 Welcome to the British Library. I'm B. Rowlatt of the Cultural Events Team. Tonight we're casting the net wide with this majestic beast of a book, the Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, which you can buy here, click above, and I strongly recommend that you do. You're about to meet some of the writers from within the book, and also it's editor, the one and only Dr Hannah Dawson, who's a senior lecturer at King's College in the history of political thought. And an all-round person of busy brilliance. Plus, we haven't had hair this big in the British Library since Dolly Parton. No pressure, Hannah. Over to you. Hello everyone, and welcome to this event. I think that is Dolly Parton who said that the higher the hair, the closer to God. So I think those are words that I can live by. Anyway, I was taught that feminism came in waves. And then when I dived into the water for this anthology, I found that there were oceans upon oceans of feminism from all around the world and stretching far back through the years. And that the history of feminism was as big as the history of patriarchy, which is very big. And therefore it is an unbelievable pleasure tonight to hear some of the voices from this book and indeed to be joined by two of the authors from the book who I'm now going to introduce. So first of all Pratibha Parma, an award-winning filmmaker, a human rights activist, committed to shining a light on the untold stories. Her film credits include Cush, a film about LGBT people in India, a documentary on Alice Walker, and currently she's working on a film about Andrea Dworkin. She's also a writer, has written about female genital mutilation, for example, and is the co-author with Valerie Amos of the classic article Challenging Imperial Feminism, which is in the book. Then it's my great pleasure to introduce Fatema Shams, an award-winning poet, and an Iranian scholar living in exile in the US at the moment. Fatema is professor of modern Persian literature at the University of Pennsylvania and works on the relationship between power and art on the effect of patronage on literature. And she's reflecting on this in her recently published book, A Revolution in Rhyme, Poetic Co-option Under the Islamic Republic. I came to know her through her extraordinary poetry and in particular her collection of poetry called When They Broke Down the Door, an amazing collection. And it's from that that I chose a poem for the book. We're also joined, I'm delighted to say, by Lucy Dallap. Lucy Dallap is an academic at Cambridge. She teaches history there. She is the author of the prize-winning book, The Feminist Avongard, Transatlantic Encounters of the Early 20th Century, and most recently this wonderful book, which is called Feminism's A Global History. And it's an extraordinary account of feminism around the world, not just the ideas, but also the feelings, the emotions, the bicycles, the bloomers, the badges that feminists wore, the songs that they sang. So there we are, there's our panel for this evening. And we also will in the course of the event be hearing readings from other voices in the book. OK, so now I'm going to turn to my panellists each and turn and ask them to talk about what feminism means to them. And I'll start, there they are, I'll start by asking Pratiba to go first. Thank you so much, Hannah, for inviting me to be on this panel today, and also for your incredible work in putting this amazing anthology together. It is just an absolute rich treasure trove of so much feminist writings that some of which has been completely formative for me. So, you know, it's just beautiful to have all that work within one anthology and to have something I had written in the early 80s to be included in the anthology to what a privilege and an honour, so thank you. So yes, I'm thinking about what does feminism mean to me. I jotted down a few things that I kind of would love to sort of read from. So for me, feminism really is an active verb. Feminism is the dismantling of global patriarchal institutional structures that oppress women on the basis that we are deemed not to be fully human because of our gender. Feminism is the acknowledgement that the victimisation of women and the anger experienced by women is real and has real bases in patriarchal violence against our bodies and our sovereignty. Feminism for me is a movement and a bold and audacious way of living in the world that disturbs racist patriarchal structures and demands justice for all women across differences of race, culture, nation-states, sexuality and chosen genders. And finally, feminism is about saving ourselves as women and our planet and it is about imagining a joyful future for everyone. Wonderful, thank you so much. Now Fatima, I'll hand over to you. Thank you so much, Hannah, for having me here. It's a pleasure to be here. I just wanted to second to talk about saying that it's an absolute honour to be included in this anthology. I really love it. I've learned so much from it and I will continue reading it in the next few months. I would just like to keep my words very brief so we can move on to the next stages of this very exciting panel. For me, feminism is a lifestyle, actually. Otler Lord's words for me have been crucial. I'm very happy that she's going to be read today and remembered as an extremely influential voice. She once said that if you can't really change the reality, change your perception of it. That has been an inspiration for me and also the idea that the personal is political. The fact that vulnerability and self-revelation are so important to begin breaking cycles of violence. There are so many silences to be broken. As she said, sexism and heterosexism both arise from the same source, which is basically racism. That brings