May Chazan

Settler solidarities as praxis: understanding ‘granny activism’ beyond the highly-visible

Abstract Across Canada, the Raging Grannies are renowned for appearing, invited or not, in spaces not typically open to older women, with outrageous ‘Granny’ costumes and satirical songs. A movement of predominantly non-Indigenous, settler women, the Raging Grannies regularly work in diverse activist coalitions in pursuit of social and environmental justice; many are seeking to ally themselves with contemporary Indigenous movements. However, while analyses have so far focused on their highly visible and iconic activist strategies, their solidarity-building efforts remain under-examined. Based on focus groups, interviews, and participant observation carried out in 2014–2015, this paper probes why and how Raging Grannies are building alliances with Indigenous movements in Canada. What emerges is an important tension. While many view their irreverent and theatrical strategies as quintessential to their ‘Granny Activism,’ such tactics were unanimously deemed inappropriate for engaging with Indigenous movements. Underpinned by reflections on their own settler histories, feelings of outrage at ongoing and state-sanctioned colonial practices, fears of inadvertently reproducing colonial relations, and a sense of interconnected futures with Canada’s First Peoples, they sought different, less-visible ways of practicing their solidarities. Many chose to attend rallies dressed in their everyday clothes, provide resources to Indigenous-led protests, invite Indigenous activists to speak at their gatherings, and work through their churches to redress past harm. Their solidarity efforts incorporated small acts, often pivoting around individual members’ personal connections. This article thus depicts the Raging Grannies as more diverse in their practices than typically recognized. It also addresses an important gap in scholarship on older women’s roles in solidarity movements. Finally, it extends existing scholarship on solidarity-building, suggesting that how solidarity is understood cannot be disconnected from how it is practiced, and thus demonstrating how solidarity can be relational, performative, and contingent.

Defying, producing, and overlooking stereotypes? The complexities of mobilizing “grandmotherhood” as political strategy

ABSTRACT This article explores the Canadian Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign, a mobilization of older women responding to the effects of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on interviews, participant observation, and archival work, this article looks at how and to what effect “grandmotherhood,” as discourse, was mobilized and deployed, in fluid and fractured ways, in order to increase members’ credibility as global social justice actors and build their solidarity with African women. These mobilizations functioned to uphold essentialist notions of what being a grandmother means, while also challenging stereotypes of older women as frail and disengaged.

Understanding the Complexities of Contemporary Feminist Activism: How the Lives of Older Women Activists Contest the Waves Narrative

Abstract:This paper troubles dominant understandings of North American feminist history as a series of successive, ideologically opposed, generational “waves.” While several scholars have critiqued this metaphor, few have grounded their critiques in the lives, perspectives, and organizing strategies of women involved in feminist activism. This paper draws on research with older Canadian women activists involved in the Grandmothers Advocacy Network (GRAN) to call into question three existing critiques of the waves metaphor: its implicit ageism, its simplistic categorizations, and its assumed generational discord. In so doing, it illustrates how women’s lives and mobilizations are far too intricate for this framework. This paper thus contributes to understanding the complexities of contemporary feminist activism, particularly as these complexities relate to the contributions of older activists.

Contingent meanings, shifting practices: grandmother to grandmother solidarity as transnational feminist praxis

Abstract While ‘solidarity’ is frequently evoked in transnational feminisms, it is less clear how this concept is understood and practiced among different actors in different contexts. This article addresses this limitation by investigating a movement of some 10,000 older Canadian women who, drawing on longstanding commitments to feminist advocacy, have mobilized over the past decade in solidarity with ‘grandmothers’ impacted by AIDS in southern Africa. The article investigates one pivotal development within this movement as an entry point to consider the productive friction surrounding transnational feminist practice more broadly: the splintering of the campaign in 2011 into separate advocacy and fundraising networks. Drawing on archival materials and interviews, the analysis depicts how changing perspectives on advocacy within the movement, which became most evident in this splintering, provide critical insights into thinking about the complexities of ‘solidarity’ as transnational feminist praxis. In particular, it extends existing scholarship on solidarity-building, suggesting that theorizing ‘solidarity’ in this context requires an understanding of its contingent practices. It also draws on older Canadian women’s reflections to challenge notions that ‘Second Wavers’ do not adequately grapple with how differences in power and privilege shape and inform their movements.

Natural Resource Management in an Urban Context: Rethinking the Concepts of “Community” and “Participation” with Street Traders in Durban, South Africa

Natural resource management has traditionally been conceptualized in rural contexts, yet as processes of urbanization accelerate, it is increasingly important to understand the effects of environmental management efforts underway in urban centers. This chapter examines “participatory” and “community-based” approaches to natural resource management in an urban context. It explores the effects of Durban’s Warwick Junction Urban Renewal Project from a feminist political ecology perspective, based on ethnographic research with street traders carried out in South Africa between 2004 and 2007. The end of apartheid resulted in the decentralization of responsibility for the management of the urban environment and informal economy. Warwick Junction was a pilot project for a new participatory, area-based approach to urban development in the eThekwini (Durban) Municipality and has won international acclaim for engaging community participation and for improving human wellbeing, security, and livelihoods. Ten years later, however, research in Warwick Junction has revealed that multiple forms of control, authority, inclusion, and exclusion exist within the street trading “community”, some preexisting the urban renewal effort, rooted in gender, age, and traditional hierarchies with linkages to rural areas, and others emerging as new forms of power and legitimacy connected to the urban management process itself. This chapter illustrates how differential access to resources (in this case, access to trading space, infrastructure, and services) manifest as a series of political, economic, social, and ideological struggles. The Warwick Junction case study demonstrates how even the most “successful” of community-based urban management efforts can result in an uneven distribution of benefits. The chapter calls for a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneity of “communities” and a closer examination of how power operates in “participatory” development projects.