Lila Abu-Lughod and Paul Amar both consider the victimization of women (literal and rhetorical) and its justification and production of violence by security states, Abu-Lughod, asking us to consider whether “Muslim women really need saving” (Abu-Lughod, 783) and Amar analyzing “sexual harassment politics in the global south as a crucial laboratory for testing and reformulating the mix of emancipatory and repressive governance practices that constitute contemporary gender-sensitive ‘human security’ regimes” (Amar, 299). Spivak’s “white men saving brown women from brown men” could summarize the situation each author delves into, but what is valuable in Abu-Lughod and Amar’s analysis is the approaches each offers for challenging and deconstructing this paradigm. As Amar writes, “this article reveals the queering power of new metaphors of masculinity, class struggle and global female insecurity. The conclusion generates a critical theory of security-state practice and illuminates alternative global-south feminisms that contest rather than facilitate securitized and militarized appropriations of internationalist gender and security interventions” (Amar, 299). I would like to extend this analysis of internationalist gender and security interventions and alternative global-south feminisms as their effective underminers to projects of racializing, queering, and destabilizing happening in Black liberation movements in the United States. Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, a text taught today at Yale and elsewhere, takes on the legacy of transatlantic slave trade and slavery within the United States, offering a critique of American racism and simultaneously upholding it. Amar writes in “Turning the gendered politics of the security state inside out?” that “the harassment and sexual brutalization of women, whether working-class women or middle-class political protesters, is matched by the quasi-racialization and parahumanization of working-class male youth in urban Egypt” (Amar, 315). Wright’s 1930’s set novel, in which a twenty year old black chauffeur murders a young radical white woman and is later defended in his trial by a sympathetic white lawyer exists has its own specific context but is affected by and can be analyzed alongside Amar’s assertion that “conversations in critical race theory concerned with the logic of hypervisibility (Reddy 1998; Yancy 2008) focus on processes whereby racialized, sexualized subjects, or the marked bodies of subordinate classes, become intensely visible as objects of state, police and media gazes and as targets of fear and desire” (Amar, 305). This process is illustrated in Harper Lee’s 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird as well as Wright’s Native Son. Both novels feature trial scenes in which white men are called upon to defend black women against other white men and women. This white saviorism is inherently problematic and when considered alongside Amar’s directive to “turn the gaze back on the state to reveal the interests, histories and power relations that generate certain race, sex and moral subjects and metaphors” (Amar, 305). illustrates the untenable position of both the white male savior and the white male ally. Abu-Lughod writes, “When you save someone, you imply that you are saving her from something. You are also saving her to something. What violences are entailed in this transformation, and what presumptions are being made about the superiority of that to which you are saving her? (Abu-Lughod, 788-789). Who “you” are in this context really matters. Amar describes one type of “savior” writing that “they sensed the chance as ‘gallant, protective real men’ to utilize the sexual harassment campaign, extending their prerogative power to ‘protectively’ detain women in public, and to round up working-class boys in ways that would degrade and depoliticize their collective aspirations” (Amar, 319). Although this example is quite obviously violent and oppressive, Abu-Lughod shows us how this violence can be parsed out of any type of saviorism and is not limited to police, or white men, white women, or the “global elite”. How then should those of us in privileged positions go about our interventions (historical interference inevitabilizing such intervention (Abu-Lughod, 786-787)) without taking on the role of savior? Abu-Lughod argues for developing an appreciation of difference without a reliance on cultural relativism. Amar cautions us that “when subjects are hypervisibilized, they remain invisible as social beings: they are not recognizable as complex, legitimate, participatory subjects or citizens. One route for subjects to escape the logic of hypervisibility is to strive constantly for respectability. This route entails a historically classphobic (demonizing the working class), gender essentialist moral practice consisting of self-disciplinary practices that are depoliticizing and aim for assimilation” (Amar, 305). Achieving respectability via the project of othering is an inconsistently effective neoliberal strategy which may increase an individual’s security but ultimately corrupts their agency. As Amar writes, “Parahuman subjects are thus hypervisibilized subalterns who become fetishized subjects of politics while their ability to act in emancipatory ways is buried by multiple intersecting modes of sexual, cultural, moral and social fantasy and discipline” (Amar, 306). Wright’s Native Son ends with a speech by the young man’s lawyer in which he lambastes American racism and whiteness and lays the blame for his client’s crime at society’s feet, concluding that any human being socialized as a black man was within that context could not be expected to act humanely or civilized as an adult, being inevitably a product of his backwards environment, a native son of the United States. Although written by a black man, the stereotyping of the book’s main character and the seeming inevitability of his descent into savagery have been decried by many black liberationists precisely for reinforcing the conceptualization of the African American man as parahuman and incapable of emancipatory acts, dependent on the educated, liberal minded white man for his defense, preservation, and civilization. Abu Lughod asks, “Can we use a more egalitarian language of alliances, coalitions, and solidarity, instead of salvation?” (Abu-Lughod, 789). Amar offers as example, El-Nadeem, a coalition which defies “NGOization” and rejects the lure of respectability, offering support to “middle-class women protesters and prostitutes, male hustlers and workers alike” (Amar, 313). By rejecting the victim/perpetrator narrative foisted upon these hypervisibilized (/queered) categories and offering solidarity and support, not where it is “deserved” but where it is needed, alliances are able to reveal and disempower the hegemonies which seek to destroy them.
