A couple weeks ago, Spain witnessed a second now apparently annual women's strike. The first one last year saw 5.3 million participate in the strike and about 500,000 turn out in the streets for corresponding demonstrations in 120 Spanish cities. This year's strike was much larger, with protests in 500 Spanish cities and turnout estimated at approximately double last year's. What's more, this year the women's strike centered in Spain spread to other European countries as well, with tens of thousands of French women and male allies striking and picketing on the same day as well (i.e. turnout comparable to a typical yellow vest protest action) and even reached as far east as Turkey.
The organizers of these strikes are lesbian feminists (lesbian feminism being a particular school of radical feminism which contends that women should focus their lives on helping and advancing other women) known as the March 8th Movement. The strikes were conceived of in their autonomous women's assemblies that have been established throughout Spain. The stated ultimate, long-term goal of the March 8th Movement is, according to their web site, "subverting the world order and the pervading hetero-patriarchal, racist, and neoliberal rhetoric." The inclusion of the term hetero-patriarchal here is significant in that it is a term employed (to my knowledge anyway) only by lesbian feminists, as only lesbian feminists see a direct connection between heteronormativity and male privilege. (Intersectionality theory, which is an American invention most popular here in North America and the overwhelmingly dominant variety of feminist thought here, by contrast, sees only an indirect connection between these two things.) I first heard the term used by activist, scholar, and author Sheila Jeffreys when she was interviewed by Meghan Murphy back in 2011.
Women's strikes were first conceived of as a mobilizing strategy by an early radical feminist organization called Red Stockings here in the U.S. back at the end of the 1960s during the second wave of feminist activism. The premise was to organize strikes (including of homemakers) around women-specific issues instead of labor issues as part of raising public awareness thereof, with the ultimate aim of transitioning into a whole different kind of social order. The goal of the March 8th Movement seems analogous to this. Red Stockings organized the famous National Women's Strike of 1970 that catalyzed the movement of that era. I continue to believe that women's strikes are the most effective form of feminist protest.
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(The color purple here is very common, I'm sure you've noticed. It's the understood international color of lesbian pride. The women who are wearing purple shirts emblazoned with the woman power symbol popularized by radical feminists back in the 1970s and waving purple flags featuring the same symbol are essentially declaring themselves lesbian feminists with that symbolism. What's especially striking to me about it all is the leadership of this section of the women's movement even in the last picture, which is from a parallel women's strike/protest action in the Muslim-majority nation of Turkey.)
There is also a thriving radical feminist movement that exists in South Korea as well today called Ditch the Corset.
I liked that this interview describes both the sweeping scope of ideas that are in circulation within the Ditch the Corset movement right now without pigeonholing these women as all being of one mind on any particular subject. That's how it actually is.Hundreds of thousands of women have now joined the Ditch the Corset movement, and while actions vary, Nayoung explains that “in general they include cutting one’s hair short (two-block, undercut or even fully shaved off), choosing one’s clothes based only on practicality and comfort (as men in general have always been able to do), getting rid of all cosmetics and the everyday rituals that come with having a beauty regimen, not engaging in intimate relationships with men, and renouncing motherhood.”
Nayoung herself has a has a child and a male partner, though she is supportive of the emerging movement which also takes aim at traditional notions of the family: “Many Korean radical feminists would also include heterosexual romance, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing in the list of ‘corsets.’
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(You'll notice that the main focuses of the women's movement in South Korea are topics like pornography and the beauty industry; things that are definitely taboo for feminists to oppose today here in the U.S. And also that alternative spellings that were popularized briefly by American lesbian feminists in the late 1970s are in circulation in South Korea today.)
When you combine these things with the growing, and indeed now quite powerful, radical feminist-led movement in the UK against proposed changes to the country's Gender Recognition Act that would give men access to women's restrooms, locker rooms, sports teams, prisons, and more if they simply claim to be women, without requiring a diagnosis of dysphoria for that access...a movement that I have been documenting from time to time here over the last year or so...you almost can't help but notice a trend. We are now even starting to see this movement make its way to Canada, New Zealand, and the United States even, as an organized thing, I mean. I posit it as a possibility that the revival of radical feminism isn't just a sporadic thing that's happening here and there so much as it is an emerging global trend within the women's movement that's starting to challenge and even replace the more conventional liberal (individualist) and intersectional (Marxist critical theory type) schools over time.
Regardless of how you feel about the women's movement in general, radical feminism, or any of these particular ideas that are in circulation in different parts of the world, do you think that the re-emergence of radical feminism as a global phenomenon marks the start of the next, "fifth" wave of the women's movement?