feminist blogs

Last week, I sat down with two of my favourite male people, over some Guinness(es?) and some wicked, fried pot fish, to catch up on the happenings. The conversation soon got around to feminism, because these two male people are actually interested, and don't just pretend to be in the hopes that when they ask me "how's work?" I'll just say "You know, it is what it is. Pass the pepper sauce."

So they had some issues, among them my confession that in my work, when I talk about my theories of economics to people who are presumably non-sympathetic - or who at least start out that way - I avoid the term 'feminist'. I do not call my work 'feminist economics' outside my group of colleagues or friends because:

1) It is irrelevant, almost so irrelevant as to be counter-productive. I'm suggesting that in the traditional conceptualization of the economy, there are missing markets, and missing actors. Some of women's work, and some of the consequences of economic policy and activity on women, are rendered invisible, and if we are to obtain a true picture of the economy, maximize its productivity and advance development goals, we need to start thinking about that economy in different ways. This argument hinges on the idea that mainstream economics is lacking, whereas 'my' economics is more complete. To then present my views as 'feminist', to qualify them in this way, only marginalizes them, which is the opposite of what I'm trying to do.

2) It is inflammatory. 'Feminist' is a bad word. This is a surprise to no one. Many people I encounter are eager to distance themselves from what they see as feminist ideology, and are in fact relieved to have that basis on which to reject your ideas. If advancing that ideology without using the F word is going to improve women's access to economic goods, then I'm prepared to use other words.

3) It is not true. Based on the first point, if I believe that an economic model that values women's work and counts it as an economic input is a truer model, then what I do is just Economics, only properly done. (One could argue that insofar as feminism is a belief in the right of women to have political, social, and economic equality with men, all economics should be feminist economics, which is also true. And so we could argue each of those points, and probably both be right.)

This is an age-old argument, and while I call myself a feminist, language is an important part of the political strategy that gets things done. So using language like 'women's rights' and 'equity', and employing methods like first establishing the existence of a problem and then revealing that the majority of those experiencing this problem are women or men or children is often more expedient.

But they thought that I was wrong to do this, and that if feminism was not at all problematic, as I was suggesting, then I should use my work to make it visible as a movement. Because, they said, the feminism that everyone knows, and that men in the Caribbean are so turned off by, has been imported from the US and UK, with all their bra-burning and armpit-hair growing. They suggested that the women's movement in the Caribbean has failed to adequately represent its cause, to refocus the business of feminism within the Caribbean context, and to disabuse people of the notion of feminism as a foreign, outdated ideology. They believed that rather than treat as separate issues like violence against women and sexual and reproductive rights, we should frame them within the larger context of women's human rights, showing the linkages, and in that way, it would all become clear to the masses and we, the feminists, would win. I explained that we had done this, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. They were not convinced. I suggested that they were considering the issue as already-feminist men, assuming a reasonable, blank-slate audience that does not always exist. Again, they were not convinced.

I had, and have, several responses to this, including the idea that 'feminist', both as a qualifier and a noun, is not strictly tied to 'feminism' as a movement. There's some merit in what they say, as well as some confusion, I think, about what the advancement of women's rights in the Caribbean has looked like, and what it looks like these days. But I wanted to ask you first, readers and lurkers and bears, what you think, before I address these ideas in a subsequent post.

Are Caribbean people really thirsting for feminist knowledge, and have we simply been doing it wrong all along?

Salon's Broadsheet today discusses this news of university scholarships being offered to schoolgirls in Biriwa, Sierra Leone who can prove they are virgins. The scheme is aimed at reducing high rates of teenage pregnancy, and is being implemented along with a measure that bans "any schoolboy found guilty of impregnating another student from all educational institutions." Eligibility for the scholarships requires a virginity test administered by a community nurse.

