Feminist bloggers from Asia and Africa

With the Carnival of Feminists coming up, I thought it would be wonderful to have some mention of feminists writing in very different geographical areas.  I’m now muttering to myself about colonialist assumptions of the accessibility of different cultures. 

In fact, I’ve found a wealth of reports of feminist actions in Africa, and some stunning material from Asia, but my hopes of finding the sort of list that could easily appear down in the blogroll of Western feminist blogs are considerably less bright.  There are lists alright, but of a different sort, despite the name “blogroll.”  Very often they contain something more like the names of internet newspapers with a puzzling mixture of Western bloggers.  Perhaps blogging is more suited to those with spare time? 

There are other difficulties that have arisen, some interesting enough to deserve a separate post.  One of them is that one finds amazing and distracting stories of women doing quite remarkable things, such as that of a former CNN employee who is now teaching in Hong Kong and has provided internet forums for a global mixture of voices.  More of that later on.

If you know of feminist bloggers in African or Asia, I would be very grateful if you’d share their names with us.

What do black girls dream of?

Ms. has a short but thoughtful article on Oprah Winfrey’s school for African girls that might be useful for teachers.  Without denigrating what is being attempted, the author reminds us that goals and ambitions are being brought to the girls; in a real way, they end up absorbed into the corporate world, which is hardly sensitive to their perspective.  As a quote has it:

“When [people] approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”
—RALPH ELLISON, INVISIBLE MAN (1952)

The article, by Nikki Ayanna Stewart, is a reminder of some important contributions black women’s studies have been made.   Among them is:

At the core of black women’s studies is an insistence on building knowledge from black female points of view. Historically, almost all knowledge within Western culture has been built from a white male point of view; “others” could only gain credibility by first mastering and then carefully innovating within what black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins calls “Eurocentric masculinist” traditions. When black women’s views become central, new concepts and ways of thinking emerge.

The article also contains an implicit invitation for the girls to speak of their own experience, since

Both Winfrey’s mainstream project and black-feminist alternatives seem influenced by a desire to work through issues faced by black girls in the past—perhaps even issues from the producers’ own remembered girlhoods.

There is a lot more thought in Stewart’s short piece.

Muslim Feminist Art

Including pub quizzes!  Sample question:

Round six, question two: Jean Charles de Menezes was shot and killed when mistaken for a ‘suicide bomber’.” On news reports, shocked passengers in the tube carriage stated the Brazilian man was ‘Asian, definitely Asian’. Does this suggest that a) all brown people look the same? or b) there are people in the world who believe Brazil is part of Asia?”

More here.

Police Campaign on Genital Mutilation

Here’s a report from the BBC about the Metropolitan Police’s new Campaign to counteract female genital mutilation. They are offering a £20,000 reward for information which leads to a convictions for female genital mutilation. Apparently, they’ve timed the campaign to coincide with the school summer holidays since this is the time when it happens most – they suggest as many as 7000 girls in the U.K. are at risk.

Discriminatory Beliefs and HIV/AIDs

An interesting report from Physicians for Human Rights(pdf here) draws connections between the discriminatory beliefs held against women in Swaziland and Botswana and the high vulnerability to HIV/AIDS that these women seem to have (e.g. 75% of all Sub-Saharan HIV victims in the 15-25 age range are female).

There are lots of factors involved but a lack of control over sexual decision making, and legal and social gender discrimination leading to sexual risk taking seem to factor large in PHR’s study. To quote:

“Interviews indicated that many HIV-positive women are forced to engage in risky sex with men in exchange for food for themselves and their children. As one interviewee put it, “Woman are having sex because they are hungry. If you give them food, they would not need to have sex to eat.” ”

The whole report makes very interesting reading, but what is especially interesting is that PHR take the solution to the HIV/AIDS problem in Swaziland and Botswana to hinge on greater rights and equality for women. If women have more say over sexual decisions they can assert a desire to use barrier contraception. And with legally protected property rights etc. there will be no begging for food and shelter with its accompanying vulnerability.

I think this is interesting because it gives a nice case for questions about cultural relativity, and especially for stretching any intuition we might have in favour of leaving other cultures unquestioned. Here is a case where regardless of how we, as westerners, mis-read other cultural traditions, introducing legal rights and increased social standing for women looks as though it would alleviate a huge health problem.

Makeup and Veils

Hmm. AC sent me this interesting article comparing makeup and veiling.  The main idea is that there are some cultures in which women feel they can’t leave the house without makeup and some in which women feel they can’t leave the house without veils– and that this similarity is significant.  Although this is certainly right, the article made me feel a bit uneasy and I think I now see why.  The comparison, which is clearly directed at an audience that is more familiar with makeup than with veiling can be used in (at least) two ways: (1) to make veiling, which seems strange and foreign and “other”, is more comprehensible than it might initially seem; (2) to show that makeup, which may seem just fine to us, is really oppressive, just like veiling.  The author does (2). What bothers me is the author’s unexamined assumption that veiling– of whatever kind, done for whatever reason– simply is oppressive.  (And I do mean ‘unexamined’– the article hardly discusses veils at all.) For some good discussion of the complexities of veiling, see Hoodfar 1993, “The Veil in Their Minds and On Our Heads”, _Review of Feminist Research_ 22 (3-4): 2-18.

Still, the analogy is well worth considering, and there’s some interesting stuff on the history of makeup (or at least of claims about makeup). Apparently, “in 1964, sexologists Harry Benjamin and R.E.L. Masters claimed that lipstick wearing had its origins with prostitutes in the Middle East as it was “supposed to make the mouth resemble the vulva and it was first worn by those females who specialised in oral stimulation of the penis.”” Interesting if true.

Culture-killing

Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet discusses the controversy over Richard Gere kissing Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty here. This includes a recent article titled, “The Kiss of Death: Can a Kiss Kill a Civilization?”. This all reminds me of Uma Narayan’s very convincing and important discussions of cultural essentialism (e.g. _Dislocating Cultures_, Routledge 1997). Key questions include: what are these things we call ‘cultures’, and who decides what their essential traits are, such that some changes (often those involving women’s roles and behaviours) supposedly kill cultures, while others don’t?