The last-minute cancellation of the Feminist March that was set to take place in Amsterdam earlier this year due to safety concerns and organizational challenges led the organizers and participants of the march to ponder the challenges facing feminist activism. In this blog article, Elliot YangYang, who attended the event as a participant, reflects on what transpired and highlights the importance of maintaining agency amidst external pressures.
Photo by Claudio Schwarz on UnsplashPhoto
On 10 March, just two days after International Women’s Day, a march for women’s rights organized by Feminist March was set to take place in Amsterdam. Feminist March is an organisation that focuses on protests and different feminist programmes. The purpose of the march with the same name was “to work to strengthen the bonds within the feminist community and build a brighter, more equitable future for all of us.”
But the march was unexpectedly cancelled approximately three hours before the official assembly time through an announcement by the organisation, which on its official website and social media platforms cited safety concerns, exacerbated by unpredictable circumstances, the presence of law enforcement bodies, and a shortage of volunteers for crowd control. While the official event was cancelled, some participants nevertheless gathered and unofficially marched through the streets of Amsterdam.
Five days later, the organization released a statement announcing its dissolution following the resignation of some board members and the general manager, citing the inability to meet the expectations of supporters and allies. This came as a surprise to those of us who had signed up to participate in the march, yet it is unsurprising given the myriad challenges that feminist movements face. This article reflects on my experience of the spontaneous march that took place after the formal event’s cancellation and offers reflections on the challenges facing feminist marches today.
The show must go on
Even though I knew that the event had been cancelled, I still made my way to the original gathering location, Dam Square. It was comforting to see that, despite the significantly reduced turnout, around 100 people had nevertheless gathered there, spontaneously giving speeches and walking together from Dam Square to Museum Square. Most of them came on their own initiative, and their demands were varied, ranging from concerns about the current war in Gaza, to women’s rights in general, to the rights of queers and a variety of other demands. The crowd gathered spontaneously to form an improvised protest space.
When I arrived at Dam Square, a group of Palestinian protesters were already on the scene, separately protesting the war on Gaza. Then the feminist community joined the protest they had started in solidarity with the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, aligning with the “intersectional” ethos advocated by the third wave of feminism.(1) The topic of focus remained close to the feminist interests of responding to real crises, especially to wars disproportionately affecting women, children, and marginalized and vulnerable people. The marchers thereafter split up: feminists and protesters against the war on Gaza remained on the scene, while a group of Turkish feminist activists began waving their flags and initiated a separate walk.
Showing up instead of staying away
As an activist, I often find myself grappling with the following concern: under the umbrella structure of the march as a spectrum that accommodates all individuals, how can organizations and individual activists alike navigate different challenges without losing sight of their core objectives and the issues they seek to address?
The failure to communicate different perspectives and expectations seemed to be a core reason for the Feminist March’s cancellation and the eponymous organization’s dissolution. It is a pity that this impeded our efforts. But we can also learn from it.
I posed the above question to Came Bilgin and Song Song — two participants of the march whom I interviewed. Before that, we had a conversation about their experiences as activists. Came Bilgin is a feminist activist from the Workers’ Party of Turkey, which insisted on continuing the march despite its cancellation. She mentioned that rallies and marches represent an active presence of activists, especially in environments such as Turkey fraught with state violence and pervasive social malice. Therefore, despite being aware of the decision to cancel the march, she still appeared at the scene along with other members of her organization to participate in the march. They did not think it would have been more dangerous to participate in a march in the Netherlands than in the feminist marches in Turkey, which shows a different perspective from the organizers of the march, who believed that it was not safe to protest.
This sentiment resonated with Song Song, a Chinese student studying in the Netherlands who had participated in the march as an individual. They also emphasized the importance and symbolic significance of simply showing up, which protesters did even when facing severe violence during protests in China. Thus, they also felt that despite possible safety concerns, it was worth showing up.
On-site photos (Workers’ Party of Turkey). Photo provided by the organiser.
Both interviewees expressed their discontent regarding the organization’s abrupt cancellation of the event and voiced their disappointment about the diminished turnout compared to previous years. Nevertheless, they commended the spontaneous march that ensued for showing the persistence of the protesters in marching for their cause.
