Buy iressa c.o.d., For about 20 years now, feminists inside and outside of academia have been having a very important conversation, one that has been a reckoning of sorts, an acknowledgment that North American feminist organizing has been dominated by white, middle-class women who too often failed to respect and acknowledge women's different and competing interests. But it wasn't even just a case of failure to respect and acknowledge: sometimes it was a matter of active exclusion or hostile rejection. There was outright racism, homophobia and transphobia. California CA Calif. , Certain issues got onto the feminist agenda while others were ignored and/or actively pushed aside.
This conversation has, a lot of moments for a lot of people, been very painful; it's been fraught with anger, resentment, goedkope iressa apotheek, fear, guilt, defensiveness--the full gamut of the most difficult emotions. It's also been important, liberating, strengthening, just, honest, and necessary--a panopoly of feelings that have fuelled the direction of women's movements, buy iressa c.o.d.. Purchase iressa online, Sometimes, though, that were no fuelling. Sometimes the upshot was everybody retreating to their corners while the status quo remained intact.
Unfortunately, köpa rabatterade iressa, this necessary, had-to-happen conversation coincided with a period of backlash against feminism, an ebbing of activism, Order iressa no prescription, the rise of neo-liberalism and grassroots organizations dealing with shrinking or vanishing budgets. This made it really hard for people to organize for social change. Buy iressa c.o.d., Yesterday, I wrote about the difference between feminists moving on from this discussion about diversity and moving forward with a discussion about diversity. To me, moving forward means embracing difference--and I mean really embracing it, rather than paying lip service to it, Oregon OR Ore. . Moving forward means "staying in conversation" (is there a Latin word for this. I feel like there ought to be).
It also means not letting the political right drive us apart anymore.
I'm from the Canadian prairies, where lefties of all stripes band together to get stuff done simply because there's so few of us, buy iressa c.o.d.. Cheap iressa pills, But when I moved to Toronto to go to grad school, I discovered that the tiniest sliver of disagreement made people not work with each other. I found this shocking and disheartening. And I've seen more and more of it happen, in organizing and in the classroom and in the blogosphere, Colorado CO Colo. . This, I think, is a problem. Buy iressa c.o.d., What happened to the idea of alliances. Buy iressa from canada, How did it become a political casualty in an era of fractured and freaked out politics.
Our American readers might not know this, so permit me a short discursus on a model for organizing that I would like to pull out of recent women's history. Canada actually has--or had--a model of very effective feminist organizing that is premised on alliances: the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (or NAC, for short), comprar iressa baratos. NAC was an organization that started up in 1971. The model that NAC embodied was kinda brilliant--and is more fitting to today's political climate than ever before, buy iressa c.o.d.. Why.
Because NAC was an umbrella organization, Billig kaufen iressa, one that included a broad array of groups, each of which had different feminist beliefs and mandates. An organization could join the coalition without having to disregard its own base. According to NAC's Wikipedia entry, at its height, Arkansas AR Ark. , 700 groups were affiliated with NAC (which would have translated into thousands upon thousands of individual women coming under NAC's rubric). Buy iressa c.o.d., It seems hard to imagine now (even though NAC's heyday wasn't that long ago), but this was a high-functioning, very active, very visible organization that was comprised of groups and individuals from the full spectrum of feminist beliefs, ranging from liberal to radical to socialist and anti-racist. It was effective in communicating women's interests without insisting on single agenda items. It had a powerful and active voice on the national political stage. Cheap iressa, Lisa Young notes in her book Feminists and Party Politics that in the early 1980s, NAC very successfully made a point of bringing immigrant women, women of colour and Aboriginal women under its umbrella.
Like Amanda Reaume from Antigone Magazine noted in the comments section yesterday, one thing that would really benefit Canadian women's movements would be a new level of support and connectedness among social justice organizations, Massachusetts MA Mass. . I don't see any reason why we can't harness web 2.0 technologies to do precisely that, buy iressa c.o.d.. And I don't see why we can't use NAC as a real-world analogue for a virtual umbrella organization. And once we get this in place for Canada, we can harness up to our American sisters and beyond. Buy cheap iressa, What about NAC's diversity politics. If we used NAC as a model, what kind of diversity politics would we be replicating. Buy iressa c.o.d., Part of the answer to this lies in the story of NAC's slow death.
I don't know much about the details of NAC's decline (my copy of Judy Rebick's 10,000 Roses is currently in the mail!), Missouri MO Mo. , but I suspect there were a number of factors. The 1980s backlash against feminism didn't help, but the rise of neo-liberalism more generally was also a problem. Pharmacy iressa, NAC's opposition to the Charlottetown Accord in 1992 did not endear it to the Tories, Liberals or NDP--and if your organization relies on government funding, pissing off all three of the major federal parties is sure to be a gamble. The Mulroney government instituted the first round of cuts in 1992 and the Chretien government effectively drove the nail into NAC's coffin in 1998 by cutting its day-to-day funding. Two decades later, NAC doesn't even have a website (yes, I've tried www.nac-cca.ca, buy iressa c.o.d.. You can let me know if you ever get anything other than a 404 error), District of Columbia DC D.C. . Wikipedia indicates NAC is currently headed by Dolly Williams, but Dolly's Wikipedia page doesn't mention NAC at all (not to mention that it sounds as though Dolly lives in Brooklyn).
