Guest Post: Fightback Magazine - Voices from Women and Gender Minorities

Fightback is a socialist-feminist organisation which publishes a website and themed bi-monthly magazines. This August, we are bringing together an issue that is edited, designed and written entirely by women and gender minorities on the kaupapa of anti capitalism / decolonisation / socialism / anti-racism / feminism.

Despite the centrality of women, girls and gender minorities to the social movements of today, we are still a smaller minority of writers in the socialist press. Fightback acknowledges that there are many reasons for this, some of them including the fact that these groups are weighed down by more unpaid work, that our work may not be as valued and that there's a higher chance we will come up against barriers for our involvement in political spaces.

Instead of just offering a space for writers to be read and heard, we are also raising money to support contributors in a tangible way – by paying a rate of $NZ100 per page of content. We understand that writing and creating takes time, and how much of our political work is unpaid labour. By offering this payment, we hope that people who usually wouldn’t have as much time or resources, can focus on creating a contribution they are proud of and offers further insight into anti-capitalist politics.

Fightback will be covering the printing costs, however, we are asking for donations to pay for the funding that will go to the contributors.

If you are keen to support this project, there are a couple of options:

1. Write for us! We are looking for articles, art, comics, poetry or design work to be a part of this issue. If you are interested in contributing, then please submit a pitch of your idea (can be a couple of sentences) by May 20^th (late submissions may be accepted). Our priority areas are perspectives from tangata whenua, Pasifika peoples, immigrants and gender diverse people. If your piece is relevant to these perspectives let us know. We are also open to supporting new writers, if you would like some help in developing an idea. 
    
2. Help us make sure writers are paid!  While we aren’t expecting women and gender minorities to fund this project, we would really appreciate you sharing the Pledgeme link with your networks, or passing it onto male supporters who would be keen to donate. 

If you have any queries about the project or how you can take part, feel free to get in touch with Fightback.

Why Do Women MPs Oppose Quotas for Women?

This a guest post by Dr Morgan Healey. Morgan completed her PhD through the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 2009 focussing on Irish women politicians and their experiences of gendered political spaces.

Reading the news (and in particular social media) yesterday I was incredibly disheartened to see statements from both men and women MPs discounting the potential Labour party policy calling for temporary special measures to ensure a 50:50 gender representation in the Caucus by 2017. It is a laudable goal for Labour and one that all political parties should strive for. But the misogynist discussion that followed the announcement of the policy showed exactly what women MPs have to face within the political party machinery when it comes to fighting for selection and running a successful campaign. The sophistry of equal opportunity for women and the idea that ‘good’ women candidates do not require any additional support because they will get elected on merit must be contested if this debate is to move forward.

The construction of politics as ‘jobs for the boys’ has created myriad barriers to women entering politics. Research by feminist political scientists and theorists has attempted to grapple with the gendering of political tenets, such as the abstract individual, the social contract and those dealing with the systemic limitations of not being selected to run, facing a political party system that prioritises ‘proven’ men politicians, rewarding them with safe, winnable seats (or a high number on the list), and so on. If women do manage to succeed, and make their way through the myriad gates that block their inclusion to win a seat and enter Parliament, the discrimination continues. Women with children face non-family friendly working hours, for example, being away from home for three nights a week, needing a relatively high and stable income to afford child care and perhaps assistance in the home (with the assumption still that if they are married their husbands will also be in paid work).

What is insidious about all of this is the tightrope women politicians are forced to walk between trying to belong (i.e. be the ‘same’ as the men politicians) and at the same time using their gender to promote a ‘different’ way of doing politics – one that simultaneously or strategically sets them apart for the sea of men. It is within this context that I want to unpick some of the unhelpful comments made by women MPs themselves, and argue that acts of belonging to the political gendered norm (read men) are being played out in these comments. Specifically, arguments against the proposal seem to be focus on notions of merit vs special treatment, with the latter providing a dangerous precedent whereby a woman’s gender can be used and named to detract from an already tenuous attempt at belonging.