Finding a voice and maintaining agency
Song Song’s response in particular opened up my exploration into how both organizations and individuals maintain their agency when setting agendas before and during marches. ‘This was my first time shouting feminist slogans in Chinese at a rally; it had never occurred in an organized form before. We don’t necessarily need them [the Feminist March organization itself],’ remarked Song Song. They believed that because it was an unorganized, agenda-less march, they had the opportunity to tell their story in their own language. This reflects an ongoing power dynamic where activists from different backgrounds seek to use their own language to voice their concerns and to legitimize their agendas in organized gatherings. Finding their voice in marches led by organizations from the global north can be challenging, particularly for activists from the global south, who often cannot hold large-scale protests and rallies in their own countries.
However, this is not an insurmountable problem. The decentralized place-making of spontaneous marches directly undermines this barrier. The configuration of the march as a form of “autonomy” can be “reconfigured by new and complex scale politics that reconfigure the relationship between the scale (and location) of its activities. This creates the conditions for future possibilities. In this way, a more grassroots, decentralised and extensive network can be formed.” As soon as these actors from the global south are able to reconstruct the march with will, the march spontaneously takes place.
On-site photos (Asian feminists). Photo provided by the organiser.
Improvisation and spontaneous alternatives
In her article on “margin spaces,” American author and social critic Bell Hooks suggests that our lives depend on our ability to conceive alternative possibilities, often improvised. The spontaneous march that occurred on 10 March directly responded to the challenges faced when organized marches fail. The unplanned and improvised marching creations of the activists instead created space for radical culture.
Not deterred
This march moreover took place amidst the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which exacerbated the challenges faced by those marching for other causes amidst the tensions between the political stance and actions of the Dutch government and the societal response. However, the spontaneous marchers who still showed up on the scene did not relinquish their feminist identities and spaces, demonstrating both their ability to assess and respond to risks and their wisdom in conceiving alternative solutions, thereby truly asserting their agency in shaping discourse and action. The “decentralized” mode still embodies its radical potential that emerges from scarcity and its ability to create spaces of resistance.
Endnotes
Mann, S. A., & Huffman, D. J. (2005). “The decentering of second wave feminism and the rise of the third wave,” Science & society, 69(1 — special issue), 56–91.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the author:
Elliot Yang Yang
Elliot Yang Yang is a queer feminist who studied Human Rights, Gender, and Conflict Studies at ISS, specialized in Women and Gender Studies. His research interests include transnational queer feminist movements and the intersections of gender, sexuality, and immigration.
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The emergence of feminist analysis and advocacies within the humanitarian field offers opportunities to engage with and reflect on current practices. In this blog article, Gabriela Villacis Izquierdo & Kaira Zoe Cañete explore and consider the wide range of feminist approaches to humanitarian action presented during their panel at the International Humanitarian Studies Association Conference in 2023. They look into the multiple ways in which feminist approaches can lead to more equitable and desirable outcomes whilst also highlighting the potential of embracing these approaches to contribute to reforms within the sector.
“Are we trying to turn the humanitarian system into something that it could never become?”
This was a provocation laid down by one of the speakers in a panel that we (Gabriela and Kaira) organized at the 7thInternational Humanitarian Studies Association (IHSA) Conference held in Dhaka in November 2023. The panel, titled “Mapping Feminist Approaches to Humanitarian Action”, invited conceptual, empirical, methodological, and practice-based papers to discuss the significance of feminist approaches to humanitarian action.
As an initiative under the ERC-funded Humanitarian Governance Project, the panel asked: In what ways can humanitarian practices be considered ‘feminist’? How can feminist advocacies, approaches, and research methodologies help address the challenges in contemporary humanitarian practices and governance? This article reflects on the presentations from the panel, which includes our own collaborative work, and highlights emergent themes and opportunities for advancing feminist approaches in humanitarian research and practice.
Constructing instead of extracting knowledge
The panel featured diverse presentations that underscored feminist contributions to addressing the complexities of humanitarian crises, beginning with how feminist methodologies can be useful for constructing knowledge about experiences of crises (to read all abstracts, visit the IHSA website). Vani Bhardwaj for instance presented her work on Bangladesh and how environmental impacts of humanitarian response can have gendered consequences. She problematized how approaches of INGOs working in the field, with their reliance on “traditional” data collection tools, can create and perpetuate (colonial) hierarchies, such as the extraction of knowledge and the reinforcement of power relations between researcher and “subjects” or “beneficiaries”.
