anarcha-feminist health
brighton collective
A bit about us…
We’re a small, non-hierarchical collective of DIY, anarchist, feminist (definitions?) women based in Brighton, UK. We’ve been meeting to gather and share info and experiences about our health (in the broadest sense of the word) and to understand it in a political context. We know that living under capitalism and patriarchy makes women sick. We know that our health involves looking at all the factors of our lives- physical, emotional, mental, social, political, environmental, spiritual.
We question the notion of experts and the power dynamic that expects us to be passive consumers of a medical system. We don’t want to be part of the oppression of women and children round the world who are used as testing/ dumping ground for unsafe drugs produced by profit greedy pharmaceutical companies in the north. While we are aware that conventional medicine is sometimes needed we want to reclaim info/ knowledge of our own health based on our experiences and needs. DIY.
We see this as a continuation of/ expansion on the diverse history of women meeting together to take control of their health and have a lot still to learn from both ourselves and from what has already been explored.
What we’ve been up to so far…
We’ve met pretty much weekly and talked, shared experiences and politically analysed related ideas. (We’ve also shared some right good food in the process.)
Some of our meetings together have involved:
-discussion round the politics and experience of menstrual cycle and fertility awareness
-looking at all the different types of contraception in terms of personal experience, effectiveness, side effects
-looking at global reproductive rights and the issues and violent abuses women have faced
-beginning to do genital/ cervical self-exam together
-talking about some of our personal experiences including relationship to food and body image, migraines, allergies, medical practice and experiences with doctors, pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, abortion, personal relationships, sexuality, so-called ‘mental health’, family dynamics, experiences of domestic and sexual violence.
-we’ve begun to compile a reading/ resource list
-we’ve begun to share basic herbal information
-we’ve set up a herb co-op and feminist health info stall (with books, zines and speculums) which we want to take to more events and make accessible weekly from now on in Brighton, creating a kind of self help drop in space (venue to be confirmed).
Things we still want to do…
-more self-exam with continuity so we can observe cyclical changes and become familiar with what are healthy and unhealthy sign for us
-explore more info and experience around sex, safer sex, STDs and HIV? AIDS
-breast self-exam, again with continuity to observe cyclical changes and know what is healthy for us, discuss breast health, preventative health, breast cancer, the industry around breast cancer, self-help etc.
-support/ info-share with other individual women and/ or women who might want to get together as a collective in a similar way.
-research more around the history of feminist women taking control of their health, with a plan to put together a DIY zine about the work of feminist health activists from the 1960s onwards in the UK, with an info section for women who might want to learn more and/or get together as a collective in a similar way.
-organise and create workshop spaces for ourselves and other women.
-look into possible funding for projects (publications, workshops, mobile library resource..?)
-and some…
What we’ve done so far has been empowering, complex, revealing, inspiring… a vital part of our lives and of making sense of our lives. We’d be really into hearing from other individual women or collectives and/or women maybe thinking of getting together as a collective to share ideas and be in contact. Get in touch anarchofeministhealth@yahoogroups.com