Sexism

Why Palestine’s Feminists Are Fighting On Two Fronts

June 22, 2018 Jen Marlowe and Fadi Abu Shammalah, Tom Dispatch. Create! Palestine, Sexism, Women

“I am here because I heard my town call me, and ask me to maintain my honor.” Fifty-seven-year-old Um Khalid Abu Mosa spoke in a strong, gravelly voice as she sat on the desert sand, a white tent protecting her from the blazing sun. “The land,” she says with determination, “is honor and dignity.” She was near the southern Gaza Strip town of Khuza’a, the heavily fortified barrier with Israel in plain sight and well-armed Israeli soldiers just a few hundred meters away. Abu Mosa’s left arm was wrapped in a sling fashioned from a black-and-white-checkered kuffiyeh, or scarf, and a Palestinian flag. Israeli soldiers had shot her in the shoulder with live ammunition on March 30 as she approached the barrier to plant a Palestinian flag in a mound of earth.

Mapping Out Missing And Murdered Native Women: ‘I Would Want My Story To Have Meaning’

May 10, 2018 Mary Annette Pember, Rewire.news Create! Indigenous Women, Sexism, Violence against Women

“Hand-drawn maps have great potential to reflect our ways of knowing,” said Lucchesi in an interview with Rewire.News. A recent example of this is a map Lucchesi created in preparation for the 2018 Women’s Marches. The map (shared below) features an image of a ribbon skirt, often worn as sign of respect and honor among Native women, with names of missing and murdered indigenous women incorporated into the design of skirt. Using mainstream technology, Lucchesi seeks to infuse the work of the Atlas of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in the United States and Canada with Native ways of thinking or epistemologies that are guided by community needs. “Every element of the atlas is voluntary. My hope is that it will be a model to honor people dealing with these issues, by offering skills with which they can build the work themselves,” said Lucchesi. She added that “reducing peoples very real experience of violence into data points alone felt gross.”

Zapatista Women Inspire The Fight Against Patriarchy

April 6, 2018 Shirin Hess, Wagingnonviolence.org Strategize! Mexico, Nationalism, Sexism, Women, Zapatistas

Dawn had only just broken over the mountains. While most of the women and children on the camping grounds were still asleep, others were already wide awake, huddling together in the first rays of sunlight and drinking coffee. To a casual observer, this place might have seemed similar to any mainstream festival campsite. A distinguishing factor, however, was that there wasn’t a single man in sight. The sign on the main entrance left no one in doubt that only women and children were welcome at this event: “Men not permitted to enter.” Women’s participation in Mexico’s 25-year-old Zapatista National Liberation Army, or EZLN movement, has represented an incredible organizational achievement since its original uprising in 1994.

‘It’s Time for Indian Women to Be Heard’: Promise And Problems Of Tribal Law And Order Act

April 4, 2018 Mary Annette Pember, Rewire.news Educate! Abuse, Indigenous Women, Sexism, Violence against Women

Although proponents of the act are disappointed in the DOJ’s limited support of it, they remain hopeful about the future and the potential for such legislation to help Native women. “The Tribal Law and Order Act [TLOA] feels like window dressing,” said Sarah Deer of the Muscogee Creek Nation, who worked on the legislation President Barack Obama signed into law in 2010 and was also instrumental in the reauthorization of the 2013 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). “It’s very disappointing, many of us worked so hard on the legislation.” The language of TLOA, with its specific promises to combat sexual and domestic violence against Native women, held great hope for Indian Country, a community in which one out of every three Native women reports being raped in her lifetime. Overall, Native people are 2.5 times more likely to experience sexual assault crimes compared to other races.

Women Will Rid The World Of Nuclear Bombs

March 17, 2018 Heidi Hurtur, Damemagazine.com Strategize! Activism, Nuclear Weapons, Sexism, Women

Today, experts say, we are inching ever closer to nuclear catastrophe. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists defines how close we are to nuclear war with their metaphorical Doomsday Clock. Earlier this year, on January 25, the Bulletin moved the minute hand to two minutes to midnight. North Korea has a greater capacity than ever to harm other countries, including the U.S.—and apparently so does Russia. The hypermasculine violent language between the U.S. and North Korea has provoked international tensions. Russia and the U.S. are at odds. South-Asia, Pakistan and other nations are increasing their arsenals, tensions over the Iran nuclear deal are mounting, and weakened U.S. international diplomacy under President Trump has advanced nuclear dangers worldwide. Expert nuclear war planner, Daniel Ellsberg, author of The Pentagon Papers and The Doomsday Machine, says he is terrified. So am I.

