07.01.08
Backlash against feminism
From anti-abortion laws and the proliferation of lapdancing clubs, from the media’s obsession with bodily imprefections, sexualised motherhood and crazed, out-of-control women, Kira Cochrane looks at the many facets of the backlash against women in Britain today. Below are some of the most shocking/revealing excerpts:
Then there are all the signs about attitudes to women and work. Flicking through the newspapers one day, I came across an interview with Theo Paphitis, who appears on the TV show, Dragon’s Den, as well as on the country’s Rich List each year; he is easily one of the UK’s most prominent business people. “All this feminist stuff,” he said, “are we seriously saying that 50% of all jobs should go to women?” Paphitis went on to note that women “get themselves bloody pregnant and … they always argue that they’ll be working until the day before, have the baby, go down to the river, wash it off, give it to the nanny and be back at work the following day, but sure enough, their brains turn to mush, and then after the birth the maternal instincts kick in, they take three months off, get it out of their system and are back to normal”. On the subject of paternity leave he suggested that he thinks “it’s a bit soppy”[...]
Today, with rapes at an unprecedented high (the tally of recorded rapes rose by 247% between 1991 and 2004), the number of Rape Crisis centres has almost halved – there are now only 38. This massive shortfall in services is less surprising when you consider that three of the most important women’s charities in the UK – Refuge, Women’s Aid and Eaves Housing for Women – all of which support female victims of violence, have a combined income considerably lower than that of The Donkey Sanctuary, a charity that supports ageing donkeys [...]
The rise of the sex industry is one indication of how women’s bodies are considered public property; in the wider culture, we’ve seen scrutiny of women reach unprecedented levels. In gossip magazines, women’s bodies are pored over – a pound gained provoking headlines that they’re fat, a pound lost leading to headlines that they’re too thin. Circles are drawn around a spot on their ankle where they’ve failed to apply fake tan, around a bitten nail or a tiny, incipient wrinkle beside their eye – which could just be a stray lash.
The constant message is that women’s bodies are not our own. They belong to everyone but us, and are there to be picked apart. Women can try to curry favour, come up to snuff, spend hours like, say, Madonna, working out, perfecting themselves. But there’s then every chance that they will be derided for the veins on their hands. There’s something essentially depressing about women being derided for their veins.”
06.26.08
Domestic violence and multiculturalism
‘I can’t tell people what is happening at home”, a new report by the NSPCC, draws long overdue attention to the plight of south Asian children, not just as victims of violence but as witnesses. It highlights the cultural context – isolation, fear of racism, language barriers, uncertain immigration status, cultural and religious pressures to keep the marriage going – which means that Asian women on average take 10 years to leave a violent relationship, thus exposing their children to substantial psychological and physical damage [...]
Tolerance of “cultural practices” by state agencies has been going on since at least the 1980s. Black feminists have campaigned hard against this aspect of multiculturalism, which has given unelected community leaders autonomy in the domestic, cultural and religious affairs of the community [...]
[The NSPCC] calls for the engagement of faith and community leaders in the fight against domestic violence. It is precisely these leaders – who act as gatekeepers to the community and cry racist when the state intervenes – who account for the nervousness of state agencies [...]
In this new political climate, minority girls’ rights are again being sold down the river. The political correctness the NSPCC highlights is about to get worse. Commander Steve Allen of the Metropolitan police, at a recent conference on domestic violence, said the government’s agenda on terror is hampering police work on issues such as forced marriage because the government is keen not to alienate those same leaders in the fight against extremism.”
This piece raises some very interesting points about the discourses of multiculturalism and cultural authenticity and how they function to minimalize state intervention in minority group affairs in the UK. It also reveals how the UK government’s fixation on not alienating certain minority groups as part of its anti-terror campaign is conducted at the expense of turning a blind eye to abuses therein.
I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of cultural relativism, the notion that cultural practices are justified within their own paradigm, and that to judge or denounce them based on some broad liberal framework is a sort of imperial epistemic violence, used to dehumanize our cultural ‘others’ and hence legitimize our own brand of culture, which we define as non-contextual, neutral and universal.
