She who stumbles

I made my blog private for a short while because I have a paper to write, and the blog world is just too distracting for me to avoid. The paper remains unwritten, but I decided to make SWS public again because today has been an eventful day and I feel the need to say something about it.

1. Today hundreds of Melbourne taxi drivers blocked off streets in the centre of the Melbourne CBD

I walked into work today to see the TV covered in images of shirtless, shouting brown men in the middle of Melbourne and wondered what was going on.

Notice how I highlighted race first? Apparently it never occurred to the news media, who framed it as an issue about safety, about cabbies wanting safety screens. According to the mainstream media, this is not about the fact that Jalvinder Singh, an international student from India, was stabbed while doing one of the few jobs available to international students and that mounted police were called in. If it’s about anything else, it’s about the mental health of his attacker.

Which brings me to my final point: are student organisations going to take this up? I have a feeling they won’t, despite being in one, and despite the fact that May Day is tomorrow.

2. There has been a massive bust at the Block in Redfern hot on the heels of the unveiling of a new plan to upgrade the train station and build new high-density apartments in the area

I don’t have time now to go into the entire history of Redfern, the 2004 uprising, or the State government’s triple-pronged attack in the form of: ghettoisation, gentrification, and police brutality (perhaps adding co-optation of the local Aboriginal Housing Corporation into the mix). Suffice it to say, this is convenient timing for a drug raid, when anyone who walks through the station knows that police can see everything that’s going on from the top of their tower down the road.

This is not something the newspapers will tell you, though they’ll happily print the two stories side-by-side.

3. The Rudd government plans to remove unequal laws regarding de-facto relationships, so same-sex couples can enjoy the same rights as heterosexual couples

I have to confess to being somewhat blind to the legal aspect of this, and to the implications for queer politics (who’s advocating for what model of rights for same-sex unions, who’s likely to feel how), but I have to say it looks pretty ambitious. De-facto relationships have many of the privileges of marriages… which is why I’m wondering what the Opposition’s response will be (not that it’s terribly relevant, given that the ALP has a majority in both houses of parliament).

4. [Something I should've blogged about before, but:] A refugee family from Sierra Leone is being kept apart because of the prohibitive costs of DNA testing, which the Department of Immigration demands before they can go ahead and reunite the family

Regarding the families of people of colour, I was thinking about something Brownfemipower was talking around with regard to feminism, women of colour, and families. It seems like Bfp’s focus on this issue was informed by critical engagement with racial issues as a parent and a feminist (notice that I say was). As a young, unmarried, childless woman, that stands out to me. It’s something I think needs to be engaged with more, at least in the feminism I’m exposed to and practice with my peers.

I want to explore this more: violence against families of colour and other social bonds between people of colour, not because I think those bonds are inherently virtuous (hell, they can be oppressive and downright abusive at times), but because of how white supremacy constitutes itself through enacting these forms of violence. How are white families constituted when they’re not subjected to the same kind of institutional violence? At the risk of ending up with a heavily functionalist analysis, what is white supremacy doing, when it’s attacking familial structures this way?

Secondly, as it pertains to women of colour, as women, what are these politics — of fertility, of sexuality, of bodies — producing in the consciousness of women of colour?

It might seem like I’m asking these questions because nobody is answering them, but I know that isn’t the case. I think I’m highlighting my own ignorance more than anything. Or perhaps the way that important voices are silenced, so we go over the same problems again and again.

I’m being brief and rather more simple and direct than I normally am, because I don’t have much time. I did want to mention these things, though.

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.

I’ll be posting more on the Aurukun case in a little while. I’m slowly easing myself back into blogging… I have no idea how people with full-time jobs can make time for it, honestly!

But for now I have a bit of a commentary and critique of other things happening in the feminist blogosphere.

Jessica Valenti has announced that she has a new book contract and has put the call out for an anthology on rape culture that she’s co-editing with Jaclyn Friedman.

Co-editors Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti are seeking submissions for their anthology on rape culture, Yes Means Yes!, to be published by Seal Press in Fall 2008.

Imagine a world where women enjoy sex on their own terms and aren’t shamed for it. Imagine a world where men treat their sexual partners as collaborators, not conquests. Imagine a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished.

