Go Feminist

Go feminist logo.jpg

Conway Hall was once again crammed with feminists yesterday. People came from all over the country for Go Feminist. When the organisers wrote for The F-Word about this conference, a few weeks ago, they explained the motivation like this:

We do this as a response to feminism’s most sustained critique: that it is not for all women. Although women from all backgrounds and communities identify with feminist beliefs, the movement still does not completely take into account their needs and realities. Too often in our feminist spaces, the voices of a few are privileged. Race is inadequately dealt with. Our spaces, both physical and virtual, are inaccessible to women living with disabilities. Trans women’s involvement is actively discouraged.

The conference was a sustain riposte to this argument: among the many speakers on the main stage, we heard from women asylum seekers, deaf feminists, we heard from one of the women who ran a support group in the 1980s for black lesbian feminists across the country – painstakingly collecting any articles that referenced the existence of black lesbians, and mailing them out.

With the help of Julia and Nat, the whole event was livestreamed on the internet too – you can watch back all the plenary sessions online too, even if you weren’t able to make it to London yesterday. (I’m spending this afternoon watching some of the sessions I missed!)

And I did a few little video interviews as well and blog posts which I hope give a bit more of a sense of what it was like to attend (apologies for the slightly shaky camera work at times!)

Of course, there were lots of F-Worders there too. I spoke to zohra about an intersectionality workshop we both took part in:

And Catherine explains about a session on women and the cuts:

Here’s Bidisha, who compered the event:

Anyway, it was fabulous to see a conference that walked the walk on intersectionality. Amazing work, all involved.