“At every women’s gathering the divisions of race, class, nationality and ethnicity erupt, tearing the unity that brings women together. . . . We can pretend that differences do not exist, or we can explore them, and in the process reformulate feminism itself. The latter is more difficult and painful, but indispensable, if sisterhood is to become more than a slogan.”

Asoka Bandarage, “Toward International Feminism,” 1994

“[A] vision of global feminism should be one which engages women at all levels of society in all aspects of their lives, encouraging productive diversity rather than homogeneity, while proposing a pro-active redistribution of power, rather than reactive critique of its current allotment.”

Renee Martyna, “Whiter Global Feminism?,” E-merge 2000

This issue of Briarpatch is about opening our activism to new voices and new perspectives. As Naomi Wolf recently observed, “our (Western) moment of feminist leadership is over now, for good reasons. . . . [T]he leadership role is shifting to women in the developing world.”

To be clear, Wolf is not suggesting that Western feminists have won their battles and so are free to retire to Guatemala or Thailand to help those poor other women win the same battles. Rather, her point is that feminism in the West/Global North (I use these equally inadequate terms interchangeably) cannot be universalized, and that feminism has so far failed to address the economic inequalities, local and global, that have seen some women prosper while the majority have only suffered increased economic insecurity. The antidote – global feminism – could equally be described as majority feminism.

Like the labour movement, the feminist movement in the Global North has grown gradually more conservative over the past two decades, fighting (and often losing) rearguard actions to hold onto the rights and privileges previous generations had won, rather than seeking to broaden those victories across lines of race, class and nation. Western feminism has largely bought into the unequal rewards of global capitalism and become complicit in the imperial project: we occupy Afghanistan as supposed liberators-of-women while those same women slide deeper into poverty and insecurity. We import Filipino women to care for our children and Mexican men to grow our vegetables while women in Chinese and Haitian sweatshops sew our clothes. We rail against the misogyny of Islamic fundamentalism but have too little to say about the Western militarism and IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Programs that fuel it.

We must remember that our struggles for gender equity, work with dignity, personal security and ecological integrity are interconnected, that one form of oppression feeds another, and that capitalism thrives on and deepens all these various oppressions. As Johanna Brenner saw clearly back in 1993, “[t]he solution to the political impasse facing feminism cannot come from feminists alone,” but requires “a serious and disruptive challenge to capital” (New Left Review, July/August 1993).

The feminist political impasse Brenner identified 17 years ago has persisted, and meanwhile capital has gone increasingly global – a challenge that requires feminism and trade unionism alike to go global, too. Effective challenges to gender and class oppression must come from and respond to those who bear the brunt of such oppression; they can’t originate with those who have benefitted from it. Acting on this realization requires looking both outside our borders and inside ourselves.

As Arundhati Roy has said, “The battle lines are not drawn between women and men. They are drawn between particular world views.” We must recognize that the next wave of feminism, if there is to be a next wave, must come from the South, and orient our activism accordingly.

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Illustration by Kim Sokol

By Erum Hasan
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2010

I was 14 years old, riding a Parisian metro on a Friday evening, no doubt bound for some teenage mischief. The peace of my journey was interrupted when a woman wearing a burqa entered the compartment, accompanied by her husband and young son. The three of them, visibly tourists, looked at the metro maps in clear view of everyone else in the car.

This is a scene that occurs many times a day in Paris: tourist families mapping out their routes in the web of the metro underworld. But this family was different; the protagonists were atypical. I remember my horror at the whisperings, the looks, the nudges, and even some finger pointing at the woman in the burqa. A woman sitting across from me sighed exasperatedly and mumbled something about “these Arabs” and how they treat their women.

I was embarrassed and angry at this family for having entered this very public realm of which I was a part. I didn’t want my co-commuters to be judging all Muslim women relative to this one with her covered face. It was challenging enough to be a Muslim teen in Paris without having to take on this iconic image of the burqa-clad woman that had disturbed the cultural uniformity on that metro car. Feeling resentment for her and the response she was eliciting, I looked away, hoping she would disappear quickly.

The Muslim woman is often portrayed as lacking agency, subjugated and controlled by the men in her life. Trapped behind a veil, vulnerable to honour killings, her body is seen as a dominated space, one over which she apparently has no control. This is a common stereotype. It crops up frequently in Western media, especially when military offensives in Muslim countries are in the offing, and the oppressed Muslim woman is paraded about as justification for military intervention.

The burqa, chador or niqab (henceforth used interchangeably), a loose-fitting robe worn by some Muslim women that covers the body from head to toe, is one of the most powerful symbols of women’s subjugation under Islam. This garb is often presented as an existential threat to the West, capable of destabilizing the very foundations of our liberal democracies.

This message was reinforced in October 2009 when a Canadian organization called for a ban on the burqa. Surprisingly, this demand came from the Muslim Canadian Congress, a self-proclaimed progressive organization that stated: “The Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) is asking Ottawa to introduce legislation to ban the wearing of masks, niqabs and the burka in all public dealings. . . . [N]ot only is the wearing of a face-mask a security hazard and has led to a number of bank heists in Canada and overseas, the burka or niqab are political symbols of Saudi inspired Islamic extremism.”

Such a demand seemed odd when other issues of concern to Muslims were burning up the headlines, including government resistance to Omar Khadr’s repatriation, the war in Afghanistan, Muslim Canadians imprisoned abroad, and human rights concerns around security certificates. One has to question: is the MCC’s request really about protecting the Canadian public? (After all, how many bank heists have been undertaken by burqa-clad bandits?) Is it made in the name of emancipating Muslim women? Is liberation from the burqa really a pressing issue for them? Or is the MCC’s statement symptomatic of another tendency: some Muslims reproducing the same othering they have experienced in the Western world within Islamic groups, so as to render themselves acceptable to the general (Western) public at the cost of further isolating a disenfranchised group of women?

In non-Muslim circles, the opposition to the burqa has been open and vocal. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has stated the burqa is “not welcome” in France and that it reflects “women’s subservience.” In Switzerland, the image of the burqa was used in propaganda materials to support a constitutional ban on building minarets. In Belgium, many cities have prohibited face coverings, fining women who offend. In the United States, a rule adopted by the Michigan Supreme Court may allow judges to demand that witnesses remove their religious hair coverings while testifying. And in Quebec, the question of banning the head scarf in public service jobs was raised in provincial legislature by l’action démocratique du Québec and the Parti Québécois. However, this subject is not only taken up by politicians eager to weigh in on what the ideal citizen’s aesthetic should be. It is also a bête noire of some Western feminists who see the burqa as a threat to women’s autonomy and to the political gains made by feminists in the last few decades.

Indeed, the debate over Muslim women’s attire in the West has been shockingly one-sided. Few questions have been posed about why we equate visible hair and short skirts with women’s liberation or with greater access to power. The voices of women in burqa are seldom included in the dialogue – rather, these women merely become mere objects in our subjective narrative. Their bodies – their covered bodies – become fodder for our assumptions about their repression. “They” are made into one big category, an amorphous symbol of generalized oppression. What is rarely noted is that “they” as a category are not permitted to participate in this discussion. Just like the unseen patriarchs who are assumed to be cloaking women in repressive garb, many of us feminists make Muslim women’s bodies a screen upon which we project our politics and fears. Instead of opening a dialogue about the desires, aspirations and power struggles of this group of women, we substitute the burqa as a totem of all that we oppose. No one really asks those who wear it: hey, would you feel more emancipated if that thing was off your head?

The marginalization of burqa-wearing women in Canada and other Western nations is no real surprise. After all, the attire stands out in stark contrast to our mosaic of polar fleece. More surprising is how this narrative of the repressed woman is picked up, repackaged and reproduced within immigrant communities from the Global South. The crusade against the burqa is presented in Muslim circles as a progressive discourse reflecting modernity and Western know-how. A new dichotomy is thus created: the modern, free, Western Muslim woman who repudiates the traditional, shrouded Muslim woman. This dichotomy is not unlike the division between the stereotype of the free, modern Western woman and Muslim women in general – it just allows some Muslim women into the privileged space.

The Muslim Canadian Congress, which has often mirrored the language of the Conservative government on issues such as the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008, and which lauded the cutting of funding for the Canadian Arab Federation after Minister Jason Kenney got into a name-calling match with its president, is not alone in calling for a burqa ban. Feminist reporter Mona Eltahawy began her op-ed in the International Herald Tribune with the words: “I am a Muslim, I am a feminist and I detest the full-body veil, known as a niqab or burqa. It erases women from society and has nothing to do with Islam but everything to do with the hatred for women at the heart of the extremist ideology that preaches it.” This perspective is further echoed by Quebec feminist Djemila Benhabib, who has described the burqa as a tool for extremists. When the Fédération des Femmes du Québec did not support a ban on the hijab in the Quebec public service, Benhabib condemned them for “sacrificing millions of women who are fighting for their lives.”

