Toronto Reverend Dr. Cheri DiNovo. Photo from Facebook.
Toronto Reverend Dr. Cheri DiNovo. Photo from Facebook.
The Joy of Sin
Reverend Dr. Cheri DiNovo C.M. was the guest on the November episode of The Fine Print – an online conversation series with contemporary feminist authors. Hearing DiNovo speak truth to power ended the 2021 season on a note of hope, joy and resilience.
“We’re all joyously fallible, traumatized, wanting humans,” writes DiNovo in the epilogue of her compelling memoir, The Queer Evangelist. “If we are loved by anyone and love anyone, our lives include holiness,” said the former politician turned radical reverend. ‘The joy of sin’ is how she prefers to reference the mantra ‘progress not perfection’.
DiNovo understands progress. During her tenure representing Parkdale-High Park in the Legislative Assembly on Ontario she passed into law more pro-LGBTQ2+ legislation than anyone in Canadian history, including Toby’s Act which added trans rights to the Ontario Human Rights Code in 2012, the Affirming Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Act which banned conversion therapy for LGBTQ2+ youth in 2015, Cy and Ruby’s Act which established parent equality for LGBTQ2+ parents in 2015, and the Trans Day of Remembrance Act in 2017.
“I hope this book can be seen as something of a manual for how, in spite of our ‘messiness’, we can be change agents.”
The memoir is a brutally honest tale of how a queer teen who was addicted to meth and left home at the age of fifteen went on to get elected to provincial office, change laws and save lives.
From her lived experiences activism and politics, DiNovo learned that reform and revolution aren’t contradictory. We’re living in a time when reforms are happening all around us. Anti-Black racism, reaction to the climate crisis, Indigenous rail blockades, to name only a few. Revolution, on the other hand, is a loftier goal. And it’s unlikely the reforms we’re seeing today—critical as they are—will upend capitalism and displace a system that is designed for people, not profit. But DiNovo will take what she can get. “Like the tale on one woman’s life, reforms are not nothing. Reforms are crucial. Reforms change lives as they are lived now, not in some utopian future,” she writes.
Working with the Enemy
The Queer Evangelist includes the full text of a sermon DiNovo gave when she first started at Trinity St-Paul’s. The text is based on the Beatitudes and aims to shed light on the ‘hate your enemies’ mindset. She also used the sermon to help explain her move out of politics and to help those who find church as a whole, incomprehensible.
“But I say to you that listen, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you,” DiNovo preached.
Impossible, right?
“If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Luke 6: 27-31)
Who does this?
Those with nothing left to lose.
“If we’re going to have differences of opinion and ideological debate in our governments, then we better learn to work with somebody who doesn’t always agree with us,” said DiNovo. “And so I did. And that’s how I got a lot done.”
She learned to respect people who had integrity and principles, no matter their political persuasion. She sought out people she could work with from the other parties and got most of the bills passed as tri-party bills. Eventually she became known as the tri-party bill queen. Further testament to befriending the enemy is the fact that Kathleen Wynne wrote the foreward to the book. After one of the worst smear campaigns that was hurtful and attacked her past and her family, the former Liberal Premier wrote: “Cheri’s telling of the story of that campaign is chilling for me to read as it lays bare the worst of the political process—a personal smear campaign. It was my party that would have supported, if not initiated, the campaign. But more than that, as an openly lesbian candidate, I have lived through my own personal smear campaigns. They are exhausting. They damage families ad they damage democracy.”
Just Do the Impossible
In our time of ongoing uncertainty about our environmental future and political divide, DiNovo uses the phrase ‘Do the impossible’ as a guiding principle in her life and work. She was inspired by this piece: graffiti is from Paris, France in the late 1960s when students protested the closure of the Sorbonne.
May 3rd 1968: French students protest the closure of the Sorbonne, setting off the May ’68 wave of demonstrations and strikes by millions of students and workers.
“Be realistic, demand the impossible.” —PARIS GRAFFITI. Image by Verso Books
The idea resonated strongly enough that she used it as the title of the book’s epilogue: Just Do the Impossible.
