From Third World Feminism
So, this is going to be a mini-series of Joy's Musings on Feminism taken from my Theory Responses for my 3rd World Feminism class. I am recording here for posterity.
My overall experience of the readings this week was that of being presented with new truths which, once seen, seemed so obvious that I wondered why on earth I didn’t figure them out on my own. My feminism, in general, revolves around the construction of gender, queer and trans rights, and combating sexual violence. In light of Mohanty’s chapter, this seems woefully incomplete. Of course, no personal feminism is “complete,” for no one person can adequately care about and study all the component issues within all feminisms, but still. Of course race is a feminist issue. Of course education and economics are feminist issues. So why didn’t I see that before? The narrowness and divided nature of my view struck me powerfully as I moved through Mohanty’s five provisional categories - I had never even thought of immigration law as a source of feminist issues. Civil/human rights, yes, especially in light of the recent issues with Hispanic immigration, but I did not see it as a specifically feminist issue. Considering my radically different perspective, born of my experience as a white, Western woman, made the rejection and/or qualification of the term “feminism” by some Third World women seem extremely natural. While I love Sarah Bunting’s wide, inclusive construction of “feminism” and what a feminist is (found here), even in the West/US, those who name themselves feminists sometimes run the risk of being identified as extremist and man-hating. So, it makes sense that women whose goals and concerns are emphatically different from those of Western feminists would not choose to use a word which, despite the best efforts of Western feminists, still carries very specific ideological connotations. Narayan’s discussion of charges of “Westernization” against Third World feminists emphasizes the need of Third World women to claim an identity apart from this Western movement - to name what they do, what they believe, as utterly theirs and springing from the culture and values in which they exist.
One thing which I did recognize as familiar, though not in a Third World context, was the concept, presented in the Nfah-Abbenyi chapter, of woman as the land, as Mother Africa, as an embodiment of fecundity and motherhood. The discussion of how this ostensibly woman-honoring concept actually denies selfhood and subjectivity to women recalled my own studies on medieval courtly love and the figure of the courtly lady therein. In the courtly ethos, the lady was constructed as a figure of undisputed power and beauty - nearly divine in her authority. This authority, however, only applied to her relationship with her lover-knight. In the political and social realms, she remained the property of her husband and a silent figure before the law, unable to defend herself when accused. Like the construction of African women as “Mother Africa,” the representation of the courtly woman limited and objectified women even as it appeared to exalt them. She, too, was created as a near-deity in the image of men’s fantasies - beautiful, chaste, untouchable…except when she was touchable. This strain of idealized femininity was paralleled by numerous texts which focus on, or take as their impetus, rape. The portrayal of the courtly lady was a totalization, to use Narayan’s term, of medieval aristocratic womanhood which excluded both the reality of aristocratic women’s lives and the lower classes of women as a whole. This apparent disconnect between the portrayal of woman as divine and the treatment of woman as property is unified by the concept of woman as object - of either adoration or possession. Woman, in such totalizing constructions, is a recipient of actions - never a doer of actions. It seems, moreover, that this totalizing is dismayingly cross-cultural - that neither the medieval Europeans nor the Africans nor the Indians want to treat a woman as a self rather than an object to be possessed or adored.
I am struggling with Narayan’s distinction between nonfeminist and feminist women’s perspectives on the causes of, for instance, violence against women. While I agree with Narayan that violence and injustice are built into the system; that the dice are, in fact, loaded…I also find myself agreeing with her mother, that these men are clearly examples of bad men. It seems like a cop-out, like a huge displacement of responsibility to assign all the blame to the System, to the Structure - are the men, then, not responsible for their own actions? This, of course, goes into questions of ethics and psychology - are we completely determined by our environment? Do we have some measure of “free” will? Is there an objective Morality, which is built-in or obtainable not by reason, but by the heart? Of course, I don’t know. But…my gods! Perhaps it’s just my anger, but I cannot justify only being angry at the system. I am angry at each man who beats his wife, each man who values money more than a woman’s happiness, each police officer who rapes a woman in his custody. It probably does not help that I recently saw Slumdog Millionaire, which profoundly affected me and stirred my rage by its portrayal of poverty, abuse, and sexual violation. This anger at individuals, as well as the system, does not mean that I also advocate her mother’s silence and perception that it’s a personal problem, meant to be dealt with on the individual level. Absolutely, women should feel safe to speak out, to call for help and assistance from society and the law without shame. But…it’s So Big, this system. So pervasive, these traditions of hurting and objectifying women. It feels like anger at the system and action against it is about as effective as throwing pebbles at a fortified castle. Of course, anger at individuals is of little more use in a system which refuses to condemn or punish their actions.
