Women's Fightback, Feminism

Student feminist conference

The London Student Feminist Network organised a conference on 23-24 February, Student Feminists 2013. Around 80 people attended on the first day, fewer on the second. The conference encompassed a variety of workshops, including ones on sex worker activism, Education for Choice and further education activism. Others were more experiential. A Workers’ Liberty/ Women’s Fightback session was on women education workers including information about Action for ESOL, the Postgraduate Workers’ Association and the 3 Cosas cleaners’ campaign. It is very positive that this initiative has been made, but in...

The Tory student bigots

The “lad culture” (as seen in men’s magazines like Nuts) has been around for a long time. But it has recently taken a turn for the far worse with websites like Unilad, Truelad and others finding massive popularity on university campuses. Unilad (until it was forced through criticism to close down and reconstruct itself) existed to “push boundaries” with its “jokes” about humiliating women, and “tongue-in-cheek” advice about how to inflict sexual and other violence on women. All this at a time when according to a survey by the National Union of Students one in seven female students have been a...

Here's looking at you

The idea of “male gaze” flows from a psychoanalytical/philosophical theory brought into wider use by Jacques Lacan, but it is a huge subject and difficult to summarise. According to this theory, and to put it at its most crude, the “gaze” is the relationship between the subject’s desire to look and the knowledge that one can also be viewed. The idea is that in our desire to look, we realise we can be looked upon. Then we lose some of our ability to govern our own behaviour; this process is tied into the idea of ego. We change our behaviour in accordance with who we wish to be. Gaze theory...

Historic moment for India?

On the evening of 16 December 2012, a young female student on a Delhi bus was gang-raped. Less than a fortnight later she died of her injuries. After new reports came out, something extraordinary happened: a layer of young, urban, educated, middle class people protested, others joined, and the demonstrations sustained, evolved and escalated. The early response of the Indian government was active disengagement, force — batons, tear gas, water cannons — and more conniving efforts to crush the protesters’ spirit (the woman was moved to Singapore, her funeral was hastily managed). But, after the...

Feminism, love and Twilight

What does it mean to be a feminist heroine in the 21st century? What does it mean to be a feminist? What does it mean to be a woman? These were the rather big questions that were going around my brain as I sat watching “Breaking Dawn: Part Two”, the last instalment of the Twilight Saga. According to some, “Twilight” is a story of female empowerment. In this last film, the heroine Bella Swan becomes a vampire, can fight to the death, and is stronger and faster than many of the men that surround her. Is this what it takes to be a feminist heroine? Who knows. There are certainly elements of the...

The Marxes: labours of love

“Most people would come away shocked at what a moderate [Marx] was … if they read what Marx actually wrote.” So says Mary Gabriel, of people who would see Marx as (unjustifiably) responsible for the atrocities of the 20th century, committed in the name of communism. Mary Gabriel places Marx during the events about and for which he wrote, including the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune, and tells of his irreplaceable contribution to the International Working Men’s Association, afterwards known as the First International. But Marx was constantly torn between his devotion to his primary...

The SWP crisis: socialism, democracy and feminism

Click here to hear the recording . Joan Smith, former editor of the SWP women’s magazine Women’s Voice, spoke alongside Cathy Nugent from Workers’ Liberty at the AWL London forum on 27 February 2013.

Organising against gender violence

Up to 800 people protested outside the Indian High Commission in London to demand justice for Jyoti Singh Pandey, the victim of a brutal gang rape in Delhi. The protest was organised by Southall Black Sisters. Chants include “women’s tradition: struggle not submission!”, and “don’t blame women for rape!” Rahila Gupta of Southall Black Sisters said: “We are here today to show solidarity with Indian women; their struggle is our struggle. We are here to shame the Indian government into taking action. Notions of shame and honour are used to control women’s behaviour; we’re here to say to the...

Antoinette Konikow: A revolutionary for reproductive freedoms

Antoinette Konikow (1869-1946) was a feminist activist and founding member of both the Communist Party USA and the American Trotskyist movement. Born in the Russian Empire, Konikow attended school in Odessa in the Ukraine before emigrating to Zurich where she attended university. It was in Switzerland that she became politically active, joining Georgii Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labour group, the first Russian Marxist group and a forerunner of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party. In 1893, Konikow came to America and studied as a physician. Almost immediately she joined the...

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