Several years ago, at a One in Nine Campaign, an activist held up a placard which read, “we’re not just faces and vaginas”. This is a placard that remains in my mind’s eye. It captured the frustrating lip-service paid to patriarchal oppression in SA, a country whose public discourse is saturated with challenges to patriarchy and changing women’s lives.
For people who spend a lot of time discussing gender power, we have made little headway in creating a more equitable society. This is largely because of the failure of institutions and society to move beyond mere talk, and the constant watering down of demands for real change.
Real change is institutional change and this is going to require consistent attention to feminist demands for structural change.
Large-scale recourse to philanthropy, well-intentioned as it is, usually works to keep oppressive systems in place.
We have just come out of Mandela month and are a few days away from the anniversary of the iconic 1956 Women’s March to the Union Buildings. The deluge of invitations, public awareness campaigns and events to mark Women’s Month is upon us. It will last a few weeks before the country returns to normal at the end of the month.
Each August, SA finds itself in the grip of a countrywide fever to pay attention to women and “women’s issues” because of this historic march. On the surface, this flurry of activity appears to point to collective pressure to take women seriously as individuals and as a group to ensure the elimination of such issues. In other words, recognising the existence of “issues” that affect and impede women should be an invitation to attend to such “issues” en masse and with seriousness.
As a phrase, “women’s issues” may have come from the necessary work of highlighting how patriarchal societies across the globe and time have oppressed women. History has shown that the origin of words does not guarantee that such meanings will remain stable across time.
We understand from the work of feminist thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak that oppressive systems survive by adapting and mutating. Part of this mutation is through co-opting the language of radical movements. There may be talk of “women’s issues” everywhere in August, but only those issues that reduce women to faces and vaginas receive piecemeal attention.
This explains the current circulation of the phrase “women’s issues” in ways that are deliberately vague, and often dismissive, except for the explicit identification of representation, violence, or menstruation. Thus, the phrase “women’s issues” becomes a way of avoiding feminist calls to address the many facets of patriarchal marginalisation and violence that ensure that patriarchy continues to mutate.
The women’s march recognised the importance of addressing institutional change, by posing a challenge to how structures order our society. In 1956, as in the smaller marches before, women were clear in their identification of important issues for women. They demanded more than lip-service. Women’s issues included legal, political, financial, societal and spatial changes. This is why women’s freedom of movement remains at the core of understanding women’s issues today, as it always has.
Instead, there continues to be superficial attention to patriarchal oppression, preferably only in March, August and 16 days at the end of the year. And such attention is limited to more women speakers and faces on calendars, sanitary protection donation drives and faux horror at the scale of violence targeted at women and children. More talk.
Several years ago, the Total Shutdown Movement laid out clear plans for practical systemic changes necessary to move the needle on gender power.
While “period poverty” is on everybody’s lips and donation drives are on the rise, there is scant attention to the concrete suggestions made by the activists who alerted us to the scale of the problem in the first place. It is easier to collect pads for donation than to actively work to create a school system in which pads, and meals, and books are easily available. This would be structural change, not lip-service. In a country where condoms are freely available, free sanitary protection can be equally accessible.
But why would pads, tampons and menstrual cups be freely available in a country where so much shame is attached to living in bodies seen as feminine? When women cannot move freely in schools, workplaces, homes or streets of SA without constant unwanted male correction, attention and threat, we are nowhere near addressing what makes rape so endemic. A society that terrorises women is a society in which rape is widespread.
What about addressing the conditions that result in so many women unable to afford sanitary protection? Such conditions have everything do with structures of the economy, the specific ways in which government departments abdicate responsibility, including amplifying poverty and shame in the systematic breaking down of public health and education structures in our contemporary society.
How can we end the rape epidemic when we consistently ignore the insights that come from anti-rape activists and scholars on how to ensure institutional change and pretend rape is an isolated, inexplicable event that concerns vaginas? While I disagree with them, I have sympathy for the position taken by many women who argue for the total scrapping of Women’s Month given our widespread experience of its marking as a farce. The veil continues to thin on this as a month that makes a mockery of the demands of the women it claims to honour, historically and in today’s SA. It has once again become fashionable for men to unironically take up excessive space at such events to shame women leaders, offer instructions on what women would do if “they were not their worst enemies”, mansplain and partake in other patriarchal behaviour.
My dream for this Women's Month is to see a different articulation to women’s fatigue at the unironic large-scale patriarchal feeding frenzy.
• Gqola is an author and a professor at Nelson Mandela University. Her latest book is 'Female Fear Factory'
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