Feminists Who Totally Rock, Part 1

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Feminists Who Totally Rock

Welcome to the first post of Feminists Who Totally Rock!

Today I am pleased to present two interviews, one with Rebeca Monzo and one with Terrie Chan. Read on and enjoy!

Rebeca Monzo is one of the head co-ordinators of the Beautiful One Conference as well as an ordained minister!

What was it that inspired you to become a feminist?

To be honest I have never really thought of myself as a feminist.  That being said I have always had a strong desire to work with teen girls.  That desire was inspired by the obvious need to shine a light on the unrealistic standards and expectations that are placed on girls by pop culture. I want to encourage, empower and equip teenage girls to live their life to its potential.

What kind of work do you do?

I work with youth both in the church setting as well as in the community where I mentor teen girls and help coach a Sr. Girl’s volleyball team.  I also work with girls through the Beautiful One Conference which is a faith based yearly event designed to empower, equip and encourage teen girls.

What feminist issue is particularly important to you?

I believe that every girl should be afforded the opportunity to pursue education allowing them to achieve their goals and live out their dreams no matter where they live.

What is your dream for Women?

My dream for women is that they would be confident in who they are and live out that confidence in every area of their life.

Which unknown or young feminist would you like the world to know about?

This is a tough one.  I know a lot of strong women who are actively making a difference in the lives of girls and women.

Terrie Chan is a student at UBC Vancouver. This summer she worked for a non-governmental organization in Hong Kong called The Women’s Foundation.

1) What was it that inspired you to become a feminist?

I was inspired to become a feminist for many reasons. The most prominent reason being that women are not, no matter how many people say that we have, won our equal standing in society- or at least in Canada. There are [still] many [areas] in life that women can[not] participate fully [in], or be treated as an equal. There are also many things to be done in order to protect the safety of girls and women, or simply  to be viewed just as valuable as a male counterpart.

2) What kind of work do you do?

I try to fit in feminism in my life and to reflect this to my friends and family. Whenever I get the chance, I talk about the situation of women and girls around the world, which I think is an issue needing attention. In terms of work with credentials, I spent one month in Hong Kong this summer with an NGO named The Women’s Foundation for an internship. That was my first experience with a NGO with a focus on women and girls.

3) Which feminist issue is particularly important to you?

I am most interested in sex trafficking, domestic violence, and women within law.

4) What is your Dream for Women:

My dream for women is for all women to understand their self-worth and that it is not okay when a man treats you as his possession or simply in a bad way, and for all women to understand they deserve respect. It is my hope that all women will have that self-confidence, and that they will stop blaming themselves when a man does them harm. I also hope that women can finally see that they can be just as successful as any man or woman on the planet. Finally, I think we need to accept a norm wherein women do not feel pressured to be sexy or possess a certain ‘male trait’ to be successful. Hopefully this will allow men who have this attitude to discover something other than their present normative thinking-that women are somehow of lesser value compared to men.

Introducing: New Columns at Antigone Magazine

This fall, we are launching a number of exciting blog features and  columns! They are designed to engage in important conversations and to introduce you to amazing women. Over the years, we have met a lot of fabulous female politicians and feminists and we have unfortunately not been able to include them all in our print magazine.

And then we realized that we had a blog and could features whomever we wanted!

So, please welcome our new columns and columnists! They will be posting bi-weekly so look out for their content!

Political Mavens
By Megan Ryland
This column will feature interviews with awesome female politicians and candidates!

Feminists Who Totally Rock
By Emily Yakashiro
This column will feature interviews with awesome feminists who totally rock!

The Feminist Scholar
By Kaitlin Blanchard
This column will feature discussion of ongoing issues in feminist academia!

The Cultural Critic
By Raquel Baldwinson
This column will feature criticism of culture!

We will also be offering other blogs the opportunity to syndicate these columns on their blogs for free! To learn more about how you can publish one of these great columns on your blog (or Dreams for Women!) e-mail us at antigonemagazine@hotmail.com!

