Decolonizing Feminism: International Women's Day

Today is March 8, International Women's Day, for the month of Women's History. And I'm inclined to give the "for shame" award to Google, which seems to recognize all kinds of holidays - national and insignificant - through cutesy little decorations around its logo, but fails to recognize such an important day around the world.

Then I remembered: March 8 holds great significance everywhere else except in the U.S. So, I'd like to highlight some key issues.

• The 52nd session of the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women concluded yesterday at the UN headquarters in New York City. Of the many issues discussed is the prioritization of a women's central agency. Sounds good in theory, but we can only imagine which women will get included in such a "centralizing" agency and how different women from different regions of the globe will be able to address their local/global issues.
  
• Urgent issues impacting women around the world include economic crises and poverty exacerbated by globalization, HIV/AIDS pandemic, and brutal rapes and other acts of sexual violence exacerbated by various wars in the wake of our U.S.-led "war on terror" and various arms deals, drug deals, and free trade markets that have fueled these ugly wars throughout the globe - impacting severely on women's lives and creating refugee situations; both poverty and political instability have led further to the increase in immigration.
  
• While Clinton and Obama campaigns toy around with the discourse of NAFTA, please let's all think of the repercussions of this free trade agreement, which has led to said crises mentioned above (let's also not forget that NAFTA was signed during the Clinton administration). How will our worldviews help us align both domestic and foreign policies together as we cast our vote this year in the presidential elections?

In many ways, as I discussed with a friend, we can think of U.S. neo-imperialism as a house in which the foundation was laid under Reagan-Bush (think Cold War politics and the ways in which we aligned ourselves with countries like Afghanistan and Iraq in opposition to the Soviet Union, how we meddled with Central American wars, and most infamously in the Iran-Contra affair), the house was completed under Bush-Quayle (think first Persian Gulf War, police brutality and racial profiling, LA riots), the interior of the house was installed with lighting and other utilities, as well as with various decorations under Clinton-Gore (think NAFTA in 1993, Welfare Reform and the Telecommunications Acts in 1996, the beginnings of Blackwater and white supremacist militia groups with the 1996 Oklahoma City bombing, and various school shootings, the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan, etc.), and the fortress and burglar alarms were installed under Bush-Cheney (well, I'm sure we all still remember September 11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq). And, yes, our new administration will either have to 1.) redecorate, 2.) renovate, or 3.) raze it up altogether and create something new. Which do you prefer, and which candidate is committed to doing one or more of these things? Or, which candidate is so not trying to do anything different but simply move on in, even keeping the same decorations and furniture?

So, with the upcoming elections, how will we cast our vote? After all, domestic and foreign policies are not mutually exclusive issues, and they are absolutely, positively "women's issues."

But, here's my problem with the way that those of us in the U.S. construct what's "foreign," what's "international," indeed what constitutes a celebration and awareness of "international women's day."

We tend to look at the world with "imperial eyes." I'm specifically reminded of San Francisco's International Museum of Women, which imagines that such a museum is about a colorful mosaic of multicultural women in their equally colorful and (dare I say the word?) "exotic" costumes, not to mention one of their first exhibits invited visitors to don a burqa so they could imagine what it's like to be entombed in such "Afghan oppression" (Yeah, please note that I did not bother to link to their home page). More recently, I'm reminded of Women for Women International, which is a worthy enough organization in raising awareness about women's struggles around the world, but must they perpetuate the "let's help those poor, poor, underdeveloped women in such backward countries" mentality?

One woman, so inspired by this mission (and by Oprah), especially in recent promotions of awareness of the recent rape epidemics in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has started her own campaign, Run for Congo Women, a marathon held today across the country for donations to women's aid in the region.

I link to these organizations because such causes do need our support, but while neither organization has bothered to articulate the kind of local Congolese feminism that exists - especially considering that it was local women on the ground (who alerted them and other news services to the crisis in the first place!), I think we need to think of ways to reframe how such women are positioned - not as helpless victims dependent on white or "developed" women over here but as powerful agents doing all they can to resist such oppressive forces and calling on those of us in privileged positions - whether in the U.S. or in Africa, middle-class or working-class - to join them in solidarity.

