bidisha on tokenism

Painfully true Guerilla Girls poster.

Bidisha has written an excellent piece on tokenism that avoids the usual merely factual approach in favour of an angrier kind of analysis (to be read alongside Laurie's equally excellent recent piece on why men get congratulated for saying feminist things that women have been saying forever here).

Bidisha writes:

'No modern woman wants to find herself alone on a station platform, counting a poster. It's sad. But it's all part of my investigation into cultural femicide – the erasure of women from public life. Who are the perpetrators? Events organisers, editors in broadcasting and the media, radio and TV producers, commissioners and jurors. They are male and female, they probably don't realise they're doing it, but they don't mind. They're fine with a virtually woman-free world.'

Amusingly enough, one of her major examples is the philosophy conference that runs alongside the Hay on Wye festival. I'll explain why this is amusing (or something like that) after Bidisha's summary:

'To witness femicide in action, go to the town of Hay this May. At the same time as the annual book festival is an unrelated philosophy festival called How The Light Gets In. There are 25 debates covering broad themes such as evolution, the urban space, creativity, violence and privacy. All but two of these events are male-dominated. Eight are men-only, opening with "Being Human in the 21st century." Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Four white men are going to discuss all the facets of the human experience. Thirteen discussions have just one woman and either four or three men, and one has one woman and two men. One event is a screening of a guy's film. Two talks have two men and two women. And that's it. I was scheduled to attend and was hugely relieved when other obligations meant I had to drop out. I know from experience that female participation in events that massively underrepresent women does not change anything. Year on year the ratio stays the same. How The Light Gets In gives 56 different men the opportunity to speak. It offers the same opportunity to just 11 women.'

Last year, I was actually invited to speak at 'How The Light Gets In' on a panel on utopias and dystopias. I agreed, and was quite looking forward to it. About a week later I get a call from the organisers saying: 'Very sorry, but we're not sure how you'd fit in on the panel after all…and besides, er, someone had asked someone else and we got confused…er…' Had they suddenly realised that I may hold political views to the left of the Lib Dems?! That I was actually a youngish female philosopher rather than a middle aged male philosopher?!

If you are indeed going to admit, as Bidisha puts it, that 'we no longer live in an age where female thinkers, writers, philosophers, academics, artists, theorists, activists or politicians are rare' then tentative organisers may have to acknowledge that some of those non-rare people might nevertheless not necessarily hold your middle-brow, middle-class, vacuous political and theoretical positions…or organisers should just be clear about not wanting anything new and that they're sticking to what they're 'comfortable with'. Then at least the stakes will be clear.