Why has feminism has become a vulgar word?

My vow to post about feminism seems to have given me an excuse to procrastinate. We'll see if 2009 energizes my constitution.

I have been contemplating system-wide change lately and how both women and men can revolutionize their culturalized gender roles in order to bring about both greater equality and a more exciting, inviting and livable world.

For example, the very notion of equality doesn't do much good if women simply demand the ability to participate in the world as men do. Men haven't created a very desirable world, have they? I definitely am not asking for the ability to proposition men in hair salons or make men uncomfortable by grabbing their ass in broad daylight on the beach in front of my friends.

To quote from an online discussion I have been having with some friends: "Radical feminists (often anti-capitalist) have criticized liberal feminists for the latter's characterization of feminism as 'women can do anything men can do.' The basic criticism is that such a formulation leaves the door open for things like 'women can now join the military and go kill brown people on the other side of the planet' (to pick one of the most negative) in addition to more obvious positive opportunities. This is a criticism I tend to agree with; I also think it neatly reveals the distinction between progress inside a larger structural framework (again, US capitalism/democracy) and a change made to that structural framework. 'Allowing' a woman to do a job that has a hand in demeaning women seems to indicate a very limited and specific type of progress/change. To wit: the presence of, say, Condoleeza Rice (or Margaret Thatcher) on the world stage doesn't seem to have helped end patriarchy very much, does it?"

To further the point, this from a recent article discussing the same issue that argues inclusion doesn't necessarily equate to empowerment: " In South Africa, she pointed out, women’s political participation was among the highest in the world – but so were levels of violence against women. Sometimes women’s inclusion into institutions doesn’t resolve the deep-seated problems of gender equality." (http://www.thevarsity.ca/article/6462)

So then what I deem as needing to happen is the reconsideration of a man's role, masculine values and the overall structure of a patriarchal society. But how does one go about recreating masculine values when the men are the ones in power?

My project is running in to this problem. We are providing nonformal education classes about human rights and gender equality. Our goal has more to do with changing the way men perceive their place in society than direct empowerment of women. Men are the gatekeepers, afterall. But men are highly uninterested in attending these classes. About 2/3's of the participants are women, all extremely eager to have their quieted voices heard. But it seems in many ways these women are already there. It is the men who need the changing. So how does one create such change?

To further complicate matters, issues such as gender equality in development perpetuate "the idea that brown men often mistreat their women" and development agencies use this "as a reason for northern interventions. At the same time, romanticizing all brown (or white) men as angels is clearly a problem." (http://www.thevarsity.ca/article/6462)

What the author suggests is that such a type of intervention needs to be lead by local women and their allies, "as they are the ones who have the right to say who is impeding their ambitions and desires." While Senaglese women are asking for this project, I must say it isn't exactly locally initiated. And the white (and brown) men in my country haven't exactly created space for local women either. But is it space that I'm asking for or a new, perhaps even unperceived world?

Most definitely a woman's problems are not the same the world over. But women the world over are locked in to the same system, a system created, secured and sustained by men. So as global citizens, let's not create change that allows us to play a man's game, but to literally change the game.

Modesty

Some define modesty as a freedom. The freedom from vanity or conceit. I define modesty as a prison. A justification for confinement, specifically applied to women.

Modesty is cultural. It is the regard for decency of behavior, speech, dress, etc. In many places decent dress means a woman must cover her bare flesh and sometimes even her face and hair. Decent behavior means she stays inside. Decent speech means she keeps quiet. A woman's actions risk not only stigmatizing herself, but her entire family. She bears the weight of shame her whole life.

This isn't just in conservative societies. To quote Lil' Kim (yeah, that's right, I'm quoting Lil' Kim) "Here's something I just can't understand; If the guy have three girls then he's a man; He can either give her some head, or sex her raw; If the girl do the same, then she's a whore."

I'm tired of feeling like I can't wear shorts below my knees in stifling heat, while men don't even have to wear a shirt. And when I do wear "revealing" clothing, I'm tired of men interpreting it as an invitation. I'm tired of hearing stories from 40-year old Senegalese women who can't walk around alone at night because her in-laws will accuse her of being scandalous, while her husband works in Paris, doing whatever he pleases in the wee hours. I'm tired of never seeing another female jogger on the road. Not once in my two months, while men jeer at me.