Apart from the fact that a virginity test that examines the presence of an intact hymen is not reliable (a hymen may rupture at any point through regular physical activity and some women are born without them. And I hate that I even have to point all this out in the context of this article), subjecting a young woman to this type of test is grossly invasive and potentially shaming, whatever the result. But further prizing women's virginity and using it as a basis for a reward of education is very problematic. It creates an artificial relationship between the purity of women and their potential for academic attainment. Because even though in this setting, teenage pregnancy may interrupt young people's academic careers, with adequate access to birth control and reproductive health education, sex in itself need not. Even though one may argue that applicants subject themselves to the conditions of the scholarship, we all know the extent to which restrictions in opportunity also mean restrictions in choice, especially in a country with already limited access to education for girls.

And this type of measure also makes no distinction between young people engaging in sexual activity with each other and rape. Victims of rape are of necessity not eligible, so that these schemes not only stigmatize women's sexuality and pregnancy and prize virginity, but punish victims of sexual violence and reinforce the notion that the victim is to blame.

Boys are also being punished for their sexual behaviour, and incredibly, being permanently denied access to education. So while we may want to encourage young people who become pregnant and decide to care for their child to pursue education in order to better provide for themselves and their families, this measure advocates the opposite. It caps the educational attainment and future earning opportunities of boys as a punishment for the 'crime' of impregnating a young woman. I understand the desire to balance the responsibility of child care so that women are not disproportionately affected, but this is not the way to do it, and is essentially counter-productive, since it has the effect of limiting any potential financial transfers of father to mother for the support of the child, whether these transfers be voluntary or facilitated by the State. And if the motivation is to subject teenage fathers to the same 'punishment' as teenage mothers of being kept out of the school system, perhaps the answer is not to punish anyone at all, but to work towards a system that does not convert pregnancy into a lifetime sentence to poverty.

One of the most common statistics emerging during this recession, in various incarnations, describes the extent to which men are disproportionately suffering from resulting job losses. A month ago, the NY Times speculated that women may begin to outnumber men in employment figures as layoffs rise, and Spiegel's Susanne Armann last week deemed the crisis "a very male recession".

But these kinds of articles that take aggregate layoff numbers, line them up and declare men the losers in a global recession are missing several issues. Take for example Armann's article, which deduces that men are worse off while acknowledging the following [emphasis mine]:

..a significantly higher number of men work than women. According to the Federal Employment Agency, male employment is currently 81.6 percent while female employment is only 69.2 percent. Those who work more are more likely, therefore, to lose their job.

In addition it is mostly full-time positions that are being cut -- and many women do not work a full 40-hour week. Around a third of employed women work part-time, while only 5.5 percent of working men are employed on a part-time basis.

That means that women are more likely to work in low-paid jobs. The Federal Employment Agency says that 67.4 percent of those in low-paid jobs are women, who often work as carers in retirement homes, supermarket cashiers, childminders or cleaners. These jobs may not be well paid but they are still required even in times of economic crisis.

So just to be clear: we're neatly bypassing the facts that more men than women work, that women's work tends to be part-time, and that it also tends to be lower-paid, and surmising that women are coming out on top in this economic crisis because fewer of them are losing their part-time/occasional, low-paying jobs.

However, better-paid women are also doing well, such as those working in traditionally more female spheres like education or health. The major industries like construction, manufacturing or even the financial services industry have always been more vulnerable to economic cycles and therefore suffer when the economy dips.

"Women are also more flexible when it comes to location or type of job and they adapt more quickly," says Falk of the DGB. "If a woman realizes that she hasn't got any more prospects somewhere then she tries to go somewhere else.

And once again, the old 'women are tough, they can handle it' argument. We seem to assume that women's response to economic hardship (moving or changing to find work) has little or no cost, whereas men's reality (lost employment) does. There is a cost associated with this perceived flexibility, that may involve education, transportation, shifts in family care arrangements, or increased care burdens within the home. If anything, women in some countries are less flexible because of a gendered division of labour which often sees their lives tied to those of their children. But they adapt in what is perceived as a cost-free shift, but may in fact carry several costs to the household. They adapt because women's incomes are still overwhelmingly skewed towards the health, education and well-being of their households, as against men's.

