):45&3*"
Cui Xiuwen, Existential Emptiness No.18, 2009 C-Print, 37 3/4 x 78 3/4 inches (96 x 200 cm) Š 2009 Cui Xiuwen
THE REVOLUTION WILL (NOT) BE DEMOCRATISED A STATEMENT BY J. AAMINAH KHAN HARLOW
I was a child when I learned what feminism was, and it lit a spark in me immediately. The teachers at my all-girls high school were feminists; they instilled in me a passion for the advocacy of women’s rights and a righteous fervour I was sure would last forever. Feminism, they said, was for women like me who wanted to make something of themselves without having to answer to men. Feminism would open doors to higher education, to career opportunities, to more satisfying personal relationships. Feminism would change my life. It was the greatest sales pitch I’d ever heard – and it was almost all entirely false. * As it happened, the revolution came with caveats. By the time Michelle Goldberg published her hit piece on well-known black feminist Mikki Kendall, I was an old hand at recognising white feminist doublespeak. Kendall, long an outspoken voice against racism within the feminist movement, was described by Goldberg in terms that made her sound more like an attack-dog than a woman writing about street harassment and the politics of natural hair. The coded terminology was uncomfortably reminiscent of the eugenicist language of white supremacists of days past.
derided and then co-opted by feminists who had columns in publications like The Nation and The New Statesman. Monica Roberts, a black, trans activist and advocate, was a regular target of white feminist bloggers who called her a racist for highlighting issues affecting queer and transgender women of colour. Renee Martin of Womanist Musings was the subject of many an angry LiveJournal post in the late noughts due to her wholesale rejection of mainstream feminism in favour of the black womanism that more adequately addressed her concerns. These were not coincidences. Feminism, I learned quickly, was only a movement for all women if There was no room for black women, nor other women of colour, nor transgender and queer women. The
included by feminism, it seemed, was far smaller than the number of women barred from participating meaningfully in it. The popularisation of third wave feminism seemed to bring with it a glimmer of hope, but like With every article and think piece portraying women of colour, trans women, sex workers and other women who didn’t tick all the boxes as some unknowable and unsalvageable monolith, I grew more and
more despairing. My enthusiasm for feminism, once so fervent, began to peter out. If this movement did not have room for me, I was not going to stay in it. *
found it where those feminists had failed to look – in communities of sex workers, black and brown women, transgender women and non-binary people, the disabled, the mentally ill, the poor, the
I had found my corner of the revolution. Of the women I count as friends today, many do not identify as feminists. I do not blame them, for they have found neither community, nor succour, nor common cause in feminism. And yet, I have more in common with them – despite our many differences – than I do with so many other women who claim that term. Cheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” does not resonate with me; Kimberle Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins” does. It is obvious to me now that the movement, such as it is, was not designed for women like me, eking out a life on the margins. This is not my revolution, but that does not mean there is no room for me to fashion my own. *
of us. Feminism can and should be about the rights of women of colour, trans and queer women, sex workers, the disabled, the disenfranchised, the forgotten. My feminism is. I reject any feminism that isn’t. The revolution will be democratised.
Julie Umerle, Buff Titanium III, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 34x38 inches © 2013 Julie Umerle.
BODY OF WORK A POEM BY INDIRA ALLEGRA I want my winged pads to hang brimming with crimson alongside Rothko’s red to the edges with universal themes I want my untitled compositions to be properly lighted alongside Pollock’s lavender ejaculations for ticketed publics to consider the monumental scale of pure menstrual gesture I want the verticality of my blood on this maxi to drip before Newman’s carmine stroke for my cotton canvases to be curated with Still’s monochromatic works suggesting the growth of seeds beyond their ochre I want my monthly improvisations to spread into compositions that stain the boundaries of the frame painting unapologetically expressionist works for museum patrons to wring their diamond knuckles over
I want to break from form into endometrial environments measuring the length of my career sinking like sable brushes into pigments I have created myself from linseed oil and progesterone I want my proliferation of ovum to let the color tell it to outpace the generation of Motherwell’s testicular aesthestics while art students marvel at the abstract accomplishment of my red slit
ON PRIVILEGE AN ARTICLE BY MICHELLE MANGAL
“Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhD’s, if they so desire. Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.” Bell Hooks, Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism Checking your privilege has become somewhat fashionable of late. Increased awareness and focus on intersectionality has led to feminists and others to examine how their race, gender, sexuality, socio-economic background, disability and so on interact. Supposedly there is no hierarchy of oppression, yet one cannot ignore the fact that individuals’ experiences vary depending on where they sit on various spectrums of privilege. This article will explore my growing awareness and experiences of privilege as a working-class woman of colour with the aim of illustrating how one’s privilege shifts from one context to another and so must be continuously reassessed both structurally and personally.