Because if you’ve got nothing to lose, why wouldn’t you do the impossible? Or at least give it a try.
The Queer Evangelist is DiNovo’s second book. It was shortlisted for the Speaker’s Book Award, Legislative Assembly of Ontario 2021.
Imagine being saddled at birth with a debt you must repay to gain your freedom? That question fired up the imagination of author and activist Jael Richardson as she created the dystopian world in the novel, Gutter Child, where a nation is divided into communities of the privileged Mainland and the policed Gutter. Is it a metaphor for racism?
As a recent guest on The Fine Print, a conversation series with contemporary feminist authors, Richardson teased out this interpretation with attendees, reminding them that while she mentions the skin colour of her characters, no one is labelled Black or white. There are Olo people and Sossi people in this world, and readers project the systemic oppression on her disadvantaged young protagonist, Elimina Dubois, and other students who attend an Academy where they train and learn how to work off their debts to society. Elimina was taken from the Gutter at birth and raised in the Mainland as part of a social experiment initiated by the Mainland government. But when her mother dies (on page five) she ends up at the Academy, alone and afraid.
“I started thinking about laws and constitutions and how they’re designed,” Richardson told the attentive audience when asked about the catalyst for the book. “How systems are built, and who builds them and who they’re built for.”
Richardson admits she had endless discussions with her editor as she worked out the logistics of her imagined have- and have-not world. What did the geographical landscape look like? How many socio-economic classes were there? What resources did they have? What opportunities or employment options were available to some and not others? Why?
Though fictional, the world is remarkably recognizable as any society where race and class determine who is privileged and who is disadvantaged. The book adds gender to that mix — women struggle against harsh and unjust situations and are forced to make hard choices. “What happens to women and their children in any world says a lot about the conditions of that world,” Richardson said in the interview. The difficult circumstances in which she placed her characters compelled her to add a disclaimer at the beginning of the book:
“This book is a work of fiction that explores a perilous world rooted in injustice. As in life, the effects of injustice impact many of the characters. Take care with your heart and your mind as you read. Pause and rest as required. These are difficult times.”
As in the real world, Gutter Child offers no quick fix to systemic racism. Systems protect the people who created them. And Richardson isn’t optimistic of that changing anytime soon. “People at the top would have to be willing to acknowledge that they [systems] are built on lies and falsehoods, and be willing humbly to take it all apart and give it to all of us to help build them.”
To avoid being overwhelmed by what isn’t changing, Richardson focussed on how people create bonds and community, even when forced into disadvantaged spaces. “Why do people make choices? And why do other people make different choices? And what makes each of those things different or important to pay attention to?”
Ultimately, Richardson hopes to get people reading and that Gutter Child can start conversations about oppression and how to break down unjust systems. The book certainly got the conversation flowing after the formal interview on The Fine Print as guests lingered to chat to the author about how the book jolted them into seeing and thinking in new ways about systemic oppression. One person said she was reading it with her twelve-year old son; another planned to do so with their young niece.
Richardson is considering a sequel to Gutter Child, which has become a national best seller since its publication in January 2021 and is a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award that will be announced May 27, 2021. The follow up book promises to be another dystopian tale – set in a nowhere land that could be anywhere. “As a Black woman who has sort of only lived in one place, but also felt like I belong to no place…dystopia is my favourite place to play.”
You can “play” more with Jael Richardson, who founded and serves as the Artistic Director, at the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), which runs until May 15, 2021. If you’re late to sign up, recordings of author interviews, workshops and readings are available to watch and re-watch until May 31, 2021.
To round our women’s history month in March 2021, a group of feminists gathered for the season finale of The Fine Print, an online conversation series with contemporary feminist authors. Topic of discussion? A novel inspired by one of the original founding members of the German Green Party, a revolutionary activist who fought for human rights, peace and environmental justice. The brilliant young political firebrand espoused ideas so far ahead of her time in the 1980s, we could easily imagine her in a national leadership role today, along with the likes of New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Finland’s Sanna Marin, Iceland’s Katrín Jakobsdóttir.
So why don’t people know more about Petra Kelly?
