African Feminism

This week we've been reading and discussing African feminisms. I've really enjoyed the discussions and readings so far, partially because I compared African feminisms to western feminisms for my LCCT research paper when I was in Tanzania, and partially because it has made me rethink and question some of my definitions.

One particular aspect of the reading that I enjoyed was the notion of sisterhood, and how sisterhood is a western metaphor for feminism. In African feminisms, the metaphor that is used more often is motherhood. At first I didn't really understand this. But then one of the readings explained that in western nuclear family structure, sisterhood means alliances against the oppression of the father because the mother is aligned with the father. In African contexts, co-mothering and motherhood is a shared experience by many women.

Personally, the concept of motherhood, the identity of mother has never been appealing to me. In fact, the idea of being a mother forces me to be think too fully in the female body that I don't like having. But I understand how the rhetoric of motherhood can be powerful.

Here I think the concept of intellectual imperialism is useful, because it shows how western feminism has attempted to transcribe western feminist ideas onto other contexts. It's not useful for building coalition between international feminist movements, and we need to recognize that it happens in order to deconstruct and then rebuild the relationships between western and non-western feminists. Along with this is remembering that what western feminists care about and how western feminists construct gender relations is very different than how gender is constructed in the rest of the world.

sneakers, jeans and imperialism

Several things. They're a little disjointed, and that's ok. First, I hate how difficult it is to be aware of where my clothes and "stuff" is coming from. I can't always buy fair trade clothing, and I can't even know that when factories say the working conditions are good, and their workers are getting paid decently and getting breaks and being treated like human beings. Second, I don't know how to adequately argue against people who, like Nike, argue that they are providing jobs to people in the countries their factories are in. Nevermind the fact that these factories come in, completely change and alter the economic and social structure of the area, and then leave and often demolish what economic structure had been built up around the factory. Or the fact that companies build their factories where the labor is cheapest, don't allow the workers to unionize, etc.

Another issue that came up for me in class this week. The fact that the women of the Kabul Beauty School are facing new risks, and the author of the book has left and has no intention of returning to Kabul, and hasn't shared the profits of her New York Times bestseller with the women who she wrote the book about. The link will take you to an NPR story that a classmate of mine shared, if you're interested. How can Debbie Rodriguez rationalize her actions? She went to Kabul, built trust and friendships with these women, and used them to write a book, and now isn't planning on ever returning, and hasn't shared any of the profits with them? That's not right.

Finally, western feminists need to stop talking down to women in the rest of the world. We are not the be all, end all of feminist knowledge. We only know our experience firsthand, and need to shut up and listen to the experiences of others. Cynthia Enloe's writing about the gendered empire shows that women the western world stereotypes as "oppressed and helpless" are oppressed, yes, but it's not our place to articulate that oppression for the women who actually know what it's like.
I think it boils down to a respect for lived experience, for personal knowledge and understanding of your own life. In this respect, I don't know if western feminism is really all that useful to anyone who's not working in a western context.

Cracking India

This week we discussed the novel Cracking India
I think what bothered me the most about the book and the movie was the fact that before the British, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs lived together in relative peace. It was only after the British pulled out, and divided the country up that the fierce fighting and slaughter began.

It's scary, a lot of people in the United States don't even know that Pakistan and India used to be the same country, and the partition happened less than 100 years ago. It shows an extreme sense of ethnocentrism on the part of America. But then again, many Americans don't keep up on many global political events. Many Americans don't know about the IMF or the World Bank, and if they do, they often don't understand how structural adjustment programs end up putting nations further into debt rather than helping the country build the necessary infrastructures they need.

The Century Project

On Monday I went to see the Century Project for class. If you ever have a chance to see this exhibit, you should. Basically, it's naked portraits of women from birth to 100. The exhibit starts with a photograph of a baby girl's head crowning as she's being born, and then goes chronologically through different women's photos. Each photo also has a written statement by or about the woman.