I have a bit of experience when it comes to women in politics.. My PhD thesis, “The Naturalised Politician: How Irish Women Politicians Construct their Political Subjectivities”, examined the lived experiences of then-serving women politicians in both the lower and upper house of Parliament (known as the Oireachtas in Irish). I used a poststructural feminist framework to investigate how the women I interviewed understood and articulated their own gendered political subject positions as politicians, so please excuse some modest use of this frame and some of the associated language below. While I won’t attempt to provide a wholesale summary of my thesis, I do want to return to one of the overarching themes that came across when I interviewed the women – that is, a muted sense of belonging – and how I think this is playing out in relation to the current political storm over temporary special measures.

So what does ‘belonging’ mean and require of women in politics? And how does it play out?  Academic theorists like Breda Gray (2002), Ruth McElroy (2002), Anne-Marie Fortier (1999), and Elspeth Probyn (1996) have used notions of belonging to deconstruct how identities or processes of identification are produced. They argue that individuals, groups, or nations are constructed along dichotomous relations of insider/outsider, and that these are often produced along racial, ethnic and gender lines. As Anne-Marie Fortier (2002) argues, the social and historical practices which mark out terrains of belonging or commonalities amongst groups delineates the dynamics by which people/groups fit into the norm. My argument is that an important element of women politicians’ ability to belong to the ‘gendered spaces’ of politics is conditional upon their ability to show they too can ‘fit in’. If we assume that being a politician is an example of Fortier’s ‘group identity’ and argue that through the gendering of this category as ‘man’ certain terrains of belonging are marked out, then women’s ability to belong and be considered legitimate politicians will be based on their ability to approximate the male norms of politics.

It's Time to Change Your (Facebook) Gender

Feminists were pretty pleased when Facebook bowed to user – well, OK, advertiser – pressure last month and promised it would do more to keep violent and misogynistic ads off its pages. According to The New York Times, activists sent more than 5,000 emails to FB’s advertisers and sparked more than 60,000 Tweets. (Or “posts on Twitter” as the NYT calls them). Of course, it’s early days and we’ll have to see what action is taken and how effective it will be.

Now, with that campaign checked off, I have a suggestion for another one. This one takes aim at something possibly just as pernicious, but definitely way more insidious.

Those of you FB users out who are either “FB-Female” or “FB-Male” will almost certainly have noticed it. (NB. I’m treating FB genders as just that, FB genders, not real-world genders; and, yes, FB only offers the binary, but wait up, I'll get to that -- and how to get around it -- at the end.) What I'm talking about are those targeted ads that, once you start paying attention, reinforce some of the most noxious  stereotypes around.

This all started back in May, when one add in particularly really started to bug me.
  

I bitched about it on FB, of course, and was advised to instal an ad blocker, which I did. But that only blocks (most not all) ads in your News Feed, and does nothing about the sponsored ads down the right-panel. Still, I didn’t mind those so much; they’re easier to avert the eyes from and occasionally even slightly relevant. Skinny Spotlight Woman, on the other hand, was always there, front, centre and right at the very top, her torso looking suspiciously like it's about to spawn an alien. Is it supposed to be a rib? (And no, I never ever click, so I did not bring this on myself!)

After Skinny Spotlight Woman disappeared from my Feed, though, I started to pay more attention to the right-hand panel. Yes, there she was again. Just smaller this time. As were myriad other ads telling me what I could do to make myself thinner, sexier, leaner, better dressed. I started tracking them by taking screen shots, and one day, it hit me: wow targeted stereotyping is really quite nasty and insidious. Out in the real world, we might be doing all we can to challenge all those restrictive -isms, we might be turning our eyes from the celebrity diet gossip mag covers at the checkout stand (to the candy), but on FB and elsewhere, the tide is pushing relentlessly in the other direction. 

