 June-July 2005
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Sara Burke, Jaime Lederer Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Editorial material in Peacework is published under a Creative Commons Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
From the Editor's Desk "… [T]he prisons for women are our homes. We live under martial law. We live in places in which a rape culture exists. That is a woman's home, where she lives. Men have to be sent to prison, to live in a culture that is as rapist as the normal home in North America. We live under what amounts to a military curfew. Enforced by rapists. And we say usually that we're free citizens in a free society. We lie." Andrea Dworkin, Terror, Torture, and Resistance, 1991, Most of us who are men aren't afraid of going out alone at night. Even when I lived in a neighborhood where we heard gunshots multiple nights a week, and even after I came home one night to see police tape marking off the bloodied sidewalk in front of our apartment, I still walked home from the subway after dark without much concern. Yet I realize that this is a degree of privilege which most women never experience, since they live under curfew in territory occupied by men who were brought up to wage war against each other - and against women. One night I was brought face to face with this war when I encountered, while walking home, two men beating and kicking a crying woman. I spoke to her, voicing my concern, calling out, "Are you okay?" although I knew she wasn't. It did distract the men, however. One of the young men broke a glass bottle and threatened me with it because, he said, I was meddling in his business. "You don't know anything about it. You don't know what she did. This is between us." Incredibly, through her pain, she was concerned about me, urging me to get out of there before I got hurt, urging him to leave me alone. I backed up, saying something like, "You're right, I don't know. But she's hurt. It's not okay to hurt her." He started advancing on me, repeating, "Do you want to get cut up?" Looking intently at the glittering edges of the bottle, and the fury on his face, I didn't know what else to do. I backed away and fled, terrified for my own safety, scared about what they might do to her, worried that I might have made a bad situation worse. The two guys pulled the young woman to her feet and went the other way. I wonder whether she survived, and if she's still alive, whether she remembers that night, too, or whether it was just one more night of brutality at the hands of violent men, blurring together with too many others. Andrea Dworkin, who died last month, was also forced to endure men's violence. She carefully listened to the pain of thousands of other women survivors, and transmuted their suffering into eloquent, impassioned calls for change. Our condolences are extended to her life partner (and renowned gender justice activist), John Stoltenberg, and to all who loved her. Peacework Co-Editor Sara Burke writes a critically appreciative obituary in these pages. Andrea Dworkin loved women enough to demand safety for every woman, and loved men enough to insist that we are capable of confronting and ending men's violence. She proclaimed that wars aren't inevitable, but are rooted in cultures, institutions, and policies which celebrate and institutionalize violent dominance and cruel exploitation. So, Andrea Dworkin classified pornography as war propaganda attempting to sexualize pain, especially women's pain. She strove to boycott, confront, and allow survivors to sue the producers of pornography who both profit from women's pain and fuel men's wars. Unfortunately, this invaluable core of the legislation she co-authored with Catherine MacKinnon was nullified, and their activism overshadowed, when other parts of their legislation were, from my perspective, rightly ruled overly vague and thus unconstitutional. Andrea Dworkin was a war resister who, despite vilification, never stopped resisting. This issue of Peacework, then, from the articles and photographs exposing the tactics used by the military to recruit the next generation of warriors for the battlefront; to the articles focusing on resisting racism, male violence, and patriarchal control on various homefronts; to the exposé of the massacre in Uzbekistan; to the obituaries of two more brave war resisters, Fred Korematsu and Elmer Maas; constitutes a small tribute to her resistance. I hope it's also a tribute to the woman I briefly encountered on the street, and to all women and men who endure men's violence. It's a succesful tribute only if it helps to spur us toward ending all wars, including men's war against women.
- Sam Diener, Co-Editor
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