Happy International Women's Day

March 8 is my favourite day of the year. I treat it like a holiday. This morning, I relished in a long shower, picked out a magnificent blouse, baked myself a single cookie, and took a rainy stroll to my familiar cafe for an Americano, which I now savour. 

International Women's Day is one of those exceptional events that is marked by humans all over the globe. Spawned out of socialist movements in the US and Western Europe, it spread quickly to Russia and the UN and is now a recognized holiday in places of which we Canadians may have a narrow perception: Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Russia, Uganda, and several others.

But like any rip in time, the "celebration," as March 8 is touted, is a charged one. For me, it is for reflexivity, celebration and mourning. While I swirl in the luxuries of my privileged class and race position, I take up the emotionality that fuels my work and relationships. For one day, my unique power and disenfranchisement are of central focus.

During our celebrations here in Canada, I'm cautious of the slippery slope of universalizing language, and frightened by the potential for turning inward to eclipse the unliveability of many women's lives. It is a peculiar sensation to be all of joyful, grateful, enraged, and sad, while women and girls will lose their lives today because of their gender.

Strange as well is the way I feel contrastingly about my position as a Canadian woman under Harper's majority government. C10, C30, the baiting of citizens as enemies of the state (foreign radicals, child pornographers), the robo-call scandal, and a particular set of budget cuts suggest a new regime under which women's rights stand to be undermined. Our rights have been won and can be lost, and many of "us" over here on this putative liberated continent would like to see women's rights kicked back a notch (see Sandra Fluke is a slut).

The release of the Kony 2012 video at the beginning of this week is remarkably apropos for reflecting on our relation to our own and "Other" issues. There is much to say on both the video and its reception, but for now I treat it as an opportunity for us to be critical of our own sense of universal ethics. To recognize the video as a progressive tribute to human rights is to be normal and safe. To be critical of the Kony 2012 campaign, we dare for our thoughts of moral behaviour to be far away from our familiar sense of ethics. At the risk of sounding critical for the sake of critical thought, what is endangered by international campaigns like Kony 2012 and IWD?

Moral philosophers (Adorno, Butler) point that our collective ethos is invariably conservative, and only once an idealization (a sense of nationalism, for example) loses its credibility can we stimulate conversations about nonviolent behaviour. Flipping this idea around, universal ethics are violent in that they only become known as enforced as "universal" when they are challenged. We can think about burgeoning resistance to our government of the day in this light: we moved along without climate justice in our frontal lobes until someone called us radicals, and now moral behaviour and what is "Canadian" is called into question. Adorno's account is useful for today's commemoration, as we consider how in our focus on "women" as a category, we are both solidifying and dissolving problematic narratives, as well as experimenting with moral behaviour.

And now I'm putting Adorno in one pocket and pop music and butterflies in the other, to stay alive in critical thought and full of determination. Happy International Women's Day!