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?

Postcolonial Feminism, Part 2

When we talked about postcolonial feminism in class, we used Chandra Mohanty's definition of colonialism as being “a relation of structural domination and a suppression—often violent—of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question.”  I love this definition and I think it really hits upon the two main elements of colonial practice, both in historical and neocolonial terms.


I've been thinking about the ways we suppress the heterogeneity of subjects--about the ways we insist upon hearing just one story and making it into Truth.  I've been thinking about this TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, where she talks about the danger of the single story and says, "The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.  They make one story become the only story."  In other words, they colonize.

I really want people to watch this talk.  And also, if you're looking for some good fiction, pick up her short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck or her novel Half of a Yellow Sun.  (I haven't read her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, but I'm sure it is wonderful too.)

I wrote 20 pages of notes and questions for our discussion on postcolonial feminism, and we only got to a few of them.  They have been on my mind again today as I've been following the conversation about Invisible Children's newest social media campaign, Kony 2012, which has been exploding all over facebook and twitter.  This is what I posted about the campaign on my facebook wall:

‎"Thanks to everybody who is posting the #KONY2012 video and sparking conversation about interconnected conflicts in Central Africa! Let's keep the spotlight on the region; let's keep talking about it; but let's also take the opportunity to deepen our understanding of these conflicts. My 2cents on the video is that it is doing a marvelous job at sparking conversations, but that it provides inadequate context to understand the regional security vacuum in which Kony operates and what kinds of global political/economic structures are connected to the propagation of armed conflict in the region. I also think that the solution (of increased US military involvement in the region) advocated in the video is problematic on a lot of levels.

And one other thing that I want us to talk about more, here on facebook or in person. How do we as Americans understand and conceptualize ourselves in a global context? In order for us to understand ourselves as liberated, empowered agents, do we have to first construct an Other that is imprisoned, powerless and always acted upon? Is this why we rely so heavily on the victim/perpetrator dichotomy (when in real life, that dichotomy is very often broken down)? And what are the real-world implications of constructing our conversations in this way?

My take on this is that we tend to crave narratives in which we as Americans are both guiltless and powerful. We like narratives that don't connect our lifestyles or consumption patterns to global inequality, but that do "empower" us to believe that we have the verve and voice to change the world for the better. I don't think this is the best way to construct a narrative, and I don't think it's the truest way. Let's talk more about truer narratives.


So in addition to the factual errors, I'm also really concerned about the oversimplified narrative that this campaign rests upon. Partly because oversimplified narratives result in bad policy. And also because the oversimplified good guy-bad guy narrative, the victim-perpetrator dichotomy, is linked to the formulation of Western identity. It allows us to ignore our own complicity in the creation of global inequalities even as we nurture our savior complexes. 

On the other hand, this campaign has sparked an internet conversation about Central Africa on a level I haven't seen in a while. So that is a good thing. Let's keep talking and keep evaluating how we are situated in this.

Multicultural Feminism

I loved this week's readings by Gloria Anzaldua and bell hooks.  It's hard to choose just one topic to write about because there are so many important ideas in the readings for the week.  hooks' book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, is so interesting and provocative, and her ideas stretch me and occasionally make me a little uncomfortable because of the implications if she is right--which is a feeling I like.

One really interesting quote from the book is this:

“Women are the group most victimized by sexist oppression.  As with other forms of group oppression, sexism is perpetuated by institutional and social structures; by the individuals who dominate, exploit, or oppress; and by the victims themselves who are socialized to behave in ways that make them act in complicity with the status quo.  Male supremacist ideology encourages women to believe we are valueless and obtain value only by relating to or bonding with men.  We are taught that our relationships with one another diminish rather than enrich our experience.  We are taught that women are ‘natural’ enemies, that solidarity will never exist between us because we cannot, should not, and do not bond with one another.  We have learned these lessons well.  We must unlearn them if we are to build a sustained feminist movement.  We must learn to live and work in solidarity.  We must learn the true meaning and value of Sisterhood.” 


