Anoucements
Contribution to a non existing 'transversal' gender debate
overview after one and a half hour of the PGA process discussion:
First, i wanted to put these few numbers on the walls of the debate room
as a contribution to the gender debate that was supposed to be transversal
to every debate during the conference. But i didn't because these few numbers
are partial and the fact that less women than men participate actively to
these type of debates is not frankly new. I was first quite happy with the
choice made of taking the gender debate as a transversal one that should appear
in every debate. I thought that having a separate debate on gender would have
easily ended in the usual list of concrete differences between men and women
and the statement that those are based on patriarchic cultural representations
and schemes.
becoming aware of this fact seems necessary to me if we want to struggle against
patriarchy. But it's also really limited. We can indeed find an ever longer
list of situations and areas where women are excluded or where women do the
work and men control and decide.... But these type of list usually only makes
me sick and tired of gender-relations and often makes me want to stop getting
involved in mixed areas and struggles alltogether.
If we had really questioned ourselves about gender issues inside the different
thematic debates on the program, maybe it would have given us the chance to
get a clearer picture of why our different practices are in itself patriarchic.
It may have given us a better possibility to understand in which values patriarchy
is enrooted and to go beyond the usual "men are like this, women are
like that" . Maybe we could have started to build different relationship
and to think about less oppressive practices.
a lot of interestings things were to be expected if these "transversal"
debates had ever taken place.
as this was not the case, we're collectivly led to the assumption that we
can't manage to go any further than listing facts as "men speak more
than women during debates" and that as someone from rampenplan kitchen
told me yesterday "80 per cent of volunteers for the kitchen are women"
I dont mean that i get involved in "women only" things just because i can't stand gender mixed situations. On the contrary i think that it's a good tool and an important choice if we want to liberate ourselves from gender roles (and it's fun!). But actually confronting partiarchic oppression would need a work of both men and women. Indeed, it would be wrong to say that the victims of patriarchy are only women.
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