If you are interested in starting your own weekly or bi-weekly column we would LOVE to have you! E-mail us at antigonemagazine@hotmail.com

2010 Dreams for Women Calendar with 2010 Athletes!

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2010, American athletes, Angela Ruggiero, Ashley Wagner, calendar, canada, Canadian Athletes, Cathy Priestner Allinger, cross country, Erin Hamlin, female athletes, figure skating, first nations, First Nations Snowboard Team, freestyle, girls, hockey, Julia Clukey, Katie Willis, Kirsten Manley-Casimir, luge, Michelle Roark, Olympics, para-nordic skiing, paralympics, Rachel Armstrong, Robbi Weldon, Sara Renner, ski jumping, snowboard, speed skating, US Athletes, Vancouver, volleyball, women

Ashley Wagner, U.S. Women’s Figure Skating Team

Robbi Weldon, Canadian Para-Nordic Skiing Team

Virginia Johnston, First Nations Snowboard Team

Katie Willis, Canadian Women’s Ski Jumpers Team

Sara Renner, Canada Women’s Cross Country Team

Angela Ruggiero, U.S. Women’s Hockey Team

These are just a sampling of the beautiful postcards that are featured in the 2010 Dreams for Women Calendar featuring North American female athletes who will be competing in the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games!

As an organization based in Vancouver, we wanted to highlight the powerful women who will be competing in the Games and work with them to bring attention to the importance of women’s leadership and women’s equality! We believe that these women are fabulous role models for young women and we wanted to work with them to ensure that the Vancouver Olympics has a legacy of leadership for young Canadian women!

The amazing athletes who are featured are:

Rachel Armstrong, Canada Women’s Volleyball

Julia Clukey, U.S. Women’s Luge

Virginia, Johnton, First Nations Snowboard Team

Erin Hamlin, U.S. Women’s Luge

Kirsten Manley-Casimir, Canada Women’s Volleyball

Cathy Priestner Allinger, Canada Women’s Speed Skating

Sara Renner, Canada Women’s Cross Country

Michelle Roark, U.S. Women’s Freestyle Skiing

Angela Ruggiero, U.S. Women’s Hockey

Robbi Weldon, Canada Women’s Para-Nordic Skiing

Ashley Wagner, U.S. Women’s Figure Skating

Katie Willis, Women’s Ski Jumpers

Pre-Order your calendar today and save 20% (Until November 15th!). Calendars are only $16 for quantities under 7 and $8 for quantities over 7! Learn how you can use the calendar to fundraise for your group!

BUY YOUR CALENDAR TODAY – CLICK HERE

“What difference do women make in the world’s economy?

Check out I.M.O.W.‘s latest exhibition Economica: Women and the Global Economy.

Economica travels the world and asks, “What difference do women make in the world’s economy?” A series of evocative audio slideshows give the answers by showing women’s experiences from Morocco, China, Egypt, Bolivia, and beyond. These powerful visual stories provide entry points for examining different economic systems and values. Also check out their resources page for podcasts and an awesome book and film list.

Our goal in creating the Economica exhibition is to showcase women’s broad experiences as well as their exceptional expertise. We aim to illuminate what is going on in different corners of the world, why and what can be done to make things better. We want to acknowledge that women are a powerful engine of economic growth, but also help visitors dive beneath the jargon of economics to discover deeper causes and effects and probe how things might be different. Through women’s stories, we pose questions that do not have ready answers and we offer alternatives from those working locally and globally, not only to empower women, but also to transform the economy.