concerned class and took place at university, yet, with hindsight, these experiences began while I was a teenager. I grew up in social housing in Islington, North London. I would regularly babysit for local families who lived in large terraced product of intergenerational wealth. I enjoyed babysitting in these large houses, so different to my own, and never questioned how it was that my family lived in a small council in such spacious luxury. I knew that the owners of these houses had professional jobs and made
the simplistic analysis that a good job equalled a big house. As an adult, far from my dream of being a home owner, I have considered how intergenerational wealth confers advantages from birth to adulthood. Housing and children’s life chances are inextricably linked - having the space to study in; living in a clean and safe home and area; the resources available in the area you live in such as good schools, medical services, and leisure activities; access to cultural capital, how a child succeeds in life. One needs only consider the child growing up in an over-crowded in a terraced house in Kensington. The variance in their opportunities, aspirations, ideas of work, jobs and sphere of reference will impact
but on mental health, feelings of self-worth, a structural analysis of our economy. To return to my experiences and understanding of privilege, I will describe a realisation I had recently. I used to long to be from a more authentically ‘black area’ such as Hackney or Tottenham. I understood, from others’ reactions, that Islington was considered quite well to do, trendy, and, as a ‘white’ area, respectable. Individuals’ attitudes towards me growing up in this type of
environment have been positive and rarely questioned. This gives me a privilege I rarely considered, but which was articulated by my students in Hackney taking part in a session on unconscious bias. They pointed out that I may have an advantage in being from a wealthier area because positive actions towards me. Furthermore, several bright and articulate Afro-Caribbean students stated that they had been considered ‘posh’ for a black person, particularly for a young, black person from Hackney. The underlying assumption was that well-spoken black teenagers from a deprived London borough are unusual. Such ideas are supported by research by French anti-racist organisation SOS Racisme and, more recently, by research by the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) which found that race and address can have an impact on your job prospects. The location where you grow up interacts with they can afford. My family came to the UK as immigrants through the Commonwealth and, although they were not escaping war or genocide. I recognise that their experiences are not parallel to refugees in the UK who cannot work and are wholly reliant on the state. Activist campaigns on Yarls Wood detention centre and the vulnerability of the women placed there before deportation or whilst their cases are being heard have shown me the differences and privileges experienced by here, again, privilege is shown to exist on a spectrum. At university I was most struck at the privilege that my fellow white, middle-class students exhibited in seminars and bars - the right to have a voice and the entitlement to be heard. I feel white, middle-class people are likely to assert their right to talk, often at the expense of others, something I have found particularly in some feminist circles. In my article on black women’s experiences of university some women
highlighted how challenged, rather than encouraged, they were in academic circles when they attempted to have a voice. Furthermore, white, able bodied and straight students do not have to their race, sexuality or a disability. Middleclass students are also privileged in that they are not questioned nor do they question themselves about their right to be at university. There is an underlying assumption that going to university belongs to a certain group and with it comes the lecturers. The Eurocentric curriculum of many degree courses is criticised but rarely changed and this theme runs right down to earlier schooling where, for example, the main example of AfroCaribbean people in history is the slave trade and even this is covered in such a way that the white middle class are portrayed as both the villains and the saviours of the slaves. The rest of the curriculum focuses on Europe - the ancient Romans and Greeks or the six wives of Henry the to have history written about from your perspective. Exposal to more middle-class households at university, highlighted the huge income gaps between my friends and I and made me internalise negative feelings about my family and myself. I was angry that I was so different from my fellow students because of my race and class. As a sociology student I was both oppressed and motivated by statistics on Afro-Caribbean attaingo to the best university I could. It has taken years to relax my feelings of frustration towards my economic situation, but I realised that I could not compare myself to my university friends because the privileges of being white and mid-
abilities. My anger and frustration was rooted in an awareness of how society viewed me.
Furthermore, my belief in meritocracy has been tested because life has shown me, and many others of my generation, that getting a degree will only get you so far in a competitive, capitalist society.
and the privilege of being heard. This insistence on being heard is not a negative if it is used to give space to marginalised voices and these voices are listened to.
the myth of education as a gateway to a brighter future. Yet those with entrenched privileges keep the gates.
Being aware of these forms of privilege is just the beginning. I want you to think about how you can challenge, how privilege manifests itself for both privileged and less privileged individuals both at a personal level and in the public spheres that you inhabit. To speak out and challenge privilege, power and authority is to create a new dialogue and foster change. We need to all encourage greater awareness and thankfulness that we live in a prosperous country. I may be a working-class, black woman but I have had the advantage of being born in a developed country and had free access to education, good medical care and have always had a roof over my head so I am incredibly privileged. I strive to learn more and to listen.
My experience of privilege within feminism is twofold. I started a feminist book club with several friends. The group remains mainly white, middle class and heteronormative. There is an awareness of intersectionality and as I inhabit a role where my race and class position is different to the norm my personal views are given some import. However, in black feminist circles my ethnicity, skin colour and hair are bound up with very different perceptions of my privilege, centering around the inadequacy of the term ‘person of colour’ in encapsulating the various privileges afforded to those with different skin tones. For example, I have been publicly challenged about my light-skinned privilege due to my mixed Indian and Caribbean heritage (I am often mistakenly to people questioning my right to identify as black. I am uncertain about whether I can participate in the natural hair movement as my hair is long and curly, despite my conscious political decision not to straighten my hair. These experiences have made me question what privileges I have and recognise which of these privileges I can challenge and where I can make a difference - for example by giving a voice to other women. Occasionally I have a feeling of rootlessness within feminist contexts, having too much privilege in one context and not enough in others. For example, I have light-skinned privilege but this not approximate to and does not confer on me all the advantages of white privilege. I see a parallel between my fellow students at university and in mainstream feminism where white and sometimes middle-class feminists insist on having a voice
WHAT IS CONCIENTIOUS FEMINISM? AN EXCERPT BY MINNA SALAMI
In July 1992, an international conference on
one, black or white, has the right to insult our wife”.
an interdisciplinary and international conference about African women in Africa.
Then suddenly like a rainstorm during a drought, a delegate (of African American heritage) spoke up. Why not have a dialogue between the oppressor and the oppressed, she suggested. Others agreed, the best approach would be to talk openly about racism. The chair of the local organising committee, Julie Okpala, shared in a personal
The conference, which took place in the Eastern town of Nsukka during an unusually dry week in July (precipitation for this month is normally high in the region) kicked off jubilantly matching the expectations of the excited delegates. The camaraderie was short lived. On day two the programme convenor, professor of women’s and African studies, Obioma Nnaemeka, found herself having to respond to the question of whether or seven hundred participants) should be able to “present papers on black women’s experiences”. Some delegates felt that white women, guilty of discrimination against black women in their home countries, should not be allowed to take part. The sessions should be a safe space for black women, they argued. Nnaemeka organised an open session to discuss there was weeping, shouting, yelling. The black delegates who had raised the issue threatened that they would not participate if white women did. This in turn led to tension among black women because it was a group of African-American and Black-British women who demanded the exclusion while women from the hosting country vehemently opposed it. Pushing out visitors of whatever race was contrary to Nigerian, Igbo (to be precise), customs, they argued. When the exclusion of a Bulgarian woman married to a Nigerian man was announced, the Nigerian delegates shouted, “No
resolved by a decision to allow white participants to present their papers” while women of African heritage still got an opportunity to explore their own realities in a separate space. Peace was restored and the conference proceeded, if carefully. Toxic feminism
Online Toxic Wars“, a recent article at The Nation by Michelle Goldberg. In the piece, Goldberg argues, as the title implies, that online feminism has become so toxic it is hurting the movement. The toxicity is blamed on a form of intersectionality that Goldberg calls the “dogma that’s being enforced in online feminist spaces”. While the article is well-written and resonant in parts (I also have taken issue with Check Your Privilege type intersectionality before), it is nevertheless an example of hype. And as Public Enemy said, don’t believe the hype! The politics of feminist solidarity does not hold a black/white binary (as The Nation article disingenuously implies). Yes some feminists on Twitter but if Goldberg had eschewed the stylish trickery to instead look equally into representation and visibility it would have become clear that what often seems to
be “online trashing” is in fact an outcry similar to the one that occurred in Nsukka in 1992. So, why do these outcries happen? The simple answer is because the very device that patriarchy uses to dominate women – namely the dehumanising of them – is too frequently used see this in caricature cakes of African women, for example, or in videos by white artists that use black women as tropes. Women of colour remain hurt by negligence to legacies that continue to affect black populations so widely. This is why the Nation piece is divisive, it is a four page article on a reaction with hardly any reference to the cause. It is not the rage and bitterness of racial exclusion that causes outcries but rather the lack of sympathy and outright ambivalence towards it.
