How do we do the “feminisation of politics”, asks Indra Adnan? Municipally, locally—or starting with the basic quality of our relationships?
Left to right: Caren Tepp, Ciudad Futura (Future City); Gala Pin, Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common); Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona; Amina Gichinga, Take Back the City, London; Sacajawea “saki” Hall, Cooperation Jackson, Jackson, Mississippi; Áurea Carolina de Freitas, Cidade que Queremos, Belo Horizonte. Thanks to Roar magazine.
We’ve never shied away from making the point in A/UK about the need to promote the particular agency of women, or more broadly the “feminine”, as prime builders of a better next system/stronger communities.
It’s what we’ve found as we’ve engaged with many different areas and constituencies: a thick relational web of women-centered and women-initiated works, keeping atomised individuals and groups connected. And with executives above them, that - surprise surprise - are still often predominantly male (or practice power in a predominantly masculine way, even if the biological numbers are even).
Yet we have come to be interested in the term “feminisation”, as we approach questions of sex, gender and power. Spurred by developments in municipalism - where cities and city-regions take more control of their affairs - the idea that politics could be done differently, at this scale, has been promoted by cities like Barcelona, led by inspirational figures like their Mayor, Ada Colau. Her idea of the “feminisation” of politics means a conscious act of changing the way that power is exercised.
See this from Kate Shea Beard and Laura Roth:
The feminisation of politics, beyond its concern for increasing presence of women in decision-making spaces and implementing public policies to promote gender equality, is about changing the way politics is done.
This dimension of feminisation aims to shatter masculine patterns that reward behaviour such as competition, urgency, hierarchy and homogeneity, which are less common in – or appealing to – women.
Instead, a feminised politics seeks to emphasise the importance of the small, the relational, the everyday, challenging the artificial division between the personal and the political. This is how we can change the underlying dynamics of the system and construct emancipatory alternatives.
Given that current power structures can only be reconfigured through everyday practices, it could well be that municipal politics is a better sphere of action than working at national or European scale.
Acting at a trans-local, even global, level is of great importance, but it is our view that the feminization of politics should start locally, because that’s where the foundation of any multi-level approach can be laid. The question of the role of municipalism in the feminization of politics is a question we will leave for another time.
The above passage is quoted from a major paper from Indra Adnan, The Alternative UK’s co-initiator, on The Feminisation of Politics – an Alternative Journey, for the German-based Integrales Network.
It’s as much a life-story about how Indra’s own praxis has handled women’s power and the feminine. But The passage below from Indra’s paper picks up on the question left hanging by Beard and Roth. That is, the difference between feminising politics at a “localised” or “municipalised” level:
To make change possible you need to work at the community level, where people live, within containers small enough to hold relationship. Those spaces will naturally be held mostly by women, because women have always done the majority of unpaid and low paid work that holds communities together.
Women who, even when they are forced to take badly paid jobs to bring in some money, are still doing the lion’s share of bringing up the children and looking after the elderly.
They are still the natural community networkers for these reasons. In the spaces in which they are in a majority, they allow multiple and quiet voices to be heard, quite easily.
However, as we (The Alternative UK) have brought our decades of experience seeking feminisation in other parts of society, I am less convinced that municipalism will be enough to hold the potential of feminisation and may even become an obstacle if held too tightly.
The current political system is unfit for purpose: having been designed to represent people with next to no provision for their active participation, it has and continues to guarantee the elites their dominance.
Even if one or two of the less privileged people make it through the system to the top of a party or even to become MP, that person has no mechanisms to bring the voices of the people with him or her, other than to invite a yes or no every five years.
Within this, the culture and structure of current politics has been designed entirely by men in past centuries. It has given rise to the growth economy including the military industrial complex, which continues to have a stranglehold on modern economies.
That in turn has instrumentalised the majority of human beings – both men and women – to function within the consumer society, based on an idea of merit that only creates value for the perpetuation of that political settlement. One that excludes the people who have historically been disadvantaged. And in so doing, endangers the future for everyone.
Men suffer directly from this. They occupy 86% of prisons, 90% of front line military, dying earlier than women of natural causes and committing suicide in much greater numbers.
While much of our politics has access to this knowledge, it does not have access to the resources that would make a difference. Namely the real power of people’s individual and collective agency – arising from their imagination and creativity – to re-imagine and re-build our society in ways that benefit everyone.
Because women have historically been kept in the home to nurture the family, their understanding of both human strengths and weaknesses, needs and offerings is part of their cultural heritage. You might say it is because women understand care and flourishing that they do care and cause flourishing.
But it’s also that their idea of a human being is holistic (or whole-istic). They see much more in a person than their working potential, their ability to succeed or fail within the current rat race. They see the spark of individuality in a child that no-one else sees and continue to see that in adults too.
For that reason, women need to be at the heart of the design process of a new society. Where old models have failed, rather than improve incrementally upon the old model, they are already evoking new visions of a society that could respond directly to the crises we are now facing.
Check out Rising Women, Rising World for female initiatives at every level of our socio-political-economic system that understand how things could change. Most of these are outside of the political discourse altogether. For much more on that, sign up to the Daily Alternative.
As it stands, it remains very difficult to get traction for change at the heart of politics. Opening up municipalism to the feminisation of politics is an exciting piece of the puzzle. But there are so many unanswered questions. Ada Colau, after 5 years in office in Barcelona, says she cannot change politics from where she operates – the culture both inside and outside the political / municipal realm is too strong.
If we were all to invest in municipalism, what would happen to the changing culture beyond the cities? Would it not still be subject to the national and international socio-economic-political systems that keep us all in thrall?
Politics needs to be in partnership with the changes happening in the broader society – where most women are bringing all those excluded with them – to get the traction it needs to create a genuinely new political structure and culture beyond parties. Within a community that means political activism opening up to broader community action – social enterprise, the arts, self-help, spirituality, sports, leisure and more. Where the energy is.
Other than as services, the creativity of these areas might not be captured by a municipal agenda, not least because of the reputation of civic duties as dull and lifeless. Instead we propose new ‘constitutes’ – fluid, temporary, institutions – like citizen action networks (CANs), that would invite the social energy and creativity for change.
While this can develop more freely outside of the political agenda for change, it can partner with it, to get traction between them.
Another Indra essay in this journal—for those who are interested in, and take the perspective of, integral studies—is Emerging political Alternatives through the lens of integral and metamodern thinking. By Indra Adnan, with Michael Wernstedt (LiFT)