Womanifesto

*This is the Womanifesto I wrote (and posted around town) for my friend Ash's Experimental Feminism class last year.  I am not as angry today, but I remember that anger vividly.

1: Letters

They say: You are angry.

Write a letter; send it; feel your anger evaporate.

So here it is, laid bare: My anger.

I am angry that every 5 minutes, 4 Congolese women are raped.  They are raped with sticks, their vaginas shot through with guns.  War goes on after peace treaties are signed.

I am angry that 100 million baby girls are missing—killed or aborted or abandoned when their parents, locked into patriarchal cultures, found out they were female.

I am angry that this week an 11-year-old girl was gang-raped by 18 men in Texas, making her one of the 1 in 4 American women who will be victims of rape or sexual assault.

I am telling you that the anger is in me, an exposed nerve, a deep deep wound.

I am angry about domestic violence, honor killings, maternal mortality, genital mutilation, human trafficking, sex slavery, femicide, bride burning, child abuse, neglect, forced pregnancy, forced sterilization, sex-selective abortion and infanticide, the income gap, the education gap, and all the permutations of sexual violence that disdain and sadism have designed.

I am angry that behind these words—these technical terms—there are faces and hands and bellies and breasts and wombs and vaginas and empty, empty, empty arms.

I am angry that there is only one explanation for these things, and it is: woman-hate. 

Hate of all things smaller, softer, riper, Other.

And in this woman-hating world dwells my daughter, who is one of the luckiest ones, who by force of geography and social class will probably not have acid tossed in her face or be tortured and dismembered in the desert.

But still this woman-hating world will do its work on her.

It will try to shrink her, silence her, nip her, tuck her, beat her, bash her, terrify her, exploit her, objectify her, starve her, hate her.

It will try to make her hate herself.

It will try to whittle her down

until she is trim as a bone

and hollow as a reed.

And even then.

Even then.

*

I write letter after letter,

never knowing to whom

I should send them.

2: Womanifesto

I am not my culture.

I am filled clear up with it, of course,

and when I move I feel it sloshing inside me,

licking at my ribs

and spilling over my brims.

What I learned about being a woman

might be different than what you learned about being a woman,

but I am sure we had a few lessons in common:

Be so small you are barely visible; shrink, shrink, shrink.

Sacrifice, sacrifice.  Self-efface, then some more.

Whatever you do, don’t stop sacrificing.  Give that up.  Give it up.  Give up.

But the roots of these lessons are weakening in me, and

there are a some things I will not place on that sacrificial altar:

My voice, my volume, my words.

I can say I’m angry when I am.

I can choose where I go, what I do.

I am not bound to your ideas of what womanhood means.

I am the only mother to my children.

I know what love means to me.

Since my mind has been colonized

(the last great frontier),

I can shake off any oppressors I find there.

I can be an abolitionist,

freeing—first—my own heart and mind.

In a world where women wish they were darker, lighter, thinner, fatter, shorter, taller, bigger, smaller: I will not buy products from companies that perpetuate and profit off of my self-hate.

In a world where so many women’s bodies are mutilated: I will not allow cosmetic knives to slice my skin.

In a world where women are viewed as objects for consumption: I will assert my personhood, honoring the fact that each day I can return to my true self—more generous, more honest, more authentic.

In a world where women’s voices are taken from them: I will not sit down.  I will not shut up.  I will not remain silent about suffering for fear of offending someone’s sensibilities.

*

In a world where I have a voice, I will use it.

Kimmel Quote

I mentioned this quote in class on Monday and promised I would pass it on via my blog:

“Feminism expects a man to be ethical, emotionally present, and accountable to his values in his actions with women — as well as with other men. Feminism loves men enough to expect them to act more honorably and actually believes them capable of doing so.” 


(Michael Kimmel)

Masculinity

I found this week's readings on Masculinity to be quite interesting in terms of giving some historical and cultural perspective on the evolution of ideas of masculinity (especially as those ideas have evolved in conjunction with feminist thought).  I made a slideshow on the intersectionality of women's rights and animal's rights, and in that presentation I talk a bit about how in our culture (and many others), masculinity is often constructed in the context of meat-eating.  Exhibit A:

Not only is this commercial full of men asserting their independent masculinity by eating red meat, but it is also a shameless play off of past social justice movements (like women's rights and the civil rights movements).  Symbols of solidarity and references to bra-burning and protests culminate in the destruction of a minivan, that ultimate symbol of male domesticity.  I see this as a visual representation of Kimmel's description of "men's liberationists" movements, but of course the movement has been completely co-opted and placed within a capitalist framework that is really just about buying more crappy food from Burger King.

C. Wesley Buerkle wrote of this ad and others like it that:  
“[These commercials] emphasize that women, like the burgers men prefer to eat, exist for men's pleasure. Just as the commercials forgo questioning the assumption that men have a God-given need for beef over any other food, the advertisements accept without question that men also have the right to women's bodies. Richard Nate explains that metonyms, over metaphors, often illustrate social conditions through closely related expressions. Put another way, critics need not look far to find the thing represented by a metonym, for it is the placeholder of an object close at hand rather than highly abstract. The utter collapse of women with food, especially in Burger King's Super Bowl ad, speaks to a conflation of sexual and culinary desires, men having the absolute right to enjoy both at their will and without restraint.”

