Suspend Judgment! leaflets on display at the AWID Forum. Designed by Sherna Dastur/ CREA.
In the days before the internet, smartphones, texting, Facebook, twitter, Instagram, and what have you, the distribution of parchas (Hindi for political leaflets, pronounced pur-chah) was once a popular organizing tradition of street activists and protesters, especially in South Asian countries. Even today, you can see variations of parchas pasted across city walls, although they are more likely to be advertisements rather than political messages.
Inspired by these movement traditions of the global south, CREA decided to use this medium as an integral part of the “Suspend Judgment” campaign launched in September at the AWID International Forum in Bahia, Brazil. Suspend Judgment features fourteen feminist parchas exploring difficult questions at the intersection of sexuality, gender and rights. As described in part 1 of this two-part article, we see Suspend Judgment as a campaign that both challenges and goes to the heart of the future of feminist organizing and practice. It is an innovative movement-building effort focused on feminists themselves as much as other social actors, provoking all of us to think and act intersectionally, and reflect critically on deeply rooted assumptions about who is deserving of rights, what forms of difference construct stigma and marginalization, and what an inclusive agenda for social transformation might actually look like - if we suspend judgment!
