Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

2007-01-19 15:37:14

If you followed the Burqagate wars, this article might help flesh things out. If you are still confused about essentialism and why it can be a problem, the article also illuminates, though I hope it’s not too big on the theory and strange words. The reference will also help ground my discussions of Janet Halley’s work and her criticisms of the way that feminist thought, even of the most divergentist, intersectional analyses, can become enmeshed in a tendency to represent the subject (which various justice projects want to liberate) is relentlessly victimized in order to be considered a subject worthy of liberation. In terms we’ve more commonly used: it operates either at the level of the search for the most oppressed subject by virtue of her social location (subject position) as oppressed by multiple systems of oppression or she is constructed as the most damanged, most harmed, most silenced, and marginalized. Incapable of speaking for herself, Western feminism comes to her rescue, not just to liberate the oppressed victim/subject but to justify its own, supposedly less urgent, projects where most feminists would, themselves, resent anyone constructing their lives and actions as as horrid as the lives of women for whom they so regularly feel the need to speak (or shout, as the case may be). The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the “Native” Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics by Ratna Kapur

A. Gender Essentialism Gender essentialism refers to the fixing of certain attributes to women. These attributes may be natural, biological, or psychological, or may refer to activities and procedures that are not necessarily dictated by biology. These essential attributes are considered to be shared by all women and hence also universal. “Essentialism thus refers to the existence of fixed characteristics, given attributes, and ahistorical functions that limit the possibilities of change and thus social reorganization.”[19] The limits of gender essentialism are not new to feminist legal thinking, and in recent years there has been considerable critique of the hegemonic generalizations about women that result from this essentialism.[20] Such claims represent primarily the problems of privileged women and result in the production of theoretical agendas and perspectives that efface the problems of more marginalized women. In the United States, gender essentialism has been challenged by Black, Latina/o, and lesbian feminists as being exclusive and failing to recognize that women experience various forms of oppression simultaneously.[21] Black, Latina, Asian American, and Native American women experience the complex intersection of sexism and racism. Their experiences of gender oppression cannot be extricated from their experiences of racial oppression because they occur simultaneously. They come to the law not just as women, but as Black women, and/or Latina women, and/or Muslim women, negotiating with the dominant and stable discourses on race, ethnicity, culture, sexuality, and/or family.[22] For those who do not experience such intersecting oppressions, the focus on gender remains less complicated. As Marlee Kline explains, the focus on gender as the primary variable of oppression conceals the way in which privilege may be operating simultaneously. Kline says that white women “are able to ignore the experience of our race because it does not in any way correlate with an experience of oppression and contradiction.”[23] Kline provides an insightful critique of Catherine MacKinnon’s dominance feminism agenda, which has focused on sexuality as the central source of women’s oppression.[24] Although there has been a substantive critique of MacKinnon in her own domestic arena, she has succeeded in bringing her analysis into the international arena, largely unmodified.[25] While she acknowledges the multiplicity of women’s experience, she has remained reluctant to interrogate the extent to which this multiplicity displaces gender as the central category of analysis. She focuses on that which is shared amongst women rather than on their differences.[26] Focusing on the commonality of women’s experiences places the analysis on a slippery slope where it can slide into the essentialist and prioritizing category of gender; it can blunt rather than sharpen our analysis of oppression. As MacKinnon states, “what [women] have in common is not that our conditions have particularity in ways that matter. But we are all measured by a male standard for women, a standard that is not ours.”[27] In her analysis, sexuality and sexual relations remain central to women’s oppression.[28] The fact that women do not come from a shared social position (and hence may not prioritize issues of sexuality or sexual violence) is not addressed in MacKinnon’s work. Consistent with her theory that sexual exploitation is the basis of women’s oppression, MacKinnon focuses on the issues of rape, abortion, and pornography as constituting the primary human rights violations against women.[29] She argues that, as sexual exploitation and sexual violence are experiences that women share in common, these commonalities are more important than their differences. In her view, all women experience oppression at the hands of patriarchal power, and she argues that power is invariably male.[30] In law, it is expressed through “male laws” and “male” systems of justice.[31] She does not consider the way in which legal systems have been shaped by social, economic, or historical forces, such as colonialism, enslavement of non-white populations (including both men and women), or the role of the Christian Church. Her central concern is women as objectified victims of this male process: law, which is produced by men, objectifies women. Class, cultural, religious, and racial differences between women are all collapsed under the category of gender through women’s common experience of sexual violence and objectification by men. Despite the appeal of such grand metanarratives, gender essentialism produces a theory that effaces the differences between women.[32] The exclusive focus on violence against women does not reveal the complexity of women’s lives but only the different ways in which they may experience violence. Thus, culture is invoked primarily to explain the different ways in which women experience violence—in the process often reinforcing essentialist understandings of culture and representing particular cultures as brutal and barbaric. The lack of complexity has become particularly evident in the international women’s human rights arena. The feminist legal agenda, despite its international complexion, has not sufficiently taken on board the critiques of gender essentialism in formulating the women’s human rights project. The VAW campaign has not translated into a complex understanding of the ways in which women’s lives and experiences are mediated by race, religion, class, and gender. This response has not been a liberating one. The tension between accounting for women’s multiple experiences of race, gender, culture, and class on the one hand, and violence against women as a universal phenomenon on the other, is resolved through the victim subject. Difference is acknowledged through the different experiences of violence that the victim is exposed to in diverse economic, social, and cultural settings. While VAW operates as something of an equalizer, it also sets up a subject who is thoroughly disempowered and helpless. This subject, in turn, becomes the universal subject of human rights discourse for women. VAW either erases diversity or constructs diversities as aggravating experiences of oppression; whereas, in reality, the aspects of a woman’s life which differ from the essentialized concept may serve to alleviate oppression. As Tracy Higgins says, “In short, when feminists aspire to account for women’s oppression through claims of cross-cultural commonality, they construct the feminist subject through exclusions, narrowing her down to her essence.”[33] Gender essentialism may be used with strategic purpose, but the way in which it is being deployed in the international women’s human rights arena has had a reactionary effect.[34] By not remaining sufficiently attentive to cultural and historical specificities, gender essentialism constructed through a VAW discourse has prompted state actors, non-state actors, and donors to embrace universalizing strategies in responding to human rights violations against women. It has further obscured differences between women located in very different power relationships. Religion, for example, is of acute significance in many parts of the post-colonial and Third World, especially for women located within minority communities.[35] In post-colonial India, for example, the relationship between gender and religion remains very complex due to the increasing legitimacy of the Hindu Right and their political agenda emphasizing the assimilation of religious minorities. Muslim women are caught in the tension between their demands for gender equality within their religious community and their dependence upon and support for the community as a site of cultural and political resistance to Hindu majoritarianism.[36] Unfortunately, the VAW agenda has taken up issues of culture and religion in ways that have not only reinforced gender essentialism but have also essentialized certain features of culture and reinforced racial and cultural stereotypes.