perhaps no right or wrong to be found in the controversy. The conference was not for but about African heritage women so the white participants had every right to be there. On the other hand, the systemic exclusion of black women in the west causes deep, legitimate wounds. The ordeal simply demonstrates how important it is to communicate
Conscientious Feminism And here is where we introduce conscientious feminism! Conscientious feminism is approaching feminism with meticulous care. It is diligently seeking to understand the structures, attitudes and institutions that oppress women and subsequently oppression of women of one’s race, one’s age, one’s tribe, one’s class. But of ALL women. This is not the same as everyone getting along. God, no. In fact conscientious feminism is not
to move forward. But it is about moving forward rather than getting stuck. Oppression is not banal and we can not behave in banal ways to end it. Conscientious feminism is approaching uncomfortable truths in a complex and careful manner with the goal of empowering all women to be their full selves.
Originally published on MsAfropolitan and expanded in
WHITE BLIGHT AN EXCERPT BY ATHENA FARROKHZAD
My family arrived here in a Marxist tradition
Weighed the pros and cons of the plastic Christmas tree
as if the sounds that came out of her mouth
My mother let bleach run through her syntax
My mother built us a future consisting of quantity of life In the suburban basement she lined up canned goods
In the evenings she searched for recipes and peeled potatoes in the Jansson’s temptation casserole
My mother said: It seems it has never occurred to you that it is from your name civilization descends
Mothers and languages resembles each other in that they incessantly lie about everything My mother said: All families have their stories but for them to emerge demands someone
There is a muteness that cannot be translated
My grandmother said: Maybe one day
My mother said: Maybe one day on the other side of this unfortunate lie
NO TITLE WILL DO THEM JUSTICE A POEM BY MICA HIND “I often wonder, if we shot one “poofter” GBLT, whatevers, whether the next 99 would decide on balance, that they weren't after-all?”
Shot. Shot in the buttocks. Shot by the cops, beaten and stabbed, chucked from a rooftop, mutilated, murdered, shot with a shotgun, shot to death, shot in the face, shot in the head, blunt force trauma, internal injuries, killed by her father. Stabbed in the back a hundred and twenty one times. Shot shot shot shot shot
once in the back of the head twice in the groin and dumped in the street, three times in the face four times, six times at point blank range
Shot ten times. Brutally beaten about the head and ears, then strangled, stabbed deeply in her chest and breast area between I see him there with his impassive eyes and his moustache that looks ripped from a cheap disguise, of a kindly old chap, a harmless eccentric in who's lap you would sit, and kindly presented with Wurthers Originals you'd suck up his shit.
He'd regale you with tales of “Back in my day...” “When vigorous exercise kept poofters at bay. “Cold showers and lessons in manly endeavour would never result in a 'tranny,' not ever!” And on and on with his mindless blether, till you're hypnotised and, desensitised, you dismiss him (as you oughta) I mean, he's just one, just one more UKIP supporter, right? But...he looks so jolly, with a glint in his eye, and he looks down at you with a wink and a smile, and he says, “I often wonder...”
Zanele Muholi, Miss D’vine III, 2007 © 2007 Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg. Zanele Muholi, Miss D’vine I, 2007 © 2007 Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ JUDITH BUTLER TO BE QUEER A COMMENT BY MADS ANANDA LODAHL
Do you sometimes think you ought to read a book by Judith Butler because you’re queer? But every time you try everything starts spinning and you get so terribly sleepy? Don’t worry. You are not the only one. timate her importance to the queer movement, but many people think her books are boring or hard to understand. The good news is you do not have to read them to be queer. ‘Queer’ does not belong solely to the academics and their complicated theories, the artists and their in-your-face rhetorics. Queer belongs to World Order throws its punches. Academia is not for everyone University and the knowledge produced there are important. Academics have made a career out of thinking, so they are really good at it, and we can learn much about ourselves and each other from their books and thoughts. But the academic world is also part of a power structure in society. Not everyone has formal access to a university, and not everyone understands the language spoken there. Not everyone can read an academic text. In fact some people cannot read at all. That does not mean they are stupid, just that they have not acquired the academic language. It does not mean either that they do not have valuable and important queer experiences or can be part of a queer community. When it is seen as more valuable to be able to read an academic book than to repair an electrical installation or write a song, it is because we live in a society in which academic professions
are seen as more important than other professions. And this is something we should be critical of. Just like we cannot exclude people of colour, women, men, ‘party-gays’, or heterosexuals, we cannot exclude anyone for not being able to read academic books. Or for not wanting to. Many ways to learn There are many ways to get knowledge. You can spend a long time reading Gender Trouble, or you can spend your time reading queer blogs or going to workshops or talking to people. If we reproduce the idea that the only important knowledge is produced in universities and the only real language to use when talking about queer issues is academia, then we are not really that progressive. Let us make space for a more progressive idea about knowledge, learning and education in which songs, stand up comedy, theatre, movies, self-published books, slogans and chants are part of our knowledge alongside novels, articles and academic literature. Butler’s weapons
The Straight World Order. And each warrior must Judith Butler is intelligent, one of her sharpest little knives is her thinking, so she chose university, where you get respected if you
can write long, complicated texts that make your subject seem important and serious. Part of Butler’s battle was to make people acknowledge that queer theory is something important and serious. Had she written in the language of Queer Nation, she would never have succeeded. But Butler is intelligent, so she writes twisted texts to convince her colleagues that she is writing about something important. Like the Turkish astronomer in The Little Prince who won Western suit. In other words, do not be ashamed if you think her books are boring and hard to read. They are supposed to be. And not everybody is supposed to in! Room for diversity In the queer scene we appreciate different genders and sexualities. So let us embrace to tell, explain, and negotiate. We appreciate people who do not prescribe to any certain gender or sexuality at all so maybe we can also appreciate people who are simply confused when it comes to gender. Queer theory found approval in academia thanks to Butler, Halberstam, Haraway, Sedgwick, Foucault, and their hard-to-read books (and their intelligent and original thoughts, of course). They chose language as their weapon. weapon of choice?