For author Shaena Lambert, the answer is all too familiar and tragic – history erases female leaders and their accomplishments. The Canadian author set out to resurrect the life of Petra Kelly who transformed global and environmental politics in the 1980s before she was murdered at the age of 44. Police reported that while she was asleep, Kelly was shot in the temple by her lover and ex-NATO General Gert Bastien, who then turned the gun on himself. Their bodies were not found for an estimated eighteen days – Kelly, still an elected Green politician at the time, was already in the process of being forgotten.
Lambert, also an environmental activist, met Kelly at a peace demonstration she helped organize in Vancouver, B.C. in 1986 and was transfixed by her charisma and inclusive vision. “I met her personally. I met the general and I was swept up by her vision,” Lambert said during her interview on The Fine Print. “It was so much larger than the vision we had in our peace movement out here in Vancouver. The interconnections that she made between peace and ecology and human rights and Tibet and sexual freedom.”
Decades after that event, Lambert saw Petra Kelly’s photograph in a museum at Checkpoint Charlie, the famed crossing point between East and West Berlin during the Cold War. It was the same photo that Kelly had sent to Lambert all those years ago.
In that moment, Lambert felt a zing and knew she had to write about Kelly. “I just walked out of that museum changed, with that sort of electric feeling the hairs on my arms were all lit up,” Lambert told The Fine Print guests.
To answer the question of why Petra Kelly slipped so quickly from memory, Lambert wrote the novel primarily from the point of view of Manfred Schwartz, a composite of several Green activists who were close to Kelly. In the novel, he is also an ex-lover (she had many) who struggles to understand her legacy and her often contradictory choices. Did she give up on the Greens? Did they give up on her? How could a peace activist fall in love with a Nazi officer?
“You’ve been the corpse for too long,” Manfred Schwartz narrates in the novel. “I’ve let your final identity define you, your murder turn you into a murder victim, as though that’s who you were, your meaning, your self. As a feminist, how you would have hated that! All your complexity, your laughter, your fears, reduced to a body in a bed.”
Giller-award winning author Madeleine Thien hailed Petra as “a tour de force” and “a masterpiece – a fierce, humane and powerful novel for our times…the story of generations reckoning with history, sex, the land, guilt, and our troubled future, is at every moment personal and political.”
Petra, a novel by Shaena Lambert
After the formal interview on The Fine Print, guests engaged with Lambert in a lively informal conversation. The author shared her thoughts from Cortez Island in B.C.: “I’m feeling an intersection more between activism and my work as a writer than I ever have before.”
Many at the online event voiced their astonishment at how Petra Kelly’s feminism addresses the issues of today—climate crisis, economic uncertainty, land sovereignty—nearly 40 years after her death.
As Petra narrator Manfred Schwartz puts it: “And now, in 1980, the only sane way forward, for so many of our generation—the way to channel both our love and our fury—was the new Green Party.”
If Petra Kelly were alive today, she would be 74 years old.
Petra is Lambert’s fourth book. She was the featured guest in March 2021, on The Fine Print, a conversation series with contemporary feminist authors hosted and produced by Lana Pesch in the Feminist Enterprise Commons (FEC). Watch the video highlights of the conversation here on YouTube.
Note: At the time of writing this, Trump refuses to accept the results of the US general election. This essay explores the potential and pitfalls of a Biden/Harris Administration.
A reprieve is not a victory.
It’s a pause in the onslaught. It’s a time to catch your breath, gather the wounded and get them to healers, mourn the dead . . . but all the while keeping an eye on the horizon, knowing that the struggle continues.
U.S. feminists have been waging an uphill battle for four years. Halting the backward slide caused by Trump’s bombardment is not insignificant, but it’s not the same as making it to the top of the hill. Even with the Biden-Harris win, we’re still mired in the muck of a slippery slope with an arduous scrabble ahead of us. Trump may not be able to shove us backwards with the full weight of the Oval Office on his side, but we can’t just kick back and lift champagne flutes to shattered glass ceilings. We must still push against the weight of the crises Trump has escalated: climate, pandemic, racism, misogyny, fascism, and economic collapse.