I'm tired of modesty. I no longer feel that cultural relativity can explain away this perpetual inequality. Decent behavior should simply be to respect others regardless of what they are wearing or who they are having sex with. Women everywhere are on display. This judgmental theater is suffocating

Feminism

"Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age. As students, women are probably treated with more equality than we ever will be again. The school is only too glad to get the tuitions we pay. But later come the important 'radicalizing' stages in a woman's life. The first is when she enters the labor force and discovers that men by and large, still control the workplace. The second is when she marries and learns that marriage is not yet a completely equal partnership. The third is when she has children and finds out who is the principal child-rearer. And the fourth is when she ages, which still involves greater penalties for women than for men."-- Gloria Steinem (quoted in the book: "May you be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India by Elisabeth Bumiller.)


As an over-confident, self-righteous college student (I write this as if I've changed), I espoused an quixotic argument that the study of feminism was meaningless. While I didn't have the words for it at the time, through the haze of my polemic, the idea of mainstreaming drifts to the forefront of memory. I guess I thought that studying it in such a defined category really didn't do a whole lot of good. That the world needed action. And I thought action meant work, outside the home. My poor roommate and best friend was forced to listen to my ranting as she earned her degree in feminism.

As Lenin aptly put, "Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement." Now I find myself reading as much as I can about theories of feminism and women's rights. And simultaneously eating my words. I guess in part because it's my job. But the chicken or the egg? I sought the job because women's rights interests me, I'm interested in women's rights because it's my job.

And it is so interesting. I work on a holistic gender empowerment project in Senegal. It is a new component to a community empowerment program the organization has been successfully implementing in rural communities for years. Participants in these nonformal education classes will now learn about gender, in addition to human rights and general life skills.

Gender is culturally influenced. In Senegal, the categories of gender seem more calcified and rigid than in the United States. Indeed, Western women are referred to as the Third Gender because we don't fit into their predefined categories. In Senegal, women are very much relegated to the private sphere, or the reproductive activities in a society. They cook, they clean, they take care of children and elderly, they take care of the sick and any other domestic necessities. They mainly stay at home. The men are the "productive" members.

Besides work, there are other practices that I believe limit the freedoms of women. Polygomy is practiced by 20% of the population (family.jrank.org). Men can have as many as 4 wives. Of course, the reverse is not true. 25% of the total population practices Female Genital Cutting. Unfortunately the rate is as high as 80-90% among practicing groups. The national rate is low due to the Wolofs, whom make up 40% of the population but do not practice (DHS). Close to 90% of women marry before the age of 18 (DHS).



Having come from a different background, I have to admit that certain aspects of these gender roles do nothing less than infuriate me. I sometimes find myself swallowing my anger. But in part this experience is helping me to reflect on my own culture and America's oppression of women.

We have gender roles that are just as limiting. While "liberated" women now have the ability to work outside the home, we also must do the majority of the domestic work. I remember in August, having returned from Jordan, watching American comericals for the first time in a year. Every single domestic product from laundry detergent, to dish soap to diapers was geared towards women. I never once saw a man mopping with Mr. Clean.

While America doesn't expect women to cover their faces, we do something quite the opposite, but I think just as sick. Our expectations of beauty for women are so high and pressured that one in 200 American women suffers from anorexia and two to three in 100 American women suffers from bulimia (an estimated 10-15% of people with anorexia and bulimia are males) (South Carolina Department of Mental Health). This is just one example of a culture that is highly obsessed and demanding of the way a woman looks. While I think there is pressure for men to look good too, I challenge anyone to argue this pressure is equal.

This might be true the world over. I know some say it's simply biology. I can't quite aptly comment on that. But I do know that expectations of beauty are different. For example, I recently shaved my head. Not to make a point but because it just looks so much more comfortable and easy. And it is. It took me six months to build up the courage to go bald. I was worried about other people's reactions. In Senegal though, people love it. Men constantly compliment me on my new look. I hear Rafetna (Wolof) and Joli (French) (both words for pretty), regularly. I know that most men's reactions in the US would be more likely to wonder if I'm a lesbian. As well, a skinny woman here is far less desirable that a voluptuous woman. I have to admit, I find these expectations of beauty liberating.

