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.”