GREETINGS A POEM BY WILLIAM LUKAS
Welcome to the United States. Your phone, that has synced your bank account information, monplace for residents and workers to stop everything that they are doing to watch videos of cute animals and grown men in spandex tackle one another and score what is
dreaming; stopping to engage in active listening with a friend, family member, coworker, or stranger; questioning powers, privileges, inequalities, and histories, etc.) are deemed dangerous and threatening to the State and are punishable by law. While the United States remains the only country in the history of the universe to drop a nuclear bomb and also has the highest incarceration rate in the world, our country offers award-winning wealth inequalities and defunded, broken education systems that we hope you and your family will have hope in. Again, welcome to the United States. Please mind the drones as you pass through your last checkpoint.
A QUEER INTERNATIONAL? AN ANALYSIS BY JONNY TYNDALL
“One week after Fatah and Hamas announced ‘unity’, three Jewish settlers disappeared. No
one claimed responsibility, no one observed any foul play. Yet, the Israeli government announced that they had been kidnapped by Hamas and began an even more severe reign of terror. They have arrested hundreds of people, murdered people, destroyed and invaded homes and universities, and Israeli soldiers have taken over the center of Ramallah.” Israel has “started actively murdering Gaza,” with over 2,000 deaths recorded as of August 18, 2014. “Yet the US media is barely reporting these events nor their impact more communities are signing on to Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. [BDS] Academics, students, churches, Jews, African-Americans, artists and queers are waking up to their responsibilities in larger and larger numbers. But, it’s not making an impact. The future is in the hands of the bystanders. Will we or won’t we allow this grotesque and barbaric injustice to continue?” These are the words of the novelist, LGBTQ activist and academic, Sarah Schulman, in recent conversation with me about her latest work, Israel/ Palestine and the Queer International. This tracks her growing awareness of the Palestinian liber-
one offers solidarity and practical support to queer and marginalised communities around the world without falling into the trap of ethnocentrism and appropriating marginalised voices. Schulman reveals that the name ‘Queer International’ emerged as a play on ‘Queer Nation’, movement. After rejecting a call to speak at an an offshoot of ACT UP, a campaign group that LGBTQ conference at Tel Aviv University, she made gained traction in the 1990s in its engagment alternative plans, touring various other queer with queer issues away from HIV/Aids. The term events and giving talks in Israel and the West ‘international’, she felt, communicated the Bank. Schulman then organised a tour of America communist idea of national boundaries, which are for a collection of Palestinian queer leaders in rejected in favour of a joint, borderless, common order to bring to light the Palestinian struggle and to generate solidarity. Through her book ences the Palestinian academic Joseph Massad’s Schulman represents the feelings and desires of term, ‘Gay International’, which refers to Western the queer Palestinians that she meets, giving us human rights groups that impose concepts of homoa snapshot into the fast-changing world of queer sexuality on Palestinian sex between men. It is Palestinian activism in 2011. Schulman’s ‘Queer International’ as an emerging that brings queer liberation and feminism to the movement with broader politics than just those principles of international autonomy from occu- related to sexuality. This is distinct from the assimilationist and homo-nationalist LGBT movement. ‘Queer International’, like any movement, has its strengths and limitations. This article will this idea of a global bond amongst queers by explore these, asking whether there is a common suggesting that the there are universal traits, bond that unites queers across the world and how such as needing “each other for love and sex”
which “creates a kind of interest, a bond of attention, and some kind of recognition that in some cases are transcendent.” This need for love and sex creates an awareness of, and interest in, other queer people around the world. Responding to a question at a talk in Tel Aviv about her book on familial homophobia, Schulman elaborates on this point. She states that ‘there is a universal reality, which is that in every country and every ethnicity group, the perception of heterosexuals as “neutral, natural, objective and value-free, and just the way things are” is a problem for queers however they are constructed.’ allows for the bond of solidarity necessary for the existence of the ‘Queer International’. The Queer International can, then, be seen as an antidote to the problems associated with Massad’s ‘Gay International.’ He argues that the “categories of gay and lesbian are not universal at all,” rather, they derive from a language of organisations. This “catch-all” term relates to those organisations whose agendas, according to Massad, are borne from a desire to “protect” LGBTQ people by imposing a Western model of gender and of Western identity categories of sexuality is entirely incongruous in the Arab world, and is reminiscent of a colonial desire to regulate sexuality. Indeed, Massad is right to demonstrate how subjectivities are products of historical, geographical, linguistic and socio-political factors. Yet this should not detract from the fact that – as Schulman documents in her book – there are certain Palestinians who she has encountered that have adopted, use and identify with terms such as ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘transgender’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘queer’. There are also groups that do not use any of these terms, such as ‘alQaws for sexual and gender diversity in Palestinian society’. They work with, and not for, the LGBTQ community for a more inclusive and equal society whilst recognising that there is a huge diversity in Palestinian sexuality and the way people identify themselves.
This social activism – embracing both those who do and do not identify with the LGBTQ-acronym – beyond just sexuality rights manages to simultaneously project a different world-view from that of Massad whilst not being in opposition to his arguments. Moving towards considering Queer International from a practical standpoint will unearth the for action on the basis of particular identity. Joshua Gamson, in an article entitled Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma, demonstrates how the use of the word ‘queer’ in activism often proves divisive amongst the LGBTQ community, tion, over generational differences, over who is considered ‘us’ and who gets to decide.’ (390) If one agrees with Gamson, that ‘queer’ refers to a project of destabilising norms, dismantling identity labels and disrupting dominant discourse, is it not then problematic to found and organise groups, given its inherent deconstructive political aspect, with an onus on, and basis of, LGBTQ
due to being an LGBTQ person not contribute to project aims to deconstruct? However, Schulman, with her experience of organising campaigns and her activism with ACT UP, counters this line of questioning with the simple response of, “how else would you do it? From the point of view of real organising, any base that people relate to is helpful … My job, as a person acting to support Palestinians and end the Occupation, is to work inside communities that I understand and where I have credibility.” Schulman argues that constituency-based organising is the most effective way to bring about change, whilst concurrently conceding that it is not perfect. For her, such organisation does not involve putting people into boxes, but rather observing how people group themselves and politically mobilising these factions. For those of us who believe in a cause and want to incur real change, we must then decide where on the line
between theory and practice we want our action to have an effect. If one takes the decision to help, to stand with, or to act for, LGBTQ people in other parts of the world, whether or not we believe in the concept of the Queer International, how do we do so without imposing our own value systems or exacerbating existing problems due to an ethnocentric outlook? Schulman raises the issue of gay and queer imperialism a number of times throughout the book and questions whether it means, ‘equating a nation’s “gay friendliness” with its tolerance or level of democracy’ (38–9), the way that ‘anti-gay policies by some Muslims are used are made to change the way that queer groups and campaigns operate in the non-Western world in order to make them more palatable or easier to On this point, Schulman offers many important ideas for practical action. She discusses how Palestinian queer movements have been very rigorous about establishing their own trajectory away from Western agendas, and how they have called for global support for, and solidarity with, their current position under occupation.
