a threat. In fact, it is through their intrusion into women’s spaces that men have been able to redirect the politics of the Women’s Movement in many countries—shifting its character from a radical political platform where women experience themselves as autonomous and entitled persons, into a welfarist movement that is focused on the old sexist notions of reproduction and cultural custodianship in behalf of the very males who claim that they are being excluded.

When women become articulate about who they are sexually and cast off the old patriarchal myths about what a woman can be and what she is not allowed to become, women become powerful and acquire the ability to say no to violence; no to unpaid labour; no to exploitation and discrimination in the name of cultural preservation. Women become persons who relate to the state in new and challenging ways, no longer waiting for men in the state to dole out a few “favours” in the name of benevolent dictatorship.Such women become autonomous and their Movement becomes a force for the transformation of oppressive relations of power in both the public and the private spheres. Such women are a danger to all males, regardless of how some men define themselves. Therefore, women’s spaces as politicised spaces must be occupied under the guise of “inclusion” and those women who resist such surveillance are accused of being man-haters and of acting in “exclusionary” ways the same old story we have heard for centuries. When women first demanded the right to be free, to have access to education (not even equal access, just access to the collective knowledge of their respective societies), they were accused of hating men. Those of us who have refused to be ritualised and owned by men through heterosexual marriage, and who have sometimes gone on to love other women, are marked as “heretics” and man-haters. The tarring of women with the brush of heterosexist vitriol is well-known and most women fear it because it is a harsh and ruthless brush that marks a woman for the rest of her life as Other and Dangerous.

This doesn’t surprise me. Have seen this first-hand over the years:

Two rigorous months have whizzed past. It is a Sunday (in Bangla the flavour is ‘Robbaar’) well deserved at Lost & Found, a rare luxury. With the month of March pimped out for the cause of women, I take a moment to reflect upon the last two.

So, at Lost & Found, the big money never knocked at our door. A few samaritans kept us going. The festival was shelved. The larger team met, and met yet again, and talked, and brainstormed, and met, and met yet again. While the morale dipped just a bit, something unequivocal emerged. A camaraderie of three women, Malli-Pritha-Monca, picking the strings of Lost & Found. Often, we are drowned by what is not. Seldom do we see what transformed.

January & February were breathless, back-breaking, exciting and quite satisfying months for Lost & Found. The three of us ground ourselves down and followed through every thing that we wished, imagined and desired to turn around.

In Vasant Kunj, one of our focus areas this year, we brought public performance on the streets, showcased a theatre in the community centre for the neighbourhood, shot through the som bazaar (Monday market) for a night photography workshop and inaugurated the very first public exhibition in a park.

With friends & strangers we walked all night, we walked 12 hours. We formed new bonds with artists, residents, civic & state authorities. All along, we three held hands, shared meals, dropped dead in our office corners, smiled & laughed, shouted & screamed, slept, fought, dressed up, watched plays, stood up for JNU and marched together in protests, were broke, made cups of tea and continued with our Lost & Found chores.

A moment of awkward silence a few days ago between Mallika & me, triggered this writing. We sat looking at each other with no pending work for the day. For the first time in two months a restlessness with a sense of void struck us. Is this normal? Have we missed something major? With a shared smile we made peace, knowing deep down, we had marched ahead.

While we walk on the 8th embracing the theatre of life, March & April in Lost & Found promise newer horizons.