Though valid as personal opinions, these statements rely on broad and sweeping assumptions about the experiences and stories of Muslim women who wear the burqa. In Eltahawy’s description, women are “erased” by the burqa, while Benhabib portrays all burqa-wearing women as being controlled by fundamentalists. Such blanket judgments leave no space for the diverse needs and wants of traditional Muslim women to be articulated, and the packaging of their bodies becomes the only topic of discussion. Single stories are presented as universal truths, rendering the affected women more invisible and less entitled to express their own wants and needs.

Contrary to Eltahawy’s point, women who have independently chosen to don the burqa in the West are anything but invisible. It is, in fact, their very visibility and their obvious rejection of mainstream dress codes that creates a sense of discomfort for many. The burqa is unfamiliar, stark, mysterious and unknown, and does not blend in neutrally. Portraying the wearing of the burqa as a symbol of male, religious militarism, as Benhabib does, discounts any other reason that a woman might want to wear it: for identity, cultural values, political symbolism, anti-consumerism, protection, countering the hyper-sexualization of women or religious belief. Both Benhabib’s and Eltahawy’s objections do exactly what they accuse the burqa of doing: they silence burqa-wearing women and deny them agency by imposing one narrative on their behaviour.

There is no doubt that many women are coerced or pressured to don the burqa or are required by law to wear it – Afghanistan under Taliban rule being a prime example. Such coercion should of course be resisted. However, in other places, women have been forced to remove their coverings, making some feel as exposed as if they had publicly bared their breasts. In 1936, the Shah of Iran banned the burqa, giving rights to police officers to tear off burqas with scissors and knives in order to “modernize” women. In Turkey today, women wearing the burqa are not allowed to attend public universities. Strict decrees one way or the other are equally corrosive of women’s autonomy.

Key to this story of the wrapped-up and controlled Muslim female body is the marginalization that many Muslim women have experienced in mainstream Western circles – a marginalization that is now being replicated by some privileged Muslims. After years of struggle in which women of colour, low-income and lesbian women have challenged their ”othering” by white, middle-class feminism in Canada, we now see parallel inequities being reproduced within Muslim feminism.

The most alarming thing about the new othering of (some) Muslim women is not that there is a public difference of opinion. Indeed, we should welcome dissent and dialogue – for all women are not the same, nor should they have the same opinions. Rather, it is that white, middle-class feminism, which has excluded many who come from other social, ethnic and religious groups, has come to represent the model of feminism being espoused by immigrant communities in the Global North. Instead of carving out an authentic feminist path, where the focus lies on autonomy, agency and anti-oppression, some Muslim feminists have allowed cosmetic issues like the burqa to take precedence over more bread-and-butter issues.

And reproducing this divisive discourse pays off in the West. Although challenging the burqa in other parts of the world can involve serious risks for women, burqa bashers in the West are widely celebrated. When the Muslim Canadian Congress issued its statement, the story made headlines in all three national newspapers. When women such as Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam Today, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel, pen their books, they remain on bestseller lists for a handsome period of time, basking in media attention. It is popular for Muslim women to denounce other women within the Muslim community as backwards and proclaim oneself a progressive; it is far more difficult to speak out against broader marginalizations and one’s role in reproducing them.

Progressive women in Muslim communities must question whether they are simply mirroring broader societal inequalities and further isolating already-marginalized women when they request bans on women’s attire. There will always be differences of opinion around the burqa. Some will find it vile and imposing, others will find it liberating not to share their cosmetic selves in the public realm; some will find it incompatible with Islam, others integral to their faith. The point is to foster a safe space where these differences of opinion lead to a conversation with, and empowerment of, those most affected rather than to exclusionary demands. The focus has to be on the agency of women rather than on their objectification. Single stories should not be used to deny or dismiss the multiplicity of women’s experiences. The politics of the burqa, whether through its imposition or through a ban, should not be a weapon for alienating women and limiting their choices.

Being from the Global South does not insulate one from reproducing oppressive discourses. As feminists from the Global South become more influential, armed with degrees from prestigious British, American and Canadian universities and well-versed in polished English, they must remain open to the opportunities to break from the historical trajectory of previous Western feminist movements, to carve out novel feminisms. A Muslim woman wearing a full-length “burqini” in a Parisian pool may have been called “archaic” by the mayor of Paris in August 2009, but feminists must be willing to listen to that burqini wearer’s voice to avoid being guilty of the same oppressions.

Perhaps we can take a cue from the Council of American-Islamic Relations-Canada (CAIR-CAN), which lobbied against the burqa ban, emphasizing the need to focus on rights rather than limitations:

“… [I]f a segment of Canadian Muslim women believe that wearing the niqab is part of their religious practice, then they must be allowed to freely do so. The principle must be extended to all religious practices, provided the practice does not infringe upon the fundamental rights of others. The marginalization of Muslim women must be countered with public education and anti-discrimination efforts, not with the state’s dictation on how one may dress, which only serves to further marginalization instead.”

Riding the metro in Paris, my sensitive 14-year-old self reflected and amplified the discomfort of those around me. The object of my angry embarrassment became that burqa – and the woman wearing it. Today, though, I would be frustrated not by that woman’s clothing choices, but by the assumptions fuelling the contempt of my co-commuters: their intolerance and their fear of difference.

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Over 2,000 statues fill the walls of Vientiane’s Wat Si Saket, the Laos capital’s oldest temple (built in 1818). (Photo: Nikko Snyder)

By Gita Tewari
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2010

It’s the last day of the week-long Living Buddhism class I’ve been attending at Wat Songdhamma Kalayani, an all-female temple in Nakhon Pathom, Thailand. After our morning chants and prayers, we have set off on an alms round with nuns and novitiates from the temple. We make our way from the temple grounds into the surrounding community, where groups of people are waiting along the street and in front of their homes to donate food and other supplies to the nuns.

We walk quietly, in single file. It is still early in the morning and the air doesn’t have the oppressive humidity to which I have grown accustomed. We see male monks in their saffron robes down the street from us, also making their daily alms rounds.

When a man kneels reverentially in front of the young female nun leading the prayers, I finally understand the religious clergy’s resistance to ordination of Bhikkhunis (the highest order of Buddhist nuns) in Thailand. In a country where even the King defers to monks, the implications of allowing women to inhabit the same spiritual plane as men would have a profound effect on a country that is still bound by ancient traditions.

There is a glass ceiling for women seeking spiritual advancement in the Buddhist temples, or “wats” that dot the Thai landscape. Women who seek to be ordained as Bhikkhunis, the highest order of Buddhist nuns, possessing equal status to monks, continue to experience significant resistance from the religious clergy and more conservative elements of Thai society.

In this country of over 300,000 monastics, Dr. Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, whose ordained name is Dhammananda Bhikkhuni, is a trailblazer in the movement to create a Bhikkhuni order in Thailand. She is the Abbess of Wat Songdhamma Kalayani, about a half-hour’s drive from the outskirts of Bangkok, in the ancient city of Nakhon Pathom.

Woman seeking sangha

I became familiar with Dhammananda and the barriers facing female monastics in Thailand in an accidental, tourist kind of way. In the midst of what might be termed an existential crisis, triggered by the worst economic crisis in decades, a year-long dry spell in freelance work and some personal setbacks, I found myself increasingly drawn to learn more about Buddhism, with its focus on the self as a starting point for all change – not unlike the famous quote by Mahatma Gandhi, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

I had read a few books on Buddhism, but found myself wanting to find a sangha, or spiritual community, where I could deepen my understanding of the theory and practice of Buddhism through formal practice. I had naively assumed that finding a Buddhist monastery to stay at for a few weeks or a month would be a somewhat simple proposition – according to the articles and online posts I had read, western men who sought to learn more about Buddhism seemed to have no trouble finding a monastery where they could receive daily teachings from monks or lamas. But to my dismay, I discovered that temples with female abbesses and novitiates (nuns in training) are practically non-existent in Southeast Asia.

After some searching, I learned of Wat Songdhamma Kalayani. They were holding a “living Buddhism” class starting in a few weeks that was described on their website as a “program designed for non-Buddhist, English-speaking international visitors who would like to learn about the basic concept of Buddhism, living in a monastic setting at the only Thai female monastery.” Participants were asked to wear white and observe the eight precepts: no killing, stealing, sex, lying, intoxicants, eating after noon (they relaxed this for westerners), entertainment or high beds.

Our daily schedule included an hour and a half of chanting and meditation each morning and evening, four hours of lectures, handicrafts hour (in which we learned origami, the ancient Japanese art of paper folding and other crafts to promote mindfulness), and “community time” in the evening, which often involved weeding in the garden.

