Feminism under construction: A push for new alliances in Asia

Making feminist perspectives accessible to a wider audience

With #HerStoryYourStory the first group is working on an animation film that brings feminist perspectives from Thailand, Philippines, India, Indonesia and Pakistan, dealing with reproductive rights, sex work and gender-based violence. At the meeting in Bangkok, the group finalized their storyboards and created drafts of characters, discussing details, considering culture, clothing and debating how to make women’s issues more accessible and relatable to a wider audience. 

Uniting feminists and workers

How can the workers’ movement and feminists learn from each other and support each other in their struggles? This is the question dealt with by the group called Proletarization of Feminism is dealing with. The team is developing a feminist curriculum for the Global Labour University and the discussions at the meeting in Singapore led to a focus on care work and informal work. The curriculum aims to enable a feminist analysis of women’s work, which is often unpaid or underpaid.

The economy of care fits well into current debates on the future of work and is placed at the centre of feminist and workers’ movement's interests. Feminists have been demanding the recognition, redistribution and reduction of care work for decades. A recent study by the International Labour Organization (ILO) found that women do four times more unpaid care work than men in Asia. The group hopes to be able to contribute to the debate, bringing care work to the top of the workers and feminists agendas.

5 Mangoes for a feminist movie

The fourth group in the Political Feminism Network met in Jakarta, to work on their app for intersectional feminist ratings of movies.By rating how sexist, racist, misogynist and classist the portrayals of women in popular culture are, they aim to raise awareness and gender sensitivity about the stereotyping and discriminatory content of cultural products.