The Swansea Women’s Centre are holding a workshop day for International Women’s Day. One of the rooms at the centre will be turned into a feminist art gallery for the day, and we’re looking for all kinds of artwork to feature in our gallery! The focus is on women’s experience – artwork can include painting, collage, zine pages, poetry, crafts, sculptures, mixed-media art, drawings – anything that you have created yourself!  We can’t pay for items, but we are happy to return them to you if you provide us with a SAE. 

The deadline for submitting items is mid-February.  The gallery will be open to people of all ages, so we ask that artwork submitted is not sexually graphic/explicit.
For more details, email us at swanseafeministnetworkATgmail.com.

Happy Christmas feminists!  Did you get a load of unwanted gifts this year?  Are you thinking about clearing out your wardrobe to make way for the January Sales bargains?  Why not bring your unwanted stuff to the Swansea Feminist Network New Year Swap Shop, and trade it in for something you’ll love!

14th January 2012
Swansea Women’s Centre (women-only venue)
2pm – 5pm

HOW IT WORKS

Sort through your stuff for any unwanted, good-quality clothes, gift sets, shoes, hats, bags, craft supplies, CDs, DVDs, musical instruments, or accessories. All items must be in good condition; clothing must be washed and ironed.

Pay a £2 entry fee and receive 2 tokens. Each item can be bought for 1 token. Each item you bring is worth 1 token. Tokens can be bought seperately for £1 each. Bring as much as you want – the more you bring, the more you can take!

Drinks, cakes and zines will also be sold on the day.

Please invite other people who you think might be interested and help spread the word!  You can RSVP on Facebook here.

The Swansea Feminist Network Fundraiser is held as a showcase for women musicians and singers and promotes the huge talent that these women have. Women performers are often under-valued and under- represented, especially in the rock and alternative genre. We want to give these women an opportunity to show off their skills and to give the audience a chance to see how women can perform.

The Adelines performing on the night

The event was held to raise funds for SFN to enable the group to carry on its work in raising awareness and campaigning on issues that affect women and hinder gender equality. We are a feminist activist group that organises campaigns and events. Previous campaigns have included organising the Pro- Choice demonstration outside Parliament in July this year to protest against the proposed Nadine Dorries Bill that would have set back  abortion policy in the UK by decades. We also hold ‘Feminist Fridays’ which campaign against the ‘Lad’s Mag’ and ‘Sex Object’ culture in a fun way and to spread grassroots feminist activism. Different members of the SFN have specialist areas of interest including domestic abuse, the sex industry, Female Genital Mutilation, pro-choice movement, feminist zines and violence against women for example.

The funds will also go towards paying for the use of space and a desk in Swansea Women’s Centre. SFN believes in the importance of women only space because it is in women-only space that a woman’s voice can be heard on her own terms, where she is free from male opinions, free of the spectre of patriarchal judgement, that in mixed space denounce, silence, talk over, appropriate, or ridicule her voice. Women-only space remains relevant because women need space free of male influence and control in order to forge our own politics on our own terms. Otherwise those dominant male voices and values will continue to devalue us, leaving us where we started.

The funds will also go to help sustain the cost of producing the SFN Zine ‘Pandora Press’. Pandora Press exists to give women a space to express opinions that are so often overlooked in the mainstream media. It is a voice for women to air their feminist thought in a safe space. Any women who wants to contribute to the Zine can do with articles, poems, drawings etc.

Singer/song-writer/pianist Catherine Elms gave an outstanding performance

Future events will include another Music Fundraiser, a Feminist Workshop Day, Feminist Fridays, International Women’s Day Event, Trips to Feminist Conferences, theatre & cinema. We will also continue with our successful Radical Feminist Book Reading Group, pub meetings and Art & Craft Sessions.

Enjoying the show: over £200 was raised from the event

Written by Ali Morris. All images by Rebecca Gwynn photography.

Two weeks ago, a few SFN members attended UK Feminista’s Summer School 2011 at Birmingham, where 500 feminists of all genders attended to learn more about feminist activism and issues surrounding UK feminism.  It was heartening to see so many passionate feminists at this event, most of whom asked intelligent questions and provided some interesting anecdotes and advice of their own.