Situated designs for mobility justice
Similarly, Emmanuel Kodwo Mensah from social enterprise Includovate introduced a mobility mapping methodology he developed with Dr. Kristie Drucza while studying South Sudanese refugees in Uganda, where mobility justice seems to be a distant possibility, especially for women. Through this approach, they were able to focus on the lived experiences of refugee women and men, who are also dealing with the negative impacts of climate change and could unveil the intricate realities that are behind the categories of “refugee” and “migrant”. This contribution provokes us to explore ways in which humanitarian responses can adopt a more situated design towards the achievement of mobility justice. Moreover, the presenters’ reflections motivated us to further explore the notion of allyship and ‘positive masculinities’ within the feminist approaches inside and outside the humanitarian realm.
At different levels, we could identify with Vani’s and Emmanuel’s analysis, as our own presentation in the panel aimed to share our experiences of doing feminist research in humanitarian and disasters contexts. Based on two different case studies – the Philippines and Colombia – we argued that despite the challenges posed by doing research in settings of crisis, it is important and possible to meaningfully engage with research participants and embody feminist principles of research, such as collaborative knowledge construction, awareness of intersectional identities of participants and researchers, and research as a two-way and relational process. For us, feminist methodologies have the potential to centre the situated and lived experiences of people affected and involve them in processes of knowledge-building.
Alternative forms of humanitarian action
A second set of presentations delved into alternative forms of humanitarian action. Gabrielle Daoust and Synne Dyvik highlighted one of the current humanitarian crises in Europe: the Ukraine war. They focused on the notion of private humanitarian hospitality through the case of the “Homes for Ukraine” scheme in the United Kingdom. The presentation was an invitation for us to reflect on the privatization of humanitarian responses as marked by a virtual outsourcing of government responsibility to private individuals in dealing with refugees.
This type of humanitarian response and the associated shifting of the ‘humanitarian space’ into the private and domestic sphere is enabled by particular gendered and racialised conceptions of the home (especially in relation to traditional notions of care work) and of humanitarian hospitality more broadly. In this case, white women from Ukraine are welcomed in the private spaces of UK citizens due to their perceived “harmless” identities as mothers and caregivers. Such a case would be different for other racialised refugees, especially men.
A critical look at the survivor-centred approach (SCA)
Inspired by their own experiences working on gender-based violence (GBV) during crises, Ilaria Michelis, Jane Makepeace, and Chen Reis presented a critical discourse analysis of the survivor centred approach (SCA) within humanitarian responses. For the presenters, the SCA has moved away from its feminist roots and objectives to become a technocratic tool. Humanitarian actors and service providers retain control while survivors’ choices are limited by rigid models and external assessments of their safety. As feminist practitioners and researchers, Ilaria, Jane and Chen challenged these practices within the humanitarian system and advocated for locally and survivor-led initiatives. Their recently published paper can be found here.
Knowledge extraction and the creation of dependency relations
Finally, María González presented her research about the resistance of the Tal’3at movement in Palestine from a decolonial, feminist, and critical lens. During her collaborative research with members of the Tal’3at movement, they identified how women in Palestine faced three main roots of oppression: occupation, patriarchy, and “the NGOs”. In relation to the theme of the panel, María focused on the ways in which international NGOs in Palestine tended to co-opt resistance efforts of women in Palestine through knowledge extraction and creation of dependency. Importantly, María showed how the Tal’3at movement counteracted these “structures of oppression” through political and anti-colonial engagement to advance freedom of all Palestinians.
Feminist approaches: a big step toward more equitable ways of doing things
By summarizing the different contributions to the panel, we intend to demonstrate the richness and diversity of feminist thinking and initiatives in this space. Over the last few years, feminist organizations have articulated the need to transform the humanitarian system not least of all for its tendency to privilege certain (Northern-centric and patriarchal) values, approaches, and worldviews. They have sought to make humanitarian action more attentive to the gendered, racialized, and lived experiences of crises thereby making aid more accountable, responsive, and accessible to those most affected. The emergence of feminist analysis and advocacies within the humanitarian field offers opportunities to engage with and reflect on current practices.
