Feminism in an International Context
Women Studies 305, Winter 2007

1/4: Reassemblage

• What does the filmmaker convey about the politics of representation? How?
• Is this a feminist film? In an international context? Why or why not? How does it depict gender difference?

Watching/Listening Exercise: Write down at least one phrase or sound you hear in the film that catches your attention. What image is on the screen at the moment that you hear this phrase or sound? We will use your observations about the relationship between these two elements to begin class discussion on Tuesday.

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Trinh T. Minh-ha on the women's movement: "I see the women's movement as being necessarily heterogeneous in its origin, even though it may be claimed more readily by certain groups and remains largely white in its visibility. On the one hand, I readily acknowledge my debt to the movement in all the reflections advanced on the oppression of women of color. On the other hand I also feel that a critical space of differentiation needs to be maintained since issues specificially raised by Third World women have less to do with questions of cultural difference than with a different notion of feminism itself--how it is lived and how it is practiced. Naming yourself a feminist is not without problem, even among feminists. In a context of marginalizaion, at the same time as you feel the necessity to call yourself a feminist while fighting for the situation of women, you also have to keep a certain latitude and to refuse that label when feminism tends to become an occupied territory. Here, you refuse, not because you don't want to side with other feminists, but simply because it is crucial to keep open the space of naming in feminism." ("Between Theory and Poetry," in Framer Framed.)

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1/9 Slides

The definitions students worked to come up with in class demonstrated some of the important ways you have learned to frame modes of thought and action understood as feminist. From this position of situated knowledge, we must also understand how some of our own descriptive vocabulary - choice, individual expression, bra-burning, man-hating - emerges from a very particular US-based context. This is one version of feminism, just as Mary Daly's was one version of Second Wave feminism, which claimed in some ways to be universal, and which Audre Lorde felt compelled to speak back to. Rebecca Hurdis speaks back to Manifesta, one version of Third Wave feminism. Feminism is a way of speaking back to power and its oppressions, but certain versions of feminism can also be oppressive (in their claims to authentically speak for all women) and hence call for critical response and ongoing negotiation.

1/11 Slides

1/16 Slides

1/18: Beyond West and the Rest

I. One minute paper: What phenomenon does Uma Narayan describe and critique with her concept of "death by culture"?

II. Follow through from Tuesday student presentations

Essentialism (Andrea & Kiera): a form of representation that asserts finite, fixed characteristics to a group of people. Feminists and anti-racist thinkers have argued against essentialist representations. These are not absolute truths, but social constructions to be interrogated, questioned, and remade.

• Theory as way of thinking: how to analyze the past and imagine the future.
• Impossibility of imagining in the abstract.
• Cultural specificity of the examples raised: homemaker/breadwinner (private/public)
• Biological explanations also as a form of constructed knowledge.

Cross-cultural connections & border-crossings (Irina, Jenn, & Naomi)

• Talking points: What would you say to someone who claimed that women in India didn't have the same choice as women in the U.S. to escape from an abusive relationship?
• Victims of culture: What does Narayan mean?
• "Death by culture"/Reversing the question: Could you die because of your culture?

III. Cultural icons, metonyms anthropology and Third World Women as "native"

Brainstorm list with examples.
Can you think of similar cultural icons for U.S. women?

• What crosses borders?
• What doesn't?
• How is culture invoked to explain inequality? What gets overlooked in this picture?

IV. Role Play

Cocktail party with Uma Narayan and American woman.

"I've heard that many Indian women are burned by their families for dowry."

If you were Uma Narayan, how would you respond to this statement?

What kind of cross-cultural understanding is going on here? How is feminist knowledge decontextualized and recontextualized? What gets lost?

V. How do international contexts shape feminist issues? What has been the focus for domestic violence in:

• U.S. feminist agendas
• Indian feminist agendas

Why has this been the focus?

Irina's question: What would you say to someone who argues that U.S. women have a choice to escape whereas Indian women don't?

VI. Evidence

How is knowledge constructed? What statistics are used as evidence to support an argument? Be critical consumers!

Why do you think women in the U.S. haven't organized around domestic-violence murder?

1/23: Culture & Agency

• What is "writing against culture"?
• What is agency? How do women (and men) in these stories exert it? Does how women are represented affect their agency?

