One of the most recent controversies in the feminist blogosphere is over the photo-shopped picture that Amanda over at Pandagon posted. Apparently, the young women who was in the front of the picture, Jessica Valenti, was criticized by conservatives for her informal attire and her breasts and I’m sure some other completely irrelevant things (Elayne alerted me to this debate earlier.). The conservative commenters also seemed anti-Semitic, as well. In response Amanda photo-shopped the picture to make it seem like Jessica was in a burka.
Not everyone took kindly to the use of the burka as the ultimate symbol of patriarchy. Brownfemipower at Women of Color Blog, R. Mildred, at Punk Ass Blog, and Sly Civilian called Amanda out on her use of the burka as the ultimate symbol of oppression. R. Mildred was quick to point out the sort of Western imperialism associated with framing patriarchy as something that comes from “the third world” or the “Muslim world.”
You see, one of the ways the islamic patriarchy pushes hijab onto women who would otherwise prefer not to wear head scarfs or burkas or any of that stuff is to use the KultureKampf that western imperialists are waging against muslims as an excuse to guilt trip young muslim women into donning the patriarchy uniform that goes with the particular family’s cultural background.
And brownfemipower elaborates on how this sort of joking at the expense of women of color (in particular women living under a history of colonialism) is harmful.
Because it *is* pretty funny isn’t it? The comparing of an asshole to the Taliban. But in Pandagon’s rush to make a cheap joke at the expense of women of color (because good lord, the *real* problem with anti-sex feminists is that they want to turn white women into the OTHER), Pandagon forgot something small but very important: they are feminists from and blogging within a colonizing nation. A colonizing nation that is in the process of bombing the holy hell out of the very women that they find so easy to make fun of.
In defense of Amanda, she was quick to apologize, which I think is a relatively good response, considering many of the defensive reactions we have seen from liberal/progressive white bloggers lately.
This whole debate reminds me of an article I have my students read when I teach “Race, Ethnicity, and Gender.” The article is called “The Burka and the Bikini” and the authors are Joan Jacobs Brumberg and Jacqueline Jackson. The article was published in the Boston Globe just after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. In this article Bumberg and Jackson argue:
THE FEMALE BODY – covered in a burka or uncovered in a bikini – is a subtle subtext in the war against terrorism. The United States did not engage in this war to avenge women’s rights in Afghanistan. However, our war against the Taliban, a regime that does not allow a woman to go to school, walk alone on a city street, or show her face in public, highlights the need to more fully understand the ways in which our own cultural “uncovering” of the female body impacts the lives of girls and women everywhere.
Taliban rule has dictated that women be fully covered whenever they enter the public realm, while a recent US television commercial for “Temptation Island 2” features near naked women. Although we seem to be winning the war against the Taliban, it is important to gain a better understanding of the Taliban’s hatred of American culture and how women’s behavior in our society is a particular locus of this hatred. The irony is that the images of sleek, bare women in our popular media that offend the Taliban also represent a major offensive against the health of American women and girls.
During the 20th century, American culture has dictated a nearly complete uncovering of the female form. In Victorian America, good works were a measure of female character, while today good looks reign supreme. From the hair removal products that hit the marketplace in the 1920s to today’s diet control measures that seek to eliminate even healthy fat from the female form, American girls and women have been stripped bare by a sexually expressive culture whose beauty dictates have exerted a major toll on their physical and emotional health.
The authors are by no means defending the burka, but they note how American and western ethnocentrism do not allow us to see our own oppressive symbols:
Whether it’s the dark, sad eyes of a woman in purdah or the anxious darkly circled eyes of a girl with anorexia nervosa, the woman trapped inside needs to be liberated from cultural confines in whatever form they take. The burka and the bikini represent opposite ends of the political spectrum but each can exert a noose-like grip on the psyche and physical health of girls and women.
In many ways the burka and the bikini have similar outcomes. They can both be seen as symbols of the oppression of women. Unfortunately, Brumberg and Jackson don’t talk much about how colonialism and capitalism intersect to place women in poorer countries in an vulnerable position compared to their counterparts in wealthy countries.
I struggle with this sort of ethnocentric thinking all the time in my classes. The ability to look inward at one’s own culture or group is very difficult, especially for those of us who live in the United States. The US has garnered such global domination that our norms are frequently understood and embraced by people in other countries.
The tension between feminism, cultural relativism, and ethnocentrism is real. Cultural relativism asserts that each culture should be judged by it’s own norms, and ethnocentrism is the idea that one’s own culture is normal, natural, and superior. On the one hand, as a feminist, I would like to be able to criticize the oppression of women everywhere, not just in my own culture, and cultural relativism in it’s most extreme form would not allow me to do that. On the other hand, I don’t want to be ethnocentric by ignoring the patriarchy in my own culture because it is so much more normalized to me. Beyond cultural relativism and ethnocentrism, I also need to be conscientious that as an American woman (and especially an American white woman) my ability to shape feminist discourse and ideology is much greater because of the current hegemonic position of the US. I think it is very important for women in a position like mine to avoid a patronizing “let’s help those poor women who can’t help themselves and save them from their evil patriarchal men” sort of attitude.
My sense is that this is all about a balancing act. If we find it easier to critique patriarchy in other cultures or are so self absorbed that we don’t even have a clue what issues women in poorer countries are facing, then our ethnocentrism needs to be put in check. On the other hand, if we stand back and say well that’s just their culture who am I to judge, then we really need to question our feminist credentials. I think one way for those of us in a more dominant position in the world system it is essential to avoid these traps is to listen to our fellow feminists in these countries and to ensure that leadership in our organizations is not dominated by western women. Additionally, (and I’m sure this is much more controversial) Western women also need to evaluate our position in relation to men in those poorer countries. The tendency to see ourselves as victims of patriarchy while ignoring or downplaying our nations’ dominant positions in the world system is a real problem. This is exacerbated when we fail to look inward at American patriarchy and global hegemony. Brownfemipower’s comments in the latter half of her post really exemplify a good critique of many of the types of problems that arise when we fail to balance relativism, feminism, and hegemony. (For clarity’s sake, I am not critcizing BFP here. I am supporting her critiques.) She says, referring specifically to Amanda’s post,
So when you go back to that picture, the manufactured one that centers the “humor” of a veiled woman of color, you start to notice things:
Like the fact that a feminist has otherized a woman of color to “defend” the sexuality of a white woman.
Like the fact that a veiled woman is understood to be so inherantly asexual that she stands in no danger of being sexually advanced upon by the former head of a colonizing nation/state.
Like the fact that the greatest “danger” being read into the picture is that white women will someday be devoid of her sexuality.
Like the fact that Arab men are positioned as what white men are in danger of turning into.
Like the fact that a female who is in no danger of having her skin melted off by a colonizing country’s bombs is using the otherization of a woman of color who lives daily with the threat of bombs destroying not just her, but her family as well, to make a “feminist” point.
Like the fact that feminist bloggers who are blogging out of Afghanistan and Iraq right now are taking considerable fucking risks to their lives and the lives of their families to get their word out, and yet fellow “sister” bloggers are using imagery of their subjugation to have a good laugh.
Typically, I focus more on race, but in these sorts of situations I think both race and western imperialism intersect in the process of marginalizing women in poorer nations. When I teach about this subject, there is not a big divide between US born white people and US born people of color. The bigger gap is between students from immigrant backgrounds (where either they or their parents were born outside of the US) and those from nonimmigrant backgrounds. Moreover, people have to be very careful, when we are talking about imperialism not to enforce our American definitions of race on people in other countries. The notion of a white/non-white dichotomy” doesn’t necessarily exist in every country of the world. I’m not saying race doesn’t matter; I am saying that being a citizen of the US and having all of your relatives reared or living in the US does tend to encourage this sort of hegemonic (domineering) mentality that accompanies ethnocentrism.
So back to those bikinis and burkas, is it fair to say that they are both used to promote patriarchal images of women? I think the answer is yes, but I also wonder if there is anything inherent in either item that makes them oppressive. I’m not sure if it is the object itself or the ideology that these objects are used to promote. The manifestations of sexism often vary across cultures, and we (women in wealthy nations) need to continually remind ourselves that our culture’s sexism is hard for us to see because it is so normalized. it doesn’t mean we can’t critique other cultures, but it does mean we need to listen and incorporate the perspectives and experiences of women in other cultures, especially non-western cultures and poorer nations.
I don’t have any simple answer that solves this whole problem, but I just wanted to give some food for thought. (Plus, I need to practice my lecture for next semester’s “Race, Ethnicity, and Gender” class.) The tensions between US hegemony, ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, and feminism are very real.
Bibliography
Brumberg, J.J. and J. Jackson. 2003. “The Burka and the Bikini.” Pp. 212-214 in Estelle Disch (ed.) Reconstructing Gender: A Multicultural Anthology, 3rd. ed.
Pingback: Feminist Critics
Pingback: Pacific Views
Pingback: Majikthise
Pingback: Egotistical Whining
Pingback: feminist blogs
Pingback: feminist blogs
First of all, I would like you to show me anyone who claims to believe in cultural relativism. It is a derogatory term, not a line of though.
You need to develop a real sense of curiosity about what people of color are saying and what they are requesting here. There is no tight-rope walking balancing act, if you just drop your arrogance and listen.
And of course it’s not the thing-in-itself but the context. There are cultures active today where men women and children walk around with all their stuff hanging out and it’s not an issue. No I’m not talking about naturists.