However, the ideas emanating from this are rarely brought into direct conversation with other (mainstream and non-mainstream) strands of humanitarian research and practice. Attention to context and lived experiences of crises, gendered power relations in humanitarian settings, intersectionality, and forms of care that are vital for survival and recovery are some of the contributions that a feminist perspective can bring to discussions not only on how humanitarian response can be “effective” but also transformative.
Through this panel, we have attempted to highlight some of these opportunities for further thinking and action that would help us address some of the challenges that beset humanitarian practice at present. The themes that arose in the panel discussion are certainly far from exhaustive, but they indicate valuable insights that are enabled through an application of feminist perspectives, ethics, and methodologies.
Going back to our collective concern — are we trying to turn the humanitarian system into something that it could never become? — we are convinced that it is possible, when we see what people on the ground are doing in their everyday practices of humanitarian action. We hope to be able to move further with this initiative and explore if and how feminist approaches can make a difference in the ways we respond to crises.
Acknowledgements
We are deeply grateful to each one of the participants who share their knowledges and work during the panel.
Disclaimer
This blog article is part of the work of the Humanitarian Governance, accountability, advocacy, alternatives project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 884139.
About the authors
Gabriela Villacis Izquierdo is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the alternative forms of humanitarian governance in Colombia, with an emphasis on feminist approaches and the potential of collective action, advocacy, and care.
Kaira Zoe Alburo-Cañete is Senior Researcher at the Humanitarian Studies Centre, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research interests include examining the everyday politics and ethics of living with, responding to, and recovering from disasters and other forms of crises.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
The Green New Deal has become a central focus of debates around ecosocialist politics; this list brings together diverse resources to foster critical reflection on its potential and limitations.
Credit: Becker1999 on Flickr, CC BY 2.0
The global socioeconomic and climate crises have been accompanied by an expansion of social movements and public debates and proposals for transforming our societies towards just and ecologically sustainable futures. Increasingly, these proposals are coalescing under the banner of a Green New Deal (GND).
The GND concept began circulating in the wake of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis and related discussions about governments’ recovery plans. It seems to have been coined in a 2007 article by economist Thomas Friedman, who called for a government plan which would seed basic research to incentivize corporate ‘green’ innovations. Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama adopted the ideas as part of his campaign with promises of a “green” recovery – one which never really materialized. The US Green Party also made it a focus of its presidential campaign in 2012.
In the UK, the New Economics Foundation published a report in 2008 focused on solving what they described as a “triple crunch” of the credit crisis, climate change and high oil prices. The European Greens published and campaigned around a similar report in 2009, focused on public and private investment for “green modernization” or ‘eco-industries’ in the recovery process, in transport and renewable energies, as well as the worldwide transfer of these technologies. At the international level, the United Nations Environmental Program published a report at the time calling for a “Global Green New Deal”.
Over the last two years, the GND concept has garnered great attention in the political debate in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. It has also started to be discussed as a strategy from and for the Global South, with analyses from Africa and Latin America, as well as proposals for a global GND. The history of the GND shows the variegated ideological underpinnings which persist to this day. The term is still being partially embraced by neoliberal and liberal neo-Keynesian forces, as seen in the European Union’s call for a European “Green Deal”, focused on a supposedly “green growth”. From this perspective, any techno-“green” or renewable energy initiative could be called a Green New Deal. As noted recently by a journalist, everyone seems to want a seat in the GND bandwagon these days. This risks making it another empty term, like sustainability.
Yet today’s version of the GND comes in a very different context than the original use and has become symbolically associated mainly with left ecosocialist politics, partly related with the growth of Democratic Socialist and radical left tendencies within and outside the US Democratic Party, as well as increasing discussions about the global crisis of inequality and socio-environmental injustices. Radical versions of the GND put forth a more comprehensive strategic vision and programmatic proposal to transition to a carbon-free economy that avoids climate catastrophe, and in turn addresses the economic and inequality crisis.
This entails an energy transition towards a 100% renewable system, along with a guarantee of employment with living wages, other measures to strengthen labor rights, and policies to guarantee social justice towards the working class and historically marginalized communities. Other policies that are being discussed include a universal basic income, a progressive tax reform, suspension of payments or abolition of the external debt, and a national care system. At the international level, the GND is being proposed as a measure of mitigation of the climate debt that rich countries have with the countries of the Global South, and addressing the persistence of stark North-South inequalities.
