Inter Movement Dialogues: Breaking barriers, building bridges
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Dialogue
Inter Movement Dialogues: Breaking barriers, building bridges
NANDITA GANDHI AND NANDITA SHAH
ABSTRACT Most social movements accept that their members have multiple identities and therefore diverse issues. So the women’s movements accept labour issues, the trade unions acknowledge gay rights, anti race activists take up gender issues. But movements are inherently based on single identity groups and have not been able to create a political culture and practice for this crucial paradigm shift. The Inter Movement Dialogues facilitates this process of discussion with each other. KEYWORDS feminist movement; social movements; world social forum; AWID; intersectionality; diversity
The politics of difference and the social movement We, usually, define social movements as struggles or sustained actions taken by groups of people coming together around an identity, issues or strategies formulated by a partial or developing ideology. Social movements are named after the groups they have been able to mobilize and so we have the women’s movement, the gay rights, the displaced, workers, or people for peace, etc. Movements represent their voices, issues and demands as well as formulate their own methodology and organizations. By the 1980s the women’s movement realized that there were serious limitations in using the unitary and homogenous category ‘women’as reflecting the essence of all women.Women of colour in the US and UK had challenged the women’s movement for subsuming the voices and issues of black women. Similarly, the sexuality rights movements showed that there were many ‘genders’and we could no longer use the binary of male/female. The labour movement found that the rapidly changing globalized world had broken down the straightforward divide between the formal and informal sectors and employer^worker relationships. At the same time, many were disputing and even refuting the homogenous category of ‘class’. Dalit or lower caste men were confronted with a dalit women’s movement.We have realized that although social movements bring together particular groups on the basis of an identity, people live through several identities and respond to them in different ways. These intra movement challenges dovetailed with post modernist trends for the deconstruction of categories. Post modernists argue that fitting people into one box called gender or class or black do not correspond to the realities of people’s lives Development (2006) 49(1), 72–76. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100221
Gandhi and Shah: Feminists in Movements and eventually leads to demarcation, exclusion and inequality. People have complex identities. They can be workers, dalits or lower castes; women, or members of religious groups. They have identities based on ethnicity or race, their sexual orientation, as trafficked women or prostitutes. They juggle a mix of these identities during their lives, in their decision-making and actions. Along with such multiple identities, there are also multiple discriminations and privileges. Racial discrimination an
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