Women don’t want rights anyway
Lila Abu-Lughod has some questions.
What images do we, in the United States or Europe, have of Muslim women, or women from the region known as the Middle East? Our lives are saturated with images, images that are strangely confined to a very limited set of tropes or themes. The oppressed Muslim woman. The veiled Muslim woman. The Muslim woman who does not have the same freedoms we have. The woman ruled by her religion. The woman ruled by her men.
And now for a round of spot the irony – inadvertent irony on this occasion. Or you might call it spot the pratfall.
As the late Edward Said pointed out in his famous book, Orientalism, a transformative and critical study of the relationship between the Western study of the Middle East and the Muslim world and the larger projects of dominating or colonizing these regions, one of the most distinctive qualities of representations – literary and scholarly – of the Muslim “East” has been their citationary nature. What he meant by this is that later works gain authority by citing earlier ones…
Ohhh, later works gain authority by citing earlier ones do they? Perhaps by mentioning that the works being cited are famous? Well how very shocking and naughty; good of you to tell us about it, or rather of Said to tell us about it and you to tell us again.
There are several problems with these uniform and ubiquitous images of veiled women. First, they make it hard to think about the Muslim world without thinking about women, creating a seemingly huge divide between “us” and “them” based on the treatment or positions of women. This prevents us from thinking about the connections between our various parts of the world, helping setting up a civilizational divide.
Well…that’s a wretched thing to say. Is the treatment of women such a trivial minor frivolous matter that we shouldn’t think about it? The treatment of women is the treatment of half the people in ‘the Muslim world,’ after all.
It seems obvious to me that one of the most dangerous functions of these images of Middle Eastern or Muslim women is to enable many of us to imagine that these women need rescuing by us or by our governments.
So therefore let’s forget all about them, instead. Let’s throw Persepolis in the bin, let’s ignore Azam Kamguian and Maryam Namazie and Homa Arjomand and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and all the other women, let’s just hope it will all blow over.
One need only think of the American organization the Feminist Majority, with their campaign for the women in Afghanistan, or the wider discourse about women’s human rights. Like the missionaries, these liberal feminists feel the need to speak for and on behalf of Afghan or other Muslim women in a language of women’s rights or human rights…If one constructs some women as being in need of pity or saving, one implies that one not only wants to save them from something but wants to save them for something – a different kind of world and set of arrangements. What violences might be entailed in this transformation? And what presumptions are being made about the superiority of what you are saving them for? Projects to save other women, of whatever kind, depend on and reinforce Westerners’ sense of superiority. They also smack of a form of patronizing arrogance that, as an anthropologist who is sensitive to other ways of living, makes me feel uncomfortable.
Oh. Well we wouldn’t want you to feel uncomfortable, especially as you’re sensitive. Naturally you not feeling uncomfortable is the decisive issue here. Of course, in a way, there’s something interesting about how comfortable you seem to feel in attributing patronizing arrogance and a sense of superiority and a need to speak on behalf of other people to – well, to other people – but that’s because you’re talking about liberal feminists, Western feminists, Westerners. No need for sensitivity to other ways of living when it comes to them, of course, or for feelings of being uncomfortable about all this sinister innuendo. ‘What violences might be entailed in this transformation?’ Oh, I don’t know – let’s see – how about we send fifty million soldiers to Afghanistan where they will kidnap all the women, strip them naked, stuff them into bikinis, and make them parade up and down Fifth Avenue at gunpoint. That’s probably the violences those bad liberal feminist have in mind, right? Must be.
And beyond this, is liberation or freedom even a goal for which all women or people strive? Are emancipation, equality, and rights part of a universal language? Might other desires be more meaningful for different groups of people? Such as living in close families? Such as living in a godly way? Such as living without war or violence?
Guess where she lives and teaches. Go on, guess.
It says Denmark (!)
What arrogance, though.
Let her try living as a woman in a burqua for a year, in, say Persia, and then ask her for an opinion?
The Missionary Position by Laila Lalami.
