make-more-noise

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We’re talking issues that affect Black women in the UK this time, the maternal mortality rate and Yarlswood Immigration Detention Centre. Any topics you want us to cover? Let us know. 

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happy international women’s day to everyone but men

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“Men aren’t allowed to express their feelings 😢” women were diagnosed with hysteria and lobotomized for expressing anything other than a deadpan Barbie doll gaze

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I’m not a misandrist I have man friends and sometimes I even read books by men I’m very open minded

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On this day, 8 March 1917, thousands of housewives and women workers in St Petersburg, Russia defied union leaders’ appeals for calm and took to the streets against high prices and hunger, thus igniting the February revolution (so-called because of the calendar used in Russia at the time). The following day, 200,000 workers joined them by striking, shouting slogans against the tsar and the war. Some military units began to join the workers, and by 15 March, tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate. On 8 March the following year, women in Austria celebrated International Women’s Day on this date for the first time as thousands took to the streets protesting against World War I. This International Women’s Day, learn more about radical women’s history in our podcast: https://workingclasshistory.com/tag/women https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1368646019987211/?type=3

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why are we still here? just to suffer? every day a man somewhere wakes up and decides to become a film major

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“Notice: I will not commit suicide. I won’t be bought off or drown in a bath tub, nor will I shoot myself in the head. So, if that happens: I wasn’t me. Save this tweet.”

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as a black woman, i feel my loyalties very split between black men and white women. like sometimes white women have privilege over black men, of course. however, i'd feel safer walking past a group of white women at night than i would a group of black (or any other race BTW) of men at night. i just feel like both groups are threats in different ways, i guess.

Yes that's true, I feel a similar way. I feel comfortable being alone with women I don't know in a way that I would never ever feel with a man.

I think bm and ww really play off each other in denying their privileges and blaming the other group for black women's problems, and we get screwed over either way.

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Super interesting stuff!

Dr. Vandana Shiva & Feminist Theory

In Hindi, chipko means, “to embrace.”  The Chipko Movement in India became one of the most successful environmental activism struggles in the world.  Vandana Shiva was one of the women involved in this movement, which resisted industrial forestry and logging in rural India.  Local women physically put their bodies between the machinery and the forest that provided their livelihood–literally hugging the trees (Callicott, 218).  The largest success of the Chipko movement was convincing Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister in 1981, to declare a fifteen-year moratorium on logging in the Himalayan forests in Uttar Pradesh (Callicott, 218).

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a woman whose work is focused on embracing not only the principles of feminism, but also the principles of ecology.  In fact, as an ecofeminist, she sees these two movements as interconnected and believes that the worldview that causes environmental degradation and injustice is the same worldview that causes a culture of male domination, exploitation, and inequality for women.  Vandana Shiva titles her feminist theory “political,” or “subsistence” ecofeminism, to differentiate it from the more spiritually focused ecofeminism popular in Western countries (although, since the WTO protests of 1999 and the events of September 11, 2001, Western ecofeminism has become equally politically aware).   Both her activism and theory has had a global and concrete focus.  Her work has dealt with “third world” women, whose lives are adversely affected by the forces of corporate globalization and colonialism.

A tireless author, speaker and activist, Shiva has written over 13 books that reveal the true impact of globalization on the lives of women and men in developing countries. She has founded several organizations, including The Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, Navdanya, and Bija Vidyapeeth, an organic farm and center for holistic living.

Born in 1952, she began training as a nuclear physicist.  When Shiva’s sister, a doctor, explained to Vandana the effects of nuclear radiation on life forms, Vandana was shocked because her science education had not addressed the risks and horrors of their work.  This was a pivotal moment that caused Shiva to critique science and the worldview behind scientific ideology.  This critique led to the development of her “subsistence” ecofeminist theories, and her relentless activism to protect both women and nature.

“Ecofeminism” was a term first used by Francoise D’Eaubonne in 1980 and gained popularity in protests and actions against continued ecological disaster.  Shiva and Maria Mies explain:

“We see the devastation of the earth and her beings by the corporate warriors, as feminist concerns.  It is the same masculinist mentality which would deny us our right to our own bodies and our own sexuality, and which depends on multiple systems of dominance and state power to have its way” (14).

