She who stumbles

A number of things in the news have been upsetting me this week for their sexist, oppressive nature and the potential consequences for women generally, and women of colour in particular. I’m going to write about the ones which got the least attention from the blogosphere first.

1. A rape charge against rugby player Anthony Laffranchi has been dropped because there was “no direct evidence of lack of consent”

Needless to say, this is fucking appalling. A woman who was so drunk that police “estimated her blood alcohol content at the time she arrived at the apartment at between 0.145 and 0.168 - a level at which most social drinkers would be “in a stupor and may be unconscious”" can not be said to be in a fit state to give “consent” to sex*, and if she says so after the fact then she should be believed. I’d say that her choice to go ahead with charging and prosecuting the assaulter speaks to a sense of believing this, but of course her voice is completely silenced in all the reporting about the case.

The disturbing thing about the magistrate’s decision is that it takes the capacity to withhold or withdraw consent completely out of the hands of the woman. Unless there’s “evidence” that she did not consent, it’s assumed that she did, or at least the outcome is the same as if she did. And because she got drunk, her testimony is positioned as inherently unreliable, so that the actual act that’s being punished is getting drunk, rather than rape. Hear that women? “If you’re gonna get raped, don’t get drunk first. Rape is your own fault, and you invite it if you get drunk. Don’t expect anyone to care if you’re drunk and raped. P.S. Men: you can rape all the drunk women you like!”

I’m also really sick of female judges and magistrates who punish other women who are raped. Again, proof that professional feminism/liberal feminism does not work.

I’d also say that it’s a clear case of why a “Yes Means Yes” approach to consent doesn’t work either. When the power to give consent, to withhold consent, and to withdraw consent once it’s given, is out of the hands of women, then exploring the hows and whys of women’s choices to consent to sex is inherently limited. Instead, perhaps what should be explored is how to convince the law (especially white female judges) that “no means no,” since it seems to have a really hard time with that concept. Or even how to dismantle rape culture altogether, since this entire disempowering framing of consent seems to be a key element of it.

* This is not to say that all women who get drunk and have sex are actually raped. I want to challenge the notion that women who combine alcohol and sexual activity shouldn’t be believed when they say they’ve been raped. Because the notion of an unreliable drunken woman is such blatantly slut-shaming one that it endangers the capacity of women to enjoy sex, of the drunken variety or otherwise.

2. Noellee Mowatt, a 19-year-old immigrant woman from Jamaica, was jailed in Canada because she refused to testify against her partner, who allegedly abused her

Credit for this story goes to Aaminah Hernández, Professor Black Woman and Ilyka Damen.

Earlier this month it was revealed that Noellee Mowatt was jailed under a law generally reserved for gang members who don’t testify against collaborators because she refused to testify against her boyfriend, who she alleged was abusing her. “Mowatt told the court she made the abuse statement after Toronto police Det.-Const. Mandy Morris threatened to “lock her up” for public mischief if she didn’t corroborate the 911 call.”

She says:

“I only made a mistake by calling the cops,”

“This is what I get. … I’m never calling the police again – even if I’m dying, I’m not going to call them.”

She has since testified that she made up all reports of abuse, and that the bruises and abrasions she had were self-inflicted. She said that she made up the allegations to punish her boyfriend, who kicked her out of their apartment after an argument.

Mowatt seems to have no source of support in Canada other than her boyfriend. Her mother and 2-year-old daughter are in Jamaica, and her father, who she moved to Canada to live with, died last year. She was living in shelters and a boarding house in the months before she was arrested.

And it turns out that Christopher Harbin, her boyfriend, was already in breach of the conditions of his probation for a previous domestic violence charge.

Now, the Toronto Children’s Aid Society is planning to take custody of her child because of “her inability to be able to offer proper care to the child when the child is born, and one of the factors is the domestic violence situation surrounding her circumstances”. Yet neither Ms. Mowatt nor her lawyer heard anything about this.

I’m completely shocked and appalled by the way the entire policing and legal system have handled this case, and the dehumanising media reporting about it. Each self-righteous attempt to “help” seems to have been designed to coerce Noellee Mowatt into behaving in an appropriately “victimised” way. Which is to say: having no will of her own, no sense of her own prospects for survival and presenting no challenge to the restrictive attempts to aid her. There’s also a complete lack of any reporting on her circumstances since emigrating from Jamaica, or how her race and nationality shaped her choices about work, family, or her safety and that of her child. She may have made up the testimony, and she may be clumsy, but the erasure of her agency seems to be the worst aspect of the entire scenario.

3. The implicit racism of singling out and homogenising the voices of people of colour in a protest situation

BlackAmazon has talked about this repeatedly:

TO mention your name once and magically turn you into women of color while expressing sympathy for people who flat out made you cry. To turn one SINGULAR you into this monolithic beast as if the people who agreed with you couldn’t possibly be diverse interested in their own realities but some side that is being ‘counterproductive” and not ACTUALLY wounded?

