Girlhood: A Story of Resistance
Girlhood: A Story of Resistance
Since time immemorial, girls have been pushing back – in their homes, their families, their countries, and across the globe. They have pushed back against the everyday oppressions that are so often synonymous with girlhood, and against the forces that define and form the nature of that oppression. Girls resist marriage, violence, they fight to stay in school, they push back against how other’s name them, and shame them, and seek to separate them from the platforms and resources that are their right. They fight to take up space, to access space and to reshape space. Girls resist because to resist is to live, to breathe, and to be in the world as a girl.
Girls and non-binary young people are organising with each other – behind closed doors, on the street, at school, while they farm, and as they care for their children. They are changing hearts, minds, behaviours, laws and norms, everywhere all of the time. Leading and embedded in movements, they often challenge conventional hierarchical leadership styles and organising models to draw on creative and brave tactics that make the unimaginable – possible.
Girls resistance – formal and informal, individual and collective, within generations and intergenerationally – cuts across all struggles for justice and freedom. They resist at the intersections of age, gender, land rights, climate justice, LGBTQIA+ rights, anti-war movements and so much more. From anti-colonial movements of Southern Africa to the Arab Spring, the Standing Rock movement on the traditional territory of the Sioux and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, to the child labour rights movements in Latin America – girls and young non-binary people have sparked, led and sustained transformational change throughout history.
I keep saying the world is not ready – the rumble of the anger of women and their revolution – I feel it coming.
Girls Defining Resistance
We chose the term resistance deliberately. It is best able to capture the formal and informal, bounded and unbounded, spontaneous and organised, individual and collective ways in which girls push back and imagine better worlds for themselves and us all. From secretly learning to read, to questioning the gendered burden of domestic duties at home, to grabbing the microphone at a political rally, to leading revolutions; girls are resisting the many abuses of power they experience in different ways. Sometimes seemingly small acts of resistance work to transform her world, and often plant and nourish the seeds for decades of resistance to come.
Resisting is just an indicator, I think, that we are on the right path and no one can overcome or deny the power of people and their specific principles and values like justice and equality
...I think resistance is just… some small acts, actually, I see them as resistance. Like at some point going out in the streets without a veil was a big act of resistance. Just continuing to have these mixed gatherings with male and female friends in public or in houses, that was resistance. Going out in public, that was resistance. But also just resisting the social norms and just stand your point and just questioning. So that of course came gradually but at the beginning, for me resistance was just to question whenever someone would say, but you should do this or you shouldn’t do this. So just resisting the social norms and arguing that nothing is fixed and things could be different from one person to another.
I don't know if I have a really bad memory, but I think my resistance was so subtle that I don't recollect. Because, if you've noticed, it's a bit hazy when it comes to girlhood because I've always been this way. Exactly. It sounds crazy but…so I don't even remember a moment, because in subtle ways, I was always resisting. There's no particular moment. I'd say throughout, maybe by simple things, me saying, why do I have to do it, why can't he do it? Why can't he do that? That's my brother. Why can't he do it? So, I think subtle things like that. There's no one ah-ha moment. I think it was the subtleties, be it in the house, at school. Just subtle things like that.
Why I was just starting out in the activism work, and the party that guides the country of Poland right now, was gaining the power and the power dynamics in Poland changed a lot; which ended up in a series of abortion rights protests for example, the black protests became quite famous, and this was the biggest thing that I remember. And it happened, I’m trying to remember the date, but it was influenced by the changes that were being pushed to the government to totally ban abortion, even in cases that were threatening the life of the woman; which was really scary. So I think in 2016, people came to the streets, and I was 17 at the time, and it was really both terrifying but I think it was also the first time in which I experienced a sense of community with all of the other women in Poland because it was such a big movement. It kind of transformed my views of many things, because I have never experienced it before.
Resistance means pushing back. It means standing firm for what you believe in and it doesn't always have to be loud, but it's always there. It's a force to be reckoned with.
