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“Our tv-stars just came in,” mihui said on the phone as we crossed her in the hall way. Our housemates definately shared the excitement. What a concidence, our local television performance. Tom, the father of Giulia’s housemate Ailin, invited us for what was a wonderful dinner in the good company of some other guests – like Neil, the italiophile who should have been treating his gourmet belly with good italian food and wine and his cultural interests with conversations about Italian cinema and music somewhere in trattoria in Roma but instead was melancholically lost in Santa Cruz (and a palm tree shirt), admittingly not a very good place for a classisist. |
What are two feminists from europe were doing here, our table guests wanted to know, and what kind of research work were we up to. “You should invite these girls to your talkshow, Tom.” It turns out that Tom hosts a talkshow Voices on Santa Cruz community TV every Thursday. And what’s more, the first Thursday after this sweet dinner Tom didn’t have any guests for his show yet.
Religion and sex work. Piece of cake to bring them together: shisms within european feminism. The day before the show we meet up with Tom at Lulu Carpenter’s (Pacific Ave, near the Clocktower) to talk a bit more focused, although i’m not sure if that was what we were actually doing. i start off by saying stuff that makes me think “what the hell am i talking about”, afterwards giulia tells me that she was thinking the same thing. This was after Tom proposed us the title “world feminism” for the show – gosh no, it’s not because we’re not from here that we’d be able to represent the world… Let’s keep it european, that’s already impossible enough. But Tom wanted to bring in a third guest, he’d contacted a feminist from Mexico and a feminist from Lebanon and the Susie Bright. With every possible third guest we saw how the show would take a very different direction, so in any case it would be a surprise…
The community TV operates from a building on Pacific Ave (near the beach) with a shop front with three TV screens tuned in on their three channels. When some months ago marÃa and i stood for some minutes to watch, we were immediately invited to come in and join the audience in the studio. We arrive shortly before the show and find out that the third guest is a woman from the community TV crew, who is presented as a feminist single working mum. Just before we get on the studio stage Tom mentions something about how Claire can bring the issues back to women’s daily life… ay, the dreaded division of labour between who represents theory/politics and who “real life”…
Tom first has a conversation with Claire and this kind of sets the tone of the things we want to react or come back to. How is it to be a single mum in this country? If you really want it, if you are determined, you can do it. It’s tough, there are plenty of inequalities, but in the end it’s in your hands and if you fight for it you’ll make it. Did you get help? Claire takes pride in saying no, she did it without help. Nothing from the “other party”. Nothing from the goverment. Then she nuances that she did have a goverment job at some time, so if that counts as help… (Hell no, that doesn’t count. A job, trading your work force for money, since when would that be social welfare… okay, i know it’s all mixed up, but at least i want to be upset about it!). Tom had to probe further – help from friends maybe? Yes, other single mums, but Claire wraps up her story that basically she did it alone. What is it with this pride in independence and investment in the image of the one who stands alone, who fights alone, who got no help? When obviously she had community around her… Then there’s a strange disjuncture between how she talks about this wild west “at home” and the lack of opportunities “in other places”. In telling the story of her success as a single mum, she incorporates a visit to a village in Portugal where her father is from and ponders over how “back there” she obviously wouldn’t have had opportunities like a decent education and so on. Her story about women’s opportunities effectively fell apart in two pieces: full opportunities here and the absence of opportunities for women outside of this country.
I insisted that there is something very wrong with the idea that this is a land of opportunities, that what characterizes this country is not the fact that people have more opportunities here than in the rest of the world. What characterizes this country is the fact that people are being fed – in the media, in school,… – with this story of opportunities, that they believe they have so many opportunities, when it’s a lie, when (tax) money goes into war instead of education, child care,…
In the end there was not much space to talk about “european feminism” (there was not enough of a context to have a conversation about that) nor our work (although Giulia did manage to talk about sex work, complicating the choice in the pro-prostitution argument in a way which wasn’t really picked up by Tom or Claire.)
After the show we went for pizza on Pacific Ave (near the Clock Tower). In exchange for an ad for the pizza joint at the end of the show, the entire staff (with guests and audience…) gets free pizza here every Thursday night. We talk about the show and why nobody called, why there were no questions from the audience. The people around us agree: there was no disagreement or conflict between us. This came as a surprise to us. Giulia insisted that we were telling a really different story then Claire’s. Our conversation partners looked puzzled and wanted us to explain. The emphasis on individual choice, responsibility and opportunity versus a perspective on structural inequalities and collective political strategies. They nodded and concluded that for Santa Cruz it was all part of the liberal left, there was no disagreement on issues, so it was all the same thing. Oh that really counts as an indication of the omni-presence of neo-liberal ideology…
The next day Susan, who watched part of the show, expressed her scepticism of the whole thing. Good that you guys did the show, but the whole thing shows how inadequate these progressive voices are… As we were talking more about the problem with the set-up and arguments, she looked at me and asked, “Did you actually use the word neo-liberal? I bet nobody in Santa Cruz understands that concept.” Yep, Giulia is right, we need to learn how to do these kind of performances…