We are going through hard times.
Every corner of the world is in the grip of rising conservatism and misogyny. Cries of war ring out, xenophobia increases every day. Every kind of means is tried to attack women’s reproductive rights and right to life; the existence of LGBTI+ people is not tolerated.
Even looking at what has happened in Turkey since last March 8 is depressing enough. The male violence we face every day at home, at work and in the streets. Every day, news of another case of sexual abuse, and in response a government trying to pass laws to provide excuses for sexual abuse, seeing the way to prevent femicides as preventing divorce to trap women even further and make them internalize inequality. We are surrounded by misogynists who make it their business to concern themselves with our shorts, skirts and how tight our trousers are. They want us both to work like slaves and not to leave home more than necessary; they want us to agree to everything they say. They even want us not to take a breath they do not want us to take.
There is a Directorate of Religious Affairs, with its enormous budget and authority, that has entered the very heart of our lives and occupies every space. While the budget flows into the Directorate and war, our labor is exploited at home and at work and we are forced to provide care services for pennies. As life becomes more expensive, we are increasingly impoverished; through unemployment or its threat, we are made more dependent on and beholden to all kinds of insecure work and to certain men under the name of the family. They steal from us: from our pockets, from our lives.
If we can carry on amid all this, it is thanks to women’s solidarity that connects us to life, lets us breathe and gives us the strength to continue; thanks to feminism that crosses borders and reminds us another world is possible. Our feminist rebellion and struggle connect us to one another and to life. In defiance of male domination, which grows stronger by trying to turn us against one another and sanctifying dying/killing, we draw from one another both hope and the strength to sustain life and resist. In these hard days we become a breath for one another, opening spaces in which to breathe.
Feminism offers us a method that shows us inequalities in every area, even among ourselves, and proposes an alternative. Through one another’s stories we learn our differences and commonalities. In one another’s stories we see that what oppresses us is not a few bad-hearted men but a whole vast system, and that the sexism we face wears masks suited to each woman’s differences.
Now is the time to expand this struggle, this rebellion, to claim our lives.
Our life, our struggle, our rebellion is feminism!
For the 16th #FeministGeceYürüyüşü on #8Mart, we are in Taksim at 19.30!
We meet in front of the French Cultural Center…