I arrived at the monastery during Sunday prayers. The temple is located off a busy, six-lane highway. Visitors are greeted by a large, gold, laughing Buddha statue that is visible from the highway. I was taken up to the second floor of the temple to meet the Venerable Dhammananda, a tall woman in her early 60s with a shaved head, wearing orange robes. Novitiates and locals (men and women) were sitting on the floor while Dhammananda led the prayers and chanting in Thai. The other three individuals who had registered for the Living Buddhism class – a woman from New Zealand who lives in Bangkok with her husband, a Belgian woman who had been attending the monastery for a few years now and a Thai doctor from Chiang Mai who led our nightly meditation sessions, wouldn’t arrive until the following day.

Culture clash

Most Buddhists in Thailand practice Theravada Buddhism. This is the most conservative form of Buddhism, dedicated to preserving the teachings and practice of the Buddha in their original form. Thais believe they are accumulating merit – which will allow them to be reborn in better circumstances – by giving donations to support the monasteries and build new temples. Nearly all Thai men spend a few months in temporary ordination at a Thai temple at some point in their lives.

The social prestige of the monastic life has begun to fade, however. Many of the seminarians I met encountered the disapproval of their families when they expressed an interest in ordination. For instance, the mother of a nun I met who had recently graduated with a BA degree had not wanted her to become a nun; she wanted her to use her degree to get a well-paying job. Another nun I met had been married; both husband and wife decided to join a temple after they retired and their children were grown. Some seminarians are trying to escape abusive situations. Many of the younger seminarians will return to lay life after a few months. One said she had a life-threatening medical condition that the doctors were unable to treat. She said it was only after meditating for hours every day that she started to recover. This led to her desire to join the monastery.

Living Buddhism

While Thai attitudes toward sexuality and female autonomy are quite relaxed compared to many places, cultural attitudes towards women among the country’s Buddhist clergy remain quite rigid. The traditional stance against the ordination of women has been described by one writer as an example of how “the egalitarian ideals of Buddhism appear to have been impotent in the universal ideology of masculine superiority.”

As Rochelle Jones wrote in a 2005 report for AWID, the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, “Women in Thailand are supportive of Dhammananda’s quest [for female ordination], asserting that monks do not know how to listen to women’s needs and problems in the community and are educated to avoid women. The temple of women in Nakhon Pathom gives them confidence and support from the Buddhist community they have never had before. In Thai culture, monks are not allowed to touch women, and Buddhist nuns in Thailand are given a lower rank than even the youngest monk, and are relegated to the more menial tasks in the temple, such as cleaning and cooking.”

In Thai culture, it is believed that, if you were born a man, it means you accumulated more merit in a past life than if you were born a woman. One of my classmates, who is the president and a long-time member of the Soroptimist International Club in Thailand, an international humanitarian organization that works to advance the status of women worldwide, explained to me that this is why poverty-stricken families will allow their daughters to become sex workers if it means that the sons can continue on with their education.

Dhammananda is concerned about the disparity between the core teachings of Buddhism and how it is practiced by the lay population. There is more public emphasis on the rituals of Buddhism, such as accumulating merit by giving money and alms to the temples, and less on understanding the more complicated notion of dukkha (suffering) and how to achieve Nibbana or Nirvana (enlightenment).

She took us to another temple in Nakhon Pathom to see for ourselves. The scene was a buzz of activity with families milling around. There were many opportunities to give offerings with incense and perform other merit-bearing activities, but it didn’t feel particularly spiritual to me. This was a real-life example of the intersection of Buddhism as a spiritual ideal and Buddhism as practiced in a living, breathing society.

My Belgian classmate has been going to the monastery for a number of years now. She is a physical therapist who, in her spare time, is researching the role of women in Buddhism. She first met Dhammananda in 2003 after the Abbess was fully ordained in Sri Lanka, and travelled with her throughout Thailand. During that time the Abbess encountered much hostility and received death threats. Dhammananda was the first Thai woman to be ordained in the Theravada monastic lineage, but her title is not recognized by Thailand’s religious authorities. She continues to experience open hostility from lay men and monks who believe that female monastics are illegal and corrupt.

Dhammananda’s mother and grandmother were both strong advocates for female ordination. Her grandmother was instrumental in the creation of a female order of monks in the 1920s, though King Rama V banned the practice in 1928, and her mother became the first Thai Bhikkhuni since ancient times when she was ordained in Taiwan in 1974 in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, an ordination that was not recognized by the Thai religious establishment.

In 2005, the initiative 1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005 included Dhammananda among their list of nominees for the prestigious prize. She has two grown sons and is also a grandmother. She received her PhD in Buddhist studies from Maghda University in India and taught Buddhist philosophy at Maha Chula Sangha University and Thammasat University in Bangkok for many years prior to becoming the Abbess of the temple that her mother founded. She has also authored a number of books on Buddhism. In Dhammananda’s past life, she hosted a popular television talk show for many years called Life is Not Without Hope. After she decided to ordain, she filed for divorce from her husband. In a 2003 interview with Buddhadharma magazine she recalled, “I told my husband that I wanted to follow my path, that I wanted to do something much more meaningful than sit at home being an old lady.”

Reality check

Sri Lanka is the only Theravada Buddhist country with a history of female ordination. The country re-established a Bhikkhuni Sangha in 1996 with assistance from Korean and Taiwanese Bhikkhunis from the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. Meanwhile, the male Supreme Sangha in Thailand continues to resist the ordination of Bhikkhunis. In 2002, a Senate Subcommittee submitted to the Supreme Sangha Council that women should be given permission to be ordained, but thus far, the appeal has been denied. In November of 2009, the Wat Nong Pah Pong monastery in Thailand expelled an Australian abbot for ordaining Bhikkhunis in Australia, and issued a statement to its affiliated monasteries throughout the world affirming, “the Sangha does not accept the act of ordaining Bhikkhunis on this occasion and holds it as void.”

Dhammananda continues to write and speak about issues that centre around “socially engaged” Buddhism, including Buddhism and ecology, Buddhism and poverty, feminism and Buddhism, Buddhism and prostitution and Buddhism and education. As she told the Bangkok Post in a 2001 interview, “I know there is some resistance out there. It is not my intention to stick out and provoke anybody. I will try to honour everyone. I will try to be a supatipanno, to be a female monk with good conduct. Time will tell. If society believes this is a worthy role, then people will support it and consider it another alternative for women.”

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Illustration by Kim Sokol

By Penelope Hutchison
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2010

We once called ourselves Radical Obnoxious Fucking Feminists. When we meet again 20 years later, I discover that both f-words make us wince. What happened?

The day after the reunion, the subject line of Kelly’s email reads: “Did you hear?” On August 4, 2009, the same night as four university girlfriends and I had gathered for a 20-year reunion, a man walked into a gym in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, and opened fire. In response to what his online diary described as years of rejection by women and his inability to get a girlfriend, George Sodini shot three women, injured nine others – all unknown to him – and then killed himself.

The coincidence is surreal. My undergraduate girlfriends and I had planned the reunion as a memorial of sorts to mark the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. On December 6, 1989, 14 female engineering students were shot to death by a man who blamed women – feminists in particular – for ruining his life. The event shocked and scared us because we saw just how far the backlash against women could go.

I swiftly type my reply to Kelly’s email:

“The shooting and killing of those women on the same night as our reunion is unbelievable. Clearly misogyny is still alive and kicking. Getting together with you all made me realize that perhaps we still can make change. Instead of enlisting as junior members of the raging grannies, maybe we can morph into some fabulous forty-something gang? Something to ponder.”

Not a single one of my former fellow activists responds to my email. My disappointment turns to depression. How is it that as 40-something professionals, we don’t feel we have the same power and voice and ability to make change that we once believed feminism offered us? What has happened to us? To the world around us?

In the wake of this latest killing, we won’t be gathering in the Queen’s University Women’s Centre to plan a candlelight vigil. Julie won’t be making a sign that reads “Misogyny kills.” Nothing but a brief flurry of emails.

It is not that my girlfriends don’t want to speak out about violence against women anymore. It is, I tell myself, that in our supposedly post-feminist age, such outbursts from savvy professional women seem uncouth and unreasonable. Now that women are encouraged to pursue an education, a career, and be sexually independent, many see feminism as a thing of the past. To ease our way in the world, women like me have given up any public claims to feminism, or have at least tucked it away in an unobtrusive corner of our beings so as not to offend.

We have become lapsed feminists.

The rise of ROFF

Twenty years ago, my girlfriends and I, undergraduates all, formed ROFF – Radical Obnoxious Fucking Feminists. We gained notoriety in the media for our political protests. A Globe and Mail reporter described us in November 1989 as a “shadowy group” that shook “the serenity of Queen’s, a campus renowned as a hotbed of social rest.”

