Is Peace Activism Feminist?
This is a short video I created for my Feminist Online Spaces at Pitzer College. The video is the culmination of my semester long interaction with Iraq Veterans Against the War, and is a tribute to their work:
For this video I took my daughters to the Arlington West Memorial on Santa Monica beach. The memorial consists of crosses placed on the beach for each soldier killed in combat from sunrise to sunset every Sunday. Upon its conception the memorial placed one white cross up for every death, but it has now exceeded its spatial capacity and has had to replace white crosses with red crosses that symbolize ten deaths each. It is a project of Veterans for Peace, and is now in its eighth year of existence. The trip proved itself to be safe for our purposes, and I found it to be very much in line with feminist ideology, albeit lacking in the vernacular of feminist discourse. The video itself follows us through Arlington west as we take in the memorial and interact with the Veterans for Peace members. Spliced into our adventure are images from World War II Army propaganda films (produced by the Signal Corps, of which I was part of for three years), and images from the documentary “The Doctor, the Depleted Uranium, and the Dying Children.” It asks whether or not all peace activism is feminist by default.