A crucial difference today is the influence on GND debates from climate movements that have burst into the scene with force over the last five years or so, and which come from decades of building grassroots local and transnational power. This new moment was epitomized by the US-based Sunrise Movement (re)coining the GND in its occupation of the office of Democratic House representative Nancy Pelosi to demand swift climate action in 2018, a demand taken up by Democratic Socialist representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Climate Justice Alliance – composed of more than 70 grassroots organizations – deepened the discussions by linking the GND with longer-standing proposals for climate justice and just transitions, and emphasizing that a GND should be led by frontline communities and workers most impacted by climate change, who have been leading climate justice struggles and solutions.
Such a radical turn is accompanied by a lively debate about the limits and potentials of GND to transcend capitalism, its growth imperative and its crises, and about which actors should lead this transition. Crucial issues, like the need for “socializing” means of production and reproduction, such as energy, land or housing – which had been pushed to the margin by three decades of neoliberalism – have been again brought to the center of the political debate (no less than in the US, the belly of the capitalist beast).
Some commentators on the Left remain skeptical, pointing to the intrinsic limitations of the concept, asking important critical questions about whether the GND is ultimately capable of overcoming the “coloniality” and problematic socio-ecological implications of capitalist development. Yet, scholars and activists from different movements are appropriating the concept and making their own variants of it, including an ecological-economic and degrowth GND, a people-led and frontline communities’ GND, a feminist GND, an indigenous (‘Red’) Deal, or an Ecosocial Pact (Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, as it has been labelled in Latin America).
In this moment of struggle over the meaning of the GND as a “master signifier” of eco-socialist politics, we want to offer this reading list as a way of providing an introduction to this diversity of positions and stimulating further debate. The list is structured by type of resource (books, academic journals, blogs and magazines, reports and briefs, audiovisual resources and movement campaigns), with the exception of sources in Spanish, which are grouped in one section following this introduction.
The annex at the bottom collects additional materials that are not directly on the GND, but offer relevant research and reflections on related themes of just transition(s) and energy and sustainability transitions. This is a relatively small sample of sources out of the hundreds we collected and received from friends and colleagues (see the “acknowledgements” at the end of this post), selected mainly on the basis of their relevance to political ecology debates. We hope you find it useful in your political-ecological praxis.
Cohen, Maev and Sheryl McGregor (2020) Towards a feminist Green New Deal for the UK (A paper for the WBG Commission on a Gender-equal economy). Women’s Budget Group & Women’s Environmental Network (Briefing here).
New Economics Foundation – Weekly Economics Podcast (moderated by Ayeisha Thomas-Smith), What’s the deal with the Green New Deal? (with Ann Pettifor, Miatta Fahnbulleh, and Waleed Shahid). February 26, 2019.
The Intercept, The Right to a Future, Naomi Klein with Greta Thunberg, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, Xiye Bastida, Vic Barrett, and Tuntiak Katan, September 10, 2019.
The Leap, 3-part webinar series on Naomi Klein’s book On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal (moderated by Avi Lewis), october-november, 2019.
Just Transition Research Collaborative – JRTC (2018) Mapping Just Transition(s)to a Low-Carbon World. JRTC, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) and Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
We want to thank the following people for sharing suggestions for this list, including some who sent entire lists of their own: Joseph Nevins, Jevgeniy Bluwstein, Levi Van Sant, Camille Laurent, Luis Gutiérrez, Steven A. Wolf, Mary Lawhon, Daniela Sánchez López, Fletcher Chmara-Huff, Dimitris Stevis, Daniel Gabaldón-Estevan, Rachel Slocum, Susan Paulson, Erik Kojola, Nathan J. Bennett, Riccardo Mastini, Sam Bliss, Stephan Lorenz, Jeremy Sorgen, Betsy Taylor, Kathryn Anderson, Mattias Borg Rasmussen, Elise Remling, Christos Zografos, Stefania Barca, Martí Orta Martínez, Sofía Ávila Calero, and Michael Méndez.
This blog was originally published on Undisciplined Environments and has been republished with permission of the authors.