Western feminists, MUST WE ALWAYS ASSUME THE MISSIONARY POSITION? (If you resist it in sex, I certainly urge you to resist it in global feminist organizing!)


How about naming the actual feminist organizations in the Congo, who are working to create rape crisis centers and health clinics to address the needs of rape survivors and war refugees? Two such groups include the Association nationale des mamans pour l’aide aux déshérités
(ANAMAD, National Mothers’ Association to Aid the Dispossessed) and Mamans organisées pour le développement et la paix (MOADE, Mothers for Development and Peace).

How about naming important feminist individuals devoted to the region, like Rakiya Omaar, journalist and writer of several articles and books about genocide, and director of the African Rights organization?

This is not to just beat up on First World/Global North/Western feminism, for some groups do get it right occasionally. I'm thinking of MADRE, which addresses women's issues through the lens of human rights, and engage in various coalition-building and transnational partnerships with such "sister" organizations like Sudan's Zenab for Women in Development (with an increase in warfare violence and the targeting of women and children, both MADRE and Zenab are asking for Emergency Donations) and The Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI).

But for too many others, I feel the need to point out that we must decolonize our feminist view of the world. Asian American activist Joo-Hyun Kang asks the question: “How do we dismantle an empire?" I say we do this by first decolonizing our minds and looking at women around the globe as our equals who are doing their own feminist theorizing and practices from which we can both benefit if we shared equally in our knowledge on how best to address gender oppression - especially in its intersections with race, class, sexuality, nationality, and imperialism. Feminist theorist Ella Shohat suggests that we begin to build a "relational feminism," which "goes beyond a mere description of the many cultures from which feminisms emerge; it transcends an additive approach that simply has women of the globe neatly neighbored and stocked, paraded in a United Nations-style 'Family of Nations' pageant where each ethnically marked feminist speaks in her turn, dressed in national costume. To map resistant histories of gender and sexuality, we must place them in dialogical relation within, between, and among cultures, ethnicities, and nations" (Shohat, 2).


If we operated under this "relational feminism," I wouldn't have to be skeptical about plans for a UN women's central agency or the latest and greatest international women's campaign or museum that reproduces the "imperial gaze."

March 8, for me, means that we begin to dialogue across nations and across cultures (sometimes this is difficult since a U.S. neo-imperialist agenda does not encourage us to learn any other language outside of English) and that we complicate our discourses of gender through intersectional and globalized analyses.

I will end this post with a music video of a song that Marie Daulne, Congo-born vocalist and founder of the amazing Zap Mama vocal ensemble, collaborated on with Erykah Badu. Daulne, who is the biracial daughter of a Bantu mother and Belgian father, was forced in exile with the Pygmies in the rain forests of the Congo, during warfare in which her white father was executed in colonial independence struggles. Now living in Europe, Daulne has created music that pays homage to her Congolese roots (including a complex vocal styling from the Pygmy community, who are still viewed among other Africans in denigrating ways, most recently when a group of Pygmy musicians were relegated to a tent in a zoo last summer during a Pan-African music festival (please see this BBC news report because Words Fail!) . If you have never heard Zap Mama's debut CD, Adventures in Afropea, which interweaves African and European musical styles through a capella vocals, then you have been culturally deprived! Hurry up and get a copy, please! Daulne has since moved towards more experimental styles, especially hip-hop, hence her work with Badu in creating a neo-soul sound. What I like about their collaboration, "Bandy Bandy" from Daulne's Ancestry in Progress CD, is the way that they have created an African Diasporic dialogue through their love of music. May we all learn to collaborate in similar ways in politics, culture, education, and especially in new millennium movements.




Art by Roshini Kempadoo: first image ("European Currency Unfolds"), last image ("War of Position").

Citation in Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.