On Valentine’s Day we planted stop signs around campus to mark the places where, it was rumoured, women had been sexually assaulted. During Orientation Week, we whitewashed the “Golden Tit,” the speed bump engineering students decorate each year with a pink nipple, and spray painted “ROFF” over top in purple letters. We organized a 24-hour sit-in in the university principal’s office with two dozen other women. The sit-in was a response to the administration’s failure to discipline a group of first-year male students living in residence who had plastered their dorm windows with slogans like “No Means Kick Her In The Teeth,” “No Means Tie Me Up” and “No Means Harder.” The signs were the men’s response to a “No Means No” anti-date rape awareness campaign on campus.

My ROFF girlfriends and I had come to Queen’s in the late 1980s believing the battle of the sexes was over. Instead, we faced signs on student ghetto houses with messages like “Bring Your Virgins Here,” “Show Your Tits” and “Why Beer is Better than Women: Beer Doesn’t Run to Tell the Police When you Rape It.” We met one another in classes on feminist jurisprudence, women in politics, literature and philosophy, and made the Queen’s Women’s Centre our clubhouse.

We were empowered by the possibil­ities feminism offered to challenge society’s power structures. We devoured the texts of writers like bell hooks, Catharine MacKinnon and Carol Gilligan, and the lectures of our young, untenured female professors who sparked discussion about the exploitation of women in a male-dominated culture.

The gender politics at Queen’s and other campuses across Canada certainly reinforced this perspective. We read about panty raids at Wilfred Laurier University where male students splashed ketchup on women’s underwear and hung them out for display. Blindfolded and bikini-clad mannequins were paraded through Carleton University’s campus. We saw the world anew, and it seemed a threatening place, full of hatred towards all things feminine. In feminism we saw hope; a way to make the world a safer place for women.

ROFF reunited

The release of the film Polytechnique, a dramatization of the Montreal Massacre, in early 2009 inspired me to track down my ROFF girlfriends and host a reunion. I remember how devastated we were by the massacre, how it felt like the culmination of everything my ROFF girlfriends and I were fighting against at Queen’s. After reading a review of the film in the Globe and Mail, I decided to re-establish contact with my girlfriends and engage in some collective soul-searching about our university activism. I was curious to hear about the paths their lives and their feminism had taken.

As Kim, Kelly and I gather around Kim’s living room table, noshing on low-fat, low-carb crudités, white wine and Diet Coke, Jen and Julie join in the reunion by teleconference from British Columbia and Nova Scotia respectively. Once we are past the niceties, the conversation turns to our feminist activism as undergraduates.

We laud ourselves for our political protests and remind ourselves how the media attention we got for the sit-in sparked a national debate about sexism on campuses. Toronto Star columnist Michele Landsberg wrote at the time that “women from all over Ontario have written me letters of blazing indignation about the sexist hazing they receive at universities in this province. Some of the language they endured – language on banners and T-shirts – would make you faint with shock.” We talk about how our actions helped raise the issue of systemic discrimination against women in universities, and how that discussion spilled out into the workplace and onto the streets until it became a matter of public debate.

Despite the pride evident in my ROFF girlfriends’ voices, not a single one of us identifies professionally as a feminist today. “I don’t say I’m a feminist, but talk more about social justice issues. They are much broader than gender politics and that language,” says Jen, director of a network of HIV/AIDS organizations in B.C. After a brief stint articling at a corporate law firm in Vancouver left her miserable, she took on advocacy work in the predominantly gay HIV/AIDS community in the mid 1990s. There she used her legal expertise to help those with HIV/AIDS access Canada Pension Plan and B.C. benefits.

For Jen and many other women today, the discourse of gender politics is a thing of the past, its legitimacy giving way to other issues – social justice, the environment, antiglobalization, etc. Julie, now general manager of a non-profit arts organization in Nova Scotia, was ROFF’s leading agitator. She has continued to be a vocal proponent for change, working for a London, Ontario, homeless coalition and eventually running for the NDP in the riding of London North Centre in the 1990s. Now living in a hamlet near the Bay of Fundy, she describes her current political activism as more locally focused. Managing a theatre company, running artist retreats and art camps for kids where discussion centres on issues like the environment and mental health, she says she’s “gone from making bigger changes and contributions to smaller local things. I feel like I have more personal impact this way.”

As we aged, we began to choose more manageable goals, but the playing field also shifted. At the same time as we were launching our careers, falling in and out of relationships, acquiring mortgages and having children, society was rebranding feminism as irrelevant. Feminist scholar Angela McRobbie says this is not a straightforward right-wing backlash against feminism. Instead, feminism has been incorporated into this new “post-feminist” landscape through media depictions of independent, sex­ually liberated women like Bridget Jones and Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw. These images of strong, educated and sexually independent women (who also happen to be white and middle-class) give the message that equality between the sexes has been achieved, and suddenly feminism is passé.

It is not that the feminist demands for equality have been met, however. It is that in this new social and cultural landscape, the language of feminism has been delegitimized. What happened for women like my ROFF girlfriends and me is that in one way or another, we have all had to make the bargain so many ­middle-class women come to make to find success in our personal and professional lives. The bargain is this: women can be powerful as long as they give up their claims to feminism and the notion that women are unequal and marginalized in society.

‘Post-feminist’ malaise

Kim, a single mother with a high-status job with the government of Alberta, outwardly personifies the changes feminism has undergone in the intervening years. She has transformed from a curvaceous, bohemian-dressed, unruly-haired brunette to a thin, blonde Gabrielle Reece look-alike in tailored suit and heels.

Bunking at her house for the reunion, I see how she organizes her life to meet all the demands on her time. Up at 5:30 a.m. to work out on the elliptical machine in her basement, she’s showered, dressed and feeding her boys by 7:00 a.m., shuttling them off to school to clock in at the office by 8 a.m. A full day at work is followed by a busy evening of attending to her kids’ after-school activities, meals, homework and bedtime. Her attention then turns back to the briefcase of work she’s brought home before her head hits the pillow at 11 p.m.

It is a rigid schedule but one that is reinforced through women’s magazines and TV talk shows that promote the message that working women’s demanding timetables show how competent we are because we can, and do, “do it all.”

Kelly and I have similar schedules to Kim’s. We’re both at the gym four or five times a week, working out with personal trainers to fit the thin, tailored professional woman mould. Kelly, the mom of twin boys conceived through donor insemination, manages a busy family law practice where as a legal expert to the federal government on assisted reproduction, surrogacy and ovum/sperm donor agreements, her services are in demand.

As a self-employed writer, I have the luxury of working in my home office but my day is still rigidly structured. Bouts of writing interspersed between meetings with clients, meal preparation, car-pooling my son between school and after-school activities, and trying to care long-distance for my aging parents.

By adopting these roles, Kim, Kelly and I have been able to achieve success in the still predominantly male workplace. The price we have paid for such success has been to have to distance ourselves from our earlier feminist identities, or at least from contemporary culture’s view of feminism as a juvenile, extreme dogma typically associated with hatred towards men. It is not that we believe that equality between the sexes has been achieved; it is that living the day-to-day practice of feminism in our professional and personal lives is much harder than we anticipated as young women. Feminism is a long historical movement; as individual women striving to find fulfillment in our personal and professional lives, it is hard to live that struggle on a daily basis in the face of a culture that tells you feminism is a thing of the past.

“In my circle of friends, I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist but wouldn’t say I’m not. I talk about broader social justice issues. Despite feminism’s efforts to be more inclusive of other issues, it’s not,” says Kelly.

As we recount the trajectories of our various career paths, the joys and challenges of raising boys (Kim, Kelly and I all bore sons) and the ups and downs of our sexual relationships with men and women, we recognize the irony of our situation. Feminism has played a significant role in making our professional, ideological and identity choices possible. As a successful lawyer active in Toronto’s gay and lesbian community, Kelly can partially credit the gains made by the feminist movement. Yet, like the rest of my ROFF girlfriends, she has come to distance herself from feminist rhetoric in order to succeed in the legal profession.

While my ROFF girlfriends no longer identify as feminists, they readily acknowledge the ample evidence that exists showing how women have not overcome the problems feminism sought to solve. “I firmly believe that as much as women think they are sexually liberated now and sexual equals to men, it’s crap. At work, if a man sleeps around, he’s unremarked; if a woman does, she’s labelled the office bicycle. That has not changed one iota,” says Kim.

According to Statistics Canada, women are over six times as likely as men to be victims of sexual assault, the majority perpetrated by someone they know. Women working full-time still earn 29 per cent less than men employed full-time; the gap between male and female earnings has not changed significantly in the past decade. Women are still the primary family caregivers, far more likely than men to have to take time from their jobs because of personal or family responsibilities.