– Masum Momaya, Curator

KEY FACTS AND FIGURES (referenced in Curator’s Statement)

• Women constitute an estimated 70% of the world’s absolute poor, those living on less than $1 a day.(1)
• Women work 2/3 of the world’s working hours, yet earn only 10% of the world’s income.(2)
• Women are responsible for producing 60-80% of the world’s food(3), yet hold only 10% of the world’s wealth and 1% of the world’s land.(4)
• Worldwide, over 60% of people working in family enterprises without pay are women.(5)
• The total value of a woman’s unpaid house and farm work adds 1/3 to the world’s GNP.(6)
• In countries such as Austria, Canada, Thailand, and the United States, over 30% of all businesses are now owned or operated by women. Thailand tops this list with an impressive 40%.(7)
• As of 2006, 53% of worldwide college students were women, despite the fact that girls still only comprise 47% of all primary and secondary school students. However, in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, women comprise fewer than 35% of college students and 44% of primary and secondary students.(8)

The Feminist Scholar: The Performance of Feminism Issue # 4

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activism, affect, emotions, fairies, feminism, scholarship, theory

Affecting Others: The Passionate Feminist (A Fairy Story)

I’m going to start this entry with a personal anecdote because it touched me, and this, as I will argue, is part of my point. Sitting having tea with a former professor of mine the other day, she told me a fairy story which she had heard when she was young in order to illustrate a small, but not insignificant, story about being-with-others. The story tells the tale of a young knight who unknowingly falls in love with a fairy. The woman disappears during the night and always comes back disheveled and bearing traces of her adventures. He follows her into the woods one night and comes upon her in a fairy circle, whereupon he is told that because he has done this and violated her trust he has to give her up entirely. Walking home dejected, he sees a cloaked figure ahead of him in the road. The figure turns and it is the woman: he had to give her up to win her back.

While seemingly a very quaint and archetypal tale, the story illustrates a vital point, one which I think much theory has lost sight of. That is, in trying to master its objects, theory often reproduces the same divides it criticizes. It reifies the structure of binary oppositions that it seeks to undermine, leaving very little room for growth or contingency. So while it may be a necessary, and potent force, the theory we produce is not always palatable. Unlike the knight who loses the “fight” for love in a binary relation, only to win it back because he has grown, theory and correspondingly its practioners tend to embrace rather rigid formulae for their analyses. I want to suggest that perhaps we, as feminist critics, like the knight, need to give something up in order to win it back.

The Dali Lama came to UBC in September and spoke to a select audience. He called himself a feminist. Many celebrated this. However, he also said that “many feminists have too much emotion, and that he doesn’t like…” (September 28, 2009). This statement rankles as many as his previous statement enheartened. I am not a buddhist so I will not pretend to analyze the statement within its context, but I would like to perhaps infer that when he says emotion he means a certain kind of passion. Passion, as we understand it now, is, I believe, a kind of feverish identification with a particular affective state. It is, in all cases, exorbitant, overwhelming, powerful, and compelling. However, and this may seem rather facile for now, I think there is a kind of passion we can embrace as indeed rational in itself.

Anyone who has graduated from theory kindergarten will easily disassemble the claims I’m going to make as essentialisms, at the very least, but bear with me. I’m wondering why it is that passion has been characterized as “excessive” and used more commonly as a pejorative qualifier in relation to the affective states it describes. In other words, have we cordoned off excess in the same way we have cordoned off the subject? Radical feminists, those who practice a kind of reverse sexism have long been rejected by the movement at large, and I think largely for good reason, but not because they are passionate. Rather, because they are not being “rational” or perhaps more accurately reasonable. Reasonable is a good word to focus on here because it connotes a kind of moderateness, an Aristotelian mean, of sorts sans the classicist consequences. However, it also signifies a capacity for reason, but not necessarily the practice of it. Reason itself, on the other hand, recalls perhaps the most insidious and pervasive binary of all: logic and passion. I want to suggest that passion itself can in fact be reasonable; that is, capable of acting according to a logic or following a series of syllogisms. Passion, can be, in other words not restrained, but moderate and most importantly careful and caring.

