Collaboration 2.0
Overview
The Institute is devoted to grassroots political education. We sharpen our thinking about the political contexts of the present and inform ourselves about the conditions of women’s lives in specific geographies. Each Institute training designs a curriculum that addresses specific aims. Institute Europe launched last year through “Collaboration.” The theme emerged from reports of activists that European women were often pitted against one another in the world of surfing, creating competitive feelings and group behaviors that were obstacles to women banding together against common problems. Our goal was to identify strategies for working cooperatively. Since the initial launch, a new more self-conscious collaborative philosophy is motivating European surfeminist activisms and relationships. We will come together again in July, this time in Manorbier, to strengthen this budding philosophy and to invite new friends to join in and expand our collective power and expertise.
As it was last time, the curriculum is designed by Dani Robertson of Surf Senioritas and Krista Comer of Rice University. Plan 3-4 hours of time to read, reflect, take notes if you like, formulate questions or objections. Our discussions over the weekend will be informed by these readings and your responses to them.
Here you can find last year’s 2018 IWS Europe curriculum.
2019 Materials Collaboration & Fights Against Global Right
We have a mix here of popular culture, short journalistic readings that are excerpts of longer works (you can read the full versions later if you wish), and one piece of feminist political philosophy. All the materials show different views of politics and visions of social life — that is, they make clear what their feminisms are about. A couple of them are more explicitly interested in collaboration and what groups who “find each other” (as Sara Ahmed says) can accomplish. The last readings conceptualize some of the complications of politics of the present, including authoritarianism and rise of the Global Right and its foundations in misogyny.
I. Collaboration Models
a. Dream Wife —UK punk Pop band (2014-present)
Check out link of Dream Wife here .
‘I am not my body, I am somebody’.
If you see Dream Wife play live, this will be the lyric of the night. Hundreds of fans see this as the lyric that not only defines the band and what their music stands for, but also the lyric that resonates with them the most. Over time they have honed their song writing skills to tackle complex issues such as feminism, gender roles, body issues and sexual objectification, with the song ‘somebody’ being the musical embodiment of protest.
“The age of creepy pop punk guys harassing underage girls is over. Let the era of strong pop punk women commence.” (BTRtoday.com, Dec 17)
Born from a group project when they met at Brighton University, Bella Podpadec (Bass, vocals), Alice Go (Guitar Vocals) and Rakel Mjöll (vocals) formed the band to be a ‘fake girl band’. Little did they know they were forming exactly the feminist band Britain needs right now.
“We don’t fit the mould of how people think women in music should be.” (Feb ‘18, Independent)
Most women who have attended a gig, especially of heavier genres such as rock, punk etc, will have had the awful experience of being trapped in by the crowd and being sexually assaulted by another member of the crowd. To combat this very real issue, Dream Wife enact a ‘bitches-to-the-front’ policy. This allows women and other vulnerable audience members to form a safe space at the front of the stage (normally the worst place for attacks) where they can enjoy the music. The ‘bad bitch club’ Instagram page celebrates this safe space for women and the bands photographer and friend, Meg Lavender, turns the camera on the audiences to tell their stories. This has also lead to the band embracing their feminist potential and working with UK organisation ‘Girls Against’, who work to stop assaults on women at music venues.
When you look at their rise to success, the band site collaboration and community as the key elements of how women progress in male dominated industries, “Incubating a community of not only a chosen few creative people, but of a wider group aligning their experiences and expressing themselves…” They have a true understanding of how the privilege and skills of others has helped them and in turn, how theirs will help others, to succeed, “It’s about embracing everyone around you in the position you’re in, and honouring that”. (Vice, March ‘18) This is a powerful example of community building and what we should work to achieve as an Institute.
b. Sara Ahmed, “Once We Find Each Other, So Much Else Becomes Possible “
We read this piece last year and it made its ways into our conversations in unexpected ways — in our thinking alongside Ahmed’s claims about us all building from what she calls “experiences of walls.” Walls are what we come up against but also what is behind our survival and the archives or records we make of our inventiveness. Ahmed’s work is philosophically inclined and she gives great language to thinking about the communities we can make of people who share values and political dreams and the “so much else” that becomes possible through those networks. She teaches us how to be better allies to one another across many differences that divide movements (in feminism, the most notorious is race and histories of racism of white women).
II. Thinking about Global Right & Defining the “Feminisms” We Stand For
Several brief readings. The point of below is to show that the work we do now as feminists has very large political stakes. Feminism in fact is the most active movement to date to protest the rise of the Global Right — beginning in Poland, moving to Hungary, Philippines, US, and now emerging in the UK.
a. UK and Boris Johnson, “Ten Things [he] Has Said About Women”
b. Afua Hirsch, Expecting Me to Explain Racism is Exploitive. Thanks!! to Helen O’Rourke for suggesting this reading. On the topic of the Global Right, the piece shows how racial targeting and belligerence is on the increase in the years of broader rightwing political gains. Afua Hirsch, prominent newscaster, reports on racist comments about the Royal mixed race baby of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (Harry & Meghan) but reports also on her refusal to “debate” why such racist comments were wrong. She says, “I was not performing [for my job], I was living another traumatic encounter with the denial of my experience.” Black Twitter in Britain exploded in agreement. The lesson here for us: majority white surf communities need to do their own homework and not expect education about racism from those who live with it.
c. “Beauty Industrial Complex” by Rosalind Gill (London University). Gill gives us the concept of “beauty industrial complex” as a way to think about the STRUCTURES or industries supporting new beauty practices and pressures regarding nails, hair, bodies, photos/selfies, and the normalization of medical interventions (Botox etc). This is important for us because she is taking a topic usually thought to be “private” or “individual” and loaded with presumptions about female vanity, and showing how it is part of new economies, since the 1970s, associated with globalization and with ideologies of neoliberalism and postfeminism.
d. Short excerpt of Empowered, by Sarah Benet-Weiser (professor London School Economics). She is noting that feminism seems to be popular recently in the Western world, judging by its embrace by artists like Beyonce as well as corporate HR campaigns and the well known phrase “lean in” — meaning strategies women should adopt for corporate achievement. How should we understand this popularity? Benet-Weiser asks us to think critically about how this new version of popular feminism is defined. Is feminism “confidence,” “empowerment?” Do feminists want others to recognize their viewpoint and acknowledge they exist? Or does feminism want something else — like a transformed social order?
This reading is important as we think about “feminism” for our Institute group and individual projects. Empowerment is often a goal of surfing for women and for groups that get girls in the water. What more might we be striving for than individual empowerment and how can we help one another to fight for a much more ambitious feminism that goes well beyond the fight for equality or equal pay?
e. Brief review, “Women Rewriting Feminism for a Late Capitalist World,” about Feminism for the 99%. Again this is a discussion that asks how we define feminism, and suggests that liberal or “lean-in” corporate or individual-empowerment feminisms are, at root, projects that benefit the 1%. The visions of a feminism that can speak to attacks not only on women’s reproductive freedoms but also on violence against non-whites and climate, are, for them, visions that challenge capitalism as a global system.