This weeks reading broke down activism and made it simple for me to understand. I learned that it existed throughout history in different forms, and how it changed over time. In contrast with bloody revolutions and mass protests that were common in the past, a lot of today’s activism happens online. Because of this, I realized that it is something everyone can do through resources they have. All of us have access to different fields and to different knowledge. I think it is important to use them for good, and to share the knowledge you have, because it can complete someone else’s understanding of an issue. You don’t have to necessarily stand outside on the street for hours, or write a manifesto and try to spread it somehow. All you need to share something is an internet platform.

The documentary I watched this week is called “The Vessel.” It is about activists that work together to combat restrictions of reproductive rights. Rebecca Gomperts, who is a central figure of the documentary, gave me a sense of empowerment as I watched the film. She is a Dutch physician who used her authority in healthcare to address the abortion rules imposed in many countries. It was heartbreaking to see how much resistance and negativity she had to face upon arriving in all of those countries. She and her team received threats, blockades from the governments and protests specifically aimed at them. Yet Rebecca didn’t seem discouraged and sad because of it. In fact, I felt like this resistance fueled her dedication more and more. The team eventually starts to create an underground network of activists around the world who train women how to conduct self-managed abortions. Its amazing to me. Not only the film was very enlightening, it also gave me an idea of what my activism can be about and inspired to be more vocal about it.

I’m glad the topic of reproductive rights was brought up this week, because I was able to catch up on everything that was going on. I didn’t know about the details of the leaked decision, neither did I know about the Hyde Amendment, which blocks federal funding for abortions. This means people who rely on Medicaid would have to search for other ways to fund their abortion, which in many cases is impossible. Watching the short movie “Abortion Helpline, This is Lisa,” which shows these cases, almost made me cry. I kept imagining myself in the place of everyone who called the Helpline, realizing that this can also happen to me and how precarious my life is. Not terminating pregnancy sometimes means not surviving after that, because you’re loosing your financial security. And sometime this means having one more person in this world with a traumatic childhood, growing up in extreme poverty and in many cases, not being able to get out of it. This traces back to what Rebecca Gomperts said in an interview: “when you keep people poor, you can control them.” It was a pleasure to read an interview with Gomperts because I watched the documentary Vessel, about her activity, for one of our assignments in this class.

I also didn’t know that abortion bans were implemented to benefit slave-holders and amplify their wealth. Considering what I just wrote about keeping people poor, one may see a really strong connection here, which feels terrifying. As if slavery has never gone away, but just changed its look.

The biggest message that I acquired from the reading “Why Artistic Activism” is that art and activism fuel each other: art gains more meaning and value, while activism gains more energy and dimensions. Combining these two means greater support from society, because art is easier to perceive than complicated texts and professional literature. It also deals with pathos and thus people take an issue more seriously. In modern society, it spreads quicker. And, it is a way to bypass censorship in a repressive regime, which I’m seeing a lot right now. For instance, the green ribbon project in Russia is a form of anti-war protest, where people just hang green pieces of fabric or ribbon everywhere they can on the streets. Such activism is hidden and communicates in the first place to like-minded people, showing them that they’re not alone in this. Interestingly, almost all art that I’ve observed lately is a form of activism, yet I didn’t know there’s a term dedicated to it.

In the second article “10 Female Performance Artists You Should Know, from Ana Mendieta to Carolee Schneemann,” one thing that drew my attention was dance as a form of artistic activism. Because I grew up dancing, I’m especially sensitive to performances and I can translate them easily into a story or a message. Through the example of dance, I could realize why artistic activism works so well — there are just certain things about our feelings and emotions that cannot be explained another way.

This week’s materials at some point felt hard to continue reading because of the amount of humiliation it described. Not that I did not know about transphobia in the health field, but to immerse myself in the personal experiences was quite powerful. The article “12 reasons it should be illegal for doctors not to treat a trans person” shares messages from people who stand against the proposed law that would allow denying medical care to transgender people. Many of them have faced discrimination based on their gender personally, while some were speaking for others. I cannot point a specific quote out of it – they all seem equally sad to me.

While reading “A Birth Story,” I once again thought of how obscure oppression can be. The article illustrates one of the many examples of obstetric racism, which impacts a patient’s medical treatment or diagnostic decisions based on their race. It can be taken as medical negligence that has nothing to do with racism, but the article shares a statistic that proves the opposite: “Black Women are more likely to have C-sections than any other group of women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” One quote from the story that made me emotional is this: “No wheelchair was provided and she had to walk to another room, pushing her newborn in the mobile crib and her IV…” On top of being exhausted and perhaps traumatized by her difficult labor, and on top of all sorts of emotions that postpartum brings, LeConté had to also bear this humiliating experience and I can’t imagine how painful it was for her.

Not only the readings, but the film “Period. End of Sentence” made me emotional in many ways. In the beginning, when both men and women are asked about periods, no one seems to have a willingness to answer or actual knowledge about it. One of the comments under the film on YouTube states that it “Broke my heart when those boys called periods a disease,” and I can totally relate. But later on, when I saw men, who are husbands and relatives of interviewed women, joining the pad production, I also got too emotional in a happy way. The documentary also served me as a reminder of how precious my life is, after seeing those women finding so much joy in things that are ordinary to me (like pads or having a routine job).

While reading “The Power of Identity Politics” by Alicia Garza, I felt like I’m having a therapy session with my own beliefs. They were challenged. This text unpacks the concept of identity politics. To start, the writer uses an image of a young woman that they overheard in the bar, who also happened to be white and blonde. The woman felt irritated by the frequency with which race was mentioned everywhere. She believed it was dividing people even more. As a young white blonde woman, I admit that I can relate to her a lot — I often have the inner monologue of “I wish we just didn’t have the concept of race at all.” That’s why I’m grateful for this piece of writing. Such a view of mine came from not understanding how my privilege functions. As Williams states, “power prefers to operate in obscurity.” That is to say, we are hesitant to acknowledge the differences between the quality of life of certain race groups because privilege exists when it is ignored. One part that helped me understand the whole dilemma is this: “If white people had not enacted a system of enslavement where Black people from the Caribbean, Africa, and Latin America were stolen and forced into subjugation for generations, would we be having this conversation?” It’s like a trap or a loop that white people put themselves into long ago. And despite their desire to let go of history and just move on, we cannot and should not. As I read about why I couldn’t help but compare it to the struggles of my homeland. “The willful forgetting of traumatic experiences allows their harmful effects to continue.” There were two man-made famines in Ukraine, aimed for both humiliation, genocide, and profit. There were generally a lot of things happening to erase Ukrainian culture and history as if it never existed. It was so traumatic that many survivors of the famine have never spoken a word of it. They all pretended that it never happened. Because this and many other historic events that were forgotten until recently, an image of brother nations have established, leading to the further assimilation of Ukrainians. Apparently, the same thing is asked of Black people – to move on, forget, and expect that the historic oppression would never happen again. But as we see, it certainly can happen.

That’s why identity politics should not be suppressed – they raise awareness of diverse cultures that deserve to exist and to be different. We can observe it in the second reading by Aleichia Williams, who struggles to put herself in one category – she is both African-American and Latina. Her writing reminded me of myself — born in one country, speaking a language of the second country, and being moved to the third country as a teen. Who am I? I was influenced by 3 different cultures and they all found a way to coexist inside of me. I’m speaking not only for myself but for many other immigrants and/or people of mixed origins. Williams’s words echoed in my heart: “just because I don’t fit into one specific mold or the other doesn’t mean I’m any less of who I am.”