A reprieve is not a victory.
Feminists in the United States are holding a lot of complex and even contradictory emotional responses to the elections. As we should. Our ability to articulate complexity and nuance, especially in such a polarized world, is a strength of feminism. We advance feminism’s non-binary, non-dominator values when we take the time to speak, think, and feel beyond simple sound bites. We embody feminism when we’re able/willing to hold multiple truths and beyond the duality structures of victor/loser or optimistic/pessimistic. We can feel both jubilant that the Orange Menace lost the popular vote and furious that it was a close race at all. We can feel both cautiously hopeful and cynically underwhelmed by the concept of a Biden/Harris administration. We can appreciate that Harris shattered a glass ceiling while also recognizing that non-feminist policies advanced by a female body – or any body – are still not feminist. We can feel both relieved and worried. We can feel let down and uplifted. We can feel frustrated by politics-as-usual and renewed in our commitment to making change. We can feel all of these things and so much more. Feminism is not an either/or equation.
Rivera Sun, Rivera Sun is a change-maker, a cultural creative, and novelist, and an advocate for nonviolence and social justice.
The 2020 Elections reflected this complexity. They delivered a mixture of the good, the bad, and the downright ugly.
Let’s start with the good:The Squad is back and stronger than ever. If there are any politicians aligned with feminist values and policy, it’s the infamous Squad. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reminded everyone: progressive platforms are winning platforms. Every candidate who backed Medicare For All won their race. All but one of the many candidates who endorsed the Green New Deal was elected to office. Fight For $15 won a number of campaigns to increase the minimum wage. Georgia’s Stacey Abrams tireless work to increase voter registration helped shift Georgia to a swing state. (It’s amazing what’s happens when we stop disenfranchising BIPOC, poor, and marginalized voters.) The Cheyenne Nation elected an all-female government for the first time. New Mexico is sending an all-women-of-color team to the US House of Representatives. Los Angeles County elected an all-female board of county commissioners. LA scored another feminist victory, Measure J, which defunds militarized police (an outgrowth of the racist patriarchy) by funding social services (a policy squarely in-line with feminist values). The Rainbow Wave sent a number of LGBTQIA candidates to public offices. Orange County, Florida, can celebrate one of the most overlooked and impressive feminist achievements: recognizing the Rights of Nature for all of their many waterways. It is crucial to recognize the role of BIPOC women in achieving all of these successes.
The bad news? Biden and Harris are behind the curve of these progressive victories. Given their track records, we know that meaningful change won’t come naturally from the Biden/Harris White House. One of the core challenges of the next four years will be pushing the federal agenda to reflect the solutionary policy proposals being advanced by BIPOC organizers, youth leaders, intergenerational movements, and women. Margaret Flowers, editor of Popular Resistance, points out, “Change doesn’t come from the top, especially within a manipulated ‘democracy’ as exists in the United States. When social transformation occurs, it follows years of educating, organizing and mobilizing at the grassroots. Elected leaders who represent that transformation ride on a wave created by social movements, not the other way around.”
As for the ugly: We know that defeating Trump is not the same thing as defeating Trumpism. And “Trumpism” is just the latest code word to describe racist, sexist, misogynistic, domination-based worldviews that eschew facts and science in order to narcissistically continue their oppression of everyone else. The exit poll statistic that angered and depressed so many feminists was that the majority of white women voted for Trump — representing at least a two-point increase for this demographic since 2016.
Kaylen Ralph said in a recent Teen Vogue article: “If internalized sexism was to blame for white women’s choice in 2016, how to explain 2020, an election in which voters had the choice between two demographically identical old white men? As a voting bloc, white women seemingly doubled down in their support of Trump, opting to align themselves against science, reproductive rights, diplomacy, and economic solvency in support of the spoils they (we?) reap as secondary benefactors of white privilege.”
Dealing with the entwined problems of white supremacy and sexism will be a crucial task for feminists in the coming years (particularly for those who are white). Dismantling the toxic privileges that white women claim through supporting politicians like Trump will take strategy, skillfulness, and focus. But what’s at stake is our collective futures. Many warn that the next fascist white supremacist candidate will be far more dangerous than Donald Trump.
