TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
International Women’s Day: Celebration or commiseration?
There is even the danger that feminism can be co-opted by the state and capitalism.
Change Size
A day to remember: A female worker joins a rally to mark the International Women's Day in front of the House of Representatives in Jakarta on March 8, 2022. Rally participants also urged the government to revoke the Job Creation Law. (Antara/Muhammad Adimaja)
Yesterday we celebrated International Women’s Day (IWD)! Yaaay!
A flurry of IWD greetings and slogans were exchanged, and a spate of webinars and even some offline events, leading up to March 8 and set to continue for up to two weeks after, as is usually the case every year.
Or is IWD this year more a time for commiseration than celebration? Certainly, deep reflection and drastic action, given the current state of the world. We are in the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and climate change is a real threat to humanity and our planetary existence.
Yet money is wasted on expensive conferences like the November 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, which Greta Thunberg considered a colossal failure, calling it “a Global North greenwash festival.”
As Safina Maulida, a young ecofeminist wrote, “you destroy the environment, you destroy the basis of women’s livelihoods”. And guess what? Ecological crisis gives rise to an increase in violence against women.
So, it’s not for nothing that the theme for this year’s UN IWD is “Gender Equality for a Sustainable Tomorrow”. A tomorrow that is fraught with frightening uncertainty, I would add.
As if the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change were not enough, now there is the looming threat of a nuclear World War III, triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is too scarifying even to contemplate. Kaboom! Bye-bye world!