SaltyC,
Cultural relativism is a term commonly used in by anthropologists to indicate the importance of not judging other cultures by the standards of one’s own. I agree with Rachel S. that there’s frequent tension between cultural relativist and feminist ways of thinking.
Interesting. Speaking of cultural relativism (if, as SaltyC points out, it actually exists as a theoretical framework), what about something like Female Genital Mutilation?
Is it ok for white, Western women to be critical of FGM? (I’m curious because one of my best friends is seeing an Eritrean man and she told me that all of his sisters have undergone FGM.)
OK I’m calling bullshit here. I challenge anyone to reference a piece of writing which praises cultural relativism by an adherent of such.
Darned if I can figure out Trackback, but here’s a link and an excerpt:
Veiled Criticism
My point is, you are belittling the critics of white women laughing at a burqa’d woman by labeling them and their position as cultural relativism, which used widely as a derogitory term. The problem isn’t that we don’t judge the burqa as an Afghani would. The problem is that our country’s resources are being used to kill such women, and that to laugh at them is to ignore that fact.
SaltyC,
First, I agree with you completely as to what the problem is. I’m not reading Rachel as saying that the critics of the burqa-humor are engaging in cultural relativism, though. A cultural relativist position would be to say “the burqa is a cultural symbol that has its own specific history and meaning, separate from what western thought imposes on it, and therefore we may not judge those who wear it or promote it.” As the link above points out, while cultural relativism is often a vital part of good social science fieldwork, it presents moral and ethical problems as well, such as moral paralysis in the face of blatant human rights violations. That’s where it comes into conflict with feminism, specifically – FGM may have its own cultural value and meaning, but it’s cruel.
I don’t recall hearing “cultural relativism” used as derogatory. “Moral relativism,” on the other hand, has definitely become a right-wing buzzterm.
All of this is apart from the very good point made by brownfemipower that “[the Pandagon writers] are feminists from and blogging within a colonizing nation. A colonizing nation that is in the process of bombing the holy hell out of the very women that they find so easy to make fun of.”
That link says that cultural relativism is a tool used by anthropologists doing fieldwork :
So why would RachelS feel a tension, Is she an anthropologist doing fieldwork?
And how does this tool used by anthropologists doing fieldwork affect a discussion about a woman in a dominator country using a subjected country’s image as a target of ridicule?
You don’t need anthropology to see it’s tacky.
[I fixed your blockquote – Nick]
saltyc said, “First of all, I would like you to show me anyone who claims to believe in cultural relativism. It is a derogatory term, not a line of though.”
You need to develop a real sense of curiosity about what people of color are saying and what they are requesting here. There is no tight-rope walking balancing act, if you just drop your arrogance and listen.”
With all due respect, I think you are misreading my post. I didn’t attribute cultural relativism to any person in the photoshopped picture debate at all, and I don’t think cultural relativism is an inherently bad thing. In sociology and anthropology cultural relativism and ethnocentrism are frequently set up as diamterically opposing concepts. My point is that both are problematic for feminists (of all races and cultures, but especially for those in the dominant culture).
My point is not to reiterate what anyone in the debate over the photo had said. Instead, my goal is to point out some of the related issues that this debate raises.
saltyc said, “There are cultures active today where men women and children walk around with all their stuff hanging out and it’s not an issue.”
Yes, and that is just the point I was making in the end of the essay.
Dang blockquotes.
This last paragraph was mine:
SaltyC: And how does this tool used by anthropologists doing fieldwork affect a discussion about a woman in a dominator country using a subjected country’s image as a target of ridicule?
You don’t need anthropology to see it’s tacky.
One of the primary areas where this issue comes up is female circumsion.
saltyC said, “And how does this tool used by anthropologists doing fieldwork affect a discussion about a woman in a dominator country using a subjected country’s image as a target of ridicule?”
In part, because much of the way we have developed our images of non-western people is through anthropological research, and much of that work has had a long term detrimental impact on people in societies that early anthropologists have labled “primitive.” It is highly relevant. Because the photo that sparked the debate is an example of how ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism, shape the responses of people in dominant countries.
On another note, I am a sociologist by training and I do ethnographic research, so from a personal perspective I do need to try my best to keep my ethnocentrism in check. However, I think it is not only sociologists who should try not to be ethnocentric. That’s valuable for everyone.
Finally, I am not at all defending the photo. I don’t think it was funny or appropriate, and I am not defending it at all in this piece.
“The problem is that our country’s resources are being used to kill such women, and that to laugh at them is to ignore that fact. ”
Who’s laughing at them? I don’t see how the recognition that the burka is oppressive means that we are laughing at or demeaning women in burkas? If I say that rape is oppressive, does that mean I am demeaning women or laughing at women who are raped?
Also, I don’t see the burka and bikini as two ends of a spectrum. Rather, I see them as two sides to the same coin. The coin is the objectification of women as the sexual property of men. On one side of the coin, women are public property to be sexually used by all men (bikini). On the other side of the coin, women are private property to be sexually used by one man in private and hidden from other men in public (burqa).
Kali said, “Who’s laughing at them?”
The photoshopped picture that started the debate was intended to be humorous. It included a burka photoshopped on an American woman that’s where this statement came from.
The burka is a symbol of oppression as is any forced uniform – it and the bikini are only oppressive if there is no choice whether to wear them or not – period – The penalty for not wearing the burka exactly as your masters dictate is the lash and the club. We should ridicule it and the men who defend it’s use. I am not talking about psychological pressure which you can reject. I am talking about force and cult societies from which there is no escape – societies which enforce submission to the rule of thugs and priests.
Here is the feminist position outside all these big words. CHOICE – Freedom to Choose.
Where there is no choice, where women are silenced, forced and punished none of you can say a damn thing about what those women want because they cannot tell the truth about their lives. A 16 year old girl in Iran tried and they slowly strangled her to death. Most of you saw the pictures on the Women Against Fundamentalism website. 100 lashes before they killed her.
We should do more than criticize, we should support this war, expand it into Iran and Saudi Arabia, blow up the patriarchy everywhere possible. Support the immigration of women to the US from any Moslem country without husbands or fathers, forbid the oppression of women by Muslims in this country. Call it slavery and act against it wherever we can. The boys shouted us down in 1972 and they will do it again except for the decent men – shout back. Better yet turn your back on them and reach out to your sisters in Afghanistan and if it ever gets safer to your sisters in Iraq.
Your “civility” , your need to be with the boys has blinded you to how you would feel if it were YOU under that burka, you forbidden to drive or leave the house without your brother, you denied an education and sold off in marriage at 12 or younger—and worse. No rights, No voice ,No freedom – and no right to teach a class that does not echo the will of the mullahs. Just do what you are told or else.
This system kills everyone’s spirit, men and women but we are women and must act to save our sisters and our selves. Please don’t tell me about my power compared to third world men -puke – if I had real power I would end the oppression of Muslim women but it is the Muslim elite and their religion that has all the power and all the control – to deny those who want more choice – to install Sharia law not just in the middle east but in Canada and wherever they make them self a majority through their forced breeding of slave women.
Don’t let those who support the power of men to oppress women make you afraid to act. Don’t let the boy’s WORDS define the problem and stop you. Burkaed women cannot act to free them self and neither could you in their position.
Where ever the reins are loosened, even a little, they rise up and face the storm – we must act for them until they can act for them self without being buried up to their chest and stoned. Where were you, their tortured spirits will ask. Right now the answer is that feminists were with the boys on the left urging others to support the theocracies. Because somehow we felt it was none of our business that our 1/2 of our caste members are held in slavery as long as it was in far away countries and we didn’t have to see it. You can act for them by the questions you ask in your class by the books you read and the projects you assign.
Read Phyllis Chesler’s “The Death of Feminism” for your class. Move beyond the boy’s words and make up your own definitions. Do something with the women of Afghanistan – there are many links – there is the State Dept’s Office on Women’s Issues, force them let you link up with their on the ground projects – do critiques of their BS women’s project and demand they fund battered women’s compounds. Ask why the UN’s fund to end violence against women has not built one shelter anywhere in the world despite the millions that have disappeared from the fund.
Stop accepting the same old male definitions and get to the real gender issues in the world and challenge the oppression of women instead of just debating with jerks and thugs. Stop asking if it is left or right and start asking if it is good for women. Stop trying to be good girls.
Because what goes around, comes around and none of us is secure in freedom until we are all free. We are a caste and as it is for one of us, it can be for all of us. The power base we did not build to help the women in Iraq and Afghanistan,(as we were to busy with the boy’s anti war rallies) will not be there when they come to take our reproductive rights away here.
Pingback: Women of Color Blog » Liberation through bombs
So how does bombing engender choice. How does you telling otehr owmen how to live their lives engender choice . How does you using archaic and somewhat deroghatory terms for Muslims – many of whom are women engender choice.
HOW DOES YOU IGNORING MUSLIM WOMENS VOICES AND OPINIONS ON BURQA AND HIJAB ENGENDER CHOICE?
Name one place in your long extended self indulgent rant where you talk about the OPINIONS FEELINGS AND WORDS OF MUSLIM WOMEN?
FINALLY ENCOURAGE A WAR THAT HAS KILLED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF WOMEN,HAD MANY OF THEM RAPED BY THE ” SAVIORS” AND TELL ME WHERE THAT HELPS CHOICE?
HOw does you infantilizing and encouraging colonialism towards Muslims engender spaces to make choice.