From Shiva’s perspective, women’s liberation cannot be achieved without a simultaneous struggle for the preservation and liberation of all life on this planet from the dominant patriarchal/capitalist worldview (Mies and Shiva, 16).  Ecofeminism distinguishes itself from other theories of feminism, which maintain the hierarchical worldview of the Western world. “Rather than attempting to overcome this hierarchical dichotomy many women have simply up-ended it, and thus women are seen as superior to men, nature to culture, and so on” (Mies and Shiva, 5).

Shiva and other ecofeminists are explicitly anti-war and anti-capitalist, because both war and capitalism are seen as patriarchal structures. “The capitalist patriarchy perspective interprets difference as hierarchical and uniformity as a prerequisite for equality” (Mies and Shiva, 2).  For Shiva there is connection between the escalation of war, “musclemen” culture, and rape and other violence against women.  “It is no coincidence that the gruesome game of war—in which the greater part of the male sex seems to delight—passes through the same stages as the traditional sexual relationship: aggression, conquest, possession, control.  Of a woman or a land, it makes little difference” (Mies and Shiva, 15).

The historical context that radicalized Vandana Shiva and many others was the Green Revolution and the vast globalization of the mid to late twentieth century.  Shiva refers to this model of economic development as maldevelopment. “Maldevelopment militates against equality in diversity, and superimposes the ideologically constructed category of western technological man as the uniform measure of the worth of classes, cultures and genders” (Shiva, Staying Alive, 5).

The “Green Revolution” is a misnomer used by U.S. industrial agriculture and biotechnology seed and chemical corporations (Monsanto, Cargill, Dekalb, ADM, et al) to aggressively promote the implementation of their products to farmers in the “third world.”  As Shiva explains in a lecture given in 2003 (An Hour with Vandana Shiva), these corporations convinced farmers in India to shift from subsistence farming (where a family grows food primarily to meet their own food needs, and trades a small amount of their crop for other local goods and services) to growing a monoculture (growing a single plant species over a large area) of a cash crop bound for the global food market (for example, growing potatoes in India that end up as French fries at a McDonald’s in Detroit, Michigan).

This method of farming, aggressively forced on Indian farmers by the WTO (World Trade Organization) and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) in the 1980s and 1990s, was disastrous for the farmers of India.  Cash crop industrial agriculture caused farmers to go into debt to the multinational seed and chemical companies, and when their crops failed, the result was over 20,000 farmers taking their own lives by drinking the chemical fertilizers and pesticides sold to them by the corporations that held their insurmountable debt.

Vandana Shiva credits Article 27.53b of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which allows corporations to hold patents on forms of life, for pushing her to become an ecofeminist activist.  Under this article, it is illegal to save seeds and plant them the following year if a corporation holds a patent on that plant.  For a farmer, this means that he or she cannot be independent, but must now pay the corporation every year to plant that seed.  For the corporation, it means that it can appropriate any life form (such as basmati rice, which had been developed over thousands of years in India through traditional breeding and selection techniques), apply for a patent, and is thereby granted complete legal and biological control over that species, anywhere in the world.  In resistance to these violent forces of globalization, Vandana Shiva founded Navdanya in 1991, an organization in India that saves seeds, promotes biodiversity, empowers women and children, and protects indigenous knowledge.

To the western worldview, the patenting of seeds or the deforestation of the Himalaya may seem completely unrelated to feminism.  For women in the global South, however, the “environment” is the place where they live, and it encompasses everything that affects their lives (Shiva, Close to Home, 2).  According to Shiva and Maria Mies, “urban, middle-class women find it difficult to perceive commonality both between their own liberation and the liberation of nature, and between themselves and ‘different’ women in the world” (5).  This disconnect is due to the fundamental dualistic nature of the western worldview, where the nature of reality is divided into opposing parts, and hierarchically arranged.  Thus, humans are seen as separate to nature, technology is seen as superior to indigenous knowledge, men are superior to women, and humans are superior and separate from animals, etc.

Shiva and Mies write, “The women’s movement…had fastened it hopes on the progress of science and technology, particularly in the area of reproduction, but also of house- and other work” (7). This progress would have to be based on the continued dominance over nature, and pursuing the goal of “catching up” to men in “advanced” societies (Mies and Shiva, 7).  But if the definition of “equality for all” is that all people in the world are able to live at the same level of consumption of resources enjoyed by men in advanced societies, this equality is quite simply impossible.  “With a limited planet, there can be no escape from necessity.  To find freedom does not involve subjugating or transcending the ‘realm of necessity,’ but rather focusing on developing a vision of freedom, happiness, the ‘good life’ within the limits of necessity, of nature” (Mies and Shiva, 8).

