This week’s Campus Celebrities are Jo Estrin and Frankie Garforth who have founded a feminist campaign right here at the University of Nottingham. Jo is a medic and Frankie is a classics student, together they are fronting the campaign for greater awareness for feminist issues here at uni.
What is the feminist campaign?
It is a collection of people who want to promote feminism in Nottingham to the student body. We want to try and tackle sexism and get rid of the stigma attached to the word feminism. We would never want to preach to people and we don’t want to force our opinions on people. We just want to lay out the facts and let people come to their own conclusion. We are certainly not claiming to be the head of the feminists! This is such a big topic and we are on a learning curve too.
At Freshers Fair you were asking people to write down what feminism meant to them. People were asked to finish the sentence ‘I need feminism because…’. But what does feminism mean to you both?
Feminism for us is the movement towards everyone having equal opportunities and the right to make choices. The way we see it, it is the vehicle to equality.
Why was it necessary to do this at Nottingham?
We’ve been talking for a year about how we would want to be involved in something like this. We saw a Facebook event for an ‘I need feminism because’ event in Nottingham and we were like, “finally!” We had seen so many other universities creating feminist groups. Unfortunately there is still a sexist attitude that is part of our culture, especially in universities. We went along to write our boards and realised that it was a Nottingham Trent society! So we decided that it was definitely time, we had to do this ourselves because we really need one. The girls at Trent have been so supportive. We started a Facebook group to see if there was any interest and thankfully we can now finally we can make things happen in Nottingham!
What events have you got planned for the next year?
We are working with various different people. We are hopefully working with the ‘No more page 3 at Nottingham’, AU sports and Amnesty International. It is going to be ad hoc as the issues arise because we want to keep everything relevant. We want to get more people on board with us and campaigning too.
What reaction did you get a Freshers Fair?
It was quite funny really because it was such a mixed bag. It was really nice to see the amount of people who were so interested and were like “I am so glad this is here!”, people were grabbing the pen out of our hands, that was really inspiring. We did get some people who wanted to write really mean things or would just walk past but we took it in our stride. We went around all the stalls and it was quite interesting to get different societies perspectives. There were some people who came up to us and they were either confused or couldn’t see the point of it but obviously that is why the campaign is so important. The best ones for us were when people were confused or completely disagreed with us and we chatted with them and they changed their mind. A lot of the time it came down to a difference of opinion to what the word means.
Who inspires you both?
Such a huge question. There are so many inspiring men and women who are all great feminists. The amount of coverage in the media for feminism recently has been so inspiring, there is article after article about students picking up their own campaign. A girl came up to me at freshers fair and apparently her best friend started the ‘I need feminism because’ campaign at Oxford so obviously she is such a legend! We really like Daisy Donovan, she did a documentary called the Greatest TV Shows on Earth. It was about how the media around the world reflects the underlying beliefs in society, it had a great feminist angle. Daisy used television, a media which the world just consumes, and used that to promote feminist values.
Finally I want to ask your opinion on banning Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines at university?
Basically we think there is a big difference between banning a song outright because by banning its affiliation to your institution, censorship issues arise. If there was feeling within the uni that it should be banned we would completely support that. We think that Blurred Lines promotes rape culture and sexism which is obviously something that we are against. In terms of our uni, we would be proud if the Student’s Union took a stand on it and wasn’t silent on it. A representative body with a big following would have to make their voices heard if this was to happen. We would rather have it replaced with a parody because they are funny and make it light hearted and bring these issues to the forefront of conversation.
Like UoN feminists on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/uonfeminists to check out the ‘I need feminism’ photos.
Follow UoN feminists on Twitter @UoNFeminists to keep up to date with the campaign!