Regardless of differences in expectations, I truly believe women are the most oppressed minority in the world. People think change has come and gone and we're now empowered. Let's move on to the developing countries who still need the revolution. This, of course, is crap. Unfortunately I find myself at a loss to support my assessments and observations with theory. So I've decided to dedicate my blog for the remainder of my year in Senegal to the subject of gender. It will only help with my work and will motivate me to read books and journals I should have long ago familarized myself with.

Technology and Power

Technology is power. Having just refamilarized myself with Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I am reminded that technology can be used as a powerful oppressor. Whether intentional or not. Where once being poor meant not having enough to eat, a place to sleep, access to education, today it denies you access to the cyber world. A world we live in more and more every day.

I was not surprised to learn that most of my colleagues don’t have PC’s. I was surprised that most of them had never had an email address and could not conceptualize navigating the web. It’s simply a matter of exposure.

Recently, the volunteer house in which eight tubaabs were living, awaiting regional assignments, was robbed. The burglars sawed the metal bars off the wall, broke the glass and then stole four computers and ipods, several cell phones and a pair of sandals right out of their rooms as they slept. I count myself as terribly lucky for having escaped unscathed. I had just moved to my Kaolack cave.

Upon hearing about such an incident, I was immediately frustrated by my organizations lack of security. I also thought it unjust when the organization hesitated to buy replacement lap tops for the victims to use for the remainder of their stay. Their justification: they can’t even afford laptops for their Senegalese employees (who make up 99% of the organization). I reasoned that those Senegalese employees were at least getting paid.

Now that the newly purchased laptops are residing with the volunteers, I question this line of reasoning. People get robbed here constantly. After the incident, a Senegalese friend explained how one night she came home to an empty house (even the couches were gone). And this is just one recount of the many stories that were offered up in sympathy. Whose responsibility is it really to secure your possessions?

It’s true that the volunteers have built their lives around computers. The West demands it. Some volunteers who were writing their thesis or in the midst of a university program, would have been forced to return home. Senegal is not yet so demanding. But of course the argument rises that a lack of PC’s is one of the reasons Senegal is still developing.

Listening to my Senegalese colleagues admit their ignorance about computers and the necessity for a computer in order to do their work well was quite compelling. So who deserves those new laptops more? The volunteers or the Senegalese staff?

This Pen Dwells on Guilt

"...The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt. " Martin Luther King, Jr.

Do you experience guilt? Does it debilitate and alienate you? Are you sometimes rendered an awkward ineffectual because of that existential weight? Or a ranting annoyance?

I think I've pointed out my guilt in previous posts. Dare I say, I've harped and grumbled and whined and beat a dead horse about my guilt? Well it hasn't gone away. I'm beginning to accept that it doesn't go away. My graduate diploma could read Guilt Masochist, MA.

And my anomalic pigmentation, my proficiency in both the colonizer and neocolonizer languages, my nationality, my profession, these are very visible brandings of why I might have cause to succumb to guilt in Senegal.

So why am I once again pontificating about my guilt?


Let the anecdote commence:

I went to the market in Dakar with a very unlucky friend. During her first month in Senegal she has parted with $100, an unwilling and unknowing donation to a smooth con-artist. She has lost a computer in a burglary. She has fallen victim to malaria and an intestinal infection. She wasn't born yesterday, but she is considering visiting a voodoo doctor to surgically remove her hex.

Shopping is not my favorite activity. I just don't like to buy things. When I do, I impulse buy. My money vomits out of my hand like bad vodka. It's too much stimulus, too many choices. Chaos. I've found large souks to be the worst. Large souks where people scream out foreign words, kiosks reek of rotting fish in blazing heat and buzz with flies, little children and grown men beg for money.

Combined with her bad luck and my shopping ineptitude, what did we expect?