me also to the fact that the centrality of the woman's body in feminism, the importance of it, which for me is very much linked to the anti-slavery movement. As you have thoughtfully quoted Frederick Douglass in the introduction of the anthology, I see that very much resonating with the woman's struggle from the part of the world that I come from, for example, that there is no truth more self-evident than that every man is of right out to be the owner of his own body and that no man can rightfully claim other bodies as his property. I believe this to be at the core of feminism as well. That's lovely. That's very powerful. I wonder Fatima, would you like to read your poem from the book? Absolutely. The poem that you have included in the anthology is very much in line with the idea of this spirit of feminism and the idea of owning your own body and not letting it to be owned by others. The poem is called Acid Throwing. I read it in Persian first and then the English translation will follow. Acid posi. Caos mi'ch yw'r surat am rha bar' dar'am. Bwg ddar'am, ja'i'r surat ysgwch ddead. Rha barbaz ae'i nera bar'a ae'i hamishe samt eto bechar chanan. Acid throwing. How I wish it were possible that I could remove my face and put it in the place of your burned face and then forever turn a mirror toward you. This poem was dedicated to Iranian women who were victims of Acid Throwing in 2014 in Iran. There is still an ongoing, and this has been one of the aspirations for the feminist movement in Iran to this day to bring those salons to justice, unfortunately, until this moment it has not been a possibility for the fight is going on nevertheless. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for that reading. Thank you so much for that poem. I mean, I remember I still hearing you read it is extraordinary. It's electric to hear you read it Fatima. And I remember the moment that I read it and I just couldn't. I mean that the obviously the pain of the act, but also the sisterhood, the desire to, as it were, bear another woman's pain. I found that just brilliant. And thank you. And then finally, to Lucy, would you like to tell us what feminism means to you? Yeah, thanks, Hannah. It's hard to follow that poem, I have to say. Absolutely beautiful. Prasip has given us a politics. Fatima has talked about a lifestyle and also an emotion around feminism. It's been exciting to be asked like what does feminism mean to me. And I want to give us my sense of feminism was also an intellectual experience as a reading experience. I love the idea of the reading woman as the feminist subject. For me, feminism is about passionate visions of change and otherness. And a lot of those visions have been rooted in in books, films in creative arts in a sense of hope and determination. And in looking forward in hope for other worlds, feminism has also been curiously willing and able to be a brilliant vehicle for looking backwards. And thinking about my own kind of evolution, my own trajectory as feminine. It's been very rooted in reading experiences that are often quite historically distant. Reading, Olive Shriner, Miles Franklin, the wonderful Australian writer, Simone de Beauvoir, Alexandra Collins, some of the writers that Hannah's included in this wonderful collection resonated to perhaps a surprising degree with me across the decades and continents that separated us. And in experiencing feminism through that kind of that that reading experience. It's also been clear to me that lots of those things that I read, which I love and identify with also don't don't necessarily represent my politics in in in the full. I'm thinking here of that extraordinary moment where Simone de Beauvoir says a woman's body is like a fiery mist that descends in front of her as she moves into adolescence as as she starts menstruating. And I remember thinking, I don't think my body is a fiery mist. So reading back helps us understand that, you know, feminism is quite subjective, it's quite individual, it's born of those historical moments. We're not always going to see eye to eye with all those wonderful feminists in our in Hannah's book in our feminist canon if we want to see it in that way. And for me that's really helpful, because it introduces immediately the idea that are many feminisms that we don't necessarily all see eye to eye that sisterhood is something which we can't take for granted that we might inhabit feminist moments that don't necessarily translate to other moments. And that is true, not only across time, but at any one any one moment where there's going to be multiple visions and those visions won't always be pointing in towards the same the same goals. Fantastic. Thank you, Lucy. So important there that the idea that we have to be comfortable, not only would we have to be comfortable with difference but we have to be attentive to difference. Yes, brilliant. Well, I think that now we might turn to our first reading. Our first reading is going to come from from Q gin, who was born towards the end of the 19th century in China, a revolutionary feminist who fought for the education of girls. She fought against foot binding. She fought against arranged and tyrannical marriages. And we're going to hear from the poem that I chose for the anthology, which is called a song promoting women's rights. And it's going to be read this evening for us by Mae Mae MacLeod. Our generation yearns to be free to all who struggle one more cup of the wine of freedom. Male and female quality was by heaven in doubt. So why should women lag behind? Let's struggle to pull ourselves up to wash away the filth and shame of former days. When we are united, we can work together and restore this land with our soft white hands. Most humiliating is the old custom of treating