Muslim women are used as pawns by Islamist movements that make the control of women’s lives a foundation of their retrograde agenda, and by Western governments that use them as an excuse for building empire. These women have become a politicized class, prevented by edicts and bombs from taking charge of their own destinies. The time has come for the pawns to be queened.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060619/lalami
Of course she is right that liberation is not ‘a goal for which all women or people strive’, but this is completely irrelevant. Some women in the islamic world would like some kind of liberation and are denied it. To take a simple example, not all Saudi women wish to drive a car, but some do, and they are prevented from doing so. As long as some women are prevented from doing perfectly reasonable things that they wish to do, that is oppression, and the fact that others do not wish to do these things is irrelevant. Surely this is not hard to grasp?
But what she is saying is just not true. Forget about Muslim lands and colonies. Just look at the UK and the US. The experience of women in the First World War and recorded by conversations with them (haven’t got references to hand, but can find if requested) demonstrated that women valued the ability to go to work and have some of the freedoms in living of men and resented being forced out of the workforce at the end of the war. Unless women in non Western countries are different , why should not (some at least) they actually resent their second class statu? And why should not that be a concern, not only of women femists but of all who believe in the equality of the sexes?
“Sexual equality” . . . it’s a strange expression, innit?
For insofar as a relationship is specifically sexual, it is a relationship of complementarities rather than of equalities.
And insofar as it isn’t, the sex of the participants is irrelevant.
And here was me thinking that later works citing earlier works was pretty much the essence of scholarship. Collective enterprise, falsifiability, and all that. Then again, universities have long since turned into places where people who know nothing come to fight those who already know something, to paraphrase a Dutch writer.
I totally agree though with the quoted writer that “living without war and violence” might just be a rather meaningful desire for a woman living in a country with institutionalized violence against women.
No, not Denmark, that’s just where the article was first published. No, she teaches at Columbia. Good enough for her, but not for all those other people.
Thanks for the link, Tasneem. I saw that article when it came out, and thought Lalami was a little too hostile to Manji.
“Of course she is right that liberation is not ‘a goal for which all women or people strive’, but this is completely irrelevant.”
The thing is – if there are choices, one can choose not to be liberated, but if there are no choices, one can’t choose to be liberated. So as you say, Abu-Lughod’s point is irrelevant, because the goal is not to impose liberation on people who don’t want it, but to make it available for people who do.
“The experience of women in the First World War and recorded by conversations with them…demonstrated that women valued the ability to go to work and have some of the freedoms in living of men and resented being forced out of the workforce at the end of the war.”
Funny…I was just saying something similar to Jerry S yesterday. It seems to me there is considerable evidence that the experience of going from less freedom, power, agency, involvement with the world, to more, is one that people welcome, and that the opposite experience is not. That the trajectory from subordination or exploitation or seclusion to freedom and action, from less to more, is one that it is perhaps natural for humans to enjoy and want to continue and have more of, while the trajectory from freedom and agency and autonomy to subjugation and enslavement and confinement is one it is natural for humans to dislike. That oversimplifies somewhat, but still – I just don’t think you find great piles of testimony from people who have been conquered and had their freedom taken away who have rejoiced, while you do find great piles of testimony from people who have been emancipated in some way who do indeed rejoice, with considerable fervor. I think that tells us something.
“That the trajectory from subordination or exploitation or seclusion to freedom and action, from less to more, is one that it is perhaps natural for humans to enjoy and want to continue and have more of, while the trajectory from freedom and agency and autonomy to subjugation and enslavement and confinement is one it is natural for humans to dislike.”
But isn’t this just your meta-narrative? What makes your viewpoint more “right”?
:)
Sorry, I was just being flippant.
At the heart of academic discourse concerning “relativism”, is there any consensus that the “availability” of Liberty is a Universal desire? Or has this “relativist” pendulum swung so far away from reality, that there is no agreed upon equilibrium point?
“At the heart of academic discourse concerning “relativism”, is there any consensus that the “availability” of Liberty is a Universal desire?”
