Hot dayum! Growing Strong killed it this year

WORDS BY WHITNEY DUAN

The rad fems at the SRC Wom*n’s Collective have produced a killer edition of Growing Strong this year and Pulp is a huge fan. The annual journal, edited by WoCo office bearers Anna Hush and Vanessa Song and a team of sub-eds, features some of the most diverse and intersectional writing and artwork by USyd’s unapologetic feminist killjoys to grace our senses since the release of Beyonce’s self-titled album.

Amongst the journal’s gems is a poem written by Courtney Pearl (aka. Courtney Thompson) which manages to honestly capture the unglamourous first times of many wom*n, an experience often rooted in shame, misogyny and powerlessness.

If that isn’t enough to make you pick up a copy straight away, Lamya Rahman’s critical think piece “Problems with Solidarity: In India and Beyond” is damn right about the West’s neo-colonialist attitude towards the intersection between race and gender.

“I find shaming as a demonstration of solidarity highly disconcerting,” Rahman writes. “Demonising Indian men inadvertently positions rape culture and misogyny as an exotic ‘Third World problem’ when existing high rates of gender based violence in the West tell us otherwise.”

“Whilst some Western feminists argue that vilifying one group doesn’t necessarily excuse another, it doesn’t change that these shame tactics are grounded in the false notion that India’s patriarchal customs pre-date to an ancient, long-standing Indian culture. Many of India’s patriarchal attitudes—such as the stigma around divorce and remarriage for females—are actually recent constructs extracted and enforced by the British Empire during the codification movement. Later British negotiations with native male elites made these constructs even more widespread among differing castes.”

FUCKING. THIS

FYI, we’ve re-published both of these pieces - Courtney Pearl’s poem inner faux: the foe and Lamya Rahman’s Problems with Solidarity: In India and Beyond - on Pulp if you want to check them out in full!

An online version of Growing Strong is available here.