Feminist Peace Network

Diary of an Anxious Black Woman asks some right on target questions in her post about International Women’s Day:

“Western feminists, MUST WE ALWAYS ASSUME THE MISSIONARY POSITION? (If you resist it in sex, I certainly urge you to resist it in global feminist organizing!)

How about naming the actual feminist organizations in the Congo, who are working to create rape crisis centers and health clinics to address the needs of rape survivors and war refugees? Two such groups include the Association nationale des mamans pour l’aide aux déshérités
(ANAMAD, National Mothers’ Association to Aid the Dispossessed) and Mamans organisées pour le développement et la paix (MOADE, Mothers for Development and Peace).

How about naming important feminist individuals devoted to the region, like Rakiya Omaar, journalist and writer of several articles and books about genocide, and director of the African Rights organization?

This is not to just beat up on First World/Global North/Western feminism, for some groups do get it right occasionally. I’m thinking of MADRE, which addresses women’s issues through the lens of human rights, and engage in various coalition-building and transnational partnerships with such “sister” organizations like Sudan’s Zenab for Women in Development (with an increase in warfare violence and the targeting of women and children, both MADRE and Zenab are asking for Emergency Donations) and The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI).

But for too many others, I feel the need to point out that we must decolonize our feminist view of the world. Asian American activist Joo-Hyun Kang asks the question: “How do we dismantle an empire?” I say we do this by first decolonizing our minds and looking at women around the globe as our equals who are doing their own feminist theorizing and practices from which we can both benefit if we shared equally in our knowledge on how best to address gender oppression - especially in its intersections with race, class, sexuality, nationality, and imperialism. Feminist theorist Ella Shohat suggests that we begin to build a “relational feminism,” which “goes beyond a mere description of the many cultures from which feminisms emerge; it transcends an additive approach that simply has women of the globe neatly neighbored and stocked, paraded in a United Nations-style ‘Family of Nations’ pageant where each ethnically marked feminist speaks in her turn, dressed in national costume. To map resistant histories of gender and sexuality, we must place them in dialogical relation within, between, and among cultures, ethnicities, and nations” (Shohat, 2).

If we operated under this “relational feminism,” I wouldn’t have to be skeptical about plans for a UN women’s central agency or the latest and greatest international women’s campaign or museum that reproduces the “imperial gaze.”

March 8, for me, means that we begin to dialogue across nations and across cultures (sometimes this is difficult since a U.S. neo-imperialist agenda does not encourage us to learn any other language outside of English) and that we complicate our discourses of gender through intersectional and globalized analyses.”

A big brava–this is the kind of analysis that we need a whole lot more of!

Filed under: Uncategorized, Commentary, International Women's Day