First we attended an introductory talk held by the organisers, closely followed by Feminist Resistance: the past, present, and future of activism.  Speaker Rosalind Miles was fantastic, providing the perfect response to the question “Why are you a feminist?” – “Why aren’t you?”

Next, there was a lunch break, during which time we attended The Colour of Beauty: race, gender and the beauty industry.  Personally, I was very disappointed that this workshop was on during lunch, as I felt it was too important an issue not to be placed in a more sociable time slot; plus, this was my favourite workshop of the day!  The facilitators Sandhya Sharma and Chitra Nagarajan divided the room into groups of around 8, gave each group one or two mainstream beauty magazines, and asked us to tear out every image of a person of colour, and tack it to the wall on our left.  The resulting wall of images took us by surprise – the people of colour found in the pages were usually either celebrities whose lives were being picked apart by the likes of Heat magazine (e.g. Whitney Houston’s daughter’s drug habit), or they were fashion models featured in ads where their race was stereotyped (in adverts such as this).

After the morning talks, we had to choose between the numerous workshops on during the afternoon, a decision that proved to be very difficult given the interesting topics on offer!  Our first choice was The Role of Nonviolent Direct Action in Feminism, which featured many inspiring and passionate speakers including activist and London Feminist Network founder Finn Mackay, and Tamsin Omond from Climate Rush.  Tamsin’s speech was particularly inspiring, providing us with plenty of pithy quotes that we shared via Twitter using the hashtag #femschool, including the suffragette slogan “deeds not words”.  Alison Dear, coordinator of OBJECT’s Feminist Fridays, showed us a video of OBJECT’s Feminist Friday action at Tesco, which encouraged us to be much louder at SFN’s next Feminist Friday!

After lunch, we attended a lovely workshop run by Emma Moore of Pink Stinks, where she discussed their work and future campaigns.  What was particularly interesting about her speech was the discovery that Pink Stinks, an organisation that has been featured extensively in mainstream press, is run by only two women, both working mothers!  It was saddening to hear the amount of criticism and vitriolic comments they have received for their work, including claims that they are bad parents (one need only read the Daily Mail’s coverage of the campaign to get an understanding of the kind of backlash encountered).

A discussion on women living in the Arab Spring, led by Nesrine Malik, closed the day’s workshops.  Afterwards, the organisers led the attendees outside, where we all stood in the courtyard spelling out the words “FEMINISM IS BACK”.  An aerial photograph was taken of this; we’re all very excited to see it!

That evening Birmingham Fems held an after-party at a local bar, where they laid on a vegan-friendly buffet, played awesome feminist music, and held a feminist pub quiz (SFN’s team name was “This is What a Drunk Feminist Looks Like”!).  It was a lovely atmosphere, very relaxed and cosy, and we got a chance to mingle with some of the other attendees.

The following day, we dragged our slightly-hungover selves to the opening workshop, which perked us up and got us back into our angry-militant-feminist moods: Defending Women’s Reproductive Rights.  The speakers, Darinka Aleksic from Abortion Rights and former MP Dr. Evan Harris, were great.  It was frightening to learn how the government has increased its efforts to restrict women’s access to abortions, handing reproductive health advisory services over to religious, anti-choice organisations.  Aleksic informed us of the lies that such organisations spread to pregnant women seeking abortions when they seek counselling, e.g. that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer, and that they would birth the aborted “child” at home a few days after the procedure.  Another shocking discovery was learning of the arrival of American Christian pro-life groups in the UK, and their extreme tactics used to restrict abortion access.  (It’s impossible to condense such a dense topic in one paragraph; for more info, check out the Abortion Rights website. Adele from SFN also wrote a great blog post on this topic here).