And finally as people are not children nor galvinized to action by florid unsupported prose name one person here ONE who has supported fundamentalist acts when speaking about this.
ANd for someone so intereste din speaking out against the boys you link to teh State department?!?!
But more importantly stop calliing grown folks girls I have been and many of these romanticised women who you’d rathe rsee dead than engaged have been and always will be grown women
Greenconsciousness you should fucking be ashamed of yourself.
The fucking war you’re supporting is KILLING the women you pretend to want to ‘save’, it is KILLING their children, and their loved ones.
The soldiers who are fighting the war you’re supporting are RAPING those women and children you pretend to want to ‘save’.
And then, people get upset when WOC expose the fucking colonial logic behind that stupid picture. Well people, THIS, is where that logic gets you.
You know, the cultural relativism trope was used by the Bush administration early on in this fiasco we call the War on Terr ™. Why on earth do we want to pick it up again and recirculate it in the warped way they did.
From ‘Don’t Blame Relativism’ by Stanley Fish For the life of me. I can’t see why we’d want to give up serious thought when we have a wealth of material from the canons of Feminist social science methodology that clearly shows us how it’s quite possible for there to be no conflict at all between serious understanding and feminist politics which, I should point out, is PLURAL, not singular.
Rachel:
I always thought the typical word to use is repressive, no?
I always like Young’s work, which fleshes out Marilyn Frye’s class defintion of oppression:
The Five Faces of Oppression
I am really curious about a literature on objects as oppressive in and of themselves, though. I’ve been curious about the idea for awhile since a debate back on PUnkass blog a couple of months ago. Since I’m not going to be around much, pls write at info AT pulpculture DOT org if anyone can help.
The Shorter Greenconsciousness: You little brown people are going to breath free or else!
[removed by request of Brownfemipower.]
I’d ask everyone to remember the moderation policies here.
Greenconciousness,
There are many things in your post I disagree with, but I’m going to pick out a few of them. In the haste to speak for women in Afghanistan and the Middle East. I feel you ignore the fact that these women are speaking out. The most famous organization that I am familiar with is RAWA, and they do NOT support the war in Iraq. And I can assure you that the women in these countries you selected do not want war. The notion that the US is the voice of freedom and democracy for women around the world is both naive and incorrect. Why do you think that our government didn’t take up the cause of Kuwaiti women in the first Iraq war? They were our strategic allies. I don’t see how the patriarchy behind US missiles is going to stop Islamic fundamentalist patriarchy.
Pingback: Taking Place » Blog Archive » Liberation through bombs
Ampersand:
I’m not a usual reader of your blog, so I went to read you moderation policies. The first paragraph sums up, I think, the policy:
Now, maybe it’s because I’m new here and don’t really know how you usually control the comments here, but it seems to me that almost everything that was posted by Greenconsciousness was in direct opposition to any real meaningful understanding of the concept of ‘respect’. Racist, violent, colonialist, etc., that’s how I would qualify the post by Greenconsciousness. So, am I to assume that your comment about moderation policies were directed at this particular poster? Or was it directed at those who, like me, responded with what I believe is justifiable anger to this post? Please, tell me that you are not saying to those people that we should be more ‘nice’ when engaging with someone who’s advocation for the mass murder of entire countries and people.
What if women in a given society were so repressed that you really couldn’t hear their true voices? Certainly, in Afghanistan, one purpose of the burka was to remove women and their voices from the public sphere insomuch as it was humanly possible to do so. Women risked their lives to get the truth of their plight out. There is still a better than even chance that we can’t know what women in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan are thinking until they are safely beyond their borders.
No, I’m not in favor of expanding any wars, I recognize that whatever is being said by U.S. officials in defense of women’s rights is cynical — perhaps I am looking in the wrong place, I just wish the level of passion displayed over misplaced use of symbolism were also directed at enabling Muslim women to tell us what they really think, without fear of retribution.
A few posts down we are asked to write to various officials in multiple countries to prevent several women from being stoned. I hope everyone will do this.
[removed by request of Brownfemipower.]
Bitch|Lab said, “..it’s quite possible for there to be no conflict at all between serious understanding and feminist politics which, I should point out, is PLURAL, not singular.”
Yes, I agree with that piece. I think it is a point that needs to be reiterated, especially outside of academia.
What I find interesting, is that people frequently try to grapple with cultural relativism, without addressing ethnocentrism. I don’t really know how we can do that. Perhaps part of the problem is that relativism is being use in a way that appears to be way too broad. (Both moral and cultural.)
Do you care to elaborate on the oppression vs. repression point?
The social constructionist in me says nothing about objects is inherently sexist. I was really grappling with that when I wrote this piece.
What Veronique said, and how.
per actual Arab/Muslim women: also: hello, RAWA was already mentioned; they DO speak for themselves; they DO NOT support this war. Really.
Pingback: Women's Space/The Margins
Weird, isn’t it ? That strangely sensible assumption that being “bombed back to the Stone Age” –or whatever testosterone-addled trope our bipartisan clown squad is using these days– is not terribly compatible with liberation or freedom. Particularly when the “liberated” are being killed by the truckload.
Frankly, Amp, I think bfp was being too kind. Kinder than I would have been. >:
I suppose it’s escaped Green’s “consciousness” that the war she urges us to support has been FORCING WOMEN INTO BURQAS. (Don’t take my word for it, read Riverbendblog.)
Feh.
What she said. To Brownfemipower, BlackAmazon and Veronique.
And Greenconsciousness, your words made me sick too and I’m a member of a colonizing race. When the nausea leaves my stomach, I’ll return and respond in a manner more in line with the moderation code, because righteous anger is apparently less “civil” than an extremely offensive, if politely phrased colonialist attitude.
Btw, I’m somewhat mystified at any suggestion that expanding these wars to liberate more women. None of the wars currrently being waged by the United States in the Middle East have an iota thing to do with liberating women. I’m not sure it’s even so much the War on Terror, given that UNOCAL and other gas companies made a fortune from the Afghanistan war, and Cheney and his buddies are profiting off the war in Iraq.
Btw, how many more people were killed in Iraq today? How many women and girls have been killed just this week? Liberate women by killing them, yes, this makes a lot of sense. :rolleyes
I agree that there is no civil response to this:
It reminds me of a local representative said that women who wanted to wear scarves should go back to Islam or Iraq. The racism is bad enough, the plain ignorance adds an element of farce to it all.
Radfem – don’t forget rape – the US army has been liberating women by raping them. Doesn’t sound like any sort of feminism I’d know.
I recently read an excerpt from the book “The Caged Virgin: A Muslim Woman’s Cry for Reason’ written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. (This is the woman who wrote the film “Submission’ about the treatment of women under Islam. The Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist because he’d produced the film.)
Hirsi Ali fled a forced marriage in Somalia and was a member of the Dutch Parliament until mid-last year. She resigned after being threatened with the loss of her Dutch citizenship for having used a false name and date of birth on a refugee application. The threat was withdrawn, but she’s now moved to the US to work as a resident fellow at a conservative think-tank in Washington DC.
Anyway, the reason I’m writing about this is because in the book she is directly asking governments of the European Union (as well as NGO’s) to be more active in stopping the violences perpertrated on muslim girls in European countries. She writes:
I’m wondering if anyone here knows exactly what is meant by ‘mixing education with ideology’ in those countries, and whether it would be discussed in terms of a struggle between cultural relativism, ethnocentrism and feminism. I guess the banning of the hijab in French schools would be a case in point, although I’m also sure that what Hirsi Ali is referring to is things like a lack of vigour in ensuring that particularly immigrant muslim girls, brought into the countries to marry conservative muslim men, actually get to go to school or stay there for any length of time. She writes about a particular young woman who left home because of the violence there to live in a university dorm. She did her studies under threat of death from her brothers – who said killing her was the only way to avenge the shame she’d brought on the family by leaving their parents house. And this was in the Netherlands.
the biggest problem with the use of the term ‘cultural relativism’ by Amanda in her defense is it asserted by assumption that other cultures, not her own (not Bill Clinton, explicitly) force women to wear burqas and otherwise abuse those women. The problem with this assertion is that it is simply a lie, a self serving lie, a self congratulatory lie, and one often told in the service of the white supremacism and imperialism to which Amanda is showing her allegiance by repeating these lies. Amanda evoking ‘cultural relativism’ remarked, from a purportedly objective position of innocence and neutrality, on “another culture”, only to assert without argument the indefensible assumption that she speaks from a position – confiding in her audience’s assent to this denial of the criminality of her culture and its responsibility for the suffering of Afghan women including that inflicted by its creature client Taleban – of a falsely idealised and acquitted place in her own idealised, virtuous and guiltless ‘culture’, which she defines precisely and only by opposing it to the ‘culture’ pictured as a burqa and meaning ‘Misogyny and Wickedness’, for which culture she is engaged in a very typical white supremacist, imperialist apology, made especially grotesque and inexcusable by the presence of Taleban in Chief Clinton in the picture.
Amanda herself you see is guilty of practising the bad aspects of ‘cultural relativism’, because she condemns acts she assigns to one culture (Afghan) and applauds the very same acts committed against the very same victims by another culture (Clinton’s culture;, the culture of imperial power, with which she associates herself) in a single visual statement. Clinton’s abuse of Afghan women is acceptable because of ‘his unique culture’, where this is done for profit and generates the cultural meaning ‘political realism’ or ‘liberalism’ or whatever, while the Taleban’s carrying his very acts of abuse out for him by proxy is abominable because of the cultural meaning ‘piety’ rather than ‘profit’ it generates for them as Amanda freely and of course completely irreponsibly, contemptuously and ignorantly imagines them.