We also have to be careful not to ascribe the same economic behaviours and consequences to all men and women everywhere. In countries, especially in Europe, where there have been historically higher levels of state investment in the household economy, towards universal day care for example, there tends to be a lower cost associated with labour shifts. And while the recession began in developed nations, it certainly did not end there. Developing nations with large export markets are also being hit hard by reduced demand from the global North, and those markets often employ far more women than men.

And if the response is to invest in those industries with the highest losses, where men are more heavily concentrated, then at best, the post-recession economy will position men and women exactly where they were before: with women earning much less. What is required is not just worker protection laws to eliminate discrimination and create equal employment in those sectors without regard to sex, but also more jobs in women-dominated sectors, with higher, living wages and increased benefits.

So given all this, and while we observe all kinds of gendered job-loss phenomena, like positive correlations between male unemployment and incidences of intimate partner violence against women; a slow supply response to domestic care demand by newly-unemployed men (that means that apparently some men pretty much sit around and do nothing - for a really long time - as they adjust to their new situation, increasing the care burden for those who already provide it rather than lightening it. Don't eyeball me. I'm just reporting it); and increased anxiety among women regarding the economy (although this same writer says that women are more worried but men are more likely to just pretend not to be worried and freak out anyway), I wouldn't be so quick to summarily declare women the 'winners' here. There's a little more to the story than that. And while we do need to address men's overwhelming job losses where they exist, and their psychological responses to the recession, we also need to go a little deeper on both sides in order to gauge the real costs and risks, and shape adequate policy responses.

Last Wednesday, women in Kenya, led by The Women's Development Organisation coalition, imposed a week-long sex boycott aimed at pressuring the country's two power-sharing leaders Prime Minister Raila Odinga and President Mwai Kibaki into resolving their conflicts. Amid fears that current rows could see a renewal of the election violence of 2007, in which 1500 people were killed and 300 000 forced from their homes, the women's groups have solicited the support of sex workers as well as Ida Odinga (left, pictured next to Lucy Kibaki), wife of Prime Minister Raila Odinga (below left, pictured next to Pres. Kibaki).

Patricia Nyaundi, executive director of the Federation of Women Lawyers (Fida), one of the organisations in the campaign, said they hoped the seven-day sex ban would force the squabbling rivals to make up.

"Great decisions are made during pillow talk, so we are asking the two ladies at that intimate moment to ask their husbands: 'Darling can you do something for Kenya?'"

It is the kind of tactic that certainly draws attention to power-sharing tensions in the country, but how valuable is it as a feminist action, and how effective can it be as a political strategy? Writing in the Guardian, Lola Adesioye declines to comment on the latter, but offers that regarding the former:

..this boycott is significant as it says a great deal about women's progress, the way in which women are reconsidering their role in Kenyan society and how they are reclaiming power where they can.

[...]

Africans can be pretty conservative on topics such as sex. For the older generation in particular, discussing sex in public is something you just don't do. In addition, unlike in the west, you tend not to hear African women sitting around talking casually and openly about it. Within that framework, taking such a politically-motivated sexually-orientated stance – actively withholding sex for a week and announcing it to the world – is, actually, a very bold and radical move.

[...]

Will this strike achieve its aims? That's debatable. However, even if the government doesn't end its feuding, this modern-day version of Lysistrata has already had a useful effect. It has put the spotlight on women's roles, power and rights and is showing how national politics affects the individual.

For women, at least, a week without sex is worth that.

But even in the context of a society where polygamy is still practiced, where sex is seen as a woman's duty to her husband and family, and where open discussion about sex is considered taboo and un-African, this strike is still a double-edged sword, with perhaps one side sharper and therefore more destructive than the other. Yes, it does represent a big "suck it" to the patriarchy that Kenyan women can declare ownership of their bodies and their sexual agency in this way. But at the same time, it says that this is their only card to play, their only value and their only contribution. And I find that problematic.