After a break, we attended Mobilising Men: Engaging Men in Feminist Activism.  This workshop was met with very mixed reviews, and was arguably the most widely-criticised of the whole weekend.  Some rightly criticized speaker Matt McCormack Evans’ use of the phrase “both genders” rather than “all genders”, and his inability to acknowledge anyone outside the gender binary.  Others argued that Matt McCormack Evans came across as condescending when urging us to include men in our activism; as blogger Madam J-Mo noted, “it was troublesome to have a man stand up and tell women what to do (never mind clap his hands to silence us at one point)”.  Others argued that his comments that “men experience sexism too” were offensive.  I would also add that the workshop seemed rushed and poorly structured, as if the facilitator had thrown it together at the last minute – it didn’t seem to provide us with anything we didn’t already know, and relied too heavily on audience input.  The workshop was derailed for a good 15 minutes by a discussion on whether we ought to rename “feminism”.  At a feminist conference, this seemed like a complete waste of time, and only served to convince most of us that shying away from the F word will do us no favours, and only serves to distract us from more pressing issues.

After lunch, we attended Not For Sale: Resisting the Sex Industry, led by Anna van Heeswijk from OBJECT.  The weekend was brought to a close for us with Everyday Activism: Promoting Feminism in Everyday Life, a fairly disappointing talk which also relied too heavily on audience input, and suffered a derailment by those who insisted on discussing the merits of the word “feminism”.

My main criticism was the lack of intersectionality at this event – there was a strong black presence, and a few great workshops on race, but little to no representation from transgendered, LGBTQ, or disabled women.  There was also no discussion of class issues, and no presence on any of the panels from sex-positive feminists.  This may well have been due to the lack of women available to run workshops on the aforementioned issues, but I feel that a bigger effort perhaps needed to be made to make sure that these groups were better represented at such a large-scale event. Furthermore, as many have pointed out, it seemed fairly incongruous to hold a workshop on the inclusion of men in feminist activism, but nothing on the inclusion of LGBTQ or disabled women.  Surely our first priority as feminists is to mobilise women from all social groups, before moving onto men?

Another minor criticism, from a more personal stance, was that the “getting to know each other” aspect of the weekend could’ve been a little more structured, so that we could all participate, rather than just trying to talk to the people sat around us when we could find some time between talks.

Despite its problems, the weekend was a success, as it proved to be well organised, informative, and inspiring.  Good job, UK Feminista, and thank you for providing us with such a lovely space for us feminists to get together and meet – we’ll see you next year!

-

Other interesting blog posts on this event: 

Women’s Views on News
Mary Tracy
La Petite Feministe Anglaise
The Feminist Companion
The Guardian
Womankind 

(written by Cath Elms, media officer of SFN)

pic by Ali Morris

Act 1: Catherine Elms (www.catherineelms.co.uk)

Act 2: Sera (http://www.myspace.com/seraandtheelements)

Act 4: Sleepy Panda Club (http://www.myspace.com/sleepypandaclub)

An excellent evening was had by all, and our event managed to raise close to £500 for the Women’s Centre!  Pats on the back all round, girls!

Some SFN girls partying! (pic by Ali Morris)

—

Pandora Press is now looking for submissions for its second issue!  The theme is sex.

Here are some suggestions in which you could go with this theme:
Sex in culture
Sex in the media – literature/music/zines/mainstream press/film
Sex and religion
Gender and/or sexual identity
LGBTQ issues
Sex and love/relationships
Sex-positive feminism
Sex throughout history
Social attitudes to sex
Prejudices surrounding sex
Sexual violence
Sexualisation/raunch culture
Sex for sale: pornography/prostitution
And anything else you can think of!

As well as general articles, we need the following submissions, which will not need to fit into the issue’s theme:
Cover art
Poetry
Cartoons
Interior art/illustrations
Reviews:
- Films
- Music
- Blogs
- Zines
Swansea News/Events

The deadline for submissions is 2nd October 2011.  Please send any ideas, questions or submissions to Cath at:

Finally… we’ve added a new page to the blog – upcoming events!  Take a look at what we’ve got coming up this month and come along to whatever takes your fancy! :)

-

(Written by Cath, media officer of SFN)

We’ve a meeting about the Swansea Feminist Network zine yesterday, where we decided an official title for the zine - Pandora Press!  We’re looking for submissions for our first ever issue, which will be released in time for our Music Fundraiser at the end of July (details about the fundraiser here).  The theme is OUR FEMINIST HEROES.  Write about a feminist who inspires you – a politician, a relative, a musician, an actor, a philanthropist, a medic, a writer, a goddess, a good friend, anything you like!  There’s more info on the kind of thing we’re looking for here.  We’ve only had a few submissions so far, so please consider writing something for us!