Blow up the patriarchy everywhere possible.
Why not start in your own backyard greenconsciousness?
YOUR fathers and brothers and cousins and uncles, rather than some OTHER “brown” woman’s. Then when you are finished bombing the bejesus out of your hometown, you could take on Wall Street. You could assinate CEOs. Or wait? What about Washington? Whoops, shouldn’t have said that — might get myself arrested as an unarmed combatant.
No, I guess your buddies like Ann Althouses must be right. Its better to kill them over there than to deal what ails them and us (patriarchy) over here. Because , after all, it is legal to kill those patriarchs.
Well here they are, all the girls who know ever so much about the women who I have been working with since 1972 – the ones who are not with them and never have been.
RAWA asked for our money until Bush got serious about their complaints – then they opposed the invasion because the Northern Alliance was in control and they were loyal to the Pustune tribe – the taliban was pustune – the women who speak for feminists in the middle east are Women Against Fundamentalism but you will never understand them. Luckily, they are too busy to care.
You are the fascists of the new pseudo feminism, trying to silence women who do not kiss the boys ass but organize based on what is good for women. I have listened to you tell me to vote for Ralph Nader and now I listen to you rant about Bush – same old crap. Real feminist don’t organize for the boys – ever. We were an independent movement – based on our own reality but slaves to dem or repub, left or right but as Dylan says, things have changed. Feminism is not a movement anymore specifically because of the politics articulated above.
Who Care if you are civil or not? I don’t. I have seen your teeth. Women will organize outside your cult politics . One day Muslim women will be able to spit in the eye of their religious thugs who will be exposed for the pedophilic AH they really are just as priests have been exposed. I whined about the oppression of women in the middle east for 20 years to the Democratic boys who did nothing except use those women. I could do a book list by Muslim women, it exists but you would not read their words. You do not care about them or their oppression. And neither do the brainwashed Muslim American women who support their oppression. Fine.
There are warriors there, suffering dying and aware of your oppression as well as that of their men and the theocracies. And there are women here who are not called feminist but who have compassion for the suffering of their sisters and who will move to help them.
You will sit in your small word and whine about those awful white women who do not understand their own racism and white middle class and all that same old crap while women in Africa are infibulated and have their clits cut off and then are gang raped by the other tribe and then the UN peacekeepers . Your UN heroes who are stealing the funds that were supposed to help those women and endlessly talking about whether they should do this or that – much the same way you do.
But the “brown” groups here will be more concerned with those racist white women working for six dollars an hour at Wal-Mart. You care about being righteous which is so different from being right.
Go to your anti war rallies with your boyfriends. Better yet go to a Muslim country and live under Sharia. Then free women won’t have to listen to your trashing disguised as analysis. In the 70’s working women who organized scorned academic women who talk talk talk and obstruct the real work. Why don’t you just do something to help oppressed women instead of focusing all your energy on other women. Something that involves institutional change instead of charity.
If you want a book list written by Muslim Women I will bring it back here – if you want cites to the UN fund and the State Dept ask. If you want to trash Knock yourself out. It gives me a laugh.
I write in a separate entry to one specific argument which I do take seriously. That Bush’s motives were not to liberate women and that the war is not doing so.
Let me say this simply and try to understand. The man’s motives will never ours – our job is to make what they do work for us— this is what is up to us. We could have organized to use this conflict for oppressed women. They needed our support and would give plenty to get it. We could have made women’s equality part of the demands. And it started in the Afghanistan constitution. But to begin to make it work would have called for a feminist movement. A powerful group of many disparate women working together for a common purpose. To influence the development of women’s programs at the state dept and at the UN.
But NOW and the women’s majority have become the ladies auxiliary of the democratic party and the left supports the theocracies. Instead we left it to repub women and really I have to give them credit – they tried at the State Dept. But they do not have a clue as to what must be done in the face of that kind of violence toward women.
I could say much more here but this is enough because it did not happen and won’t – primarily because of the responses above.
KNow what many tried to be civil but fuck this.
Number one for someone who is so “organising and concerned about Afghanastani women and iraqi women’ your condescending girls girls girls is sexist intellectually demeaning bullshit.
I AM A GROWN ASS WOMAN and so is everyone else here. My great aunt,grandmother, and foremothers did time in shit you niether know about nor uinderstand to have that right, shit that DESERVEs much more than a passing refrence in your blood hungry desire for perfect white feminism. So take that smug shit somewherelse.
RAWA opposed when peopel started dying who were related to them in willy nilly ways in an infrastructure that was and is barely being restructed as we fight more wores killing more of their family members. Also if they asked for money and got bombs then BUsh wasn’t serious about their demands.
” REAL FEMINISTS’ well not a feminist Womanist . Never voted for Nader and as anIUNDEPENDENT WOMAN why is it when i disagree with you I’m a slave. And as a women of color your use of slavery is culturally inappropriate, disengious and racist. But you kknow more than me right.
For someone so wise youre telling me to go to rallies with my boyfriends? Well sorry got shit like organising food drives, stopppig violence, getting education, saving babies, rasing kids, not rasing, and oa ll thsoe other things taht come with walking teh walk and not jsut speaking on hi from privilege that come with a real indepth will to work with feminism. And don’t have a boyfriend
And many of these posters ARE if not directly connecting organising and sending money straight up African themselves. Do you know of sokari or the African bloggers conference. Of course not because it would damage youre ability to be the wise white sage.
Also Africa not afucking monolith.
And teh brown groups here are concerned with women having rights to be women.
And niether are anygroups monoliths. Muslim American women, Muslim SUdanese, Muslim Afghani. Are ALL muslims and are allowed to speark . Funny that in you desire to free women everyone who isnt that must shut up
IN WHATEVER WAY THEY FUCKING PLEASE.
Not by our standards , your standards but their own.
And forgive if our analysis looks like trash i n this case, We can only rise as well as teh material.
Rumsfieldconsciousness wrote:
This system kills everyone’s spirit, men and women but we are women and must act to save our sisters and our selves.
It sounds like you really enjoy helping the completely helpless, G(R)C! That way you can always be right and never have to deal with any questions about the effects of your actions.
Where there is no choice, where women are silenced, forced and punished none of you can say a damn thing about what those women want because they cannot tell the truth about their lives.
These are the perfect people for you to go and save, then, aren’t they? You know, helpless little kittens and puppies that have no agency, no opinions, and are completely incapable of an honest thought about their lives. You can just swoop down and decide what is best for them from your enlightened point of view, not theirs. How incredibly noble of you!
Over at Bitch|Lab, Arwen wrote:
I cannot ignore that the women in the burqas are living their own lives, though. They’re not overwritten by political realities, subsumed and destroyed personally ’til there’s nothing but blank and broken cringing victims. Women have been, are, stronger than that; we’re people. People do what they can with the cards they’ve been dealt, and have lived through atrocities unthinkable for all time.
And let me bring some personal experience into your “save the world despite itself” attitudes, shall I? Try growing up in the 50s and 60s with a psychopath for a father. Try having that man threaten your life over and over again and do unspeakable things. Then have a bunch of social workers and psychologists with your fucking self-righteous attitude try to tell you that you have no thoughts to be trusted, no ability to speak your pain. Try having them tell you over and over and over again that it must be in your freudian mixed up brain and all you really need to do is to stop being such a sniveling baby and go back in there to experience it all over again. All fucking over again. Because they know better than you. You are too young or too emotional or too female or too hysterical and have too many absurd fantasies about having guns held to your head and seeing your stepmother beaten to a bloody pulp. You can’t speak for yourself, so I will and the system will and the social workers will and the bloody damn psychologists will. And nobody, not one god damn person will listen to you.
I’ve dealt with people like you and they caused me years of pain. The only ones who made a difference were the awesome women and men who actually listened to me and heard what I said and helped me to become what I wanted to become, not what they decided I should become. Don’t pretend for a second that you hate male oppression better than its victims do. I danced on that fucker’s grave with pure delight.
G(R)C, you’ve apparently had problems with all kinds of feminists, but don’t assume that is what you are reading here. Your attitude — that you know better — that these people are helpless — may make it possible for you to do activist work. And if you are saving lives, then good for you. But this attitude of yours has consequences. If you cannot listen to Muslim women or believe them to have minds and thoughts of their own, then you are part of the problem, not the solution.
Amp —
I love you to death. I lavish bitch-hugsandkisses because I know running a blog is hard work and it’s stressing to see these things break out.
I agree with Veronique, though. One thing running a discussion for years taught me is that it is important to speak specifically to *what* you find offensive in the comments. I know a lot of us think that it’s easier to be vague and everyone will know what you mean. But what I’ve seen happen is moderation that is vague — that doesn’t point at the precise things someone said and why you object — teaches people nothing.
In other words, it’s not always obvious to readers what you’re finding objectionable. That’s often just the nature of interpretation — people see different things. In order to learn how not to do the things to which you object, people have to learn sometimes.
But perhaps more importantly, I learned that when I thought I was just trying to help each side save face, I only made it worse. When people are squared off, a vague pronouncement — be nice — feels like you think both sides were naughty. And yet, we often think the other side was naughty and we weren’t. Then, it feels like the moderator is unfair and everyone gets angrier anyway.
