I just read a paper presented at a conference (not published on the site) which goes into anal detail, fetishising whiteness and being all dismissive of “the left”. As if it were a homogeneous entity. As if “the right” represents the views of PoC equally, instead of trampling all over them (literally and figuratively).
I’m sick to death of (white) academics from the so-called “left” apologising for racist violence. I’m sick of hyper-detailed ethnomethodology being used to erase the power differentials between people of colour and white people. I’m sick of self-absorbed academic relativism that refuses to see the bigger picture.
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
I can’t believe I have to share the stage with this shit. Or even keep to polite, middle-class ways of critiquing it, rather than tear it to shreds like I really want to.
Instead, I’m gonna repost something I wrote for a different community, but which I’d like to share here. The sentiments are all the same, but I’ve thought more about it since then. As usual for me, stuff I wrote a few months ago now seems really naive. I’ve added emphasis to the things I’ve been thinking about.
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What follows is an email I wrote to a well-known Sydney community activist, after she made a presentation at an academic conference about racism. I’ll add some footnotes to contextualise everything for any non-Australian readers.
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I heard your paper yesterday at the conference.
I made the comment that the response to gang rapes in
Sydney by young Lebanese men[1] wasn’t really feminist.
First of all, I want to apologise, because I ended up making a
statement that used your presentation as a soapbox, rather than
engaging with it. But I’ve been thinking about it more, and I think
there’s a lot more to be said for feminism around this issue, even
if white feminists have been lacking in a critical voice.
First of all, I just want to elaborate on my comment about the
threat of rape, and the positioning of the rapists in popular
media. This kind of sexualised racism is nothing new; bell hooks
talks about the same thing with regard to black men in the USA
being demonised through their sexuality. But what she also says is
that this was done not just to control white women’s sexuality, but
also to prevent miscegenation. And she defines miscegenation not so
much as interbreeding (even though for biological racists, that’s
what it was; and it created difficult issues for slave owners as
well) as relationships that mix race and produce unmanageable
political loyalties.
At the same time, it made white women complicit in white
imperialist patriarchy. By positioning them as objects of its
extension, and their bodies literally as national territory, rather
than animated by independent political wills, it fostered a
separation between white and black on sexual and affective grounds.
The same thing is happening in Australia: with the Sheehans[2] of the
world talking about gang rape as if the racial dimension of the
crime override the gendered dimensions of the crime, they’ve
re-made the gang rapes into crimes against the (white) nation, not
crimes against women’s bodies. They’ve made them into treason and
sedition, not rape.
I think white feminists have fed very neatly into this in ways I
find positively creepy. [...]
I’m not saying that the race relations of the USA map perfectly to
the situation in Australia; not nearly. But that non-white
feminists have something to say about racialised sexism, and have
been saying these things for a long time. [...]
But, going back to the point Ghassan Hage made[3] yesterday, about
comparing patriarchies, I don’t think it’s so simple a case of
different, discrete, and independent patriarchies as he made it out
to be. Because gender relations in the Arab and Muslim world have
for many years been formed and re-formed by imperialism. It’s
mind-boggling that feminists can forget that the forces that became
the Taliban were sponsored by the USA! Not to mention the entire
history of Western imperialism in the Middle East.
The fact is that it’s not about comparing patriarchies. It’s about
critiquing imperialism as a mode of patriarchy, and critiquing the
ways in which white imperialist patriarchy uses non-Western
patriarchy to its own ends, and has done so for a long time.
At the same time as patriarchy was formed and re-formed by
imperialism in the Arab/Muslim world, so too has feminism. Some
(white) friends of mine were talking about whether white feminists
should engage in “missionary” work to spread feminism to non-Western
countries. Well, it’s already happened, and the non-white feminists
it made are already talking back to those white feminisms/ists.
What’s going on is a strategic amnesia/deafness about those
critiques and movements, as white people dither over whether or not
there’s a White (Pseudo-)Feminist’s Burden.
At the same time, the same thing is going on within Australia. The
other week Leslie Cannold, a very prominent (white) Australian
feminist scholar, wrote an article in the SMH saying that women
from traditional ethnic and religious backgrounds should be treated
as if they are victims of domestic violence, and given “refuge” if
they want to “escape” their traditional families[4]. She didn’t quote
a single “ethnic” or religious woman.
So, what I want to ask is whether there’s a place for those
anti-imperialist feminist critiques in the community/activist
response to contemporary Islamophobia? If so, what might that place
be, and how might these insights be used to form strategies,
alliances, activities in the community sector as it deals with the
new racism?
