It’s been four days now two weeks since I got back from AWID 2024 in Bangkok. In the initial days back my mind didn’t seem to able to move on; I dreamt about being in conference spaces every night, much to my amusement and exasperation. I talked about it to anyone who would listen – my mother, my friends, my sister, my colleagues, trying to giving each of them a slice of being in a large space that saw some 4,000 people from across the world meeting to discuss all kinds of feminisms.
On the flight journey back, I wrote these points as what I want to remember from the conference, in no particular order:
- The chat with the person in the booth put up by the International Network of People who Use Drugs, and why drug policy is a feminist issue. I told the person that I couldn’t understand, and they invited me to a mock debate they were going to do the next day. I took a pamphlet that outlined how people who used drugs could safely navigate a conference like AWID.
- How when you account for the margins – occupied by gender-diverse people, people with disabilities, sex workers, drug users – you automatically include so many people.
- How in all our work about women (and perhaps even in the conference) we still don’t talk enough about men, often the causes, complications of much of what is messed up in the world. I agree, but I also felt happy to be in a place with few cis-men and where they weren’t, for a change, in or taking up the conversation!
- How much geopolitics makes a difference to feminist politics and policies. I know, it sounds “duh!”, but from safety from sexual violence to safe abortion to literal physical safety, the breadth of issues that geopolitics influences is staggering.
- The many, many strands of feminism that were there: ecofeminism, climate justice, feminist economic justice, disability, narcofeminism, technology, sex work, caste, indigenous feminisms, queer feminism, ethnicity, African, Pacific, Lat Am, abortion, labour, trade – AMAZING! The complete AWID itinerary can be a lesson in how interconnected things are.
- Meeting or seeing people from Burma, Palestine, Mozambique, Sudan, Syria, Tigray, and the Philippines, who talked about settler states, occupation, the “hunter”, and thinking, “the world is so f***ed up; will it always be?”
- A quiet sense of wonder at how much healing is becoming a part of these conversations, and yet is thought of as “mumbo jumbo” by many
- Stories of women resisting, persisting, with whatever means available. Like Rohingya women stringing up sarongs, considered “impure” by men, as a wall to slow down the oppressors trying to enter their villages.
- Listening to Poongodi and Meenakshi talking in Tamil in a venue like this, about their success in negotiating a treaty with garment manufacturing factories to have anti-sexual harassment guards in place. I was overwhelmed, all goosebump-y and teary-eyed, so proud to hear these two women from Dindigul, having come all the way here to talk about their work to a room full of, as Meenakshi said, “people the likes of whom I have only seen on TV.”
- Just seeing women and people in all their diverse glory, especially their clothing! African folks in stunning clothes and jewellery, beautiful braids and cornrows; South American folks’ skirts and colourful or silver jewellery and the colourful headgear! And oh, the profusion of curly hair! In all stages of messiness, lengths and curliness -kinky, coily, wavy, curly! The women with short cropped hair I think I crush on!
- The young Indian women who came with organisations that work in their communities, and who were wide-eyed but also owning the space with their proud dance, dressing it up, singing!
In the days since I’ve also discussed this with colleagues and read this and that about the forum, some of which has influenced how I’ve been thinking about this. Most of the following points are a mix of my thinking and the responses or ideas of these people, and I can’t completely say which is which, now; but here goes:
- As the “sector” – whatever makes up the sector – gets more organised and professionalised, fear pervades. Fear of losing funding, taking a stance, not taking a stance, damaging (i.e. not constructive) criticism from within, call-outs, and so on. This, of course, affects what we do and how we do it. Sometimes, it’s out of caution, a “make the most of what you can” approach. Sometimes, it’s fear. I don’t know if I can distinguish them clearly.
- What “political” really means. In a country like India, the spectrum of talking about, say, sexuality, includes everything from convincing married couples to use safer sex methods, to building inclusion of diverse sexualities, to the right to sexual pleasure for people with disabilities, to convincing schools and parents about the need for sexuality education, to talking about consent. In such a spectrum it feels like everything about sexuality is political. And yet – and yet – the sector is not seen as being “political” anymore, not engaging enough on global issues of war, genocide, climate change and ethnic cleansing and neoliberal capitalism and overconsumption. We’re doing a lot and yet it’s not ever enough, and worse, it seems we’re doing “less” than we did a decade or two ago.
- I’m perplexed by how much funding has come to be central to this kind of work (perhaps I’m being naïve and it always was, as we stepped away from the “social service” nature of the development sector). The conference had a significant portion of time allotted to conversations on improving funding, what grantee organisations want to ask of funders, how funders can be accountable to the sector, how they can ease accountability standards that they demand from their grantees, and so on. There were long queues for the “meet the funders” sessions they organised. In a lot of cases, sessions that involved telling the funders what grantee organisations want, were old things: “let us decide what our community’s priorities are,” or “give us multi-year core grants that help us sustain rather than look for funds each year,” for instance, that I’m baffled we still have to say these things. While of course all this work needs to be funded, I do wonder what makes the balance of demanding accountability from funders while acceding to their demands of accountability and fair practices. Who is paying whom for what work? And where is the money from and how are we convinced of its “cleanliness”, especially in the wake of BDS lists and government funding?
- All this reminds me of “Against Purity”, a book I haven’t read but whose principal argument was introduced to me and my team by Arundhati Sridhar. I’m going to take the lazy way out and share its premise from the book’s description: “The world is in a terrible mess. It is toxic, irradiated, and full of injustice. Aiming to stand aside from the mess can produce a seemingly satisfying self-righteousness in the scant moments we achieve it, but since it is ultimately impossible, individual purity will always disappoint. Might it be better to understand complexity and, indeed, our own complicity in much of what we think of as bad, as fundamental to our lives? Against Purity argues that the only answer—if we are to have any hope of tackling the past, present, and future of colonialism, disease, pollution, and climate change—is a resounding yes.” This seems to be important as we are exposed more than ever to extreme viewpoints, black-and-whites, “if you don’t do X you’re Y” arguments, which could leave us smug or fearful or defensive, depending on whether we’re the one telling or receiving.
- Inclusion, tokenism and solidarity. What each of this means, and when one becomes the other. As someone with a lot of privilege on many counts, I honestly don’t know what I can say about this without it sounding hollow. I share two people’s takes on these topics especially in the light of AWID here, who raise similar questions too: Sachini Perera and Priyanka Samy. There is also this statement by feminists from the SWANA region, parts of which the organisers responded to at the closing plenary, including that none of their funders threatened to pull out funding and that they will share the list of funders in a few days.
All this thinking notwithstanding, it was a powerful space to be. I’m in awe of how well it was organised (much of it was seamless and easy to navigate, to the extent that a conference catering to 4,000 people can be). Food, physical accessibility, a fast-track immigration lane for attendees at the airport, multi-language interpretation, a “low sensory room”, harm reduction spaces, and a childcare room. I remember coming back energised, questioning, and curious, even as funder reports swallowed my days back at work (ironic?!). As regular tasks and 2025 planning and everyday logistics took over, I wondered how these things would stay on in my mind, and I’m glad that two weeks since I’ve still been able to finish writing this piece. Perhaps the conversations and ideas will stay in a quiet part of my brain and come back every now and then.
Below, images of a few lines from my scribbled notes.