Whenever I hear the Grace Banu word my gender and caste it’s coming back to me so it’s very difficult as a trans writer of a book esp. as a dalit trans writer of a book, its completely difficult and I know a lot of publications in Tamil Nadu. I approached a lot of famous publications, but they denied, and they didn’t support my book release so that is why I started my own publication. It is completely about our trans community so that’s why I put the name trans publications. So, people who want to release a book or poem, this is the platform and you can use it. So that is my own publication.
The situation in my country makes us find ourselves in a situation of censorship on many occasions, we have been limited in our basic right to the free manifestation of our needs, demands, and there is always a type of repression, which puts our lives, our freedom at risk. That is why I have been in full fight on the street, like other colleagues who have given their lives. From my resistance I have suffered violence, mostly verbal, threats like “that I should not continue working on this, which is an absurd fight”, and they seek to scare me, to make me feel fear, of what could happen to me for continuing in this.
I think a part of our resistance, at least my resistance, does have to do with what I put on my body and how I present my body. And we are in a natural hair movement and African prints are cute right now but I will say that for me walking into a board room or a meeting with my hair out and my African print – add a loud coloured nail polish - to me that is resistance because it's saying that I don't have to wear a suit and have a slicked-back hair-do or whatever the case may be in order to be educated, professional, know what I'm talking about, all of that stuff. I do think that for me since I was 17, before natural hair was cute, a part of my resistance was wearing my Afro and having locs and being like – I'm not here for the white beauty standards. I'm not doing it. I'm not aspiring to it, none of that.
I believe that I am doing what I do because women before me did their part and it’s my responsibility to do my part for the generation to come.
It gives you the satisfaction of the fact that whatever you were doing had been able to bring some change in the lives of women and girls of the present generation. That inspires me to do more things. It doesn’t allow me to sit in comfort and that is the only reason why I keep on doing something or the other.
For me, resistance goes hand in hand with transformation and resilience, because you can resist your whole life a problem and endure it, but if you do not use this problem as a way to transform your reality, to make this problem a springboard to transform, resist and do something that changes your life and that of other people, that for me is not to resist, because we are surrounded by problems and it is not possible that our only way out is to just hold them or put them in the backpack and carry them around for a lifetime, you have to use those stones to make a wall, to do something.
As a girl, men made me angry. Men made me afraid. And school was what filled me with hope. Because I saw that my mom and my grandma didn't have the opportunity to really go to school, stay in school and graduate from school. And I was doing that. I had hope not just for myself, but also for my family. I saw myself as the light of the family.
Because this world is supposed to be considered free, we are supposed to be able to grow to our greatest potential. Just seeing the fact that- oh, you're a girl so this field of work just isn't for you. Who is to say that I'm not going to create some ground-breaking experience or law or something that is going to push the territory or the world to a whole new level?
Sometimes, I felt that whether I am not telling anything wrong. Like my story, I felt scared that may not something is said at home. So I used to shiver when I stood on stage, I felt scared. -And today I don’t get scared. I have started telling and talking everywhere. The situation in my home has changed a lot. Earlier my father was very strict. Now if I don’t even buy jeans top, then my father tells me to wear that. That is apt for me. So the mindset has changed. The mindset of my parents have changed. And many things have happened after my work like in my friends circle. There were many who appreciated that the way you have done, we also want to do the same way. So like this many changes have come.
And I'm very grateful that I know so many women who are supportive of me and my advocacy. There are so many women who have paved the way, especially women in Parliament, and in other spaces. Women who are much older than me but also those who are not that much older. They empower me by being themselves, and creating spaces for younger women like me.
I think it's simple things like when a woman is walking on the road and a man says something to her that she doesn't like or doesn't approve of, I think it's the small things like responding to him and responding in a very aggressive and abrasive way, and not be polite about communicating your disapproval. I think it's small things like that, that to me would scream resistance. Or it's even small things like - how we choose to wear - like all black persons need to be wearing an Afro or this is how they must present themselves, but it does say something when you acknowledge that your community doesn’t approve of your hair or your skin, but you still choose to present your hair and your skin in a very loud and present way.
It [resistance] means ensuring that I empathise quietly. It means that I quietly placed myself in a position to be able to lift up someone that's like me.
- Explore: A Story of Resistance