women no better than cows and horses. When the light of dawn shines on our civilization, we must rise to head the list. Let's tear out the roots of servitude, gain knowledge, learning and practice what we know. And on our shoulders, never to fail or disappoint our citizen heroines. Thank you. Thank you, Mae Mae. So there we heard from Q Jin, who was actually tortured and executed by the authorities by the King dynasty. She was headed in the village where she was born. And I think one of the things that strikes me about her and about other Chinese feminists, and indeed more generally about the work that I did for the book, was the way in which historically feminism has been bound up with other global movements, such as socialism, anti-imperialism. And I wonder if we might now as a panel turn to think about feminism as a global movement and feminism's interweaving with other global movements. And I wonder, Lucy, if I might ask you first to comment on that and maybe other socialist feminists. I mean, one of the things that's so exciting for me as a historian of feminism is that sense that they mesh with lots of the kind of grand intellectual developments across modern times across the last couple of hundred years, if not a bit earlier. And Hannah's book draws out those commonalities, those ways in which feminists were engaging with sorts of revolutionary or utopian or liberal or modernising or nationalist and colonial movements. I see this very much to stick with Chinese feminism for a little bit, in the work of Ding Ling, who wrote much later than Q Jin, who was a very significant communist activist, was one of the most prominent women involved in the kind of early days, where in Yunnan and then later as a national movement, communists set out to transform the position of women. And Ding Ling was both an agent of that transformation of that nationalist and communist project, but also clearly retained in her political approach, a sense of how difficult it was for women to inhabit those nationalist communist projects. How scrutinised their actions were, how the double values, if you like, that judged women differently from communist men impacted on their ability to to survive politically. And in Hannah's book Ding Ling is included with a wonderful piece from 1942, where she questioned the Maoist celebrations of International Women's Day, and the sense that revolutionary male comrades married women, but then expected those women to do all the childcare and all domestic work, and then divorce them for their backwardness, for their lack of kind of political fit with the communist project. Ding Ling points this out, and she paid a high price for pointing that out. She was forced to recant her words in a kind of self-criticism moment, and, you know, trod very carefully after that in the very, very difficult landscape of Maoist China. She was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. She was kind of repeatedly celebrated and then disavowed by Chinese communists in a sign of how difficult it was to bring feminist contributions and insights to that nationalist communist project. And just thinking about individuals like her, I mean, there are so many more that like her, give us a sense of, you know, this difficult marriage. It was often called, you know, the marriage of socialism and feminism or communism and feminism. But also the richness of what happens if we go global, and how we get figures like Ding Ling speaking, who, you know, frankly have not been part of the canon. The canon of feminist thinkers has been very Euro-American until perhaps the last decade where the scholarship has really gone global, and that gives us super exciting ways of recognising that feminism does not originate in the European enlightenment or the American revolution, and that it, you know, it genuinely is a global movement. Thank you, Lucy. I wonder, Fatima, if you'd like to say something to this question about feminism globally, and maybe particularly to think about feminism in Iran at the moment you referred earlier to an ongoing movement there. So I just wanted to say what Lucy said really resonates with, about Ding Ling, it also very much resonates with the feminist struggle in Iran to be part of the global movement. I think one thing that is really important when it comes to sort of discussions about the global aspect of feminist movement is that we really have to invite the feminist theorists and activists beyond what is considered to be normal or normalised, and what is considered to be acceptable according to the Western norms. And I think I find myself struggling, for example, to constantly identify and define myself as a feminist, academic, poet, woman, stateless, political refugee, freedom fighter, this is an intellectual, culturally Muslim and religiously agnostic. It's difficult, you know, when you don't want to be put into one box, and to be, you know, that again, this idea that Angela Davis also talked about, and I think it's very important, is that when you're talking about the intersectionality and when you're talking about interconnectedness and the idea of difference, we really have to think about difference as a generative concept, as a generative force that is going to give us the opportunity of sort of recognising different ways of being and different ways of thinking within the feminist movement. And I think we have a long way to go as far as, you know, sort of the global dimension of feminist movement is concerned. I think what is really important also is to consider the importance of feminism from below, instead of a sort of governmental and established voices when we were talking about feminist movement. The most important substantial work that has been done has been done by women of colour, black