This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like by Alyssa Teekah

Author:Alyssa Teekah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Demeter Press
Published: 2015-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

“It Happens Here Too”

The SlutWalk Movement in Hong Kong and Singapore

ANDREA O’REILLY

IN THE FALL OF 2013, I had the good fortune of being on sabbatical with plans to visit my son in Asia for three weeks at the end of his teaching contract in South Korea. I saw this trip as an ideal opportunity to interview founders and attendees of SlutWalk marches in Asia. A Google search revealed that both Singapore and Hong Kong had active SlutWalk Facebook pages, and had hosted various SlutWalk events since the start of the international SlutWalk movement in the spring of 2011. As a proud attendee of the first SlutWalk march in Toronto, and a passionate defender of the international SlutWalk movement, I was keen to examine how SlutWalk happened and developed in a cultural context radically different than my own. In exploring the “how, why, when, where, who and what” of SlutWalk in both countries, I was particularly interested in addressing the central criticisms of the SlutWalk movement, namely the assumed homogeneity of SlutWalk marches globally; the presumption that SlutWalk was largely a feminist movement for and about privileged, Western, white, educated, young women; the alleged lack of diversity in SlutWalk participants; and finally its uncritical use of the term slut. The interviews were conducted in December 2013. In Hong Kong, due to the holiday season, I was only able to interview one person, Dan Garrett (who has also contributed a chapter to this collection). In Singapore, I had the good fortune of conducting a group interview with seven women and one man, attending one of their monthly business meetings, and giving a talk on SlutWalk Toronto at a women’s community centre.

Due to seemingly endless demands on my time, I was only able to begin writing this chapter in the fall of 2014. While certainly not planned, the delay proved to be fortuitous as the thinking and writing for this chapter took place when violence against women became the topic of Canadian public and media discourse as a result of the Jian Ghomeshi “scandal” and the marking of the 25th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre on December 6th. It seemed as though everyone had something to say about sexual and physical violence against women as 2014 drew to a close. As yet another woman came forward to disclose the sexual assault she experienced by Canada’s former media darling Ghomeshi, as one more story of sexual violence was shared via the hashtag #Iwasraped on Twitter, and as our country remembered and mourned the murder of fourteen female engineering students who were killed for simply being women, the outrage and outcry of the SlutWalk movement again became timely and relevant. As people asked why the many women assaulted by Ghomeshi never reported the crime to the police, feminists found themselves needing to explain once again the concepts of slut-shaming and rape culture; women—even privileged women like those assaulted by Ghomeshi—are seldom believed and readily blamed when the crime is sexual assault.

As the themes in my

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.