Panel discussion facilitated by Chakka Reeves as part of the double bill film screening of the Women’s March on Washington and Women Mobilized for Change 1966 to 1974 at CIMMfest on Sunday April 23, 2017.
Our program was scheduled after an all male panel (all white with one hispanic man). The all male panel started late and ran into fifty percent of our scheduled time slot. The audience who turned up wanting to attend the Women Rise Up program walked into an all male panel discussion - can you imagine? But yes it got worse, not only was it the usual bunch of men talking about their work and what they do and representing themselves and having the space to talk about what they do and their ideas. Two of the guys, lovely as they maybe proceeded to talk about how they had taken a slogan from a women’s march in 2016 and created a techno track with the verse “Pussy Fights Back”. They also mentioned they were thrilled to see women playing it on the buses to Washington DC for the Women’s March in 2017. They could have stopped there making the perfect segway into our films having at this point run over by 20mins but the facilitator who is the current Assistant Director of CIMMfest said to the female on site producer that he will finish when he is ready.
So when they finally finished at 1:30pm the Assistant Director failed to mention the next program which is weird and when asked to do it refused. At this point I went up to the “facilitator” to ask if he could announce the program and he told me he had the power. Yes indeed this is a question of power and who gets to have it in public spaces. So I asked him to question his own power in these situations and stated how problematic this is. (I do hope he reads this as I hope he does more thinking about this and how he can address his privileged position in future.)
Then what happened everyone in the audience was furious and the panelists who were there for our conversation were angry too. Why? Because this is a classic example of patriarchal privilege that occurs everyday. Men taking up our time and space and in this case our audience to represent themselves rather than being in the listening seat for a change. I do a test these days I always go up to my male colleagues and ask them what are you up to? How many times is the question reciprocated? Zero percent.
So the offense from the all-male panel rippled in different ways throughout our audience and panelists but one thing that made it worse was the “Pussy fights back” techno track. Part of the problem with patriarchal power is that men assume they have ownership of our ideas and can take and steal anytime they want from us. We just have to read the history books to see this annihilation in action - a classic example was Claudia Claudel whose work was stolen by Rodin. We all probably have a personal story of appropriation that we could share. I recently had a graduate student who had worked with me during his summer prior to his first semester of graduate school and he took the basis of my conceptual framework for his entire thesis project.
Another woman on the panel was highly offended by the techno track as she is a survivor of sexual assault and finds the whole language around “Pussy fights back” a sexualization of the female body in a political context that is yet another form of erasure. Unfortunately we have adopted yet another example of female objectification in order to campaign for our liberation. The use of language that is constantly used to oppress our bodies and voices needs to be analyzed and considered questioning the cycle of oppression.
My hope is that organizations like CIMMFest and workplaces start to address this by creating training days that specifically address inequality in the work place. We need to have open conversations and address this in a constructive manner. It’s time for speech, action and methods.
