Needing to Feel

Do I really have to leave?

The answer is yes.

I left New York Saturday at 2 p.m. and after a 10-hour train ride and some other finagling, I finally got home around 1a.m. Sunday. And I was exhausted.

I woke up Sunday with a feeling of “What the hell just happened to me? And why can’t I process it?” so I did what I always do when that happens…I went for a motorcycle ride.

Being on my bike, and in the moment, clarified some things for me. What I experienced in NYC was epic, but I’m still not sure I fully understand how “left out” of the formal conversations I was. Although the term “Woman” was never explicitly defined, I came away with an understanding that it means a person who enters heterosexual relationships with men, a person who, even if they are educated, will eventually become a wife and mother, a victim that needs to be fought for and taken care of, and a person who is talk about rather than included in conversation.

None of those definitions apply to me. Except maybe the mother, but even then being a mother comes in the context of all the other descriptors (i.e. one can only be a good mother if there is a father as well, otherwise they are a person to feel pity for because they are missing a crucial element), so I still don’t fit.

It seemed to me that throughout the week, the voices at the UN were strongly telling me I wasn’t a “woman.” So what does that make me? And what do I do with that?

I know…I take my roommates’ advice and write an ethnography about it. About the fact that difference matters and that by not explicitly defining terms like “Woman” and “Girl,” people get left out.

I had only gone about 50 miles yesterday when I saw the clouds gathering, began to smell the rain and felt the first small drops on my arms. I had a rain suit in my saddlebag but decided against putting it on. In that moment I needed to feel something…anything. I needed to know I existed. I wanted to make sure I was real and that no amount of language could erase me.

By the time I got home, 10 miles later, I was soaked to the bone, shivering and so, so tired. But I was real. And I had solidified the idea that mine is a story worth telling.

So it begins…

Last two days in NYC (in photos)

Zoe, Lindsay, Lianne and I are roomies for life!

Protesting in support of the Middle East

More protesters outside the UN building

Quote on the wall at UNICEF

A tapestry hanging on the wall

At the UNICEF building

Playing with the UNICEF children

Urban garden in a concrete jungle

Zoe’s ready to go out

Lindsay (L) and another group member Michelle

Lianne (L) and Zoe

We were toasting something… clearly

Zoe!

Thinking…

Deep in conversation

According to Michelle, I was “taking a picture of the water I didn’t even know I had!” I so don’t remember taking this photo LOL

Zoe’s pretty slick. Florida looks good on her :)

Posin’

Sunny on the last day in NYC… of course

Lianne’s ready to go home

Finding My Voice

One of the best parts of the UN trip has been the time I spent with my three roomies – Zoe, Lindsay and Lianne.

I’m not sure we went to bed before 2 am any day this week and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Our conversations – ranging from life after college to the necessity of monogamy as the only legitimate form of adult relationships to why in the heck we sometimes felt so alienated in so many ways from what the UN was doing – challenged me, made me laugh, made me cry and forced me to find and use my voice when I was among smart women who didn’t always agree with me. Sometimes I feel that I can just bullshit my way through conversations with people if I know more about a certain topic than they do, but I couldn’t do that here.

And it was awesome.

I raised $1,000 to get to NYC but I told my roomies on Wednesday that if I had done nothing but come and hang out with them, it would have been worth it. And it would have been.

As part of this practicum, we have to do some sort of project to use what we have learned and apply it to our local community. I was hoping this blog could satisfy that requirement, but that was before… keep reading.

I am also in the middle of a final project for my graduate program which was going to be a paper about why difference matters and then I was going to offer suggestions to a local organization about how they could reframe their programs to be more inclusive of the differences their clients bring to the table.

Halfway through the week in NYC, I realized that differences were not being taken into account in many of the conversations that were taking place here (offering cell phones as a way to make emergency contact with doctors in countries that don’t even have consistent electricity for example). So I decided to revise the second half of my UNCG final project to offer a critique of the UN and WILPF, the organization that sponsored the practicum, and then I’m going to propose to present it as a side event at the WILPF national conference in June in Chapel Hill, NC.

