"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.