Recognizing the imbalances of power women still face, my ROFF girlfriends and I reflect on how important women’s studies courses were for us as young university women, offering us a critical lens and analysis about the place of women in the world. But today, young women are losing those avenues. The recent closure of the women’s studies program at the University of Guelph, the under-resourcing of women’s studies in general within Canada and the complete disappearance of women’s studies as an undergraduate degree in the United Kingdom highlight how the discipline is increasingly seen as a soft subject, lacking academic rigour and based on dated politics.

Not so radical

As the wine bottle empties and our reunion winds to an end, the discussion turns to our love lives: new relationships bubbling up for Kim and Julie, Jen making peace with being newly single, Kelly and I in long-standing relationships. Perhaps we are no different from Carrie Bradshaw: strong, independent, professionally successful, yet still, in the end, looking for life’s fulfillment through our relationships.

It is evident that the politics and passion for change that first brought us together 20 years ago are gone. We once felt so powerful in our efforts to make the world a better place. Now, looking back, I’m disappointed in myself, and to some extent in my ROFF girlfriends, for not holding on to our feminist principles as we aged; for not fighting against the inequality we met in our workplaces and in our personal relationships; for what many might call “selling out.” I don’t think we’ve necessarily sold out; there is just so much working against us in this struggle for broader equality.

As the fall deepened and the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre drew near, I managed to put aside some of my sadness about the reunion and my ROFF girlfriends’ loss of faith in feminism as a tool for change. I know now it wasn’t that we were naive or too radical to realize that the feminist project was some impossible dream. Rather, it was that we weren’t radical enough to stop the backlash that has sidelined feminism as a force for change – that keeping feminism meaningful for younger generations of women has proven a harder task than we ever imagined.

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When people are generally required to check one of two boxes - male or female - those whose gender identity falls outside the boxes are rendered invisible. (Illustration: Elisha Lim)

By Mandy Van Deven
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2010

The first step toward addressing an issue is to make it visible. An alcoholic will fail to get sober until he or she admits to having a problem. Slapping around one’s wife was not a punishable offence until it became socially and legally recognized as domestic violence. Visibility is gained through definition, and with visibility comes the power to create social change.

Transgender and gender nonconforming people are just beginning to shed the cloak of invisibility that has shrouded their participation in social and political life. The success of productions featuring middle-class transgender people, like the film Transamerica and the television show The L Word, is opening the door to public conversations that had previously been relegated to academic departments of women’s and queer studies. These popular portrayals are not always politically correct, but they do help to foster the development of an active and visible transgender citizenry working for public recognition of equal rights. Unfortunately, however, transgender visibility seems to be stalled along class lines, a problematic development that advances the rights of a privileged few at the expense of community-oriented movement building.

Similar to queer activism, transgender rights organizing appears to be gaining ground in major metropolitan areas including Washington, D.C., and Toronto. Legal victories for public bathroom access in New York City and anti-discrimination laws in Maine, as well as the election of a transgender mayor in Silverton, Oregon, are certainly cause for celebration. However, the focus on battles that require class privilege means that other battles that would make a significant impact on the majority of poor transgender people have scarcely begun. Would-be transgender activists must often favour their own material conditions above collective advocacy in order to simply survive – a position working-class feminists and feminists of colour have been arguing for decades regarding their place in the movement for women’s liberation. Given this reality, organizing around transgender issues should be viewed through an economic lens in addition to one of gender.

Transgender and gender nonconforming people in the U.S. list their three most important and immediate needs as housing, employment and health care. This is no different from the main preoccupations of low-income people generally, which is not a coincidence as a great number of transgender people live in poverty. (In the United States, a transgender person is twice as likely to live below the poverty line.)

A disproportionate number of transgender people are relegated to low-paying jobs, denied work, or fired for reasons directly related to their gender identity. More than two-thirds report experiencing verbal and physical harassment on the job. Since there are few legal protections against such discrimination, transgender folks have little recourse to address mistreatment on the job, and employers consistently fail to protect transgender workers; in fact, many times they contribute to the abuse. All of these factors contribute to the disproportionate numbers of transgender people experiencing chronic unemployment.

Transgender people who apply for public assistance face difficulties in obtaining the benefits they both need and are entitled to, particularly when they lack access to appropriate identification documents. Those who do receive benefits may do so in a program that has a minimum work requirement in an environment that proves to be dangerous for transgender people, creating a difficult choice between losing benefits and maintaining one’s personal safety. Given their limited employment options, many transgender people become involved in the illegal activities of the street economy – sex work, theft, selling drugs – and so may wind up entangled in the legal system, thus further marginalizing them.

Access to affordable housing is also a problem. Housing refusal is common, leaving many people to live in homeless shelters or on the street. Shelters, which tend to be sex-segregated, bring another unique brand of difficulty, particularly when transgender individuals are not allowed to bunk with members of their self-identified sex or given access to shower and bathroom facilities that suit their needs. Shelters can be unsafe and harassment from other residents and staff is common. Transgender people are frequently turned away from shelters (some even have policies barring their entry) or are thrown out when the staff finds out they are transgender.

Although class and gender intersect deeply and complexly for transgender folks, very little research has been done into the discrimination they face. Figures that are typically calculated by means of the census, public assistance intake forms or social service agencies are lost because transgender identity is not tracked. When people are required to check one of two boxes – male or female – those whose gender identity falls outside the boxes are rendered invisible. The same is true for laws that do not specify protections if a person’s transgender status makes them a target for a crime, such as workplace discrimination or hate violence.

This lack of data contributes to further barriers, as non-profit organ­izations that have trans-specific initiatives face an enormous challenge in obtaining funding. “Getting government funders to understand the risk and vulnerability that transgender people are at to be homeless and getting grants that apply to this work is the biggest challenge we face,” says Yasmeen Persad, the transgender program coordinator at Supporting Our Youth (SOY) in Toronto. A lack of finances is not simply a reality for transgender and gender nonconforming individuals; it is also a reality for the organizations that assist those individuals.

No one decides to do social justice work because they think it will be easy, but some areas are more challenging than others. Low-income transgender people are highly vulnerable to social isolation, abuse and violence – factors that make becoming an advocate or activist extremely difficult. According to Lynn E. Walker, the program director of the Transgender Transitional Housing Program at Housing Works in New York City, “One of the greatest challenges for our clients derives from the reluctance of trans and gender nonconforming people to advocate for themselves. Many clients have experienced long years of disempowerment and homelessness, sometimes complicated by physical and mental illness, and unfortunate encounters with the criminal justice system. Consequently, they tend to prefer to avoid advocacy events where they may encounter institutional and governmental authority, which for them are symbols of ignorance and instruments of oppression.”

The topics that get the most attention from transgender advocates and activists, therefore, are often those of primary interest to middle- and upper-class transgender folks. This is particularly the case in the U.S., where health care disparities are so pronounced: advocating for insurance companies to cover sex reassignment surgery will no doubt benefit transgender people with enough class privilege to actually have health insurance, but what about the need for basic medical care that low-income transgender people are unable to afford?

Organizing to provide free, comprehensive health care services for transgender people would prove to be a much more inclusive and effective organizing strategy. These services could include the provision of basic medical care and medications, including hormones and antidepressants; psychi­atric and psychosocial services like individual and group counselling; and HIV prevention and treatment as well as substance abuse treatment facilities for the disproportionate number of transgender folks who are afflicted with these ailments. A breakthrough in health care provision would represent a momentous step forward for the rights and well-being of transgender people, and would foster the conditions for more activists to step forward.

The Transgender Transitional Housing Program at Housing Works in New York exemplifies the kind of work organizations could be doing to address low-income transgender people’s needs. Tackling all three of transgender people’s most pressing needs, Housing Works provides “one-bedroom furnished apartments for gender non-conforming people and people of trans experience living with HIV/AIDS for up to twenty-four months. Along with appropriate medical, dental, and mental health care, [they] assist them in finding affordable permanent housing, and for those who are interested, the agency provides legal and administrative support as well as vocational training to enable them to obtain satisfactory employment.” Housing Works takes a holistic approach and works for transgender rights where it can make the broadest impact.

Increasing the visibility of low-income transgender people is a step in the right direction but it is not enough to make a sustained impact on their most pressing needs. For that, activism is needed.

Creative solutions can be implemented to solve the problems that are inherent in the current systems that serve low-income people. Transgender-only housing units or floors in existing facilities can be established with private, lockable restroom facilities and staff who are trained in transgender sensitivity. Exclusions of transition-related and gender-specific health care can be removed from the policies of medical facilities and health insurance companies. Governments can invest in transgender-specific workforce development and public assistance programs. Laws and policies that prohibit employment discrimination and workplace harassment can be amended to include transgender and gender non-conforming people. Although transgender organizing is newly emerging, the movement need not make the same mistakes as its well-meaning predecessors by ignoring the class-based needs of the majority of its members.