Enter my roomies.

We were drinking (a lot of) wine before we went out last night and I asked them critique the final project proposal I had written. They obliged and throughout the conversation they decided I should scrap my ideas and write an autoethnographic piece with me at the center of my paper, focusing on how differences have shaped my relation to the world, exploring the in-groups and out-groups I feel I’m a part of, how I have been shaped my experiences throughout my life.

I’ve kept a journal petty regularly for the last 13 years (since 8th grade), but I’ve never thought of sharing those experiences with anyone. In a sense it feels potentially very powerful but there’s also the very real sense of raw exposure, for me and anyone else I will include in this piece. I wouldn’t have thought of doing this on my own because many times I don’t feel my voice matters although I’m getting better about recognizing those thoughts and pushing them out, but I just spent a week with three amazing women who told me my voice does matter and that people need to hear it.

That’s huge for me. Being in the military and then being trained as a journalist, I spent eight years being told my singular voice wasn’t important and in some sense maybe I internalized part of that. Even now, after almost two years of graduate school where its nothing but my voice, writing and speaking about what I think, it still weirds me out to use “I” in a formal paper. To locate myself at the very center of a piece of writing is going to be challenging.

But it’ll be worth it.

I wonder if my roommates knew how much their confidence in me meant to me last night.

The Rights of the Child / The Rights of the Woman

Yesterday I went to a UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) briefing where they were supposedly making the connection between the rights of children and the rights of women. They used the Convention on the Rights of the Child and CEDAW as their background and as much as I believe in both documents, I think it’s dangerous to combine them for a number of reasons:

• Placing the documents in conversation with one another implies that all women will be mothers; and
• There is a possibility that the child’s rights will supersede the rights of the woman, potentially endangering the woman’s life. As an example, women living with HIV/AIDS are given antiretroviral drugs during pregnancy to make sure there will be no transmission of the disease to the child. Fair enough, except that most times they don’t tell the mother that the drugs given her during pregnancy can negatively interact with drugs she may take later on to control her own HIV/AIDS and could result in a shorter life span.

Either way, the documents don’t apply to the US since we haven’t signed them yet. Considering that CEDAW was passed in the UN in 1981 and the CRC was ratified in 1989, I think that makes a strong statement about where the US’s priorities are (and are not).

I Don’t Want You to Fight for Me (in fact i don’t want to fight at all)

So… the launch of UN Women…was okay.

My ticket only got me into the overflow room where I had to watch the goings-on on a big projector screen. It worked out in a sense because I had made friends with a woman from Germany while standing in line waiting to get into the room and we sat together and dissected what was being said during the program. She was a graduate student studying International Relations at some NYC university and an intern with an environmental NGO, so our backgrounds were different as could be and it was great to see and hear things from a different perspective.

But back to the event proper.

Thirteen people spoke, including Michelle Bachelet and Ban Ki-moon, but Christiane Amanpour wasn’t around because she got called overseas to do a news assignment so another ABC anchor stepped in and wasn’t near as eloquent. All the speeches were variation on a theme: UN Women is great and we’re going to do great things!

One thing that was interesting however was the presence (or not) of A-list celebrities. Geena Davis, Shakira and Nicole Kidman were all listed on the program and Geena Davis was the only one who showed up in person. They were all introduced as having a deep conviction for women, girls and the work of US Women, yet two of the three couldn’t bother to show up. Shakira provided a recoded message and Nicole Kidman was brought live through satellite from her movie set in San Francisco, but when the feed was lost half way through her maybe 5 minute speech, they didn’t bother to try and fix it. (Not to mention that she has more money than God and if she was totally committed to the organization, she could have left her movie set for a few hours, flown to NYC and been back all in one day).

in theory, UN Women is a great thing. In terms of fitting into the UN, it would be like having a cabinet position in the US government. The group has direct access to Ban Ki-moon (and his successor) and can potentially get some real work accomplished for women all around the globe.

