Cultivating self/collective care and wellbeing is both deeply personal and deeply political. When we nurture wellbeing at the personal level, we improve our ability to care and have compassion for others. We are interested not in hiding from our busy lives and stress, but in finding and sharing ways to fully embody our politics and principles, making our contributions sustainable.
As long as I can remember, my grandmother taught me to stand up straight, cross my legs, clear the table, cover myself, not to talk about periods, hide my maxi pads, not to use tampons because virginity is precious and should not be jeopardized.
We all engage with activism and become part of wider movements for our own reasons. While activism can help us feel free and grow as individuals, the road to imagining our collective futures and the effort that goes into building just, equal, free societies can be physically dangerous and emotionally draining.
The recent AWID Forum that took place in Bahia, Brazil, invited participants to imagine “feminist futures.” But to do so, we must reckon with the extent to which the state and other forces are working to limit our imaginations. This was the focus of the session, Reclaiming Democratic Spaces, in which participants explored the clampdown on resistance taking place across national and international levels.
"I grew up to the sounds of rain on the roof / Winds bristling through the trees / Rotten mangoes on the earth (...)"
We are four months away from what would have been your 80th birthday—9 July. We still invoke your words, ideas, and commitment to a global movement for the liberation of all oppressed peoples of the world. You would unequivocally agree with #BlackLivesMatter and the younger generation of women and transpeople leading the movement.
In the context of sexual reproductive health and rights (SRHR), the subject of pleasure remains a big taboo. Yet many working in the field around the world are struggling to reach young people with vital information relating their sexual and reproductive health and rights. Is this because we are failing to take into account the motivations and desires of those we are trying to engage?
From the 10th-12th of April 2016, the fourth African Feminist Forum will take place in Zimbabwe, bringing together a range of wisdom, experience and insight from feminist organisers and activists from across the continent.
Feminists disrupt systems, spaces, events that oppress, violate and exclude us from living freely, expressing our desires and creating alternative, safe and realised lives. The internet is a space, a platform, a digital connector that we are increasingly using to agitate, communicate and mobilise. As state surveillance of activists increases, misogynist trolls play out their violences, companies mine our data and invade our privacy, we need to disrupt and claim the Internet!
Whether it is our lives as women, our experiences as feminists, our histories as indigenous peoples, our struggles as trans women, our analyses as black academics, our achievements as disability rights activists, very little of our complex knowledge and wisdom is easily accessible to the rest of the world on the internet. Whose Knowledge? and a group of Wikimujeres are at AWID’s forum so that we can address this together.