protest Israeli cruelty, participate in Palestinian solidarity, and to use social media to communicate information about Palestinian suffering and resistance.” The pitfalls of gay imperialism can be avoided, then, by listening and responding to the needs and requests of queer Palestinians. It spokesperson for a cause, often claiming to know what is best for those they appear to represent. Schulman, however, takes a practical approach, demonstrated by helping to open the channels of dialogue between members of the queer Palestinian community and the queer community in the U.S. Using her privileged position to facilitate such discussions serves to raise awareness in the spheres in which she has credibility, rather than speaking for Palestinians themselves. There is often the accusation that theory fails
actions may bring to people. However, theoretical debates inform activism and activism informs theoretical debate. Issues relating to the queer and continue to Therefore it is actively try and this Schulman’s
be, matters of life and death. vital to take a stand and to shape the world. In order to do last piece of advice is hugely
concrete real actions, not symbolic ones. Apply qualities of fairness, self-criticism and open discussion while interrupting scapegoating of others at all levels”.
Chi Peng, Consubstantiality-1, 2003, 178 x 120 cm Š 2003 Chi Peng.
USE YOUR PRIVILEGE A CONVERSATION BY GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK AND BJØRK GRUE LIDIN
BGL: What do you think of the demand to have a group that is already somewhat con‘check your privilege’ currently popular in stituted in their opinions. Like the Tiananmen Square thing – that is the most famous use progressive circles? GCS: I know nothing about the demands so of social media. Social media wasn’t really I will not take a position for or against it. used to change anyone’s mind or to construct I myself think, through my many years of a movement. It was used to strategically hands-on work, that one should use one’s increase the numbers. Social media is a privilege for people who are less privileged, quantitative instrument therefore one has to telling them that one is using one’s privilege know how to use it. and the sooner they get rid of the privileged BGL: I would like to turn the focus to the person the better. This has been my policy – I myself as the privileged person. I’m not name of the publication. The name refers to really interested in checking my own privilege; the atrocities imposed on the female body as a consequence of pathology and the power I think it is too narcissistic. given psychology to dominate the feminine BGL: Many feminist organisations and indi- body - hence the social stigma of being viduals today use social media as a platform ‘hysterical’. I would like to ask you how might for their struggles. Do you regard social contemporary feminists appropriate the media as a platform that should be promoted? meaning of the word ‘hysteria’. And what Are there dangers attached to this huge dangers are attached to this appropriation? GCS: platform? It is like saying “I am hysterical” and then GCS: there are dangers and yes it can be used. It not presuming to take that as a negative depends on what you use it for, whom you want adjective. There is no real danger in it if to address, how located the struggle is. It the other person actually claims it. When is an instrument - it’s not a liberation tool. you claim what is given as a criticism from It is obvious isn’t it? If you use it, it is the other side, then the claim turns it an unseen audience therefore you have to say around and I don’t think there is any parmany more things to modify what you are ticular danger. But on the other hand I do saying and generally speaking that’s not how think that the history of ‘hysteria’ as a struggle is organised. It is as simple as way of listening to save rather than torturing that, I don’t think it is useless, I think the female body is something that one should it should be used carefully like any other pay some attention to. The history of the tool. I mean talking is telecommunication, use of hysteria; how it was found within a it is between you and me - there is a distance phallocentric world to at least attempt to - therefore you have to be careful what you listen to women. You folks are so worried say. Freud and Charcot, used their privilege to groups, which can use social media. If you listen to women rather than only to diagnose. are going to use it, you probably have to This reminds me of people talking about big
of view, not realising that there were millions of people who would have been harmed if those watershed male intellectuals had not been alive. Thus we prove that we are ‘hysterical’ in the sense of the other side because in order to be able to claim ‘hysteria’ we have to be someone who can say yes to the other side. Otherwise it is a position of weakness, a reactive position. Therefore, I would say what I look at is how hard my brother tried at the beginning of the last century to listen to women rather than just to torture them, that’s how ‘hysteria’ was used. So I look for ways of dealing with it. I belong to a much earlier generation, the same generation as Juliet Mitchell. And what
that the details of psychoanalysis were coming out of those conversations. That got lost simply because most people are not like these individuals who tried to do something by using their privilege. A doctor has a lot of privilege – I’m a doctor’s daughter and a doctor’s sister, I know how this privilege can be abused and so therefore what I have learned at this point after many years of activism - and not for minorities but for my
I’m your race-enemy and your class-enemy, I’m using my privilege, trying to bring about a situation where you don’t need my privilege to get into general discourse. That’s what I do. So for me to sit down and think about my privilege, I’ll be dead before long. This Reclaiming Hysteria” is to say that what has came to me I would say around the middle not been looked at carefully is ‘hysteria’ 80’s when I began getting into the second in the male and therefore the question of wave of the world of work. violence has been taken away from ‘hysteria’. Juliet Mitchell’s suggestion how to degIt is a very solid, careful book and I am with Juliet. I think it is a useful category. all organs of healing, to make it less gender But I think when it fell into the hands of most people – most people are phallocentric would be my own position. – in this particular situation it became “Recourse something that could be easily opposed and I don’t believe there is any danger in taking it on. Frankly, that particular battle belongs efforts of those battling to eliminate it”. to an earlier history of academic feminism. What one does then is celebrate one’s own I remember Lisa Jardine putting up little buttons saying “behave badly” because I had injustice it is, try to listen to the other suggested to some women at Cambridge that side. Both the ones on top like the ones who when they interviewed they should in fact used ‘hysteria’ so many years ago to listen not try to be modest. The battle belongs to to women from a position of privilege nor to that era. I myself at this stage am much more those who really are in a situation of interested, as I said, using my privilege, suffering. Because reporting on suffering using an instrument carefully, looking at these days through social media etc. has details of individual action and so on and become very little else than celebration of therefore I am more interested in the history of ‘hysteria’ as something that would allow without having to go to a journal. And so if women to speak, talking-cure, that’s how one wants to really change the times then Freud pulled it out of Charcot. And in those that may not be the medium. I will choose Principle” what we hear again and again is
things are presented in theatres, which can’t
be presented at universities. So either one can try to break the university’s usefulness by transforming it, like some people are doing at the top by transforming it only into a corporation – we know how to be against them. But if one transforms it only into a theatre, so that one can do at a university what one quite easily does on the stage, it’s a way of really not using one’s time and the strength of collectivities. The university is something for use, to oppose the university, one takes on the trustees and the economic infrastructure that is destroying national education in Britain. So that is like bringing ‘hysteria’ into the male domain because that applies. I’m just reading a book and he is talking about what colloquially could be called ‘the hysteria of development discourse’. Now in order to really confront it so the university would be somewhat shocked rather than the benevolent old artsy-fartsy men saying “oh nice nice.” that’s a much harder thing. That would be dangerous. Real danger. Not about claiming a name. And that would be blocked, silently and seemingly benevolently. I’m not asking you to do it, but my standards are demanding; those are my standards, real change for unseen collectivities who do not necessarily resemble me. Thank you to Jason J Campbell for assisting Bjørk Grue Lidin in the preparation of this conversation.