One of the first thoughts the exhibit invoked in me was the sheer resilience of women and women's bodies. Women go through a lot of shit in life. Sexual abuse, physical and emotional abuse, disconnection from their bodies, eating disorders, etc. But even so, women are resilient. In some ways the exhibit was saddening because of all of the women who had been abused and hurt, but in other ways, I found a lot of the portraits to be reclamations of their selves, their dignity.

One interesting point that was brought up in class was whether the portraits were nude or naked. Amanda pointed out that nudes tend to be docile, art for consumption by the "male gaze" while naked implies action and self-ownership. In Chandra Mohanty's article, she talks about the fact that in order to build something new, we first need to deconstruct the old. In this light, I think Frank Cordelle's photos are doing both. They are helping to deconstruct and show that the view of women in media and art has been false and doesn't tell the whole story or let women be their imperfect but beautiful selves. And the photos also build something new, a new way of viewing women, a new way of women having agency in their bodies.

I also think that the photography relates well to how Mohanty criticizes Western feminism for collapsing all women's experience into one larger experience. Clearly, from the Century Project we see that even in the United States, women have many different experiences that can't be reduced to one description of "women's experience."

Unrelated to the Century Project, I think that Mohanty is right when she criticizes Western feminists for placing boxes around "non-Western women" and assuming that they live under oppression, and that they don't know how to theorize about their oppression. So what do we do. What do I do as a white, Western, feminist tranny? What can I say or do that will help and not harm, something that will attempt to heal, or at least to acknowledge and to break down the bullshit surrounding colonialism and empire. And this is where I'm stuck. Right now, I think all I can do is keep educating those around me about colonialism, to try and make my friends and family realize that "those people" aren't less intelligent or less human than us, to show how the economic policies of the West have shaped the global context in a not so nice way. To continue with the border metaphor, to push the borders of understanding of the people around me.

magical gay powers!

Magical gay earthquake powers!
WTF. That's all I'm saying.

burning bridges

I really struggled with Max Valerio's article from This Bridge We Call Home. To start with, the article hits close to home for me. I also identify as trans, though in a very different way than Max does. Max identifies very much as a man , and a heterosexual man at that. Max's obsession with masculinity seems to be an obsession with hegemonic masculinity.

And this type of masculinity, and his embodiment of masculinity honestly scares me. And maybe it's partially because I haven't taken testosterone yet. Maybe it's because I don't know what the physical changes actually feel like. I feel like Max went from one end of a spectrum to another, and I'm worried that I would do the same.

It's actually one of my biggest fears about transitioning, losing some of the aspects of myself that I like. But then again, maybe I've read his experience wrong. I understand the difficulty of letting go of a prior identity, of letting going of being dyke, lesbian, whatever you want to call it. As Max wrote, "the transition from female to male completely and entirely changed not only my physical body, but also my most closely held values and deepest perceptions." I don't think anyone would be able to approach an experience that will potentially change their "most closely held values and deepest perceptions."

Another aspect of the article that I found challenging was the fact that transsexuality itself shows the bridge (to use Anzaldua's metaphor) between female and male, yet after he's transitioned, Max almost disregards that bridge. He also doesn't really talk about having privilege. He does, but he also sidesteps when talking about privilege. I understand that trans-people completely lose their privilege when they get discovered, but when you pass for most of the time, even if you are freaking out about being discovered, you are still passing, which means you've got privilege.

Even so, I also don't want to disregard Max's experience. This is his life, and how he experiences it and how he interprets it is valid, I have no bearing on its validity. Just because I'm uncomfortable about parts of it doesn't mean it's not right or true. And who knows, it's entirely possible that testosterone will completely change how I see the world as well. And while that is a really scary proposition right now, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

queer bashing in middle school

So apparently a 14 year old kid was shot in the head and neck by a classmate. Great. I can't even really write about this right now, it's severely upsetting. When I hear about events like this, I feel powerless in the face of all the hatred in the world.

http://www.gpac.org/archive/news/index.html?cmd=view&archive=news&msgnum=0704