We’ve also got an idea for a centrefold feature – we’ve got 5 questions that we’d like some of you guys to answer in less than 50 words, and all answers will be published anonymously.  Even if you don’t intend to write a full-length submission, we’d love to hear your answers to some of these questions!

a) Who is your hero?
b) What makes a feminist hero?
c) Sum up, in one word, what feminism means to you.
d) Who first inspired you to explore feminism?
e) What is your favourite feminist book?

To send us your answers, either reply to this email, tweet us, send us a Facebook message, or email me at pandorapresszineATgmailDOTcom.

The deadline is 17th July, so get writing girls!

Cath (Pandora Press editor)

We have just received some devastating news. The Women’s Centre in Swansea will close down at the end of July as the funding they were banking on to stay open has not been granted by the Welsh Assembly Government. Unless a miracle happens, and money is found by next week, this will happen.

The Women’s Centre has been running for over thirty years, and is the only remaining centre of its kind in Wales.  The Women’s Centre provides general advice, support and information for women on a range of issues, including domestic violence, education, sexual health, health and abuse. They provide support and self help groups, Crèche facilities, a library, training courses and volunteering opportunities, and a drop-in with tea, coffee and the chance to socialise.

We can’t let this closure go ahead.  To help, you can:

• Write to Sian James MP and other female councillors, such as Erika Kirchner.
• Write a letter of complaint to the Welsh Assembly Government.
• Write to your local newspaper and ask them to report this injustice.
• Attend the Swansea Feminist Network’s fundraiser on the 29th July in order to raise money to keep the centre open.
• DONATE in any way you can! We will be setting up a JustGiving page for donations, but in the meantime you can contact us at swanseafeministnetworkATgmailDOTcom to donate time or money.
• Most importantly: spread the word! Tell everyone you know.

We will keep you posted on any news developments.

Love, SFN x

Caitlin, Eleri and I are currently in the process of planning Swansea Feminist Network’s first zine (a zine - pronounced ‘zeen’, derived from ‘magazine’ - is a self-published booklet)! The zine aims to be a publication written by and for intelligent creative women, that represents what the Swansea Feminist Network is all about!

The theme of the first issue is OUR FEMINIST HEROES.  Write about a feminist who inspires you – a politician, a relative, a musician, an actor, a philanthropist, a medic, a writer, a goddess, a good friend, anything you like!

As well as general articles, people are encouraged to submit some of the following:
Cover art
Poetry
Fiction
Cartoons
Interior art/illustrations
Reviews:
- Films
- Music
- Blogs
- Zines
Interviews
Musician Profile
Swansea Women’s News/Events

Contributors should be from South Wales, preferably the Swansea area!  Submissions from all genders are welcome.

We’re aiming to publish it in time for our music fundraiser at the end of July (RSVP here), so the deadline for submissions is 17^th July 2011.

Please send any ideas, questions or submissions to us at swanseafeministnetworkATgmailDOTcom!  Happy writing! :)

Cath x

p.s. want more info on what a zine is?  Check out Wikipedia’s entry on zines, or zinewiki.

The thing that underpins my whole feminism is a belief that patriarchy is underpinned by violence against women – it is this violence that allows patriarchy to function and perpetuates the power of patriarchy, though it plays no small part in also propping up capitalism. And I see violence against women everywhere, everyday, when I just want to go about my business quietly, which has made me into someone who is often sad, often angry, but always determined to be vocal about it. I don’t think this makes me some sort of wierd, incoherent social outcast but it does make lots of people – male and female – uncomfortable and unwilling to admit that they see the same things. It’s like Andrea Dworkin said: ‘People are willing to cluck empathetically over the horror of rape as long as they are not made responsible for punishing the rapist’.

Why does this relate to my post about abortion? Well.

