(Yes, this contains all my typoes, please correct them! - Except perhaps ‘emotional cement’)

Let’s go AWOL

Anti-capitalist
Autonomous
Anti-authoritarian
WOmens
Liberation

Priorities which shape an AWOL perspective:

Opposining Sexual Violence

  • Our direct / indierct experience of it
  • strategies for dealing with it as it arises in everday life in our “sub-cultures”
  • sexual violence as all-pervasive “culture”, permeating all dominant sexual imagery and our own sexual conditioning
  • Reproductive freedom
  • Abortion and the current reactionary offensive
  • reproductive autonomy in general: the right to knowledge and control over our own bodies; the deliberate lack of access to information about contraception, sexuality, motherhood and relationship choices, and menstruation, especially for young and not-so-young women

Unpaid Labour

  • Broad understnaging that womens’ labour in the home (and beyond) is central to the functioning of the capitalist system participation and support for the Global Womens’ Strike, which takes place on IWD and highlights the need to divert funding ffrom military spending, over to paying for ‘caring work’, largely unpaid (or grossly underpaid) – came out of the Wages for Housework Campaign, has taken off in many places around the world, including Venezuela.

Outworkers and fashion fascism

  • Women are explited at both ends of the production equation within the “fashion” industries: as producers of garments, and as consumers bullied into spending big on clothes made by sweated labour
  • narrow, manipulative, and inherently violent notions of beauty imposed on us at every turn (ties in with the sexual violence angle)
  • Shedding the layers of conditioning which represses our Autonomy
  • The dead weight of our rigourous training to repress our Autonomy:and into our sexual roles as – sex object (or aspiring sex object), obedient worker, dutiful housewife and childbearer/childrearer, discinpliner of the “next wave of labour” (i.e. Children), and all-round dispenser of emotional support and effection to males the world over – forever projecting permanent sexual availability, and existing in a prision/factory of domesticity.
  • The role of the church, family and spectacle (perpetrated by the media) in cementing this
  • strategies for reversing this process
    • emotional cement for autonomy
    • excercising our capacity to live out other, more preferable roles

Queerness and Sexual Autonomy

  • Naming our sexuality for ourselves
  • living out a sexuality that is autonomous, that is, not necessarily revolving around or even wanting men in the picture
  • living out a sexuality that is entirely at odds with the socially-restricted role cut out for us by capitalist patriarchy (as outlined above)

*Lastly, an AWOL persepctive is relevant to ALL other forms and areas of organising,and/or creation of social spaces. *

by A