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Lin Shiu: “I will work as long as I can work.” (Photo: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours)

By Jillian Kestler-D’Amours
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

The Hong Kong government has promised to look into introducing a statutory minimum wage, but so far, no concrete implementation plans have been made.

Lin Shiu, 65, walks into the small Hong Kong Women Workers’ Association office, still sweating from her morning shift.

Wearing a blue suit, baseball cap and fluorescent green mesh vest, she gratefully accepts a glass of water. In an hour, she must get back to work cleaning a luxurious Hong Kong mall.

“For my age, it’s difficult to find another job,” says Shiu, who works eight hours a day, six days a week, and makes $3,600 Hong Kong dollars ($505 CAD) each month.

“I will work as long as I can work.”

No minimum

Shiu is one of many female cleaning workers in Hong Kong who must deal with low wages, dangerous work environments and discrimination on a daily basis. She is also a board member and part-time organizer in a cleaning workers’ union, working to improve conditions in the sector. Shiu says that instating a minimum wage is the first, necessary step to improving the lives of cleaning workers.

“[The Hong Kong government] doesn’t really care about the workers. The policy is not for the people,” she says. “The minimum wage would help us.”

In 2006, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Donald Tsang introduced the Wage Protection Movement, a government program that encouraged corporations to offer cleaning workers and security guards wages at average market rates.

The Wage Protection Movement depended on voluntary participation, which was not forthcoming. The initiative shut down in 2008 due to insufficient involvement.

Today, the Hong Kong government has promised to look into introducing a statutory minimum wage, but so far, no concrete implementation plans have been taken.

Structural problems

In recent years, the number of women entering both universities and the workplace in Hong Kong has been on the rise. But according to Mei Lin Wu, the coordinator of the Hong Kong Women Workers’ Association, although more women are entering the workforce than ever before, most fall into the “working poor” category.

“This means that their income is less than the minimum wage of grassroots work,” she explains. “The gap between the poor and rich is the biggest in Hong Kong’s history and the number of poor families is increasing.”

In 2006, Hong Kong’s Gini coefficient (GC), a measure of income disparity, reached as high as 0.533, surpassing that of Canada, the United States, and most Asian countries.

During this same period, the proportion of lower-skilled jobs decreased from 56.9 to 50.6 per cent.

“There is a structural problem,” says Wu, adding that the present economic downturn and age discrimination also make finding employment more difficult for women with little or no formal education.

“Having working skills doesn’t mean you’ll find a job. The opportunity for women is not much, and opportunities are not equal among women,” she says.

In 2005, 31.5 percent of Hong Kong residents aged 65 and over lived in low-income households.

“[Hong Kong is the] most free economy in the world, but what does that mean? Those that do not have money are not free. It means that labour, gender, human rights and just issues are not easy to raise,” Wu says.

An uncertain future

Soon after Mary Songsirisakul Malee fell while cleaning a glass window at a Hong Kong shopping mall, she was told she had to return to work or risk being fired.

The 50-year-old, who still has health problems related to the accident, now works part-time cleaning offices and earns $1,200 HKD ($170 CAD) each month.

Like Shiu, Malee believes that a minimum wage would greatly benefit cleaning workers who, she says, are often further disadvantaged by the subcontracting systems prevalent in the industry.

“The policy does not take care of the workers. That’s why the workers always become the losers,” she says.

She adds that in today’s economy, paying into her retirement fund has been a struggle, even though her son provides her with some financial support.

“I will go back to Thailand if I can retire,” says Malee, who came to Hong Kong 30 years ago from Bangkok. “But I can’t imagine my retirement. I would have no safety, no security. I can’t imagine it.”

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“So the leadership role is shifting to women in the developing world. Their agenda is more pressing, and their problems, frankly, are far more serious than ours - which makes it much more urgent for them to develop theories appropriate to the challenges they face.”

By Deanna Ogle
Briarpatch Magazine
May/June 2009

I first heard about fathers’ rights groups when I was working at a Vancouver drop-in centre for women several years ago. A family law advocate for a similar organization in a neighbouring community told me about a group of men who would show up at court in matching T-shirts to support male members of their organization who were engaged in custody and access disputes with their ex-partners. The groups would do this to try to influence the judges and intimidate the women, who were often there without a lawyer or any other support besides the advocate. Concerned, I wondered how organized these men were and if it was a local phenomenon. To my surprise, I learned that this group was part of a global movement with a membership ranging from Caribbean Canadian Senator Anne Cools to British anti-poverty activist Bob Geldof (though the vast majority of fathers’ rights leaders and activists are white, middle-class, conservative men).

There is a diversity of thought and tactics to fathers’ rights groups, but they share a focus on issues of family law - in particular, issues surrounding custody and access to children. Organizations like Fathers 4 Justice, Fathers are Capable Too, Canadian Equal Parenting Council, Dads Canada and Equal Parenting BC have adopted the language of “equal rights” and resistance to oppression, but wield these terms in defence of traditional ideas of fatherhood and male privilege.

Although fathers’ rights groups have existed in Canada since the 1970s, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that they began to emerge as an influential voice in divorce and child custody proceedings. In 1998 a Special Joint Committee on Child Custody and Access was convened to consult with individuals and communities across Canada on proposed changes to the Divorce Act. This committee included allies of the fathers’ rights movement such as Senator Anne Cools and committee co-chair Roger Galloway, then a Liberal MP for Sarnia Lambton. Although this consultation process was widely considered a failure (the resulting report was not adopted by the Justice Minister and none of the recommendations of the committee were adopted), it did highlight how family law has become the staging ground for a heated struggle around gender norms in modern families. With strong support from within the committee, the consultation process became a platform for fathers’ groups to air their grievances with the current system. In particular they called for “equal shared parenting” and increasing non-custodial parents’ rights.

In Canadian law there are two forms of equality that are commonly discussed, formal equality and substantive equality. A strict “formal equality” approach demands that everyone is treated exactly the same regardless of mitigating circumstances. At first glance, this approach sounds reasonable as it would allow a father’s grievance in the courts to be given equal airing to that of the mother. However, this “gender neutral” approach obscures the substantially different ways the men and women experience separation, divorce and the justice system.

While experiences of divorce and separation vary, many women find that the end of a relationship means a new life of precarity, lower income (if not complete loss of income) and single motherhood. While poverty rates among women before divorce are 16 per cent, after divorce these rates increase dramatically to 43 per cent. This drop in socio-economic status coupled with decreases in government support for family law legal aid in many areas of Canada means that women are often unable to access adequate legal representation or advice in family law matters like custody and access.

This situation is especially serious for women who are leaving abusive relationships, disabled women and newcomers who face barriers to accessing the legal system due to limited English language skills and unfamiliarity with our legal institutions. Not having access to legal advice means that these women are less likely to be able to present their arguments within legal language, and are therefore less likely to be taken seriously by the judge or mediator.

This is where substantive equality comes in. Substantive equality accounts for these patterns of discrimination and oppression in an effort to guarantee equality not just of opportunity but of outcomes. Basically, substantive equality recognizes that we don’t all start at the same place due to structures of privilege and oppression, and stipulates that giving everyone a fair chance requires that we compensate for these imbalances.

The two approaches to equality can be effectively contrasted using the example of sharing an apple with a friend. While formal equality would require splitting the apple 50/50, addressing substantive equality requires that we ask what both individuals had eaten that day and divides the apple based on need (or in this case hunger). A substantive equality argument in the case of custody and access would recognize the disproportionate burden women carry in child rearing, as well as the lack of equity many women face in the workplace.

When fathers’ rights groups speak of equality, they rely heavily on conceptions of formal equality that obscure the unequal relationships between men and women in a patriarchal society. For instance, in a document prepared by the Canadian Equal Parenting Council, equal parenting is defined as “the presumption that both parents should share responsibilities and time on the basis of equal rights. Of course parents may agree to divide duties . . . but if they can’t agree, such as in highly-conflicted divorce, both parents keep equal rights and responsibilities.”

Using a substantive equality lens, however, we must ask whether the presumption of shared responsibilities reflects the realities of families in Canada today. Statistics show that for most families today parenting is neither equal nor shared. Therefore, any discussion of responsibilities and rights must take into account women’s disproportionate burden in caring for children.

In 2004, for instance, over 14,000 women in Canada left their paid employment due to unpaid caregiving responsibilities - double the number of men - and missed an average of 10 days of work due to caregiving commitments, while men missed, on average, a day and a half. According to Statistics Canada, men have increased their participation in unpaid work in the household in the last ten years from an average of 2.1 to 2.5 hours a day. This change corresponds with a half hour decrease in women’s household labour, moving from 4.8 hours daily in 1996 to 4.3 hours in 2006. It is clear that households are changing but it is equally clear that we are a long way off of a 50/50 split in household labour.

