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LREI Students Speak Out at UN for International Day of the Girl

LREI
International Day of the Girl Child was declared by the United Nations in 2011. IDG takes place on October 11th. Each year, Ileana Jiménez brings her feminism class to the UN for this occasion. 
Following the trip, LREI high school students discussed the meaning of the trip, and shared their feedback.

My knowledge of the feminist movement expanded further at the United Nations event celebrating the International Day of the Girl on October 11th, 2018. One girl-activist, Nadia Nazar, spoke about the effects of climate change and natural disasters on women and girls’ education. I had never connected these issues before and was astounded by the depth of sexism. Venturing out of LREI and my own resources to attend other feminist events made me realize feminism is connected to every aspect of life, and there are more forms of it than I ever realized. However, despite the vast collection of feminist groups, I have noticed that there are fractures within every one; some white feminist groups exclude Black women, some Black feminist groups exclude LGBT folk, and more. This frustrates me and makes me question how lasting change can ever be made if someone is always being left out and unaccounted for. As stated in A Black Feminist Statement written by the Combahee River Collective, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” This statement made me realize that the only way society can be reconstructed and, as the performers at the UN conference said, “crash the server” in the game of life, is by liberating every group of oppressed people with intersectional feminism. - Molly V. '20
 
I think that the Girls Speak Out event at the UN for International Day of the Girl in particular helped me to understand the global nature of feminism. For example the speaker from the UNFPA, who revealed that “globally one in every five girls is married or in union before the age of eighteen,” was a statistic that literally made my jaw drop. Before coming to this conference, I think that my thinking, and the way I approached feminism was typically very American-centric, maybe because that was generally the only feminism that I had been exposed to, and the one that I felt most deeply connected to as an American woman, so it was an easy crutch to fall back on. That isn’t to say that I was totally ignorant of anything happening outside of the United States, but I never thought that a feminist lens could/should/would necessarily apply within these other conflicts. I think I felt this way because it was hard to add in a deeper analysis like feminism to something I already felt some level of unfamiliarity with, unlike applying a feminist lens to American events, history, actions, etc. because they’re something that I feel I have more of a legitimate ability to critique. After leaving the event for International Day of the Girl at the UN though, I looked back at the definitions of feminism by Barbara Smith and bell hooks from the beginning of the semester and found that I had a new understanding of them. For example, in Barbara Smith’s definition, her assertion that “feminism is the political theory and practice that struggles to free all women,” and that “anything less than this vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement,” suddenly had new meaning to me. Previously, when reading and annotating the definition, I had narrower idea of what “all women” meant. I had thought about the range of women in the United States specifically, but after hearing the speeches at the UN, the definition felt much wider to me, and it became clear to me that Smith was also including all women globally. - Elisabeth S. '20
 
The International Day of the Girl event at the UN was super informative. I enjoyed being in feminist focused environments because it gave me a sense of how much movements have changed and how different they are from the early feminist movements we read about. The intersectional and international lenses of the Girls Speak Out event really changed by perspective on the diversity of feminism as a whole. I had never heard anyone talk about feminism and environmental justice in the same context before. It never even registered in my head that those two seemingly different issues could be so connected. Two speakers, Nadia and Hanni, conveyed the clear connection between the effects of natural disasters and the oppression that women experience worldwide. Their statements that “girls experience more accounts of sexual assault after a natural disaster,” and their descriptions of the exploitation of Native women, and their stories about how extreme weather keeps girls from getting an education, all really resonated with me. It is this type of intersectionality in feminist movements that I find most interesting. The Girls Speak Out event at the UN showed me how systematic oppression shows itself in multiple ways, even when it isn’t obvious. - Sophie R. '20
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