A Different Perspective: The 16th Annual Reinstein Symposium on International Feminism
March 9th concluded the 16th Annual Julia Reinstein Symposium which ran from Sunday, March 7th to Tuesday, March 9th. This year’s theme was ‘Celebrating International Women’. The theme was chosen because the Gender Issues Group felt that Western notions of feminism have become the standard for the mass movement for women’s rights and “the rest of the world” is either forgotten or forced to conform.
Global feminism asks: are women one monolithic group of people with the same set of goals, or do women’s feminist goals depend more on their location, cultures and religions? Unfortunately, the western world does not focus on other movements and causes that are outside of the United States and Europe. Even Elmira College neglects to offer courses on the non-Western perspective in Women’s Studies.
The first event was a poetry reading and open mic night on feminism and international women in Mackenzie’s Sunday night. Raven See ’11 read “Say yes,” by Andrea Gibson, a poem about hope and encouraging others to claim your own power and to support those that can’t.
On Monday the 8th, International Women’s Day, Dr. Jessie Kabwila Kapasula gave the keynote address on ‘Feminist Agency in the Age of Beyonce's 'Single Ladies’: Faces of International Feminism in Transnational Popular Song’ in the Kolker Amphitheatre. Dr. Kapasula is from Malawi and has over 15 years of teaching experience in several countries including the United States, Botswana, Malawi and Zimbabwe. She explores issues of female agency and liberation in contemporary fiction and popular culture. She challenged students to look at the implications that the song, ‘Single Ladies’ has on Africans as well as African Americans. She argued that there is too much of a focus on Western beliefs of marriage and beauty which inhibits a group of people that have less economic opportunity as others.
On the evening of the 8th there was an international foods buffet that was open to all students and faculty in Simeon’s. The dinner was meant to celebrate the kinds of foods that would traditionally be prepared by women in other parts of the world. This gave attendees of the dinner a chance to see what the typical domestics tasks are of many international women.
On Tuesday students presented individual research presentations. Melissa Buck ’10, Hannah Kolesar ’10 and Abigail Zeigler ’10 looked at the conflict between cultural relativity and fundamental feminist beliefs, religion’s roles in women’s lives and how they restrict their sexuality and behavior and the modern perceptions of female modesty that were influenced by the early European witch hunts. The symposium concluded with a public talk by Dr. Robin O’Brian. ‘Indigenous Women Activists: Examples from Chiapas’ explored how women with poor economic opportunities and little political rights are still able to remain active within their community. She explains that women of the Chiapas value collective action and have organized a range of cooperatives in order to preserve their traditional responsibilities, such as weaving and baking.
The symposium wanted to show students that for international feminism finding similarities that connect every woman together to fight for an ultimate goal is important; however, celebrating each woman’s differences and allowing her to pursue issues that most affect her and her community is necessary in order to gain more accepted support by other women to also work towards the mass movement for women’s rights.
Abigail Zeigler ‘10
Originally Published in the Elmira College Octagon
Dr. Jesse Kabwila Kapasula
Photo by Jan Kather
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