Editorial: Making Change Happen
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Editorial: Making Change Happen
WENDY HARCOURT
Beside a starlit Bangkok river I sat with over a thousand feminists from around the world watching an open air stage filled with a beautiful talented transsexual and transgender troupe in Marilyn Monroe pink and pearls performing Helen Reddy’s ‘I AmWoman’, the song of my earlyAustralian feminist days.We were at the celebration dinner of theAWID Forum, greeting friends, discussing the many conversations of the day, smiling across a sea of table and glasses. As young Thai men in crisp white sailor suits served me cocktails, I, and others at my table suddenly needed a reality check.1 What were we as feminists engaged in the struggle for economic and social justice doing in these luxurious surroundings? Even as we sang along, were these beautiful singers from Malaysia, The Primadonna, looking like real live Barbie dolls, symbols of all we did not want our daughters and younger generation of women to be, celebrating or making fun of ‘our’ feminism? We had had to learn to be strong and invincible as the song said, and we had denounced curves, high heels, the pink and pearls in order to become women not defined by patriarchies of popular culture. Was it ok for ‘others’ to perform this kind of fetishized female body? Who was choosing what? Who was pleasuring whom? How different were ‘we’ from the western men who came to watch similar sex shows? Was this an orientalizing, an exoticizing of a most sophisticated sort? What did it mean as a diverse feminist experience? What changes were being made to have at the heart of the largest global feminist forum transgender, transexuality, pleasure, identities and difference? Welcome to just one of the many exciting, puzzling and energizing experiences of the AWID Forum, a feminist space where the connections, the contradictions, the injustices, the pleasures, diversities and the multiplicity of experiences of how women are making change were celebrated, argued and enjoyed. It is a great privilege for Development to be able to share with its readers and with participants of the Forum, some of those discussions. As Joanna Kerr said in her opening speech, the Forum was a unique experience for each person, and I would add it can provide a unique multifaceted set of resources from which all of us grappling with the world’s deep inequalities and injustices can learn.2 The AWID Forum3 dealt with the darkest of issues, exposed the core of gender injustice, unremitting poverty and workers’oppression, violence, the pain of violated bodies, the scourge of HIVand AIDS but it did so with a difference. The methodologies, analysis Development (2006) 49(1), 1–5. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100237
Development 49(1): Upfront
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and skills showed a deep and mature understanding of the body, heart and soul in the women’s movements. This was not a tired old conference, same people, same ideas, same despair and confusion of so, here are the problems, so where do we go from here? No, the Forum was about: so as we are lucky enough to be here,
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