Monday, July 12, 2021
W4D2
Afsaneh Najmabadi asks us to question whether gender and sexuality are useful categories of analysis and invites us to consider the “or what” of gender and sexuality, beyond types and acts. She and Dennis Altman both raise questions around the transnationalization and historicization of gender and sexuality that do not yield easy answers. In “Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Analysis?” Najmabadi illustrates the instability of these categories when she poses the question, “Were there any women in medieval Europe?” (Najmabadi, 18). This question responds to the question “were there any lesbians (or lesbian-like women) in medieval Europe?” which presupposes “the naturalness of woman; that there have always been women” (Najmabadi, 18). Although these questions are difficult to answer in the context of a WGSS seminar some slightly less self conscious voices have been attempting to answer them. I refer here to filmmakers in the genre of lesbian historical drama, a film category which blurs lines between academia and entertainment and stands in contrast to the gay coming of age drama, a less intellectualized and more explicitly capitalized style of film. In the first category are critically acclaimed, Oscar nominated, and usually depressing films such as The Favourite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, My Queen, Ammonite, and Carol. In the second category I place Alex Strangelove, The Way He Looks, Love Simon, and its companion television show, Love Victor. These categories are by no means absolute and are certainly not exhaustive of queer film as a whole but I hope that they illuminate how “the overall narrative effect of (Najmabadi’s) book had put woman in a position to carry the burden of gender and man that of sexuality” (Najmabadi, 15) as well as the way in which films in these two categories illustrate a divide between gender as tradition and sexuality as modernity. Quoting one critic of her book, Najmabadi asks, “Where is any account or analysis of women’s homoeroticism? This writing of history, which questions heteronormative narratives by centering men as those who desire and are the objects of desire, becomes complicit with discourses that see sexuality and eroticism as the exclusive domains of men when it ignores traces of women’s desire (same-sex or otherwise). . .” (Najmabadi, 15). Lesbian historical dramas as creative rather than ethnographic, often take as their project, an attempt to rectify this disparity in historiographical intervention, expanding or inventing lesbian histories where historical records leave only traces. Najmabadi asks, “How does one explain that while alternative masculinities can be retrieved from historical memory (though with much embarrassment and pain), alternative femininities have remained seemingly nameless” (Najmabadi, 15). Although works in this genre of film are inconsistent in quality, often rampant with fetishization, and glaringly white, they grapple (clumsily) with this quandary. Dennis Altman, in "Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities" writes that “as one (anonymous) survey of homosexuality in Pakistan put it: "'Gay implies a legitimation of a relationship that runs counter to family, and therefore gay life does not exist in Pakistan in general, or in Karachi in particular. From a practical standpoint, two lovers would find themselves without a social context....” (Altman, 83). Lesbian historical dramas have elevated this situation into the realm of a trope. In many of these films, the leading women are defined by their familial relationships and sexual desires between them are illegible to the people around them, only becoming perceptible, as well as threatening, in moments of sexual action at the film’s climax. That tropes have begun to emerge in these films problematizes their role as “representation” and stymies their potential for exploring or inventing alternative femininities. Beyond plot tropes, there are also consistencies in casting white women that imply that either women or people of color can be written into the historical narrative, but not both. In direct contrast to these tropes, the gay coming of age movie incorporates tropes of both family and racial diversity. Rather than offer historical intervention, these films supply vision for the future. They are marketed to much younger audiences, are lighter in tone, and happier in ending. They are not deconstructing the past, but rather, constructing (or prescribing) the future. Altman asks, “Is there, in other words, a universal gay identity linked to modernity?” and questions “the extent to which the forces of globalization (both economic and cultural) can be said to produce a common consciousness and identity based on homosexuality” (Altman, 86). Like the gay American tourists in Gregory Mitchell’s “TurboConsumers in Paradise”, these film studios sure hope so. Altman goes on to discuss the precursors to the development of these modern forms of sexual identity and specifically names the economic shifts which have “weakened and certainly changed their relations to their families” (Altman, 86). The coming of age trope, in addition to associating queerness with youthfulness tropes heterosexual parents and implies modernization from “traditional heterosexuality” to modern homosexuality. When the films themselves, or their source material begins to seem dated, or not diverse enough, they adapt, as is exemplified by the shift from Love Simon to Love Victor that replaced a white American with a Puerto Rican and Colombian-American protagonist without changing very much else. Altman brings up several issues with this type of representation writing that “Western romanticism about the apparent tolerance of homoeroticism in many non-Western cultures disguises the reality of persecution, discrimination, and violence, which sometimes occurs in unfamiliar forms” (Altman, 80) and asks if it is “to be understood as the oppressed demanding to be heard or as a new stage of internalized imperialism?” (Altman, 85). The children (teens) in these movies represent a sexually liberated, multicultural future made possible by the conflation of their romantic desires and their therefore inherently liberal identities. Altman’s asserts that “What was once accomplished by gunships and conquest is now achieved via shopping malls and cable television” (Altman, 87) and this is certainly apt but I think the grouping of shopping malls with television somewhat oversimplifies the role of filmed media in constructing, deconstructing and questioning categories of gender and sexuality. Lest I oversimplify the multifaceted edifice that is queer film, I invite readers to consider television like Dickinson, which names and thereby complicates its lesbian history tropes and Grace and Frankie, which problematizes the association of queerness with youth. Both, in turn generate their own complex complications bringing the medium closer to “bringing out as many possible directions of meaning (which) can illuminate the complex node at which notions of gender and sexuality are worked out” (Najmabadi, 28). Awareness of the tropes that are working in film to gender, sexualize, and subjectify, allows content creators the scope necessary for their subversion, an intricate and perilous project of its own.