Dr. Madronna Holden points out that, “Political or subsistence ecofeminists such as Shiva and Mies place part of the blame for the oppressive influence of patriarchy on the rise of Western (and Marxist) ideas of development and ‘progress’” (6). To further show this disconnect between Western views of feminism and ecologically based feminism, Shiva explains:

“A common criticism leveled at ecological feminist approaches to the current crisis, is that of ‘essentialism’; relating environmental issues to women in a specific way is seen as an ‘essentialist’ world view. Yet the charge itself emanates from a paradigm that splits parts from whole, fragments and divides, and either sees the part as subjugating the whole (reductionism) or the whole as subjugating the parts—in other words, essentializing both” (Close to Home, 7).

The alternative worldview promoted by Shiva is one of partnership and cooperation. Shiva believes different definitions of freedom, knowledge, and progress are needed for the liberation of both women and the environment, from those definitions held by Western culture since the Enlightenment. Shiva’s ecofeminist perspective makes no distinction between “basic needs” (food, clothing, shelter) and “higher needs” (freedom and knowledge).

For women in the affluent North such a concept of universalism or commonality is not easy to grasp. Survival is seen not as the ultimate goal of life but a banality—a fact that can be taken for granted.  It is precisely the value of the everyday work for survival, for life, which has been eroded in the name of the so-called ‘higher values’ (Mies and Shiva, 13).

Modernization brings with it new forms of dominance to subsistence cultures.  Subsistence, on the other hand, has been shown to be a model of interdependence and cooperation.  “The complimentarity (sic) of the separate male and female domains of work is the characteristic mode, based on diversity, not inequality” (Shiva, Staying Alive, 5).  Modernization, however, brings domination and the devaluing of women’s work, which is not done for financial gain, but for meeting the daily needs of people and families.

Shiva argues that as long as the Western world sees the environmental movement and the women’s movement as separate and unrelated, the environmental movement will be co-opted by the forces of ‘maldevelopment’ and used as a “new patriarchal project of technological fixes and political oppression” (Shiva, Staying Alive, 48).  She explains that oppression will continue in the Western worldview because it devalues what she terms the feminine principle.  This concept is often confused with the promotion of gendered femininity, but Shiva sees the feminine principle as the larger creative force in the world.  “The new insight provided by rural women in the Third World is that women and nature are associated not in passivity but in creativity and in the maintenance of life” (Shiva, Staying Alive, 47).

The feminine principle is based on inclusiveness and its recovery in men, women, and nature, is the recovery of “creative forms of being and perceiving” (Shiva, Staying Alive, 53).  Shiva proposes that the feminine principle is killed in Western women by the association of passivity as a category with the feminine (53).  In men, this principle is squashed by the notion that “activity” is destruction rather than creation, and “power” is domination rather than empowerment (53).

As natural resources become more and more limited on our finite planet, a shift in our worldview will become compulsory.  Vandana Shiva’s vision for a combined movement to end oppression of both women and nature is part of the answer to how we can achieve sustainability on this planet and find our place as a species.  We must acknowledge that we are part of the larger web of life that provides for our survival, and therefore it is imperative that we protect that fragile web of life, not as dominators—men over women and humans over nature—but as partners with every other life form on the planet.

References

Callicott, J. Baird. Earth’s Insights. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994.

Democracy Now! An Hour with Vandana Shiva. 27 November 2003.http://www.democracynow.org/2003/11/27/an_hour_with_vandana_shiva_indian.

Holden, Madronna.  WS 450 Ecofeminism Class notes. Oregon State University. 2009.

Mies, Maria and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism. Halifax: Fernwood Publications. 1993.

Navdanya. http://www.navdanya.org

The Complete Marquis Who’s Who ® Biographies.  Marquis Who’s Who LLC. 2008. Lexis-Nexis. 18 January 2009 http://www.lexisnexis.com.proxy.library.oregonstate.edu/us/lnacademic/search/loadForm.do

Shiva, Vandana, ed. Close to Home: Women Reconnect Ecology, Health and Development Worldwide. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers. 1994.

Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed Books. 1989.

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Save the date for the launch of the Detransition Advocacy Network. A new network where detransitioned people can come together for support and community. Manchester location. 30th November. Tickets here.

