Happy International Women’s Day! 10 (or more) Things to Read Watch Learn

(aka: don’t sleep on MāoriPlus, they have amazing material from Aotearoa and around the world)

International Women’s Day is celebrated on Saturday 8 March this year – so we’ve curated a weekend reading/watching/learning list for you all – several parts fun to some parts serious – on the extremely timely 2025 United Nations theme: “For ALL women and girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.” For us, “ALL women and girls” means encouraging and including all our differences while acknowledging and working to reduce intersectional systemic burdens and exploitation.

Discover, enjoy, and understand more about how different women are responding to what they’re facing here in Aotearoa and elsewhere. All the content is free, no paywalls:

• A perennial favourite piece: Te Raukura O’Connell Rapira’s “I want a Māori Prime Minister” (2020). It’s an Aotearoa riff on Zoe Leonard’s great “I want a dyke for President” (1992) – and it gives us goosebumps every time: “I want a trans Samoan deputy prime minister and I want a former refugee as speaker of the house. […] and a late-life lesbian who cheated on her husband as leader of the opposition.”)

 

artist: Huriana Kopeke-Te Aho, for Counting Ourselves

• A sobering and important read for all of us is the second Counting Ourselves report re trans and enby (non-binary) experiences in NZ: the 2022 survey released last month. Participants report extremely high levels of psychological distress and fear, linked to being targeted with extremely high levels of physical and sexual violence, and (for some) lack of access to gender-affirming healthcare. At the same time, trans identities are sources of wellbeing and pride. One survey participant shared, “My takatāpuitanga has helped me better understand and love myself. Knowing that shame and fear around queer and trans identities is inherited from a colonial legacy has helped me connect better with my own spirituality and embrace a way of being that was passed down from my ancestors”.

• Viewing time! Watch ten films in less than 25 minutes (Youtube). Around a decade old, this list of super-short films which screened at “Wandering Women – the Feminist Film Festival of India” – is both fun and eye-opening. Starting with a Bollywood spoof (the Good, the Bad and the Aunty, pictured), the list goes on to cover undies, masturbation and asks what’s a woman to do if she needs to pee in a country where more people own phones than toilets?

• Something for the design fans: Tere Insley – the first registered wahine Māori architect (pictured)– and Elisapeta Heta and Raukura Turei talk about incorporating indigenous aesthetics into their work in a beautifully-shot 20-min episode of The Drawing Board (MāoriPlus). They’re smashing glass ceilings while lifting up glorious buildings.

 

• The multiple meanings of Serena Williams reclaiming the crip walk at Kendrick Lamar’s half time show for the Super Bowl are laid out in this LAist article. “For me, the dance form is a form of liberation” said [Shamell] Bell, a Harvard University lecturer whose doctoral research focuses on dance as grassroots political action. (As an aside: great research topic!)

 

• Speaking of dancing and activism, check out the 3-min POI episode (pictured) of Precious Clark playing and poi-dancing with her daughter on Takaparawhau (Bastion Point). In Kura Te Waati’s episode, the kapa haka powerhouse talks about how the heightened emotions means being hapū is “a prime time for creativity”(MāoriPlus). (Also of keen interest: the series Karanga: the First Voice about “the unique artform practiced by Māori women”)

• The D*List is “the home of disability culture […] publishing unapologetic content by disabled people, for disabled people” in Aotearoa – non-disabled people will also find content (and the funky pastiche design!) of interest also: disabled women authors with great takes on what makes a cool disabled villain; and pieces on how solidarity in the disabled community makes everyone more powerful and how self-diagnosis is helping autistic women make sense of their worlds: “When hearing about a support group for autistic women from someone in the autism sector, Stacey was told she was welcome despite her lack of official diagnosis, and her identity was affirmed.”

 

• From mid last year: Palestinian women report on their lives amid Israel’s siege of Gaza (Hammer and Hope article). “On Oct. 7 I was in my room. I still had my makeup on, because my brother’s wedding was the night before. I was in my room, trying to clean my room after the wedding and cleaning off my makeup. […] I don’t want to forget to talk about the shortage of sanitary pads and shortage of painkillers that we used during our periods. It’s a very sensitive topic to talk about for them, so they just suffer in silence.”

• For Waitangi Day this year, superb poet Dr Karlo Mila (pictured giving an oral submission on the Treaty Principles Bill) pulled together an anthology of mostly women Māori and Pacific poets in record time. Called “Fighting Words for Despairing Times“, Dr Mila describes it as: “This is poetry, but perhaps, not as you know it. All the poems have something in common. They have shit to say about the shit that is going down right now. These poems are not mucking around.” Her own contribution is a history lesson like you’ve never had before (They say:/ “There’s no need to raise the dead.” /And yet, the dead raised me.) The book is free, “because as Tina Ngata says, ‘You can’t capitalism your way out of colonialism.’”

• Three documentaries we’re looking forward to watching (all on MāoriPlus): Fiona Clark: Unafraid – When “A young, queer photographer exhibits her photography of the LGBTQI community in 1975 [on Karangahape Rd], she and her friends face the systemic backlash of an oppressive New Zealand society.” (1hr20, pictured). Precious Leader Woman – “Spencer O’Brien was on her way to becoming the best female snowboarder in the world when Rheumatoid arthritis set in. Forced to return home, she rediscovered her First Nations identity” (45 min) and The Last Daughter, about one woman’s experience as part of the Stolen Generation in Australia (1hr27)

• As Muslims around the world observe Ramadan, we’re looking at the award-winning CHILL campaign, showing the achievements and everyday lives of Muslim women in Aotearoa, thanks to the Islamic Women’s Council of NZ. “Muslim women are ambitious, they are driven, and they are capable leaders. Her choice to wear the hijab is a personal decision rooted in faith also  demonstrates her autonomy and strength in the face of misconceptions.”

Enjoy!