For my final blog post I decided to write about our last class topic, resistance. Throughout our class readings we have seen so many examples of resistance. The most prevalent examples to me is in Playing With Fire. All forms of resistance that they presented were non-violent and produced desired results. Just writing their book alone was a form of resistance. They critiqued NGOs, they very organizations that they worked for. Doing this brought them a lot of backlash, but it got the conversation started for their work and the fallacies in the idea of NGOs. They created their own knowledge and had a voice which I think is just a few of the most powerful things a woman can have. They refused to be silenced, and by doing that, they were heard.
Another example of non-violent resistance is Plachimada fight vs. Coca-Cola. They were fighting against coporatization and western imperialism through events, networking, and working through official channels. In The Essential Feminist Reader, each country shows some form of resistance to their everyday lives that they live. For example, the daughters in boxes and how they ask people to examine their own daughters and their lives. All of these writings are a form of resistance by challenging their existing institutions in what is considered 'normal' and what should be done to evoke change.
The outside source I decided to bring in was a TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jamila_raqib_the_secret_to_effective_nonviolent_resistance?language=en#t-525051
I thoroughly enjoyed this talk. She explains that "non-violent struggle works by destroying an opponent by identifying institutions that an opponent needs to survive and then denying them those sources of power." I think this is partly what our readings showed us. They identify their institutions and begin to deny them in their own way. She mentions that protests are good, but will not create the change you may be looking for, which I was confused about at first. She clears this up with an analogy: A army leader would not lead his men into a battle without a plan to win the war. Isolated actions do very little without complex strategies to win what you are fighting for. She suggests that we learn where these tactics have been successful and make it more powerful. She, as well as many others including myself, want to make violence obsolete. For now this may seem unobtainable, and may be for decades to come. But I believe with the right people, ideas, and actions, this may become a reality one day.
~Samantha Romes
Hi Samantha,
ReplyDeleteNice blog post. Thank you so much for posting that video. It was very interesting.
In the context of resistance, I have been noticing ‘resistance’ in so many different places after we talked about it in class. Resistance in a broad sense is around us all the time in so many different ways. It can be as forward as sending hundreds of eggs, to a government officials door, or releasing painted pigs with hats tied to them in the street to send an unspoken message. It can also be as subtle as wearing Converse with blue laces as Wadjda did from the movie (Wadjda) we watched in class. She was resisting her cultures feminine prescribed dress code. Wearing plain ‘boring’ black or brown shoes was not her preferred style. She wanted to be different, she was resisting her cultural norm in a subtle way.
I like the concept of resistance and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about it in class. I feel like it was the perfect way to end the class content after everything we learned about women in the Global South! There are so many good examples of resistance and its so inspiring that there are so many women and people that care about activism and resistance and growth as a community!
ReplyDeleteJust like Aria, I also enjoyed watching Wadjda preform her own versions of resistance. That movie proved to me that people of all ages and demographics can resist something they don't feel comfortable complying with!