The reality of separation in Canada today is that even when joint-custody arrangements are made, children are typically cared for primarily by the mother, while decision-making is shared by both parents. In practice, this emphasis on shared parenting and increased non-custodial parents’ rights only serves to reinforce the roles demanded of the traditional heterosexual nuclear family, with the father as the decision-maker and the mother as the primary source of unpaid reproductive labour in the form of child care, food preparation and cleaning.

In order to appease the strong local fathers’ rights movements, England and Australia have shifted away from the framework of custody and access to a shared parenting model, where each parent keeps their pre-separation roles and responsibilities. However, this shift just further perpetuates unequal relationships. A study undertaken in Australia three years after the amendments were introduced found that the changes had put an increased pressure on women to provide contact even in situations that compromised their safety. Additional studies found that the changes had not reduced conflict or litigation, nor had they substantially changed caregiving patterns. Shared parenting models, the evidence suggests, simply do not address the root problems of gendered inequality that shape women’s experience both before and after separation.

Nonetheless, members of the Conservative Party have supported further entrenching patriarchal relations through similar changes to family law. The Conservative Party has included a commitment to shared parenting after separation in various election platforms. Last year, former MP Carol Skelton and sitting Saskatchewan MPs Maurice Vellacott and David Anderson (all Conservatives) publicly pledged support to equal shared parenting in the House of Commons. Fathers 4 Justice activists continue to rally support in British Columbia and across Canada, staging banner drops off of prominent bridges while dressed as superheroes and trekking across Canada to raise awareness and money. Fathers’ rights groups have also worked together with the conservative women’s organization REAL Women to lobby for equal shared parenting. Beyond extensive lobbying and direct action tactics borrowed from social justice organizations, fathers’ rights groups have also attempted to simply bully groups into supporting their cause. Bruce Wood of the Saskatoon Men’s Resource Centre, a male-positive, pro-feminist, gay-affirmative and anti-racist non-profit organization, told Briarpatch that the Centre “has been the target of an organized campaign of harassment by fathers’ rights activists in Saskatchewan and Alberta.” The Centre, Wood said, has been “flooded” with anonymous calls, voice mail messages and emails - many of which appear to have been scripted - voicing anger at everything from the courts to women’s violence against men.

“The objective of their harassment is to confront us on our public support of the feminist movement and our work on male violence against women,” Wood said. “They also have insisted that we take a public stand in favour of something they call ‘equal shared parenting.’”

These tactics have put many feminist and pro-feminist organizations further on the defensive as they seek to maintain services at a time of funding cuts and increased demand for services. Without an infusion of new volunteers, the Saskatoon Men’s Resource Centre is at risk of having to scale back its programming. Likewise, many feminist women’s organizations have borne the brunt of cutbacks. In Vancouver, 100 per cent of the North Shore Women’s Centre’s operational funding from the provincial government was cut in 2002 and the centre has only been able to keep its doors open through community support and fundraising. In the midst of these financial struggles, the North Shore Women’s Centre has struggled to block a local fathers’ rights organization from joining a local Coordinating Committee on Violence Against Women in Intimate Relationships. The committee had been alerted to the presence of the fathers’ rights activists when they lobbied to change the language in the District of North Vancouver’s violence policy to remove any mention of gender. Michelle Dodds of the North Shore Women’s Centre told Briarpatch, “we spent a lot of time trying to figure out if they were going to come to community meetings. If we thought they were going to present at a meeting, we had to prepare people so that they would understand what it was that they were saying.”

Although the committee was able to block the group from joining, they have increasingly had to devote already strained resources to providing services not just to abused women but also to men stirred up by the angry rhetoric of the support groups organized by the local fathers’ rights centre. These support groups have been effective at capitalizing on men’s feelings of loss after separation. Playing to traditional conceptions of male authority and entitlement, these groups build upon and stoke men’s sense of victimization, scapegoating their former spouses, feminists and the courts for the failure of their relationships.

One man in North Vancouver described to a community advocate how attending fathers’ rights support group meetings caused him to develop an anger he never had before he attended the meetings. Feminist and pro-feminist organizations have had to devote increasing energy to countering these myths of victimization and to supporting men to take responsibility for their role in the failure of the relationship. According to Bruce Wood, “there are lots of men (as there are women) who are full of grief, anger, sadness and shock after a relationship comes to an end. These men deserve to be heard and to be helped heal - not to have their anger fed like a fire for political lobbying purposes.” In a past Briarpatch article (March/April 2007), Wood asserts that “heterosexual men seeking connection with and support from other men have proven easy targets for . . . fathers’ rights organizations.” Wood goes on to suggest that our “unwillingness to support and deliver comprehensive education for adult men . . . is a significant contributing factor in our failure to reduce the rate of violence against women.”

The challenge for the feminist movement is to engage men in the discussion around the relationship between fatherhood and masculinity. We must engage in these discussions not only for men but also for women, who bear the brunt of abuse and are facing a disproportionate burden in caregiving that impacts their economic freedom before and after separation.

Fathers’ rights groups have proven very effective at reaching out to and supporting men who are anxious about their perceived loss of power in a relationship that is dissolving, turning that anxiety into anger, and directing that anger outward at spouses, women in general, and the courts. They have been equally proficient at taking equality language that was originally developed out of social justice movements and using it to support traditional ideas of masculinity.

Activists need to re-engage with and support feminist and pro-feminist organizations in our community, reclaim the language of substantive equality, and contribute to rebuilding a national feminist movement to counter the fathers’ rights movement and push for real equality pre- and post-separation.

Sidebar: Challenging the myths of the fathers‘ rights movement

By Deanna Ogle

Myth #1 - Men face a disproportionate burden when paying child support

In 1997, the federal government brought forward child support guidelines to regulate the amount that non-residential parents are obligated to pay to support their children. Prior to the regulations being introduced, recipients of child support saw their income go down by 29 per cent after divorce and the income of the payers increased 20 per cent. Clearly there was a need to balance the situation.

These new guidelines calculated payments according to income and the number of children, and have helped set a common standard across Canada that had not previously existed. That same year, the tax law was changed so that child support payments were no longer tax deductible by the payee. For many men, these policy changes represented an increase in the support they were expected to pay. The fathers’ rights group Fathers Are Capable Too characterized the regulations as “arbitrary, greedy and [an] inaccurate formulation by people who knew better.”

But according to the courts, child support is the right of the child and in their view it is the right of children to enjoy a standard of living similar to that of the non-residential parent.

Myth #2 - Men face a women-friendly bias when applying for custody

There has been a dramatic shift over the past several years towards joint custody. Joint custody in Canada allows for a child to spend similar amounts of time with each parent and requires shared decision-making. Usually there is a primary parent and generous access for the non-residential parent, with major decisions like where the child attends school made by both parents. The difference between joint custody and equal shared parenting is that joint custody is awarded on a case-by-case basis and the decision is made based on the best interests of the child. In 2004, just under half of all custody cases were granted jointly; this number roughly equalled the number of cases where custody was given to the wife only. Sole custody was given to the father in only eight per cent of the cases that year. This has led fathers’ rights groups to argue that women receive custody whenever they ask for it and men almost never receive custody. However, given that decision-making and access to children is shared in almost half of all custody and access cases, it can hardly be said, as Fathers for Justice does on their website, that “family law has evolved from being anti-female to anti-male … the pendulum has swung too far.”

In his paper “Hard Time to be a Father: Reassessing the Relationship Between Law, Policy and Family,” Richard Collier, a British legal theorist on men and family law, challenges the assumption that custody should be 50/50 between men and women, arguing that it devalues the ongoing work of women in caring for children. Collier questions the courts’ emphasis on shifting parenting practices after the relationship has broken down and instead calls for men to be accountable for their parenting practices during relationships. According to Statistics Canada, men currently do not contribute 50 per cent of the labour of raising a child and make few of the career sacrifices, so joint custody represents a substantial shift in parenting dynamics. Contrary to the myth of a women-friendly court system, it seems that the courts are giving men the benefit of the doubt in awarding joint-custody in such large numbers.

A disturbing reality is that the likelihood of sole custody being given to the father may increase if the mother alleged that the father was abusive to her or the children during the course of their relationship. In survey of 100 self-identified protective parents by researchers at California State University, 94 per cent identified that they were the primary parent in the relationship prior to separation and 87 per cent had custody at the time of separation. However, after reporting child abuse only 27 per cent of the mothers were left with custody after the resulting court proceedings. Forty-five per cent of the mothers were labelled as causing “Parental Alienation Syndrome” in their children. (See below for a discussion of Parental Alienation Syndrome.)