Although there have been many analyses of Muslim women under the
Howard regime, I don’t think enough of them have been explicitly
feminist, or have drawn on the broad array of postcolonial,
non-white feminist critique. There’s a deeply incisive body of
thought on issues of race and gender already around in global
circles, which isn’t finding its way into Australia, or so I see.
But feminists in other countries are using it to combat the forms
of racism in their societies, and I think it has a big place in
combating Islamophobia.
Can we decouple white feminism from the positioning of white
femininity under white imperialist patriarchy? If so, how?
Because I definitely think that colonial patriarchy had a guiding
hand in forming and re-forming Western patriarchy in the imperial
centres, and white feminists have swallowed the platitudes of white
patriarchy and ignored that.
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[1] In 2001 a series of gang rapes were committed in Western Sydney by young men (aged from as young as 14 to their early 20s). Most of these young men were either first or second-generation Lebanese migrants (I think I remember one or two of them described as Egyptian, but I can’t think which case it was). The victims of the rapes were young white teenage women. What followed was a moral panic about Arab masculinity/sexuality and misogyny.
[2] Paul Sheehan is a prominent right-wing journalist. About 2 months ago he released a book titled Girls Like You about the gang rapes. In it he argues that basically Islamic culture is misogynistic and encourages rape, amongst other things. The thing is, this is what the defence lawyers of the rapists also argued in their trials.
[3] Ghassan Hage is a prominent Lebanese-born Australian anthropologist. He’s the chair of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, and he was the convenor of the conference last week.
The point he made was that feminism is an inherently progressive philosophy, because it compares the past and present, and feminist activism tries to make the future better than the present and past. If we can compare patriarchies historically, then why can’t we compare them cross-culturally?
(I do think he understood the limitations of this line of questioning. I think he was more interested in inviting a clear and comprehensive answer to this question than in playing devil’s advocate.)
[4] http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/caught-between-right-and-right/2006/10/08/1160246008793.html — the Sydney Morning Herald is one of the major daily newspapers in Sydney.
Recently the Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Taj el-Dinh al Hilaily, in his Ramadan sermon, made comments to the effect that women are to blame for rape. He compared uncovered (female) flesh to cat meat, and said that if women stayed at home in their hijabs there wouldn’t have been any problem.
There’s been a similar backlash around his comments in the press and by public figures. Paul Sheehan pretty much sums it up in his article: Sheik’s views show up the wider problem with Muslim men (27/10/2006)
I think we need a similarly comprehensive critique of this issue as with “cross-cultural patriarchy”.
The Mufti is actually supported by the government. He was hand-picked about a year and a half ago, after the London Metro bombings, to be part of the government’s Muslim Community Reference Group. In this policy, there’s an explicit assumption that ethnicity is the cause of terrorism and other social problems. The MCRG is also made up of conservative, middle-aged, middle-class men, most of whom don’t speak English very well, and doesn’t represent the breadth of diversity in the Australian Muslim and Arab community.
Again we can see how the logic of “client patriarchies” is applicable here. While the voices of Muslim women are silenced and co-opted because they’re “too oppressed” to speak for themselves (patently untrue), the government is sponsoring conservative community leaders to speak on behalf of it, to aid their demonisation campaign.
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It pisses me off that white academics are playing with this economy of race, and trading on white femininity to demonise men of colour. Making out like the “revenge attacks” were equivalent to the riot itself (and minimising the racism that has fed into Islamophobia with some glib, dismissive asides), and using some ambiguous one-sided statements to support sexualised racism.
HOW THE FUCK IS IT “FEMINIST” TO TRADE ON WHITENESS IN ORDER TO BE TREATED AS A HUMAN BEING??? TO STEP ON OTHER WOMEN JUST TO GET RESPECT???
The people who lose out when white women trade on their whiteness to demonise men of colour and make themselves look good are women of colour. Does it matter to these theorists that thousands of Muslim women are afraid to leave their homes because the Good White Patriarchy has eradicated the “threat” to “their women”?
Co-operating with this macho crap makes white women complicit, not “anti-racist”. It’s White Woman Syndrome — trading on victim femininity for white privilege — NOT feminism.
Moreover, these academics appear to not know their shit. After working so hard to familiarise myself with the world of critical race theory, radical women of color, and critical whiteness studies, that really pisses me off. These people are given audience and publishing space for their hedging and apologism, without even referring to the major theorists who’ve worked before them and opened up so much critical space. It’s not just dodgy politics, it’s dodgy work.
I guess Ruth Frankenberg was right when she said that studying whiteness can just reinforce its centrality, I’d just never seen it played out so appallingly.
I guess I’m exaggerating over a few articles here, but it really is the thin edge of the wedge.