W3D2
Both Kathy Davis’s “Feminist Body/politics as World Traveler: Translating Our Bodies, Ourselves” and Michelle Murphy’s “Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices” explore complications in feminist and collectivist approaches to care, with Davis writing that “OBOS validated women’s embodied experiences as a resource for challenging medical dogmas about women’s bodies and, consequently, as a strategy for personal and collective empowerment” (Davis, 224) and going on to analyze the neoliberal context for the book as “feminist export product” (Davis, 233). She illuminates OBOS’s historical positionality within the self-help framework of women’s empowerment and optimization. Davis writes that “In a context where the government cannot be counted on to meet the basic health care needs of all its citizens, the combination of self-help and consumer activism advocated by OBOS made perfect sense, providing a needed corrective to the US healthcare system and the ubiquitous commercialization of the female body” (Davis, 225). Even within collectivist settings, Murphy points out that these approaches have a tendency “to avoid addressing the ongoing, painful, and extensive forces of racism or colonialism that do not disappear with good intentions or by constructing spaces where such forces are not keenly felt by privileged subjects” (Murphy, 720). Self help and consumer activism are tools applicable to projects across a wide range of political or social interests, in every case reinforcing an individualist, neoliberal approach to whatever goal they are used in service of as they both ultimately responsibilize the individual agent for their own wellbeing (self-help) and community wellbeing (consumer activism) in a way that forecloses the possibility of collective care and collective action. The self-care/burnout model of wellness and illness evolves within this framework and is an incredibly effective capitalist strategy. Self-care is constantly being redefined, delegitimized, legitimized, bordered, and expanded. Explained to me at a convention for “low-income, high achieving” college students (Questbridge), self-care is the unwaged labor one performs in order to self-optimize and excel at the paid/valued/productive labor of school or work. This excellence is threatened by burnout, a stop on the road to depression, mental illness, and ultimately uselessness to society, should self-care not be implemented. It did not escape my notice at the time that self-care did not seem to be something that my wealthier college friends struggled with. Not only were their base needs already being met (in many cases via the paid labor of people like me), they didn’t feel the need to earn their place or prove themselves worthy by working themselves to exhaustion in the way that I and the other Questbridge scholars did. The idea of achieving one’s full potential is linked to all sorts of rhetoric as diverse as “proving the haters wrong”, “defying the odds'', and even modeling “black excellence.” For low-income college students, especially at prestigious universities, a theoretical and individualized future is constructed in which, after accomplishing all this which seemed impossible before Yale’s stamp of approval, they might also achieve some version of the American Dream but only if they are willing to differentiate themselves from their families and communities. The sanitized sensorium of the Ivy League promises great rewards to those who both conform and excel. First-generation, low-income students are expected to outperform their privileged peers despite systemic barriers within the university. They are dehumanized by their status as investments, wholly reliant on the university’s continued “generosity”, until they can offer their return. There is no room for error in their work, as in many cases food and housing are supplied directly by the university and are uncertain in its absence. Under these conditions, it becomes necessary for FGLI students to undertake the work of optimization, attempting to find shortcuts in the unpaid care work necessary to their survival and acceptance to avoid sacrificing their productivity. These shortcuts are more often than not, products marketed to teens and young adults which offer fast fixes to the individual impacts of systemic burdens. Within this system, we work to earn money which we then spend on our maintenance and improvement so that we can continue to work and our value does not decline. At the same time, we are blamed for our financial instability, as in the now memed millennial’s dilemma of choosing between a mortgage and an avocado toast. The dichotomization of self care and self indulgence dates back to Audre Lorde’s 1988 “A Burst of Light” from which it is oft quoted that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (Lorde). As the dominant conceptualization of self-care has shifted from an effort at preservation to one of optimization, it has come to bear less resemblance to warfare and is barely legible as a form of resistance. Perhaps the most legitimized form of self care is therapy, with its institutional backing and historical association with white and western patriarchy. Feminist projects to accessibilize or even transform