Adesioye argues that the strike " has put the spotlight on women's role, power and rights", but has it really? It seems to cast this role, power and rights strictly in terms of their usefulness as providers of sex and nothing else. It does not advance a dialogue on all the cases where even this role, even this sexual agency which is the minimum a woman should be able to exercise, is removed from her in the country's many cases of marital and community rape. It does not associate the lack of political consensus with other realities of women's lives such as insufficient access to water, food, health, education and security. And while it is encouraging to see women declare that their sexual lives are theirs to control or reveal as they decide, if the discourse stops here, then it arguably has done very little to advance women's economic security, their true political engagement, and the overall stability of fair and inclusive governance in that country.

Yesterday, in the Comments section of the Watchmen review, we got to talking about representations of race and sexuality in the Zack Snyder-directed film adaptation of Frank Miller's 300. And a reader made the following comment:

I've been meaning to write about this kinda thing. Do you think it was a consciously done racist thing? As in, it may have been consciously done, but was it done with purposeful racism in mind? I am not trying to make excuses for it either mind you, but I find we over analyse and make more out of some things that for the most part are innocent coincidences. To avoid it, we would all have to spend our time politically correcting everything we say and do so as not to piss off some demographic, race, social group etc.

So I thought I would share some thoughts on the questions he raised, both in relation to the film and in a general context. A bit heavy for a Friday, yes, especially when my brain synapses are pretty much through firing for the week and are already heading down the pub. But let's give it a shot anyway.

First, the idea of intent:

"...was it done with purposeful racism in mind?"

I think that the question of whether someone sets out to denigrate an entire group of people, or whether it happens as a result of their own unexplored or unresolved prejudices, is not as important as we make it out to be. In fact, I might argue that the latter is more insidious and therefore more dangerous than the former. If racism has become so ingrained in the business of living that it is evident even when people aren't trying, then that is a much sadder reality than if there are fringe elements of people out there going "you know what? I hate black people and I'm going to make a movie about it." But aren't we lucky! We don't have to choose, because both exist.

So yes we'll find people like the bus driver in the DR who let the fair-skinned people board but left my friends and me at the bus stop because he thought we were Haitians and he "doesn't stop for 'negros' (spanish)". But perhaps much more common in our lifetimes will be the films, TV shows, songs, comedians that reinforce ugly stereotypes about certain groups of people. And for these cases, "I didn't mean it" does not cut it as an excuse. Because what "I didn't mean it" really means is "I didn't care enough about these people to do better".

It's comparable to my work as an economist. You go to talk to Ministers of Finance or budget directors and they say "We didn't develop this budget to discriminate against women" or "The economy is gender-neutral!" Well no it isn't, because you're operating within a system that since it existed has made much of women's work invisible. So the results that you get if you depart from that system are also going to exclude those women, whether you 'mean it' or not. It is your responsibility to interrogate your own assumptions and do better. Because otherwise, you're hurting the group in question, and that hurts everyone.

"...we over analyse and make more out of some things that for the most part are innocent coincidences."

Definitely, for 300, these weren't innocent coincidences. This wasn't a film that included one walk-on role of an Asian person in a laundromat, which after they saw it made three white University anthropology majors in Seattle somewhere roll their eyes and mutter about stereotypes. We're talking about a film that, in depicting an epic battle between Persians and Greeks, digitally manipulates the features of the players to make the Persians appear as dark, faceless (therefore inhuman, unimportant) devils and the Spartans white gods. It excludes any redeeming characteristics about Persian society at that time like their famed religious tolerance and focused only on Xerxes' obsession with enslavement. It called the Athenians "boy lovers" (bad) and portrayed the Spartans as hypermasculine (good). None of this is coincidence, especially when you consider Frank Miller's Islamophobia, which I didn't know of until after the film when I went searching to find out what all that mess had just been about . (I couldn't possibly explore this as well or as thoroughly as others have done, so I've included some links for further reading at the bottom.)

