One Woman Army

Safe spaces at risk - or are they risky safe spaces?

These days I'm writing about safe space, voice, and transformation.
Its amazing just how little academic information there is out there about safe space.
No one wants to define it. No one knows how. The term is tossed around carelessly. Its overused in the classroom -feminist academics and those of us in women's studies are sure to have heard it as professors set the "ground rules" for class discussions.

But what, really is it?
What makes a space "safe" for you?

I would argue that a "safe space" is not always the right term - but I can't redefine it right now.
There is the space around me - my physical space, that I long for to be safe - always. Safe from violence, oppression, discrimination, harassment, sexism, misogny, racism, classism, etc. My physical space kept safe so that I don't worry about getting beaten or harassed, grope, fondled, leered at.

And then there is my safe space where I am free from verbal and emotional sexism. Free to speak my voice and say what I think without being jeered at or criticized.

But - that's not always safe. Nor should it be.
To speak freely - truly freely, and to encourage discussion - there has to be some form of risk involved. I take a risk in speaking something with absolute freedom - a risk in being criticized, in being debated, discussed, commented, and a risk in being truly, really listened to. In telling someone something from the heart, that involves risk.

Does that make it not safe?

***

What does safe space mean for you?

- Artemis.

The blame game in Africa; a tale of discrimination

I want to come back now to my earlier post about the forced sterilization of women - particularly the news today about the situation in Africa, where women are being sterilized to stop the spread of HIV without their knowledge.

My thoughts kept on in this direction after a lengthy debate about the issue with my partner.

Aside from the issue of choice, this points to a much larger issue.

That being, women-blaming, misogyny, sexism. discrimination.

Yeah, not words thrown around lightly, but also not words that one should be surprised to find me using on this blog.

In this case, we are seeing the sterilization of hundreds of women with the sole intent of ensuring they don't pass HIV onto any future children in pregnancy (which is preventable, might I add). There is no concern or mention of the same issue with men - who continue to spread HIV in Africa through sexual intercourse with men, women, and children in a hopelessly depressing, agonizing myth that having sex with children is a cure for HIV. There is no mention of how the government and health system are dealing with this issue - solely that women are being taken to task. In Sierra Leone and Tanzania, governments have passed laws outlawing transmission of HIV from mother-to-child - despite that medications are now available to prevent this. The onus is still put on the woman, being blamed for contracting HIV, the responsibility put solely on her. This does nothing to prevent further HIV transmission to other partners, nor from those partners transmitting themselves. It does nothing for education regarding HIV and serves only to fuel existing myths and blame.

Frustrated, angry, upset.
Africa needs much more than forced sterilization of women. Support for economic poverty, access to healthcare, equality... that's only the beginning and a much much larger issue for another discussion.

Musings on choice and birth control; forced sterilization still an issue?!?!?!

Lately I've been thinking a lot about forms of birth control.
How they control us, how they don't, the costs, the benefits, the pleasure factor - who are they really made for?
Does it make me a bad feminist not to like hormonal contraceptives?
Yes, they give us the power of choice. I believe in choice. I just don't believe in extra hormones being put inside my body, stopping and changing the cycle of my period, causing all sorts of reactions and symptoms and being made to believe that's "normal".
Does that make me a bad feminist?
That's just my choice. Its not my choice for all or other women.

***

I believe in the power and freedom of choice. I am a doula, but that does not make me anti-choice or pro-birth. I am a doula and a childcare worker who believes in choice for all birth choices - whether that means to not have children, to have an abortion, to have an adoption, to have a surrogate, to have a single-parent family, a same-sex family, a heterosexual family, a co-parenting family however you should choose. I believe in choices for all birth control as well - hormonal, barrier, what-have-you.

****
This week, two stories of unwanted sterilization of women have hit the Canadian media. Both international stories, though I don't doubt that we have them locally and that there are many, many, many more out there.

This is not choice-supportive. This is violence against women. It violates a woman's body, takes away her choice, her freedom, taking away her ability to have ever said "yes" and performing an unwanted act on her body.

In Namibia, hundreds of women being sterilized unknowingly, while on the operating table for something else - c-sections, childbirth - because they are HIV-positive. Sterilized without their knowledge, without their consent.

Violence against women - not to mention how this promotes stereotypes against those living with HIV and discrimination, as well as furthering deep-rooted sexism in those communities.

"Governments and doctors still sometimes see HIV-positive women as irresponsible dangers to society who must be restricted or even criminalized. Despite new medicine that allows them to live normally and have healthy children, many women are told they must not get pregnant. Two countries, Sierra Leone and Tanzania, even passed laws that criminalize the mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

Sterilization is an especially traumatic blow for village women in rural Africa, who endure humiliation and being ostracized if they cannot have children. Some childless women are even labelled “witches” who “ate their children” for witchcraft medicine." The Globe and Mail.com

This comes just a few days after the decision that a Romani woman who was coercively sterilized in Hungary three years ago will receive compensation.  A great history of the case is provided by RHRealityCheck.com.

Its appalling to consider how long it took for this woman to receive recognition and compensation for her pain - her freedom of choice removed from her without her consent - 9 years. In this day and age, that is appalling.

That forced sterilization is still an issue in this day and age itself, horrifies me.

All women should have the freedom to choose how and if they want to have children - whether that decision means they choose not to (via birth control, sterilization, abortion, adoption, abstinence) or whether they choose to.

Listen to my story, silence me no more...

“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.” - Audre Lorde

I am in awe of the words of women.
I sit here alone, in a house on the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the voices of women who I spoke with so long ago. Women who I worked with, talked with, laughed and cried with - who trusted their stories, their words, their lives, to me, to my care, to my listening and witnessing. To take these stories of theirs - their herstories - and to share them, use them, analyse them, trust them, guard them, work with them, and to honour them.

To honour their herstories.

They were not mine to give, and yet here I hold them.

I am challlenged with how to tell their stories, to give them the adequate - no, not adequate - the necessary attention they so deserve. How to respond to them and ensure that they are received into the hands of others with the necessary care that they require. How to do justice to women's words.

We, women, live in silence. Our stories, not told. Not spoken. Not listened to. Not given respect.
How to them justice when they are told?
How to be an active, truly present listener and witness?

To ensure that women's voices are not lost in our re-telling of the story?

This is my challenge.
Not my stories to tell, yet here I am, entrusted in telling them.

To be continued.
-Artemis.

Writing the good fight...

I have taken several self-imposed hiatuses from blogging and writing as of late.

So many other projects and activities.
Doula-in-training. Activist-oh-hold. Thesis-writer-in-never-ending-progress-and-state-of-unrest. Childcare-worker-to-the-extreme. Occasional-columnist-and-writer. Crafter-and-baker/food-worshipper.

Not to mention occasionally having fun and doing things in my private life.

So many projects, so little time, everything always in progress or put on hold.

Today's site redesign came out of a state of unrest with my thesis-writing. I have spent the last 4 weeks holed up in a remote, far from civilisation, destination on the Atlantic ocean - writing, writing, writing.  Editing and rewriting. Reading and analysing and more reading and editing and writing. This past week, paralysed by uncertainty in my writing, I have begun to think about this blog again, my passion for feminism and activism, and my desire to write for myself (not academically).

Hence, here I am.
Here, I hope to be much much more.

-Artemis.