THE HYSTERICAL BODY AN ESSAY BY AGATA CARDOSO
Agata Cardoso, untitled no. 2 (from the series ‘Meat’), 2013, silver gelatine print, 16x20 inches © 2013 Agata Cardoso.
What does the hysterical woman tell us through her bodily symptoms, sufferings and conversions?
symptoms remained vague for centuries. Charcot, the French neurologist, started his work on
protolanguage, communicating messages which
in Paris. He took the problem ‘Head on’ and brought hysteria, hitherto marginal into the mainstream.
speaks to and against patriarchy. The famous women hysterics of the 19th century have been throughout its history, hysteria has been constructed as a “Woman’s disease, a feminine disorder or a disturbance of femininity,” and has been
inherited neurological disorder, similar to multiple sclerosis, not madness or malingering.” After continuous observation of his subjects, Charcot concluded that the symptoms of hysteria repeated themselves. From this, he asserted that there was a form of the disease called ‘Major sive actions followed by four major and distinct
With the invention of hysteria came an extensive repertoire of symptoms involving the body and including violent and jerky bodily contortions; - third, ‘passionate poses’, in which the subject sitivity, anorexia and bulimia, constipation, performed emotional states such as terror and diarrhoea, excessive urination, urine retention, ecstasy; and fourth, a state of delirium. Soon depressed and heightened moods, insomnia and after Charcot formulated this diagnosis, he attacks of sleep, shortness of breath, muscular included different variations of this ‘archetype’ spasms and fainting, anxiety, irritability, allowing for great difference in symptoms of - ‘sufferers’; which was facilitated- or necessitating or unusual behaviour”. Reportedly, patients ed-by the fact that his diagnoses was based purely on his own observations. Like neurasthenia and posture (christened arc-de-cercle) in which they the nervous breakdown, hysteria was grouped under arched their body backwards until they were the broad psychoanalytical category of neurosis supported only by their head and their heels. The great variation in symptoms suggests a lack of thought hysteria was “Rooted in unconscious concrete knowledge of the ‘problem’- suggesting, turmoil rather than just weak nerves,” and that perhaps, that the problem was imposed over various- the symptoms of hysteria were developed when and far from complimentary-symptoms to create a ‘feminine’ illness. shameful to talk about; were displayed in bodily symptoms.” He called this ‘conversion hysteria.’ ‘Hysteria’ comes from the ancient Greek word for uterus. The philosopher Plato described the Charcot wished to employ the new art of phouterus as “an animal”, he said it roamed inside women’s bodies, causing symptoms as it moved. hysteria” and appointed Paul Regnard- another This idea had existed for millennia. An Egyptian French physician-to the task. Employing the camera papyrus dating from about 1900 BC includes recipes lens he set out to portray a staged situation as for medicines to coax a “wandering uterous”. The objective-providing a visual (and novel) docuGalenic physicians who came after Plato, and who mentation of a sexual and feminine illness, to had gained better knowledge of internal anatomy, be produced in books for other male physicians rejected the idea that the uterus could drift. to see. Regnard’s photographs were suppose to However, medical explanations for hysterical possess a naturalistic appearance, suggesting
that the subject was really experiencing the hysterical symptoms as the image was captured. Yet, the reality could scarcely be further away. Photography before the 1900’s was very time
grandiosity and severity of her movements create an extremely powerful dialogue between hysteric and viewer. She is deviant. Her contorted body displays her truth, her turmoil and ultimately
camera with wet plates; create perfect lighting conditions; and, most importantly, negatives could take up to twenty minutes to expose. Therefore, the subjects of these photographs-rather than being in a hysterical condition-were positioned and ‘acting out’ different states of hysteria. These recorded pathologies are completely staged and can almost be seen as ingenuous acts of per-
refuses to give into a role of submissiveness or to conform; acting to shock and provoke. She causes fear and anxiety because the viewer cannot understand and is therefore powerless; the hysteric’s language forces us to confront our inner she is daring, she is standing her ground, refusing to participate, she will no longer deny her own experiences and makes this known. She is fearless,
physical. I believe there is a difference between the authentic voice of the hysteric, and the representation of hysteria as directed by the male tion of hysteria is an adopted language used to
- but this does not mean that this is an authentic truth. Hysteria in its authentic or ‘real’ form is a ‘language of resistance’ in itself, rather than the hysteria portrayed in Regnard’s photographs. The Hysteric is empowered by a hysterical language of resistance. Her hysterical body, then, represents a language of rebellion, and the
‘neurosis’ but provides us with a powerful archetype of female resistance and resilience.
A BOP FOR DORA A POEM BY GEMMA WEEKES
What seems to be the problem? Buries it now, under make-up. How does this make you feel? Sick. Lost. Sometimes I can’t speak, doctor. How’d you get to the station? Going where? Funeral. Window falling away at speed - door blinking out - extinguished - have to go - get out. Whos funeral, Dora? What name then? Every time you get upset, they strap you to a table. Mum frantic - saving her treasure. Knick-knacks! Treasure! Nobody died then? Who/why/where/when/what? You don’t know where the station. You don’t know who’s funeral - don’t know Dora?
Like a doll,
Every time you get upset, they strap you to a table. Try to remember! Childhood went down with a roar - mum abandoned - nothing rescued Who’s funeral, Dora? Mum burning - endless - screams poked out through blistered smile - she still did the dishes - Try to remember! Take the pen, clock, notepad - smash them - need to get
Every time you get upset, they strap you to a table.
