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.