therapy in order to spread its benefits to a wider audience are hindered by this history and the limits that it places on imagining alternative modes. One such project was attempted at Yale by Laurie Santos and Tracy George, the latter of whom referred to pandemic quarantine as an “involuntary meditation retreat” (Konversai). In her tenure at Silliman College she spoke often of her desire to create a wellness community that she hoped would someday supplant individual therapy for many Yale students. Although this approach has been largely ineffective in that it generalizes the needs of a diverse population and failed to consider the access needs of many students, I believe that it was ultimately flawed in that it attempted to leverage community care into individual empowerment. When happiness, or what feels good (Murphy, 717- 719) is privileged above honesty and what does good, we end up being left with just a room full of beanbags and free stickers. The difference in positionality and ideology between figures like George and "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Audre Lorde. Lorde was speaking on the strategies necessary for splitting her energies between a battle with cancer and a lifelong fight against oppression. Neoliberal and capitalist interventions into this territory largely led by wealthy white women have drawn the line between legitimate self care and reckless self indulgence. A classed split between self care and community care dates back, at least, to the Industrial Revolution. Contrasting, for instance, the British Victorian practice of drinking tea (notably, a colonized commodity) in small, carefully selected groups of Upper class citizens, or in isolation, and the practice of imbibing local beers, ciders, and liquors in large numbers at public pubs among the working class. The difference between these two approaches to “relaxation” are tied inexorably to colonial projects of constructing difference, and painted even white British subjects as “uncivilized” should they engage in these “lower class” customs. In the construction of one activity as legitimate and one as illegitimate, one is also classed as stuffy and one as enjoyable, or even free. Consider for example the below-deck scene in the movie Titanic in which the upper class heroine loses all inhibitions, and appears “happy” for the first time in the film. Depictions of working class and racialized subjects as joyful and free spirited are deeply problematic in that they tend to erase the traumatic harm caused by oppressive hegemonies and carry with them connotations of blissful ignorance. Partying is not self care but vagina steaming is??? I would like to offer an alternative to the neoliberal imperative to “treat yo’ self.” The question of whether millennials deserve to have that Starbucks coffee or nine dollar avocado toast obscures acts of pleasure which are simultaneously acts of resistance, and implies that an activist's only options are participating in capitalist self care or succumbing to burn out. Kathleen Newman-Bremang wrote in article for Refinery29 this past May,“I’m so fucking TIRED of the onus being put on Black people to ‘find a way to heal’... This is a time when the concept of self-care is rendered essentially useless without community care, this is not the kind of thing that *can* be survived alone, and it is also the kind of thing that is all the more devastating in isolation.” (Newman-Bremang). For people from outsider or marginalized groups, the communities which we have been taught are holding us back, or preventing our ascent to middle class bliss (in my experience as FGLI Yale student) with their supposed ignorance, recklessness, and inability to take care of themselves, are in fact made up of our true allies and our traditions of communal celebration which have been so maligned are in fact sites of resistance, where it is needed most. Multinational punk band Gogol Bordello wrote in their 2005 song, “Oh No” that “Sometimes when facing common trouble / When whole town is screwed / We become actually human / Act like Prometheus would / Suddenly there is more humor / And a party tabor style / People ringing one another / "Yo man, how was your blackout?" / Suddenly there is more music / Made with the buckets in the park / Girls are dancing with the flashlights / I got only one guitar / And you see brothers and sisters / All engaged in sport of help / Making merry out of nothing / Like in refugee camp” (Gogol Bordello, “Oh No”). The song’s title comes from the singers refrain that “Oh yeah, oh no, it doesn't have to be so / It is possible any time anywhere / Even without any dough / Oh yeah, oh no, it doesn't have to be so / The forces of the creative mind are unstoppable” (Gogol Bordello, “Oh No”). The song, which I’ve included a link to in the bibliography, goes on in its second verse to address many of the same challenges that capitalist interventions pose to this type of community engagement that I hope I have illustrated here. The work that proponents of self care have done to delegitimize community care is directly applied to the hierarchization of bodies, pleasures, sexes, and genders that precludes both collective resistance and transnational stranger intimacies.