Welcome to the world of Yes Means Yes.

Yes Means Yes! will fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex. We are looking to collect sharp and insightful essays, from voices both established and new, that demonstrate how empowering female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture.

Potential essay subjects could include;

* Revamping how public sex education is taught, and to whom.

* The new backlash against rape survivors (i.e., media obsession with drinking, Girls Gone Wild culture being to blame for assault)

* Bringing men back into the conversation, making men leaders in the movement to end rape culture

* Thoughts on “enthusiastic consent”

* Taking Back the Porn: How changing the pornography industry can stop rape

* The power of language (naming rape for what it is, or the new myth of “gray rape”)

* A primer for men on sexual assault

* How good sex (where women’s pleasure is central) can mean an end to rape culture, and how a society that values genuine female sexual pleasure will make it easier to identify and prosecute rapists.

* Rethinking sexual interaction as a private joint performance, as opposed to as an exchange of a commodity or service

* An analysis of the economics of female sexual alienation/oppression, and an economic model for resistance

* Holding the MSM accountable for torture porn, kidnapping crusades and faux feminism.

* Desegmenting the Market: overcoming commercially enforced sexual stereotypes to organize across race, class, gender, and difference

* On pulling out the invisible lynchpin of rape culture: homophobia

* Creating accurate media representations of rape

Women and men, published and unpublished authors, are all encouraged to submit essays. Be creative, be forward-thinking, be funny! Perhaps most importantly, we are seeking essays with a pro-active bent that offer new and insightful thoughts and actions on how to dismantle rape culture. No more “No Means No,” let’s think “Yes Means Yes!”

In general, I’m very supportive of exploring consensuality as an element of rape culture, and some of the proposals in the call-out are exciting to me as a feminist. I think that good sex education ought to be a big priority of feminism, to empower young people to make healthy decisions about their lives and bodies. I also think that sex education can be a life-long endeavour, that adult feminists have a great deal to learn, and young people a great deal to offer, when it comes to understanding sex and revolutionising sexual practice.

However, the way this anthology is being framed seems really limited to me.

I’ve seen pro-consent activism that went into a great deal of depth about the needs of a consent-based approach to sexuality. Groups like worldwithout in Melbourne have some great resources on sexual assault based on ongoing activism they’re doing around the issue. So I’m in no way unsupportive of the stated aims of this project.

But while talking about the IDA for community response to sexual assault, I also heard some criticism of consent-based work on sexual violence because of all the people who experience sexual violence without having the opportunity to give or withhold consent. Indeed, given that the majority of sexual assaults occur in institutions, not within the family or amongst intimate partners, this is a glaring omission.

The use of sexualised violence to dominate and control people isn’t addressed by consent-based activism, and often there’s no legal protection against this kind of assault because it occurs in government institutions or is otherwise mandated by the state. For instance, women in Australian prisons are subjected to daily strip searches and cavity searches, where no hygiene is observed. Evidence shows that these women exhibit similar symptoms to rape survivors. Sisters Inside, a women’s prison advocacy group, have a research paper about it here.

This data reminds me of some of Bfp’s writing about women’s experiences of sexual violence when crossing the US-Mexico border, women who are raped by border guards or in immigration detention facilities…

And I think that this kind of blatantly non-consensual sexual contact, which can either serve the purpose of sexual pleasure or not, occurring in institutional contexts has to be considered when defining the term ‘rape culture’ and deciding what “the key to dismantling rape culture” really is.
I don’t think that the call-out for the anthology deals with systemic and institutionalised sexual violence very well, and it seems to privatise the issue, so that partner and acquaintance rape is central to the understanding of ‘rape culture’ being employed.

So if “female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture” in a world in which women are far from equal to each other, then which women’s orgasms are “the key to dismantling rape culture”?

That’s a very strong claim to make, and I have serious doubts that an anthology framed as it is in the call-out will be able to live up to that claim.

I think that this call-out is implicitly centralising certain kinds of women and certain kinds of rape by crowding-out many other kinds of women, and other kinds of rape. And I thought feminism, and Valenti, had learned enough from “identity politics” to realise how problematic that is.