I. Mapping exercise

II. Some history: Egypt-Historical Overview

• Arab conquest of Egypt in 639-42. Arabic became predominant language.
• The clans or tribes known as Awlad ‘Ali migrated into Egypt from Libya. Most concur they are descendents of Arab invaders from the Najd (region in what is today central Saudia Arabia) who swept through N. Africa during the 11th century. Migration into Egypt in 17th or 18th century. They have remained marginal to the agrarian society of the Nile Valley, the economic and central core of Egypt. By all estimates, Bedouins of Western Desert are less than 1 percent of total Egyptian population and decreasing.
• Napoleon-French occupation of Egypt 1798-1801, with object of cutting British trade lines and detaching India from the British Empire.
• French withdrawal followed by rise of pasha Mohammad ‘Ali, who used Europe as a model and laid the foundations of the modern Egyptian state. His empire extended from Sudan to Arabia to Syria.
• In 19th century, the free movement of Awlad ‘Ali, control of caravan routes and lack of respect for law were a bane to Mohammad ‘Ali, pasha of Egypt 1805-1848. In exchange for their help in patrolling border, quelling internal rebellions, and assisting in foreign campaigns, he rewarded them with usufruct rights to the land in the Western Desert and with exemption from taxation and military conscription.
• Suez Canal in mid-1800s put Egypt into deep financial debt and opened door to British intervention.
• British naval bombardment of Alexandria in 1882. British consolidated their control during 1883-1907 under Lord Cromer. During WWI declared Egypt a British protectorate.
• By the time the British governed, the Awlad ‘Ali were still far from subjugated or settled, although many had been induced to take up agriculture by the high value of cash crops, and the beginnings of competition from the railroad had loosened their hold on trade and driven them to concentrate on sheep rather than camels. The British, insecure about the nomads' close ties to Libya and their smuggling activities, periodically and unsuccessfully sought to revoke their privileges to carry firearms and to claim exemption from military conscription.
• A treaty for Egypt's independence in 1922, in effect in 1923. Britain retained right to station troops, until new treaty of 1936.
• During WWII, the Bedouins suffered the loss of herds, wells, and possessions when the battles between the British and Germans were fought on their soil.
• Post-independence struggle for power between Wafd party and the throne. Wafd gained majority in 1950. 1953 Republic declared. Nasser took control in 1954, elected president for 6 year term. Strove to industrialize and make Egypt a leader of a united Arab world, tension with Israel.
• Only after the revolution and Nasser's rise to power in 1952 did government goals shift from political control to assimilation. The motives underlying the government's interest in integrating the Bedouins into the Egyptian polity, economy, and national culture were both ideological and material. (nomadism seen as not modern) The gov't initiated projects to settle the nomads: it reclaimed land for agriculture; subsidized olive, fig, and almond orchards; subsidized fodder through the cooperatives; and made laws giving individuals who built a house the right to keep the land on which it was erected. →sedentarization. Still the Awlad ‘Ali see themselves in opposition to non-Bedouins.
• Anwar Sadat succeeded Nasser as president in 1971. Involved in peace process with Israel, assassinated by Muslim extremists in 1981.

III. Writing against culture/Reading against the grain

Pay particular attention to historical and change, especially in relation to the West, Egypt (nation-state), and gender relations; this is not a separate, timeless, static, homogeneous culture

This book is not explicitly about men, but what can we learn from it about masculinities; not focused on Western society, but what can we learn about the West from it?

The anthropological moment in which Abu-Lughod wrote this book was influenced by feminist critiques of classic ethnography, in which "cultures" were defined largely by male anthropologists, often with access mainly to male sociality. Is this objective knowledge? "Positionality, feminist theorizing teaches, not only is not a handicap but must be made explicit and explored" (6).

How is this a feminist book (the course readings build upon this question of what it means to be feminist)

1. Critique of universal notion of a "female voice" or female sensibility
2. Abu-Lughod's definition of feminism on p. 5.

Writing Against Culture

The problem of generalization based on the "incarceration of non-Western people in time and place," which creates ideas of other cultures as homogeneous, coherent, and timeless

Storytelling

Stories are perspectival: show storyteller and audience relationship
So are scholarly arguments→ how we develop our own rhetorical styles

Tactical (vs. essential) Humanism

1. Critique of humanism (p. 28) as a local and historically specific language of post-Enlightenment west, but why she still uses it
2. Her techniques:

• Leaves traces of herself
• Each chapter loosely constructed around 1 or 2 women, but not life history
• Narrative form (opposite of Trinh in this way)

V. Agency & Resistance

Resistance (focus on action) / group or individual

• in Marx: people can make their own history, but not just as they please; they make their history under circumstances transmitted from the past, not circumstances of their own choosing
• Resistance is part of the struggle to make one's own life in negotiation with other groups with more power, to try to change circumstances so that one's own opportunities to "have a say" increase
• Resistance takes various cultural forms
• Emphasize the "nestedness" of power relations
• Abu-Lughod's point about tendency to romanticize resistance. "I argue instead that resistance should be used as a diagnostic of power." What forms of Bedouin women's resistance reveal about historically changing relations of power in which they are enmeshed as they become increasingly incorporated into the Egyptian state and economy.