The phenomenon whereby the blackness of a person who is vocal and vehement in their protest at something is singled out as “colouring” that action as racial, and is used a sort of code to delegitimise the concerns raised by the protest action, is something I’ve noticed in the past with regard to social movements.

For instance, in an action taken in October last year to oppose the nexus of mining interests and dispossession of Aboriginal people by the Northern Territory intervention, the protest was branded as “violent” (because an old white man was scratched by a placard) and one of the few Aboriginal people who was there was depicted as “the most vocal of the protesters”.

Now, having been at the action myself, and helping to organise it, I know that it ended up having very little to do with the Northern Territory intervention at all. It was actually meant to be a protest in solidarity with women in the Territory who were protesting the intervention. Environmental activists who were involved with organising suggested protesting the Australian Nuclear Association conference, and invited speakers who hardly said anything about the intervention. The linking of “violence” to Aboriginality (when in fact many older white men were shouting in the faces of younger women) in this case, without any reference to the actual politics of Aboriginal resistance to the nuclear industry (which has a long history in Australia), is blatantly racist.

But white activists never do anything about it. Often they do the reverse, claiming legitimacy with other activists because of the involvement of people of colour.

It plays into a protest dynamic whereby many people of colour at protest are put in unsafe situations because of the actions taken by white protesters. For instance, a Persian friend of mine was called a “terrorist” for starting a chant in a heavily-policed protest situation, when it’s widely known that ASIO have been monitoring her. This is a rather extreme example, but it highlights something I want to bring up, which is the privilege inherent in some kinds of action being taken by white protesters. While we’re on the subject of people of colour distrusting police, it really needs to be said that there’s an uneven distribution of risks across racial lines in a protest situation. White activists deciding that certain types of action are appropriate and not taking into account how they affect people of colour differentially is a huge problem which I think needs to be addressed.
I really wish I could link to the great discussions of this issue at Brownfemipower’s blog, but of course it’s been shut down.

Delegitimising a protest through racialising and homogenising its interlocutors is something that Hugo Schwyzer, a self-proclaimed “pro-feminist man” has done repeatedly:
“Certain radical women of color bloggers (RWOC) are accusing…”
“…my critics in the “feminist/womanists of color” blogosphere…”
“Many of the prominent “women of color” bloggers in the feminist blogosphere clearly don’t read my blog regularly.”
This is while many white feminists were raising the same issues.

He’s by no means unique in this respect, and I bring his posts up as examples illustrating a more general point rather than to represent him as The Bastion of Race-baiting in the “feminist” blogosphere. I have no desire whatsoever to start any kind of argument with him about this (and he’ll probably ignore this anyway, since he’s never ever answered me before). Certainly there are white women who make the same mistake, invoking “women of colour” as a homogeneous batch in an affirming way, which tends to play into a logic of “best ally in the room” by oversimplifying race issues.

Ultimately, I’m writing about this as a consciousness-raising exercise. I would like to see more white “allies” discussing this, and perhaps keeping it in their awareness when they organise, write, and interact around issues of race, with an view to avoiding, overcoming or dealing with it.

4. A bunch of geeks get together at a convention, and initiate what they call an “Open Source Boob Project” (OSBP), in which women are offered badges that designate whether they would welcome having their breasts groped or not

There have been many, many analyses of this already, so I won’t offer any more. There are some good round-ups of the posts about the subject, including one at Hoyden About Town, and one by a woman who participated in the original situation. I haven’t had time to read through all the posts and comments, but I wanted to add my own take on it. I have to say that my opinion of it was heavily influenced by this post by Springheel Jack (through skywardprodigal), which was pretty much the first I heard of it. I also want to point out the unspoken whiteness of both the original ‘project’ and a lot of the feminist and feminist-inspired criticism of it, which Delux Vivens has outlined.

Stuff like the OSBP is why I absolutely hate “geek culture”.

What I want to talk about, instead, is a personal experience of a party where there was a similar level of sexual liberality, initiated by a group of men and one or two women. It was a costume party where skinny white women played on sexual stereotypes to get men’s attention, which eventually ended in one woman offering to strip in exchange for a lift, while a group of men looked on. This was while I was ignored in a corner by those men, who I’d known longer than this white woman, and assumed I was friends with them. Funnily enough, it was at this party that I declared “patriarchy ruins everything” and was met with jokes about how it’s great cos it benefits men.

Now, I don’t hold it against any woman who strips in exchange for anything. I felt kind of uncomfortable with passing judgement on this behaviour because I felt I might be slut-shaming. I realised, though, that my problem wasn’t with anyone’s behaviour in particular, but the uncomfortable dynamics whereby “winners” and “losers” are created in a sexualised economy. I did feel that as soon as sex became a currency by which women got attention from men, I was on the “losing” team because I didn’t want to play.

