Sydney + All About Women

It’s been almost eight years since I last went to Sydney. That trip was a highschool graduation present from and with my mum. We ate pancakes and had our fortunes read and went to Supanova Pop Culture Expo and it was basically the best.

So it was weird in some ways to go back now, so much older. I don't know if I'm wiser, but it was with different eyes that I saw Sydney. Of course, I was going at a very different time too. It was the final day of Mardi Gras when I arrived, and the second day was the All About Women conference at Sydney Opera House, so in a lot of ways it was a weekend of gender and sexuality, unfolding loudly, with bite and shine and fury. 

It was escalated in some ways by the heat. Australia's been pretty hot generally lately, but to head to a cloudless Sydney with an unrelenting sun made a lot of the weekend feel like a boiler pot. It gave the conversations a little more sweat, and meant a lot of the walking my friend and I did between venues and bars was a wee bit more intense.

But hey. Enough about that.

All About Women

While the conversation is one that I'm always interested in, I'd really been drawn to All About Women this year because of the guests. Roxanne Gay, Anita Sarkeesian, Jane Caro and Clementine Ford are all brilliant women apart of dynamic and important dialogues internationally, and they really demonstrated that in full over the day.

But let me backtrack for a second. All About Women is a conference held out of Sydney Opera House and focuses on issues concerning or related to women. I went to three panels throughout the day, How to Be a Feminist, with the pretty stellar line up of Clementine Ford, Celeste Liddell, Roxanne Gay, Tara Moss, Anita Sarkeesian and Germaine Greer, Gamergate & Beyond: women in pop culture and video games with Anita Sarkeesian again and lastly What I Couldn't Say with Tara Moss, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Jane Caro and many more.

It was pretty terrific across the board, and raised really compelling questions about the nature of feminism in modern society and how it interacts and opens up things from pop culture to other forms of discrimination and bigotry, where we've been and where we've still got to go.

You can watch a selection of the panels over on the Sydney Opera House YouTube channel, which I'd totally recommend doing. It was a pretty impressive day and one really worth the trip.