BLOOD AND BONE A POEM BY JESSICA KNIGHT
do not remember why. it left a scar below my belly button. a surprise smile unseen in the dark by lovers of the future. I do remember my father carrying me down a bright whute hallway. his free arm pulled the i.v machine alongside us. A needle in my tiny arm.
13 years old. twisted spine. it was a mess this mess of mine.
Run for the hills. The hospital gown was far too big. The pre op meds made it hard to keep standing as my mother tied up the back. as I hullucinated. Beautiful golden spiders crawling on the ceiling.
They were spinning glorious webs of silver thread. seven hours ninety nine stitches down my spine. My parents went to a movie.
what they saw. It sounds arrogant. arrogant but true. I have more back bone. The doctor said kindly. More back bone “we could make you perfectly straigh, than you. but it would kill you.� They removed a rib and grated bone from my hip. So, they settled on straighter, So if bible stories are true. better than before. a spine so rebellious I have more back bone it tried to out grow me. more back bone than you.
‘ANTAGONIZING’ THE MARRIAGE DEBATE AN ESSAY BY V. SPIKE PETERSON
The heteropatriarchal premises of marriage are deeply entrenched, not only in law but also in hearts and minds worldwide. Given these premises, it is no surprise that feminists and queers have developed the most trenchant critiques of the institution, and it is the points they raise that tend to dominate when the pros and cons of marriage are debated. I endorse these critiques but argue that they do not go far enough. The power relations of marriage breed not only inequalities of sex/ gender and sexuality, but also and, inextricably, of class, race and national prosperity. Moreover, the scale and intensity of these inequalities – and the pain, anger, resentment, despair and violence they generate – are key to some of the most urgent problems, arguably crises, of the 21st century. Hence, the importance of specifying how marriage, as a traditional and state-sanctioned institution, produces and/or exacerbates these inequalities, and especially those less tution. I proceed by initially describing how the premises and power relations of marriage shape particular inequalities, and cast here the con‘antagonisms.’1 But to undercut any sense of independent or discrete ‘antagonisms’ or stratifying dynamics or ‘antagonisms,’ I also identify comticular inequality is complicated by, and hence always interacting with, other inequalities that are shaped by marriage. The point is to expand the marriage debate, to draw attention to its the salience – and complexity! – of intersectional homogeneous ‘identity’ categories).
Given the patriarchal/masculinist premises of is between ‘women’ and ‘men.’ It is states/nations that formalise marriage, historically with the nuclear families (husband, wife and children) and establishing stable socio-economic household units in service to state priorities. Marriage’s normalisation of masculinist privilege and power variously entails less autonomy and/or economic independence for women and hence their structural vulnerability, in particular to male violence within the family sphere and male representation of women’s interests elsewhere. While feminist activism and socio-economic changes in recent decades have altered – or provided more alternatives to – the harshest effects of patriarchal marriage arrangements, the institution continues to foster gendered and unequal divisions in labour, authority, status and power, which continue to be legitimated by religious dogma and sustained by state policies regulating marriage, erotic/ sexual practices – especially women’s reproductive activities and options – and family/household formations. Marriage’s foundational antagonism of gender appears to have the longest history. Yet even this is deceptive. Marriage in archaic states not only instituted distinctive male and female ‘identities’ and corollary subjectivities that privileged masculinist principles (of authority, power, inheritance, etc.). It also instituted inequalities between ‘respectable’ married or marriageable women and those who were denied that status by virtue of various exclusions (non-virgin, slave, foreigner). Marriage in the modern (European) context inherited the normalisation of a male-female binary and the priority of regulating women’s reproductive activities (again, in service to the
state/nation), and effectively prohibited homo- as and support LGBT issues and risk fueling sexual unions. Marriage as a matter of economic ‘anti-gay’ politics if they criticise particular arrangements continues in much of the world, which choices of a community and movement they fundashapes class inequalities, and even marriage ‘for mentally support. love’ is patterned by economic, ethnic and race Few of us are unaware of, or oblivious to, how the mechanism of intergenerational inheritance Because marriage is not only patriarchal but shapes an individual’s life options, and how explicitly heterosexist, a straight-queer antag- patriarchal principles (of marriage and family onism seems equally obvious, but is also more law) have historically dominated transmission of complicated. Whereas queers have in common their property, and, inextricably, ‘social status.’ What - we often overlook (we are encouraged to do so) tioned marriage, heterosexuals have diverse per- is how effectively these principles reproduce spectives on and experiences of marriage, and economic inequalities over generations and long are not homogeneously in favour of it. The dif- time periods. Inheritance begets continuity of ferences among heterosexuals with respect to age, culture, religion, ethnicity, race, economics antagonisms,’ which present enormous obstacles politics and national location complicate who to improving one’s options (upward mobility is relative, and currently overrated). State policies marriage; and of course not all queers seek it. (regarding age, sex, race, etc.) shape not only who can marry who, but how – through inheritance, An unanticipated antagonism emerges as same-sex taxation, welfare and family law – economic and marriage becomes an option. This development other resources are accumulated and distributed. revives debates about marriage more generally, Only recently, and primarily in rich ‘liberal’ countries, have these traditional rules been activism. One effect is a tension between feminists altered, though hardly eclipsed, by both social (and others) who, for good reasons, are critical movements and economic developments. For the most of marriage as an institution and ambivalent about part and in most of the world, property inherqueer inclusions, and LGBT activists (and others) itance is shaped by (heteropatriarchal) marriage who, for good reasons, advocate same-sex marriage and family arrangements that continue to shape and the rights and recognition it affords. We might characterise this as a feminist-queer antag- resources. Although the role of familial inheritance is often obscured, the ‘class antagonism’ beyond differing with respect to marriage as these inequalities generate is a more familiar desirable and/or as a queer priority, some target of critique, and we are relatively more feminists (and others) criticise the extent to aware of how it is complicated by cross-cutting which (white, middle-class) gay males dominate inequalities of gender, ethnicity, race and geothe discussion and politics of same-sex marriage, politics as well. in the sense of ignoring feminist critiques and marginalising lesbian perspectives. On this view, Less familiar is how marriage plays a decisive gay marriage does not escape or contest but in role in producing, normalising and perpetuating effect sustains – even adds legitimacy to – mas- racial inequalities. Most obviously, colonising culinist/patriarchal privilege and dominance (while also variously exacerbating racial politics). a European ideal of heterosexual, patriarchal, This also poses an activist dilemma for ‘anti-mar- monogamous, and Christian ‘respectability.’ This riage’ feminists (and others) who identify with/ marriage model was normalised in most Western
states/nations and variously encouraged or imposed in colonies, often explicitly as ‘superior’ to other practices they encountered (e.g., polygamy), which were then denied legitimacy within their own territories. Anti-miscegenation laws – in ised and publicised the state’s racial politics while also essentialising racial ‘difference’ and perpetuating race categories through, for example,
alities, particular racial/national or religious identities, and ‘unwanted’ workers.
