Idealize This | Feminism

Written for Hyphen on November 24, 2009.

For most of my life, I’ve acted the part of the fiery feminist activist. At age 10 (before I even knew “feminist” as a word) my surprisingly cogent defense of biblical Eve moved my evangelical father into surrendering his argument that women are the root of all evil. At age 16 (when I only knew “feminist” as a term of derision) I scandalized my Filipino teachers by conducting an (albeit amateurish) study charting gender discrimination within Republic Central high schools. And by age 19 (when I proudly donned my first signature “this is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt) my transformation seemed complete. In those enlightened times, I was fond of telling people, “You’re probably a feminist — you just don’t know it yet.”

So thrilled was I to have found a word — an ideology, a movement! — which embodied my long-standing belief system that I didn’t realize until much later the foolishness of such a proclamation; feminism isn’t, after all, defined by one’s inherent, unarticulated views on gender (however progressive those may be), but is rather a conscious, political choice one makes after considering and asserting those views.

These days, a much more educated, experienced, and cynical Me teeters on the fence. Some days, I hear feminism derided by an ignoramus with a beer and the beast inside rears its rosy head in indignation. Other days, my oft-broken heart smarts at the memory of old friends and activists whose feminist ideals didn’t stand in the way of their marginalizing a person of color, or objectifying another woman, or even downplaying the sexual assault of a friend. Most of the time, my commitment to social justice advocacy doesn’t feel as though it requires a label so I have the room to vacillate.

However, my indecision piques about every six months.

Idealize This | Solidarity Tipsheet

Written for Hyphen on September 11, 2009, and cross-posted at Racialicious.

My last column, about the ethical differences between charity and solidarity, was a heavy-handed critique of NYT Magazine’s “Saving the World’s Women” issue. Good criticism, however, ought always be tempered by practical suggestions for improvement. So, for this week, I’ve distilled the opinions of other critics, suggestions of notable theorists, and my own rich reserve of activist foibles into 3 simple (albeit wordy) tips for doing solidarity work the right way.

Tip #1: Realize that, no matter how much you know, you actually don’t know shit.

When Americans set out to work transnationally, we have a tendency to assume that our education, or experience, or even underprivileged upbringing makes us both “insiders” into other people’s struggles as well as qualified to tell them how to address it. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that a poli sci major, a backpacking trip through Southeast Asia, and/or a stint as the president (and incidentally only member) of your local Amnesty International Chapter makes you qualified to be anything more than an asshole just shy of completing an undergraduate degree.

Third World activists, as well as scholars studying transnational activism, have long decried the Western tendency to speak for, over, and about people of the Third World under the seemingly benign mantle of “global sisterhood” or “global citizenship” or some other similar ideal that blurs the ethnocentrism of their efforts. The first UN Women’s Conference in 1975 is a well-known example of this conflict: many Third World participants took issue with the feminist manifesto drawn up by white American feminist Gloria Steinem, which had been touted as a common framework for action, but was crafted without input from Third World activists.

Eminent postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty similarly made waves a decade later, when her 1988 essay, “Under Western Eyes,” deconstructed the ethnocentric and ironically paternalistic analyses of Third World women that was (and is) prevalent in Western feminist scholarship. Delia Aguilar, another feminist theorist hailing from the Philippines, similarly argues that there is no such thing as “international sisterhood” and talks at length in many of her books about her problematic interactions with well-intentioned but misguided scholars and activists who wrongly presume that their experiences in the west qualify them to speak on women’s issues elsewhere.

If you really want to be effective (as opposed to annoying, useless, and embarrassed), get over yourself. Listen before speaking, and pause before acting. To paraphrase Aguilar, you have to illuminate these power relations in order to make unity possible.

Idealize This | The Ethics of Solidarity

Written for Hyphen on August 27, 2009, and cross-posted at Racialicious and Worldtown.

One of the first things a (good) transnational activist learns is the practical meaning of solidarity — which, as the latest issue of New York Times Magazine illustrates, is a concept not easily grasped by even the worldliest and most committed of advocates. This week’s installment of the NYT Magazine manages (for the most part) to thoughtfully and contextually explore the plights of Third World women, while examining some of the the hard realities of transnational activism. Nevertheless, the clear subtext of the articles belies the contributors’ apparent commitment to building real and lasting solidarity movements. As journalist Edwin Okong’o points out, the lead feature paints a rather two-dimensional (albeit compassionate) portrait of life in the brutal third world, but shies away from covering the efforts of impactful Third World activists and movements in favor of spotlighting the high-dollar (emphasis on the $) development projects of western nonprofit organizations.