I like how this quote lays out the various levels on which sexism functions: institutionally and interpersonally, and men and women can all be perpetrators of it.  I think it's interesting how she draws upon the cultural idea that women are women's worst enemies, which unfortunately is an idea that has a lot of traction in our society and forms a significant barrier to both sisterhood and political solidarity.  We've all heard the essentialist assertions: women are catty, women are judgmental, women just backstab other women all the time.  I obviously don't believe this based on my own personal experience, but the prevalence of the cultural idea makes me think: If women can't be friends with women, and women can't be friends with men, who am I supposed to be friends with?!


If anyone out there is reading this blog, can you tell me what you think about this idea?  If you are a woman, did you go through a stage in your life (as I did) where you felt you did not know how to form bonds and emotional connections with women?  Where do you think you learned this?  And did you/how did you re-learn the art of forming sisterhoods?  And if you are a man, how do you react to this quote?

Decolonization

This week's readings were on post-colonial feminism; I am looking forward to leading the class discussion tomorrow.  I am hoping we can talk about the different levels for which post-colonial feminist analysis is useful: Thinking about whole peoples who have been historically colonized, thinking about the ways in which women's labor and bodies have been colonized, and thinking about the ways our own minds have been colonized.

To get everyone thinking about this third level of analysis and how it is connected to the other two, I'm going to post an essay that I wrote in December.  My wonderful friend Ash hosted a "Move the Gift" party, a one-night gift economy.  Each participant was supposed to think of a value that had been important to them over the past year,  write a short essay about that value, then bring a book or other gift that was related to that value.  The gift I brought was "The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai, and this is the essay I wrote about it:

value: decolonization

“To adjoin the instinctual nature does not mean to come undone, change everything from left to right, from black to white, to move the east to west, to act crazy or out of control. It does not mean to lose one's primary socializations, or to become less human. It means quite the opposite. The wild nature has a vast integrity to it… It means to establish territory, to find one's pack, to be in one's body with certainty and pride regardless of the body's gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one's behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one's cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as we can.”

(Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves)

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai is a member of my favorite genre: post-colonial fiction.  One reason I love this genre is because it is capable of given voices to disenfranchised peoples, capable of seeing out of the eyes of those who have been colonized, gagged and bound.  It is important to me to listen to those who know what it feels like to be colonized, to recognize my own heritage as the descendent of colonizers, to think about the discourses of power and possession and hierarchy that swirl around me and always have, though for a long time I wasn’t able to see them for what they were.

I also love this genre because despite my white skin and European gene pool, I have been colonized too.  My brain is a demographic for people who want to control me and use me and take my money, and who are depending on me to socialize my children to defend and entrench the status quo.  My body is female in a patriarchal society that tells me to put up, shut up, shrink and whittle.  So who better than colonized people—those who have lost their lands and lives and livelihoods to the desperate graspings of colonial ambitions—to teach me to engage in personal, mental, emotional and spiritual decolonization?

“The [colonial] system might be obsessed with purity, but it excelled in defining the flavor of sin.  There was a titillation to unearthing the forces of guilt and desire, needling and prodding the results.  This Sai had learned.  This underneath, and on top a flat creed: cake was better than laddoos, fork spoon knife better than hands, sipping the blood of Christ and consuming a wafer of his body was more civilized than garlanding a phallic symbol with marigolds.  English was better than Hindi.”

(Kiran Desai)

We are descended from colonizers.  We are colonizers.  We are descended from the colonized.  We are the colonized.  How have we been taught to see ourselves as superior?  How have we been taught to hate ourselves?  What are the pictures, words, movements, images, lessons that reentrench these ideas about who is right/beautiful/strong/powerful, and who is lacking?  When do they tell me I am right and when do they tell me I am wrong?  And always, always at the core of these questions, another question: Who is benefiting when I think these ways about myself and others?