Hegemony as what resistance activates against

• in Gramsci: moving equilibrium containing "relations of forces favorable or unfavorable to this or that tendency," includes cultural as well as political and economic factors
• more than an essentialist idea of powerful and powerless; there is a constant struggle; reistance is the other competing force in struggle for hegemonic power

Agency (more focus on actor, who has agency)

1/25 Group 2 Student Facilitation

1/30: Critiquing "Save the Women" Discourse
Q: What do neat cultural icons used to represent "other" women repress? What are the implications of such icons for transnational feminist praxis?

I. Why culture is a useful concept, but potential pitfalls.
"Writing against culture" 1-minute papers

• This is what Abu-Lughod attempts to do through storytelling. She points out that anthropologists (as well as others) tend to homogenize culture by ignoring that culture is a product of historyÑa process that is always changing. She hopes to capture this fluidity through stories situated in time and context.
• By writing against culture, Abu-Lughod is working against generalization. She emphasizes that all knowledge is situated and that cultures are not static but change over time.
• In Writing Women's Worlds, Abu-Lughod writes against culture by allowing her readers to understand the daily lives of people within the culture: their experiences and feelings, which demonstrate that one "culture" cannot be flattened and homogenized as if all the people in it have the same experiences.
• Abu-Lughod wants to show that certain forms of social organization, such as patrilineality and polygyny, are not experienced in the same way by everyone who lives within these social institutions. They are not totalizing descriptors of a culture and don't mean the same thing to different groups or individuals or across time periods.

**"The West" or America: Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar is a useful exercise, but in so doing beware of making the same sort of generalizations in the opposite direction.**

EPost question from Siri:
In Chapter 4, Abu-Lughod speaks to how the wedding ceremonies have become more sexually segregated. We already talked about this in class yesterday, but I was wondering why this has changed? Why has polygyny become more common? Someone in our group mentioned that it might be caused by more adherence to the Qur'an. Is this why? Or is it the modernization of Egypt?

II. Honor & Shame

Look closely at pp. 21-22 in Abu-Lughod's introduction, where she gives an overview of the linked issues of patrilateral parallel-cousin marriage (as a social "institution") and honor and shame (as a "cultural" complex). A simple and formulaic model of honor/shame as a "cultural" complex, often applied to Christian and Muslim circum-Mediterranean cultures (i.e. Spain, Sicily, Greece, Algeria, etc.), sets up the following dichotomous relationship: 
honor : men :: shame : women.

When seen as a generalized and determining moral code that structures all of society, the honor/shame complex has been used to explain all forms of social interaction and organization, such as the division between public and private space, gender segregation, conflict/conflict resolution, and family and lineage, as if they were timeless and absolute. How does Abu-Lughod deconstruct this essentialist picture of strict binary opposites of honor and shame, particularly as they are categorized as "male" or "female"? How do Bedouin ideas of honor, propriety, and modesty change over time and in relation to their contact with other cultures, such as British colonial or Egyptian national culture?

How does Lila Abu-Lughod's chapter on "Honor and Shame" dismantle formulaic understandings of this "cultural" construction?

Abu-Lughod insists on the importance of carefully examining both the actions and the assumptions that make up our everyday lives. Thus, while Abu-Lughod works to understand how women can gain power in unequal societies, she also encourages all who pursue such work to consider what women lose when they adopt the lifeways and the values of modern society.

She has said, "Feminists, leftists, progressives, and other intellectuals still haven't questioned the idea of development, progress, modernity, as wholly a good thing."

What does Kamla, the subject of "Honor and Shame," stand to gain by breaking with her tradition and completing her education? What does she stand to lose? Under the circumstances, what outcome should one hope for?

Continue thinking about Kamla as part of two worlds in relation to Tambu, the protagonist in Nervous Conditions.

