Last night I attended the Laboratory of Feminist Memory Bar at the Glad Day Bookshop. I was not sure what to expect other than perhaps feminist remediation, or archival feminist art. The event was very much true to its title, and showcased different feminist archives and art pieces, and included many identities.
One piece that stood out to me the most was a woman who wrote a poem about the issue of women being made to be child brides. This common occurrence is an issue I am very passionate about, because it breaks my heart that a child, who still needs their parents’ comfort is being shipped off to marry a man, without her consent. It reminded me of a passage from the “Big Affect:The Ephemeral Archive of Second-Wave Feminist Video Collectives in Canada” reading by Marusya Bociurkiw, which read “One of the earliest works to emerge from feminist video collectives in Canada focused on the personal affects surrounding marriage. So Where’s My Prince Already (Reelfeelings, Canada, 1974), a video about a woman who does absolutely every- thing, from housework to sex, while wearing her wedding veil is one of the few examples of experimental work emerging from the early collectives. It addresses an era when marriage rates were peaking in Canada and the 1968 Divorce Act had not yet been amended to make it easier for couples to separate.” (Bociurkiw, 10.) The paragraph talks about the problem of marriage in feminism, and how difficult it was to divorce. The archival piece being talked about discusses the difficulty of marriage for women, and how difficult it may have been to divorce at the time, which left many women unhappy and unsatisfied in their marriage. I immediately thought of children being forced to marry when I read it, as today for many Canadian women it is much easier to divorce, or to choose not to marry. I was moved by the poem read out loud at Glad Day Bookshop, and was reminded of why archives are so important to feminism; they remind us of the past feminist movements, and can make us draw connections between then and now.
Many of the artists spoke about important issues to feminism, such as trying to conceive a child in the 80s as a lesbian, during the segment where women spoke about feminist memories they had. It made us all understand the positive changes that have been made to society, and perhaps challenged us to think about what could still be done to problems that still prevail. When the box of feminist memories was shared, I related to most memories, and thought of many of my own. One memory which stood out to me was a woman who shared her memory of fighting for women to be allowed to wear pants to school in the early 1970s, which I related to my own self being sent to change in middle school and high school when I refused to wear a bra or conform to their dress codes which promoted rape culture; this being in the 2010s. It made me realize that there will always be problems for women, and that we must continue to fight for equality, while learning to include all identities, and acknowledge feminist archives.
Works Cited
Bociurkiw, Marusya. “Big Affect: The Ephemeral Archive of Second-Wave Feminist Video Collectives in Canada” Camera Obscura (2016) 31 (3 (93)): 5-33.