“But while the residents were shocked by the violence, they were also often surprised by the mundaneness of it all.  Discovered the extent of perversity that the heart is capable of as they sat at home with nothing to do, and found that it was possible, faced with the stench of unimaginable evil, for a human being to grow bored, yawn, be absorbed by the problem of a missing sock, by neighborly irritations, to feel hunger skipping like a little mouse inside a tummy and return, once again, to the pressing matter of what to eat… There they were, the most commonplace of them, those quite mismatched with the larger-than-life questions, caught up in the mythic battles of past vs. present, justice vs. injustice—the most ordinary swept up in extraordinary hatred, because extraordinary hatred was, after all, a commonplace event.”

(Kiran Desai)

So what do we do?  How do we decolonize ourselves while still living in a place and time where we are encouraged to ignore and ignore, to pretend we don’t see things, to walk lock-step with our arms folded and nod our heads ceaselessly, to become bored by the enormous violence that is perpetrated all around us and even in our names?

§  Learn good history, preferably told by those whom traditional history has rendered voiceless and powerless.

§  Identify the enemy, and don’t be afraid to say, “you have tried to enslave us for your own benefit.”

§  If you catch yourself hating yourself, ask why.  Ask who benefits when you hate yourself.  Say no to them.

§  Think about the difference between impulse and intuition.  Notice when you do things you have been carefully trained to do.

§  Support indigenous rights and territories; you cannot decolonize your brain if your voice is being used to support those who benefit from oppression.

§  Try new words, written and spoken.  See how it feels.

§  Believe that there is something inside you that is capable of steering you in the right directions.

I think that once we’ve really started this process, we won’t be able to stop.  There is no going back.  Steps are steps; motion leads inevitably to inertia.  Maybe we will have times—months, even years—when we will fall back into complicity and worry principally about missing socks and mealtimes, but these times will pass and we will remember who we are and what we are a part of, and we will remember that we want to decolonize ourselves because we want to live in our wildness.  We want to summon our intuition, claim our territory, speak with our truest voice, and we want to defend everyone else’s right to do the same.    

“Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own mean little happiness and live safely within it.”

(Kiran Desai)

Patriarchy

In class this week, Bree asked a question about definitions of patriarchy and I said I would share a couple of good definitions on my blog, and so...

I like this one from Cynthia Enloe:

“The extent to which the survival and success of this group or institution or society is imagined to be dependent on:
-The privileging of masculinity.
-The marginalization of women and anything or anyone deemed ‘feminine.’
-The perpetuation of those ideas and routine practices that legitimize and enforce both that kind of privileging and that kind of marginalization."

* * *

bell hooks also has some wonderful definitions and explanations of patriarchy in her books. I found a website with her essay, "Understanding Patriarchy," which is excellent and deals with the ways that patriarchy harms women and men. It is definitely worth taking a few minutes to read it in its entirety.  She includes this definition: "Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence." 

I especially like this passage from the essay:

"Keeping males and females from telling the truth about what happens to them in families is one way patriarchal culture is maintained. A great majority of individuals enforce an unspoken rule in the culture as a whole that demands we keep the secrets of patriarchy, thereby protect­ing the rule of the father. This rule of silence is upheld when the culture refuses everyone easy access even to the word "patriarchy." Most children do not learn what to call this system of institutionalized gender roles, so rarely do we name it in everyday speech. This silence promotes denial. And how can we organize to challenge and change a system that cannot be named? 

"Indeed, radical feminist critique of patriarchy has practi­cally been silenced in our culture. It has become a subcultural discourse available only to well-educated elites. Even in those circles, using the word "patriarchy" is regarded as passe. Often in my lectures when I use the phrase "imperial­ist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to describe our nation's political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It func­tions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic and not the system they describe. I interpret this laughter as the audience's way of showing discomfort with being asked to ally themselves with an antipatriarchal disobedient critique. This laughter reminds me that if I dare to challenge patriarchy openly, I risk not being taken seriously.