About the authors:
Gustavo García-López is an engaged scholar-activist with a transdisciplinary training, building on institutional analysis, environmental policy and planning, and political ecology approaches. Starting the 1st of September 2019, Dr Gustavo García López will hold the Prince Claus Chair for two years at the International Institute of Social Studies with the focus on ‘Sustainable Development, Inequalities and Environmental Justice’. His research and practice centers on grassroots collective commoning initiatives that advance transformations towards socially-just and sustainable worlds.
Diego Andreucci is a postdoctoral researcher with the 2019-2021 Prince Clauss Chair at the ISS, and a member of the Undisciplined Environments Collective. Previously he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He holds a PhD from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2016). Prior to that, he studied philosophy and anthropology in Rome (Università La Sapienza) and received a master’s in human geography from the National University of Ireland, Galway. His recent investigation has examined political processes and indigenous-campesino mobilisations around natural resource extraction in the Andes, particularly Bolivia. Over the years he’s been involved in various environmentalist and anticapitalist organisations. Twitter: @diegoandreucci.
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With the attention to Sudanese women musicians actively participating in the current uprising in Sudan, this article reflects on the history of women’s involvement in music and how their performances have acquired political claims over time.
Music in times of revolution
The ongoing revolution in Sudan started with mass protests in December 2018 (see last week’s BLISS blog), led to the overthrow of Omar El Bashir in April 2019, and to a massacre orchestrated by the Transitional Military Council on the 3rd of June, 2019. These unprecedented peaceful protests had opened up a space for the amalgamation of creative productivity in Sudan and across the diaspora, including music. Young people and women have been portrayed as being at the forefront of the resistance. The images of women demonstrating on the streets, singing, drawing and making art on the streets have flooded the social media. However, this is a hyperbolic depiction of their actual number supported by the fact that this level of participation by them was unanticipated. The revolution has been seized by diverse women as a space to make claims for greater freedoms and liberties, including contributions to nation-building projects. Yet, these acts of citizenship (see Isin and Nielsen 2008) are highly gendered and take place within the constraints of patriarchal norms (Azza Ahmed. A. Aziz).
Music has always occupied a significant role in the multiple cultural expressions of the Sudanese nation. In the current uprising, it created a space to enact resistance and narratives of belonging. Women amateur singers as well as professional musicians in the diaspora and in Sudan have become key voices in the message of the revolution from the streets and visibilising the political claims that are being made.
In Sudan, since the coming to power of Omar El Bashir and the Islamists in 1989, the music scene has been deeply affected. Many musicians were curtailed, went into exile, and the once popular music spots in Khartoum where Sudanese jazz and popular music could be heard were banned. It was also combined with the demise of once famous music institutions in the capital. The Sudanese government’s centralisation of power under the banner of an Islamised identity was established, and this ultimately imposed specific gender codes that were legally consolidated through The Public Order Law of 1996 that established strict rules for women’s dress code and public appearance. This measure limited the public spaces where women artists could perform both in Khartoum and throughout Sudan. Despite this, women’s political and patriotic claims within songs were not silenced.
For example, an all-female music group Salute Yal Banoot, who since its foundation in 2014, has been contributing to dismantling some of the obstacles (other examples include female members of the mixed Igd Al Jalad group, Nancy Ajaj, Al Balabil, etc). These women had to navigate arbitrary refusals by the government to allow them to perform in public on stage. Salute Yal Banoot have also been actively involved in the uprising. They dedicated their performance in Kuwait in March 2019 to those who had lost their lives in the protests. On their facebook website, they stated that resistance could take different forms, one being music, and the need to embrace the collective of being Sudanese. They use the slogan of John Garang, the late leader of South Sudan, quoting him: ‘SUDANISM embraces all that is African, Arabian, Islamic and Christian. It encompasses religion, race and culture and expresses them as a unique identity. Thus, it is inherently irreconcilable with sectarianism of any kind.’ Here, their music and creative practice merge with the political potentialities of the nation that they enact through the diversity of the composition of their own music group.
To understand the musical role of women visible on the Sudanese scene in the current context, we need to situate it within the wider history of women as the producers of music in general and their performance of political songs in particular.
