International Women's Day 2019 - a chance to re-articulate key demands of the feminist movement
Channel: New Internationalist
Date: 08/03/2019

Today  marks International Women’s Day, when women around the world
will be mobilising to re-articulate key demands of the feminist movement.

These demands are, and have always been, rooted in material struggles:
whether it’s about the rejection of austerity measures like the closing
of domestic violence shelters, or dismantling a border regime that
condemns refugee women for exercising their right to asylum, or the
decriminalisation of sex work.

Feminism has always been rooted in other radical movements. But over
recent years we’ve increasingly seen cynical moves from corporations to
co-opt the language of the feminist movement and sell us watered down
‘feminist’ merchandise, all the while paying workers poverty wages, or
even using prison labour. 

So naturally, as feminists we should take the opportunity to publicly
bin neoliberal feminism – a  strategy that sees the goals of feminism as
individual empowerment within a marketplace, rather than collective and
international solidarity against systems of oppression.

We need to scrutinise the supply chains that pay Bangladeshi women 35
pence an hour for £20 ‘girl power’ shirts and threatened with murder
after demanding higher wages. And we need to show solidarity with
Brazilian women, who refuse to remain neutral over the rise of fascism. 
Bolsonaro isn’t a “radical”, a“game-changer” or introducing ‘free-market perestroika’. He’s a threat to women in Latin America.

And finally, we need political education and to learn the lessons of the
feminists that came before us, whose writings are rich resources for how
to deconstruct our present. Like  Audrey Lorde said, the master's tools
will never dismantle the master's house.