Friday, July 9, 2021
Week 4, Day 1: Transnational Technologies and Media
This week I will examine Kalinda Vora’s “Call Center Agents: Commodified Affect and the Biocapital of Care” and Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora’s “The Surrogate Human Effects of Technoliberalism.” Strangely, these two texts reminded me of some of my own writing about my specific interests in Ethnicity, Race, & Migration, Human Rights, and Korean language studies. For example, I am motivated by the cultural production-- in the form of art, music, and family traditions-- of people around the world. I am especially interested in how humans, cultures, and communities are able to produce such beautiful testaments to their cultures while dealing with structural and systematic violence. I often think about what could emerge from people when they are liberated from the oppressive systems they currently contend with. I have been learning Korean for the past year, learning the language and familiarizing myself with the culture. In fact, I will be spending the upcoming school year abroad in Korea and for me, learning Korean, and any language I have learned in the past, is a commitment to understanding peoples’ cultures more intentionally and learning from them. It is a study rooted in others’ lived experiences and an opportunity to compare our cultural livelihoods. This is why I am so struck by the reasons Indian call center workers have to learn specific accents as they are so different from my reasons for learning languages and about cultures. In fact, these call center agents are some of the people at the core of my interests, i.e., I wonder what could emerge from call center agents if they were not call center agents, not forced to perform affective labor, and consequently not forced to learn about other cultural contexts in order to better perform this labor and increase their employer’s profits? What could happen if they were in my place, a student at a university, and learned languages and about cultures because they wanted to relate to others and form those interpersonal and intercommunal bonds rather than for the sake of value and profit? In “Call Center Agents,” Vora writes,
“[The call center agent] must become familiar with the cultural context of the customer in order to effectively soothe agitated callers and make the contracting corporation appear accessible and approachable. She must work to follow and respond to emotional and conversational cues and to maintain a polite, patient, and attentive demeanor during the conversation in a way that seems authentic. When the data form or the Indian agent is projected successfully, it produces value for the company employing the call center” (46).
I am struck by the fact that call center agents, and other workers who must employ intense levels of affective care, must become familiar with the cultural context of the customer in order to better connect with them in order to create value and serve and benefit the company. What if this education (if I can even call it that) could really be about the people and cross-cultural learning for everyone, instead of about money? In my context, I make an effort to become familiar with the cultural context of the people whose language I am learning in order to better connect with them in order to better understand them and engage with their language more intentionally and with more care and respect. There are a great deal of differences and power imbalances between me as a Yale student and call center agents, but even then our difference as it pertains to language and culture education is so striking and unsettling. One is a passion and self-motivated (because I have the privilege of being able to pursue this passion) and the other is necessary in order for the call center agent to earn income to sustain themselves. In their context, because of their employers and companies, language learning is subverted and perverted. I know that, in order to maintain a transnational approach when it comes to this analysis, I must consider the fact that there is a power imbalance between the united states and India and that the united states is extracting resources and labor from India at little to no benefit to India and Indians, thereby cheapening Indian service workers’ labor: “The transnational nature of the interactions between Indian agents and global customers means that the biopolitical territorialization of this work leads to accumulation outside the worker and [their] immediate community and results in a net flow of affective resources to consuming nations at the expense of producing nations like India” (44). Thus, I know this subversion and perversion benefits the nation-state I was born and raised in, and it only makes it further unsettling that a whole nation benefits from their suffering and from something that is undoubtedly exhausting for them but gets to be enriching and beautiful to me.
On the other hand, “The Surrogate Human Effects of Technoliberalism” relates to my scholarship and interests in the sense that it examines humans’, particularly working people’s capacity for creativity, or a lack thereof. In this text, Atanasoski and Vora write, “The article explains that within 20 years, half of current US workers will be out of jobs, and in a more distant future, even jobs that seem currently unthreatened (such as that of medical doctor) will be more efficiently---- and productively---- performed by robots and artificial intelligence. The author speculates about this future as one that can lead to more freedom, but also more suffering, for humans” (1). It’s interesting because part of my academic interests, like explained above, are what potential can exist for people and what time and space is available for them to create art, literature, culture, etc. if they were to be liberated from oppressive structures. So, if we were to examine the replacement of laborers with robots in a vacuum, this could theoretically allocate more space and time for humans, specifically the exploited working-class, to rest and then to create, and then to rest again. However, I know that Atanasoski and Vora write that the author of this article reckons that it could lead to more human suffering. I know this analysis cannot be made in a vacuum and replacing laborers with robots is not the solution so long as capitalism still exists. This would render them unemployed and they would face even more stigmatization from their community members and they would not receive any assistance from their local, state, and national governments. They will still remain the neglected members of their society, just with less access to resources and increased suffering. The only solution is to abandon capitalism.