From #MeToo To #WeStrike

March 10, 2018 By Liz Mason-Deese, Lithub.com Educate! Labor, Latin America, Sexism, Strikes, Women

A year before #MeToo erupted in the United States, women in Argentina were fighting against an epidemic of violence against women in which, on average, one woman is killed every 30 hours. The murders are often brutal, women are tortured, their bodies are mutilated and dumped in public places. But women in Argentina are not merely victims. At noon on October 19, 2016, thousands of women all over the country walked off their jobs, stopped doing unpaid housework, watching the kids, or preparing the meals; they stopped carrying out the emotional work required of political organizing; they stopped conforming to the social script of gender and its attendant divisions of labor that organizes the subordination of women. The strike was Argentinian women’s response to the growing number of femicides in the country, and specifically to the brutal murder of the young Lucía Pérez.

More Than 5 Million Join Spain’s ‘Feminist Strike’

March 10, 2018 Sam Jones, Theguardian.com Resist! Sexism, Spain, Strikes, Women

More than 5 million workers have taken part in Spain’s first nationwide “feminist strike”, according to trade unions. The action, held to mark International Women’s Day, is intended to highlight sexual discrimination, domestic violence and the wage gap. On Thursday afternoon, the Workers’ Commissions and the Workers’ General Union said that 5.3 million people had participated in two-hour walkouts, describing the action as “an unprecedented strike in our country’s trade union movement”. The strike, which is being supported by some of Spain’s best-known female politicians – including Madrid’s mayor, Manuela Carmena, and the mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau – has drawn huge crowds on to streets and squares across the country to call for change and equality.

On March 8th, Women Across The World Are Going On Strike

March 2, 2018 Staff, Redpepper.org.uk Resist! Sexism, Strikes, Women

It’s been a turbulent year for women everywhere. Whilst a self-confessed perpetrator of sexual assault sits in the White House, feminist grassroots organisations are gaining in strength and momentum. The #MeToo movement continues to make headlines – but some seem quick to tamp out any suggestion that the problems it points to are truly as widespread or damaging as many women claim. We have a woman prime minister – but she heads up the cruel economic settlement of austerity, 86% of whose effects falls on the shoulders of women. This year, we mark 100 years of women’s suffrage – but like that early triumph, many of the benefits of feminist movements are recouped by more privileged women.

Marching Forward Women, Resistance And Counter-Power

February 23, 2018 Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres, Medha Patkar and Nonhle Mbuthuma, Longreads.tni.org Resist! Resistance, Sexism, Women

If we learnt anything in 2017 in the aftermath of Trump’s election shock, it was that the face of resistance to today’s autocrats would be that of a woman. Women were the first to take to the streets the day after Trump was inaugurated in the largest street march in US history and have since been at the forefront of resistance to his toxic politics of racist fear-mongering and corporate cronyism. Women have similarly changed the entire conversation on sexual abuse, not just in the US but also in Asia and in Latin America, most recently through the #niunamenos (not one woman less) campaign. Women everywhere are leading struggles against corporate crimes and defending their communities and the dignity of all people, risking their lives in the process. To introduce TNI’s State of Power 2018 report on counter-power, we interviewed three women activists who have displayed incredible courage...

“This Is An Era Defined By The Rise Of Women”

February 1, 2018 By Angelina Giannopoulou, Transform-network.net Educate! Activists, Sexism, Women

In Athens, in a crowded room of 600 people, which proved very small for such an incredible woman, Angela Davis started her lecture by expressing her gratitude. She thanked all the Greek political prisoners who, back in 1970-1972, when she was facing the death penalty, joined the international solidarity struggle for her release. International solidarity, as she highlighted, must today be demonstrated towards the Palestinian people who relentlessly fight for their rights and their lives. Angela Davis’s feminism was born through Marxism, and through theory and collective struggles as well. These two steps opened the road for a feminism that includes poor and black women, standing out against mainstream white, bourgeois feminism. It is not even possible to speak of a white feminism anymore, not only in the USA, but also in Europe. Europe is no longer a white continent.

Iceland Makes It Illegal To Pay Men More Than Women

January 4, 2018 Staff, aljazeera.com Create! Iceland, Sexism, Women, Workers Rights and Jobs

A new law making it illegal to pay men more than women has taken effect in Iceland. The legislation, which came into force on Monday, the first day of 2018, makes Iceland the first country in the world to legalise equal pay between men and women. Under the new rules, companies and government agencies employing at least 25 people will have to obtain government certification of their equal-pay policies. Those that fail to prove pay parity will face fines. "The legislation is basically a mechanism that companies and organisations ... evaluate every job that's being done, and then they get a certification after they confirm the process if they are paying men and women equally," said Dagny Osk Aradottir Pind, a board member of the Icelandic Women's Rights Association.

