Showing love for the Mumbai artist Kanika Kaul. Released May 2015.
The series mixes sarcastic humour with a cold and honest look at the plight of a lot of women in India today.
A satirical take on what a woman should do to become the epitome of a Perfect Indian Woman. By Kanika Kaul
A STORY BY DARK MATTER
New York, USA
The story goes something like this:
Every morning when I wake up and look at my closet I ask myself, “How much do I want to be street harassed today?”
This means I usually gravitate away from the skirts and dresses and move begrudgingly toward the more conventionally “masculine” clothing. I consider for a moment how peculiar it feels that I have been made to find safety and security in masculinity -- this thing that has been such a site of violence and anxiety in my past.
This weekend I did the same. I woke up. I looked in the closet and I saw this new dress I got on sale. But after I put it on I knew that I would have to pay for it, anyways.
.. .
At my performance downtown in the evening everyone told me that they loved this dress and remarked on how fabulous I looked. I did not mention the stares, the slurs, the panic, the terror. I smiled. said, “T H A N K Y O U.”
After the show I was walking home with one of my trans sisters and a man rolled down his window and screamed, “What the fuck are you faggots wearing!!”
There is something particularly unsettling about being harassed right outside of your home. Like that time on my way home, this man screamed, “You better take off that dress, or else!” and I walked faster and faster and didn’t look back while his girlfriend laughed at me. I will never forget her laugh. It left a stain on that dress, stubborn and permanent like wine.
I remember that for so many of us home is not that sacred place away from violence, it is actually that place constituted by violence. A type of violence that holds the paradox of being both perpetual and surprising. Keeps you on your toes.
That night I started thinking about how so many femmes I know are literally attacked for loving ourselves. How so many of us are harassed most on the days we think we look best. How dangerous and lethal self love can be.
I started thinking about how so many narratives in our culture are obsessed with “authenticity.” How we as trans people are celebrated because we have “embraced our truth.” And I think about what this does: how it standardizes visibility as authenticity, how it understands authenticity outside of violence, how it erases all of the calculations we must make to keep ourselves safe and whole.
Can we hold that on the days we are most authentic, that we are most ourselves, that we love ourselves the most -- are the days that we are most terrified and afraid? Can we hold that not everyone can nor should afford to be “authentic,” because it means that they will be turned away from gender segregated bathrooms, shelters, parties, lovers. Can we challenge the hierarchy that’s drawn between those who are “out” and “authentic” and those who are not -- as if these distinctions don’t have everything to do about race, class, security, home, terror, history. Can we be more critical of a culture that tells us that we are brave for being ourselves instead of dismantling the structures that made that so impossible to begin with?
I wonder whether we are ready to be more compassionate and appreciative for the ways that we have come to disguise ourselves. Can we find resistance in our duplicity and our disingenuousness? Can we remember the ways in which being inauthentic has kept us alive?
Today I woke up and looked at my closet and I remembered the street outside and that man and his girlfriends laughter so I put on a button down shirt and a beard and some pants and I have never felt more like a woman in my entire life.
Appeared in ISSUE #2
Follow DARKMATTER on twitter / trans femme south asian artists (they/them)
DARKMATTER is a trans south asian performance art duo comprised of Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian. Based in New York City, DarkMatter regularly performs to sold-out houses at venues like La MaMa Experimental Theater, Nuyorican Poets Café, and the Asian American Writer’s Workshop. DarkMatter was recently part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival as well as the Queer International Arts Festival. Known for their quirky aesthetic and political panache, DarkMatter has been invited to perform at stages and universities across the world.
FROM THE DWGS POSTCARD SERIES
New York, US
My work deals with identity, otherness, self-consciousness and displacement. I’ve made work parting from / inspired by women in my family, popular stories, historical investigations, periods of dislocation, psychology, myth, and symbols I grew up exposed to. I see many of my pieces as portraits. I’m intrigued by the way in which historical hierarchies affect current identities and social spaces. I’m particularly interested in the body as a conditioned recipient and performer of these ideas. Through a variety of media I question how my own experience objects or negotiates traditions and historical impositions. In my work I attempt to create several power positions, often contradictory but operating simultaneously; navigating binaries in search of in-between- ness. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mi obra trata sobre la identidad, la alteridad, la autoconciencia y el desplazamiento. He trabajado partiendo de la experiencia de mujeres de mi familia, cuentos populares, investigaciones históricas, períodos de dislocación, la psicología, el mito y símbolos a los que crecí expuesta. Veo muchas de mis piezas como retratos. Me intriga la forma en que las jerarquías históricas afectan las identidades y espacios sociales actuales. Estoy particularmente interesada en el cuerpo como receptor condicionado e intérprete de estas ideas. A través de una variedad de medios me pregunto cómo mi propia experiencia objeta a, o negocia con estas tradiciones e imposiciones históricas. En mi trabajo intento crear varias posiciones de poder, a menudo contradictorias, pero que operan de manera simultánea; navegando sistemas binarios en busca de nuevas combinaciones y alternativas.