Historical take on women and music
Historically, women have had a significant place in musical production in Sudan according to different genres that have existed: hamassah (encouraging men to go to war: for example, Mihaira bint Aboud who encouraged the Sudanese to fight against the Turko- Egyptian occupation and who is evoked during the current revolution as a voice for women to emulate), sirah (songs for men at their weddings en route to the bride’s home, manaha (bereavement songs) and as hakamats’ songs (existing in Western Sudan encouraging men to go to war). Hence, there has been a continuum of women using music to enact gendered citizenship and the current uprising is another expression of such political actions.
The history of women’s eruption onto the Sudanese music scene was not always smooth. The first public rhythms used by women were characterized by 3 beats on the daluka (a clay drum with a leather covering) and they were known as the tumtum. They were the province of ex-slave females working in local alcohol haunts that were deemed disreputable. Eventually they became a source of emancipation for ex-slave women (ghanaya) within the urban centres of Sudan. They came to express the life experiences of working class women during the 1930s and 1940s. These rhythms became part of female wedding universes and they were equally sung by free-born female artists.
Given the popularity of the genre it was gradually appropriated by men and modified. The establishment of Radio Omdurman in 1941 made this genre intrinsic to Sudanese popular music (see also Saadia I. Malik 2003). A notable singer of this genre was Asha Al Falatiya. Asha managed to access a men’s world by shifting to the use of an orchestra. Part of her credibility as an artist was contained in the fact that she penetrated men’s world’s through her recordings that were diffused on Radio/TV Omdurman. Her political stand was well visible in a nationalistic song about defending the nation against heavy artillery external attacks where she enjoins Mussolini to wage war in Sudan’s defense in order to circumvent the duplicity of Hitler. This was a time when women’s feminism was still subject to penetrating mens’ political and economic worlds.
In the 1970s, certain forms of women’s singing were institutionalized and the penetration of women on the music scene was the product of liberalization and market forces. Eventually women started singing on television and the approbation of the official media elevated the profession of women singers. Their access to public stage, however, dwindled with sharia law and 1996 public order law.
The political momentum of the current uprising gave women musicians more opportunities to take risks and re-enter more visibly the public stage in Sudan. This gives us a sense of the ongoing transformations of gender norms and gender relations more widely.
This article is part of a series on Creative Development. The first part dealing with art in the Sudanese revolution can be found here.
Image Credit: Salute Yal Bannot
Azza Ahmed Abdel Aziz lives between Khartoum and London. She holds a Ph.D in Social Anthropology, with a special focus on Medical Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research focuses on cultural understandings of health and well-being. She has been following the unfolding upraising in Khartoum since December 2018 and has been documenting the everyday protest practices, focusing specifically on the artistic expressions. She is also a co-researcher with Kasia Grabska in the ISS-funded project on creative practice, mobilities and in development in Sudan.
Katarzyna (Kasia) Grabska is a lecturer/researcher at the ISS and a filmmaker.
In spite of international pledges to gender equality and development that leaves no one behind, the current wave of populism and autarchy is materializing in the form of resurging patriarchy, oppression and exclusion. This has spurred a counter movement of feminist activism across the globe. At this juncture, this article discusses the role of feminists in development organizations that can and must also do their part to promote change that is premised on gender and social justice.
With the adoption of the Sustainable Development Agenda 2030, the international community committed to transformational change that puts gender equality, human rights and leaving no one behind at the center of sustainable development.
At the same time, with the rise of populist, fundamentalist and extremist politics, not only has the space for democratic civic expression and engagement shrunk, but women human rights defenders are also increasingly the target of violence and oppression. The recent report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders highlights the rise of “misogynistic, sexist and homophobic speech by prominent political leaders in recent years, normalizing violence against women and gender non-conforming people”. Equally worrisome are the spread of “gender ideology” advanced by certain groups as a threat to morals, religious and family values, widespread militarization and use of violence and force, and globalization and neoliberal policies that disempower women and exacerbate power and social inequalities (United Nations General Assembly 2019, 7).
The current political scenario calls for an urgent action and convergence among those committed to social and gender justice. As we approach the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action in 2020 with a gender equal world still a chimera, we need to step up our efforts and “push back against the push back” on women’s rights, as the Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Gutierrez said in opening the 63rd Committee on the Status of Women in March this year.[1] Testament to that is the new wave of feminist activism that is spreading across the globe. Feminists working in development can and must also play their part.