"Citizens in this nation fear challenging patriarchy even as they lack overt awareness that they are fearful, so deeply embedded in our collective unconscious are the rules of patriarchy. I often tell audiences that if we were to go door-­to-door asking if we should end male violence against women, most people would give their unequivocal sup­port. Then if you told them we can only stop male violence against women by ending male domination, by eradicating patriarchy, they would begin to hesitate, to change their position. Despite the many gains of contemporary femi­nist movement-greater equality for women in the work­force, more tolerance for the relinquishing of rigid gender roles-patriarchy as a system remains intact, and many people continue to believe that it is needed if humans are to survive as a species. This belief seems ironic, given that patriarchal methods of organizing nations, especially the insistence on violence as a means of social control, has actually led to the slaughter of millions of people on the planet."

Ecofeminism

This week's readings were fantastic; no surprise, as ecofeminism is one of my favorite feminist genres. Marti Kheel summed up the premise of ecofeminism like this: 
—“Ecofeminists have argued that the domination of women and nature has gone hand in hand in Western patriarchal society. Furthermore they argue that the devaluation of women and nature is connected to other forms of oppression, such as racism, classism, heterosexism, and speciesism. Underlying these forms of domination are a series of dualisms: rational/irrational, good/evil, sacred/profane, conscious/unconscious, autonomous/dependent, active/passive, culture/nature, positive/negative and male/female.”


I liked that this week's readings represented several different strains of thought within ecofeminism.  The Starhawk readings represented a historical spirituality approach to ecofeminism, which seeks to reclaim goddess-worship and earth-centered ritual and overturns the patriarchal cosmovision.  And the Vandana Shiva and Heather Eaton readings (among others) contained a socioeconomic analysis that explains the links between globalization, corporate rule, environmental degradation, and white supremacist patriarchy--and details how real people's lives are affected by invisible power structures that operate based on this classic patriarchal hierarchy:


God
Man
Women
Children
Animals
Nature


Ecofeminism has been heavily critiqued for several things: for purportedly essentializing women, indigenous people, and other groups; for participating in luxury spirituality, cultural appropriation, and escapism; and for overgeneralizing gender and nature in ways that don't apply to all cultural contexts.  I think there is something to these critiques, but keeping them in mind I still think that ecofeminism is one of the most appealing schools of feminist thought for me.  I think it is a powerful frame that is capable of using both cultural-symbolic and practical-socioeconomic levels of analysis to approach a wide range of social and environmental problems.

Critical Race Feminism

"[A microaggression is]...one of those many sudden, stunning, or dispiriting transactions that mar the days of women and folks of color. Like water dripping on sandstone, they can be thought of as small acts of racism [or sexism], consciously or unconsciously perpetrated, welling up from the assumptions about racial [and gender] matters most of us absorb from the cultural heritage in which we come of age in the United States.  These assumptions, in turn, continue to inform our public civic institutions--government, schools, and churches--and our private, personal, and corporate lives."  

(Delgado & Stefancic)

This week's readings on Critical Race Feminism reminded me of a website I like: microaggressions.com.  This site is a collection of reader-submitted quotes and experiences that illustrate microaggressions that the readers have experienced or witnessed.  I think this site is a great tool for understand how subtle microaggressions can be, and also for helping people to realize that they may engage in microaggressions against other people without realizing it.  I also think it's a good tool for practicing responses to microaggressions.  When I look at this site, I ask myself, "How would I respond if someone said this to me, or if it happened in a conversation I was involved in, or if I overheard it?"  Thinking through and practicing my responses helps me to feel empowered that I can learn to respond in an assertive way and help carve out safer spaces for people who are victims of microaggressions.

