By Margarita Windisch
MELBOURNE — The National Organisation of Women Students Australia (NOWSA) Collective has been meeting to discuss organisation of the annual feminist student conference. NOWSA conferences provide an opportunity for women students to discuss feminist politics, from theoretical perspectives to strategies to combat sexism.
The 1999 Melbourne NOWSA Collective has decided to implement a quota system for speakers at the conference in an effort to tackle the discrimination faced by women from indigenous and non-English-speaking backgrounds (NESB). This affirmative action initiative aims to ensure that a minimum of 50% of the speakers at the eight feature plenary discussions will be indigenous or NESB women.
Plenaries at the conference will discuss: sexuality, women in institutions and servitude, women and capitalism, prostitution and pornography, gender, NESB women and international women, indigenous women and different feminisms.
The quotas have sparked controversy in the collective, with members of Left Alliance arguing for the quotas and Resistance and Democratic Socialist Party members arguing against the way in which they have been implemented. The collective is removing proposed speakers from consideration if they are white, regardless of their experience and/or contributions to the feminist movement.
In addition to the speakers' skin colour, they are also being vetted on the basis of their sexuality. There were lively discussions at collective meetings on the appropriateness of making claims about speakers' sexuality in their absence. Resistance members argued that a person's sexuality could not be used as a means to determine the "progressiveness" of her politics.
While quotas can be useful to encourage women from indigenous and NESB backgrounds to make their voices heard, Resistance members criticised the process that is being employed to achieve this.
The NOWSA Collective is also engaged in a debate on the participation of transgender women and has not made a final decision on whether they are to be excluded as plenary speakers.
None of the plenary sessions is to focus exclusively on women and education. This oversight is a serious problem, especially at a time when voluntary student unionism legislation is looming. The VSU legislation may outlaw student unions' right to fund important women's conferences such as NOWSA.