But I also remember there was a minor furor inside and outside of NAC when Sunera Thobani took over from Judy Rebick as the president of NAC. Ordering iressa from canada, Judy Rebick, as president, was mouthy, ballsy and always shoved back. Buy iressa c.o.d., In other words, she was truly inspirational. But when Sunera Thobani, buy iressa without prescription, another mouthy, ballsy, shoving-back woman (who happened to be South Asian) came onto the national scene, Köpa iressa online, some people got their knickers in a twist (now, how much they were upset because she was a woman of colour and how much they were upset because she was a vocal, outspoken, radical, anti-racist woman of colour, buy cheap iressa online, I don't know--and I don't know if this is anywhere written into NAC's history). What I do remember clearly was that this was the 1990s, when political correctness, Osta iressa online, debates about affirmative action and the culture wars had brought issues of race and ethnicity to the fore with a new sense of urgency.
I imagine that Thobani's presidency alienated some segments of the NAC old guard. But I also think that, in the decade and a half that has since passed, things probably would have turned out differently now, order iressa online cheap. I think that now, we can give ourselves credit for more people grasping the improtance of having elected an outspoken woman of colour to the position, buy iressa c.o.d.. Moreover, many of the successive NAC presidents have been women of colour, including Joan Grant-Cummings and Terri Brown, Iressa without a prescription, NAC's first Aboriginal president.
But I've also read account indicating that NAC had had working committees on Aboriginal women's justice starting in the 1970s, and a women of colour caucus from the early 1980s. I gather that having Aboriginal and women of colour in leadership positions (other than the presidency, prior to Thobani) in NAC was actually not that exceptional. And part of NAC's decline was its decision, under Judy Rebick, to side with Aboriginal women who were against the Charlottetown Accord--even though this would mean threatening NAC's funding from the federal government. Buy iressa c.o.d., What intrigues me about NAC--and again, I am not aware of a detailed history of the organization, so I am absolutely open to hearing from people who know more about this than I--is that it was a coalition comprised of individuals and groups who did not agree 100% of the time, AND paid attention to a diverse range of women AND was incredibly effective. Its weak spot, of course, was relying exclusively on government funding.
But it seems to me that there is no reason why Canadian feminists can't establish a kind of "virtual NAC," a broad coalition comprised of a variety of individuals and organizations who just want to get shit done, rather than police each other's feminist chops. If we decide that this is what we want, we can find the funding. And we can do this while still struggling through the conversation about inclusion and exclusion (e.g. the fact that poor, homeless and rural women may not be plugged into web 2.0 technologies is an issue to stay mindful of and a matter to be addressed, but not a reason to not move forward with it), buy iressa c.o.d..
Is there a way for us to stay engaged with each other when it would just be easier to say, "Screw you, I'm leaving". For our American readers, are there models where you live that hold out possibilites for organizing. Is there a way to envision coalition-building when the state of politics at the moment is so fractured. I think so. Do you. Please let us know.
(And stayed tuned for tomorrow's post, where I go into more explicit detail about current possibilities for feminist organizing).
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An interesting addition to this discussion is the following excerpt from an interview with Sunera Thobani in Upping the Anti (http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/3013) about the decline of the national women`s movement. By the way, I totally should interview her as part of the forthcoming blogging carnival as she is at UBC where I`m currently a student and I was introduced to her the other day:
Given your history with NAC and with other forms of anti-racist feminist activism, what’s your sense of the women’s movement in Canada? Is there a national women’s movement in Canada today?
To answer the second part first, no, I don’t think there’s a national women’s movement in Canada today. At least not a very active, organized, or visible one. I think it’s been very unfortunate and damaging for women in this country that there is no strong national feminist movement right now. The reasons for the demise of the women’s movement are many and complicated – some were internal to the feminist movement and some are the result of larger dynamics occurring in society. The causes internal to the feminist movement were the divisions between different visions of what feminism is and can be, and which groups had been represented in the national women’s movement and which had been excluded. But I think the external forces were far more significant in the decline of the movement.
The massive budget cuts and the restructuring of the Canadian welfare state in the 1990s had a very depressing effect on feminist organizing. Women’s groups fought back strongly but were greatly weakened by this fight. The promotion of “free” trade through deregulation and privatization has had a major impact on feminist organizing in different parts of the world. Globalization really dealt a serious blow to most social justice movements, and the women’s movement was no exception.
With the end of the Cold War and the move to the right by most social democratic parties, there was a general decline of the left. The resulting disillusionment with social democratic and communist politics in Western countries had a very negative impact on feminist and other social justice movement organizing. The lack of an alternate radical vision for a just and egalitarian society, and the stark recognition of the serious limitations of “democratic” politics within existing electoral systems, have had a very depressing effect. Another major factor in the decline of the women’s movement in Canada has been the deep dependence of many women’s organizations on state funding. When state funding was cut, many groups were unable to survive. All these factors have shaped the context within which the decline of the women’s movement in this country took place.
I do want to stress that there is still local organizing by women’s groups, and sometimes it’s very intense. But it’s done in a piecemeal manner, with local and provincial politics coming to the fore and very little focus on national or international politics.
I can see how the NAC is not doing anything in Canada and I always thought it was due to the recent cuts, but I guess it goes further than that. In Québec, the Fédération des femmes du Québec (Québec federation of women) is active everywhere and they are politically organized. Most women’s groups/centers have some linked with the FFQ and I think that is key in mobilizing women and their allies every time it is needed. the FFQ was behind RebELLES and they are there for women of every origins. I don’t know if it’d be hard to take a successfull provincial model and expand it to become national because it seems to work!
Amanda–It’s amazing how our blogs have connected like this. How about we make a deal: you interview Sunera Thobani and I interview Judy Rebick? We can glean the wisdom and insight, share it on our blogs, and use it to forward this thing together!
Karine–Like most ignorant English-speaking feminists, I was totally unaware of the FFQ! But of course, I know that Quebec is a lot more progressive than the rest of the country. I think it’s fantastic that in at least one Canadian province, there is a province-wide organization that is helping women’s groups. Clearly, this is all the more reason to sharpen up my French!
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