I also think the site is great because it contains submissions from a wide range of people--people who experience microaggression because of their race or ethnicity or class or sexual orientation or gender, or, in some cases, people who experience it in the context of their intersecting identities.  I have experienced microaggressions personally because of my gender--but at the same time I am a "possessor" of white privilege and straight privilege and cis-privilege and class privilege, and so it is important for me to hear the stories of people who experience different brands of microaggression.

In recent months I've encountered a number of women (including, I think, some members of this class) who have told me that they have never met a feminist/pro-feminist man.  This makes me so sad, not least because non-feminist men (and especially men who are not conscious of their own privilege) tend to be big offenders when it comes to sexist microaggressions.  I have known men in the past with whom I have felt consistently insecure because of the constant risk of microaggression; it is a terrible feeling and so exhausting.  I have been thinking lately about how lucky I feel that now, literally all of the men who participate in my life in an intensive way are either self-avowed feminists or at least acquainted and comfortable with the feminist ideals that are an integral part of who I am.  Part of this is because I am lucky, and part of it is a function of social privilege, and part of it is because I am demanding of people.

Liberal Feminism

One issue that has come up a couple of times in class is the difficulty that some of us younger feminists sometimes have relating to the ideas that classical, liberal and radical feminists came up with.  I think some of that is the fact that my generation has grown up in a third-wave environment, and so our context for understanding feminism is extremely different.  This week, while reading Charlotte Bunch's 1975 essay, "Not for Lesbians Only," I was reminded of one way that the feminist discourse has changed over the past few decades.

In the essay, Bunch argues for lesbianism (and specifically lesbian-separatism) as a viable political choice that undermines the hegemony of compulsory heterosexuality.  In her essay, little attention is given to the issue of lesbian desire, and she focuses mostly on the social and political implications of living queer.  Lately, the actress Cynthia Nixon has been in the news for comments she made describing herself as "gay by choice."  Her statements have provoked a small media firestorm and garnered attention from gay rights activists seeking to challenge still-extant social notions that homosexuality is purely a choice.  In response, Nixon has clarified her comments, but I think it is an interesting case study for how the politics of lesbianism have changed over the past few decades--and closely linked with that, it is an interesting case study for how the language of feminism has changed, too.

"Feminist Thought"- Part 2

This week, shortly after finishing Tong's chapters on multicultural/postcolonial feminism, ecofeminism, and postmodern/third-wave feminism, I saw a commercial that caught my attention.  It was a tourism ad for Puerto Rico that highlighted two main attractions: Golf (advertised by a fully-dressed, light-skinned man) and beaches (advertised by a brown-skinned woman in a yellow bikini).

I thought immediately of Maria Mies' classic essay "The White Man's Dilemma: His Search for What He Has Destroyed."  (I can't find the full text of the essay online, but it is in Ecofeminism which she co-wrote with Vandana Shiva; the whole book is amazing.)  I don't know if I can do the essay justice via synopsis, but I will try: In this essay, Mies deconstructs how historical Western colonial practices have created wealth in the Global North, but how the very process has resulted in widespread alienation from the land and natural processes.  As a result, Northern people feel acutely their alienated despair and feel a drive to re-develop connections to "nature."  She writes, "Part of this reaching out towards nature in all its manifestations is the search for beauty, for aesthetic pleasure. Obviously, the cities’ consumer paradises, the abundance of man-made commodities fail to answer this desire."

However, because "connection" is in many ways a lost value in a world riven by gender, race and class hierarchies, this despair often leads people (and specifically men, as the dominant social class) to reentrench systems of domination in their search for what they have lost.  Mies writes about how nature is romanticized, and because women (particularly third-world women) are perceived as being "closer" to nature by virtue of geography, their bodies are also eroticized and represented as consumable objects that will help men overcome their own alienation.  Women in formerly-colonized lands are especially viewed as "wild terrain," "dark continents," and viewing them in this way reentrenches deeply-historical racial interactions.