women, Latino women, Muslim women. And I think that idea of sort of going beyond what is normal and then trying to establish that as a sort of the core argument of diversity and interconnectedness. I think it's very, very important and key in understanding and sort of including these diverse voices from all over the world. Thank you Fatima. I mean, I'm very struck by what you said, Lucy, about the sense of being kind of caught between movements. It reminds me, I mean, and for example, as you said, being caught between a socialism that didn't respect women and a patriarchal capitalism that similarly exploited and erased them. And I'm reminded of the anecdote that I talk about in the introduction by Shulemith Firestone is kind of, you know, just gets heckled, sexually heckled by men on a stage and just says, fuck you left, I'm going off to start my own movement. And that, I mean, there were many things that came through as kind of repeated notes when I was doing the reading, but one was exactly the sense of women being caught between loyalties. Yeah, absolutely Hannah. And one of the things that I love about the ding-ling reading for those of you who are in the audience who don't know her writing, she really gives it straight. And one of her recommendations is she says, don't, women, if you want to like fight back against this awkward position that you find yourself in. Number one, don't let yourself get ill, look after your body because you need to put yourself first. This comes back to Fatima's point about bodily autonomy. And I love it personally because it brings to mind my grandmother who said to me very seriously her advice for the future was look after your teeth. And so I feel like ding-ling is telling me, you know, look after your teeth. She also says, make sure you're happy. She puts emotions first. She's got this wonderful list of what women should do. Use your brain, have a vision of what your life should be. And, you know, for ding-ling, the vision is a revolutionary one, right? It's about communist revolution. She genuinely is committed to that. And then she talks about resilience. She says, show resilience in hardship but perseverance never give up. That's just a wonderful list, isn't it, about how women can survive. It is wonderful. It is wonderful, Lucy, but of course it puts all the burden on women to do the work, which of course, and I think that's another, I mean, of course, I mean her instruction to us all not to get ill is a very poignant one right now, when of course that is not a choice that many people, most people have around the world. If we take, if we think about India now, if we think about the virus globally and in terms of race and in terms of class, it is not a choice that a lot of people have and kind of shines a light on the structural dimensions that feminists have also been keen to emphasise. It's all very well to say, women do this for yourselves, but it's also, that's why the sort of structural understanding of patriarchy, a structural understanding of sexism is so integral. I agree, Hannah, and you know there's interesting questions there about the role of men. And I do think that, I don't think the feminist past is like a completely undifferentiated period, and one of the things that I think we can see as changing over the last century is the much like harder questions that women are asking of men. By the time you get to the 1970s, women are not saying we want to be included in your, your systems of privilege and power. They're saying we think men should change, men should give up power. And that, you know, that proved to be a very difficult thing for men to do, but it's, I mean, I would say it's still a project which is ongoing. How does anyone give up power? It's a question which is very pertinent around white supremacy, as we've been talking about already today. And it's interesting, Hannah, that in the book there aren't very many men speaking. I think there's only John Stuart Mill, and there he's, I mean, he's writing with a woman. So, you know, that's a real question for us is how do men respond to feminism? What can they do? Have they historically been able to hear feminist voices and come up with anything in answer? Yeah, I should say the question. I mean, obviously there are males feminists. That's very important to stress feminism as a political position. It's a struggle against patriarchy and men can absolutely get on board with that. The reason I didn't include any, apart from John Stuart Mill, who as I, as you say, is a kind of codicell really to his wife Harriet, is that there were so many women who I couldn't exclude. I thought, you know, I don't know who I couldn't include, that I thought that I'd just leave the men off altogether. What I suggest we do now is turn to our next reading. So the next reading drumroll, because of course I realise this is a surprise for the audience is going to be from the giant, the legend Audre Lorde, who we've already talked about. This evening, the American poet, writer and activist, a leading light against homophobia, sexism, racism. And tonight we're going to hear her poem, Who Said It Was Simple, which will be read by Vivi Diwan Tessa. There are so many roots to the tree of anger that sometimes the branches shatter before they bear. Sitting in edyx, the women rally before they march, discussing the problematic girls they hire to make them free. And almost why it counts them and passes, awaiting brother to serve them first. And the ladies never notice nor reject the slighter pleasures of their slavery. But I, who am bound by my mirror, as well as my bed, see causes in colour, as well as sex, and sit here wondering which me will survive all these liberations. Thank you, thank you Vivi. What an extraordinary poem. So