Finally, I want to reflect a bit on this quote from this text that deeply resonated with me and my interests, “This is a revolution that is either celebrated as freeing humans to be less oppressed by the drudgery of wage labor, domestic and reproductive labor, the work of care, and even the work of waging war, or alternately feared as displacing humans as the masters of this world… The human-machine future thus envisions a white loss that philosophers, politicians, and engineers must address before it is too late” (2). Like I mentioned above, part of what I am interested and hope to contribute to is the freeing of humans from oppression in order to be free to live, to connect with themselves, others, and the earth, create, and do whatever they please. While I can imagine the fear of the displacement of humans with robots to be scary because of what I wrote in the last paragraph (they’d be further marginalized and neglected because their replacement as laborers would not necessarily abandon and replace capitalism), I never had read that some find it scary because then humans would not be the masters of this world. It really is a fear of white loss and it’s so frustrating because we see this fear today when it comes to public discourse surrounding Indigeneity, the earth, and climate. Rich elites cannot bear to imagine a world where they do not have control over and destroy other people, other living beings, and the earth. They cannot bear the thought of living with and caring for the land and having it care for them in return if it meant they had to relinquish their wealth and excess. It is incredibly devastating.Thursday, July 8, 2021
Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Fashion: A Discussion of Abu-Lughod, Massad, and Nacirema
Rakel Tanibajeva
WGSS 206 Blog Post 5
Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Fashion: A Discussion of Abu-Lughod, Massad, and Nacirema
The readings for this week revolve around the theme “transnational feminist and queer movements,” but I want to focus specifically on the discussion of cultural relativism and the harm Western narratives continue to have on Islamic “nations” through Abu-Lughod, Massad, and Nacirema.
In our feminist twenty-first century, gendered orientalism has taken on new life and forms. In the post-9/11 era, important issues of identity, religion, and human rights are increasingly centered on the contested universal human rights framework, cultural relativism, and the role of Islam1. Lila Abu-Lughod’s article, “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?,” addresses this critical dialogue. She investigates how the concept of rescuing Muslim women from what she refers to as "Islamland" gained traction, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11. The premise of the paper is that Western actors must reconsider widely held normative assumptions regarding the role Islam may or may not play in the repression of women in primarily Muslim communities and nation-states. According to Abu-Lughod, issues such as government structure, politics, and economics are more directly related to women's subjugation. Abu-Lughod’s focus is women in Islam, specifically the treatment of women and how it might be utilized as a justification for invading into a country and liberating its people. The countries Lughod refers to in her article are primarily Afghanistan and Egypt, and Lughod points out the misunderstanding from the people to the Bush administration like First Lady Laura Bush who believed that intervention was necessary to free women from the captivity of their own homes. Abu-Lughod emphasizes how the most fundamental conditions of these women's livelihoods are determined by political forces that are oftentimes national or even international in origin, even if they have local impact. What are often seen as “traditions” are thus in reality responses to war and uncertainty, economic and political upheaval and instability. For instance, in debates about Afghanistan, there is an overemphasis on cultural practices and little discussion about the effects of the injustices of war and militarization. Against this wider geopolitical background, she argues that concepts such as “oppression,” “choice” and “freedom” are blunt instruments for capturing the dynamics and quality of Muslim women’s lives in these places.
Colonialism, from its origin, spanned the entire globe, allowing the creation of a global modern and its subject during the nineteenth century. In "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," Joseph Massad confronts the problem of knowledge In a world that continues to be disproportionately divided along political, economic, and military lines—lines that are profoundly felt in the Middle East. He investigates how the emergence of “civilization” and “culture” as new objects of concern in the West—and, via colonialism, everywhere else—was burdened with a new temporality marked by an evolutionary conception of progress, in which a new hierarchy of moderns and non-moderns was brokered. The mapping of increasingly globalized human rights politics through the growth of the international gay rights movement complicates the latter as a reinscription of the East-West colonial-Orientalist divide. That activism now also projects a new binary between heterosexual and homosexual, forcing a choice between the two. this nineteenth-century projection of the advanced/progressive West and backwards/despotic East continues to legitimize imperialist actions and incites reactionary discourses.
It is important to emphasise that cultural relativism is arguably a less harmful a better outlook of other cultures than ethnocentrism, a worldview that has led to lethal and devastating interactions amongst cultures throughout history2. However, in her article Abu-Lughod argues that cultural relativism (analyzing someone's culture within the same culture rather than your own) is no longer enough-- cultures are no longer pure in the sense that, currently, all cultures have been influenced by others to some, if not a great, degree. In other words, no culture is isolated from all others. Therefore, a culture can not be observed and studied without considering the ways in which it has been touched by all other cultures. In my opinion Americans do not make the effort to truly understand Islamic culture; since I can remember many inaccurate and harmful interpretations circulate around Islamic Radicalists' for instance. A dichotomy has developed where American interpretation has clouded the actual wants and needs of Muslim women, while we simultaneouly expect our feminist movement to align with the goals of women's rights for Afghani women. I must admit that for a time I also thought head coverings were oppressive, and it wasn't until reading more literature and doing research that I became more knowledgeable. However, the fact is that everyone does not do their own research and take the general consensus in the media and whatnot at face value. Thus, it is important that these conversations are not only reserved for the educated but brought to the forefront, which begs the question-- how can this be accomplished?
