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- Convenors:
-
Deepta Chopra
(Institute of Development Studies)
Tessa Lewin (Institute of Development Studies)
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- Chair:
-
Sohela Nazneen
(Institute of Development Studiesies, University of Sussex)
- Discussant:
-
Sohela Nazneen
(Institute of Development Studiesies, University of Sussex)
- Formats:
- Papers
- Stream:
- Global inequalities
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will explore women's struggles that visibilise inequalities and intersectional oppressions, with a focus on their strategies to counter or unsettle backlash. We will showcase women's lived experiences of resistance, and new and emerging forms, spaces and methodologies of this resistance.
Long Abstract:
This panel will explore women's organising and struggles that visibilise inequalities and intersectional oppressions created as a result of backlash against women's rights and exacerbated by Covid-19 effects, with a focus on their strategies to counter or unsettle this backlash.
We will pay special attention to whether women's organising has taken new forms, including: length of organising; formation of intersectional alliances, creation of new counter-spaces (physical or virtual) and emergence of new kinds of leadership. We will reflect on the extent to which these struggles have managed to draw in new members, because of new forms or modes of organising and methodologies that include digital and visual-cultural forms of protests. The panel will draw attention to the continuities and discontinuities between women's struggles against backlash, and their everyday lives. In this way, we will interrogate boundaries between 'public', visible spaces of organising and 'private' (often invisible) spaces of women's lives; We will also examine the multiple roles played by women as activists and the interaction of the nature of the civic space with these roles.
Special importance will be given to showcasing women's lived experiences of organising, leading and participating in resistance. We invite papers that focus on the nature of the resistance, and their real impact or perceived effects - including changes in discourses regarding women's rights; changes in in policy/ practice; or changes in the perception of women by themselves and others as political actors. We will showcase new and emerging forms, spaces and methodologies of this resistance.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 July, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The Feminist Coalition's role within the EndSars protests is examined against the wider perception of women's role in nation building. Feminist organising in the future may take lessons from the Coalition's mode of operation and wider impact, particularly on human and women's rights issues.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the evolution of women’s participation in the ENDSARS protests which took place in October 2020 all over Nigeria and its metamorphosis into the creation of the Feminist Coalition. The formation of The Coalition as well as her mode of operation will be studied against the functions which she performed within the protests. The criticisms and hindrances which The Coalition faced in the course of contributing to the effectiveness of the protest and how this is reflective of a wider perception of the role of women in nation building will explored. Data will be obtained through In-depth interview of Key Informants; the women who formed the feminist coalition and front liners of the protests. Media articles will be reviewed to determine the extent to which the group’s participation attracted Nigerian diaspora support and international attention. The paper will draw inferences on the future of women’s organising as well as the potential that this presents for feminism to be a core component of human and women’s rights advocacy within the spectrum of women centered participatory nation building
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore how women trade union leaders mobilized during the COVID Pandemic to safeguard rights of women RMG workers in Bangladesh. It will analyse strategies used to confront employers, buyers and government agencies and also to counter the backlash faced from each of these actors.
Paper long abstract:
The Ready Made Garment (RMG) sector is the largest export industry in Bangladesh. It employs approximately 4.1 million workers of which 65% are women. The COVID 19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the industry and on garments workers’ livelihoods. In the first two months after Bangladesh has identified its first COVID-19 patient on 8 March 2020, $3.16 billion worth of orders were cancelled from 1140 factories. Affecting approximately 2.26 million workers, this lead to many workers being sent home without pay and job loss of thousands of workers in first six months.
Inspite of the RMG sector being dominated by women workers the trade unions are mainly led by men. Often contributions of women leaders in mobilizing workers and negotiations for rights are side-lined and remain invisible at national level. However, during COVID an emerging group of women trade union leaders came to the forefront and demonstrated their skills in organizing in-person protests, being vocal in both national and international press, skillfully using social media with evidence all while maintaining close contacts with employers and their associations as well as government agencies and national political leaders for negotiating workers’ rights. The paper will emphasize the struggle women trade union leaders faced to achieve their goals while dealing with the multiple forms of opposition faced. The process of bargaining and negotiating brought out the strengths and weaknesses of a factionalised labour movement when confronted with the interests of global capital and employers supported by the State.
Paper short abstract:
This study explores how social positionality in India is employed as an instrument of backlash against the #MeToo movement. The findings of the study reveal that the two categories of conventional and alternate understandings of backlash emerging from existing backlash literature overlap.
Paper long abstract:
This study investigates how the social positionality (caste and class) of female students in university campuses in Kolkata, India is employed as an instrument of backlash to dismiss their efforts at making progressive changes with regard to sexual harassment within such spaces in the light of the #MeToo movement. There is a strong anti-caste critique of the #MeToo movement in India posited by Dalit- Bahujan- Adivasi (DBA) feminists. I argue that leftist male dominated political organisations in university campuses in Kolkata use these critiques to their advantage as tools of backlash against gender equality to uphold established power structures in the campuses removing both categories of women from spaces of power and rendering their demands for redressal and justice against sexual harassment redundant. Piscopo and Walsh group the different understandings of backlash into two categories, as an immediate reaction to progressive change demanded by women (conventional understanding) and inherent oppression present within powerful structures which make the experience of backlash different for different groups of women (alternate understanding). I employ the existing and emerging body of backlash literature, primarily written in European and South American contexts to the Indian context arguing that conventional and alternate understandings of backlash are not independent of each other but are interlinked. I present lived experiences of politically active young women in University spaces with caste and class backlash using semi structed interviews and secondary literature review to show how it hampers feminist organising and negatively impacts the agency of female activists.
Paper short abstract:
Against the backdrop of austerity in the UK, the Focus E15 campaigners rejected the label ‘single mothers’, reclaiming new family forms and refusing inequality. I analyse their activism through Judith Butler’s work ‘Gender Trouble’ and her advocacy for a reclamation of life unbounded by labels.
Paper long abstract:
UK government cuts have entrenched inequality deliberately, in part as a backlash against women living outside the boundaries of normative heterosexuality. A group of ‘single mothers’ collectively received eviction notices from their hostel in 2013, they successfully organised to fight these evictions and demand their right to be housed in their home borough, Newham. The group succeeded in resisting the forced move out of borough and now fight for others experiencing this deliberate erasure. I interpret Judith Butler’s work ’Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity.’ (Butler [1990] 2006) and apply it to the activism of ‘Focus E15’, the campaign group that emerged from this event. This presentation will explore how this group re-appropriated the power stolen by invisibilising labels, demanding housing as their right. Motherhood and the home are not just the site of oppressions, sometimes they are the site of rebellion, unruly anger that spills over into a political fight against oppressions. Butler writes that gender is constructed as a method of maintaining normative heterosexuality; repeated performances of the societal norms that are ascribed to a given gender further entrench these expectations (Butler [1990] 2006). Fear of unintelligibility, and the material impact it could have on lives, perpetuates the performance of normative heterosexuality. I read Butler’s work as a political manifesto for the rejection of labels, through an unruliness that manifests in a refusal of the boundaries imposed by labels, and re-appropriation of the power purloined by their use.