But there we go speaking for others again. Ideally, women at the grassroots level are going to voice their wants and needs to their allies with power who are then are going to be their voice within UN Women. Then UN Women will propose resolutions to the UN as a whole, countries will vote to approve and sign (or not sign) the resolution and positive change will be made. I just don’t think it’s that simple. We’re using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, and change doesn’t come like that.

And beyond just speaking for other, UN Women never really try and complicate what they mean by the term “Women.” And, unfortunately, I think one huge assumption they make is that “women” equates straight. The emcee for the evening even made a comment that Ban Ki-moon had a strong woman supporting him (his wife) and that all the women in the audience have strong men supporting them as well, because otherwise the important work we’re doing would not get accomplished.

There’s also the assumption that women will all have children at some point in their lives. One of the agendas within UN Women is to educate girls so they can avoid being pushed into child marriages and delay pregnancy and childbirth until they are older. While both are noble goals, the assumption is that girls will follow a set pattern which will eventually culminate in (heterosexual) marriage and children.

In celebration of the launch, UN Women commissioned a song and it was performed at the end of the program. The song was titled “One Woman” and the chorus went like this:

“We are one woman/ Your hopes are mine/ We shall shine”

The rest of the song was in the theme of being one woman which, if you can’t tell by now, I find problematic. What bothered me in the song was the last verse, sung by a man, went like this:

“And one man, he hears her voice/ And one day, her fights he fight/ Day by day, he let’s go the old ways.”

I don’t need a man to fight my fight for me. I don’t need anyone to fight for me. I want people to work alongside me to make this world better.

I also don’t like the choice of words in that same verse. Why choose fight? That’s such a masculine, military word with very historically negative connotations. Fight is what you do when dialogue breaks down and there is no other option. There are better ways to advance equality than fighting.

Overall, I think that UN Women has the potential to be very powerful, but I think there needs to be dialogue surrounding “common definitions” and whether “common definitions” are even something that the group should be working toward.

JuJu Chang

Bon Ki-moon

Nichole Kidman

Her Royal Highness Princess Christina of Spain

Ms. Rakhi Sahi, Former Commander of an all-female Formed Police Unit for the UN Mission in Liberia

Scenes from Yesterday

Good times from yesterday and into the evening. Because we have been at so many events, my family (as we’ve started calling ourselves) and I  don’t really see each other much during the day. But last was bonding time! Pizza, beer, liquor, getting in at 3 a.m.

Yeap, good times!

The big-as-my-head cinnamon roll I bought from a street vendor yesterday.

Outside the Noodle Shop I visited for lunch were Chinese newspapers shoved into the corner of the building so people could take and read.

Yep, that’s a leg lamp. And it was inside the random pizza joint where we ate.

Zor (L) and Lindsey

Lianne and me

Lindsey outside a bar. I think she was having a dramatic moment.

Zoe was annoyed at me. I was taking too many pictures.

Lianne talking with her hands.

It’s rainy and gross. Not sure about cold as I haven’t been outside yet today.

Another view from my hotel room.

Shut the Front Door! (Or, I’m pretty sure I have a ticket to the party of the century!)

O! My! Goodness!

Before I even came to the UN for this week, I had been invited to RSVP for the official launch of UN Women, the section of the United Nations that works specifically to promote gender equality and empowerment for women around the world.

Cool. I had no idea what that meant.

I get here and realize that the 55th Commission on the Status of Women is sponsored by, or at least tied into UN Women, and quickly realize that the event tonight is one of, if not THE, premiere “unofficial” event of the comission.

That’s great, but what’s the OMG about Katie?

The OMG is about the fact that two of my idols will be in attendence tonight, including:

• Former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who is the first (and current) executive director of UN Women; and
• ABC News anchor Christiane Amanpour who will serve as the emcee.

O, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will also be in attendance!

Holy canolli! This is huge!

Photos and blog posts most definitely to follow!

O, and P.S. the STEM Education panel earlier was a wash. It was more about “Rah, Rah, go us! Let’s feel good about promoting programs for girls that will have impact in the long run and not challenge the structural problems that keep women out of sciences in the first place!”

But it was cute to see the 2nd graders talking about growing plants without water and middle schoolers talking about building boats.