solidarity
In the video section, watch Tishani Doshi perform one of her most haunting and popular poems ‘Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods’. Using the movements of/in body, music and language, it is a powerful expression of Tishani’s expansive vision of resistance, freedom and solidarity in the face of violence.
There may already be another organisation in the community to share resources with but for community-led initiatives, a shared perspective on Safe, Inclusive, Sexuality-Affirming (SISA) spaces is also important. Sometimes when the shared perspective is not there, that becomes a challenge.
I recently watched North Country on Netflix, a movie based on a true story of a woman’s fight for equality at the workplace. It is based on the case, Jenson vs Eveleth Mines, in the United States in which Lois Jenson, fought for the right to work as a miner, and the right to work free of sexual harassment. She won the landmark 1984 lawsuit, which was the first class-action lawsuit on sexual harassment at the workplace in the United States and resulted in companies/organisations having to introduce sexual harassment policies at the workplace.
…even if people have little in common, once they enter these spaces of solidarity, they are connected to a larger community. These spaces become wellsprings of an unspoken sense of safety and mutual support between individuals of communities that share a sense of having been othered.
Our sexuality is often in flux – being manoeuvred (sometimes in ways we cannot control) by the crashing waves of societal expectations, circumstances, and our own choices and experiences. But the world continues to uphold a fixed, rigid idea of sexuality, and continues to confine us within this idea, and therein lies the conflict.