Women's Conference: Revolution in the Making

The fifth session of the International Women Conference in Frankfurt showed ways of weaving the future together

The last session of the International Women's Conference 'Revolution in the making' addressed the need and explored the ways to weave efforts, struggles, practices together. 

The upheavals of our times, said moderator Meral Cicek of REPAK (South Kurdistan) have not only resulted in much pain, violence and the removal of millions of people from their land, but they have also given us a chance to weave our own way of life. What are the parameters, asked Cicek, that we are proposing?

To answer this and other questions a number of panelists were called. Siana Bangura of the Black Feminist Platform, UK, said women have faced fierce racist repression, manifested in archaic enslavement colonization and the aggression that comes with it in different forms. 

Radha D'Souza, reader in law at the University of Westminster, said that the beautiful colors depict how women in India are daring, struggling and resisting the attacks of the neo-liberal policies of capitalism and the overall attacks of patriarchy. But she asked, how do we make room for solidarity of different kinds?

Shereen Abou Al Naga, Professor of English Literature at Cairo University, said that the women from Arabia have incurred the double layer of loss of freedom due to very harsh Arab hegemonic patriarchy, which has lost its regional and world power to capitalist hegemony. 

Sylvia Marcos, Academic from the Indigenous Movements in the Americas, Mexico, said how women in the zapatista movement tell us the same son in a different tune.