Action at the Closing Plenary: Rising Together, 15th AWID International Forum in Bangkok, Thailand.
WHERE IS THE MONEY FOR FEMINIST ORGANIZING?
Impressions after AWID Forum 2024 Bangkok
by Basha Changue
Last week I had the amazing opportunity to spend a few days surrounded by incredible feminist warriors around the world in the Awid 2024 forum in Bangkok.
As a Black Feminist working in Spain (the former imperial metropoli, the actual south border of europe), most of the sessions I chose to attend were those who intend to address feminist movements funds and money circulation issues but -to no one’s surprise- anything was actually addressed because there is something that continues to be fiercely ignored by the majority of feminist funds: the intersectional reality in a globalized world.
What about the South in the North?
Most of them continue to separate and relate the fund programs to the continental territory, ashamedly exposing the whiteness frame that rules the feminist funding ecosystem where African, Asian, Indigenous and non white grassroots feminists organizations only live and fight at “their own” non-whites territories outside Europe and North Amerikkka.
In other words: racism is not a feminist problem or, at least, not a feminist priority. So non-white feminist in the Global North need to compete with white women for the feminist funds. Result: we never see a cent because our struggle is not Gender Equality based but Racial and Class Justice based.
I’m sadly surprised by the lack of actual political context consideration shown by the majority of fund organizations representatives (with the remarkable exception of Black Feminist Found whose entire existence -as far as I could hear and see these days- is rooted in attending the racial capitalist reality and trying to close this historical gap in funds distribution, BTW).
Generally, feminist fund organizations say that they’re in crisis because they’re receiving less money from governments and also from private donors. Gurl… I don’t know so much about funds but I know about politics and, long story short: capitalism in the actual imperialist era is ashamedly ruled by fascism and fascism will not fund feminism no more because corporations no longer need to pretend they care about human rights. So they can continue to invest all the money in war, exploitation and extractivism, now in a guilt-free way.
So, when the only opportunity we have to thrive in the future is clearly to build a strategic global organization of grassroots movements, why not provide a real space to do so? The awid forum was really awesome!, but not really a space organized as if it was truly focused on promoting spaces for debate and discussion that build effective global feminists alliances. It was more focused to promote a diverse feminist market so the funders can choose where to invest. I said what I said and I meant it.
Feminism is about Social Justice, not about Gender Equality
It’s critical and urgent to differentiate between gender equality movements and movements ruled by women & queer people. Because only white bourgeois women are primarly fighting for gender equality. For the rest of us, the struggle is related to racial capitalism, land defense and colonialism-imperislism-fascism. In fact, Gender Equality based feminism can become (and often became) in violence against non-white women, man, children and queer people. What does “equality” mean in an exploitative system? Do we want to achieve the equal right to exploit others as white rich men do? I don’t think so.
Relation with governments most of the time means adapting the organizations’ arguments to the governments political agendas that obviously don’t want to challenge this colonial system. Spain is the perfect example. A country known as the epitome feminist state, with all the new equality and anti-gender based violence laws.
But at best, Spain is a deep white feminist state (if we want to consider that a win): spanish equality laws marketed as a huge feminist win in terms of anti-gender based violence, does not include non-citizen women nor the state violence they receive. In Spain, migrant women issues are not targeted institutionally as feminist but “foreign cooperation” ones, because at the end of the day, they consider these women don’t belong here. That’s also why the spanish feminists don’t do anything with the foreigners law that maintains the migrant women in apartheid as exploitative surplus, available to clean their houses or take care of their kids and elders meanwhile they go to empowering marches to break the glass ceiling.
In other words, in a country where the 43% of feminicides are of migrant women, can we consider a non structural but individualistic and punish-based anti-gender violence law, that left violence against non citizen women out, a truly feminist win to export elsewhere? I don’t think so. Stop worshiping Spanish white feminism because it’s rooted in racial capitalism.
Beware of the master’s tools
My concern in this forum is not that much where the governments and corporations spend or not spend the money, but how much their policing policies are reproduced against grassroot movements in and by spaces like this forum. When it happens, I wonder who these funds organizations are serving to? whom’s agenda? Why is any global feminist fund useful if it’s not to make our work as activists easier and to filter and absorb the impact of colonial, fascist and racial capitalist agenda?
The data showed in the “Where is the money?”’s AWID report is sad (the feminist organizations are surviving basically by autonomous resourcing, volunteering, popular donations and membership fees), but the goal of funding organizations must be avoid to become the tool of control for the system and truly promote self-organization between grassroots in a real way, not only performative. Our lives depend on it.
Leer el texto de Basha Change en castellano aquí>
