We need to talk about Honor Diaries
Yesterday evening the Student Law Society at the University of Bradford in conjunction with Karma Nirvana showed the documentary film Honor Diaries. The documentary, which takes as its focus the idea/concept of Honor (I know I know, I want to slip the u in too but I’m sticking with the spelling in the title of the film!) and the harm that this does to women and children across the world. The idea that honor of the entire family is vested in the women of that family, what they do, say, wear and how they behave is a complex one to get your head round but an important one if you want to understand the issues raised. I found it a difficult film to watch. I had tears rolling down my face several times during the film and I think it is an incredibly powerful film which people should watch, talk about, think about and then watch again.
The screening was followed by some input from various people and then a panel discussion. Here it became apparent to me how difficult it is to talk about these issues in genuine dialogue, without agendas, without getting defensive. I’m a feminist, there were so many issues in that film to follow up on, so many questions, concerns, issues about women’s rights, patriarchy, misogyny. So the first input immediately after the film was to tell us about services in Bradford that had been set up for men. We were told that these issues also impact on men and they also need help. I get it, I do. It’s an important issue. We’re not going to solve questions around honor killings, forced marriages, abuse etc if we don’t also look at men. But it grated. Every feminist fibre of me bristled. We went on to hear about the White Ribbon Campaign – men standing up to end violence and abuse against women. Great idea, valuable message but here we were again with the men. What about the stories of the women we had just heard in the film? Why weren’t we talking about them? Why weren’t we giving the young women in the audience a voice? Why did we have to let the men speak first? I was actually angry.
I was over-reacting. I do that. I was being overly sensitive. The message was one of solidarity and all I heard was here’s a campaign that will make men feel better about being men. Lovely. Patriarchy alive and well – albeit a bit less violent towards women. Anyway, we moved on to the panel. The first question was about whether it was really fair to blame the men given that many of the perpetrators of Female Genital Mutilation and other forms of violence against women are women. So, back to men again then. Come on women, we’re more creative than this, surely?
I wasn’t the only one being overly sensitive though. The questions fairly quickly turned to that of religion. Is this idea of honor a Muslim problem? Was the film we had just seen islamophobic. The University of Bradford Student Union Women’s Officer thought it was. She based her thoughts on the film’s production team’s previous work as well as snippets of the film. A student nurse from the audience responded that she, as a mother, christian and student nurse watched that film and it hadn’t occurred to her that it was anti-islam or about religion. Some people in the audience were overly sensitive to the points about religion. I see nothing in that film that is anti-islamic. I see lots that highlights that religious and cultural communities have difficult questions to ask themselves; that they need to claim back their faith and culture and that they need to stop accepting the unacceptable (a line I am fairly sure I have picked up from the film). Now, I say ‘they’ but I guess I mean ‘we’. The questions are for all of us.
So, having slept on it, I am still irritated that we couldn’t have an event where we talk about women, just women, not women framed by a ‘this impacts on men too’. I’m not angry about it anymore though, I get it. I understand that the message is important. I think the evening achieved its purpose. We’re talking about it, we need to and we need to understand that we all have things we get defensive about, that’s ok but we cannot let that stop us from talking. Dialogue is powerful – so let’s keep talking about honor, let’s acknowledge the human rights violations committed in its name and let’s try and find a way of reclaiming it.
So, the next post – hopefully in the next day or two will be my reflections on the film itself – rather than the event.
Tweeting My Day
On 23rd September 2014 I tweeted my day. The idea came as a result of an email at work suggesting we could do some video diaries to help each other understand what we all do and the pressures we can be under better so as to ultimately lead to a better understanding of different roles. That in turn should lead to better working relationships. Well, a video diary was just never going to work for me! Twitter however would. So I offered to live tweet a day at work. I tried to do that as honestly and as informatively as possible. There are some details of discussions in meetings which I obviously couldn’t tweet but I hope I have captured what Tuesday this week was like for me, some of what I did, how I felt about it…
I have captured the tweets of the day using storify so you can see the whole thing here: https://storify.com/Jess_Guth/my-day-in-tweets
On reflection, I enjoyed the experience. It did slow me down a little in terms of work. My most efficient time – between 7.30 and 9am – was noticably less efficient but I did go through the day reflecting on what I was doing and why. I was acutely aware of how much coffee I was drinking and that I don’t spend enough time chatting to colleagues about work generally.I also felt connected though and like people were with me – not in a freaky being watched sort of way, more in a supportive kind of way.
I think I might do this again towards the end of term because I think it is really important to stress that there is no such thing as a typical day – had I chosen today or yesterday, the whole thing would have looked very different. That however is why I love my job. I hope it was interesting or entertaining or useful or perhaps a little of each!
Philosophy reading group
For those of you who follow me on twitter – you might have seen me live tweet my day yesterday and the next blog post was supposed to be a summary of that. However, that’s going to have to wait until tomorrow because I did something today which I think is worth blogging about. I think it’s worth blogging about because it is such a simple, yet utterly brilliant idea: I took part in a philosophy reading group. Don’t laugh! I did and it was great.
So often we struggle on our own trying to understand the theories, philosophies and writers that went before. I’ve never really had the opportunity to sit down with people to read specific sections and figure out what they mean and go from there. Usually you get feedback on your application of the philosophies and theories – say through conference papers or similar. This group though is different. The group, as I understand it, isn’t aimed at discussion our own work but steps back from that to help us all get our heads round the philosophers we choose to look at.
I wasn’t sure what to expect. The reading was an extract from Foucault on ‘the Docile Body’ (A chapter from ‘Discipline and Punish’). I have never used Foucault explicitly in my work – probably mainly because I struggle to get my head round it all properly and I’m always scared of making a mistake that will make me look really stupid. I have however, drawn on Judith Butler who seems to draw quite a lot on ideas we also find in Foucault. Anyway, I digress. We only looked at a few pages and yet I feel like I have come away with a far greater understanding of what Foucault’s writing generally is all about. I have more of a handle on how he uses language (bearing in mind of course that we were looking at a translation!) and his key position. It also makes me feel more confident that my thoughts about Foucault were pretty accurate and that I haven’t misunderstood and got it all wrong (which is my default position when it comes to theoretical stuff!)
The really lovely thing about the group was that there was no expectation that anyone knew the answers, we were all just figuring it out together. It was the kind of collaborative, joint, supportive academic work I love. The kind of work that makes you walk away with a bit of a buzz, that makes your brain hurt in a good way and that makes you think about things. I loved it. I’m not entirely sure what I think of Foucault’s work, I’m not entirely sure I understand it all but I am sure that this theoretical stuff is not just something I have to think about – it is now something I want to think about. Thank you to all those who were there. Next time we tackle Nietzsche – just a paragraph of Nietzsche – but then I suspect that a paragraph is really all we can hope to get our heads round in the time we have. It will however be a pragraph more than I understood before and a paragraph more than I could ever hope to understand on my own. So I think I may finally have found a way to overcome my theory issues! I joined a group – who would have thought!
My Conversations 