So, yesterday many Paper Women went to London to make their bodies (tired, sweaty, thirsty) shout against what is happening by a government who just doesn't think. Or at least doesn't think about how people, and how women, live, and struggle to live.
Walking and Booing down Whitehall a monument struck two PW's as a sort of silent monument to what this whole project is about. In Whitehall, the supposed place of "democracy", the place of power, the place where hundreds of "actual men with actual faces" are displayed and commemorated (to quote a Paper Woman's perceptive recognition), there is one monument commemorating women. And:
"it's literally commemorating no one, just empty suits of clothes. A very striking image of women's erasure actually set in stone"...
So women can only be present in places of power as long as we are symbols, as long as we are generic, as long as we don't have faces, as long as we don't have individual bodies, as long as we are only hanging clothes...
So although this PW was truly inspired at the beauty and energy of yesterday's march (and not just because she could shout wanker loudly and flout police commands and just walk across Westminster Bridge with so many other women, and men, collected under countless banners which all kinda said "This is Shit"...), she is disheartened that an alternative to women being erased as just face-less-body-less-name-less-nothingness-symbols, is just marched by and somehow late...
Enough gloom! Paper Women ARE STILL on George Leeman three weeks later--- and this is a very small march towards an alternative!
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