Bunnies On Strike board: Flemish Womens day

[ Post a Response | Bunnies On Strike board ]

Flemish Womens day

Posted by Sarah on December 15, 2002, 11:24 am
62.234.110.253

here's a message I think you all wanna know about.
It sounds like they wanna organise s'thing massive!
enjoy the read, cheers Tanja.
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 13:53:18 +0100
To:
From: "Sara 's Jegers"
Subject: Fw: performance at the Flemish Women's Day!
Hi all
This message was sent on the NextGenderation mailing list. [The Next GENDERation network is a European network of students and graduates working in various fields of women's, feminist and gender studies.] It's a call for participation on a perfomance which will take place at the next Flemish Women's
Day (11/11/2003). A first meeting will probably be held in Brussels in January, but two of the three people who are already participating in this will reside (from Feb 1) or already reside in The Netherlands (Utrecht and Amsterdam).
If you are interested in participating, I suggest you subscribe to the NextGenderation mailing list (it's a good idea to subscribe even if you are not interested in this particular event). Go to http://nextgenderation.let.uu.nl/, click on "mailing list" and follow the directions on the screen. Once
you're subscribed, you can send a message to the list to say that you're interested. You can also contact sarah.bracke@let.uu.nl about it.
Hope to see some of you soon!
Sara
----- Original Message ----- =
From:
To:
Sent: Sunday, December 01, 2002 2:44 PM
Subject: [NextGENDERation] performance at the Flemish Women's Day!
dear all,
Almost month ago, the VOK (Vrouwen Overleg Kommitee, the autonomous Flemish umbrella organisation of women's organisations) directed a question to some of us if we could not organise a performance at the national Women's Day
(because of the busy agenda of Simone de Beauvoir, some 32 years ago, women's day in Belgium is on the 11th of November ever since...). The question was directed at the old Utrecht Nextgenderation Group (UNG), a group that isn't really active anymore (although we still have a little mailing list) since most of us are not living in Utrecht anymore. As some of you in this list might know, UNG did a performance (making use of images and texts and music) at the 4th European Feminist Research conference in Bologna, 2000. VOK wanted something similar for the Women's Day, which was
on Women and Violence (both war and domestic violence). (the women's day was by the way a big success, with 2000 women, from many parts of the movement, present).
Time was too short to organise something for this year, and then some of us were working on the preparations for the "Missing Links" workshop at precisely the same time. But now we have almost a year time for preparations, and VOK has already repeated its question: would a nextgenderation group do something like a performance at the next women's day, 11 november 2003. The theme of next year will be: the multicultural debate and globalisation.
I've already been talking informally about this idea with some of you, but let's try to get ourselves organised - all those of you who are interested in getting involved, and having some link to Belgium i would say (since preparing something like a performance does involve a period of regular
real-life meetings in belgium.) of course, not necessarily speaking flemish - eventhough the flemish women's day is mainly in flemish, it seems to me that in the belgian reality people speak not only flemish &french but also english, arabic, turkish, spanish, etc.
i really do think that NG could make its own particular contribution: considering the principles in our mission statement, and considering the whiteness of the belgian women's movement in general, i think it would be nice if we could address the postcolonial and anti-racist angle in a intelligent and provocative way. so, who would be in for preparing that?? (and we could actually do part of the discussion on this general list, before we start the more practical things on a local level??) and on that practical level: i could at a certain stage organise a first preparation meeting at my place in brussels (also explaining more about and showing a video of the UNG performance if necessary), but from there on i cannot take much responsibility (writing up a phd... :-( so it needs to be clear beforehand that there is a big enough group of us to do this...
by the way, the multicultural debate in belgium is particularly hot once again: with the riots and recent arrest of Abou Jahjah (finally a loud, outspoken, provocative, radical postcolonial voice??) - how could we interact with that? (now the liberal mainstream is considering Abou Jahjah and his Arabic European League as extremist)
ok, now i'm *really* waiting for your reactions...
all the best, sarah

[you can email Sarah here: sarah.bracke@let.uu.nl cheers Tanja]