III. The Veil

• Analyze photo at beginning of Chapter 5.
• Marjane Satrapi's "The Veil" in Persepolis.
• Other ways of understanding veiling from Abu-Lughod's article.

To think about in relation to "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving" and Nervous Conditions: What is "colonial feminism"?

LINK: BBC interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga, author of Nervous Conditions on the role of women in contemporary Africa

2/6: Colonialism & Gender

Midterm overview + slides

Colonialism:

Deep, racialized structural inequality is created through forceful oppression, one which materially profits the oppressor. However, the colonizer justifies this overt material inequality through a narrative of civilization and development that:
1) describes the colonized as inferior and attempts to eradicate and replace their "other" culture (for within it may lie cultural resources for resistance)
2) erases (through a historical amnesia) the oppression and inequality that created and perpetuate conditions of poverty

The colonized (e.g. Tambu and her family) experience a radical, traumatic decentering of the self, but not as a one-time occurrence. Rather, it is a planned, everyday, self-replicating form of violence--pyschological and physical--that makes the colonized into an always already inadequate and injured subject. Men and women experience this process in gendered ways, for they must contend with the gender categories and norms of their own culture, of the colonizer, and the combination of the two.

How does feminism fit into this picture? (Importance of gender analysis, not as an additive thing, but as a mode of thought that fundamentally changes how we understand social phenomenon like colonialism, by examining the gendered dimensions that undergird it.)

Third World women often find themselves suspicious of Western "liberatory" feminism as an extension, part and parcel, of colonialism. It collapses them into a single image--as victim of their own culture--and aims to make them over in the image of the West. They have feminist voices of their own (that come from heterogeneous, intersectional positions) that in addition to fighting colonialism also struggle to make the independent postcolonial nation accountable to continuing and new forms of gender inequality.

These two websites provide some great material for thinking about themes and characters of Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions in relation to the question of colonialism and gender:
LINK: Western Michigan University website on Nervous Conditions

LINK: Central Oregon Community College website on Nervous Conditions

2/8: Colonialism and Gender (cont.)

Concepts to consider in relation to Nervous Conditions:

• Agency
• Resistance
• Hegemony (Colonizer-Colonized & Male-Female) nested forms of it (Nhamo vs. Tambu)
• Cultural Capital: skills that Tambu learns at mission vs. knowledge of Shona language and culture that Nyasha lacks
• Modernity/Progress: what is progress?
• Performance (gender as performative, the roles that women in different positions naturalize): the Maigurus or the Lucias (p. 138)

Themes to consider:

• Remembering and forgetting: lessons of history (what history, whose history, defined by whom?)

• Grandmother's history, p. 17
• Nhamo--more educated, more aphasic (loss of words) p. 53
• Nyasha's history of the mission, p. 63
• Babamukuru as historical artefact, p. 160
• "Don't forget" mantra, p. 188
• Nyasha's shredding of her history book, (p. 155) p. 201

• Language
• Education
• Food
• Illness
• Generations
• Body

In Nervous Conditions, the main characters are all caught, in different ways, by the psychological contortions caused by colonialism. Even the most educated women (Maiguru, Nyasha, and Tambu) gradually realize that the escape promised by Western education increasingly feels like entrapment. Making themselves over in the image of the colonizer has simultaneously resulted in an almost schizophrenic process of self-negation.

As Nyasha nears the breaking point, she grown more conscious that her struggle with Babamukuru is deeply rooted within the larger power dynamics of colonialism, in which her father is also caught. While Nyasha cheers on her mother when she temporarily leaves Babamukuru, she also admits to Tambu, "But it's not that simple, you know, really it isn't. It's not really him, you know. I mean not really that person. It's everything, it's everywhere. So where do you break out to? You're just one person and it's everywhere. So where do you break out to?"

pp. 200-201: By the time of her breakdown, she declares, "They've trapped us. They've trapped us. But I won't be trapped. I'm not a good girl. I won't be trapped."

How effective do you think the different women's forms of resistance were? Do any of them seem to have a better chance of breaking out? What would that entail?

The book leaves us hanging. It is roughly 1968-1969. What do you think are possible futures for these women?

1/13: Women and National Liberation

Flame handout

1/15: Producing Gender-Modernity & Labor Politics

Other Modernities slide show

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2/27: Producing Gender-Postsocialist Cohort

Translating Feminism slide show

Red Detachment of Women film clip

3/1: Reproducing Gender- Body & Labor Politics

Carmen Miranda on My Mind slide show

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