Audre Lorde is talking there about white feminists sitting in a hamburger joint, preparing to march for women's liberation, and the initial lines discuss how they talk about the problematic girls they hire to make them free. And there's that idea there that they're employing women of colour in order to look after their children in order that they can then go out and march for their own liberation. And which of course runs to the heart of problems with white feminism and the absolute essential necessity for being intersectional in our feminism. And of course it was Pratiba's article, Challenging Imperial Feminism, that was precisely about saying that what Audre Lorde had identified in the US and what Bell Hooks had identified there was absolutely true of British feminism too. And so Pratiba, I wonder if you'd like to talk to us about your foundational article, and indeed about Audre Lorde, if you'd like. Audre Lorde, what can I say, she was such a formative, incredibly sort of passionate moment in my life, because she really helped me, and I know many other women of colour to really find the, or she gave us the inspiration but also the courage to come out about our sexuality as women of colour. And that she, you know, I was part of a small feminist publishers called Sheba Feminist Publishers in the UK, and we were responsible for publishing Audre's books, we were her UK publishers. And so it was a fantastic opportunity to have to bring her over when we published her books, The Cancer Journals and Zami, and for her to come and be with us and visit with us. You know, I just remember her in our living room, in our apartment in Islington, and meeting with about six of us and just talking to us. And it was one of those memorable moments in my life that I think is one of the stories of my life that I feel really grounded me in an understanding of what it meant to be, to be a feminist, and a lesbian, and someone who had a much broader perspective of feminism. And I think that the text that you include in the anthology, Challenging Imperial Feminism, which I co-wrote with Valerie Amos in 1984, I was looking at that and I was like, whoa, we wrote that in 1984. And I haven't revisited it since, really. I mean, it's been republished in so many anthologies, but I'd like to just read your suggestion, just the first paragraph of it, because when I was looking at it today, I thought how absolutely relevant it still feels to me, actually. So, our task here is to begin to identify the ways in which a particular tradition, white, Eurocentric and Western, has sought to establish itself as the only legitimate feminism in current political practice. We seek to address ourselves in very broad terms to the theoretical and consequently political limitations of Euro American feminism and the ways such analysis inform and distort white women's political practice. In challenging such feminist writings, we not only look at the ways in which analysis of racism have been significantly lacking from that work, but equally importantly, we look at the ways in which we as black women and women of colour have been made visible in such writings and the terms in which our experiences have been explained. And I think that, you know, that's just the first paragraph of the article. And I think that when we wrote this in 1984, we were really looking at our own experiences as black women as women of colour in the UK and our experience of feminism. And we felt that we were having to accommodate all the time to the terms of a certain kind of white liberal feminism. And so, you know, to point Audrey's poem, where she's writing about the white woman going to the rally to free women, but being served by a woman of colour. And that contradiction, you know, and I think that was when, for me, when I read the Combahee River Collective and their statement about, I think they're really other ones who coined intersectionality. I mean, it's wonderful, Kimberly Crenshaw has made it much more contemporary and relevant to now. But I think that Combahee River Collective, what they were writing and illuminating was that there was no way in which we can, as women of colour, divorce ourselves from class, from sexuality, from gender, you know, gender that was racialized in many different ways and very specific ways. It was both that kind of writing from the US that kind of emboldened us, but also, you know, my own experience of growing up as the child of immigrant parents in the UK. And my mother was a sweatshop worker, she worked in a sweatshop, earned tens, you know, sense a kind of a pillowcase that she would sew. I remember her sewing till midnight at home when she started to work from home. And to kind of be able to figure out how does this all fit together. Where is the class analysis, where is the analysis of otherness and belonging that was absent from white feminism. And so I think there were a lot of kind of trajectories, both personal and political, that went into the kind of the writing of challenging imperial feminism. And, and, you know, one of the things we were talking about earlier your question about feminism's relationship to other political struggles and I think that that is, you know, again when, you know, when I read Angela Davis's book, when they come for you in the, you know, in the morning about her experience of being imprisoned and the liberation struggles around the world to free her. You know, she helped me to find the language to be able to understand my own experience as the child of immigrants living in the UK and working class immigrants. And that, you know, in terms of contemporary feminism, what to me is one of the, again, you know, taking a lead from Angela abolition feminism is something that's really crucial for us to