Launching the Resisting Women Project at WSF 2007 in Nairobi

The Resisting Women Project has been launched in Nairobi (Kenya), with a Seminar organised by Alter Inter at the Word Social Forum (23/01/07). This is the invitation text :
The Call

Women, let us refuse to be hostages to the clash of civilizations!

The clash of civilizations paradigm has gained autonomy in these past years: It permeates political discourses and practices in many a region of the world, in the North as well as the South, transforms human and social relationships, affects international relations on all levels. In this eminently symbolic war, women’s body, their free will and their struggles are taken hostage. Indeed, this situation of new war, real and fantasized at the same time, leads to a re-emergence of virility values reduced to their most bellicose conception, in short an aggressive and destructive one: Sometimes, in the name of the struggle against the imperialist and colonialist West, women are thus restricted to a conservative reading of religious traditions; Or else, in the name of a formal interpretation of universalist values that include gender equality and woman’s rights, a war with imperialist overtones, latent or active, is declared against social groups, nations and peoples, against their culture and against their right to think, to emancipate themselves, to invent… In short, women tend to be reduced in a renewed fashion, all over the place and in all social classes, to an object thought about by others, defined by dominant groups on the basis of the latter’s authority, according to the needs of the latter’s struggle, used as a mere tool or even demeaned by these very groups: Rapes in the context of war, intensified normalization of women’s emotional and social life, ideological hijacking of their histories and their fights, aggravated suspicion vis-à-vis an autonomous feminist search, refusing the diversity of women’s trajectories toward emancipation outside of admitted circuits… Setting the world up for war in the name of a civilization supposed to free the “barbarians” makes women’s life a little more difficult with each passing day, while women still have to suffer as well and as always from patriarchal oppression, from the weight of economic liberalism and the ensuing misery, but also from the effects of this disguised war that singles them out as potential enemies of those women deemed to be emancipated.

This ideological confrontation hampers the dialogue among feminists themselves, harms the convergence between women’s struggles, deeply divides the feminist movement, dangerously weakens it just at a time when the rights, words and freedoms of half of humanity are mistreated and do call for common mobilisations. In particular, of course, the religious issue, “the headscarf case” or the demand of an independent thinking by women on spiritualities or intercultural relations are as many splits cutting across the various activist fields.

Today, how could we resume the debate that was left in abeyance by these recent transformations and divisions while relying on an analysis of current emergencies and struggles for women? With our diversities, in which terms could we frame the imperative of feminist struggles that would once more converge? With which slogans? Are we still able to have a common reference among activists, beyond disagreements, old or recent? And do we take feminist struggles away from the clash of civilizations paradigm? How do we denounce the latter in the name of “another possible world”… by explicitly relying on women’s struggles? How do we link up feminism to the other social and political struggles for emancipation, and how do we place it inside the worldwide movement for alternatives to neoliberal globalization? The key stake lies indeed in deconstructing this situation of capitalist, nationalist, ethnic, religious or cultural “war set-up” at work, in order to contribute to opening up a common space for the construction of global alternatives while avoiding two pitfalls together: absolute cultural relativism and an “abstract” and dominating universalism.

The seminar intends to analyze the present state of affairs regarding women’s struggles in the context of current international transformation, in order to bring out their specificities and their convergences, to examine their kinds of connections to other social struggles, to invent new active perspectives for feminism that would be likely to serve women’s struggles as well as the world social and alternative movement as a whole in its search for viable alternatives.



Resisting Women, Nairobi Karine Gantin, Siham Andalouci & Cecilia Baeza presenting the Call in Nairobi