Protest, Celebrate, Remember

One year of Pen in Fist

Image: Drumband5 @ pixabay

Today marks one year since my first newsletter post, International Women’s Day 2022.

That day, I went to a small but boisterous feminist march in Trafalgar Square, teeming with enthusiastic, aptly angry, dapperly dressed demonstrators with loud voices and  some great banners.

It was a fun and fateful day. On the bus back from the march, I started sniffling behind my red mask. Back home, I quickly took out a handy test kit and went through the now-familiar drill: nostril swab, swish of mucous in the small tube of sterilised water, a few drops into the round hole on the test kit. The pinkish liquid raced up the small plastic device and almost instantly a thick red line formed at the T.

Two years into the official pandemic, I’d tested positive for Covid.

For the next two weeks I was drained of energy, mostly confined to bed, exchanging tales of novel symptoms with friends down the road who’d caught the lurge just days before my partner and I, bingeing Netflix and enjoying the generous care packages delivered to our doorstep by dear friends. These were days of intimate solidarities.

I’ve often heard people say – I’ve heard myself say – that the pandemic has wreaked havoc on our sense of time. There’s a before and after (if, indeed, there is an after). But the period in between, weeks, months, whole years become hazy, expand or shrink. In this strange time warp, days of collective celebration or protest become memory markers.

March 8 is one such date for me. Ever I went to my first International Women’s Day march in Toronto some 35 years ago, it’s a day, like my birthday or New Year, when I look back on where I was in previous years. In 2019 I attended another small march in central London, near the Royal Courts of Justice, where protestors took advantage of new guidelines to devise clever masks to hide their faces from the cops, mixing carnival culture and politico gear. Even the small group of police determined to halt us from claiming the streets wore blue medical masks. In the pub afterwards, we were all a bit wary of touching the table, even each other. By the end of that week, the first official lockdown would be announced.

This year I’ll be celebrating International Women’s Day a day late, with a collective feminist dinner. I realised as I read the invitation that tomorrow also marks 15 years since my all-time favourite IWD: when I helped to organise a do-it-yourself anarchist feminist conference at a squat in east London on 9 March 2008.

As with far too many feminist initiatives, the impetus for our unofficial event was frustration with other feminists: some months before, a speaker at London’s Reclaim the Night March had called those of us who support the rights of sex workers “idiots”. I’d had enough of feminists who claim to prioritise male violence against women but in practice focus much of their attention on attacking other women. So with some friends I put together an alternative event where women and differently gendered people could gather and discuss a range of issues, share skills, cook together, and hang out plotting the revolution.

As I was writing this post, I pulled up some messages from the email list we created for the day. One had the subject heading “Gender trouble”. It was an exchange about the challenge of finding a trans-inclusive women’s venue. I had written, “Every time I think this issue has calmed down it rears its boring head, again...” As I reread this I thought to myself, “If only I’d known then what was to come!”

In the end we secured a squatted pub in Clapton with an accessible toilet, a tiny kitchen behind the bar, and plenty of rooms; in the spirit of the early women’s liberation movement, we installed a small creche upstairs. We put out a call for people to offer talks on different topics and got more offers than we could include. There were a couple of films, including V’s “Until the Violence Stops” on violence against women, a make-shift bike repair station throughout the day, a women’s self-defence lesson and a range of workshops:

·      Why feminists need to support sex workers’ rights

·      Women seeking asylum

·      Campaign against homophobia and racism

·      Solidarity between women’s and trans movements

·      Prison abolition

·      Feminist and queer movements in Belarus

·      Femmes and sex consciousness raising

·      Women of the book/religious women

·      The goddess in your cunt

If you’re smiling at that last title, I’m grinning with you: this one was classic Caroline. One of my treasured memories from that day was steeling myself to interrupt the small circle my late friend had gathered, just at a moment of intense humming, to tell one of the attendees that their toddler was screaming for Mummy. Caro’s face was thunder as I meekly snuck out of the space nodding profuse apologies.

As I look back at our offerings that day, I confess this would still be my ideal this mix of sex and politics.

But my nostalgia is tinged with regret: not at the event itself, or even at the loss of one of the key people involved. But at the sense that I haven’t held up my side of the bargain. I’ve continued to do activist work, but I haven’t been great at transmitting the transgenerational knowledge of struggles past, struggles that are still very much present.

In a recent Twitter exchange, I discovered to my surprise that while all the queer feminists I know today are familiar with, indeed spend a great deal of their time fighting for, trans rights, they are not all aware of the recent history of the sex workers’ rights movement in the UK. I didn’t conduct a scientific study, and I know there are lots of feminists of different generations doing great work in the sex workers’ rights movement. Still, I was taken aback at the lack of awareness of this issue among some people committed to queer and feminist activism.

Maybe this was the kick in the butt I needed to shift some of my attention back to sex workers’ rights after a decade or so in retirement. I’d burned out after a series of intense campaigns and turned my focus to other issues, including veganism and drug law reform. As activists committed to progressive change we’re bound to be drawn to different causes as we continue to grow and learn more about the world and how it works (and doesn’t work), and about where we think we can be most effective.

But it’s also crucial that we commit to passing on the experience and knowledge we’ve gained from earlier activism.

It would be easy to become a cliché, bemoaning the ignorance of youth. But that’s too easy, as well as too smug. The responsibility rests with those of us who’ve been around the block a few times to continue to educate people – just as we were educated by generations of activists before us, and just as people who may be younger or have different experiences and expertise continue to educate us.

As so often happens with these things, no sooner had I turned my mind back to sex worker activism than I received messages from a couple of friends asking me for details of some earlier campaigns. It was time to go back in time and think about what we’d learned, what work is left to do.

International Women’s Day is for all of us. It’s a day to protest and celebrate, and to remember the importance of passing on the historical memory of our movements.

No one else will do it for us.

Pen in Fist is written by me, C Lou Hamilton, aka Dr Carrie. To find out more about my activism, follow me on twitter. You can access my other writing, and information on my editing and translating work, on my website. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Pen in Fist for free here.