Joiri Minaya is a Dominican - American artist born in 1990. She graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales (ENAV) in Santo Domingo, D.R. in 2009, the Altos de Chavón School of Design in La Romana, D.R. in 2011 and Parsons the New School for Design in 2013. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013.
Exhibitions include a solo show at the Centro de la Imagen in Santo Domingo, and group shows at Rush Arts Gallery, MoCADA, Grace Exhibition Space, Trestle Gallery, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery and ARC Magazine’s New Media Exhibition at the Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival 13.
http://www.joiriminaya.com/
A POEM BY JUDE ORLANDO ENJOLRAS Birmingham, UK Oh, sisters – what are you doing Undoing The shoulders Of giant soldiers Past? Last I checked We were all in this together, but you wrecked The dream that I had I’m sad It’s come To this, but we’ve come Too far to let you tear Down the barricade we built, smear The good name Of our Revolution. For shame What part of, United we stand Do you not understand? It’s not that hard If our ranks are marred By civil war We will never win the war Against patriarchy So WTF is this TERF malarkey? Who died and made you head Of PR? I’ve said It before, I’ll say it again You don’t speak for me when you call our sisters men Particularly when the men in your head Are all better off dead Enough of my trans sisters are dead and cold And it was you who sold Them out for a bite of establishment cookie A rookie Mistake, latching onto this rhetoric of sin With a curtsy and a grin You recycle words like sick, deluded, perverse Try traverse A mile in trans women’s shoes See how you like the abuse They get – Familiar yet? I won’t let you lose our battles, you will never win in my name A reign Of oppression by any other name would smell As rank, so show some respect for those who fell I have had my fill Of words that kill.
Appeared in ISSUE #2 'Feminism is'
Follow Jude Orlando Enjolras on twitter - #amwriting #librarianlife poet boy. queer of faith. pronouns: pri/prin(s)/princeself#IAmNonBinary #TransIsBeautifuldisabled survivor #MedicatedAndMightywhite
judeorlandoenjolras.wordpress.com
AN ILLUSTRATION BY LOUISE BYNG Birmingham, UK
Birmingham, UK After following Harnaam Kaur’s story in the media I wanted to reflect my impression of her with a portrait - one exhibiting power, grace and femininity. She exuded radiance and love in the face of shallow questions from TV hosts about how she would find love as a heterosexual female with a beard as a result as a polycystic ovary. She wasn’t constructing her identity to be attractive to others and that must have scared the shit out of them. I admired that her faith was what had put an end to her shaving the facial hair away and that had helped give her peace in embracing who she was, which shone out of her like a beacon to women everywhere. The colour pink interests me in that until 1940 it was the colour associated with boys, at which point it seemingly fell out of fashion and switched over to fresh association with girls. “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” - June 1918 edition of the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department. Similarly the original ancestor of the high heel is a fancy Persian riding boot worn by men designed to hold the rider’s foot in stirrups. For me these transitions and evolutions demonstrate that associations of gender are pretty arbitrary, and only feel fixed when they’ve been collectively constructed and agreed upon. Of course these ideas have to be understood as subject to change and shift; push and pull and break, and we are rewriting them all the time. Of course there is no reason women shouldn’t have facial hair, we’ve just developed a context where hair on the female form is generally perceived negatively which, frankly, sucks. We need to rewrite the story of the other as no longer a signal of the freakish or unsettling or amusing or disgusting, (like some kind of residual reaction to traditional bearded ladies at a carnival freak show) but rather allow our differences to help us question our own responses and unravel accepted norms to promote greater acceptance and confidence not just in others, but also within ourselves.
