Anthony Furia, Melbourne
The “Stop Killing Women” anti-femicide rally held by the Red Heart Campaign here in Melbourne on the 15th of March was politically abysmal. I have personally made similar critiques1 of certain Palestinian solidarity marches2, but this rally (if it can be called that) was in actuality the outpouring of mass amounts of grief and misery by those who had lost family and friends to direct male violence. Not that such displays are devoid of utility, or wholly unimportant, but a political rally that makes its tagline “stop killing women” should, perhaps, have a coherent proposal to do so.
Instead, speakers (those mourning their loved ones) were provided the opportunity to present varying (frequently conflicting) proposals and demands, all of which were inadequate and some of which were straightforwardly dangerous. Multiple speakers proposed mandatory life sentencing for murder charges, some advocated for mandatory ankle bracelets for all subjects of AVOs, and one speaker had the gall to call for the introduction of coercive control laws, already used in New South Wales to further discriminate against and separate Indigenous families. These appeals, in addition to being utterly politically compromising, also reflect the passivity of the protests themselves – with appeals leveled against the state to ‘act’ to protect women, and a total disregard for the need for women’s self-organisation; to organise women as revolutionary subjects, not objects of policy.
The total lack of political coherence was particularly jarring considering the content and nature of the rally itself. Attendees were exposed to some of the most naked forms of patriarchal brutality and violence – to graphic examples of the unbarred violence which enforces social reproduction and kills women and children en masse – and provided with no solution whatsoever. The family form was not mentioned once as a cause and product of this violence, nor was the systematic subordination of women in social reproduction touched on once, in any form, through any language.
Politics was abstracted, left to the ‘lived experience’ of individuals, who produced sclerotic, anger-motivated programs which would do more to alleviate their personal sense of injustice than uproot the totalising social structure responsible for the deaths of countless women.
Any movement for women’s liberation must be a communist one – but beyond that, it must be political. It must engage women as political subjects, not enforce their status as objects of hatred. Women deserve, and indeed need, far better than a dead-end movement whose intention is to memorialise grief and commemorate tragedy. Women deserve a future, not an endless reflection on the total suffering and individual outbursts of total violence.
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