So, we’ve won a reprieve, nothing more. And a reprieve is not a victory.
If we want victories, we’re going to have to take a deep breath, survey the terrain ahead, and boldly push for the change we desperately need. To do this, feminists in the United States could look beyond our borders to feminists advancing causes in powerful ways around the world. Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand won re-election in a landslide, largely because her feminist policies have protected her country from the ravages of COVID-19. In Turkey, the women rose up en masse and stopped the “family values” misogynists from dismantling protections against domestic violence. In Poland, women filled the streets to rebel against attempts to ban abortion. In Chile, the movement that won a gender-equal, citizen-driven process to craft a new constitution did so with the rallying cry, “Never again without women!”
With the Biden/Harris administration, US feminists face a chance to shift gears – not to stop the fight — but to reach with one hand into another toolbox. We can fight, yes, but we can also heal, cultivate, nurture, build, repair, restore, create, and much more. Our diverse capacities have given us the resilience, throughout millennia, to challenge and undo patriarchal injustice. More than ever, we need to utilize these capacities to push forward for meaningful change. Our complexity is our strength. Our ability to work with nuances instead of broad brush strokes is a superpower. The next few years require us to use the many tools at our disposal to ensure that feminist policy and practices are implemented in political policy – and everywhere in our society.
No, a reprieve is not a victory, but it gives us a chance to breathe, strategize, look beyond the immediate, and rise up for change in bold, unexpected, brilliant, and powerful ways.
Need a break from sitting or the news? We thought you might. So we asked Sue Dunham (ey/em), a writer, musician, and activist who lives in the Midwest to pull together a 10 song playlist that will get you fired up, moving and by the end, hopeful no matter what happens.
Gudrun Schyman, the founder of Europe’s first feminist party
Gudrun Schyman, the founder of Europe’s first feminist party
When Gudrun Schyman, the founder of Europe’s first feminist party, was visiting New York to promote the US premiere of a documentary about her controversial life and career, The Feminist: A Swedish Inspiration, New York film critic Annika Andersson saw it and was intrigued. She considered herself a feminist too, but Schyman’s teachings were at a whole different level.
Andersson, who grew up in Sweden, requested a meeting through the film’s producer in the hopes of arranging an interview with Schyman for LiisBeth. When the producer said the writer could travel to Sweden, Schyman invited Andersson to meet in person—in her hometown.
Here is Andersson’s account of what she learned from that meeting with Schyman.
After an eight-hour flight from my home in New York City, then a 600-kilometre train ride south from Stockholm, I arrived at the station in Simrishamn on Sweden’s picturesque Baltic coast. The winter snow had melted, leaving a dense mist blanketing the streets of this tiny city, town really, with just 6,500 inhabitants. My steps echoed on cobbled roads that I shared with only one other pedestrian. Quaint and somewhat desolate, it didn’t come across as a hub of political activity.
I made my way to the Kagan cafe, which was cozy, warm, and welcoming, with a nice selection of tea and baked goodies, the Swedish remedy against cold winter days. I soon discovered it to be Schyman’s regular meeting place for interviews, and she arrived right on time, entering with a friendly smile and purposeful stride. At 70, she still cuts an imposing figure: tall, slim, and charismatic.
After I caught her eye, Schyman quickly made her way to our table and sat down, greeting me by asking who I was. That’s the first thing that struck me: she cuts right to the point. She has no time to waste because there is still so much she wants to do.
I understood immediately that she didn’t just want my name, she wanted a brief bio. She wanted to know who I am and what I do, in order to set the bar and adjust her answers to best serve the readers of the outlet I represented. I was sitting face to face with a professional, through and through.
But, admittedly, I was nervous because I am not a political journalist, and Schyman has been a trailblazer since she entered politics from a career in social work and after her divorce (she is not shy about talking about the domestic abuse she suffered, nor about her own struggles with alcoholism, as she had done in the film). When she took the helm of Sweden’s Left Party, she led it to its best-ever election result and it became the third biggest party in Sweden until 2004 when she and the party parted ways.