As a woman of colour who was told repeatedly when I was young that brown is unalterably ugly and undesirable, I have a bit of a complex about this. There are two extreme sets of stereotypes that woc can fall into: the asexual hard worker, and the oversexed ‘whore’. I think they play off each other, because they’re predicated on erasing a woman of colour’s capacity to negotiate both meaningful work and sex. A lot of the suspicion around the work of woc revolves around a suspicion of the sexuality of woc. The agency of woc is never recognised outside its sexual dimension, rendering the sexuality of woc one-dimensional, and erasing the reflective, reasoned decision-making capacities that go into work.
I’ve felt pressured to perform either, or both, stereotypes in order to get recognition, depending on the situation. The alternative would be to disappear altogether. “Geek culture” has its own roles for woc to play, often as the ‘whore’, since it is by definition a leisure/hobby culture. Often, the sexism of this culture lies in reifying women’s sexuality which is especially harsh on woc. The result has been that I have at times felt that my sexuality is out of my own control.

Clearly, valorising women when their sexuality falls into a set of predetermined outcomes has its own inequality built into it, since it reduces socialising into a two-dimensional space.

I think it relates to capitalism, and the creation of value. (I’m getting all Marxist on your arses because I’m studying it right now.) Without going into elaborate detail, I think the Marxist notion of labour markets involving an unequal exchange is really important here, as well as the notion of a homogenisation of values across a commodity-producing sector. Capitalism rewards some workers over others, for producing things which are more conducive to its interests, in similar ways that patriarchy rewards women who comply with its interests (and of course, these are interconnected systems). It tends to mean a reproduction of those modes of activity over any given social space. I.e. women’s sexuality is homogenised into a set of repetitive forms — stereotypes.

But it doesn’t mean that women who do take up those positions of privilege are inherently bad for doing so, or that the solution — as some feminist strategies would have it — is to refuse those positions. ‘Reforming’ them is obviously rather problematic, since that process will be exploitative and unjust. The solution is for all women to organise together to work against the oppressive conditions faced by women, in all their different forms. And this is what women of colour seek when becoming involved in the women’s movement — it’s not about “jealousy” of white women’s privileges, or ressentiment towards them. Obviously this is an idealisation of the women’s movement(s), but I do want to outline an ideal here without compromising an oppositional stance towards the multiple forms of injustice that women face.

… so I guess what I mean when I sometimes tell male friends that they wouldn’t understand something because they’re men (which one friend tried to argue was “abusive”), I really have a point. There are so many things which are poorly understood in our society, but the “poor understanding” actually produces false forms of knowledge that are predicated on reproducing racist and sexist stereotypes which leave huge gaps in understanding. I write in this blog to sort those gaps out.

So the Chaser guys have outdone themselves and are clearly desperate for laughs, because now they’re not only content to exploit Muslims, they’ve broken out the boot polish and actually gone for full blackface.

Who would’ve thought that some middle class white guys doing sketch comedy could be so unoriginal!?!

I can’t embed the video but it’s here on the ABC’s website, and is this week’s default video. You can also download the whole episode from the ABC site.

For a long time I’ve wondered why I keep getting approached in public by South Asian men, being asked where I’m from, what I study, where I live, etc. Nobody else seems to do it, and street harassment from non-South Asian men tends to be of a less conversational nature, so I always assumed it was about me looking Indian and them being lonely (and assuming that I, as a woman, am gonna be more accommodating than the other South Asian men in the vicinity).

The number of South Asian migrants to Australia is increasing as a proportion of the total immigration intake. Partly, this is fuelled by changes in South Asia (I know that it’s becoming easier for Indians to travel, work, and repatriate money from overseas), partly by changes to the workforce in Australia that have increased the number of short-term immigrants who come to Australia to work. The majority of these immigrants are male.

The area I live in has a large South Asian population. The proximity to the city and availability of decent units are a drawcard. And if the conversation of these South Asian newcomers is anything to go by, there are a fair few newer migrants moving in.

But until I read Annie’s post in Known Turf about being harassed in Delhi by a man claiming to be from Melbourne, I didn’t connect the behaviour of these men to norms within South Asia. The salient quality to me was their desire to find some shred of familiarity with their homeland, which, as a migrant myself, I do understand and have sympathy with. But I’ve always been vaguely baffled by their choice to approach me rather than anyone else, and so kept my irritation with their sense of entitlement to myself.

Knowing the age and background of these men, I can imagine that they’ve absorbed the same norms as men in South Asia who engage in “eve-teasing”. Which isn’t to make some kind of special case out of the sexism of South Asian men — because, like I said, I get harassed by non-South Asian men too — but to point out that it has distinctive characteristics arising from its social circumstances, and that it manifests itself in different ways to other types of sexual harassment.