A Women’s Revolt That Targets Far More Than Sexual Abuse

December 7, 2017 Chris Hedges, truthdig.com Strategize! Sexism, Sexual Assault, Women

By Chris Hedges for Truth Dig - The press, trumpeting the lurid and salacious details of the sexual assault charges brought against powerful men, has missed the real story—the widespread popular revolt led by women, many of whom have stood up, despite vicious attacks and the dictates of legally binding nondisclosure agreements, to denounce the entitlement of the corporate and political elites. This women’s revolt is not solely about sexual abuse. It is about fighting a corporate power structure that institutionalizes and enables misogyny, racism and bigotry. It is about rejecting the belief that wealth and power give the elites the right to engage in economic, political, social and sexual sadism. It challenges the twisted ethic that those who are crushed and humiliated by the rich, the famous and the powerful have no rights and no voice. Let’s hope this is the beginning, not the end. “Women are carefully choosing the men who are at the pinnacles of power to address race and class and sex,” the feminist Lee Lakeman told me when I reached her by phone in Vancouver. “[These women] know what they are doing. You can’t take down someone like Harvey Weinstein without affecting a whole industry. Feminism has never been just about protecting our individual self. It is a collective resistance. It has a vitality we need to use to deal with these hierarchies.”

On Good Guys And Bad Guys

November 8, 2017 Robert Jensen, commondreams.org Educate! Patriarchy, Sexism, Women

By Robert Jensen for Common Dreams - I am not as abusive as Harvey Weinstein, nor as narcissistic as Bill O’Reilly. I’m more respectful to women than Donald Trump, and not as sleazy as Anthony Weiner. Judged by the standards set by these public reprobates, most of the rest of us men appear almost saintly, and therein lies a danger. The public disclosure of these men’s behavior—from the routinely offensive to the occasionally criminal—is a good thing, and all those who have been harassed and raped should continue to speak out. But we should not let the most egregious cases derail the analysis of how a wide range of men’s intrusive and abusive sexual behaviors against women (as well as against girls, boys, and vulnerable men) are so woven into the everyday fabric of life in a patriarchal society that the intrusion and abuse is often invisible to men. Pause for the required disclaimer: Not all men are rapists. To acknowledge that sexuality in a culture of institutionalized male dominance (a useful shorthand definition of patriarchy) takes place within a larger framework of male domination/female subordination is not to accuse all men of rape. Another required disclaimer: Not all sex in patriarchy is rape. To take seriously a feminist critique of patriarchy and men’s violence is not to suggest that intimate relationships can never reflect mutuality and equality.

Weinsteins In The Workplace

November 6, 2017 Steve Early, counterpunch.org Educate! Sexism, Unions, Workers

By Steve Early for Counter Punch - The exploding national debate about workplace harassment of women by powerful bosses or male co-workers is a great opening for unions to demonstrate their importance as one form of protection against such abuse. Unfortunately, when unions are not pro-active on this front in their dealings with management or, worse yet, allow bullying or sexual harassment among staff or members, their credibility and appeal as a sword and shield for women (or anybody else) is greatly reduced. Unions don’t exist in a vacuum. They reflect the workplace or occupational cultures of their members, and the latter are a product of social conditioning often unsupportive of solidarity on the job, collective activity, or sensitivity toward women and minorities. So the task of forging a united front, for purposes of mutual aid and protection in the workplace, is easily hindered by union dysfunction and internal divisions based on race, gender, ethnicity, age, and other membership differences. It takes continuous organizational effort—in the form of training and recruitment, new leadership development, and structural change–to insure that the bullying, harassing, divide-and-conquer behavior of bosses, big and small, doesn’t infect and weaken the “house of labor” too.

Women Still Need More Seats At The Peace-Making Table

November 2, 2017 Shaheen Chugtai, towardfreedom.com Resist! Sexism, United Nations, Women

By Shaheen Chugtai fo Toward Freedom - (IPS) – Whether targeted by perpetrators of sexual violence, oppressed by ideological extremists, or uniquely threatened by the bombing of hospital maternity units, women often bear the brunt of conflicts. Yet when it comes to peace negotiations, women too often don’t have a seat at the table. The continuing reality that men, particularly armed men, enjoy an almost exclusive role in peace processes defies both logic and evidence. It is now 17 years since UN resolution 1325 was adopted – the first Security Council resolution to establish the so-called women, peace and security agenda, which aims to uphold women’s rights in war and roles in peace. Ahead of the Open Debate on Peace and Security at the UN, it is the time reflect and double down both on what promises are left unfilled, as well as what progress has been made – there are examples of both. There have been some positive signs of headway, as seven subsequent UN Security Council resolutions have helped strengthen policies and norms worldwide over the past decade. Almost 70 countries have national action plans to put women, peace and security aims into practice. This year, renewed peacekeeping and peace enforcement mandates for Western Sahara, Sudan and Somalia included new language on the importance of women’s participation. Hopefully this trend will continue with South Sudan’s peacekeeping mandate renewal just around the corner.

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