In these noxious times as Donald Trump establishes himself as President alongside right-wing racist patriarchs like Modi in India, and Putin in Russia, it is so urgent for women and the people who love them to stand against racist misogynist hatreds, and come together in radical solidarity for a humane planet.
We say no to all collaboration, all compromise, all accommodation with the exploitation of the air, the water, the earth, and with human life itself.
OUR S/EXPLOITATION
We are mobilizing against each and every kind of s/exploitation.
S/exploitation–the benefitting of stealing someone’s labor,
or bodily integrity,
or emotional wholeness.
Exploitation is simultaneously sexual and economic, and racist. S/exploitation shines a light on the intersectional complexity of gain itself. Taking. Looting. Raping. Each protects the other.
S/exploitation is the process of taking what is not yours.
To exploit is to gain from someone or something, like the earth, without asking, thinking, or caring. It is to profit at someone else’s, or something’s expense. It is a form of stealing. It is an unfair use of power.
To s/exploit is at the heart of capitalist racist hetero-patriarchy. It is to take what is not yours–economically, sexually, culturally, racially, politically, environmentally. S/exploitation is a form of economic devastation. It can and often mimics and uses sexual rape.
The problem that must be abolished is capitalist racist hetero-misogyny and its vehicle of extraction is s/exploitation. Sexual violations of every sort are the most intimate and personal form of s/exploitation that powers the globe.
S/exploitation is war in yet another form.
Each normalizes and naturalizes the other because of both the repression and expression of each.
Rape becomes a normalized/ invisible site of war through the discourse of sex.
The violations against girls and women–especially the sexual exploitation of all of us is multiple, particular, everywhere, and most often ignored.
Sexual violation–rape, incest, harassment, verbal abuse, battering, and intimidation–exists inside the locales we inhabit in everyday life. So s/exploitation exists on the job, in the home, inside families, in the factory, in each place that power is exchanged.
OUR SOLIDARITY
Our solidarity is possible and necessary in order to stop the economic and sexual violation against all people, especially women and girls in this particular global moment.
Our solidarity in the US matters especially in this moment just after Trump’s win with his vile and sexually abusive bravado. He bragged about being a sexual predator. He dumped masculinist hatred on Hillary and all of us, especially Muslim and Black and Latina women.
So, the solidarity between us must be intimate and deeply felt and this stretches outwards to build a broad mobilizing of selves that is inclusive and loving.
Building solidarity between women and girls across all borders of race, class, sex, gender, body ability, nation, city, neighborhood, place of work, and family is crucial to ending sexual violence and its many forms of s/exploitation; and exploitation in its many forms of sexual violation across the planet.
Solidarity means we stand together with each other. We move out of our homes and work places into the streets together. We see one another. We can hold each other’s hands. We see each other’s smiles and fierceness. Together we energize and soothe each other. It is why solidarity is so much fun, and so dangerous to those who exploit us.
Solidarity between women and girls can expose the sexual violence that remains an open secret, covered up, denied, treated as invisible. As we connect our violations in the system of exploitation we expose the sexual structuring of our exploitation. The economic becomes very personally sexual, and politically important.
Any person who stands against sex discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual violence, sexual exploitation, sexual oppression, sexual violation, sexual trafficking, sexual objectification sexual commodification, must stand in solidarity together.
The location of power in misogyny is both personal and political, private and public, domestic and waged labor, familial as much as economic, sexual reproductive alongside production itself. So solidarity must be drawn and built across and through these sectors.
The “we” of women and girl’s solidarity is built with the overlap and intersections of our shared uniqueness. Our coalitions built with each other allow for our differences and similarities. Our solidarity is at the heart of this newest revolutionary mobilization against all forms of stealing, abusing, and harming.
I hope to further build solidarity against the taking and using and violation of people, of the earth and its resources. Instead of taking and stealing I want us all to share our labor and our gifts and our potentials. This process that ends the stealing of ourselves, from ourselves is revolutionary and can revolutionize our hearts and our minds.
Let us unite here in the US along with the women in the streets in Brazil, and Argentina, and Poland, and Iceland, and Congo, and Nigeria, and Syria. Let us burst open the boundaries of the nation state and build a feminist revolution against every kind of s/exploitation. Let us burst open the secrets of sexual violence.
Let us burst open the understanding of the proletariat to end the s/exploitation of every mother, daughter, wife, sister, and person.
“WE”, the “we” of all of us, can do this: build and rejoice in coalition, with solidarity, against every form of s/exploitation. We stand with our bodies–demanding their full capacity.
This revolution demands a full sharing of our lives and the earth’s bounties. The solidarity of and with our bodies is the energy that will save this planet. So RISE! DANCE! EXPLODE against this punishing moment!!!!
1 in 3 women across the planet will be beaten or raped during her lifetime. That’s ONE BILLION WOMEN AND GIRLS. Every February, we rise – in hundreds of countries across the world – to show our local communities and the world what one billion looks like and shine a light on the rampant impunity and injustice that survivors most often face. We rise through dance to express joy and community and celebrate the fact that we have not been defeated by this violence. We rise to show we are determined to create a new kind of consciousness – one where violence will be resisted until it is unthinkable.
This year we are Rising In Solidarity Against the Exploitation of Women. We are initiating a new series, “RISING SOLIDARITY” where we will be sharing stories of extraordinary activists from around the world about their experiences with true solidarity, harnessing a deeper understanding of why it is critical in the fight against systems of oppression and exploitation. Providing both regional and global context for what it means to stand in solidarity with each other.
