Feminist Fightback 2006

OK so today I went to the Feminist Fightback conference at SOAS. Very interesting. I didn't get there until half three because I had popped along to the Tate Modern. Had lots of fun pushing past huge slide queues on my way to the Guerilla Girls exhibition in the permanent collection. Got distracted buying the pink (I never wear pink) t-shirt about women artists which you can see above. Outrageous at 20 pounds, but I really wanted it.

So anyway back to the conference, to say that this was my first real experience of socialist feminists should give you some indication of how I felt. I really am a liberal white over-educated middle-class feminist, this conference forced me to admit it. The closest I have come to socialism was reading a couple of biographies about Lenin and Trotsky. I am admittedly too ignorant about this strand of feminism. My biggest revelation is probably that I have a huge tendency towards lobbying for legislative and policy change in government, which obviously isn't part of their main agenda.

The session on female sexuality was bloody tense to put it mildly. Rape, prostitution, bondage, censorship it was all there. There was some kind of rigid question taking system which no one adhered to because the debates were quite heated and often profoundly personal. Lots of talk of 'sisters' and 'comrades' which I am not at all used to. Abby Lee, author of the blog/book Girl with a One-track Mind was there giving her first public appearance since the Sunday Times 'outed her'. For someone who wasn't an academic I probably enjoyed her speech the most. Probably because everyone else seemed to have rape fantasies; which, though I tried to keep an open mind, creeped me out.

I only stuck around for the abortion rights session because it was raining outside, but I'm glad that I did because it was a much more cohesive exercise. Everyone was obviously pro-choice, but it annoyed me how they kept referring to a 'pro-life movement'. My position is that I'm both pro-choice and pro-life. I don't want everyone to have abortions, I want there to be adequate sex education and sexual health services so that they aren't needed. Above all I don't want to be infantalised and I want complete control over my reproductive decisions and my own body. I was going to propose that we dispense with using 'their' language and call them what they are - anti-choice, but we ran out of time. It's a little discursive shift but it emphasizes that the issue is about choice rather than life/death.

There was also a suggestion that we ask for 'abortion on request' rather than 'abortion on demand' because the latter sounds too forceful. But I was thinking on the walk home that if we consider autonomy over our own bodies to be a right, then 'demand' is the correct term. I certainly don't 'request' any other basic human rights (which I consider abortion on demand to be). Anyway, there was an excellent suggestion that we stop being reactionary to anti-choice legislative challenges and propose our own Early Day Motion for abortion on demand. This really fired me up and I'll keep blogging about what happens with this in the future.