Appeared in ISSUE #2
Follow Louise Byng on twitter /More images than getty / hair like wholewheat spaghetti. Drawer; thinker; gin drinker; wannabe rapper. @ByngInc,@IllustratedBrum et al / louisebyng.co.uk
A CONVERSATION BY JØRGEN CALLESEN AND EMMA MØLLER Copenhagen Photography Jackie Baier, Fabrizio Terrezza, Iben Mondrup, Jørgen Callesen, the Danish artist behind the un-categorisable performance figure Miss Fish, operates be- tween mainstream cultures, fine art worlds and subcultures in order to break down normative structures and exclusionary boundaries. His work in turn takes on a flexible format. ‘Half man, half woman, half fish’, Miss Fish, presents work as a solo-performer, the lead-sing- er in Miss Fish & The Drowners (a wave-punk band), a lecturer, host and much more. I sat down with Jørgen, August 21st 2014 to learn more about Miss Fish and her art activism. Emma Møller: What is Miss Fish? Jørgen Callesen: Miss Fish is a performance figure, which works with gender, identity and body aesthetics to challenge norms—the way we perceive each other as humans. Jacob Tekiela EM: How and why was Miss Fish created? JC: Miss Fish began in a radical queer art group in Copenhagen, a social network of people who were bored with mainstream and commercial culture. We were all tired of how a group of people that had been marginalized, that had fought for the right to be who they were outside of society’s norms suddenly themselves developed a set of norms and an identity that excluded others. A lot of new subcultures had developed — within the BDSM scene, within the transgender scene and they were more or less excluded from this new mainstream in LGBT culture. We wanted to oppose that and we did it by creating a manifesto where we said, we are strong because of our differences. Everything is allowed. Everybody who struggles with some kind of exclusion because of their gender identity is welcome. We don’t label people. We started to do events, and we developed this performance art nightclub for- mat where we produced music, did performances, and came up with shows that were completely different to what you normally saw in commercial LGBT entertainment. My first name was Frau Seltsam, which in English means ‘Miss Strange.’ In English, you say that there is something fishy about something you don’t understand. Later, I came up with the name Miss Fish and the concept ‘half man, half woman, half fish’ be- cause it doesn’t fit in any category; it’s absurd. It’s about how when you try to transcend your biological gender, you go into a space between reality and fiction where you develop a persona that is away from your biological gender, but maybe closer to your psychological gender. And this kind of spectrum is really, really interesting, and it’s filled with taboos. Now Miss Fish is breaking into the mainstream because I can and have used this character on television, in my rock band Miss Fish & The Drowners, in lectures, in official speeches, in demonstrations, etc. For example, when I talked to the Yugoslavia ambassador in Denmark about LGBT problems in Belgrade in 2003, it was as Miss Fish because that gives me a platform to speak from. EM: Where did your influences for the development of Miss Fish come from? JC: I have an academic background and I work with media arts. In media arts, you work with presence and you work with the representation of reality. These two poles between your physical-bound biological background and your persona, which is based on your psychological perception of yourself and others, can be related to this spectrum between reality and fiction. My own work is always on this spectrum between the materiality of things and what they represent, and how you navigate between them. This is also why my performances are gendered and not gendered. They are gendered because I work with three elements: man, woman, fish. But I bring in ‘the other’ in the sense that, like Wittgenstein says, if a lion could speak, I wouldn’t even understand what it would be saying, even if we have the same language. I don’t know what it is to be a lion, or do I? So, it’s also on this more philosophical linguistic level that I think my work functions. But Miss Fish also comes from pup- pet theatre. I studied puppet theatre in The Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Art in Berlin. And puppetry works with exactly this thing. You have a physical object in front of you that you see for what it is—its materiality. But the object can transform in front of you so it triggers your imagination and you have this oscillation be- tween fiction and reality. I also learnt a lot from Butoh. I trained with Kit Johnson, in Copenhagen. Butoh is a very generous art form in the sense that it is also activist-based. It’s counter culture, and quite controversial – Butoh always also had its underground. It had a breakthrough in the performance scene, especially New York; it influenced the whole west and dance scene. In Butoh you work with your body as a material and it is non-psychological, which I like. And it also becomes non-gendered; you have a material you can transform. Artistically for me it is very, very important that I know exactly when I’m dealing with a material reality, and I really try to articulate that. I have this body. I have my age. I have my biological gender. And then I have this ability to transform into different things, and that’s what I work with. EM: I understand that you consider Miss Fish art activism. JC: Yes! EM: Could you describe how your art is a form of activism? JC: As a performer I come from an activist background, but I also have an academic background, and I have some formal training. Art is political. The art activism is sort of professional acrobatics [laughs]. You need to be able to navigate in many different contexts. That is why it’s important that I one week can perform in a night club in Berlin, the next day at an underground queer performance tent at an anarchist vegan hardcore punk festival in Czech Republic, and then the following week I can be part of an established production in Denmark, then maybe I do a solo piece in a