When I was working for various Women’s Aid groups and people asked what I did and I explained, the reaction was generally positive. They thought, oh, those poor battered women, what monster could beat someone like that. People could disagree with that sort of violence against women, as long as they can also ignore the nuances within the whole concept of domestic violence, because it’s so visible and visibly disruptive. Get on to rape and things start to change. Hmmm. ‘Stranger rape’ (the Ken Clarke version) is bad, especially if it’s done to sober women who were dressed properly. The sort of rape that is what the vast majority of women who are raped experience – the sort that is perpetrated by a known man, often in the home - doesn’t really exist in mainstream public consciousness. Is it because it so uncomfortably brings it right into our front rooms? Is it because it is thought that in excess of 50,000 women are raped each year in the UK and there can’t be that many psychotic strangers lurking and someone has to be doing it? We don’t want to think about that.

Which brings me on to abortion. For me, denying a woman the right to choose whether or not she carries and gives birth to a child is violence. Just as rape is a violation of someone’s body, their mind, their humanity, so is taking control of someone’s womb. We could spend all night analysing the research about when a foetus begins to feel pain but we, as a thinking, philosophising, feeling society, have set a time limit for abortion which reflects that rational thinking. I don’t see the anti-abortion lobby jetting off to India to tackle the shocking sharp rise in the practice of aborting female foetuses - but maybe this is because all those non-white people are barbarians who don’t know any better? Or maybe it’s understandable because they’re not good Christans either – wierd idol-worshippers? Or maybe it’s because there, like here, girls and women are not valued, are an underclass, are not worth the effort? Whatever, the anti-abortion lobby concentrates its efforts on flyering university campuses – like they do here in Swansea – or insinuating their beliefs into parliamentary policy making. And it makes people who may think that domestic violence is wrong, that rape isn’t justified, think twice about whether women should have the right to an abortion. Take away that right and you violate someone’s body. You take away her autonomy and you deny her humanity – you privilege a formation of cells over the rights of a thinking human and turn her into nothing more than a vessel. You tell her that she doesn’t matter. Denying a woman’s right to an abortion, it seems to me, is a violent culmination of the messages a woman gets everyday about society’s rights to comment on her body, to consume that body as it sees fit, to sexualise, dehumanise and discard her. And that’s why I’ll be protesting in London in July. I wouldn’t care if I had to go by myself because I will not be complicit in pretending that the government’s appointment of Life to the sexual health forum is anything but a sinister, underhand attack on the rights of woment to live free from violence.

Call me a reactive, humourless feminist if you like…

Adele

#prochoicedemo2011 

https://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=175470995844914

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/may/24/abortion-sexual-health-coalition

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/labour-challenge-anti-abortion-group

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100089532/outrageous-we-cant-have-people-who-disagree-with-the-liberal-consensus-thats-so-victorian/

and then have a look at:

http://www.lifecharity.org.uk/home/

Why is it that this organisation feels able to hold forth on what is right for women and children? Why is it that women’s bodies are available for public consumption? Why do they not recognise that better sex education in schools from a young age is crucial in bringing down the rate of pregnancies amongst young women? Why are they not looking at the links between hypersexualisation of young girls and the resulting pressure of engaging in sexual activity without proper sex education (which won’t be provided at all when Nadine Dorries gets her way)?

There are a hundred other questions I could list, but it all boils down to just a few basic facts. Our society feels that women should not be allowed to, and indeed, cannot responsibly, make their own choices about what happens to their own wombs. Our culture infantilises women at the same time as sexualising them in order to allow it to perpetuate those ridiculous beliefs.

Whilst the right to an abortion (and I use the term ‘right’ loosely, because begging two doctors and having to be deemed a little bit crazy in order to get an abortion doesn’t really count as ‘having a right’) is under threat in this country, women are under threat. Women are not valued. Women are not seen as citizens who can make their own decisions. This is not about ‘helping’ all those desperate women brainwashed into aborting a screaming, pain wracked foetus by kooky liberals without morals: this is about the right-wing, Christian ideology that is being fed to us by a Government that wasn’t even properly elected.

I respect people’s right to have a faith and to practice a religion, and respect the fact that the Tories and Lib Dems have a right to hash together some sort of half functioning Government (though clearly I don’t repsect the result of that hashing together). Why can’t they respect my right not to have their insidious, outdated ideology worm its way into my body?

If you agree with me, check out this hashtag on Twitter #prochoicedemo2011 and join us in July.

I will come back and attack ‘the facts’ when I’m feeling more analytical…

adele