Salvation is a term that connotes ethnocentrism. It assumes that the subjects in question need to be plucked from their circumstances and placed in a cleaner, more civilized environment, or that their culture itself needs to be made clean and civilized. But while cultures may indeed be facing certain oppression from which they need relief, this does not mean that all other aspects of their culture--aspects which may seem strange and oppressive to others--are not wanted or valued. The veil discussed by Abu-Lughod, for example, became key in the quest to rescue Muslim women, when in reality, the veil was not seen as oppressive to these women after all. According to Abu-Lughod, it instead serves as a symbolic and religious item that empowered women to be able to leave their homes in an appropriate and socially respectful manner. As I read in Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” for a past history class, there are many similar situations in American culture that might seem oppressive or self harming to an outside culture3. For example, the act of going to the hospital where an ill individual is “stripped of all his or her clothes,” and “assisted by a vestal maiden while he [or she] performs his natural functions into a sacred vessel,” is a very routine experience for most Americans, despite how it could be regarded as strange and terrible by another culture (Miner, 47). Another example, one more relatable to the veil of Abu-Laghad’s article, is American women dressing up for Sunday service4. I doubt that the American women wearing dresses to church are desperately longing for another culture to drop in and fight for their right to wear pajamas to Sunday service. Dressing up is simply their way of demonstrating respect and reverence. Yet another example is the wearing of wedding rings, symbolic items that signal to strangers that this individual is married and therefore not looking for a partner. The concept of wearing certain clothing due to social norms is not reserved to Islamic countries. It happens everywhere to varying degrees. We are all controlled by society's standard of “normal,” but we fixate on liberating other cultures as we consider our culture and lifestyle normal. We must thus acknowledge that some of these Muslim women feel the same way. Abu-Lughod urges us to focus our attention away from both ethnocentric salvation narratives and the naive version of cultural relativism that replaces it. Instead, we should ask how we might contribute to making the world a more just place by accepting the reality of difference.Wednesday, July 7, 2021
Week 5, Day 2
This week’s reading perfectly cemented all that we have learned into one key concept: Transnational Feminist and Queer Movement. That said, Abu Lughod’s writings about “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” especially appealed to me. Lughod first introduced her piece mentioning her invitation to panels that wanted her to speak about Muslim women. And she brought up a key question, “If you [the panelist questioner] were to substitute Christian or Jewish wherever you have Muslim, would these questions make sense?” Her question is a question that continually pops into my mind whenever I see videos “critiquing” religions other than Christianity, lifestyles other than this upper-middle-class white American lifestyle. If the tables were to be turned, what would the response be? All too often, people take one seemingly related event and use it to homogenize an entire diverse population and critique them. It almost seems as if they are waiting for these sorts of terrorist events to give them grounds for harassing and dismissing “the other.”
Throughout her entire piece, I was reminded of many of the comments sections and the “For You” page of TikTok and my own thoughts. Lughod mentions how after 9/11, many questions concerned the life and beliefs/values of Muslim people. However, it is critical to point out that people in America began to connect Muslim people (sometimes just Middle Eastern people in general) with this idea of terrorism. To the point where it became a social war on people who seemed Middle Eastern or Muslim. Hundreds of TikToks and other social media posts recount how the parents and other family members and friends were continually harassed after 9/11. They often include physical harassment, people refusing to serve them, and many actions along those lines. Even larger organizations like airports (TSA, more specifically) tend to pick out who they assume fit this “terrorist profile.” Following 9/11, I remember seeing a post about how people were just scared to hear a Middle Eastern language in public. They were called many terrible things and blamed for the events that occurred. People want someone to blame, they want to take anger and hatred out somewhere. And they use this extremely toxic and unsafe outlet of taking it out on people who scare them, people they do not know about. This idea of knowing especially resonated in Lughod’s piece as she mentioned that many of these interviews and panelist questions were happening in a vacuum of sorts that ignored all the complexities of the situation. These ideas reminded me about how people often view countries as “ahistorical” and put them into this single time and place.
But, I wonder even if they took into account the complexities of the situation, would their attitude change? Personally, I do not think that they would. I believe this sort of hatred might have already been there and they took the incident as a way to categorize an entire region and put it down. It was not some white Christian American doing this act of terrorism. In fact, if it were, the incident probably would not get labeled as terrorism in the first place. A fair amount of social media posts back this idea as this past year (and even before then) showed the disparities between a POC person committing a crime versus a white person committing one in America.
However, I would like to go back to this idea of “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” My thoughts remain the same as at the beginning of this paper. The question merely answers this homogenized, ashitorical version of Muslim women. The pretense into the question is a weak link between 9/11 and the treatment of women in Muslim culture. Many people tend to have this idea that Muslim women are being forced into these seemingly submissive roles. As Lughod mentions, things like veiling are completely voluntary in the Muslim religion. That is not to say however that some families or governments will not force, but even then, that ought to be a critique on a government organization rather than the religion which has already proved it does not force veiling. Moreover, this conversation reminded me of TikToks that talks about how nuns from the Catholic Church continually cover themselves. But when people think of that idea, it does not have the same connotation as a Muslim woman covering up. This stems back to this idea of the freedom of choice, or lack thereof. And so, it begs the question, if these Muslim women were middle-class white people, would their want to cover up still seem like a forced procedure?
