About 30 participants from three continents came together for a two-day intensive
workshop in Seoul that was followed by a public forum on Apr. 18 to announce the
establishment of the Network of GloCal Activism (NGA) and School of Feminism (SF).
The network will start with 5 glocal points (GPs) in China, South Korea, Mexico
and South Africa.
“To deal with global economic crisis, we need to explore new attempts and forces.
Mutual interaction between local and global will bring about new energy for feminist
activism. It should be based on green (ecology)-red (Marxism)-Purple (Feminism),”
says Patricia Martha from Mexico.
Glocal is a combination of ‘global’ and ‘local.’ The organisers say this is created
to refer to mutual responses and relationships between ‘local and local’, and ‘local
and global’; different from the existing concept of the South, the third world or
transnational, for instance.
The idea was first floated in South Korea several years ago.
According to Gaphee Ko from the South Korea GP, “we are living in an era of ‘global
patriarchal system’ which has reinforced discrimination based on gender, race, species,
class and race. Our movement will be based on the ideological paradigm of feminism
through which Green-Red-Purple can be brought together.”
For feminist activists, the global patriarchal system is enhanced by militarism,
capitalism, imperialism and fundamentalism.
To challenge this, the NGA plans to establish a Theory Research Center, School of
Feminism and GP Network.
The Theory Research Center will generate agendas and theories to support glocal
activism. It will primarily theorise the gendered and sexualized nature of female
labour. Domestic work, sex work, care work, and irregular works mainly carried out
by female workers will be some of the main agendas.
The School of Feminism will provide space for experimentation where diverse theories
formulated in the Theory Center and movements will be combined. Participants will
be feminist activists working in areas like domestic work, care work and sex work.
They will have opportunities to connect their activism and theories through following
the curriculum of the school.
SF participants will further become members of the GP network which aims to plan
and implement glocal forums and campaigns based on connectivity and integration
of movements among GPs. After participating in the school, they go back to their
own GPs and also take part in organising different forums and workshops with their
own issues in their GPs.
As a starting point, the first School of Feminism will open this October in the
Korea GP. Members of the ‘Establishment Committee for NGA/SF’ from the 5 GPs are
due to come together to map out a common curriculum in July.
The process of establishing the NGA was very challenging, and required a lot of
patience, according to the organisers. Language, which could have been a hurdle,
was dealt with by providing interpretation and translation services during the
whole process.
Says Johanna Kehler from South Africa: “It is a very new way of debating and discussing.
It demands enormous amount of patience. You may feel very emotional about something
but you have to wait until all translations are done. So you may lose your moment
of emotional response but nonetheless it is a very new experience for us. So the
keyword is Patience!”
To deal with the language challenge, several interactive language programmes will
be included in the First School of Feminism to facilitate communications of local
activists from different GPs.
In the public forum on Apr. 18, diverse issues such as sex workers’ rights, sexual
equality, domestic workers’ rights, AIDS were discussed and debated as agendas to
be dealt within the NGA/School of Feminists.
XiaoPei He from China expressed a strong desire to establish concrete collaboration
through NGA for LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans-gender).
“In China, even though many networks were formed after the Fourth UN World Conference
on Women in Beijing in 1995, networks for LGBT was not focused upon enough compared
to other issues such as labour and migration,” she points out. “We need to collaborate
together and establish feminist theories to develop our activism.”
Just what the NGA/School of Feminism proposes to do. (END/2009)