So, right after reading Annie’s post, I switched over to Sepia Mutiny and read Ennis’ disingenuous dismissal of Richard Gere’s sexual harassment of Shilpa Shetty.

My problem with it isn’t his attack on the prudish morality of the court case being brought against them; my problem is the focus on the overblown sexual morality of the Indian response to the case and the minimising of the sexual harassment involved.

Ennis wrote:

An embrace and a smooch on the cheek is tame compared to stuff in Bollywood lately.[...]

Why not say, I’m sorry you all are offended, I’ll ask him not to do it again, but really it was just a kiss on the cheek. It wasn’t on my lips, and there was no tongue involved. None. Now if you’re done with the lawsuits, I have to get prepared for my sexy Bollywood movie …
[emphasis mine]

So according to Ennis, the non-consensuality and force in the incident are less problematic than the conservative response to it? And it’s okay to paint Shetty as a hypocrite because she makes money from sexually suggestive films?

By removing the issue of consent, Ennis has just played a rhetorical trick that equates sexual harassment with consensual “kissing” — removing the issue of female agency altogether. Male agency defines and constitutes what is sexual, while women’s agency is a non-issue.

Gere and Shetty didn’t “kiss”. Gere manhandled her. She did not consent to it. In fact, she was very uncomfortable during the entire incident.

So defending the incident in a climate where conservative Hindu moralists have made it into an either-or issue (EITHER stand up for Indian autonomy by condemning both Shetty and Gere for their licentiousness OR allow foreign men to plunder “our” women at will), invoking a patriarchal nationalism that has superficial anti-imperialistic connotations, is a bit tough. That’s hardly an excuse.

Buying into this logic means ignoring the sexism of the incident as well as the moralistic response to it. Both responses involve ignoring the fact that a woman’s bodily integrity was violated to produce this “obscene” display.

A comment from an article I read the other day has stuck in my mind all week, and I think it applies here:

culture is structured according to the circulation of women among men according to historically and culturally specific patterns. Feminist critics have highlighted the ways that such “trafficking in women,” to use Gayle Rubin’s term, establishes and institutionalizes the oppression of women.
[...]
In addition to a sex-gender economy that organizes men into social groups through the distribution of women, there is an economy regulating the distribution of women so as to construct and perpetuate racial groupings.
- Gwen Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman? Or, the Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks‘, in PMLA, Vol. 110, No. 1, Jan. 1995.

The two issues — street harassment and public harassment by celebrities — both tie into this issue, I think. The use of women by men according to logics of capital, race, empire, and “culture”.

Both sides of the dichotomy that have been created by the comments of Judge Gupta are about what kind of sexual economy women are ‘circulated’ within. Evaluation of women’s behaviour in terms of obscenity versus chastity opposes two different systems of sexual ‘circulation’ — one based on patriarchal familial bonds that extend and reproduce the patriarchal family, or one based on male-dominated capitalism in which women’s sexuality is commodified. There’s a certain amount of agency that women have in either system, depending on a variety of things (including their freedom of movement between the two systems), but overall these overlapping systems dominate women.

In the case of street harassment by recent South Asian immigrant men, it’s that they’re treating me, and women like me, as repositories of both exciting sexuality and familiar culture — as inhabiting both the white public world of the labour market, academia, and politics, as well as the private world of hearth and home (in the immigrant context where “culture” is rendered part of the private sphere).

It’s kinda depressing that women going about their business — whether walking home from the train station or addressing a gathering to combat AIDS — are doing that business in spaces overdetermined by patriarchal domination (as well as other kinds of domination). When will our actions, words, thoughts, feelings and bodies be our own?

Just as I was lamenting the irrelevance of my blog to my mostly-American audience…

Immigration minister Kevin Andrews denied Snoop Dogg a travel visa to enter the country to perform at the MTV Awards ceremony. While I’m no fan of the guy and I’ve sheltered myself so successfuly from the vicissitudes of pop culture that I couldn’t even name a song of his, I still think this has to do with race.

In a situation where we have the American military coming into Australia for training exercises in less than a month’s time, and Bush himself coming to town later this year (while the whole goddamn city is being shut down for him, BTW), I think some “drug and gun offences” look pretty fucking trivial.

It’s this whole drive to individualise moral culpability and evade the issue of power that’s really outrageous about this. While a high-profile black American rapper whose audience is mostly white, whose wealth is built upon a skewed portrayal of black men, which again benefits wealthy white Americans (and was indeed constructed to do so) is made out to be personally degenerate for embodying elements of a culture that has both been socially engineered and lambasted, the whole fucking country is getting ready to hold an orgy in celebration of war and capitalism.

I know who I’d rather bar from the country and it’s not the rapper.

EDIT: Now the PM is comparing his behaviour to Holocaust denial and making comments about his “background”.