consider. And, you know, although Angela and Gina, Angela Davis and Gina Dent have kind of developed it in the context of the US, I think it's more than applicable to what is happening elsewhere, particularly in the UK. And Lola's article in your book from feminism interrupted is just brilliant. I mean, and it really makes those connections to what is happening into the UK as well. So I think that there is, you know, there are so many different kinds of feminisms right now. And, you know, Sharon Salzburg telling women to lean in to break the glass ceiling. I mean that the who are those women, they're not the women that, you know, Angela Davis is talking about in terms of abolition feminism. But, you know, I think that one of the other kind of really pertinent pertinent issues that we need to be also thinking about as feminists is climate justice and climate change. And I think that that is something that, you know, and to actually kind of bring to the forefront women from the global south, who are at that fault line of experiencing the sort of the fallout of the climate change and not being brought into the climate justice movements to kind of actually highlight their own specificity in terms of how it's affecting their own lives. So I think that there's so so many different kind of priorities that we need to be thinking about right now. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Pratiba. So powerful. I mean, yes. And this business, this awful business of leaning in, Sandberg's business of leaning in. I mean, you know, as has been often said before that white women lean on, lean in by leaning on women of colour and working class women and working class women of colour. And we've really, we've really got to that's where the feminism ought to focus itself, rather than on as it were breaking the glass ceiling, a very injurious breaking glass ceilings. Okay, so let me turn now to Fatima for this question about God, the horrors of white feminism and the importance of intersectionality of thinking about race and class. I think one of the things that is really important, again, going back to Angela Davis, I think she has she's such a pivotal figure when it comes to feminism, I think in one of her interviews, she was talking about how important and central the 1968 movement has been in sort of bringing emerging this feminist consciousness where gender is no longer separated from other issues, such as race, class, I would add to that religion also and different cultural backgrounds. And I think, and of course, the fact that, you know, considering that sexism and racism and feminism are are connected in the sense that feminism is the force of change, then it has to address different issues. And then the notion of interconnectedness of course comes in as I mentioned before, and I think that's absolutely crucial. And I just want to add a couple of points to what you were discussing and also Fatima was mentioning the importance of where to fit as a woman of color in the global feminist movement, right, to be integrated but not to be discounted or to be forced to change to something that you don't want to. I often find myself, you know, in a in a liminal position in an in between position where in my home country and considered as a rebellious woman who is a, you know, who is who does not, who is not allowed to speak her mind and under the Islamic Republic, of course, I'm talking about and, you know, the importance of addressing the power and authoritarian powers as sort of manifestation of patriarchy that, you know, legitimizes acts such as, you know, horrible crimes such as acid throwing, for example, or a mandatory veiling for women, which is an ongoing struggle at the moment in Iran. And, you know, acid throwing is part of that sort of assault that comes with not just the patriarchy, but also the laws that are in place that women cannot own their bodies. They are constantly controlled and being told how to how to basically treat their bodies and believe in their in their bodies. And I think that's that's really important for that. If we are talking about intersectionality, then to consider these differences, sort of as that, and the creative power of this difference, and not just a difference, not only as sort of a word that is oftentimes, you know, thrown into into the discourse of sort of the global feminist discourse, but then oftentimes unfortunately it becomes a means of exploitation rather than rather than change. And I think that's something to sort of think about that, you know, regardless of our particular differences. If we really want to make it make a sort of an effective political change, we have to come to a shared understanding and of womanhood and the struggles of gender as a sort of a global concept rather than domestic or indigenous or native particular job. Yes, yes. Yes, that's right. So somehow to hold simultaneously the possibility of universality sisterhood joining, but but simultaneously to think about difference. Now we're coming terribly towards the end. And I want to ask the audience. I want to give the audience an opportunity to feed in question so do please now audience if you have questions feed them in via whatever the mechanism is that you have I believe there's some sort of chat thing that you can use. And while you're doing that what I'd like to do is ask each of you. To pull out from the book one particular whether there was any one particular person in the book that you didn't know about before or that you were kind of reminded of and that spoke to you particularly powerfully. We don't have long here but just if I might go round and ask you just to say a little thing about about one of your favourites and I'll start with you Lucy. Oh well there's so many Hannah, but I think I'd