October 24, 2008

 Wings of the Butterfly in Feminist Movement Building

                               

By María Suárez Toro

Historically, feminist and women's movements have undertaken the monumental task of challenging Patriarchy’s oppression and exclusion of women -- organizing, debating, researching, reconceptualizing and transforming our personal lives, politics and culture.  Today discrimination against women cuts across society at large, in our personal interactions as well as those with government, and even in other social movements that are engaged in transformational politics. Despite their commitment to building just, inclusive and equal societies, some still do not recognize or tackle women’s oppression. In  response, women and their organizations have researched and uncovered the many contributions  achieved by women throughout history, making them visible to the world at large.    

Auditorium at the Cape Town International Convention Center in South Africa, where "The Labyrinth of the Butterflies" will be performed at the 11th AWID International Forum entitled, "The Power of Movements"

In many cases, alternative paradigms emerge out of women's experiences and contributions that can help shape new ways of thinking and acting.    Encouraging such paradigm shifts is an urgent need, especially considering the overall human and ecological destruction that the present hegemonic paradigm is causing all over the planet. 

However, many of women’s initiatives and contributions remain isolated and invisible, either because women are unaware of them or because many still need to be uncovered. In the process of highlighting and legitimizing women's experiences and  ideas,  the wisdom of that feminist saying, “the personal is political” needs to be recaptured and affirmed for what it tells us about epistemology -- how we know the world.

The authenticity of this saying has resonated with women, upholding what they have known and learned from their daily lives and what eventually science (including quantum physics) has finally recognized: that all knowledge is subjective, thus we learn from the way in which we organize our experiences and that that is where the source of wisdom lies.

This epistemological breakthrough of the feminist movement mobilized women and legitimized our daily experience as a source of knowledge that often times contradicted what institutionalized or ‘scientific’ knowledge presented as unquestioned “universal truth”.

But sometime over the last two decades, this feminist approach to learning and knowledge seems to have been lost, leaving women exclusively at the mercy of institutionalized knowledge. Furthermore, institutionalized knowledge has been co-opted by conservative scientific, political and fundamentalist forces that  claim their perspective as the only valid truth.

In this context, women's contributions are in danger of losing ground, not only by very visible neo-liberal policies, but by invisible political and ideological dynamics though the discourse that denies, de-values and de-legitimizes sources of experience and knowledge that do not come from mainstream, experts and science made by men.  These interacting forces undermine women’s critical and creative voices by affirming the patriarchal Newtonian paradigm of science as “the” paradigm.

The reasons why this has happened so quickly are many -- ranging from the past failures of progressive projects and movements to change the status of women and other marginalized peoples and the resulting opening  for  advances in conservative world views and projects to  the rise of fundamentalisms in science, religions and economics that filled the vacuum left by the lack of alternatives.

While we can identify multiple reasons, the fact is that the de-legitimization of our own sources of knowledge has weakened and undermined all women and their movements.

The project Wings of the Butterfly and its present theatre production, The Labyrinth of the Butterflies, seek to  counteract such forces of backlash and fundamentalism in a variety of ways, including: honoring and making visible women’s contributions to emerging paradigm shifts; connecting the experiences of women throughout history to women today; developing and encouraging artistic expressions by women activists, thus, helping to reactivate women's lost sense of power and entitlement to NAME the world.

In The Labyrinth of the Butterflies women do just that! The production features women from Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States from various eras of world history who in their lifetime endeavours made contributions to a variety of disciplines that have rarely been acknowledged.
The place and contribution of females in the evolution of all species - including our own - has largely remained invisible and devalued to this day.  In this production, we weave together threads of women’s hidden and unrecognized contributions through history. These women travel through time to our world, bringing us a new tapestry of hope and action -- a vision that encompasses life-affirming dreams and challenges the risks that we face today as humans on this planet.  If we are to survive our species’ current  destructive patterns, women’s knowledge, insights, and sense of stewardship and caring, need to be at the heart of global thinking and action.