Frustrated by the treatment of women in politics and violence against women in society, Schyman launched an action group called the Feministiskt Initiativ or, translated, the Feminist Initiative (FI) in 2005, which became the country’s first feminist party. It had a structure headed by three spokeswomen—Schyman being the most well-known—who then led the FI to electoral success: it won seats in 13 municipalities in the 2014 municipal elections and, in that same year, made a historical breakthrough by garnering 5.3 percent of the Swedish vote to win a seat for FI in the European Parliament. Then, Schyman stepped down as co-leader of Sweden’s FI party this past February to take on yet another political challenge: uniting feminist political action across Europe by creating FUN Europe, short for Feminists United Network Europe. But more on that later.
While I consider myself a feminist, the depth of my engagement relates mainly to numbers. In film, for example, movie audiences consist of half men and half women, but only 23 percent of film critics are women. This is obviously problematic since male critics are likely to favour films that speak to them—male perspectives, storylines, characters. No wonder there are so few women filmmakers, given films they produce struggle to win over male critics to even reach audiences. I am all for introducing incentives to increase the number of female critics, a kind of targeted, sector-by-sector problem-solving attempt to achieve gender equality. But to be honest, I didn’t really know anything about the need for a feminist political party.
But Schyman explained that the FI party sees gender struggle as inseparable from other inequalities in society, which is in contrast to how society functions now, privileging needs of “man” over the environment, animals, and other societies. That kind of feminism is the party’s “independent, ideological starting point.”
How Do Feminist Political Parties Create Change?
Schyman pointed out that Iceland had a feminist political party in the 1980s called Women’s Alliance, which was successful for many years but didn’t have a clear ideological foundation. Rather, it focused on concrete gender questions such as equal salaries (basically the kind of feminism I knew).
In other governments, such issues are often relegated to Status of Women offices, which, in Canada, was recently rebranded the Department for Women and Gender Equality. To Schyman, that’s hugely problematic. “I’m allergic to that type of situation, with women’s associations and Status of Women,” she says. “They were formed, once upon a time and in different political parties, because women felt they needed to come together to strengthen their positions, and not be run over by the male politicians.”
Shyman in a meeting with local news papers
The problem with creating such “protected areas” in a patriarchal system is that questions affecting half of the population are reduced to minority status, or special side interests. But women’s rights are human rights. And women belong to many other groups in society. Said Schyman: “The political analysis needs to be more advanced, just as it is with matters such as class. Nobody would get the idea to start a Status of the Lower Classes or Status of the Middle Class. This just manifests how our society is structured.”
When FI had its breakout election—winning its first seat in the European Parliament—FI’s rep did not join the Status of Equality group. Rather, Soraya Post (also the first Romani in Swedish history to be chosen a candidate for a political party) joined the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats. “They are a much larger group with more resources,” said Schyman. “She can address the question of men’s violence against women as a question of security policy where the security policy of EU is discussed. This is crucial because, otherwise, you send it away to the Status of Women and it becomes less important.”
The Birth of a New FUN Europe?
With an eye to bolstering the ranks of feminists in European Parliament elections coming up at the end of May, Schyman helped set up an alliance known by what has to the best feminist acronym yet: FUN Europe, short for Feminists United Network Europe. To muster support for it, she has spent years travelling throughout the EU meeting with like-minded activists: feminists, human rights organizations, people working with refugees, LGBQT groups. Through putting forward candidates from different countries—Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Romania, Spain, Finland, Poland, and Italy—the FUN network developed a common electoral platform for the upcoming elections and set a goal to win enough support in the European Parliament to create a feminist alliance.
The network has their work laid out for them, according to a study commissioned by FI’s current European Parliament rep, Soraya Post, which shows that as support for nationalist parties and extreme right fervour increases, space shrinks for feminist, LGBQT, human rights, and women’s organizations. Such organizations are often accused of acting against national interests and have even been subjected to police raids and criminal prosecution. Schyman says Hungary and Poland are both worrisome, with people embracing more traditional political values where women are praised as child bearers and creating hostile environments for LGBQT people. The bit of good news in the study is that feminism may be the most articulate opposition to rising nationalism.