Ads like this are figureheads of a patriarchal media culture that wields feminization like a weapon, and uses feminized terms to discredit not only women and animals, but also vegetarian men, gay men, men in non-traditional occupations, etc.  The "cult of masculinity" that dominates our culture is based on a model of manhood that  This is why, in my mind, "men's liberationists" were less about any sort of liberation and more about further entrenching the patriarchal status quo.  Still, this image of "embattled men" continues to dominate.  The past couple of Super Bowls have been packed full of commercials that demean domesticated men and encourage them to rise up and free themselves of their women-built shackles!

I think it's so important to think about how the media constructs both "ideal femininity" and "ideal masculinity;" there is so much that is troubling about these social/media constructions: the limited and inauthentic selves that are created, the heteronormativity, the narrow and arbitrary beauty standards, the pervasive messages about sex and relationships and race and class, and the normative modeling of intensely gendered behaviors and the underlying supremacy and hierarchy.  But for me, the single most troubling thing is the mind-bending cynicism with which the popular media uses these tactics--building insecurities in children, crafting distorted pictures of relationships, demeaning women, and the list goes on and on--solely for the goal of selling us stuff.  That's it.  That's the end game.  To get us to buy more things that we don't need, to convince us to align ourselves fully with an obsessively consumerist culture.  Masculinity has been constructed by different cultural, economic and political forces over the years, but I would argue that at this point in time, media is one of the strongest enforcers of gendered social norms, both of femininity and masculinity (always constructed, of course, dichotomously).

Girls' Studies

This week's readings on girls' studies were really interesting.  Though I haven't read a lot of girls' studies theory, I have actually been studying this topic for years--ever since reading and loving Mary Pipher's "Reviving Ophelia" as a junior in high school.  I now have a five-year-old daughter so I have spent a lot of time thinking about the way socio-cultural forces seek to construct girls in very specific ways.  I've been paying attention to the messages my daughter absorbs and doing my best to mitigate the ones that I find to be harmful.

I think this passage from the Kearney article best illustrates the approach that I've taken in the past when trying to understand the social construction of girlhood and think about how to resist it:



"Although many journalists explored the “girlification” of mid-twentiethcentury
consumer culture, contemporaneous academic analyses of that
phenomenon did not appear. (Youth research was still boy-centered, and
feminist scholarship had yet to emerge.) With more rigorous manufacture
and promotion of products made for and about girls in recent years, contemporary
popular culture’s girl-centeredness has ensured greater attention to
female youth by both journalists and scholars. With McRobbie and Garber’s
(1976) groundbreaking work to guide them, numerous feminist researchers
are attempting to understand how the culture, fashion, and beauty industries
create commodities for and about girls, how girlhood is represented
in such products, and how female youth consume them."


Though I see many structures and institutions that seek to define (and in my mind, severely limit) my daughter's conception of what it means to be a girl, one of the most concerning structures is advertising.  Marketers seem to be single-mindedly interested in selling my daughter a particular self-concept, one that is rooted in stereotypical femininity, overt domestication, and chronic consumption.  There are so many great blogs that deal with this issue and the commodification of girlhood (among other important issues, of course).  A few that I like are Feminist Frequency, Pigtail Pals, and one of my favorite organizations, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

Here's an example of a great video from Feminist Frequency that introduces the gender-marketing complex by tackling the marketing strategies used by Lego:

Feminist Pedagogy

I forgot to write a full blog entry before class this morning, but since our class discussion I've been thinking about this statement by Richard Schaull in the Foreward of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  I think this statement is very relevant to this morning's conversation:

“There is no such thing as a neutral educational process.  Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes “the practice of freedom,” the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of the world.  The development of an educational methodology that facilitates this process will inevitably lead to tension and conflict within our society.  But it could also contribute to the formation of a new [humanity] and mark the beginning of a new era in Western history.” 

Indigenous Feminism

When we discussed Ecofeminism in class a few weeks ago, I asked this question:

"How do we walk the fine line between honoring and learning from indigenous cultures and systems of knowledge, and appropriating that knowledge through acts of cultural piracy and "luxury spirituality?"

Angela wrote out a response to this question and some of you were interested in being able to re-read her answer, which was:

"I struggle with this question myself.  I think the best idea I can throw out there, which may or may not be the best way to think about it, is to take the knowledge that is offered freely and voluntarily and to hold that knowledge tentatively and with an open hand.  Since knowledge has been shared with you, it does not mean you "get it" or that you have a right to present it to others.  I think you have a responsibility to sit in that knowledge and get to know it, and absorb much before you speak.  I also think you hold a humble attitude about whose knowledge it is and when you share about it, you avoid speaking as if you know something that is not yours.  You share the product of your own meaning-making and you label and acknowledge that.  You hold the subjective nature of your response up."

I asked this same question of a couple of other friends, and their answers were very helpful so I'm posting them here for all of us to consider.