At least by engaging in concrete criticisms, they can deal specifically with what you find problematic and your *reasons* for doing so. A vague pronouncement leaves it up to the imagination. When I started being specific, things weren’t easier, but we tended to stay on topic and, most importantly, things improved because people *learned* what to avoid doing and how to have a respectful conversation. The fact is, we have to learn how to do that sometimes.
You will sit in your small word and whine about those awful white women who do not understand their own racism and white middle class and all that same old crap while women in Africa are infibulated and have their clits cut off and then are gang raped by the other tribe and then the UN peacekeepers .
ahhh, here is the reality of your indignation. you are white and you are tired tired tired of being “whined” at by brown women. because you know where the real evil is. you, who are not living any of it, KNOW THE TRUTH.
Please wake up to reality. A group that is based in England DOES NOT AND CAN NOT “SPEAK FOR” feminists in another nation. NOBODY “speaks for” a feminist, least of all, another woman.
and sorry, but “brown” groups are already creating and moving with structural challenges to the system. we just aren’t using our bully big brother to save us from our battering boyfriend. Women of color, dear green, are the ones that made Western feminists aware of the fact that the u.n was raping and prostituting women to begin with. It was the grassroots mobilization of women of color that wouldn’t accept Western Feminists response to saving us from “getting our clits cut off”.
and frankly, i think we’d be more inclined to see a white woman “Go to anti–war rallies with their boyfriends.” “Brown women” are too busy creating alternative economic structures and media outlets and health care centers and abuse response teams and organizing conferences with other women of color world wide to sit and mess with something as insignificant as an anti-war rally. The only reason white feminists are even aware of the interlocking systems of oppression of the nation/state, the sexism of hypernationalism, the connection of over there to over here–is because of us whiny brown women who do nothing but sit and complain about white women all day (aka grassroots basebuilding and organizing).
I would invite those here to go to RAWA’s website, http://www.rawa.org, and read the herstory of that organization for yourself, read what it has done, what its goals are, look at the photos. RAWA opposes all fundamentalism and always has, not only Islamic fundamentalism, which seems to be your specific focus, greenconsciousness.
I don’t really get how you can be all about environmentalism and green consciousness and advocate for making war on… anybody, and not just for the obvious reasons, like that it’s not exactly green conscioussness to advocate for blasting people to kingdom come in wars of various kinds. Hell, according to a CDC report that just came through and is being circulated now, we are all walking around with toxic levels of rocket fuel in our systems because it’s in the water, the milk, it’s everywhere, it is wreaking havoc with our health, thanks to warmongerers in Congress who have opposed any efforts at dealing with the situation.
This is from a blog post I wrote a couple of days ago about Malalai Joya but it’s relevant to this discussion:
This is how the women of Afghanistan have been “liberated” and “emancipated” and “empowered” by the war Bush made to “liberate” them.
There is some truth to what you write, greenconsciousness, about today’s “cult feminism” and the way some mindlessly trash good feminist women who have done good work for decades and decades, and the way it’s a little too easy — for men, especially — to write off white feminists as “racist” and “middle class.” I agree with you that we should allow any and all women and girls who want to immigrate into the United States to do so, without their husbands and fathers.
But as to Phyllis Chesler, whose views you seem to share, for all the amazing, wonderful work she has done in the past, and despite the respect I have for that work that she has done, she has taken a *wrong wrong wrong* turn, as have a couple of other erstwhile Second Wave radical feminists, in supporting the war the Bush regime has been waging on the Middle East. Those wars are being waged not in the interests of destroying fundamentalism, they are being waged for oil, they are being waged for control and power, i.e., imperialism, they are being waged by and large BY fundamentalist Christians or with fundie backing, these are just fundamentalists of another stripe, who will colonize the countries which end up occupied and will add Christian fundamentalism to Islamic fundamentalism as a “choice” for colonized women.
As to U.N. peacekeepers, yeah, they go in and rape and pillage and terrorize women whenever they get called in to make peace, but SO DO AMERICAN TROOPS, as we have recently seen with the rape of the 14-year-old girl, with more revelations emerging every day, every day, Iraqi women and girls raped, assaulted, brutalized by U.S. troops and in “detainment centers.”
The way to revolution, to women’s freedom liberation, is not to call in the men of one country to deal with the men of another country! All that’s going to happen in that scenario is, **** the women and children are going to be brutalized by more men than they were brutalized by before ****. And there is so much more to say, really, in response to your imo very strange comment. I mean, who the hell is going to demonstrations with their boyfriends here? Who supports the Democrats? Who supports UN peacekeepers? Who thinks UN peacekeepers are heroes? There is so much just absurd assuming going on in your comment. If you want to just vent, unload, whatever, why don’t you first find out who the hell you are even talking to?
Ugh, the subject is way too big and I told myself I wasn’t going to do this, I have to stop.
Heart
GC, have a cup of STFU with a side of get a fucking clue.
Killing and bombing people does not liberate them. You don’t speak for me, and you can take your arrogant, colonialist bullshit and get lost.
If feminism is not a movement, perhaps that is due to:
A) It need not be one movement. Because what works for women of my race, class, and nationality might not work for another sort of woman. That woman needs help from people of her own background and culture, or at least she needs somebody who can listen to her with some knowledge of her own situation and not with some kind of she-Kipling complex.
B) The fact that your arguments are so vague and contradictory as to border on the incoherent. Wheee !! If you voted Nader you are of course a patriarchal handmaiden, but it’s okay for me to quote Bob “Victoria’s Secret Ad” Dylan to prove what a brave lone she-wolf I am. [rolleyes] Give me a damn break.
Snap out of it, Greencon. Feminism is not dead just because you can’t get a planet’s worth of women under the war machine’s heel– on what you alone seem to have deemed the appropriate schedule.
Rachel wrote:
*nod* *nod*
Yep. spot on. CR is a *method* of understanding. The focus here is on the formal rules of how we come to understand something, not on the substantive ends of how to behave or act politically or engage in strategies for social change.
that doesn’t mean that there is no relationship between the method (means) and the end. Instead,the argument is that it is a preferred method precisely becasue it leads to better knowledge of our situation than does proceeding by using an ethnocentric method of understanding others.
I hadn’t really thought of all this before, so I’m curious what you think about that way of thinking about it. If seeing it as a method and not as an end, which many people seem to think it is — that it will somehow directly lead us all to a corner to stare at our navels, unable to act. But what Fish is saying is that, no, CR gives us a better knowledge of what our enemy is. In this case, our knowledge of what our enemy is, is that it is *both* the misogyny of the Taliban *and* the misogyny/capitalist hegemony/imperialist policies practices by the US government — whether democrat or republican. That certain policies that we have engaged in and even certain actions by particular Western feminists themselves have contributed to this situation.
I tried to with the Young quote and the link to the rest of the essay. But what I recall from many of the earliest essays and articles fleshing out a new understanding of oppression is that they almost always begin with an explanation of how oppression is found in social structure. And they would almost always start out by saying something like “oppression isn’t suppression. oppression isn’t repression.” and then explain why. Another point i recall was to often say it was important not to speak as if certain acts or things were oppressIVE because that would lose the point. That for something to be oppressive, it was because it was part of a much larger system of oppression — the bird cage of oppression as Marilyn Frye called it.
Here, an individual bar — the bikini, men opening doors for women, the burqa, the idea that women are more nurturing, the normative requirements of a professional career path or the ideal of successful college student, etc. — was part of this whole birdcage of interlocking bars. If you look at only one bar, a lot of people imagine you can fly out. It’s no big deal. But step back and you see all these bars that lock together, where they are spot welded in places for extra reinforcement, and where there is a solid metal floor to keep you from crapping on your owner’s carpet after they’ve feed you rotten bird seed and food that is unhealthy for you.
*nod* *nod* *nod* *nod* *nod* *nod* *nod* *nod* *nod* *nod* *head falls off*
I can understand Rmildred’s point, one she’d made on a thread a long time ago, that high heels are inherently painful, but then after I wear any shoes for more than 5 hrs, they hurt. :)
I live in FL, having to wear clothes on some days is irritating and I’d much rather wear a bikini. :)
Alas, I’d still rather reserve the word “oppression” for what it actually points at — the wider system of meaning within which things, practices, objects, ideas lead to the oppression of a group of *people*.
I think here of the way we think of property. Property isn’t land or money, but a set of social relations – a set of normative rules and practices — that shape how we act toward, think about, and what we actually *do* with land, money, and (these days) ideas — or sunshine or water rights, etc.
Oppression is a structural concept and I find it really troubling that, after our feminist foremothers worked hard to elaborate the concept, we insist on thinking that, in and of themselves, things are oppressive. Restrictive, painful, repressive, sure — but oppression seems to me to be a concept that should orient our otherwise highly individualist selves — selves that don’t like to think much about social structures and systems — to thinking about a wider set of practices, norms, and beliefs that we think are *normal* and *natural*.
It’s easy to see how the burqa is an instrument of oppression, but getting rid of it means changing a plethora of other things going on in a society — not just getting a society to ban the burqa let alone bomb the people who made it an instrument of repression in the first place.
As ppl have said repeatedly in this conversation, listening to women in the society’s of which we speak means that they have other, more pressing, things they are concerned about — though they certainly remained concerned about burqas and other coverings. Listening means that they will tell us the bombs are far more dangerous to them, AT THIS MOMENT, than the burqa. When they say that, they are not silly fools who don’t know where their real interests lie.
