When I picked up Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, a collection of poems by 49 female-identified poets published by OR Books, I hoped to report that feminist poetry — and the new feminism that it represents — would not be a tragic, polemic trudge through the trash-pile that patriarchy has made of the world and women’s lives. .
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Information, as powerful as it is, belongs to everyone and can help in individual self-determination.
At the center of any WikiLeaks discussion lies Julian Assange, the platform’s founder who has been embroiled in scandals and accusations of misogyny, amongst all else. Lesser known is the story of the women involved in the WikiLeaks phenomenon, as whistleblowing is an area of activity that, as Renata Avila, Sarah Harrison and Angela Richter write in Women, Whistleblowing, WikiLeaks: A Conversation, is “widely perceived as heavily male dominated.”
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The wonderfully alliterative name of this recently published book may be difficult to resist, but don’t let the title fool you. This slim volume has been written to further the fight on a number of epic fronts – gender, data privacy and disinformation. The battlefield is the digital world and its three writers are self-declared digital activists. What do such labels really mean you may wonder and where does Julian Assange fit in?
This book takes the form of a conversation between three dedicated female activists – British journalist and human rights advocate, Sarah Harrison, Renata Avila, a well-known Guatemalan human rights lawyer and digital rights expert and Angela Richter, a Croatian-German theatre director and author. I was party to a similar live conversation between these three women at a recently attended Border Sessions Tech Culture Festival here in the Hague. This is a wide ranging collaboration between Crossing Borders and a variety of local tech-focused initiatives including Impact City, Start-Up Factory and Hack the Planet among others. All three women have close connections with Wikileaks and all are highly sympathetic to the current situation of the organisation’s founder – Julian Assange. Described by him as a ‘a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents’ to which this multi-national media organisation ‘gives asylum’, Assange may well be describing his own situation in the Ecuardorian embassy in London. Founded in 2006, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses including the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diary and of course the NSA scandal leaked by Edward Snowden.
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Women of Resistance: Poem for a New Feminism is a collection of poems revolving around the subjects of sexism and racism, whether ‘everyday’ or more extreme, and the implications of such attitudes in a wider consideration.
Reading the book, I got the overwhelming impression that each poet is in full support of the other, and that they are all restless for the same cause. There is something profoundly comforting in the knowledge that all these people understand; there is a sense of an army of poets, voices shouting from the pages that things need to change.
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Plenty of women are whistleblowers, and plenty more work for the organisations that aid them. So why do we rarely hear about these women? And who are they?
In 2010, British journalist Sarah Harrison, then in her mid-20s, began working for WikiLeaks, the website created by Julian Assange to help expose large-scale injustices and cover-ups. It was the year that the site received and published some of its most explosive information to date; the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diary and Cablegate were a collection of classified documents that were leaked out of the American military by Chelsea Manning, including a video showing the killing of civilians in a 2007 Baghdad airstrike.
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This anthology has a strong feminist ethos that cuts through race, gender identity and sexuality. The resistance in the title stems from the fight for agency through suffrage in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election as US President. The editor’s note that ‘suffrage’ comes from Middle English, meaning intercessory prayer, and this informs their invocation of the other, encompassing transgender women, as well as its sense of grieving for the violence, rape and oppression of women.
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