I got to wondering what kind of crap the “male” version of me might be told to be, to buy, to look like, to aspire to; what kind of things "he" would be gently advised should inspire self-loathing?  And I decided it might be interesting to find out. There are, I know, myriad other things that factor into what kind of person FB’s ads think I am and should be: age, education, location, other stuff I’ve "liked", crap my friends "like" (you know who you are), relationship status and so on. The list is endless and endlessly spooky, and the people who keep warning us about cyber-Big Brother know way more about it than I do. But just so you know: for the purposes of my research, I’m in my early 30s and live in the Bay of Plenty and obviously tend politically feminist/progressive. (Because FB’s terms and conditions state that “you will not provide any false personal information on Facebook”, I’ll neither confirm nor deny any of this, particularly the age part, but I'll just say this: “you are only as old as you feel”. When I signed up, I only gave FB the info I had to give it, so my profile is free of everything that's not mandatory, like "religion", "political views", education, and so on. )

Bottom line, nothing changed for the purposes of this experiment but my "FB gender". (Oh, and I did remove the ad blocker). So, if you're interested, here are the illustrated results of my research, followed at the end by a conclusion with some recommendations.

Moving beyond Marriage Equality

Three events in Wellington this week of interest to the queer and trans* communities in moving beyond Marriage Equality.

Firstly, tonight, Wellington Gay Welfare Group is hosting an event exploring "Suicidality, Our Communities and Authorities Response".  More details here.  We know the rates of self-harm and suicide are higher for queer and gender diverse people, and it's time our systems of response both paid attention to that, and set about demanding a social environment which would prevent it in the first place.  Which means queering our schools, which means removing discrimination, which means representations of queer and gender diverse people everywhere, which means a whole bunch of education.  Ending homophobia, biphobia and transphobia, embedded in systems of sexism and cis-sexism which promote harmful, unrealistic gender norms.

Second event on Thursday 18th April, post Marriage Equality passing (and yep, I'll be partying) is hosted by the Human Rights Commission, "Human Rights priorities for intersex, trans and queer people."  Details for the Wellington event here but you can join in from other parts of the country too.  This event will discuss key issues for our communities, with a view to bringing them forward to the UN Universal Periodic Review.

And finally, from Wednesday 17th April, if you'd like the chance to become street theatre while dressed in a donated wedding dress, come be part of Brides - particularly open to queer and gender diverse peeps.  This is a Barbarian Productions event which the organisers describe as:

Bearing in mind the current passage of the Marriage Equality Bill through parliament, Brides asks visitors to come inside and watch / speak / sing / share in a free-wheeling public discussion on the meaning, relevance, and experience of marriage: the ritual, the institution, the dress.

It's going to be a queer old week in Wellie :-)

When census forms don't fit, it's time to double the tick

A friend and I were talking about what gender diversity would look like on a form recently, because she was having to design something to collect data for work.  The last couple of times I've been developing forms, I've created a "Gender" category and left it open for people to self-identify.

But I'm not collecting data about four million people, like Statistics New Zealand in the census, so the diverse responses I get (from female to intersex to ftm to sometimes to yes to genderqueer to mtf to male) can be managed.  I recognise Stats NZ probably need to find "categories."  I just don't recognise that those categories need to be limited to "Male" and "Female."

Which is why the campaign for two ticks is important.  Unless this issue is publicised - nope, those two labels don't meet all of our gender diverse needs - Stats NZ are unlikely to change their thinking.

I identify as and love being a cis woman.  But I'll be ticking both gender boxes this census, to show solidarity with people who are unrepresented by our current gender options.  As the Facebook campaign page makes clear, this is a broader issue:

If Statistics New Zealand expands its understanding of gender and officially recognises genders outside of the male/female binary, institutions all over Aotearoa will be able to do the same.
Currently institutions are prevented from recognising gender diversity because they have to provide information consistent with Statistics New Zealand's requirements.

Get your ticks on next Tuesday if you agree.