In this episode we speak with Beaver, Canadian lesbian de-transitioner, whose journey led her to re-identify with womanhood, and become a feminist activist.
In this episode we talk with our member, Sonam, on some of the ways patriarchy manifests itself in South Asian communities, and with UK based Lesbian second-wave feminist Lynn Alderson about consciousness raising, women's groups as a radical act and women only spaces as crucial for women's resistance.
"Yoko Onoโs โArisingโ is yet another reinforcement of how we women must create and preserve spaces that invite us to share and hear each other, to join forces, take action and fight our oppression until we are all safe and free."
"Feminism is the first theory to emerge from those whose interest it affirms. Its method recapitulates as theory the reality it seeks to capture. As marxist method is dialectical materialism, feminist method is consciousness raising: the collective critical reconstitution of the meaning of women's social experience, as women live through it."
"Consciousness-raising โ studying the whole gamut of womenโs lives, starting with the full reality of oneโs own โ would also be a way of keeping the movement radical by preventing it from getting sidetracked into single issue reforms and single issue organizing. It would be a way of carrying theory about women further than it had ever been carried before, as the groundwork for achieving a radical solution for women as yet attained nowhere. It seemed clear that knowing how our own lives related to the general condition of women would make us better fighters on behalf of women as a whole."
"A political contribution which we feel we have already made is the expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is political. In our consciousness-raising sessions, for example, we have in many ways gone beyond white women's revelations because we are dealing with the implications of race and class as well as sex."
One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.
The experience of oppressed people is that the living of oneโs life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby trapped.
