Venezuela’s Community Media Movement: Educating on Feminism and Gender and Sexual Diversity
Through a national assembly of spokespersons which took place in March last year, the National Association of Alternative, Free and Community Media (ANMCLA) adopted feminism, sexual and gender diversity, and the anti-patriarchal struggle as a line of action and central nexus of the organisation. From discussions realised after the meeting, an agenda of education and production workshops was planned to generate and disseminate our politics in this area of struggle.
First ANMCLA Education and Production Session on Feminism and Sexual and Gender Diversity
Through a national assembly of spokespersons which took place in March last year, the National Association of Alternative, Free and Community Media (ANMCLA) adopted feminism, sexual and gender diversity, and the anti-patriarchal struggle as a line of action and central nexus of the organisation. From discussions realised after the meeting, an agenda of education and production workshops was planned to generate and disseminate our politics in this area of struggle.
The first session of this agenda took place on the weekend of 21 and 22 January in the “Urgent Voices” School of Popular Communication and Crepuscular Radio 99.5 FM in Barquisimeto. The Women’s Movement for Life opened the session with a workshop about patriarchy where it was explored, through songs and children’s stories, how the patriarchal system indoctrinates us from birth, making possible the subjugation of women and all who don’t comply with the dominant heterosexual and monogamous male figure.
The workshop concluded with the creation of scripts for short audio productions on the subject, which will be produced during this week by the workshop participants and diffused through radio stations.
The participants emphasised at the end of the session the importance of the feminist struggle as an integral part of the construction of a socialist society. They also demonstrated their determination to continue promoting these spaces of reflexion in local and regional areas in order to increase participation, building towards a national meeting. The next education and production workshops will take place in the last week of February in Caracas and the first week of March in Zulia [in the west of Venezuela], with the participation of collectives from various states in the country.
Therefore, we continue building for a socialist feminism, where the Fatherland isn’t only the man and the Motherland is all of us.
Original text by the National Association of Alternative, Free and Community Media (ANMCLA), translated and edited by Ewan Robertson for Venezuelanalysis.com