But we should have known better. When the rasta-resembling Baye Fall (a Senegalese brotherhood of Islam based on Qur'anic and Sufi traditions) saw our polite response to his Wolof salutation (call: Nanga Def; response: Mangi fi) as an invitation to join us, as an interest in visiting his shop, we should have just kept quiet until he left us. But we couldn't shake him. Did I mention the market is stressful? He grew from one to three. All pursuing us for monetary compensation. When one man asked my friend for a kiss and pursed his lips, she snapped at him to leave us alone (in Wolof: Baima).

Unexpectedly, the man grew enraged. He called us racists (ironically, my friend's father is black). He became aggressive, screaming, specs of his spit hitting our wide eyes, veins popping out of his forehead, arms failing, pointing at his skin. He told us to go home. That we were no good.

Being called a racist is a big deal where I come from. Being loudly proclaimed as a racist in front of a market full of Africans is horrifying. We quickly jumped in a taxi and sped away.

The man was wrong to have done it. We later found out that this happens to tubaabs (foreigners) routinely in Dakar. Yet, I get it.



I not only represent a past of disgusting brutalization but a present of both visible and unseen exploitation (just in different terms such as food colonialism, resource extraction, structural adjustment policies, bilateral free trade agreements, the war on terror...).

God, all the reasons this man has to be angry with me. With my simple luck in being born an American in a comfy Midwestern "mansion" while he has to hustle in the streets everyday, begging young white girls for money, working for the Lebanese and French, imperialistic ghosts, watching American media and wondering why not him too?

Poverty is violent. Very violent. This man is a victim. I have guilt about this.

However, he's also a perpetrator. I have no doubt his anger was borne in some small way out of hurt pride. Like every other country in the world, Senegalese women are the man's inferior. He most likely didn't expect such a strong reaction out of my friend's mouth. Can he really expect us to allow such sexist insults? I have no guilt about this.

And funny enough, his spoken language, Wolof, and possibly his tribe, is a sort of African colonizer. It has become the national African language, even though there are hundreds. The Wolof tribe dominates the country. And it was the Wolof tribe that sold their Seneglese neighbors to the slave traders. Few people in this world have clean hands.

So yes, my presence in Senegal and my guilt is as horribly complex as the situation is horrible. My guilt though, is not a problem. In fact, my guilt, if channeled resourcefully, can be part of the solution. I would argue that the only way we will have real change is when a lot of us, a whole lot of us, start feeling really guilty. And start doing something about it.

Water

The drinking water in Kaolack is, well, undrinkable. At least when meeting my inflated Western standards. There's salt in it. And probably a whole host of parasites that cause a variety of corporeal discomforts. This is unfortunate considering Kaolack is hot. The kind of sticky heat that suffocates you in your sleep. If Queen Mab even grants you entrance to that nether region. And when the power goes out and the fan stops working and the malaria invested night yields no refuge, not only is quenching your thirst predicated by your ability to afford bottled water but taking a cold shower means dousing in sodium. Your skin starts to itch within days.

I wish I had more time to research the causes of Kaolack's water problem. There are salt flats mere kilometers out side of town that are exploited. By whom, I'd like to find out. I doubt many local Senegelse profit from the salt cultivation here.

Currently, I know merely what many of us know, that water poverty is a stark and forever growing fact of our future, that "while a handful of the wealthy routinely drink expensive, high function mineral water, one out of five people in the world cannot count on getting any safe drinking water at all" (Japan Focus, Tomoko Sakuma).

Senegal

It's been long since I've posted. I don't feel guilty. I would have loved to record my travels through the Middle East with two of my best friends. But they are far better company than a computer screen. Reverse culture shock, bouncing between five states, graduation and reunion with my past deserves documentation too. But my memory suffices. And that was a month packed with either constant activity or constant stasis. I could have indulged in more of the latter.

And now, Senegal. I'm letting it wash over me. Posts will become more frequent soon as I move in to a working groove. A groove that I oscillate between hating and coveting. For now, I will list posts I hope to expound upon, questions I have and observations, issues I'd like to pursue. It's not a promise, just a goal. I'll let some pictures do the talking for me. Because I've discovered I can't think and sweat at the same time. I will get a beer and ponder further all I have left unsaid.

1. Underdevelopment
2. Talibee boys
3. Learning Wolof
4. Speaking French
5. My work
6. Islam in Africa