Women's Bodies (part II)

Video highlights of Endangered Species gives a taste of what the London summit was like. Why 'Endangered Species'? Susie Orbach says: The young woman who can feel free to explore her interests without being preoccupied by how her body appears or focus on what procedure she should have in the future to change it, is becoming an ‘endangered species’.

Sibongile Khumalo - jazz and classical singer

Here in South Africa we still have a multiplicity of images of women that inspire us, but for young women they are fading fast. The quest for the perfect body is in the ascendancy. As Susie says, Body Hatred is one of the West's most nefarious exports. Look at this ad. for deodorant in which Lira, a hugely popular singer in our country especially among young women, says: The whole world is like a stage and I have to look perfect all the time.....We are being manipulated to use a product which has nothing to do with looks, the inference being that if we perspire less we can be perfect like Lira. What is implied about the natural propensities of our bodies to perspire and for that matter smell, is just another well-known addition to the catalogue of Body Hatred. For a wonderful contrast to all of this take a look at the football grannies, who have also been used in advertisements. However young women are not the target of these. 
I wonder if people know of some other South African examples of Body Hatred production that they'd like to share?

Should Individual Counselling Be a Luxury?

From "The Gift Returned" by Lauraine Vivian

For many years, post-TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission), there has been hardly any funding for individual trauma counselling. The directors and management at the Trauma Centre (and probably other NGO’s) had to be creative in how they could permit counselling programs to continue. No-one on the staff doubted the need for it and many of us were invested in it. By invested, I mean that we had been trained to do individual work and believed in it. Besides, it had taken at least 10 years of mental health education to make trauma counselling into a service that poor and working class people would seek, let alone find accessible. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s the Trauma Centre’s Training Department played a part in this. It offered widely disseminated Trauma Skills programs to front-line workers. But prior to those programs, OASSSA, provided services to ex-detainees and their families even before the Trauma Centre existed.
The imparting of various forms of emotional literacy also happened in workshops provided to many workers during the 90’s. These were intended to fuel the transformational agendas of various sectors, e.g. public service, the army, the police, and other emergency personnel.

These efforts reached their apex in the trauma counselling culture that developed around the TRC. In 1996, when I met with Thulani Granville-Grey who was involved with the Human Rights Violation Committee of the TRC, he showed me his list of victim requests. I was surprised to see that counselling was prominent among them.

Now the global economic crunch has relegated individual counselling and therapy to the realm of the luxurious –services a developing society can presumably ill afford to indulge. And yet the need remains. I have recently participated in a worldwide e-mail colloquium of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IARPP). In it we discussed traumas of history and war. The need for a respectful, patient, nuanced approach to each individual with their own unique history, was so sensitively articulated by many experienced practitioners that I wonder how we can go about effecting the kind of mass scale of recovery that is required in this country. Why should only those who can afford it have the individual attention that most people need? Is everyone else supposed to make do with groups, workshops and “community healing”? I’m not saying those don’t also have their place, but it’s not enough, is it?

Human Rights Day and the Under-recognition of Robert Sobukwe

On March 21st – Human Rights Day – one of the rights we celebrate is the right of every South African citizen to move about freely in the country of their birth.
Fifty-one years ago, this was not the case – most South Africans by birth were not citizens, and the movements of all black South African men were severely restricted by the laws which governed the passes they were obliged to carry.

Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe

On March 21st 1960, nonviolent protests against the pass laws were initiated by a new organization - the Pan Africanist Congress. Thousands of people gathered at police stations to burn their passes and to present themselves for arrest.
At Sharpeville a large gathering of unarmed protestors was fired on by apartheid police. 69 people were killed and many more wounded. This massacre changed the nature of the struggle in South Africa. Within a week the country was mobilized – there were mass protests, demonstrations and strikes.

Tutu, Human Rights and the Human Genome Project

Last week, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu by citing his sequenced genome pointed out how ridiculous racism really is. " I am related to the San people, so I am coloured." he said at UWC, poking fun into the current debate about how jobs should be allocated in different regions of the country. (That is, according to national racial demographics and not taking into account regional population differences)
The Human Genome Project (HGP) has provided us with the kind of information that makes me think differently about us human beings. For one thing, despite all our languages, different cultures and allegiances, we are all Africans! I love that about us. Furthermore, the most ancient genes on our planet are carried right here amongst the San people of the Namib.

The HGP was funded because it was marketed as being able to provide insights about non-communicable diseases and it is doing this more and more rapidly and also more cheaply than it did 10 years ago. This history is well documented and if you read the link, you will probably think like I did, that it'd make a terrific movie.

There are however, human rights implications that interest me just as much as the idea that drugs could be designed to counteract my particular version of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's which is probably where I am headed.

International Women's Day

This year it is being said that March 8 was the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day and that is why many organisations are coming together in this month in an international effort to re-examine issues of women's oppression. This is what Susie Orbach had to say about the work that still needs to be done after the London summit of "Endangered Species": 
Girls don’t see themselves reflected and so they try to change themselves to mimic what they see. Last Friday in London, young women from all over the country came together to show us what they are doing to combat this tyranny and to create a new visual culture. There was joy in the room as they showed their fight back and dared to love their bodies. We all vowed to stop the trafficking of body hatred throughout the world. It is not an easy struggle. It can be written off as trivial. But it isn’t. We all know it eats away at us. That’s why we are campaigning. Join with us to get our bodies back.

What do women commemorate on March 8th?