love to tell the audience about Rokea Hussein, who was born in what was then colonial India and in present day Bangladesh, and who wrote an amazing piece of science fiction feminist science fiction. In 1905 called Sultana's Dream. And there's a wonderful account of it in Hannah's book, where you know that the narrator falls asleep, and goes to a world in which men can find in a zanana in a harm, and women are the ones who are out on the street and the women have turned their city into a beautiful kind of eco feminist paradise to pick up on the dead deepest point about, you know we need to look to the environment, they've harnessed the water from the atmosphere, they've harnessed the solar power. In fact they use solar weapons to keep men back to keep all their enemies at bay. And it's just such a wonderful vision of women as knowledge bearers as as having different values. I mean it's a little bit dark that the locking away of all the men, but it's just a wonderful kind of fun think piece. In 1905 by a Muslim woman who was really at home with you know her vision of a feminist future, and that if anything says feminism has always had global roots. Thank you. Pratiba. Oh Pratiba, I think you're muted again. Okay. Yeah, I mean there was so many that I hadn't put quite a few things in the book that I haven't read before and I didn't know about. But there was one particular poem, actually by Amal Musa from Tunisia. And she wrote this poem in 2015 and it's called Love Me. And I loved this poem so much because it was such a reclamation of selfhood and the kind of joyousness in in claiming yourself. And it sort of reminded me of this quote from Adrienne Rich, who had said something like poetry has the potential to be liberative. And, and I think that this poem is to me speak so much of of liberation. Can I read just a little bit from it. Yes, please. I carry me on my fingertips. I carry me on the galloping of my vision. I wrap myself with a swaddling of my skin. I embrace me longing for myself. I bless my flowing, my gushing, I cradle me in my chest. I glove these budding hands with poetry. So good. So good. I know. And I'm so glad you picked that as well because, I mean, you know, obviously what feminism is, is the struggle against oppression. The object of feminism is suffering. But I didn't want the book just to be a sort of catalogue of suffering. And I wanted it to speak to the kind of plenitude of emotion and the kind of reclamation of selfhood that you're talking about, as it were, the move from objection to abundant selfhood. And I wanted it to be a pleasure, a pleasure and a pleasure to read. And so that was exactly my experience when I read Amal Musa's poem, I thought. Yeah, it's just, it's balm, isn't it? Balm for our women's souls. Fatima. So it was likewise, it was so difficult to pick, you know, some poems and, and you and I corresponded, you know, I, I picked the poem and then I was hesitant and picked another one. It's such a wonderful collection, Hannah, really is. So I picked Anna Achmatowa's poem. And it's, it's just, of course, I knew about her before and I've read her extensively. Her life really resonates with me, her life under U.S.S.R. especially. And there is this sense of, we talked about sisterhood, of course, it's, I think it's at the core of this poem, but there is so much more going on in this poem. And she describes this poem, it was very interesting for me that you picked this poem as well because she mentions in one commentary that this poem is very uncharacteristic of me and without any continuation. And there is a, there is a sense of duality, right? As many of us as women actually constantly deal with it, especially those of those of us who have experienced life under authoritarian Islam or in revolutionary societies or, you know, constantly on a daily basis dealing with patriarchy. But there is also this really moving, honest encounter with self, with age and with the use in the poem. So you can really take the sister in the poem on so many different directions. And it's just fascinating to me how she uses sister as a sort of a mirror image of herself, but many other sort of images as well. I will read only a couple of lines of the poem, which is called Sister I Have Come to Take Your Place written in 1912. Sister, I have come to take your place at the high bonfire standing in the forest. Your hair has long turned gray, your eyes are dimmed, turned misty by your tears. You cannot understand what the birds think. You do not see the stars or summer lightning. Time has instilled your rattling tambourine. I know your fear of the silence of the trees. The last two lines are among her favorite lines that she has quoted herself in her diaries, actually. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much. Now, yes, we do have a question. I mean, I thought I'd just, I mean, we've already, I thought I'd mention someone as well before we turn to our last, to the question from the audience, which is an upbeat question. Everyone will be glad to hear. And I just, I mean, I learned many things in the composing of this anthology. But one thing that I learned was that the history of feminism is as much about conflict between women and between feminists as it is the struggle against patriarchy. And that women feminists, especially white feminists, especially white middle class feminists like myself, have our blind spots. And that in the way we have to do the work and that part of the work is actually shutting up and listening, listening to people at the margins of power and bringing them into the center, as Ambel Hook said. And, and that's why I put as the end, at the end of my anthology, Lola Olufemi's amazing book Feminism Interrupted, which Pratiba has mentioned, which is, I hope