Victor: "Your question is a tricky one and there are no specific answers or perhaps myriad answers to the question, for me the important thing is how the information or knowledge is handled. First one must never lose sight of the origin of the knowledge and information that will always remain someone else’s. For example If non‐Native teachers are to use and tell Indigenous stories, they must begin a cultural‐sensitivity learning process that includes gaining knowledge of story‐telling protocol and the nature of these stories, the challenge for scholars, educators and students of Indigenous Knowledge is to find ways to engage with Indigenous information so that they are understood not in simplistic and stereotypic ways but as deep knowledge understood in complex relations to context. There is nothing simple in seeking ways of approaching in the correct way the delicate balance between Indigenous Knowledge, learning and cultural appropriation but for me as an Indigenous person one of the powerful ways for you as a Non-Indigenous student to be respectful and ethical is when you start questioning yourself, what are you doing with the knowledge that you are gaining and how is your approach to this knowledge. I think only you can really determine whether you truly are respectful or if your interest is a form of appropriation. The answer to your question, I think, lies heavily in your motivations and how you view Native Cultures.

- your approach to Native cultures is distorted by the racists views of the bloody savage or the noble savage?

- Do you acknowledge that there is no such thing as one Native culture–that this continent is one of many nations and peoples with unique cultures?

- Do you recognize modern-day Native people as real, living,breathing people and don't see them as part of a primordial, innocent past?

- Do you pay attention to what is going on in Native American reservations and communities TODAY? Do you know the realities of these reservations and communities? Do you acknowlege the way that colonization in this continent has harmed its people? Is your interest in the mythology of the Native American or the real Native American?

I am always a little wary when I witness people taking an obsessive interest in a culture that is not their own. My wariness stems from a realization of how easy it is to move from appreciation to appropriation

Why do you want to know about Native cultures? That is the question. And it is one we all–regardless of race–have to ask when we explore,study and are drawn to other cultures. So I constantly examine my motivations and so must you and everybody."

Mindy: "I have more questions to ask yourself then direct answers.  I think the main things we (and using this we as assuming you missy are also non-indigenous/colonizers, and apologize if through this I am ignoring histories, legacies of your family, community) need to think, and practice to walk this line is accountability, reciprocity, debt. How can we be accountable to people, lives, histories, struggles, resistances- many of whom we will never meet in person, or directly experience? Which means as well we can never fully understand, and yet that does not mean we do not try to understand. To understand that these knowledges are not ours for the taking-as 'our' history of being colonizers has allowed us to do. To not just continue a legacy of taking we need to create reciprocity in the present-and to the past, and understand-while actively intervening- in our historical and current debt for this taking. This is then how a practice in the present is important, and there is not one way to go about this, just as indigenous knowledge is heterogenous...

It is a fine line and daily self analysis, placed within particular social cultural, political history. The more I learn the more i see my own enactment of my privileges, my own continuation of colonial patterns. Thankful for allies, and building relationships outside of my particular history as to resist the world I was born into inherit!  (p.s. and will add to my first comment that I 'fail' (while critically thinking failure) daily at what I said is 'necessary' and yet in the failure, with' allies-people reciprocally committed to you unconditionally, who hold you accountable, change occurs- colonial patterns re-emerge/are engendered/shift-while still causing effects which then need to be accountable to-despite 'failure' and continued change with accountablity...and on and on)."

I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think that talking about indigenous cultures/systems is a delicate balancing act.  I want to honor cultural beliefs and practices that I believe are far more sustainable, egalitarian and harmonious than most practices in my own culture--but I don't want to participate in reductive and oversimplified glamorizations based on generalizations that distill many different cultures into one.  I want to learn and study and respect without  being essentializing or condescending or tolerant of the "noble savage" trope."  I want to integrate holistic ideas and practices into my life but somehow avoid cultural piracy and the "luxury spirituality" (the "icing on a materialist cake") that Vandana Shiva writes about.

I would love to hear more ideas and suggestions about how to do all of these things at once!

Real Quick

I can hardly handle my facebook newsfeed lately.  As if the Planned Parenthood brouhaha last month wasn't enough.  As if the panels of male experts debating women's access to contraception wasn't enough.  As if laws required vaginal ultrasounds weren't enough.  As if Rush Limbaugh (in general, but specifically referring to Sandra Fluke) wasn't enough.  Today I saw that Arizona has advanced a bill that allows employers to fire women for using birth control, based on the employer's religious beliefs.  You know it's gotten bad when Fox News runs an article taking seriously the idea of a political war on women.


I've been thinking a lot about this sentence from Ong's article "Sisterly Solidarity:"

“Brackette Williams has argued that subordinated male agency seeks redemption through the ‘retraditionalization of wayward women’ by calling for the revival of domestic feminine virtues and for women’s protection from outside dangers.”  

Do you think we can interpret this recent politicization of women's health issues as a call for "retraditionalization of wayward women?"  What about the other calls for retraditionalization in the American context?  Who leads these calls, and who benefits from their implementation?  In what ways are women themselves gatekeepers and agents of retraditionalization?  Sometimes I think that women are the primary agents of retraditionalization (although I've had plenty of evidence lately to challenge that idea!)  But if so, what are the gendered dynamics around this process?