And in that case, I don’t think it’s advisable to claim to “fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex” or to frame a pleasure-positive, consent-based sexual politics in opposition to an oversimplified caricature of older feminisms. For one thing, older feminists such as Betty Dodson have done ground-breaking work in promoting female sexual pleasure as a means of empowerment; for another, this newer work wouldn’t exist without that older work.

In fact, the only means I have of making sense of daily cavity searches in women’s prisons, or of friends telling me about the humiliation and fear they experienced when being strip-searched, is to divest myself of any concept of sexual consent and to return to the older feminist catchphrase: “rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power”.

November 30th 2007

We are calling for people to organise in their own towns and cities to take action on this day. This means whatever it means to you – maybe organising in your school, occupying an office or a court or a police station, holding a rally, making a publication, talking to people, or anything you can think of.

The government has used sexual assault to justify the military invasion, removal of land permits, and denial of Indigenous autonomy in the Northern Territory. But this is not a way of dealing with sexual assault – fear, intimidation, and military and police presence as a “solution” shows no understanding of sexual assault or ways of dealing with it. The police and military have been perpetrators of sexual assault in communities around Australia, in Iraq, around the world. Some communities have themselves called for police involvement in dealing with sexual abuse, but not all. What is most important is that communities themselves direct the way they want to deal with sexual violence.

The Northern Territory intervention is a racist intervention. It is ridiculous that our white government thinks that Indigenous communities are unable to respond to sexual assault themselves, with their own processes and understandings, especially when we look at the way sexual assault is dealt with across the rest of Australia, by relying on an alienating, adversary and difficult to access legal system.

Almost no sexual assaults are reported to police, and most reported cases result in no conviction. This is not because they are “false claims” but because the legal system forces someone who has been assaulted to try to “prove” their claim, doubting them, disbelieving, pressuring them to relive their assault and undergo invasive medical examinations. Most assault happens in private – it makes it the survivor’s word against the perpetrator’s. The court system is designed so that survivors of sexual assault are attacked and broken by defence lawyers who only want to win their case. In the rare case that a perpetrator is convicted, prison does nothing to confront and challenge the behaviour and underlying assumptions and understandings that foster a culture of sexual assault.

We want a day of action calling for community – not military, not legal – responses to sexual assault. Our government shows no interest in trying to engage with the real issues of sexual assault and how to confront it, so we need to do it ourselves. We are calling for support for survivors of sexual assault, and a process of community response that prioritises their needs and safety. We are calling for processes that try to change the underlying myths and power dynamics that lead to assault, before it happens. We want processes that deal with perpetrators in a way that challenges their beliefs and behaviours, and gets them to take responsibility for their actions and trying to change.

For more information, or to add your own:
communitiesresponsetosexualassault.wordpress.com

Email: ida_2007@graffiti.net

Other links for info on community response, the Northern Territory intervention, etc:
www.worldwithout.org
theoryoftheoffensive.blogsome.com

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.

________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

—————————————————————–
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.

from BBC World News:

Dozens of young women from a religious school in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, have broken into an alleged brothel and kidnapped the owner.

The women, from the nearby Jamia Hafsa madrassa, burst in late on Tuesday, demanding the premises be shut down.

The women say they have a right to end immoral activity under Islamic law.

There are so many things going on in this piece that I’m not sure where to start.

What strikes me is:

1. That women are at the centre of it, not men.
2. The implications it might have for white Western feminists, in reinforcing or repudiating Orientalist sensibilities towards women of colour (especially Muslim women).
3. What the Western “sex positive” and “anti-porn” feminist camps will make of it, as it falls outside the traditional (i.e. Western) scope of either movement.
4. That it’s been beaten up by Western media who talk about “Talibanisation” as if it meant “more terrorists” and therefore “Pakistan is next on the list, after Iran”.

I’m a bit too scatterbrained to formulate coherent thoughts about Western feminism, patriarchy and imperialism right now, but I do think there’s a lot to be said about it. Point #4 is the most obviously objectionable, I think, while the complex interconnections between gender, religion, and empire leave it all a bit more ambiguous.

I think it’s really important to remember that what we think of as political might have completely different dimensions in other societies. Our own priorities may not be integral for justice or change elsewhere.