And listening to them means that we know where our actions should take us: stopping the war, now. That is an act of solidarity. And if we are so concerned, then the next act is to work toward creating a world where we can hear them speak even more — and that might just mean shutting the hell up for a change. It might just mean leaving our own projects and concerns behind to focus on someone else’s for awhile — IF, that is, we truly mean it when we say, “the burqa is a symbol of the worst misogyny on earth.”
If you think it is, and you live in the belly of the beast, the nation considered THE one and only of the imperial center — Empire — then you fight the turkeys *here* that are harming the lives of the women one cares so deeply about.
Anything else strikes me as doing what Uma Narayan has described happened in the Victorian era in Britain, when feminists there used Indian women as a symbol of oppression and ground their claims to their own rights on appeals to the need to save “brown women from brown men.” Our job is to save brown women from white men, the rules of *this* country and the idealogical supporters who advance and promote war. Here’s a quote from Narayan, which I’ll post more at my blog later:
Now, as you an see, a postcolonial feminist critique such as the one BfP engaged in, is not at all incapable of understanding the complexities of the situation. Anyone who engages in an analysis which even suggests that postcolonial feminists don’t also understand how “their menfolk” oppress them is simply ignoring what they say.
You are the fascists of the new pseudo feminism, trying to silence women who do not kiss the boys ass but organize based on what is good for women.
I know there’s a moderation policy here that objects to this, but there isn’t really a “civil response” to this that isn’t simply another way of saying: bite me tooley-mctooleyson.
That your moderation policy doesn’t involve the moderation of bullshit like that, where there’s this weirdola borderline-macho conception that either you steam roll over everyone who isn’t white without common sense or rationality being involved – lest you be labelled “soft on the taliban” or whatever horse hockey every pasty faced freak seems to be pedalling atm – is peddled without sanction or criticism is why I usually stay clear of alas’ comments section.
Offensive substance dressed up in a civil form is still offensive.
Greenconsciousness wrote:
See Amp? This kind of ranting — she’s not even talking *TO* anyone here — is actually more offensive than calling her a racist misogynist or fuckhead or typing at her in ALLCAPs.
And to see the things made equivalent is just annoying as all get out. She comes off as, you know, just stating her opinion and all nice and everything. And yet, by engaging in the OXfored debate tactics of how to use logical fallacy without really looking like you’re doing so, she hurls around great globs of arsenic that poison the wells of discourse from the get-go.
That *is* more harmful than calling her an asshole or tellingher to drink a warm glass of STFU. Her feelings are hurt by the latter. The entire community of commenters — including Greenconsciousness herself — is harmed by the former.
That’s the last I’ll say on the topic, but I just wanted to provide a very concrete example of what I meant.
I write in a separate entry to one specific argument which I do take seriously. That Bush’s motives were not to liberate women and that the war is not doing so.
Let me say this simply and try to understand. The man’s motives will never ours – our job is to make what they do work for us— this is what is up to us. We could have organized to use this conflict for oppressed women. They needed our support and would give plenty to get it. We could have made women’s equality part of the demands. And it started in the Afghanistan constitution. But to begin to make it work would have called for a feminist movement. A powerful group of many disparate women working together for a common purpose. To influence the development of women’s programs at the state dept and at the UN.
Yeah, this would have been really great, but we have not yet achieved enough power and influence *as women* to make this happen, and that’s not the fault of feminists posting here, or the “responses above”, or the feminists you are calling pseudo-feminists and fascists. Do you see any feminists with any real power in the world, heads of state, etc.? No, you do not. Not here in the U.S., not in the UK, not in the UN, not anywhere. That’s the fault of the backlash against feminism, that’s the fault of Christian fundamentalism as well as Islamic fundamentalism, that’s because male power is relentlessly *unyielding* and oppressive to women and prevents women from accessing or taking the kind of power you are talking about here.
Why blame feminists for this? You’re doing the same thing you’re accusing the women who wrote “the responses above” of. You say they blame white middle class feminists for all sorts of stuff, in the same way you are basically blaming *them*, *us*, for the fact that women in foreign countries are oppressed and subjugated, as though women right here in the U.S. are not similarly oppressed and subjugated as well. Any united feminist movement that attempted to make the kinds of demands for women in Afghanistan and Iraq that you are talking about would have its members in war-torn countries summarily executed and blown to smithereens by terrorists and warmongers/warmakers of all stripes. Malalai Joya who is challenging basically ALL of the Afghan parliament receives constant death threats and has to have 12 armed escorts everywhere she goes. In order to have used the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to benefit women, women would have had to be able to access at least SOME position at the bargaining table. We don’t have that kind of power. Plain and simple. And it sure as heck is not because of “brown feminists” in the United States or feminists, period! It’s because all of us, wherever we are, as women, *still need feminism*, still are not liberated, and in fact, in many ways we are *worse off* than we were before, not only because of Islamic fundamentalism but because of CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM IN THE U.S. Hello.
But NOW and the women’s majority have become the ladies auxiliary of the democratic party and the left supports the theocracies.
NOW and the Feminist Majority, however wrong-headed they have been at times, do NOT support any theocracies. Where do you even get this stuff, from Front Page and the like? The Feminist Majority, Feminist Majority Foundation, and American feminists in general have learned, and learned well, learned the hard way, that it is NOT OUR PLACE to speak for, or on behalf of anybody but ourselves, we have to be *invited*, and to be *invited*, we have to *listen*, including to Muslim women, including to fundamentalist Muslim women. Listening is not “supporting theocracies.” Working to build bridges and to be respectful is not “supporting theocracies.” Listening and working to build bridges is laying the necessary groundwork for the kind of coalitions you are talking about. You don’t just ride in like the fricking conquering hero, feminist or no.
Instead we left it to repub women and really I have to give them credit – they tried at the State Dept. But they do not have a clue as to what must be done in the face of that kind of violence toward women.
What are you talking about, “we left it to repub women.” The Bush regime is in control in this country. Would to god we had the power or influence to “leave” anything to anybody! Republicans have been in control here (thank god, that is crumbling as we speak). I give Repub women no credit– whatever they may have “tried” was doomed to failure given that the Bush regime is in the pocket, again, of *Christian fundamentalists*. Some Republican women might have genuinely cared about the plight of Afghan and Iraqi women, I’ll give them that, but they had no power to do anything that Bush and his regime didn’t authorize, want, endorse or support. All their gestures in the direction of Middle Eastern women accomplished was, it made Bush, et al, look good to the naive and gullible. The Repubs could say, see there, we really care about Afghan women, look, we stole RAWA’s flyers and dropped them on Afghanistan right along with the bombs with which we killed Afghan women and children.” Jeezus.
Heart
brownfemipower:
nailed it again.
Is it just me, or is GC kind of heading into word-salad territory?
oh, wait, other people have already said what i was going to say:
>Greenconsciousness wrote:
I have listened to you tell me to vote for Ralph Nader and now I listen to you rant about Bush – same old crap.
See Amp? This kind of ranting — she’s not even talking *TO* anyone here — is actually more offensive than calling her a racist misogynist or fuckhead or typing at her in ALLCAPs.>
Yup.
>I know there’s a moderation policy here that objects to this, but there isn’t really a “civil response” to this that isn’t simply another way of saying: bite me tooley-mctooleyson.>
Yup.
>Offensive substance dressed up in a civil form is still offensive.>
Yuppper McYupperson.
I’ve said it before, I’ve said it again: “civil” is -not- about using language that Miss Manner would approve of, eschewing anything that sounds remotely like “fuck you,” any sort of “ad hom” that in fact is -not- an ad hom because there simply -isn’t- an argument there to be argued with; the person speaking is simply a…
well, we can all throw around terms like “troll” easily enough, can’t we.
but goddam. it’s like, I don’t know, squeaky wheel gets the grease around here. Love ya, Amp, but, okay: the fact that some people can and do yell HELP HELP I’M BEING OPPRESSED louder than anyone else does -not- automatically mean that they -are-, sometimes.
and btw, just to be clear; i don’t know about anyone else here, but strictly speaking for myself: my beef is not that GC was allowed to say what she said without moderation so much as it is that when people respond to the -extremely- provocative -content- with strong emotion and language, as they damn well have a right to, -they- are the ones who are chastised.
I apologize for comment #22. My goal was both to criticize GreenConsciousness and to ask the other posters not to let the thread turn into a big pile-on of anti-GC flames, which I thought was a likely direction for the thread to move in. Clearly, no one took it the way I intended it, and that’s my fault.
(To give a little context, I was also completely exhausted (as in, dozing off at the keyboard) and I had a lot of real-world things I had to deal with which made it impossible for me to spend 20 minutes formulating a detailed, specific moderation post. So I just wrote a quick “everyone, please remember the moderation goals” post which naturally made things worse. Not an excuse, just a contextualization.)
So I apologize for comment #22, to all of the regular “Alas” posters. I should have just ignored everything and waited for a later time, when I had wakefulness and time enough to deal more intelligently with the situation.
I especially apologize to Rachel for ruining her thread.
On the other hand, some of the things folks here are accusing me of are simply unfair. R. Mildred (#52), Bitch (#53) and Belledame (#56) seem to assume that because a post appears here, it must be something that I’ve approved of, and thus I’m blind or a hypocrite for not having moderated it, or for not realizing that it’s offensive.