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Lughod’s writing over “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” I believe it raised excellent points concerning the history of Muslim women and addressed many counterarguements. I am only left with “What if” ideas about how these questions would be addressed if it was a white, middle class American doing them.
Week 5 Day 2
Cultural norms, regional or religious practices, and even terminology do not exist in a vacuum; all are created and shaped by people, meaning all are susceptible to the effects of, among other social forces, patriarchies. To take these things as unchanging, uninfluenced standards would be to overlook nuance and, in the end, the truth. In “Re Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” Joseph Massad looks at the projection of Western notions of homosexuality and Western interpretations of the Arab world, detailing how these misguided understandings have led to a deep divide between Western imagination and truth. Similarly, in “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” Abu Lughod describes the dangers of oversimplifying historical influences on modern cultural icons with respect to the Western panic around “the veil” in Afghanistan, though she enters this dangerous territory occasionally when discussing the “meaning” of Muslim women’s clothing choices. Overall, though, both pieces are concerned with the problems that arise when history, imperialism, colonialism, and myriad other -isms are ignored in favor of an ahistorical, neat narrative.
Massad tackles “the Gay International,” which he describes as “missionary tasks, the discourse that produces them, and the organizations that represent them,” with the tasks in question being helping those discriminated against due to their sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status (Massad 362). The Gay International functions as a general term for the way the notion that homosexuality is one thing - the Western kind - or that homosexuality in its present Western understanding even exists everywhere in the world has permeated LGBT+ discourse and has made itself the primary channel for Western individuals to “help” those not in the West. In critiquing one book about Muslim sexuality, Massad writes, “time is not part of the analysis when the topic is the Arab and Muslim world,” and goes on to say, “even careful scholars of Islam and those who seek to challenge stereotypes of Islam and Arabs commit errors of ahistoricism” (Massad 367). Massad notes how, by homogenizing a culture or set of regional beliefs over long periods of time, an accurate picture of modern practice is obscured. The Gay International’s “incitement to discourse” is an extension of ahistoricization and gross homogenization, as “in a world where no one questions the identification of gayness, gay epistemology and ontology can institute themselves safely. The Gay International’s fight is therefore not an epistemological one but rather a simple political struggle where the world is divided between the supporters and opponents of gay rights” (Massad 374). The language and terminology that is used in discussion can have an overwhelming impact on the parameters of the discussion itself, and the Gay International ensures that the term “gay” and its attached meanings exist in a vacuum, allowing its very use to set the terms for discourse immediately. With the modern Western understanding of homosexuality being the standard for all discussion on global LGBTQ+ issues, said discussion is predicated on an implicit acceptance of this understanding as the only and the true conception.
Abu Lughod has similar critiques of rhetoric and generalization in “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?”. She writes, “we need to be suspicious when neat cultural icons are plastered over messier historical and political narratives,” referencing the how the veiled, oppressed Muslim woman has become the standardized image plastered on feminist-ified pro-war messaging. This constitutes the core of her paper, which does not really answer the question posed in the title, but rather spends its time developing the idea that the Western “concern” for Muslim women is simply hawkish ideology that also covers up a history of violence perpetrated by the West, all masked in efforts for “women’s empowerment”. However, when Lughod moves to explain the meaning of the veil both historically and contemporarily, she obscures any real interrogation of the veil as an oppressive concept. Though her explanation is by no means exhaustive, she writes, “the burqa, like some other forms of ‘cover’ has, in many settings, marked the symbolic separation of men’s and women’s spheres, as part of the general association of women with family and home, not with public spaces where strangers mingled,” never questioning where these “general associations” arose from or whether or not they are good for women (Lughod 785). She goes on to say, “veiling itself must not be confused with, or made to stand for, lack of agency,” yet she never explains this assertion outside of examples of women making “choices”, though the conditions under which these supposed choices are made are not examined (Lughod 786). The idea and practice of veiling is made as ahistorical and unquestioned as the “neat cultural icons” Lughod warns against.
Lughod’s later statement that “projects of saving other women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners” insists that concern for women’s liberation with regard to Islam is necessarily tied to an assumption of superiority and an acceptance of the Western status quo. This is similar, though not the same, as the assertion that feminists are looking for “equality” to men, despite the fact that to be equal to men in brutality, rape, harassment, and destruction would level the planet, and instead many feminists look for a way forward that neither accepts men’s societal positions as the standard to look up to nor accepts the position women are in now. Feminists may also critique “the veil” and imperialism, criticize the treatment of women in Afghanistan and in the United States, look for a new way forward without “the patronizing quality of the rhetoric of saving women” (Lughod 789).