literature tent somewhere. I think art activism is concerned with the fact that you use your abilities as an artist to express yourself in many different contexts and you use them for many different purposes. This autumn I have a performance piece at a gallery opening with an oil painter and I see it as an opportunity for me to develop some very subtle, very refined, highly aesthetic aspects of Miss Fish. But I also like to bring these aesthetics into squats, which I did in Berlin at Köpi. EM: Could you elaborate? JC: Köpi is one of Germany’s biggest squats, but the anarchist scene has realized that it is quite heteronormative. So, every year they give their performance space to a queer group that organizes Queer Gala. I came in with a performance piece called ‘Skin Amnesia’ [developed in collaboration with musician Prafix Aztech]. We wanted to do something different; we came in with a choreographed piece based on the sensation of skin. Our subtext was, if the skin had a memory that was shut off from the brain, what story would it tell? And is that memory gendered? Is your gender in your brain or in your skin? We worked with big balloons, working with weightlessness. And Prafix produced a musical score. We did this very subtle, highly aesthetic piece in this squat for this audience who are used to seeing more in-your-face, radical, fierce work. And it was so well received. I think that if you see something you’re not always used to, or in a context where it’s not normally present- ed, that it creates some kind of openness. And I think that that is where the activism really starts. EM: Because you navigate through different spheres – fine art, mainstream and subculture – are you concerned that your work becomes compromised for accessibilities sake? JC: I work with this very consciously. I say, I have to perform in a nightclub in Berlin. How can I create an initial dialogue with these people? What kind of means do I have to use? Okay, I use my disco-punk interpretation of Donna Summer as the performance figure Miss Fish. I find some kind of key to get a platform to speak from and when that’s established I can speak freely – I can develop my performance figure. Even if you put it in the mainstream there is still a reminiscence of more and the curious people always find it. I think that is how you use mainstream culture, to reach new audiences. If I am asked to perform at, for example, Köpi, I don’t bring a hard- core-punk in-your-face piece. I bring something highly aesthetic, sensitive and poetic, to bring them something new. When I perform in a hedonistic gay nightclub I bring something more punk with an edge. I am always nervous before I do it, but I think that the risk is worth it because you never know what will happen and that is also what has kept me going – I am curious. I have always been fascinated by the outsider and with the performance figure Miss Fish I have this position. Every time I enter a new context I have to win people’s confidence and Miss Fish says that openly because no body understands the construction. If I can win people’s confidence as this strange performance figure, I am amongst people who are able to transcend normative exclusionary structures. And that is also where my art becomes political. EM: By taking the position of the other, how do you respond to the exoticisation of the other in art? JC: I mean, we know it – we know it from freak shows, we know it from media sensationalism – and this has also now become some- thing that we see in the art scene. I think the answer is the same now as it has always been, which is that this exoticism is very ambivalent. It has a thrill and it attracts people’s attention. People are curious. They want to see this, sometimes to be convinced that they are not like that; to enforce their more normative thinking. But it also attracts people who are open to new things. Every time you present your work on any stage, in any media, it is exotic. It has to be. Art is not reality and art is exotic because it is extraordinary. But to use that without any awareness, it becomes cynical and mainstream. I see this tendency growing in the art scene. I navigate around it and I am highly critical of it, as you know [laughs]. EM: Lastly, can you share some more examples of Miss Fish’s work? JC: I have two examples. The first example is ‘Emotional Fish’, an interactive installation piece with video. It was a moving video sculpture that would change according to people’s movements in space. I worked with being present, but non-present. ‘Emotional Fish’ really stands out as one of the pieces where I could really define, but also flesh out Miss Fish in many different ways. The piece I like the most is ‘My House’ because it is so simple. ‘My House’ is based on the transformation of a dress; the dress transforms into a house in front of the eyes of the audience. The piece has been presented in many different contexts: at the Danish Royal Art Academy, at Roskilde Festival in Gyldendal’s literature tent (the biggest publishing house in Denmark), and in nightclubs. The idea is that your identity, your gender-identity, and the way you appear in daily life have to be re-performed every day. You have to become a woman or a man everyday; it is always negotiable. Your identity is a very fragile construction and you have to keep up the appearance or you will lose it. I recite a text [written by Gritt Ulldal] and then the piece develops: I step onto a box, suddenly the dress transforms into a geometrical shape of a house and I’m standing inside the house. My identity becomes a building. And a building is different from your fragile identity because you have an address, you have a door you can lock. It’s stable and there are laws protecting you; if you have a house, your identity is kind of safe. People who adhere to normative structures connect their identity to their buildings because it’s safe – you can’t move it. There are so many ways to stabilize the fragility of your identity – through having insurance, a big house, an expensive car. This piece, very simply, by transforming the dress into a house embodies all of this.
