Women's Studies Program

Margaret Laurence Women's Studies Centre Speaker Series Presents

Feminisms Revealed:
What Does Feminism Look Like?

Past Events

October 26, 2005

Feminist Community Organizing:
Taking Back the Night

Tanya McFadyen, Women's Studies Program Honours Student, University of Winnipeg

Tanya McFadyen will focus on her experience organizing the 2005 Take Back the Night March and the challenges she faced in gathering community organizations and community members together for a common goal while interweaving concepts of collectivity, consensus and respecting diversity into the organizing process. She will discuss her desire to combine her feminist beliefs with her activism while being cognizant that in some ways her feminist practice was unique to the community she was working with. She shares her realization that feminism(s) are practiced by many women in the community and that they might not name it as feminist work. In her discussion, she will reflect on her personal journey to feminist community organizing through her challenges and successes with working in the community and in the academy.

November 2, 2005

Broadcasts:
Feminists on Radio

Mandy Fraser, CKUW, University of Winnipeg campus radio host from This is What a Feminist Sounds Like & co-host of Say it Sista!

Melissa Truman, CKUW, University of Winnipeg campus radio hosts from Say it Sista!

Ginna Berg, CMFM, U of Manitoba campus radio host from Eve's Third Wave

On this panel Mandy Fraser, Melissa Truman and Ginna Berg will speak about their experiences hosting feminist radio programs on campus radio stations. Topics discussed will range from: feminist music labels; what is feminist news; feminist collective organizing and programming; strengths and weaknesses of programming at a campus radio station and what happens when feminists take their place on the airwaves.

Listen to CKUW 95.9 fm Say it, Sista! Thursdays 8-9 am and This is What a Feminist Sounds Like, Fridays 3- 4 pm & CMFM 101.5 fm Eve's Third Wave, Wednesdays 1-2 pm.

November 9, 2005

The DAWNing of a Global Feminist Discourse

Dr. Peggy Antrobus, Esau Distinguished Visiting Professor, Menno-Simons College, University of Winnipeg

In 1985, at the NGO Forum held in Nairobi to mark the end of the UN Decade for Women, a group of feminist scholars and activists from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean organized a series of panels on Feminist Perspectives from the South. For the first time at these international meetings feminism was identified with women from the (economic) South. These panels, based on a platform document, "Development, Crises and Alternative Visions," related the experience of poor women living in the South with the colonial and neo-colonial relations between their countries and the North, and the IMF-inspired macroeconomic framework of structural adjustment. The platform document explored the links between systemic crises of debt, environmental degradation, famine, deteriorating social services, political conservatism and religious fundamentalism. These presentations had an immediate impact and led to the formation of the network DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era) the following year.

Over the years DAWN's conceptual framework has been used by researchers and activists in many countries, including in Canada, the USA and Europe and helped strengthen feminist analysis and advocacy in the global conferences of the 1990s. In the context of these conferences women emerged as a political constituency, and an international movement was transformed into a global women's movement with a clearly articulated position on major global issues, from environment to human rights, from population to debt and trade.

Peggy Antrobus, a founding member of the network and its General Coordinator from 1990-1996, will reflect on the origins and significance of DAWN in her own work and in the global women's movement.

November 16, 2005

Finders Keepers:
Integrating Feminist Values

Lisa Aymont Hunter, Money and Women Project Coordinator, North End Women's Centre

Lisa Aymont Hunter will speak about the various aspects that she understands contributes to feminism's visible-ness. She will give examples of these aspects based on her experiences at The North End Women's Centre, NEW-C. She will discuss: Authenticity, getting real, in the moment, moment to moment; Self-approval, which is juicy, as opposed to deferring to an outside authority, which is dry; Honouring experience * developed knowledge being just as important as academically-learned knowledge; Exercising the voice, speaking out in different ways about the reality we see and our desire for the changes we think necessary; Collective, a power spread out, instead of hierarchy, the slippery ladder; Respect for diversity, the different expressions of humanity that colour this palette of a world and make it interesting.

November 23, 2005

Podiums and Public:
The Poetry of the Montreal Massacre

Dr. Candida Rifkind, English Department, University of Winnipeg

The Montreal Massacre inspired an outpouring of feminist responses across the arts, from paintings and multi-media installations to sculptures, monuments, and spoken word performances. United in its memorialization of the fourteen murdered women, this body of work is also diverse in the ways that artists practice a politics of mourning and develop a poetics of memory. Although literary responses have not been limited to poetry, it has been by far the most popular form for anonymous, emerging, and established writers to inscribe the events of December 6th, 1989, into national and international, but also private and personal, struggles against misogyny and violence. In this talk Candida Rifkind analyzes examples of Montreal Massacre poems that foreground the racial as well as gendered structures of both dominant Canadian culture and the feminist movement. She investigates the technologies of the podium, real and virtual, these poets have mobilized to construct a feminist textual community. She reads readings of these poems, their ritual reiteration and ongoing circulation, to understand the dynamics of a feminist counterpublic sphere organized around poetic texts that cross the boundaries between lyric and manifesto, private grief and public witness.

November 28, 2005

Women in the Sex Trade:
The Front Lines of the War Against Women

Carie Winslow, Dream Catchers Program, Klinic

**Please note room change * 2M77**

Carie Winslow will talk about the obstacles women are facing while they are in the sex trade and when they are trying to exit: including homelessness; domestic violence; sexual violence; addiction; systemic barriers experienced with Income Assistance and Child and Family Services rehabs. Also, she will discuss the role of community and political action as a tool for transformation.

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