3 days, 14 workshops and a ton of new knowledge and inspiration
It has been a great weekend in Querétaro at the Sexuality and Gender Conference organized by AMSSAC. Thanks to the 27 funders who supported our crowdfunding campaign, both Nori and Salka had the opportunity to participate in the conference.
Friday – inclusive language
After doing the inscription, we participated in the workshop “inclusive language”. For those of you who do not speak Spanish, it is important to understand why this is and issue and an important topic. Spanish is a very gendered language. All nouns are gendered and plural is said in masculine. An example: 20 women and one guy are gathered. To refer to “us” you would always talk about the group in masculine, because there is 1 guy present. The women are included in the masculine “us”. This has started a linguistic movement and tendency to start naming women in the language. This is also a reflection of culture, and by naming women we also recognize them in the cultural context and it is a way of fighting the strong machismo and violence against women in Latin America.
The idea with the workshop was to pronounce this issue and why it is important to do something about it. We had some good discussions and were taught some interesting tools to try and move towards a more inclusive language.
The day ended with a toast in red wine to mark that the conference was officially initiated.
Saturday – from 9 am to 9 pm
Saturday was the main day at the conference with many interesting topics. We split up twice to cover as many workshops as possible. We participated in the following:
To which point does PrEP work?
Sexual education project in Guerrero, Mexico – case study
Sexuality and sexual rights for people suffering from arrested development
Sexual domination and sumision
SEXposium: Sexual education for psycology students – case study
Understading trans
Equality and the difficaulties in implementing it
Empowering is transforming
Toxic love
Do femist men exist?
The history of gender in the Western World
The final workshop of the day “The history of gender in the Western World” was our absolute favorite. We were tired and mentally exhausted from a long day with a lot of new and interesting information, but this was an amazing experience that we wish you could have all experienced.
Juan Carlos Hernández Meixueiro did a great job explaining the different social constallations from before the ancient time and until today and with an excellent sense of humor. How gender roles have changed, from women having an important role, especially because of reproduction before the historic time to what we know today. Through language examples and hitoric information, he managed to show that patriarchy and the way our world works today has not always been like this, and he strongly believes that this is not static structure either. We are moving in the right direction, but we have to be part of the dynamic, otherwise we can easily go backwards.
Sunday – Gender focus for education
On Sunday, we started at 9 am with a workshop to place some technical terms within gender equility and placing it into a Mexican context. Later on we participted in a workshop about gender in education. The importance of not using gender stereotypes while educating, especially when it comes to sexual health education. It was interesting especially because we got some ideas on how to implement it in our workshops in Colombia.
Sunday ended with a small ceremony to hand out participation certificates.
Post conference
Monday afternoon, we spent a couple of hours comparing notes from the different workshops that we participated in. We talked about every single workshop and topic to refresh, and also to learn about the topics that we split between the two of us. It was very productive and we both felt that this was a good way for us to close the topics from the conference.
It has been a great experience participating in this conference. Hopefully we will have the opportunity to participate in future events too.
Comments