That’s not how moderation here works, folks. I have a life outside this blog; I have a job, I have friends, I have dishes to wash and laundry to do, sometimes I sleep or watch TV. Sometimes 10 friends come over to watch TV with me, as with the Battlestar Gallactica season opener last night. :-) Most posts here are unmoderated until I have time enough to get back to the computer and inclination to read through the build-up of comments. Assuming that because you’ve seen a recent post and think it should be moderated, I must also have seen it and not seen anything offensive about it, is unfair.
Anyhow, what to do now?
Clearly, having GC post here is going to be a problem, and send dialog here spiraling in the wrong direction. Also clearly, comments like “You are the fascists of the new pseudo feminism” – and much more importantly, her general contempt for feminists and belligerent “I’m here to pick a fight” attitude – are over the line. Plus, she’s dominating discussion here to the exclusion of a serious discussion of Rachel’s post. For those reasons, I’m banning GC, unless Rachel objects.
Second of all, the pile-on about what a shitty moderator I am is also dominating discussion here to the exclusion of a serious discussion of Rachel’s post. For that reason, please don’t use this thread to discuss moderation policies any further. If you must, use this post to discuss moderation issues further. If you want to respond to this comment of mine, do it there, not here.
Just to clarify, for my own part:
I recognize how easy it is to Blame The Host for, well, pretty much everything; Amp, I do not think you are all your commenters’ keepers, nor should be. and looks like i may have skimmed past an earlier retraction of the post people found offensive, in my haste to post. I am sorry.
good grief. whatever i wrote that made you think i was angry that you let the post through — not at all! you’ve made clear your position and i’ve even privately told you that i think ppl were wrong to give you so much heat as they did. i only intended 53 to be an illuatration of how that was, to me, clearly a post that should be blatently chastened rather than chastened under the guise of a post that said, “everyone play nice” as if everyone said things that were equally culpable. you seem to agree with that, so that was all.
and yeah, i did wonder if it wasn’t a post intended to forestall an incendiary blow up.
lots of hugs and a virtual megadeath chocolate cake as atonement (though, gosh, i don’t even know if you eat chocolate!)
oh, geez, that post was intended in the tone it seems as if scolding. no, just really bummed if i said something dopey that made you feel badly about your policy of allowing a wide variety of comments through.
Thanks Ampersand for clarifying your comment on moderation policy. I am pleased to see that we seem to have the same understanding of what ‘respect’ mean. And I totally agree with you that GC posts, and the necessary responses to it, were actually derailing a much more productive conversation.
Well, I’m not going to tell anyone how to moderate because I’m lousy at it.
And Amp, sleep is highly overrated so you don’t really need that!
My problem wasn’t moderation of GC’s comment, but similar to what belledame222 said here and what Heart brought up originally. After seeing GC’s first post, I wasn’t surprised at the other ones.
I thought I’d respond further, but I’m exhausted, just came back from a training session, have three letters to write, a report to finish, glue and feathers to clean off and a response to a retired lieutenant who keeps showing up when someone else asks him to spout off about how futile police reform is. It’s pounded in my head(which is pounding already) again that some people are not at a site to dialogue, but to berate, insult and in GC’s case impose colonialist, racist attitudes on people, in a way that may seem “civil”. At least the lieutenant is a barometer of the attitudes of resistance to changing the status quo, but GC is here to use Muslim women and other women of color worldwide to promote his or her true gripe, which is that White feminists including his or herself are being called on their colonialist and racist attitudes by women of color. That women of color who do not take the lead of White feminists on issues pertaining to women of color, are collaborating with men against “women” and diverting the attention from where it’s really needed, which is issues pertaining to women of color((though most often, “women” as defined by White women) as a White feminist or White feminists see them. Give that her solution to this problem is to bomb these women of color and their families out of existance in support of wars that have nothing to do with their liberation(and have done the opposite in many different ways), I think her only interest in Muslim women is telling them what to do, even if it means sitting there while the U.S. is bombing their countries.
This became clearer for me here:
Muslim women who disagree with GC are “brainwashed”, of course. Ones who do are “good” Muslim women. Muslim women are individuals but of course, not allowed to be individuals or automonous like White women.
and
Women of color are attacking poor(class, wise) White women, I’ve seen this one before often by White women who are not poor or working class, but I’m not sure what the original context for this that GC is operating on.
This appears to be a focal point in GC’s tomes on ” fascist pseudo feminism” here and it’s been played out on so many blogs and forums lately. The words used and the issues discussed may be different but the attitudes are the same.
This is all pretty obvious I think but I’m so tired….
“The irony is that the images of sleek, bare women in our popular media that offend the Taliban also represent a major offensive against the health of American women and girls.” … “In many ways the burka and the bikini have similar outcomes. They can both be seen as symbols of the oppression of women.”
Equating burkas with bikinis in any way is just silly. Being able to wear bikinis is a sign of liberation, not oppression. If a woman or girl doesn’t want to wear a bikini, don’t.
And if a man or boy doesn’t want to go to the beach and wear simply shorts, he doesn’t have to either.
Wow.
You know, after everything else that’s gone on in the same vein recently, I’m actually glad I didn’t see this one until now.
Rachel wrote:
but it does mean we need to listen and incorporate the perspectives and experiences of women in other cultures, especially non-western cultures and poorer nations.
One of the things that amazes me about the attitude that Afghan women cannot speak for themselves and need to be saved by Western women is that it completely ignores how much we can learn from women who survive under harsh circumstances. That’s why I linked Arwen’s post above. We can learn a lot from these women. Even under the Taliban, women organized. They set up their own secret schools and clinics. They acted in amazingly brave and intriguing ways to deal with their reality. To pretend they cannot say or do anything is to lose the knowledge that they can pass on to other women in similar circumstances if they choose to do so.
That’s what drives me crazy about the argument that U.S. troops cannot leave Iraq now. The Iraqi people have survived over a decade of being bombed and starved by the most powerful military on the planet. It’s time we gave them some credit and stopped pretending that they need us in order to survive.
Nicely put. And to GC
“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”. –US major on Vietnam, February 7, 1968
>One of the things that amazes me about the attitude that Afghan women cannot speak for themselves and need to be saved by Western women is that it completely ignores how much we can learn from women who survive under harsh circumstances.>
Yup.
And also consider: they can do this not because they are Other but because they are HUMAN.
as are we.
and yes, most of us posting here can probably count ourselves a lot more fortunate than the women in Afghanistan under the Taliban. those who do not have bombs dropped on our heads have a particular kind of privilege, yes, all else aside.
and yet: we learn: humans are resilient.
this should be something we take as a lesson for our own battles. with all our (collective) resources, how much more could we accomplish if we really -believed- we could?
>“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”. –US major on Vietnam, February 7, 1968
“Destroying the World to Save It” is also the title of an excellent book by Robert Jay Lifton. About that sort of mentality in general, extrapolating from “cults” like…fuck, brain fart, the Japanese sarin-in-the-subway people, to terrorist groups to yup, whole actual governments, perhaps. (wrote this before 9/11, p.s.) Grim but a great read.
Pingback: nospeedbumps.com » Blog Archive » Feminists: The Bikini-Haters vs. The Nude-Bloggers
In response to Cicely, at number 38: Traditionally, many western European schools have funded religious education within a public school framework. Basically, they permit religious denominations to “educate their own” with resources supplied by the state, sometimes in the school itself and sometimes in a separate location. Germany for one (well, this is the one I’ve read about), has begun funding education of Islam in the same manner as it does of Christianity. The result has been to give governmental support to what is almost certainly fundamentialist education of Muslim children, boys and girls. For instance, schools have seen a marked increase in the number of girls who feel that they “have” to attend school with traditional dress. This has started to be noticed in Germany, and discussed. In particular, a German-born Muslim woman wrote a book objecting to this policy as, in effect, forcing Muslim womento adhere to traditional codes that do not guarantee them the same kinds of human rights that German-born Christian women take for granted and zealously protect. I am not sure of the latest developments. In the U.S., of course, funding would be prohibited for any religion (or at least under our traditional rules of separation, it should be — who knows now, with our new theocratic bent, what might happen) .
Finally, encourage a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of women, had many of them raped by the “saviors” and tell me where that helps choice?
I took license to edit out the “all caps”.
Anyway; Blackamazon, could you document that hundreds of thousands of women have been killed in this war? Also, while I am aware of one rape case that’s currently being adjudicated, could you document your “many of them raped” claim?
That’s what drives me crazy about the argument that U.S. troops cannot leave Iraq now. The Iraqi people have survived over a decade of being bombed and starved by the most powerful military on the planet. It’s time we gave them some credit and stopped pretending that they need us in order to survive.
What military would that be? There have been some very limited areas that the U.S. military has bombed, but the main reason the vast majority of the Iraqi people have survived the bombing is that the vast majority of the Iraqi people have not been bombed.
What do you think would happen if the Coalition military left Iraq?
Rachel, can you provide a link to where Ms. Valenti was criticzed for her attire on a conservative site? I searched Free Republic, where stuff like this usually pops up, and I couldn’t find a link.
maybe as a matter of balance there could be a photoshop in a burka AND a photoshop in a Playboy outfit or S&M gear
that way it illustrates BOTH extremes of patriarchal thinking vis a vis women’s attire instead of ONLY singling out the extreme of the the taliban version
afterall the conservtives are reacting as if she wearing cones like Madonna which suggests they like “modest” attire and it don’t get more modest than the burka does it?