Schyman certainly believes so. “All human rights are under attack in Europe. Abortion rights are one of them, reproductive rights another.” She said that feminism makes human rights central to politics. Creating secular states and secular education and anti-militarism are important common goals as is stopping men’s violence against women. Looking at salaries, employment, and retirement through the lens of feminism helps us see that the gender salary gap and barriers to women in many occupations extends into the social security system, with women retiring poorer and living on reduced pensions. She also pointed to massive protests in Spain and Italy as evidence that people are increasingly fed up with violence against women.
Will the FUN Catch On?
Europe may well need FUN, but polls suggest Sweden’s FI may not keep its seat in the European Parliament, with support tracking as low as one percent. FI also lost voter support in Sweden’s parliamentary elections last year, falling to less than half a percent from just over three percent of the votes cast in 2014 (getting over the four percent threshold might have won it a seat).
Schyman said FI rode a wave of support for feminism in 2013/14 when issues such as racial profiling and ridiculously lax rape sentences drew attention to questions of inequality. “It spurred an interest in feminism, and people turned to us because we were there. People had somewhere to go.”
But support has taken a hit as increasing numbers of refugees crossed European borders. She blames government inaction. “The refugee situation accelerated in 2015 and became a bit chaotic in ports and train stations. Tons of volunteers showed up to help while the government stood nonplussed,” she says. According to Schyman, right-wingers seized on the chaos as a sign of system collapse and argued that Sweden had exceeded its capacity to absorb refugees. Sweden Democrats (SD), with deep alt-right and neo-Nazi roots, advocates for a stop to asylum seekers in Sweden—and has gained support.
Schyman believes the work of FI has motivated voters to try to stop the rise of nationalist parties such as SD. “Our slogan was very clear: ‘Out with the racists, in with the feminists.’ We defined the conflict early on.” Unfortunately, FI is paying the price as many voters are backing more established parties to counter right-wing nationalists. “I understand the reasoning—what if they don’t get in? We have to vote to keep the nationalists out. The process becomes more of a tactical strategy rather than voting for what you really believe in.”
FI has also taken a hit from some critics for being reluctant or slow to deal with “the culture of honour” brought to Sweden by some refugees. Galaxia Wallin is of Syrian origin and the author of Fånge i hederns famn, which roughly translates to “Prisoner in the arms of honour.” In it, Wallin tells the stories of seven immigrant women from various “honour cultures” who were forced to marry young and were subsequently abused by their husbands. She says Swedish politicians, including the Feminist Initiative Party, have been reluctant to address the issue. “We have wasted years just trying to define what the culture of honour is, and to determine if it’s something we’re allowed to talk about or not. Politicians are still worried that addressing it may be racist,” says Wallin.
Current FI co-leader Gita Nabavi agreed that FI was reluctant to single out a culture or religion and that vague approach has undermined FI’s message that they stand against all violence, regardless of form. Nabavi has since apologized on behalf of the party and told me in a separate interview that “FI supports people who are vulnerable, regardless of where this vulnerability comes from, even if it’s people with immigrant backgrounds who are the perpetrators.”
When the Going Gets Tough, Throw a Party?
To get through the ups and downs of polls and electoral cycles, Schyman takes a long view and advocates throwing a good party to spread the feminist message. “I compare us to the suffragette movement. How long did that take? All those women travelling around to lecture and demonstrate. Every single step taken in the past has been necessary for us to end up where we are today. This is crucial to remember.”
FI had similar struggles, starting out as a lean volunteer organization. How do you build support and campaign without employees and money? Schyman came up with the concept of home parties. The way it works is if the host was able to gather 25 people and agreed to recruit another five people to host a home party, Schyman would come to their home to speak about feminism and FI’s platform. The concept caught fire, with Schyman sometimes attending up to five home parties a day. Gatherings took place in all kinds of homes: large villas and small studios where furniture had to be removed to make room for guests who sat on pillows on the floor. “No meeting was identical to the other,” recalled Schyman fondly. “We became the ‘Home Party’ party. It’s a fantastic way to meet people. You’re invited into their homes. They gather their friends, colleagues, and relatives.” Looking back, she wonders how she ever managed to attend so many.