Emma Møller Independent Producer & Curator / New Producer @SPILL_Festival
Jorgen Callesen ARTIST – CURATOR – ARTISTIC DIRECTOR – RESEARCHER www.jorgencallesen.dk
AN ESSAY BY LEYLA EROGLU Nottingham, UK Our society needs to pick a stance on the uncomfortable issue of how we feel about life before birth. As it stands, if you are one of the every five pregnant women who will miscarry in your first trimester, your personal tragedy will rarely be regarded as more than an unfortunate but regular medical occurrence. Adversely, if you are one of the every three women that require an abortion in the UK, you will have to face under-funded and oversubscribed services that entail longer waiting times than any pro-life evangelist could hope for. In both cases you will be offered woefully inadequate care, having been given zero formal education from the age of consent to towards the end of your fertility. As such, upon extremely rudimentary research of both these subjects, you will find scores of women who were more traumatised about the care they received than the event itself. In the same way that not being a foul racist gets dismissed as being “politically correct,” having an ounce of concern over these issues gets lumped into the women’s issue category, an irrelevancy listed alongside ladies instagramming their menstrual stains, “#freeingthenipple” and generally clouding the feminist sphere with trivial matters that only serve to parody the whole feminist school of thought. It is in day to day legislation and negligent medical practice like this that societal misogyny really rears its ugly head and needs to be called out as an anomaly for modern times. At a time in the UK when the rate of conviction for rape is as low as 5.7%, the sex education offered is so dire and the reproductive health services are as insufficient as they are limited, could it be that the UK state is still set up to shame women for being remotely sexually active? Abortion is legal in the UK; you can get an abortion up until the end of your first trimester on the NHS or up until the 22nd week of your pregnancy (yikes) via free organisations like BPAS or private but legitimate and safe Marie Stopes clinics. The law cannot stop or criminalise you for accessing abortion but the state can refuse to educate you on it at the age of consent, prolong your unwanted pregnancy experience by delaying your termination with medically unnecessary appointments regardless of your circumstances and then lie to you about what to expect from the procedure. Although the current state of affairs is insidious as it is commonplace it remains, just about, within the law. So abortion begrudgingly exists in our society as testament to our half-dead reputation of having an autonomously liberated female populace, which we like to wheel out and parade when it suits in times of moral crusades but in reality, abortion rights in the UK are so poor that instead of being testament to the fact that UK women have the much-coveted, sanctified right to choose what to do with their bodies and futures, it is in fact yet another extension of the ever-present and archaic patriarchy. In other words, we’ve only evolved about one single moral inch away from the days of being prescribed a large gin and a very hot bath. When we know that 1 in 3 women in the UK have had abortion, why is adequate reproductive education and access still so controversial that it is scarce? Surely this only serves to stimulate the stigma around reproductive rights and promote a culture of isolation that, when faced with the statistics of the UK abortion rate, so many women must share. Unplanned pregnancy options, miscarriage and abortion are all explicitly absent from the UK curriculum about sex education. The latter is revered as a go-to religious education, foreign languages or public speaking topic from as young as year 8, - as long as the issue is addressed from a moral, rather than biological viewpoint- but the realities of what to expect and its necessity in a society - that knows birth control fails, that knows rape is pervasive and that knows it sexualises its youth from an age that would make our European counterparts grimace, - is entirely absent from UK education. Could it be that the UK Sex Ed curriculum is complicit in rape culture? Why have we accepted that premarital abstinence is outdated and unrealistic if we are not prepared to adequately educate about unplanned pregnancy options and miscarriage? Is its absence from formal educational discourse indicative of a greater, systemic misogyny? Bafflingly, even Consent remains a fairly recent addition to Sex Education. Although your reproductive rights and health as a woman are an integral part of your Sex Ed, such information isn’t being taught in secondary schools on presumably “ethical” grounds, out of fear abortion will somehow be promoted as a contraceptive option. In the same way that the medical abortion pill has faced controversy in its efficacy in very early pregnancy, but access to it is seemingly wilfully impeded with systems laced in pro-life agenda for the same reasons, via medical insistence upon unnecessary and invasive TVS and option-discussing appointments that prolong the pregnancy to further torment women on their choices, perversely leading to a longer gestation of the unborn child only to then be aborted. As if you don’t know your own body, your own future, your own values. This is vastly less ethical than prescribing the abortion pill at a stage so early in the pregnancy that it could be misconstrued as a contraceptive last resort and far more punitive an experience, that a woman of a supposedly civilised society should not have to endure. You would think that this was only going on in the Deep South but it’s happening in the UK today. (Although hotly debated, the abortion pill however is not the coveted embodiment of feminist ideals, and is indicative of other systemic cruelty that will be covered later.) The people who administer such waiting times and choices about your “choices” actu- ally have no real idea about how you came to be in that position unless you choose to prosecute your rapist, which if you’re aware of the staggeringly low conviction rate in the UK (5.7%) you would have valid apprehensions about pursuing; if you find yourself in that situation following a non-consensual encounter, the entire experience must feel like little less than an extension of the assault. Lack of education on these issues leads us to the alternative that we are faced with at the moment where women in the UK are only being presented with information of their options and what to expect from an unwanted pregnancy, termination or miscarriage at the time it occurs. Meaning that over 1 in 3 pregnant women in the UK had no real idea of what they were going to do or were in for prior to hopelessly flicking through a pamphlet either pregnant, or miscarrying on an Early Pregnancy Unit. It’s unacceptable. This is hardly sustainable when it’s common knowledge in the EU that the UK has the highest rate of teen pregnancy, in the face of such evidence it is safe to suggest these preg- nancies were