Myth #3 - Women often make up stories of abuse to discredit the other parent’s custody bid

The fathers’ rights movement alleges that women lie to the courts and make up stories of abuse to “get back” at the father. Groups like Fathers are Capable Too argue that Parental Alienation Syndrome, a supposed condition with no scientific foundation, is a disorder that results from the dysfunctional and adversarial divorce system.

Only five per cent of separation and divorce cases end up as “high conflict” cases where parents are not able to come to a mutual agreement on custody, access and child support, but instead go to trial. High-conflict family law cases are often characterized by a history of violence within the family. If they acknowledge such violence, fathers’ rights activists characterize these cases as instances of men driven to violence over the stress of the legal battle, lashing out in anger at spouses who have unfairly denied their access to their children. However, many fathers’ rights sites don’t even bother to justify violence as they simply deny it exists, claiming that women unfairly and inaccurately fabricate stories of abuse in order to separate the children from their father.

This narrative of embittered women lashing out at helpless fathers through the children represents one of the main areas of pseudo-science that has emerged from the father’s rights movement: Parental Alienation Syndrome. Parental Alienation Syndrome was “discovered” by the late Dr. Richard Gardner in 1985 while he was working as a paid consultant to men charged with sexually abusing their children. Gardner defined Parental Alienation Syndrome as “a disorder that arises primarily in the context of child custody disputes.” He claimed that “it results from a combination of a programming (brainwashing) parent’s indoctrinations and the child’s own contributions to the vilification of the target parent.”

Gardner often dismissed claims of abuse voiced by children as merely symptoms of parental alienation, where one parent (typically the mother) has turned the children against the other parent.

Critics of Gardner’s work, and there are many, have highlighted that Parental Alienation Syndrome fails to account for the multiple factors potentially contributing to a child’s rejection of a parent, thus grossly oversimplifying a complex situation. Gardner justifies this simplification based on a very constrictive definition of how “real” sexually abused children behave. If an abused child does not behave in the narrow manner that Gardner proposes, he assumes no abuse has taken place. Thus, Parental Alienation Syndrome’s assessment procedures rely on a circular logic that almost guarantees the conclusion that a given child has the syndrome.

In Canada, two Queen’s University law professors, Nicholas Bala and John Schuman, reviewed 196 judges’ decisions between 1990 and 1998 where allegations of physical and sexual abuse were made in the context of separation in order to determine what patterns emerged. They found that judges concluded that only a third of all false allegations were a result of individuals deliberately lying in court. Moreover, the study found that men were far more likely to make intentionally false allegations of abuse, as 21 per cent of men brought forward intentionally false allegations compared to only 1.3 per cent of women.

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PART ONE: PREAMBLE
We come from eighty countries. We are men and women, young and old, working side by side with respect and shared goals. We are active in community organizations, religious and educational institutions; we are representatives of governments, NGOs and the United Nations. We speak many languages, we look like the diverse peoples of the world and carry their diverse beliefs and religions, cultures, physical abilities, and sexual and gender identities. We are indigenous peoples, immigrants, and ones whose ancestors moved across the planet. We are fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, brothers and sisters, partners and lovers, husbands and wives.

What unites us is our strong outrage at the inequality that still plagues the lives of women and girls, and the self-destructive demands we put on boys and men. But even more so, what brings us together here is a powerful sense of hope, expectation, and possibility for we have seen the capacity of men and boys to change, to care, to cherish, to love passionately, and to work for justice for all.

We are outraged by the pandemic of violence women face at the hands of some men, by the relegation of women to second class status, and the continued domination by men of our economies, of our politics, of our social and cultural institutions, in far too many of our homes. We also know that among women there are those who fare even worse because of their social class, their religion, their language, their physical differences, their ancestry, their sexual orientation, or simply where they live.

There are deep costs to boys and men from the ways our societies have defined men’s power and raised boys to be men. Boys deny their humanity in search of an armor-plated masculinity. Young men and boys are sacrificed as cannon fodder in war for those men of political, economic, and religious power who demand conquest and domination at any cost. Many men cause terrible harm to themselves because they deny their own needs for physical and mental care or lack services when they are in need.

Too many men suffer because our male-dominated world is not only one of power of men over women, but of some groups of men over others. Too many men, like too many women, live in terrible poverty, in degradation, or are forced to do body- or soul-destroying work to put food on the table.

Too many men carry the deep scars of trying to live up to the impossible demands of manhood and find terrible solace in risk-taking, violence, self-destruction or the drink and drugs sold to make a profit for others. Too many men experience violence at the hands of other men.

Too many men are stigmatized and punished for the simple fact they love, desire and have sex with other men.

We are here because we know that the time when women stood alone in speaking out against discrimination and violence – that this time is coming to an end.

We also know this: This belief in the importance of engaging men and boys is no longer a remote hope. We see the emergence of organizations and campaigns that are directly involving hundreds of thousands, millions of men in almost every country on the planet. We hear men and boys speaking out against violence, practicing safer sex, and supporting women’s and girl’s reproductive rights. We see men caring, loving, and nurturing for other men and for women. We see men who embrace the daily challenges of looking after babies and children, and delight in their capacity to be nurturers. We see many men caring for the planet and rejecting conquering nature just as men once conquered women.

We are gathering not simply to celebrate our first successes, but, with all the strength we possess, to appeal to parents, teachers, and coaches, to the media and businesses, to our governments, NGOs, religious institutions, and the United Nations, to mobilize the political will and economic resources required to increase the scale and impact of work with men and boys to promote gender equality. We know how critical it is that institutions traditionally controlled by men reshape their policies and priorities to support gender equality and the well-being of women, children, and men. And we know that a critical part of that is to reshape the world of men and boys, the beliefs of men and boys, and the lives of men and boys.

FULL ARTICLE

Feminism, the political movement for women’s autonomy (not some abstract ‘equality’ within the very categories established by millenia of patriarchy), is an essential component of any political struggle that takes the integrity of the human body as its point of departure. More than that, however, feminism is the precondition of any lasting social transformation, because patriarchy as both the political and metaphorical model for all relations of domination is the most long-standing, persistent, and intractable cultural form of oppressive power. [...]
“There is no ideology that is experienced with the same personal and emotional force, that is perceived more like a law of nature, that is imprinted earlier or with more relentlessness during the socialization of individual human beings, than gender – and in the actually-existing world, that means male and female as masculinity and femininity, in a hierarchical relation.”
Stan Goff, Energy War

This issue of Briarpatch is a temporary androgynous zone in the no-man’s land between male and female. It is addressed neither (just) to women nor (just) to men, but to anyone who is serious about putting principles of social justice into practice.

Every March, we devote an issue to the politics of gender. We used to call this the “women’s issue” - Briarpatch is, after all, a feminist publication and women’s autonomy is, as Stan Goff suggests above, integral to the success of any struggle for a more equitable and sustainable society. But designating gender a “women’s issue,” as if the articles it carried would only be of interest to women or the issues addressed were only the responsibility of women, always struck me as both a lost opportunity and a tactical mistake for a magazine with as many male readers as female. Gender-based violence and discrimination impact all of us (in different ways, certainly, and to different degrees), and are the shared responsibility of all of us to address together.

Although gender, as Goff observes, tends to express itself in the real world as “masculinity and femininity in a hierarchical relation,” I would suggest that the concept of gender is best approached as fluid, malleable and socially constructed. Gender essentialism - the belief that men are from Mars and women are from Venus - is a dead-end which feminist and queer activists and theorists have made important strides in escaping. When we approach gender as an androgynous zone rather than viewing male and female as sovereign territories aligned in opposition to one another, interesting possibilities begin to emerge.

This is not to say that we have transcended the need for gender-exclusive spaces. Whether it be educational spaces like the Prairie School for Union Women or political spaces like take-back-the-night marches, the designation and defence of women-only spaces is an important part of our educational and political work.

(This cuts both ways, though. There is currently a dangerous vacuum of pro-feminist, anti-oppressive, men-only spaces dedicated to providing men with the resources to work through issues of conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, substance abuse, intimacy, commitment, parenting and healthy sexuality in a supportive environment. (The Saskatoon Men’s Resource Centre is one notable exception.)

This lack of support leaves many men woefully ill-equipped for the emotional challenges and personal struggles they may face. In extreme cases, such men become easy targets for recruitment by neo-Nazis, criminal gangs and anti-feminist men’s groups - all of which are quick to exploit recruits’ feelings of doubt, fear, shame and confusion by channeling those feelings into anger, that most masculine of emotions, and then setting that anger loose on an external target.)

If we only ever speak to women and girls about gender, we doom our efforts to build communities grounded in women’s autonomy and sexual diversity. We need androgynous zones where men and women can learn and converse together about these issues. This magazine is intended as such a space.

Next issue: Briarpatch goes undercover to investigate “crime, punishment, and other miscarriages of justice.”

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