This is what an activist looks like

Nicholas Maronese
Editor-in-chief
She rips off another piece of masking tape and pastes it to the door of the Accolade West building, firmly pressing it over the edge of the bulletin.
It looks like your typical York security bulletin, but the standard  “We ask students to remain vigilant” post-sexual assault message has been translated into a biting, perhaps slightly more transparent text – “Don’t get raped,” it reads.
She doesn’t know it, but while she’s marching across the rest of campus, posters and tape in hand, her work is quickly being taken down, removed by representatives from the administration.

Those bulletins are one of several reasons Feminist Action @ YU isn’t an officially recognized York club.
The rest have to do with unsanctioned parades, the unapproved use of police tape and sidewalk chalk advertisements.
Feminist Action is bent on employing tactics that don’t quite follow the rules.
“We acknowledge that we’re in an institution, but we try to subvert that as much as we can,” explains Cersei*, one of their members.
The security bulletin fiasco perpetrated by her predecessors last year was done partly to grab attention, but it was also part of a return to grassroots activism the group hopes to inspire. The feminist canon has evolved since the days of Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem, says Cersei, but the notion feminism should effect real change hasn’t.
“People say York is really political, but we don’t see student activism [on campus], especially in the realms of gender and sexuality. We’re trying to bring that back, to fill that niche,” she says.
It’s not really a niche, though. The people that make up Feminist Action @ YU, which was formed in 2009, are linked simply by the fact they’re all anti-oppression, and that leaves plenty of room for all sorts of political views. Members who were concerned their views on animal rights or abortion might clash with the group’s philosophy were all welcomed into the club without hesitation, says Cersei.
Though their goals seem agreeable, the same can’t be said of their unconventional methods. Cersei defended their postering and outreach methods as something inherent to the cause.
“People think you have to write letters, and do formal things – things through the institution. While that’s valid, that’s a function of privilege. How can we sit here and talk about systems of oppression when we’re using privileged methods?”

The group has graffitied their name on campus with sidewalk chalk; littered posters in York’s hallways; and, last year, used that advertising to promote a bake sale.
“We said, ‘How can we have a bake sale if we’re feminists?’” says Cersei. “So we made penis-cookies and tittie-cakes.” The pornographic pastries shocked and disgusted some students, but Cersei says that’s part of the point, too.
“We want to push everyone’s envelope, because we should be able to talk about these issues.”
This kind of push needs almost necessarily be from the outside-in, she explains; she has a few doubts, for example, about the METRAC-recommended move to make an undergraduate women’s or equity studies course mandatory.
“I don’t think it’ll have as much of an effect as if people had come to it on their own. I mean, remember history class in high school?” says Rima*, another member of Feminist Action. “It depends on who’s teaching it, but the way university curriculum is formulated and standardized and watered down, I don’t think it’ll have the effect that it could.”
For a real shift in attitude like the one her group is looking for, change needs to happen not only on a student level, says Cersei, but on the administration level as well.
“It needs to come down to the people who represent the institution itself,” she says. The controversial York Lanes banner promoting LiveGreen, a company co-founded by Vanier rapist Daniel Katsnelson, should never have happened, she explains, but it did because the university simply isn’t thinking in terms of anti-oppression.
“Unless [the administration] have this new way of thinking, anything that disseminates downward from them is totally useless.”

That’s why for now Feminist Action @ YU is going to continue to employ guerrilla marketing techniques and loud, in-your-face events; they have several planned for the coming semester, and they’re not slowing down.
“We want to do things that are very fun, very radical,” says Cersei. “Things that push the boundaries of what should be done.”
* Names have been changed