the feminism of the future. And, and she, I'm going to just read a little bit from the end of her book, which is all about the importance of listening. And that's by the way why it was so lovely in the end to be doing an anthology rather than writing a book because I could shut up and let everybody else talk. And she says, yeah, she says black feminists have always understood the importance of difference in tension. Those pushed to right from the margins and destitution, those who muddle and disrupt the traditional binary gender, those who have attempted to unsettle and dismantle them as bound boundaries. And that's why I think as from the global south, challenging Western hegemony and domination, those who are and have always been the wrong kind of woman. They have cleared a space for us to understand the political possibilities that feminism offers us. We only have to listen for it to reveal itself. And that is the lesson that I have got, which is that I and people like me have to listen. Now I'm going to turn to the end to the to the question from the audience. So we have a question, which is, are things moving in the right direction? Can we be optimistic? So I'm going to ask each of you for sources of optimism. Let me go Lucy Fatema Pratiba. It's a good question. And I think that there's been quite a lot of coverage of some of the disputes and controversies and kind of political paralysis that has resulted from the difficulties of incorporating questions of non binary gender of trans women and men of people who identify as having no gender or fluid gender. I do think this has been a difficult issue for feminists. If our political subject is woman, what do we make of the diversity of who might align themselves with that category. But to me it's also a moment of real creativity of loosening what some feminists have talked about as the vice of gender, the vice of the binary. And again, our theme is about global feminisms. And when we look globally, we discover that in fact the gender binary hasn't has not been a universal that there are many societies in which there are there are multiple genders, or that gender is not the most important category of analysis or that it can only be understood in dialogue with age or other kinds of forms of gender. And to me this is therefore a kind of moment of excitement, where we can radically de centre a kind of binary version of gender and and draw from the creativity of thinking about gender in a wider variety of ways. I'm super excited about that prospect, even though I know that, you know, on Twitter, there will be a Twitter storm that says no no this is this is a disaster for feminism. Thank you Lucy. Fatima. I'm excited to to second Lucy on the fact that the binary approach to gender is very much still in place in certain parts of the world, and not only that, but, you know, any form of gender consciousness or some, you know, radical forms of gender consciousness are criminalized. We have to, you know, we have to collectively think about how to how to face authoritarianism in particular and the way in which feminism and any any type of feminist activity is criminalized and many, many feminist activists in Iran are in prison. Many many others are in exile. So I think as much as as much as it's an intellectual endeavor, I think it's also very much, you know, sort of practical sort of activism grassroots work that that needs to be done. And, and also the act of translation. This was something that I forgot to think about to actually discuss. You know, I think it's an absolutely exciting moment in the scholarship and the intellectual discussions in particular the voices of different parts of the world being translated. And just to say that, you know, there are many other books that have not been translated that need to be translated to be heard. Thank you. I'm sorry to have to rush you but I know that we are, we're now one minute past so Pratiba, have you got a sentence for us. I mean, I think that there's many, many things for us to be optimistic about. I think that the future of feminism is, you know, guaranteed, because there are so many, and I see across the globe so many young women who are taking the lead on climate change who are taking the lead on violence against women and doing so in the most creative of ways so that we see women in Argentina doing performances on the street with their bodies to protest against the genocide of women and the violence that women experience with rape with sexual assault on a kind of regular basis. And I think that, you know, as a filmmaker for me, creating art and a lot of the art that's been created all over the world by younger women, older women, women across the indigenous women, trans women. This is art that is liberatory. It is art that actually helps us to imagine what a feminist future could be, and that maybe we have our little moments of feminist futures that those ideal futures that we want to be living in. When we are in dialogue with each other, when we are dancing together, when we are gardening together, when we are collectively creating and nurturing and kind of imagining. So that's all I have to say about my optimism for the future. That's wonderful, gardening and dancing. I'm going to wrap up by thanking you Fatima for those last words and reminding us that feminism is a life and death struggle. And Lucy, for helping us think about the way in which, you know, if our concepts don't fit the world, then we need to rethink our concepts, and that is an exciting thing to do. And Pratiba, but I thank you for your, well, for challenging imperial feminism, challenging white feminism. And now, and I thank the audience for watching and, you know, engaging with this global movement. Thank you very much and good evening.