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2006/09/lets-take-closer-look-at-those-breasts.html
Look at the comments.
Let me also add that the tenor of the language in the comments is such that I can no longer access that discussion from my office.
while I am aware of one rape case that’s currently being adjudicated
*snorts*
Right. Because it’s just so easy for a member of an occupied population to report and fight back against her rapist-occupier. So we can all assume that the number of rapes adjudicated or reported is equal to the number of rapes that actually happen.
Blackamazon doesn’t need to “document” her claim that many women have been raped in this war. Because that’s what happens in wars and occupation: women are raped by the occupying army. And nothing happens to the rapist, because the rapist as a member of the occupying army has MUCH more power than the woman. She would have to report him to his commanding officer who has no reason to trust her and every reason to trust him, and she would fear retaliation from him and his comrades. And spare me the Americans Wouldn’t Do That bullshit. Wearing an American uniform is no safeguard against the moral evils of wartime.
Actually, she should if she wants her posts to be viewed as more than just anger driven bloviation. Also, terms like “Because thats what happens in wars and occupation” wont get your feet planted on solid ground when arguing a point. Anyone who engages in debate with an ernest desire to be educated and enlightened will respond to factual argument…..regardless of your point of view. I will agree with the last line of your comment, Grouch, as there is a case being adjudacated. Hard numbers would go along way in proving or disproving the problem is pervasive. I am curious about the men of the victims household. You know, the ones with the backbone to standup to the U.S. warmachine, and bring this crime to light. I wonder, is the courage there when the same crime is committed against a women by men from their own community because a she didnt cover her pupils. I may be puke white hedgemonic american male, but if a slobbering mob ever shows up at my door to rape
my sister because she violated the dress code, they had better standby to stanby. Sorry, huuuuge digression. I think the facts reasonably show that these marines acted outside the norm, the communities angry outcry did not go unheard by the military and as a result, the criminal trash is being dealt with.
Here is a link summarizing a few “deaths in Iraq” numbers:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/iraq/casualties.html
RonF, you’re not seriously claiming that there’s only been one rape in Iraq…?
Yes, our troops are comparatively “controlled” inthis respect seeing as we do not use rape as a sanctioned method of war, as is happening in Africa. But there’s not a non-laughable claim to be made that there are no rapes which have not been reported.
Wading in a bit more — without data it’s hard to say much more than rape is an unavoidable consequence of a ground war. Which is true, and rape should be added to the other mostly unavoidable consequences, like destruction of infrastructure, loss of life, and social chaos as a compelling counterweight to any decision to go to war. But in some cases rape is used as a weapon, as it was by Serbs in Bosnia, and as it is increasingly being used by some African countries such as in Rwanda, during war, and in others to punish dissidents. So while it is admittedly hard to figure out whether it is more or less prevalent, it does seem to me that it’s worth trying to figure out.
tangentially, who the fuck is this nospeedbumps character?
“This subject bores me and is unimportant. Now allow me to blather about it anyway…”
LOL!! belledame222, yeah you’re right on that one.
On another note to everybody, I haven’t had the mental energy to come back and engage with this thread. Sorry if that pissed anybody off, but I’d like to actually revist the idea in another post. Hopefully, another flaming response like the greenconciousness one won’t derail the thread.
There are many important issues that this brings up, and we need to discuss. I really felt like people were much more willing to critique relativism than ethnocentrism, and that surprised me. Maybe when the dust over burqagate has settled, I’ll try this over again.
Actually, she should if she wants her posts to be viewed as more than just anger driven bloviation. Also, terms like “Because thats what happens in wars and occupation” wont get your feet planted on solid ground when arguing a point.
Sure it does. Because it’s not just “anger driven bloviation.” It’s a realistic view of the inevitable power imbalances when the rapist is backed up by a victorious army and the woman is a member of the population occupied by that army.
Thanks for that explanation, Barbara.
They haven’t been. The Lancet Survey’s estimated less than 100,000 civilian deaths. Less than one in 15 of them was female. See my analysis of their figures here. Although the sample is small, it is consistent with ICRC figures which show that 90% of war casualties are male. The claim, widely propagated by feminists, that the burden of war falls overwhelmingly on women is a myth.
Daran, your argument doesn’t take account of people who have died since that survey stopped collecting data, in August 2004. Also, although I’m sure you’re aware that there’s more to “the burden of war” than mortality, you don’t say anything to indicate you know that in this comment.
Nonetheless, you’re correct about mortality: the latest Lancet survey suggests that tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, more female Iraqis have died since the invasion than would have died if pre-invasion conditions continued.
However, I think that BlackAmazon’s substantive point — which, if I haven’t misunderstood her, is that any “pro-woman” argument for invading Iraq has to somehow overcome the obvious harm to women of tens of thousands of female deaths and the inevitable rapes that are always part of war and occupation — is correct.
The new Lancet study comes out today.
Here’s a WaPo article summarizing the findings:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html
The study claims 650,000 deaths as a result of the war.
Barbara, thanks.
That picture is what all the discussion is about? What’s the problem? She’s wearing a T-shirt, the same thing that approximately 1.265 zillion bloggers wear. It’s not low cut or scoop neck, it’s not tight, it doesn’t stop a foot above her belt, it doesn’t have a “look at me” color or pattern, and she doesn’t appear to me to be “posing”, as some would have it.
And having posed in my day for numerous group pictures, I can tell you she’s standing there because that’s where the photographer told her to stand. Since she’s the (by my eye) 3rd shortest person there, she’s in the front row near the center. No, I’m not naive, as an attractive young woman she’s going to stand out, and the photographer may well have had that in mind when he told people where to stand and to turn this way or that (and I well imagine that when an ex-POTUS has his picture taken in a group, a professional photographer is taking the picture). But to criticize this woman for the way she’s dressed or the way she stands seems ridiculous to me.
As far as the photoshopped picture goes, I don’t see what Amanda has to apologize for. The fact that she has used a product of extreme “patriarchy” to lampoon the less extreme attitudes of the critics of the young woman in the original photograph does not seem to me to demean “women of color” – for one thing, I would never have thought of Iranian women as “women of color” in the first place, and I’m not aware that anyone else does, either. That woman in that burhka could have skin lighter than mine (especially since it’s constantly protected from the sun). I don’t think that doing that makes fun of women in burkhas (sp?) – I don’t think anyone believes, especially on the basis of that picture, that women in burkhas are objects of derision.
The impression I got from that photoshopped picture was that it lampooned the people who objected to the blogger wearing the T-shirt. And it issues a warning as to what the kind of attitude that leads to criticizing a woman in a nondescript T-shirt can lead to. It reminds us that if she wore that T-shirt in the land where that burhka was worn, she would likely get publicly beaten in the street by whoever felt like doing it. And it reminds us that there are some people in America who would feel justified in restricting women’s clothing choices, or in doing things like breastfeeding in public (we are talking about breasts here).
Amanda didn’t “other” that woman in the burhka. The people who make her wear the damn thing did. Amanda is just bringing to our attention that critics of wearing that T-shirt are “othering” the woman involved, and to what that kind of “othering” of women in the U.S. is related to and can lead to. And I think it’s a valid point.
As a feminist in the U.S., Amanda has an advantage over the women in places like Afghanistan, Iran, and other such countries; she has a voice that she’s free to use and facilities to make it broadly heard that are far superior to what’s available to those women. She should use it – it’s supportable to argue that she is obligated to use it – and she did.
RonF,
Let me put this more politely than I suspect others will ;)….
You seem to be unaware of the entire brouhaha about this.
Read the brownfemipower link (and the gazillion comments) and/or the other links in the OP. Your point has been presented there in some detail.
I agree that there’s more to “the burden of war” in general than mortality though in the context of my comment the phrase should be construed as specifically referring to mortality. The point of the remark was to forstall the inevitable response: “it says here, that…”. I know what “it says here”. It’s a myth.
However, construing “the burden of war” more widely, what, specifically to you think is my burden of proof here? Do you deny that this is a claim “widely propagated by feminists”? Have feminists met their burden of proof in any substantive way, rather than simply denying, minimising, dismissing, or ignoring the proportion of the burden of war that falls upon men, while regurgitating in ever more exaggerated terms the exaggerations of other feminists?
I appreciate that you have began recently to acknowledge the male death toll in your own blogging, but you are only one feminist.
I was not aware of the new data. If “hundreds of thousands” means 100,000 or more, then I had a 15X margin of error on the old data, and, as you point out, even on the new data, I am correct.
No argument from me on that, although I do reject the unstated premise that the harms to women or to “women and children” are the only harms we need to consider when evaluating whether war is a good thing.
Is it too much to suggest that harm on the scale suggested by the Lancet study can never be viewed solely in terms of its impact on any specific demographic group? Clearly, women and children are harmed when their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons are dying, especially in a society in which support and protection hinge so much on patriarchal structures.
That’s fair enough, but feminists typically do view the harm solely in terms of its impact upon women, while denying, minimising, and ignoring the harm to men.
I dont think that is a fair characterization. A fairly old development in feminist thinking/theory is the notion of ‘gender’ as a relationship between humans–both ‘men’ and ‘women.’ The change over last decade from university Women’s Studies Departments to departmetns of Gender and Sexuality was largely made to make exactly the point that feminism is about the negative impact of gender opression on society as a whole. I know that BPHMT is often derided, but that doesnt mean that most of us think that it isn’t true. Its just not ALWAYS the most relevant point.