not planned. Furthermore and most importantly, the less women and indeed young men are properly informed, the less the choice to be made is actually her choice. Leaving women uninformed leaves them open to being talked into the decision to terminate the pregnancy by their partners or talked out of it by their parents, when really a decision of such magnitude should be yours and yours alone. There has actually been a sharp increase in the number of terminations in the UK among women in their thirties. Married mothers in their thirties are having more abortions than any other female demographic in the UK at the moment. From this we can infer that the main causes of these terminations are financial, as these women already have children, which is perhaps interesting to consider alongside the current economic climate and increase in suicides amongst men in their forties. Therefore if The Patriarchy is only willing to inform women on their reproductive health through their own personal anecdotal retrospective wisdom as opposed to formal education, then it cannot be said that these women were somehow suffering the consequences of being irresponsible, chlamydia-afflicted, binge-drinking and promiscuous teenagers. These are grown women and mothers who are being routinely misinformed and treated appallingly, especially in instances of miscarriage. That being said, there is no shared socio-economic, racial or religious similarity to be seen between women who access abortion services. This is something that has been reported in all nation states that officially offer the service legally. Adequate abortion services or lack thereof is not a women’s issue, it’s not even a feminist issue as making vast swathes of the population suffer in silence like this is a human problem and only contributes to societal malaise wherein women’s rights are alienable. If the life of your unborn child is indeed so sacrosanct, why then are so many women’s miscarriages treated at best with silence and at worst, blasé? If you need an abortion, which you can only access through the NHS until the twelfth week, you will face prejudice about your decision to terminate the pregnancy for the rest of your life. It’s true. Yet if you miscarry – and most miscarriages occur in the first twelve weeks also- your baby will often thereafter be referred to by your doctor and disregarded as “the product of conception,” or even “POCs” for short. Such insensitive euphemisms are surely illustrative of a greater indifference, inferring you should pull yourself together because this happens all the time. Our society needs to make its mind up about how it feels about life before birth because as it stands we seem to be picking and choosing how much we care dependent on the measure of the mothers torment. If we know from empirical evidence the frequency in which these internal injustices must be happening to women in private, what implications does this have upon the modern, female psyche? How does this affect the modern masculine experience if men are either oblivious to or complicit in the neglect of women when they are at their most vulnerable, their most alone and their most desperate? Everybody knows how high miscarriage rates are – a fifth of people who know they’re pregnant will miscarry. Up to 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage – and yet most women never reveal they have had one. Everyone knows what it is per se, but no one tells you what to expect when what you’re expecting isn’t meant to be. But why is miscarriage also omitted from education until it happens? Surely any shame associated with such age-old tragedy has no place in modern society and a lack of information thereof would only serve to perpetuate any outdated myths surrounding the issue. Could it really be that any sexual health education that doesn’t really affect men directly is simply left from the syllabus? We can reject the prejudices surrounding abortion choices but it is evident where they stem from, yet it is the absence of miscarriage education that substantiates this notion that anything that doesn’t affect a man in his life is rendered irrelevant from formal public knowledge. How grim. Miscarriage culture is, from a feminist perspective, an amplification of the shame involved in being female in the first place. Like motherhood, it’s the territory on which you discover that the one thing more deficient and embarrassing than holding the female apparatus, is to hold it wrongly. Naturally, though, a culture in which the loss of a pregnancy is unmentionable affects women and men, and heaps loneliness indiscriminately across the genders, so it is only a feminist issue in so far as it’s a human one. The ample male-centric miscarriage support networks available to men online, who have been mortified by the realities of miscarriage and miscarriage aftercare, substantiate this claim that more information would serve society in general as opposed to being dismissed as a Women’s Issue. The topic of educating women on the facts that they can bear death after life within them, may be legitimately divisive, but at least some formal acknowledgement of the fact that there is no real reason why miscarriage can occur would be undeniable progress for the completely unprepared female populace, and evade any consequential prejudice or shame thereafter. So ... in the UK right now, if you miscarry outside of business hours (!) you will be made to wait until a Monday morning opening to confirm if your baby has survived. Some women have reported being made to wait up to a week unassisted to find out if they are still pregnant having started bleeding. Having been told that their pregnancy has not survived, many women will be told to simply go home and “let nature take its course.” If this occurs after 8 weeks, your pregnancy will no longer be an embryo. If, having been seen by a Doctor you are legitimately frightened of returning home to do this, the only place you can stay on the hospital will be the Mother and Baby Unit surrounded by people celebrating what you have lost. Other than “Nature” as a course of action, you have two other choices that involve taking either medication or having uterine surgery. At least, in both of these cases your aftercare will be on the Gynae ward, but all three of these options will entail a potentially long wait in A&E, with considerable blood loss, where your baby will herein be blithely referred to as “the product of conception.” Anything after 22 weeks of pregnancy is a Stillbirth, not a Miscarriage and involves going into full-on, induced labour. There aren’t any independent miscarriage clinics like there are with other reproductive health services so you will be at the mercy of the underfunded NHS, but there are a wealth of charities that operate counselling and emotional aftercare services. You may have to navigate these and their value alone. Thankfully, there are organisations like SANDS that exist to ease mothers with their trauma and bereavement but the only pastoral after care you can receive through the NHS will involve seeing a councillor on a GAU ward, again surrounded by pregnant women