No, clearly not. I would say that precisely the denial of that consensus is at the heart of academic discourse on relativism. That may be the chief item that cultural relativists have to deny – precisely because the world is so full of unfreedom and subordination. If you’re going to be a relativist, you pretty much have to deny that the desire for freedom is universal.
To take your question literally, I’m certainly not sure it’s universal, myself. I think it is, and I think there is evidence that it is, but I’m not sure of it.
The Kenyan woman is Wangari Maathai. I found something I’ve been meaning to look for for more than a year – a Living on Earth broadcast about her work. There’s a bit on it where a woman talks about the experience of learning agricultural techniques and thus learning that she wasn’t a powerless useless nothing. I haven’t heard this since July 2005 but will listen to it and transcribe that bit, shortly. It seems to me to stand for a lot.
Even better, there’s also a transcript, so I could find it in a hurry. This passage has stuck in my mind for more than a year…
VOICEOVER: Before, I worked in the farm compound and looked after my children. I couldn’t stand up amongst people, or give them my views about things. I was not able to do even the smallest thing in this respect.
[KAGIITHI SPEAKING SWAHILI]
VOICEOVER: Professor came here and she showed us that a woman has the right to speak, and when she speaks, she can make things advance. A woman has a right to speak. And now I feel if I speak, things can move forward.
Quote: “To draw some analogies, none perfect: why are we surprised when Afghan women don’t throw off their burqas when we know perfectly well that it wouldn’t be appropriate to wear shorts to the opera?”
As several have pointed out, there is a profound difference between compulsion and choice. I suspect one reason they don’t “throw off their burqas” is that they know that they will harrassed, at least, and probably worse.
I suppose I appreciate having these foolish articles pointed out but, sometimes, I think I would rather just miss them.
Oh, and in Darwin, we DO wear shorts to the opera!
I have a friend who wore shorts to Covent Garden opera in about 1981. He heard an Old Etonian voice behind him drawl “Ay Say, Charles, look at thet FELLOW over there – he’s wearing football shorts! Haw, Haw!”
And while we are talking women, islam and stereotypes, the rapist view of western women that prevails among the islamofascists seems to be central to their ideology; sexual freedom is their obsession, I suspect partly because their brothers got knockbacks at western universities – they parade their shitty attitudes while trying for a date.
In her abstract Lila Abu-Lughod states “But veiling should not be confused with a lack of agency or even traditionalism.”
So there, Shazia Mirza.
Who is patronising who here ?
“But veiling should not be confused with a lack of agency or even traditionalism.”
It is not just the veiling, but also what the veiling is often accompanied by : restrictions on women’s mobility, access to education and employment, and in some cases extreme limitations on their political and legal rights.
Abu-lughod very neatly sidesteps the whole bloody mess by focussing on the veil and ‘western feminism’s’ supposed cultural imperialism. It is a clever tactic – of course the veil is the least of many an Afghan or Saudi woman’s priorities – there are far more life-threatening hurdles to overcome. Muslim women’s organisations (those in muslim countries) make the same point frequently. Abu lughod (and many an islamist) even has a point that the veil in some circumstances – imagine how dire they were to start with- actually liberates women from the home and enables them to get an education or a job without being lynched. Hence, the rise of “Islamo-feminism.”
What apparently cannot be questioned is the religio-cultural framework that makes all these contortions necessary.
Yeah. She also neatly sidesteps the fact that there are plenty of women in and from majority-Muslim countries who don’t agree with her. She frames the debate as if ‘Western feminists’ were the only feminists or the only women who worry about constraints on women. As if.
>>She frames the debate as if ‘Western feminists’ were the only feminists or the only women who worry about constraints on women.
This is another classic defensive move. Laila Lalami does the same, for the simple expediency, I think, of then being able to introduce western imperialism – from the crusades to the colonial era to, inevitably, Bush/Blair adventurism – as the singular evil that has created or exacerbated these extreme conditions for muslim women. Thus righteous political resistance to an imperialistic western agenda trumps all other considerations.
Yeah. [groan] I do wish they wouldn’t.