I believe that change can happen - I must believe it. But I cannot feel optimistic…I cannot see change occurring soon, occurring now. And that means that women continue to suffer. I keep thinking, in thinking of this, of slavery in the South. I keep thinking of how reprehensible the whole ideology is to me, and I keep thinking that, despite my disgust and anger, not all those who advocated that system were totally evil beings. I cannot bring myself to think that they were good people…but I think it helps me understand, perhaps, what Narayan means when she speaks of anger at the system, at the culture, at the pressures and strictures which produce these attitudes and injustices. Not all Indian men who are caught in the system are, perhaps, bad men, but I can’t absolve them of personal responsibility, all the same. It also comforts me, in my pessimism, to think that in less than two centuries, the US has moved from slavery to something much closer to equality (though that is not to say that there is not still much work to be done). Two centuries is a long, long time…but it is conceivable. I can work for something that may take two centuries to complete.
It is probably apparent that Narayan’s chapter provoked the most thought and strongest response in me out of the readings for this week. This is, I believe, because I felt very invited to use my own life and experiences as a basis for understanding her arguments, since she herself started from her own life stories. Mohanty, especially, was difficult for me to engage with beyond the level of “Oh, yes, of course, interesting and true ideas - a thorough approach to a wide and problematic situation.” She seemed abstract…and I am, frankly, scared by feminist theory because it is so important to me - it’s clearly too important to be dabbled in, too important to really be engaged with unless I’m devoting my whole life and scholarly career to the pursuit. And Mohanty’s words seem to confirm this for me - the multiple sources of oppression, the infinitely problematic nature of attempting to define terms and groups…oh, surely she’s a great scholar for figuring all this out (Because of course, she did it alone, right? …Right.). She’s got the resources to speak about this. But what can I do? Small me, unfamiliar with political theory or economics? Narayan gives me a way in by starting from her own life, her own experiences. I can connect; I can relate my stories, my friends’ stories, my relatives’ stories to hers, and I can build from there. And because that’s how Narayan builds her own story, her own arguments, that makes it acceptable for me to do likewise.
.
My overall experience of the readings this week was that of being presented with new truths which, once seen, seemed so obvious that I wondered why on earth I didn’t figure them out on my own. My feminism, in general, revolves around the construction of gender, queer and trans rights, and combating sexual violence. In light of Mohanty’s chapter, this seems woefully incomplete. Of course, no personal feminism is “complete,” for no one person can adequately care about and study all the component issues within all feminisms, but still. Of course race is a feminist issue. Of course education and economics are feminist issues. So why didn’t I see that before? The narrowness and divided nature of my view struck me powerfully as I moved through Mohanty’s five provisional categories - I had never even thought of immigration law as a source of feminist issues. Civil/human rights, yes, especially in light of the recent issues with Hispanic immigration, but I did not see it as a specifically feminist issue. Considering my radically different perspective, born of my experience as a white, Western woman, made the rejection and/or qualification of the term “feminism” by some Third World women seem extremely natural. While I love Sarah Bunting’s wide, inclusive construction of “feminism” and what a feminist is (found here), even in the West/US, those who name themselves feminists sometimes run the risk of being identified as extremist and man-hating. So, it makes sense that women whose goals and concerns are emphatically different from those of Western feminists would not choose to use a word which, despite the best efforts of Western feminists, still carries very specific ideological connotations. Narayan’s discussion of charges of “Westernization” against Third World feminists emphasizes the need of Third World women to claim an identity apart from this Western movement - to name what they do, what they believe, as utterly theirs and springing from the culture and values in which they exist.