and babies. You will also be enduring this in a society that has conditioned you to aspire to child bearing above all else, that thinks you merit pity if you choose not to marry or reproduce, a life choice where if you were male you would be affectionately referred to as a “bachelor.” If you have suffered this more than twice you can be referred to a programme for Early and Recurrent Pregnancy Loss, where all manner of tests can be run on you and your partner as to the cause, but other than that there is no separate ward, no specialist care, no reason offered other than misfortune and your own guilt. Neither Miscarriage nor Abortion in any circumstances other than a threat to the mother’s life is regarded as a medical emergency. The vast majority of surgeons - even in these instances - are unfortunately male. So you can request to have a female present at all times as standard, but you are going to have your feet in stirrups as well as having to see a man at the end of the bed. Should you require a termination of pregnancy - in a society that offers but does not condone it and has given no regard throughout the 50 year old ethical debate towards the immorality of impregnating, then abandoning a woman - on the NHS women are not deceived about what to expect, but made to wait so long by the oversubscribed service that it would be easier to access the procedure if living in Virginia. If you don’t wish to wait to be seen at a Hospital, you can be seen much earlier through the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) or pay upwards of at least £700 with Marie Stopes. BPAS are funded by NHS trusts yet are situated and organised independently, if anything goes wrong at a BPAS or Marie Stopes clinic, the patient is sent to a hospital. With BPAS, to reduce cost, risk and panic the description of your procedure is kept vague if not entirely false, in order to promote the options that don’t involve general anaesthetic; but with the NHS you will be made to wait, pregnant, for weeks and weeks to be seen due to the disparity between access and demand. Your choice. Of the three options (Awake, Asleep, Medical,) “Gentle Aspiration Awake” is the only option you can have if you cannot provide a chaperone on the day of your procedure. Instances where you may not be able to find someone to come with you include privacy, shame, stigma, rape, religion, race, or the cost of a flight back to Ireland. It is offered until 16 weeks and is marketed as “Gentle,” but is actually trans-uterine surgery and cervical dilation whilst conscious through- out. If you are raped in Ireland by someone you know and cannot face prosecuting or find someone you trust enough to accompany you, this is the only termination option available to you for your pregnancy of rape or incest. Many women especially in London, complain of being harassed on the way to these clinics, whereas clinics in the North near Airports where Irish as well as English women are seen are often over crowded. Even in 2015, the people who work at these clinics also face intimidation. Emotional or psychological support prior to and after these procedures is notoriously difficult to navigate as lots of free support services are in fact run by religious organisations. So even fifty years since the Abortion Act you still have to navigate your own way round the ideological minefield of support services supposedly available to you. The medical abortion pill, although highly coveted in places where hygienic, legal abortion does not exist is in lots of respects a duplicitous weapon against women, but to critique it is to only play into the hands of baffling pro-life activists and any honest debate around it has already been absurdly successfully manipulated by MALE senators in the US to reduce American women’s access to their basic human rights. It fails UK women in two ways: pregnant women who cannot keep their baby are being made to carry the child for longer, in order to wait for an obligatory Trans Vaginal Scan, which are medically unnecessary but assess what stage the pregnancy is at in order to administer the pill safely within the first 9 weeks. The scan itself is also incredibly invasive. If you’ve no idea what the options or your rights are because you weren’t told at the age of consent or thereafter (cc: anyone educated in the UK with a vagina,) you won’t know that this stage in your pursuit of a termination is only necessary if you would like to take the pill. Secondly, you might be even more inclined to opt for a surgical procedure over a medical one once you know that the information provided by Marie Stopes and BPAS is indeed false, prompting outrage from women who have taken the pill online. Women who have been given the pill are leaving BPAS clinics with parac- etamol, being told to expect cramps akin to normal menstruation and sent home to pass their pregnancy unassisted. Whereas when the same procedure is administered by the NHS, a nurse is always present, tranquilizers are offered and patients are warned of the potential agony, incontinence and allegedly that “they may feel like they are going to die.” Unlike the NHS, BPAS also administer this pill after 9 weeks, given its reviews from women who have had it while the pregnancy was still in its early embryonic phase, this is presumably a medieval ordeal. Telling women honestly about this will only frighten them when they are already in desperate situations. Banning the pill will force women to have surgical procedures, so at least the chemical option diversifies the legal methods available to you. Telling recently sexually active teenagers about this might terrify them. But if the state won’t inform women about what to expect, not condemn those who are happy to leave you in that situation, how is that “choice” a choice at all? No one is going to have a positive abortion experience, a lot of women feel overwhelmingly relieved and there is only so much that can be done to alleviate the invasiveness of these situations when the services are heavily criticised and underfunded as it is. However, it is irresponsible of UK reproductive health services to misinform, and then abandon women like this. The debate around women’s rights may well be tired and only being reheated in English speaking media at the moment due to the absurdities emerging from the US Republican 2016 election campaign, (where perhaps the abortion debate has only flared up again as a ruse to not discuss other more glaringly pertinent issues in America like, perhaps, Race?) but actually in times where women’s self-worth is routinely being reduced to what is between her legs, that “empowerment” is the epithet of female sexuality, then we need to talk about it more than ever. Similarly to the domestic violence fatality statistics in the UK dwarfing the deaths as a result terrorism in the past decade, any issue that is a women’s issue is so absent from current affairs or public discourse that it is sinister. Whether or not such discussions will lead to even further under funding of the NHS or more control given to Pro Life organisations is unclear, but the current state of affairs cannot continue.