The role of feminists who embrace gender as a profession in development bureaucracies – referred to as ‘femocrats’ (Goetz 2004, 137) – has not always been fully appreciated by feminist activists and academics, although there have also been genuine attempts to recognize the contribution of and the hardship faced by femocrats (Goetz, 2004). In the past, this divide reflected critical feminist reflections on the heels of the gender mainstreaming project. On the one hand, gender equality had become an integral part of the development agenda and sustainability discourse, opening the door for feminists to engage in high level political fora and processes (True 2003). On the other hand, by coming to mainstream, gender lost “its political and analytical bite”, sometimes leading to simplification and essentialization of the feminist project (Cornwall 2007, 69).
This juncture, however, requires alliance building and bridging rather than dividing. For those like myself who navigate multiple positionalities, as feminists, gender and development professionals, women and men from different cultural, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, the question is: How can our work make a difference while being apparently more acquiescent to different interests, including of bureaucracies that are slow and/or reluctant to change?
Despite the challenges, the present moment is ripe with opportunities. While not perfect, Agenda 2030 opens the way to tackling a broad range of structural gender inequalities, including violence against women and girls, unpaid care work, sexual and reproductive health and rights, access to productive resources, and women’s access to decision making (Razavi, 2016). Increasingly in development, the call is for feminist and gender-transformative action. Action that transforms and subverts the traditional structures that perpetuate gender, social, power hierarchies and, injustices – be it in environmental, agricultural and rural development or climate change policy and praxis. Such transformation implies moving beyond technical and technocratic approaches and fixes to addressing gender inequalities. It implies grounding the design of development action on a thorough understanding of the power and social dynamics at play in a specific context. It calls for recognizing the intersectional and compounding nature of inequality and oppression.
Within this context, femocrats can advocate for stronger political commitment and for policies and programmes that take the Agenda 2030 pledges seriously and address the structural barriers to gender equality and the realization of women and girls’ human rights. Femocrats can also push for increased accountability towards international instruments and conventions. Importantly, femocrats can expedite the promotion of a re-politicized understanding of gender and the positioning of intersectional gender justice on the agenda of global policy fora, where social justice-based approaches are easier to take forward. Finally, femocrats can play a unique role in opening doors while facilitating dialogue among parties and actors.
It is thus the special duty of any femocrat to fight from inside the system while creating alliances with likeminded people from different backgrounds. For example, femocrats can promote dialogue and create formal spaces and terms of engagement[2] of women’s groups, LGBTQI groups, social movements, farmers’ and fishers’ organizations and indigenous and minority groups with government actors, engaged researchers and other actors. This is needed to build the kind of sustainable coalitions that can bridge initiatives from below with initiatives from above, thus opening the space for more democratic participation and decision-making while advancing a vision of development grounded in gender and social justice.
[1] Opening remarks made at the opening session of CSW63, held in New York, 12 March 2019, which the author attended.
[2] As Jonathan Fox (2009: 489) notes, “balanced decision-making processes are especially difficult to construct, especially across cultural and organizational divides” but coalitions can become sustainable “when grounded in shared terms of engagement”.
Razavi, Shahra. 2016. “The 2030 Agenda: Challenges of Implementation to Attain Gender Equality and Women’s Rights.” Gender & Development 24 (1): 25–41. doi:10.1080/13552074.2016.1142229.
True, Jacqui. 2003. “Mainstreaming Gender in Global Public Policy.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 5 (3): 368–96. doi:10.1080/1461674032000122740.
United Nations General Assembly. 2019. “Situation of Women Human Rights Defenders. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders. Human Rights Council. Fortieth Session. 25 February-22 March 2019.” A/HRC/40/60. Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Including the Right to Development. New York: United Nations.
Clara Mi Young Park is the Regional Gender, Rural and Social Development Officer of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Office for Asia- Pacific. She has recently earned her Doctoral Degree at the International Institute of Social Studies with a thesis on “Gender, generation and agrarian change: cased from Myanmar and Cambodia”. This piece is partially based on self-reflections about doing feminist research included in the doctoral thesis.
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Azza Ahmed Abdel Aziz
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