One thing which I did recognize as familiar, though not in a Third World context, was the concept, presented in the Nfah-Abbenyi chapter, of woman as the land, as Mother Africa, as an embodiment of fecundity and motherhood. The discussion of how this ostensibly woman-honoring concept actually denies selfhood and subjectivity to women recalled my own studies on medieval courtly love and the figure of the courtly lady therein. In the courtly ethos, the lady was constructed as a figure of undisputed power and beauty - nearly divine in her authority. This authority, however, only applied to her relationship with her lover-knight. In the political and social realms, she remained the property of her husband and a silent figure before the law, unable to defend herself when accused. Like the construction of African women as “Mother Africa,” the representation of the courtly woman limited and objectified women even as it appeared to exalt them. She, too, was created as a near-deity in the image of men’s fantasies - beautiful, chaste, untouchable…except when she was touchable. This strain of idealized femininity was paralleled by numerous texts which focus on, or take as their impetus, rape. The portrayal of the courtly lady was a totalization, to use Narayan’s term, of medieval aristocratic womanhood which excluded both the reality of aristocratic women’s lives and the lower classes of women as a whole. This apparent disconnect between the portrayal of woman as divine and the treatment of woman as property is unified by the concept of woman as object - of either adoration or possession. Woman, in such totalizing constructions, is a recipient of actions - never a doer of actions. It seems, moreover, that this totalizing is dismayingly cross-cultural - that neither the medieval Europeans nor the Africans nor the Indians want to treat a woman as a self rather than an object to be possessed or adored.
I am struggling with Narayan’s distinction between nonfeminist and feminist women’s perspectives on the causes of, for instance, violence against women. While I agree with Narayan that violence and injustice are built into the system; that the dice are, in fact, loaded…I also find myself agreeing with her mother, that these men are clearly examples of bad men. It seems like a cop-out, like a huge displacement of responsibility to assign all the blame to the System, to the Structure - are the men, then, not responsible for their own actions? This, of course, goes into questions of ethics and psychology - are we completely determined by our environment? Do we have some measure of “free” will? Is there an objective Morality, which is built-in or obtainable not by reason, but by the heart? Of course, I don’t know. But…my gods! Perhaps it’s just my anger, but I cannot justify only being angry at the system. I am angry at each man who beats his wife, each man who values money more than a woman’s happiness, each police officer who rapes a woman in his custody. It probably does not help that I recently saw Slumdog Millionaire, which profoundly affected me and stirred my rage by its portrayal of poverty, abuse, and sexual violation. This anger at individuals, as well as the system, does not mean that I also advocate her mother’s silence and perception that it’s a personal problem, meant to be dealt with on the individual level. Absolutely, women should feel safe to speak out, to call for help and assistance from society and the law without shame. But…it’s So Big, this system. So pervasive, these traditions of hurting and objectifying women. It feels like anger at the system and action against it is about as effective as throwing pebbles at a fortified castle. Of course, anger at individuals is of little more use in a system which refuses to condemn or punish their actions.
I believe that change can happen - I must believe it. But I cannot feel optimistic…I cannot see change occurring soon, occurring now. And that means that women continue to suffer. I keep thinking, in thinking of this, of slavery in the South. I keep thinking of how reprehensible the whole ideology is to me, and I keep thinking that, despite my disgust and anger, not all those who advocated that system were totally evil beings. I cannot bring myself to think that they were good people…but I think it helps me understand, perhaps, what Narayan means when she speaks of anger at the system, at the culture, at the pressures and strictures which produce these attitudes and injustices. Not all Indian men who are caught in the system are, perhaps, bad men, but I can’t absolve them of personal responsibility, all the same. It also comforts me, in my pessimism, to think that in less than two centuries, the US has moved from slavery to something much closer to equality (though that is not to say that there is not still much work to be done). Two centuries is a long, long time…but it is conceivable. I can work for something that may take two centuries to complete.
It is probably apparent that Narayan’s chapter provoked the most thought and strongest response in me out of the readings for this week. This is, I believe, because I felt very invited to use my own life and experiences as a basis for understanding her arguments, since she herself started from her own life stories. Mohanty, especially, was difficult for me to engage with beyond the level of “Oh, yes, of course, interesting and true ideas - a thorough approach to a wide and problematic situation.” She seemed abstract…and I am, frankly, scared by feminist theory because it is so important to me - it’s clearly too important to be dabbled in, too important to really be engaged with unless I’m devoting my whole life and scholarly career to the pursuit. And Mohanty’s words seem to confirm this for me - the multiple sources of oppression, the infinitely problematic nature of attempting to define terms and groups…oh, surely she’s a great scholar for figuring all this out (Because of course, she did it alone, right? …Right.). She’s got the resources to speak about this. But what can I do? Small me, unfamiliar with political theory or economics? Narayan gives me a way in by starting from her own life, her own experiences. I can connect; I can relate my stories, my friends’ stories, my relatives’ stories to hers, and I can build from there. And because that’s how Narayan builds her own story, her own arguments, that makes it acceptable for me to do likewise.
.