News of the home parties travelled and Schyman received a slew of invitations when she was in New York City for the premiere of The Feminist documentary. I attended one hosted by The People’s Forum where Schyman joked that it was like a Tupperware party but instead of plastic, she brings politics. Listening to Schyman talk politics inspired me enough to jump on a plane and track her down to this quiet distant corner of Sweden.
She has clearly inspired others too. Another group waits at a nearby table to interview her. Our hour-long talk has flown by, too fast. But before saying goodbye, Schyman made one last point about climate change and Indigenous people, which sounds like two points but, in Schyman’s feminism, all things are connected. “We are the first political party to have raised the question of Indigenous peoples to the level where it belongs, which is as human rights. We have members who belong to the Sámi people, and our parliament list included a man who was also chairman of the Sámi Parliament.” She explained that looking at the climate crisis through a feminist lens is to see that we are a part of the world rather than masters of it, a relationship and way of life that the Indigenous peoples espouse. And living according to her beliefs, Schyman has started a network of retirees to save the environment. Why? She said her generation had created the mess, and now they should help clean it up for the next generation.
Finally, she said goodbye and joined the next group of interviewers. As for the question that had brought me here, I closed my laptop with that quote from Schyman ringing in my ears. “I can’t imagine any country not needing a feminist party. We need to politicize these questions because, otherwise, they become questions everyone agrees about, but also agrees not to do anything about. We need to discuss these questions, so the conflict becomes obvious.”
The Future of the Feminist Initiative
After my meeting with Gudrun Schyman, I met with the current co-leader of Sweden’s FI party, Gita Nabavi, in Stockholm. She is just 37 but has been a member of the party since its inception. She recalled that finding out about the FI was like “love at first sight” as she didn’t feel at home in any other traditional party. She served in a leadership role with Schyman last year, and is proud of FI’s achievements. She cited strengthening the law around sexual consent, which passed in July of 2018, as a key legacy. “Other parties have worked for it as well, but we’ve been extremely persistent,” she said. “What we have to work on now is [creating] a culture of consent, since it’s not something you say yes to once, but build upon continuously.”
Gita Nabavi, FI’s new co-leader
Nabavi said that FI’s existence has actually moved other parties to incorporate feminism into their policies. “The Swedish government calls itself feminist. I don’t believe they would have done that if we hadn’t been around.”
So where does that leave FI? Pressuring the so-called feminist government to walk the talk.
For FI, to be a feminist means to get out of the arms business and embrace disarmament and peace. Nabavi said Sweden has actually gone backwards on this issue since the Berlin wall fell back in 1991. “Disarmament then wasn’t such a strange idea. We left the Cold War behind us.” She pointed out that Sweden now sells weapons to Saudi Arabia, a dictatorship widely criticized for its appalling treatment of women not to mention is in open conflict with Yemen.
Nabavi is proud that the Swedish government is calling itself feminist and feels like this is partly thanks to FI. But she warned, “What we have to work on now is that if you call yourself a feminist, you also have to act like one.”
Please note these interviews were translated from Swedish and shortened for clarification.
Related Articles
“The Feminist” is documentary film recently released about Gudrun Shyman’s life and career. In Sweden, feminist trailblazer Gudrun Schyman has long been a divisive figure. An experienced politician with a controversial past, Schyman is the founder of Europe’s first feminist party. Fiercely unapologetic, she takes to the streets, inspiring women to raise their voices and participate in politics. Featuring cameos from supporters Jane Fonda and Pharrell, this starkly intimate portrait is an homage to the political dynamo’sindefatigable spirit and a siren call to all women in the current populist climate.
Photo by Jon Tyson via Unsplash.
Rivera Sun, Rivera Sun is a change-maker, a cultural creative, and novelist, and an advocate for nonviolence and social justice.