I do not seek here to limit the rapturous and the sublime as impossibilities, but I want to suggest that passion, as a practice, is valuable when it takes its actions into account, when it makes a narrative of its feelings–the affects it discerns from others and the environment.(I borrow here from Teresa Brennan). The Freudian ego has long been touted as the mediator between the persuasive social conscience of the superego and the willful and desirous id. Really, this account of human subjectivity leaves no room for feeling: the ego is structured as a rational entity, one which carries out decisions according to their positive value to the subject. And this is my point, the ego is a primarily reactionary, and dare I say fearfully anxious conscience whose purpose is to preserve the status quo of the subject or advance its safety and prosperity. Are not anxiety and fear affects–and negative affects at that? Maybe then, when the Dali Lama says he does not like feminists who have too much emotion, we might understand that statement, not in its buddhist context, but as a maxim which warns against being possessed by the negative affects.

To bring this all back down to the ground again, in practice this would mean for feminism, a much more organic kind of theorizing, one much closer to the kinds of grassroots activism which brings communities together to form a common front. It means taking account of the affects in the air which carry us beyond ourselves, beyond the moment of feeling and into the uncertain future of anxiety. No movement which takes as its goal the furtherance of human rights and equality should embrace a modality which is fundamentally fearful.

Of course, there will always be some degree of the subjunctive in feminism, the “if’s” contain as much hope as they can fear. My point is that perhaps we ought to begin to let go of these structures of deconstruction, which have served us so well, in order to embrace the roots of our movement more firmly. Maybe we need to give up our objects in order to lose the fear and anxiety which colours our thinking about them. We need to let go of the self-centered and passifying affects of fear and anxiety in order to begin to analyzing our struggles in their moment. We need to mourn our relationships in order to re-order them; we need to feel others, rather than fear for them. This may mean giving up “women’s” studies, but certainly not the intent of feminisms. Maybe, just maybe, we need to let go of our’selves’ in order to realize just who and what has affected them and then, maybe then, we can begin to really affect the change we need to as caring and careful theorists….

Women’s Worlds 2011 – Regional Leaders Meeting Recap

I was in Montreal this weekend attending a training session as a Regional Network Leader for the Women’s Worlds 2011 conference (find out more here http://www.womensworlds.ca). The organizing committee chose two representatives from six regions across Canada to help coordinate the participation of grassroots women’s groups (particularly those from groups that are typically excluded) in the International Conference in Ottawa in 2011. The goal of the network leaders is also to assist in creating a regional network that will continue on after the conference and strengthen women’s organizing in the region. The video above is the work that two of the women present are doing with aboriginal youth. I have one word for that video and the amazing women who helped make it: wow.

But, there are not even words to describe my experience this weekend. Not only did I have the privilege and the honor of sharing in the Women’s Worlds vision, conceptualized by a number of activists and academics and sheparded by women like the fabulous Lise Martin and Pam Kapoor, but I also had the opportunity to connect with The Girls Action Foundation, RebELLES and with the fabulous women that will be working as Regional Leaders across Canada.

I cannot truly encompass the experience in this short blog post but you will be hearing far more about this team of amazing people as we get closer to the 2011 conference. I can only say that I have never before had a weekend as filled with laughter, feminism, fun, stimulating conversation and concerted planning. Despite my inevitable jetlag (which we BCers experience in any of our trips to East) I enjoyed every minute of it.

I feel like I have begun a journey with these fellow feminists that will only snowball as more women are brought together. I strongly believe that this conference will be an important moment in Canadian feminism and I feel so lucky to be able to be a part of it. The women that I met this weekend have become a part of my heart and they have informed and strengthened my activism. I hope to share many of their stories with you and in turn the stories of the women they work with. We are going to be launching a series of interviews with Canadian feminists called Feminists Who Totally Rock! You WILL be hearing more about these women and their work.

If the spirit and love that radiated through our meeting is any indication of what Women’s World will bring, this amazing conference WILL have a lasting and transformative effect on women’s activism and organizing in Canada.

With love,

AR

Dreams for Women Week 34

Do you have dreams for women?

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Discuss in the comments below or see more postcards.