Thanks to critical writings by “third world”, “postcolonial” and “black” feminists, alot of self-proclaimed feminists have given serious consideration to Chandra Talpede Mohanty’s formulation of colonialism (and Western feminism) as “white men/women saving brown women from brown men”; but nevertheless analyses of the pragmatic intersections between gender and ethnicity, especially in the context of migrants, are still far from clear cut. Obviously, as the article above hints, no intellectual formulation can ever be simply applied to a ‘reality’, and interpersonal relationships and individual emotions cannot be forcibly fit into some preconceived theory…
The author of the article, Rahila Gupta, and the group she works with, Southall Black Sisters, should be commended for their work in trying to give a voice to the most disenfranshized of the marginalized: women migrants. It is important for them to raise awareness about how fighting against certain British state policies should not be equated with blindly defending certain cultural practices.
Moreover, it is important to illusrate the tangible ways in which the claim to cultural authenticity is itself a dominant narrative that commits its own epistemic violences. We should ask who is claiming to represent whom and be aware of the vested interests therein (ie leaders of minority communities claiming that interference in family matters is against their principles or a form of oppression etc).
I also firmly belive that this is the sort of debate that contemporary feminists need to be having, because it highlights the core notions of solidarity and otherness that effective struggles for justice for women need to continuously engage in.
07.23.08
Miniskirts, collagen and institutionalised disempowerment
Posted in Comment, Lebanon Diaries tagged confessionalism, feminism, Lebanon, women, women's rights at 9:32 am by lilithhope
The image of the stereotypical Lebanese woman is of one clad in a miniskirt and heels, with pouting collagen lips and long, flowing, immaculately coiffed locks, perhaps behind the whell of a shiny BMW of Hummer, or tugging a miniature designer dog on a leash, or socializing with a long thin cigarette in big big diamond-studded sunglasses while some South East Asian ‘helper’ takes care of the kids.
She is the epitomy of a ‘liberal’ woman, freed from the confines of the conservative patriarchy that dominates in the region, as manifested by restrictions on dress, such as the mandatory hijab, or restrictions on social behaviour.
But, as mentioned in the IRIN report below, Lebanese women are systematically disenfranchised:
“Thousands of children in Lebanon are denied full access to education, healthcare and residency because they do not have Lebanese citizenship.
Lebanese women cannot pass on their nationality to their children and in the event of separation, it is the father who gains automatic custody, according to Lebanese nationality law.
Women were only present in parliamentary life twice between 1952 and 1962 and then not again until three female members of parliament (MPs) won seats in the 1992 elections.
“Women’s groups are demanding a 35 percent quota in representation in the government, which would allow for issues such as the custody and nationality law to take precedence,” said activist Roula Masri [...]
A more comprehensive reform to the nationality law has become mired in the political issue of the presence of tens of thousands of Syrian workers and 400,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.Now, it is this last sentence that really gets my goat:
Some politicians have argued that to allow Lebanese women to nationalise the children they have with non-Lebanese, such as Syrians and Palestinians, would be to shake up the delicate sectarian demographic on which the country’s political system is founded.”
All these politicians out there who fear for Lebanon’s confessionalist system, that ‘delicate sectarian demograohic’… WHAT A JOKE!!
Lebanon is founded on a demographic of the 1920’s, when the Christains were a majority, and therefore that legitimised giving them all the political power. Post-civil war, the Taif accord did grant Muslims some comparative rights in the government, but those relative gains remain subservient to a system that is very out-of-date, simply because the Christians are no longer a majority in Lebanon.
Everyone knows that. Which is why politicians refuse to have a census: any proof that, as all social indicators (birth rates, death rates, migration) indicate, the Muslim community is infact larger than the Christian community would reveal that, in the name of history, Lebanon’s political institutions are weighted to the minority.
What politicians are calling ‘delicate demographic’, I’m calling ‘denial’. Denial that, for the sake of this country’s future, the political system need profound reform, and the festering confessionalist system needs to be done away with once and for all.
But, obviously, the stakes are sky high, and no one should hold their breath that any such acknowledgment is forthcoming in the remotely near future. But as a result of this denial, this belief in a romantic myth and this unrelenting grasping to an expired colonial mindset, it is the women that suffer. Women are being denied their human rights in the name of a corrupt political falacy.
And are we surprised?
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