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I married a man who fathered my daughter in the conventional way.  Ten years later he decided that he had been a woman all along and so our marriage ended. I left the marital home, taking my daughter with me.  The man I married, no longer exists and I am forbidden from referring to him by his former “dead name”.

Having your boundaries gradually and forcibly broken down and compromised over a period of time until your marriage becomes nothing like the arrangement that you signed up to, feels exactly like Sarah describes-  a slow death with everything you thought you knew about yourself being gradually crushed out of existence.  But with the support of other women, we trans widows can rise again.

My experience is becoming more and more common and I have spoken to many women who have found themselves in a similar situation.  Women who previously felt completely alone in their struggle.

What can you do to help women like me?

Don’t call my ex “she” when you talk about him to me.  Call him what you like when you speak to him, but describing him with female pronouns to me, makes my life not make sense and my daughter’s life not make sense.

Don’t, under any circumstances, refer to him as my daughter’s mother.  She only has one mother and it is not him.

Seek out and share the stories of trans widows.  Help our voices to be heard.  Late transitioning men leave women and girls in their wake- wives, mothers, daughters and sisters who are asked not only to rewrite their past but to celebrate a new future that they do not recognise.

Many trans widows report feeling gagged by everybody else lauding their partners as “stunning and brave”.  Our ex’s are often celebrated twitter personalities, newspaper columnists or the subjects of documentaries, but those of us wives who leave are forced to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. Support those women who put themselves and their children first.

When you hear of a late transitioning male, let your first thought be for these women and how they are affected. If it is somebody in your circle of acquaintance, seek out the wife or the mother and let her know that she has your support.

Defend our use of the term “Trans Widow” as some people question its appropriateness.  However it is the name that we have chosen for ourselves and it is enabling us to find each other and to share our experiences. Women talking to each other is a powerful weapon.

Don’t exclude some women from feminism in the interests of inclusiveness. Imagine seeking support from other women, only to find that your husband or father had got there first?

When you allow our ex partners space in your feminism and give them platforms in your organisations and at your meetings, you exclude their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers from accessing these spaces and making use of resources that were set up to support women like them.  Prioritise women over your desire to have a “get out of jail free” card to hold up against hostile accusations of bigotry

Above all, the most important thing that you can do to help trans widows, is to centre women and girls in your feminism.  

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The idea that radfems are uneducated is so ridiculous like… We’re not the ones getting our feminist theory from Buzzfeed 👀

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if even one single teenage liberal feminist girl hate-stalks my blog, sees my posts, and starts to question the world she lives in, the rhetoric she sees, the choices she makes, then i’ll feel okay. 

if there’s anyone who sees this post in some tag she’s looking at to make herself angry, i’m here for you. you’re not alone, and you don’t have to believe everything you hear from liberal feminists. 

