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There are a few feminist theorists I return to, over and over and over again. Sometimes, as with Simone de Beauvoir, it’s because of their intellectual audacity. Sometimes, as with Shulamith Firestone, it’s because they propose ideas so radical they take my breath away, even fifty years after they were published. Sometimes, as with Audre Lorde, it’s how they use metaphor to make powerful arguments about racism and the limits of feminist community.
I turn to Gloria Anzaldúa both because of the depth and lyricism of her writing (it’s gorgeous writing), and because of the way she asks readers to imagine and dream in and through the margins. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzladúa draws from her own experiences growing up at the Texas/Mexico border to interrogate what it means to live as a mestiza: in the borderlands, the space between cultures, worlds, languages, identities. As a book, Borderlands/La Frontera lives between languages (English, Spanish, Indigenous) and also between genres (poetry, prose, memoir).
“As a mestiza I have no country,” writes Anzaldúa,
my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman's sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet. Soy un amasamiento. I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings. (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Third Edition, Aunt Lute, 1987, p. 102-3)
“Soy un amasamiento. I am an act of kneading.” This, I believe, is the work of feminism: to dwell in the intersections, and to knead in the borderlands, the margins, the edges, the frayings, the knots, and the tangles.
Feminism isn’t easy; it never has been and it never will be. For me, it exists not in rallies or slogans or t-shirts or shouting in the streets or commodified self-care candles, but in the hard conversations, the difficult silences, the careful navigations, and the mess of it all. Feminism is about sitting with discomfort and trying to figure out why.
Politics is messy because we, the humans who created it, are messy. Feminism for me about really thinking deeply about the possibilities – and perils – of alternative worlds, and finding ways to work towards them.
Sonja Boon
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Sonja Boon is a mixed-race writer, researcher, flutist, teacher, and stitcher of stories. She is an adjunct professor in Gender Studies at Memorial University. Read more.
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What does feminism mean to me?
Despite having availed of the benefits and advantages gained by feminist advocates throughout my life, I have hesitated to identify myself as a feminist. What is that shadow that falls over the label “feminist”?
I was born in the ‘50s and when I was becoming a young woman, it was all about Women’s Liberation. Women were calling out the patriarchy with angry voices, and I guess I thought I should be angry too. I thought equality was about being, “the same as” men – identical, indistinguishable. Women’s traditional roles were denigrated, including those of housewives, such as my own mother, who first taught me dignity and self-respect, self-love, a sense of humour and the joy of living. I suppressed my feelings, recklessly claimed my sexual freedom, drank with the boys, entered the trades. Clearly, my notion of feminism never accurately reflected the movement, as evidenced by the truly meaningful improvements in the status of women that feminists have fought for and gained.
Feminism means believing in the right of women to an equal status with men in a patriarchal society such as ours. For me, it means feeling confident that women belong everywhere – no public space is excluded to you – in the Engineering class, on the construction site, in the fishing boat, on the wharf, on the Municipal Council or any other political body – without having to suffer discrimination or harassment because of your gender.
It also means that women bring a unique female (or other) perspective to all of these spaces, which cannot truly represent them without them, and that the female perspective is worthy and true. Feminism is knowing the value of all women’s work, including women’s traditional work, and proving it by creating a society that secures their financial safety and prosperity.
The rights that feminists have advocated for and gained, to one degree or another, are too numerous to enumerate but I will mention a few that have been gained only in my lifetime, and I think men, too, would have to admit that all of this has been great for our society: the Matrimonial Property Act - now the Family Law Act, including child support enforcement; pay equity laws, divorce laws, child care and parental leave. Women no longer face the same barriers to the trades and higher educational programs in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, based on their gender alone.
And yet, gender-based violence has recently been declared an epidemic in our province. There’s still so much to gain on every level and especially on violence and sexual abuse.
Today I feel honoured and privileged to support PerSIStence Theatre Co., which continues to hold up the banner of feminism and to remind us that our evolution as a society - and my evolution as a feminist - is not finished. I look forward to learning about activism which includes, “all those facing gender-based barriers, such as “transgender, non-binary, 2SLGBTQIA+, Black, Indigenous, racialized, Deaf, disabled, and people with lived experience”.
Joan
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Joan Woodrow is Treasurer of PerSIStence Theatre Company. Find her bio, and those of our other board members, here.
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Hi! I’m Sharon, and I’m new here.
Well, new-ish. I took on the title of Producing Artistic Director back in March, but I was easing out of my previous full-time role, so I’ve only been able to dedicate my whole focus and energy to this company for the past month.
And it’s been a while since this company has been in touch. There have been some pretty big changes over here, not the least of which is my appointment as the company’s second ever artistic leader. The Board of Directors has also turned over by half, including three quarters of the executive roles.
So, we thought we’d introduce ourselves a little bit, and I’m going first. Over the next little while you’ll see some posts from our board members, our artistic collaborators, and our community partners. The prompt we are all working from is:
“What does feminism mean to you?”
While I’m still feeling pretty new to this specific role, I do feel like I’ve been “at this” for a long time, where “this” = “working toward social justice.”
To me, feminism is not distinct from any other social justice advocacy work, except that it prioritizes equity across the gender spectrum. I believe that feminists and other social justice advocates are (or, should be) fighting the same fight. We can and should be learning from each other, taking in one another’s best practices, engaging in thoughtful and sometimes challenging conversation. We should all be fighting for access to the Rooms Where The Decisions Are Made, and whenever we get in there, taking note of who isn’t in the room with us.
Theatre work is Empathy work
The causes of social inequality are, of course, extremely complex, and I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of them, but I do think one of the biggies is a failure of empathy.
It is very hard to imagine other people as fully human; that is, as human as oneself. It is even harder to imagine this when the other person in question is significantly different from you, if they don’t share your language, your culture, your family structure, your socioeconomic status, if they are from another country or another generation.
It is both easier and harder than ever to empathize with other people on a society-wide scale.
Easier, because we have access to stories from around the world, more immediately and more bountifully than we did before the internet age. We can toggle between languages with a few keystrokes. We can see videos and photographs the faces and hear recordings of the voices of the people who tell those stories.
Harder, because so many of us live so much of our social lives online, using platforms that have been designed to disincentivize thoughtful discourse and to privilege quippy point-scoring. Scoring points is not an empathetic activity. If we spend too much time in these "spaces," our empathy skills start to erode.
So, we need the arts. Artistic expression is uniquely positioned to present nuanced perspectives. It is also founded (mostly, I believe) on the premise of helping the audience to feel, or think, in a way that they normally wouldn’t… and that’s how empathy takes root. Making and taking in artistic work is a form of empathy practice.
What I love about live performance in particular is that the audience isn’t just taking in the work after the fact; they are making the piece of art alongside the artists with their presence and attention. At the theatre, the audience becomes a creative collaborator.
If I’m doing my job right, when I tell a story on stage, the audience feels for and with the characters in that story. It’s a stretch of the empathy muscles.
But what stories do we tell?
It isn’t enough to make theatre. We can’t just tell stories about the world as it exists today, or as it has existed in the past, with humour and without critique, and assume that we are improving the world through empathy practice. Stories are just as capable of being regressive as they are of being progressive. And they are powerful tools to wield, whether for or against the status quo.
To pursue social justice through theatre, we have to reframe those stories to address the path we want for the future.
We have to privilege stories that haven’t been told often enough, or loudly enough, or at all.
We have to ask ourselves: who isn’t in the room yet?
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Sharon King-Campbell is Producing Artistic Director of PerSIStence Theatre Company. Bio.