The feminist GA

At our weekly Mary Daly Feminist discussion group at Church of the Open Arms, we often talk about the Occupy Wall Street movement and how or if feminism in connected to it. On May 17, several cities around the nation held feminist general assemblies to bring feminist goals, vision, and strategy to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Thanks to Occupy Patriarchy for posting two accounts of the feminist GA that took place in Washington Square Park in Manhattan.

One of these posts came from Melanie Butler at the Ms. Magazine blog. Here's a sample:

I arrived to find a diverse crowd of around 300 people. Members of the Occupy Wall Street women’s caucus, Women Occupying Wall Street (WOW), were giving a shout of solidarity to Occupy Maine. The people of Lafayette, Ind.; Bend and Portland, Ore.; Chicago and a handful of other cities were also holding feminist GAs. The Raging Grannies sang “Evolution is too slow, revolution’s the way to go!” and things were off to a raucous start. I pitched in with a paintbrush to help record the shared values we were brainstorming–“Trust!” “Creativity!” “Justice!” “Humor!”–and, ignoring my friend’s smirk, embraced the consciousness-raising exercise as though I were encountering it for the first time. After focusing almost exclusively on women’s organizing for the first six months of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), I was happy for the chance to just participate. More importantly, I was happy to see so many new leaders and so many of the elusive “unfamiliar faces” we had spent meeting after meeting trying to attract to the movement.

Sarah Seltzer of The Nation offered a more in-depth analysis of this gathering. Seltzer saw an effort not only to counter sexism within Occupy Wall Street, but also to counter oppressive attitudes within feminist ranks. She also pondered whether this GA might be the start of a new way for Occupy Wall Street to collaborate with other movements.

Aspects of this GA offered a model for how Occupy can work with other progressive movements without accusations of “co-option” on either side. The fact that the organizers of the GA were both new to and familiar with Occupy meant that the attendees came from both inside and outside the movement, an example of horizontalism—rejecting hierarchy—in action. Beyond that, the GA reinforced the notion of Occupy as platform for ideas, rather than organization. The simple act of presenting feminist ideas in the Occupy format--in a public space, welcome to all, mingling with strangers beyond the reach of institutions--was refreshing and inspiring, the opening of a door of possibility, almost like the early days at Zuccotti Park. I realized with a start during the event that I’d never been in a public space that simply existed for feminist-minded conversation before, without a destination or goal or even work-oriented networking.

Will that door of possibility lead to a new coalition or plan for action? That remained unclear. None of the goals mentioned in the report-backs included targeted plans like “organize a sit-in in the US Conference of Catholic Bishops offices.” No specific march or strike or radical art project is in the works, and no one appeared as a representative from an established feminist organization to start building a formal coalition. At this point, the OWS ethos may not mesh with most institutional organizations, and perhaps that’s okay. What the feminists at the GA wanted more than a formal partnership was to keep converging and talking. So the one thing there will definitely be? Another GA.

This is bound to be a complicated and difficult process. I thought I detected from both Selzer and Butler an expectation that Occupy Wall Street and its feminist participants would eventually reach consensus on a complete range of goals. I don't think this is going to happen.

My own feelings about this are contradictory. On the one hand, I would join Selzer and Butler in wanting to push OWS to support women's reproductive freedom. The idea that abortion rights are "too divisive" and can be ignored just doesn't sit well with me. Besides everything else, reproductive freedom is a basic economic issue.

On the other hand, both Butler and Selzer take for granted that support for "transgender rights" is something that there is, or should be, a feminist consensus to do. I find myself balking there, because I believe there is a still a substantial segment of the feminist movement that sees the gender system itself as oppressive. We see the goal as eliminating gender entirely, not reforming the gender system to make it "more diverse."