Yes, we can say that comics and films are meant to have a good guy and a bad guy, and that the Persians were in fact invading Greece for the second time so doesn't that pretty much make them the bad guys? Of course. But what films like this do is make one-dimensional, faceless demons out of people of colour, and then celebrate their mass slaying by a white superior race. They say it doesn't matter what their faces look like (and face here is a metaphor for actual identity and value system), just where they come from and the colour of their skin; because odds are if they come from there and look like that, they have one intent, so better to pre-empt that. And the effects are not harmless. People are not as adept at separating out fiction from reality as you might think, especially in an environment of cultural tension between the groups in question. The Persians were not Muslim, but many people, after having watched the film, equated the two and transferred the images from one to the other.

In terms of innocent coincidences in other films, I can understand the dilemma. You see black people represented in certain ways and don't know if you should follow your natural urge to laugh or your intellectual urge to be offended. For me, some things are clearly, neck-bristlingly offensive; or just annoying, old, unimaginative stereotypes; or perhaps born of generalizations but true and therefore hilarious. But honestly, when I do get really offended or annoyed, it isn't as a result of an innocent coincidence. For example, in all my years watching ER (which has now hideously jumped the shark), I've seen my fair share of black crack addicts and drug dealers and Mexican gang-bangers. But not only have some of those characters been treated with complexity, to show other elements of their realities, but there have also been people of colour as doctors, activists, little nerdy kids, anything that people might be; and there have also been white criminals and drug addicts, some among the 'heroes' of the cast. So while I'm not going to necessarily get annoyed because the drug addict on a particular show happens to be a black man, I'm damn sure going to be annoyed if it is always a black man, or if they make a point to pit black ignorance and helplessness against white perfection.

I'm going to finally say just a little about political correctness. The reader wrote:

To avoid it, we would all have to spend our time politically correcting everything we say and do so as not to piss off some demographic, race, social group etc.

I think there's a growing backlash against political correctness. People now think that refusing to indulge others' sensitivities will make them seem cool and smart, like mavericks who are willing to take back their speech from hypersensitive tree-huggers. Yeah I call bullshit on all that. How about trying to seem smart the old-fashioned way? By actually being smart, and informed, and analytical, and socially responsive. Unfortunately, I sense this more acutely in Barbados and other parts of the Caribbean, where we're so used to other people looking and behaving like we do, we carry on indefinitely not being challenged on our bigotry. It is firmly entrenched and we find it comforting. We are so used to yelling slurs at gay people, Asian people, fat people, Guyanese people, that we act like it's just a quaint part of Barbadianna: it's cultural and harmless. Well it's not. And if we stepped back and considered it, we would realize that we're not only perpetrators of it, we're also victims. But some of us are too stupid and too busy trying to seem edgy to figure that out.

I know it can seem like the acceptable language is constantly changing. So what? Change it. You don't need to "spend all your time" doing it: it's not as if groups are meeting every week trying to see how they can piss people off by making them learn new words. And no one is going to put you in a pillory because you had a slip and said 'disabled' and not 'differently able'. But if a group of people gets up and says "listen, we really hate this word, and here's why, and here's what we prefer," who the hell am I to say "yeah well I don't like that word so I'm just going to call you Blackie"?

In my experience, the people who rail most against political correctness are (as just one example) the pigs who not only want to persist in calling women bitches and whores, but also want them to like it. So these people aren't the ones who find themselves having to change their lexicon every day and get genuinely confused but want to do better; it's in great part the ones who just don't want to bother with anyone but themselves and the group to which they belong. They want their bigotry to be sanctioned not only by their peers but by those they're bigoted against. It's another case where "I didn't mean it" really means "I don't care enough about these people to do better."

And I wouldn't call any of it innocent.


See also:
Osagie K. Obasogie on The Rebirth of a Nation?
Touraj Daryaee on Go tell the Spartans: How "300" misrepresents Persians in history
Jehanzed Dar on Frank Miller’s “300″ and the Persistence of Accepted Racism