From: Walpurgis (walpurg@myrealbox.com)
Date: Mon Jul 22 2002 - 06:18:03 MDT
Another interesting essay Joe, you are quite a writer! Some coments follow:
> In the Middle Eastern countries,
> opposition to 'imperialist culture' has been considered as an
> element of the fight against imperialism. Women have been the
> victims of the struggle against 'imperialist culture' and
> "Westernism". This is because women's liberation and women's
> rights were seen as imperialist and western concepts.
> Traditionalist, religious and reactionary forces opposed women's
> liberation in the name of fighting Imperialism and the West.
I recall reading Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology from 1979. She wrote that cultural
relativism would not stop women defending other women from the misogynistic
values of cultures that burn, mutiliate, rape and kill women. She supported an
universal rights based on her ideas of female essence.
> Under the guise of avoiding orientalism, racism and
> Euro-centerism, these theories have justified and continue to
> justify the attacks on women's rights,
Guise? Is this a conspiracy? Or just a mistake?
> Post-modern
> theories emerged in the 1980s; at the time of the rise of
> conservatism, the attacks of capitalist market economy, the
> international ideological shifts and imbalances, the
> anti-secularist backlash and the rise of political Islam. These
> theories were the by-products of a time of uncertainty, darkness,
> setbacks and backlash.
I'm dubious about the simply cause and effect you posit here. Post-modernity is
likely the result of other factors, part of a complicated picture, not necessarily the
bastard child of this desperate struggle.
> Post-modern theories have increasingly
> questioned the project of Enlightenment.
Good. Universalism and essentialism is just as dangerous and irresponsible as
relativism.
> These theories criticize
> the ideals of truth, rationality, system, foundation, certainty
> and coherence. They refute a universal view on history, the world,
> and society as a whole and believe in fragmentation and
> differences, since according to these views, the history of
> humanity does not evolve in a universal direction toward modern
> and secularist norms and values. These theories doubt system and a
> universal truth, and base their essence on differences and
> fragmentation.
Good. These ideas need critiquing. Science also provides counter-point to these
lofty ideals.
> From this standpoint the history has reached to its
> end, modernism failed to achieve its commitments, and secularism
> and universalism, all became empty words and terms. According to
> post-modern views, the dichotomy of oppressed and oppressor,
> oppressive regimes and people under their rule, backward cultural
> and religious values and women's liberation, are invalid and do
> not exist anymore.
At this point I sense a profound problem with the essay - how do you make such
generalisations about post-modern theory, with defintion of it, or even references to
any of its proponents? Who made these claims of invalidty? When? Where? Who
supported it? Which po-mos didn't?
> These theories tell us that the universality of
> women's rights, modernity and secularism are all products of the
> evolution of western societies and therefore inapplicable and
> incompatible to non-western societies where indigenous cultural
> and religious values and norms are different than the West.
They seem to be. rights are useful, but certianly not absolute. To conceive of them,
and implement them as universal measures is just and laudable, to make any
ontological claims about their objective reality is false.
> Therefore, dominant secularist ideologies must be questioned and
> resisted where the viable traditions of social organization such
> as Islam can lay the framework for a more humane and egalitarian
> society.
What po-mos suported Islam? Who would swop secularism for another patriarchal
religion?
> "Secularism is not a separation between religion and the state, as
> propagated in both western and Arab writing. Rather, it is the
> removal of absolute values- epistemological and ethical- from the
> world such that the entire world-humanity and nature alike-
> becomes merely a utilitarian object to be utilised and subjugated.
Removal of absolute values does not necessarily result in oppression.
> According to identity politics and cultural relativism,
> women's quest for legal, political and economic equality is
> considered as culturally specific. It permits the justification of
> practices that oppress and dehumanise women in non- western
> cultures, when similar practices would be condemned as outrageous,
> unacceptable and barbaric in western culture.
Who's identity politics?
Cultral specification does not necessarily rsult in oppression.
> The pressure
> on women living in the Middle Eastern countries to denounce
> concepts of women's rights as western, as ethnic specific and
> irrelevant to non- western contexts is one of the destructive and
> damaging consequences of these views.
Perhaps the pressure is so great because WE have sold-out on women's rights. We
still do not live in an equal society, we are still dogged and poisoned by sexism.
What must our feminisms mean to the rest of the world when there are still these
problems? This is a mistaken perspective, but one which women elsewhere might
have of us.
> Juliette Minces has argued that they are not ready "to
> undergo an emancipation which throws into question a non - secular
> equilibrium which has the full backing of religion"
It seems to me that emancipation is a necessary condition for the full modernisation
Islamic countries so desire. One cannot have a technological revolution without a
cultural one.
> One dramatic
> example is the silence of feminists in the West in face of
> systematic suppression of women's basic human rights in Iran and
> countries under the rule of Islamic regimes and under the pressure
> of Islamic movements.
Perhaps being called "islamophobic" makes them scared? But it shouldn't.
>Another example is the denial of asylum
> rights to people especially women fleeing oppression and
> gender-based persecution such as honour killing, forced marriage,
> stoning to death, veil and other Islamic practices and oppressive
> customs, under the name of respecting indigenous culture and
> religion.
I believe it is the MEN who rule our governments that deny these rights.
>The third example is the way Western governments and
> their judicial systems treat the basic human rights of women and
> girls in the Islamic families and Islamic communities in the West,
> in face of forced marriage, honour killing, imposing the veil on
> girls under 16 which deprives them from social activities and
> enjoying their basic rights. Presumably what is happening to women
> in those countries and communities is what they deserve and is
> more than enough for them.
Here you seem to conflate postmodernity with racism.
>The conceptual frameworks laid by
> identity politics and cultural relativism prevent many western
> intellectuals including women's rights activists from seeing and
> appreciating the diversified women's movements in the Middle East.
No. ID politics allowed feminists to underastand that women of different
classes/races/ethnicities/ages/etc had different needs than the white middle -class
women who were the main feminist writers. This does not condone abuse, slavery,
harm etc etc etc. The differences that were recognised we're in what women wanted
from freedom and how they were to get it - but the main concern for all was the
same.
Freedom.
Despite these observations, I salute you for being concerned with gender equality.
Thanks for the read,
Walpurgis
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