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FEMINISM - THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM - Julie Burchill "Until January 2013, I’d never thought much about transsexuals. If pushed, I’d have said I felt vaguely sorry for them, as I do white people who pretend to be black or my teenage self when I pretended to be Jewish. It’s unfortunate to be confused about what you are once you’re past adolescence. And then they went after my friend. I don’t mind anyone having a pop at me. I’ve enjoyed copious fame and fortune from dishing it out, and not being able to take it would make me a sissy and a hypocrite. Also, kinkily, I enjoy a bit of verbal abuse, finding it bracing in the manner of a cold swim. But my weak spot has always been people picking on my mates; when that happens, I see red. Ironically, the piece that the angry trans-mob took exception to was part of a compilation about Female Anger, in which my friend mentioned that are women are sick and tired of being told to aspire to impossible ideals in all areas of their lives, one of which was achieving ‘the body of a Brazilian transsexual.’ I was exchanging some bitchy quips on Facebook about the ensuing Twitter brouhaha while getting ready to go out when an Observer commissioning editor asked me - BEGGED ME! - to fashion them swiftly into a piece. When I said they were just for my friends entertainment and that I was busy, I was offered twice my usual word rate. I’m only human! I dashed off a quick piece, in which intemperate language such as *bed-wetters in bad wigs* may have been used. But I was by now an Angry Female - my mate was getting death threats and the police had been called in. I went out and thought no more of it. I awoke on Sunday morning to a right old rumpus in the small and self-important world of the media. Some Lib-Dem MP with delusions of adequacy was calling for me to be sacked from the Observer; this would have been difficult because I had no contract with them even though I wrote for them regularly - a situation which, the editor John Mulholland was soon murmuring comfortingly on the phone, would continue. Within 24 hours the column had been expunged from the Guardian/Observer website and I was never hired by the Observer again. Luckily, I was richer and tougher than all the bed-wetters (bad-wigged or otherwise) who both pilloried me and lost their nerve when it came to hiring me and survived my Wilderness Years pretty well, writing only for the bold and unbowed Spectator and Spiked until the Telegraph hired me last year. Looking back, I see that I was the first person to be demonised by the allegedly liberal, free-thinking Establishment who have continued to crumble in the face of the surreal demands of the Call-Me-Madam mad-men; in academia, in psychiatry, in medicine and now, most bizarrely, in the case of the Canadian beauticians being prosecuted for refusing to wax the scrotum of a repulsive cross-dresser. Whereas misogyny was historically Right-wing, it’s now hysterically Left-wing. We see it best in those vile cry-bullies the Woke Bros, who have found a fresh’n’funky way to hate women without seeming like sexist dinosaurs. There’s a really good way to justify hitting women if you’re a Woke Bro - just call them TERFs and punching them becomes a brave anti-fascist action instead of the default setting of every cowardly wanker who would never dare to hit a man. 62% of women at university have experienced sexual assault, 56% by known perpetrators - a lot of them will be Woke Bros. Women report being choked by male sexual partners - ‘Breath-Play’ to give it its innocent-sounding sex-name - to an extraordinary extent; that’ll be those Woke Bros who feel no guilt about watching porn because, hey, sex work is work like any other kind. (Except when it comes to their sisters.) Pornography-using men who call themselves feminists are so monumentally dumb that they probably delude themselves that the reason why the average age of death for a female performer is 37 is because they die of pleasure - having all those orgasms! An astonishing number of the showbiz sleazes called out in MeToo identified as feminists - Woke Bros to a man. But most of all, you’ll find them taking the side of female impersonators against born females. The Woke War Against Women is well and truly under way and the Woke Witch Trials have started. So I’m extraordinarily pleased that I called out the poisonousness of the New Misogyny right from the start - and to be financially supporting this event by MAKE MORE NOISE. I’ve said it before - but I knew I was right. What a fascinating time to be a feminist!" What are your thoughts? We'd love to hear what you have to say! Want to come and see women speak about feminism's elephant in the room? Come to Manchester this Saturday. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/feminism-the-elephant-in-the-room-tickets-64496743496

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FEMINISM: THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

There has been a surge of Feminist activism across the UK in the past year. Women are agitated and organised. We are finding our voice and our voice is saying NO.

Make More Noise are one such group, created to provide a space for women to talk freely and address uncomfortable truths.

Feminists are a diverse bunch and we don't always see eye to eye. Respectful and honest discussion is essential if we wish to build a unified platform to fight for real social justice. We can't bury our heads in the sand, we need to ask some tough questions and start difficult conversations. Social media is not the best place to communicate, let's do this face to face.

What are we not supposed to talk about? What is the Elephant in the Room? We invited our guests and allowed them to talk about whatever they liked on the topic of feminism's great taboos.

Speakers are:

Sarah Phillimore - Barrister and Disability Activist

Charlotte Hughes - Journalist and Anti-Poverty Campaigner

Jo Bartosch - Campaigning Journalist and co-director of Critical Sisters

Posie Parker - Women's Rights Campaigner and Free Speech Advocate

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Chaired by:

Bernadette Hyland - Socialist Feminist and Author

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Tickets are available here. If you wish to come but are unable to afford a ticket please send us a message and we will try to help you.

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The venue is wheelchair accessible but please let us know if you are a wheelchair user so we can ensure provision.

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Look at this beautiful artwork from Sofia at Feminist Awakening!

We got banned from twitter but we are here on tumblr, on Facebook and on Instagram (makemorenoisemanc) where you can get discussion, links and memes. You can also read our content on our blog.

Fight back now!

Make More Noise!

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One of the best things we can do as feminists is meet up in real life. What do we need to talk about? What are the feminist taboos? What are the elephants in the room?

Join us on 27th July in central Manchester to discuss issues and connect with other feminists. Tickets are on a sliding pay scale, but get in touch if you want to come but are unable to afford a ticket.

Let's get together. Let's Make More Noise!

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/feminism-the-elephant-in-the-room-tickets-64496743496