This helps explain how women's bodies can be represented as tourist attractions, can be placed alongside beaches and images of pristine, "virgin," "untouched," "unpenetrated" lands.  Of course, this connection isn't purely metaphorical; globally there is a burgeoning sex tourism business where wealthy Westerners (almost always men) travel to other countries to obtain sexual "products" from women, children, and teenage girls and boys. The biggest sex tourism offenders are men from the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, and Australia.  The biggest sex tourism destination is Southeast Asia, though it happens all over the globe.  The power dynamic of wealthy men from the industrialized Global North purchasing "services" from poor women and children in the Global South gives weight to Mies' critiques.

This long quote from Mies is included in Tong's book, too:
"The growing sex-obsessing apparent in all industrial societies is... a direct consequence of alienation from nature, the absence of a sensual interacting with nature in people's work life.  Sexuality is supposed to be the totally 'other' from work, sexuality should not interfere with work, should be strictly separated from the work life.  Sexuality is the 'transcendence' of work, the 'heaven' after the 'valley of tears and sweat' of work, the real essence of leisure... The tragedy is, however, that this 'heaven' is also a commodity, to be bought like any other.  And like the acquisition of other consumer goods, ultimately, it disappoints... Therefore, the constantly disappointed striving to attain this 'heaven' transforms need into an addiction."

I looked online but couldn't find the precise commercial that I saw this week, although I did find this 2008 Puerto Rico tourism commercial that is also an interesting study in how women's bodies are used to sell destinations.  For me, it is disturbing to see ads like this in the context of how much  I know about sex trafficking and sex tourism in Puerto Rico.  I think it's important to think about who is attracted by ads like this, and why, and how realities are constructed by ads like this, and what the implications are.  In this example you can see how the camera (that typical tool of the male gaze) focuses on parts and pieces of women's bodies, dancing and engaging in other forms of performative gendered spectacle:

"Feminist Thought"- Part 1

Our first class reading assignment is the first 200 pages of Rosemarie Tong's Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction.  In these pages, we learn about the history, premises, and critical authors of liberal feminism, radical feminism (including libertarian and cultural perspectives), Marxist and socialist feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, and care-focused feminism.  I have done prior reading on all these schools of feminist thought, but Tong's book is an excellent resource that places key names and ideas into context and provides a good general overview.  I can honestly say that every page of the book is fascinating to me.

When I was first learning about feminism as an undergraduate student, I remember approaching it with my mind already locked into a very specific paradigm.  I embraced the feminist label but was afraid of anything that could be termed "radical."  As I learned about individual theories within feminism, I would hold them up alongside my preexisting paradigm; if a theory fit neatly into my paradigm, I would absorb the new idea, but if they did not fit together, then I would reject it soundly in order to preserve the paradigm.  I think I felt a lot of pressure to decide how I would and wouldn't define myself.  I wanted labels.  I wanted to say, "I am this kind of feminist and I am not that kind of feminist."  I wanted to align myself firmly or else craft decisive distance.

These days, my brain feels like it has a different kind of shape to it.  I no longer feel pressure to self-label or to make decisions about whether I am or am not personally/intellectually aligned with a particular school of thought.  I am becoming more capable of embracing diversity of thought, of marveling at the creativity of ideas that would have made former-me deeply uncomfortable, and of considering--really weighing and considering--what people from all walks of life have to say.  I think that with time I will choose to take sides (and on certain debates I suppose I already have), but in general this does not feel like a side-taking period in my life; it feels like a time of liberating openness. 

Introduction

I am in the Environment and Society department at Utah State University, working toward a PhD in Human Dimensions of Ecosystem Science and Management.  As of now, my (still-being-developed) dissertation plan involves analyzing the embodied and gendered experiences of women in the ongoing armed crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

I have been heavily influenced by ecofeminism and post-colonial feminism, and by the concept of intersectionality of oppressions (including as it pertains to the connections between feminism and animal rights advocacy).  I believe that feminist theory can provide an extremely effective lens for interpreting complex relationships and helping illuminate both subtle and overt modes of oppression that prop up power structures.