Women of the World Festival, started in 2010 by Jude Kelly in London, is a global gathering for women activists, artists and performers. WOW is familiar to many in Bangladesh, as the festival has had several editions in Chattogram, Khulna, Rajshahi, Rangpur and 2 national events in Dhaka. The event brings together people to reflect on gender-specific issues, diversity, feminist activism and to foster new synergies and partnerships.
The event is a celebration of feminism – making it more accessible and palatable to a general public. Personally I experienced its power twice. In 2019, HerStory Foundation participated in WOW Dhaka with a children’s feminist history session. This year, I had the opportunity to be a delegate from Bangladesh to WOW Athens in April 2025.
My highlights were witnessing the potential synergy of women coming together with intention. Even though we have different struggles, the root cause is often the same and there is much to learn in sharing. The panel topics were broad, allowing for speakers to speak to the pressing needs of the day. A majority of the sessions were synchronously translated into English and sign language.
Hearing Roxane Gay, who despite the desperate state of affairs in her home country (USA), spoke of the need for communal action and activism, was a key moment. She spoke on solidarity:
One of the challenges of feminism is, because what we are fighting for is so urgent and so valid, people tend to become very rigid. Either you are perfect or you can’t participate. And there is also this incorrect notion that we all have to be on the same page. Now there are some fundamental things that we need to agree on – reproductive freedom, the right for women to live lives free of violence etc. but we might have different opinions on other issues. And that’s ok…Solidarity does not mean uniformity. And the more we remember that, the more progress we will make.
Dr. Marieke Bigg, author of This Won’t Hurt (How Medicine Fails Women) and the most recent No Such Thing As Normal (Disorders, Diagnoses and Limits of Psychiatry) on medical bias:
A lot of the knowledge we hold in medicine was not the objective gender neutral knowledge I had been taught it was at school. On various levels – in research, animal research, clinical trials, medical education and practice, the default is very much the male body. And that has implications on the way medicine is practiced – when there is a lack of knowledge, assumptions, generally sexist assumptions, fill the gap and that is felt by so many women across different areas of medicine. It leads to experiences of feeling dismissed or like there are no answers – like there is nothing that can be done about our problems.
We just need to be listening to what makes a difference for women and responding.
Poet Nikita Gill spoke on a great need for greater courage in this moment of great despair:
I have no choice but to be extremely honest and extremely courageous – I do not know any other way to be. You end up losing a lot. But I don’t think you can be an advocate in today’s day and age without having lost something along the way. Because advocates and people who fight, they don’t play it safe. Because we have work to do. And like James Baldwin says, it’s can’t be popular because you are trying to change the world for the better and there are a lot of people out there who don’t want that.
Masculinities academic, activist and author of Why Feminism is Good For Men, Jens Von Tricht on the need for self reflection and calling in, not out:
I actually prefer to say toxic masculinity is pleonasm – and people then think that I am saying that men are automatically toxic. But I am not saying that. The way masculinity is constructed and defined in society is non-feminine and THAT is toxic in its core. There is a problem with the term toxic masculinity because we think it’s somewhere out there, like its toxic masculinity behaviour there or there, but it wont be about ourselves. I think we need to reflect on ourselves then we can find toxic masculinity ideas in our own behaviours. In the messages we give to our children, in the way we treat our son differently than our daughter, or in the way we look and listen to people, the way we take them seriously or not.
Author Carmen Maria Machado on the importance of language in understanding the self:
I was born in 1986, I’m 38 right now, and I did not know that I was queer because I thought it was normal to like boys but also you have a friend and she is beautiful and you want to kiss all the freckles on her face and thats just normal, thats what friends do. Because I did not have language for what I was experiencing I did not really understand myself. When we dont give people education or art on certain subjects they are unable to see themselves. We are being deprived of that experience.
All this in Athens, the birthplace of a lot of the human and civic rights we are currently seeing dismantled. Athens is also one of the few capitals named after a woman, the Goddess Athena, whose domains are wisdom and war. In Ancient Greece, female worship was the norm, education was a value and democracy was a shared goal. I had the sudden urge to be a classist, to say let’s turn back, let’s revert. But it’s in seeing how history and myth manifest today, that we can break the generational systems of oppression and work towards a world with a balance of power.
Events like WOW are catalysts – we come together, talk, connect and hopefully, these are the systems that will sustain us when all else fails. But they need to protect themselves against infiltration and dilution by ensuring greater inclusivity and participation from the whole world.
