In early July, Alliance Project Officer Sienna Aguilar and ACT Board Member Romy Listo participated in the Equality Rights Alliance’s Working Together for Women Symposium in Melbourne.
Recordings from the meeting are now available. These include a panel on Sustainable Feminist Advocacy, which includes Sienna and Romy’s summary and closing remarks from day 1:
You can also read Romy’s closing remarks below:
I’ll start by acknowledging the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation, and pay respects to elders past and present, and to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women with us today. I also want to thank Helen and Maddy at ERA for pulling together this special space today, and especially Helen for holding this space for us to come together for so many years.
I have the unenviable task of drawing together the threads of the rich thoughts and expertise of our speakers today. And as I launched into this quite intimidating task I couldn’t help but feel, with full respect to Helen, that our Gender Equality Symposium: Working for Women, might be a bit of a misnomer. Because in listening to our panellists and speakers, what I heard was not a desire to talk about policy for gender equality, but what we are and where we are going as a feminist movement.
We heard this in our climate change panel, who noted that we need to go beyond acknowledging the gendered impacts of climate change to recognise that women and gender diverse people actually design different solutions to climate change problems, as Victoria put it, with a focus on nature, process and relationships, or as Bianca described through her example of introducing a language name for seagrass and teaching children to plant it, in the Buyungurra Nyarlu Turtle Monitoring Program.
We heard this again through our panel on Sustainable Feminist Advocacy, from Kit, Elena, Chandni, Caro and Sienna. We heard in particular about the importance of care and connection, and using our resources to build trust, and I think I speak for many of us when I say how much this resonated with and energised me.
We also heard that we need to focus on identifying power, shifting power, and analysing power: power over, power under and power with, ours and that of others, in this time of epochal change.
This attention to power was reflected in the words of Sally, Helen, Niki, Tanya and Ramona in our panel on Gender Responsive Budgeting. It was also reflected in the words of Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody, and her emphasis on intersectionality, as a lens for responding to the complexity of power.
Our YWAGers Bri, Tasha and Claire asked us to think about how we use our power over timespans and use it for, and with, future generations and feminists.
For me these sessions together highlighted the feminist power we have now, and our ability and responsibility to be accountable to one another. The way that we connect with each other in our movement, and whether we fight with each other or work together, is something we can control, even when as Elena described, much of the environment we operate in pits us against each other and is beyond our influence.
And we heard why our work together is needed: Dr Rebecca Huntley showed us that in spite of our progress, attitudes toward gender equality are hanging in the balance, and we’ve also discussed how intersectional feminist contributions have a role to play beyond traditional “gender issues”, in climate change and government systems and budgeting, to name a few.
At the beginning of the day Helen asked us “What are the structures, tools and resources that we need from here?” What I heard was that the structure that we need is an intersectional feminist movement, and that we need sustainability, independence, and intersectionality, and to continue to work on putting this into practice.
We already have the tools and resources of our relationships, our collectivity and our analysis of power and of ourselves. We can keep trying to build the snowball, to borrow some words from Chandni, strengthening ourselves and our relationships on the inside, while we continue to grow and pick up snow on the outside.