The collective implication of the pieces (particularly as underscored by articles like “The Power of the Purse,” “Do It Yourself Foreign Aid,” and the issue’s own title: “Saving the World’s Women”) outlines a rather paternalistic view of solidarity, in which the savagery of the Third World must be resolved through the philanthropic efforts of the West. Tragically, for the Third World, solidarity is not about westerners recognizing how terrifyingly crappy things are “over there,” and subsequently dedicating a relatively minuscule portion of their grossly exorbitant resources to save the undeveloped from themselves. If only progress and partnership were so simple.

And: if only Asian Americans, by virtue of our heritage(s), were innocent of the above-mentioned paternalism. Unfortunately, you don’t have to be white to bear the White Man’s Burden — Sheryl WuDunn, one of the issue’s key contributors, is herself Chinese-American. And, as Americans, egoistic benevolence is part of our national identity. On the bright side, we do have one up on our Western counterparts: while we can certainly appreciate the value of a dollar with regard to international development, some of us may also have distilled from our multicultural rearing a more practical understanding of the profound importance and subtle complexities of this mysterious thing called solidarity.

American “Activism”: On the Neda Video, and Other Images of the Brutal Third World

Cross-posted at Racialicious on July 16, 2009.

Two weeks after the much-publicized death of Iranian protester, Neda — whose final moments were famously captured by a cell phone camera and distributed the world over — a couple dozen performers put together a music video tribute slash “non-violent resistance” anthem filmed (appropriately?) with nothing but a cell phone camera. Described by CNN as “a call to action against human rights violations by the Iranian government against Iranians,” the video’s creators/stars rap and harmonize about non-violence, their fuzzy, pixelated faces crooning between clips of the now historic footage of Neda’s death.

The graphic clips excerpted by the creators of the video for the the purpose of spreading their message of solidarity and pacifism have generated a cacophony of international outrage, sympathy, outright disbelief, and controversy since their initial circulation a few weeks ago. While the footage has galvanized protesters in Iran, creating for them a martyr to rally around as they strive for real, lasting change, it has also prompted enthusiastic Americans to wear green and tweet about revolution in what has already been described by numerous commentators as a superficial and ineffectual display of “solidarity.” The “United for Neda” video, as well-intentioned and misguided as any green-clad American, seems to fall into the latter category. Like Americans who continually replay the Neda footage in order to sustain a dimming sense of shock, outrage, and civic duty while imagining a connection to a less complacent world, the music video appropriates the controversial images of Neda with the aim of fostering activism through the propagation of sensational violence.

Plenty has been written on the subject already. Virtually every reporter covering current events in Iran has addressed the issue of Neda’s death in some way or other — sometimes dramatically (in the case of CNN, who broke the story) and sometimes tenderly (in the case of Roger Cohen, who never fails to convey a sense of humanity and compassion in his thoughtful articulations of the events unfolding in Iran). Some have gone so far as to suggest that the Neda video was a hoax based one source’s “obvious rhetorical flourish” when recounting the event, while others have criticized our macabre fascination with the woman’s death (as evidenced by the video’s propagation).

Perhaps the most interesting bit of commentary I’ve read on the subject, however, is a piece on a personal blog which suggests that Americans’ sense of humanitarian duty is only activated by their vociferous consumption of violence against people of color:

On blog threads, commenters are thanking bloggers for posting the video of Neda’s death [...]

I understand these readers’ sentiments, but why? Why must we see an Iranian woman die on a city street in order to understand the gravity of the country’s political upheaval? Why must we see brown bodies bloated and floating to give a damn about the tsunami in Myanmar or the hurricane in New Orleans? Why did we have to see Oscar Grant killed in cold blood by police on a BART platform to talk about racism and the justice system? Why did it take the mangled body of 14-year-old Emmitt Till to give America an inkling of the tyranny and danger that black folks faced in the South every day?

I think Americans are fetishizing video of Neda Soltani’s death in a way they would not if she were a young, blonde, American college student shot down on an American street. We do not need to see the lifeless bodies of those women in order to care for them. But people like Neda owe access to their deaths so Americans can access their own humanity.