REFERENCES: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/16/miscarriage-baby-womens-needs-not-met-mumsnet-report http://therumpus.net/2012/03/the-alienable-rights-of-women/ http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/03/01/challenges-in-the-trans-vaginal-ultrasound-debate/ http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/02/social-media-miscarriage-mark-zuckerberg-pregnancy http://www.brook.org.uk/about-brook/brook-position-statement-relationships-and-sex-education http://www.miscarriageassociation.org.uk/information/types-of-pregnancy-loss/miscarriage/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_Kingdom http://www.thedadnetwork.co.uk/2015/05/coping-with-loss-after-miscarriage.html https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=stillbirth http://www.miscarriageassociation.org.uk/information/types-of-pregnancy-loss/miscarriage/ http://www.brook.org.uk/about-brook/brook-position-statement-relationships-and-sex-education https://www.uk-sands.org/ http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/03/01/challenges-in-the-trans-vaginal-ultrasound-debate/ http://therumpus.net/2012/03/the-alienable-rights-of-women/
Appeared in ISSUE #2
Leyla Eroglu
NAOMI M Lather 2015
NAOMI M Lather 2015 www.glitterdynasty.com
A STATEMENT BY ZOE SAMUDZI OAKLAND, CA
I am not a Feminist because I am “othered” by the whiteness inherent to cisgender heterosexual middle class able-bodied western [hegemonic] feminism. I am not a Feminist because in attempts to universalize womanhood, i.e. define “real” womanhood by a common set of traumatic or violent or abusive experiences, I am excluded along with other women of color, trans and queer women, disabled women, and every other woman excluded by this ridiculous standard. I am not a Feminist because the reified second wave binary of male oppressor/female oppressed constructed by the gate-keeping of “legitimate” experiences of womanhood is dishonest and reductive. We are not similarly oppressed through thesimple merit of our common womanhood because we bear identities outside of our womanhood. This lack of intersectionality fails to account for the dictation, domination, and paternalism of white women in Feminist spaces – a capital F for the denotation of hegemony. I am not a Feminist because I refuse to participate in a politics of gendered liberation that maintains the same hierarchiesfrom which we are trying to escape. Cisgender women dictate womanhood to transgender women; heterosexual women exclude the needs and concerns of queer women; able-bodied women are condescendingly “inspire by” or otherwise ignore disabled women; white women ignore and exclude the doubled oppression of women of color; non-sex workers paternalistically dictate best livelihood practice for women in sex work; women of the Global North coalesce to save and strip the agency of women in the Global South; and so on. I am not a Feminist because I cannot continue to strain my voice pleading for inclusion and consideration from the margins. I am a black feminist, I have no delusions about and will not assert its perfection. I am a black feminist because this gendered way of knowing takes my particular raced-gendered-classed identity into account when naming and describing experiences of oppression: it recognizes the multiplicity of identities that compound gendered oppression, it is intersectional. I am a black feminist because black feminism recognizes the various ways that women navigate the white cisheteropatriarchal capitalist system, the complex kyriarchy that actively subordinates. Whether a woman becomes a sex worker, a mother, a student, a domestic worker, or any other career (these range of options may be greater or lesser given a woman’s socio-economic situation), these choices are all valid. We seek not to judge or deride choices as being “feminist” or not, but rather to maximize women’s agency and put them in a position to have as many options and to make choices as agentically as possible. I am a black feminist because my womanhood and feminine sense of self is strengthened through a diversity of experience, identity, and way of knowing and understanding. This understanding of womanhood is not only raced and classed, but also queered in the recognition of the scapegoating and dismissal of femininity and femmephobia in many communities including queer communities. I am a black feminist because my voice is better spent strengthening and amplifying the epistemologies of other similarly or differently marginalized women operating in and navigating the margins.
Appeared in ISSUE #2
Follow Zoe Samudzi on twitter / Lil resistance thug, Zimbabwean, she/her; project coordinator of
@SheroesProject at @CoE4TransHealth; tweeting race & gender.