marriage/family relations and how one acquires in the modern era was a racialised system of a claim to membership in a particular (richer or economic exploitation and psycho-social deval- poorer) state/nation. In other words, just as orisation. Slave marriages were not always rec- inheritance of property reproduces wealth across ognised and ‘illegitimate’ children could not generations and hence class inequalities within inherit. These arrangements established and perpetuate racial wealth differences, while racial wealth differences between states/nations because stereotypes continue to obscure the extent and labour migration (which would ameliorate income cause of these inequalities. Complexities here include tensions between advocates of same-sex and thus exacerbates national inequalities. This marriage and ‘religiously antigay’ ethnic/racial ‘antagonism’ is complicated by the presence of communities; how race issues shape immigration rich elites in all countries; the racialised map priorities; and in the United States, the race of national territories; and who is excluded, as politics of child and family welfare policies and noted above, and who might be included in always borhoods. seekers, ‘natural’ disaster and war refugees, highly desired workers, and those with approprihow marriage produces economic inequalities ate ‘business capital.’ between states/nations, which today are more extensive than inequalities within any individWhile marriage is clearly a problematic instiual country, and presumably a source of antagonism. tution, what to do about it is far from clear. I Quite simply, since the late nineteenth century, hope, however, that the racial and international richer states have become exponentially richer effects of the institution are clearer, and might and poorer states have generally remained rela- inform the continuing debate. And in the already tively poor. In a striking contrast with earlier time periods, individual income today depends desirable reforms, might we also imagine and vastly more on the average income of the country pursue systemic transformations that serve more people, more equitably? class you are born into. This global situation This short, selective and, admittedly, an creates enormous pressure for migration from poorer to richer countries, and if permitted ting religious issues, disability concerns and re whenever desired, would presumably over time oversimplifying complex processes and group ‘identi shift all incomes toward greater equality. But migration options are severely constrained, as immigration policies are exceedingly selective and have variously excluded those with certain
Frances Benjamin Johnson, self-portrait, 1896.
THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE AN OBJECTION BY TARA ELIZABETH COOPER
There is one argument that fends off feminist
economic realities. Taking No More Page Three as
‘choice’, I mean the pervasive belief that women in the Western world can make ‘empowered’ and ‘free’ choices within their public and private lives; thus, proving their shared equality with men in their society. Many people often use choice as a defence to undermine and ignore feminist critiques, as well as a pseudo-feminist way to illustrate the leaps and bounds women have come in becoming equal with men in society. Although having the freedom to make choices in both one’s public and private life seems like an exact materialisation of feminist beliefs, the use of
to end Page Three, because they see it as a choice for both the women to model for the newspaper and the consumer to buy the newspaper. What is deeply problematic about this belief is how it removes The Sun from any ideological or political framework. It essentially de-politicises its actions and negates its responsibility for how these images are linked to and can cause material and psychological damage for women, children, and men also. On close analysis, one can easily see
close inspection, the mantra of choice actually masks social ills and inequalities, and notably, these choices are often deeply related to consumerist capitalism.
to prove how choice is utilised to mask social injustices in contemporary (Western) society; however, some particular examples will hopefully around sex work, such as the No More Page Three campaign, glamour modelling, stripping, and prostitution, often focus on the woman’s choice to work in these industries. Just discussing these issues with friends and family, the common, crudely put point is these women have chosen to undertake such work, and, therefore, how can one criticise their choice to do so? Isn’t freedom the cornerstone of democracy? However, this argument appears to lull many into a false sense of security about the realities behind these choices. This is not to belittle nor patronise women’s decisions to work in these industries, but an attempt to recognise that all choices are shaped by ideological frameworks, societal pressures and
standards of what is deemed attractive and sexy, and legitimise and exploit a pornographic representation of (young) women in Western society. These images of mainly young, white, largebreasted and assumed heterosexual women are informed by, and continue to inform, naturalised, universal standards of beauty, even though in truth what they embody is the aggressive marketing of pornographic images, masked as normative. Moreover, Page Three advocates how the display of overt, heteronormative female sexuality is meant to be a universally empowering experience for women and a cheeky bit of fun, rather than exploitative practice. The argument of choice in simply serves as a scapegoat that refuses to recognise these ideological realities. This article has focused on examples from sex work, but I feel it’s important to emphasise that the illusion of choice is not isolated to such industries. Angela McRobbie, in her seminal essay Post-feminism and Popular Culture, argues that choice now controls even greater aspects of ‘Girls must have a life-plan. They must become
Kirsten Justesen, Re member / Re play/ Hukommelse - #1, 1991, Two works for plinth, body & TV-set Archival pigment print á 135 x 160 cm. ed 7 © 1991 Kirsten Justesen Kirsten Justesen, Re member / Re play/ Hukommelse - #2, 1991, Two works for plinth, body & TV-set Archival pigment print á 135 x 160 cm. ed 7 © 1991 Kirsten Justesen
lives, from making the right choice in marriage, to taking responsibility for their own working lives […] The individual is compelled to be the kind of subject who can make the right choices. By these means new lines and demarcations are drawn between those subjects who are judged responsive to the regime of personal responsi-
As McRobbie points out, choice deeply informs how society measures women’s success, whether it be by buying a certain product, participating in and image. Looking at popular culture and chickBridget Jones’s Diary or Sex and the City, the female protagonist’s dramas are usually due to her poor initial choices, and the narrative is propelled by revealing how she eventually learns to make “good” choices, which leads to her success. However, these “successful” choices, such as Carrie’s choice at the end of Sex and the City to return to New York and her old lover Big, tend to concentrate on women returning to some form of stable domesticity, whether that be returning to the hometown, getting married or being with “the one”, or entering parenthood. Moreover, these texts always match these female protagonists with a certain desirable and attractive lifestyle and image. Therefore, what these choices and freedoms often mask is how these lifestyles, products and images are unattainable except for the privileged few, who embody a universal ideal of how women poor, or a woman of colour). Thus, it is clear to me that the power relations and systemic injustices that choice conveniently allows many dissenters to ignore must be revealed, and hence, expose the argument of choice for the illusion that it is.
HANGING BY A THREAD A POEM BY ALICE FRIMAN
Late September, and the earth grows weary. The sky, a dropped ceiling too tired to hold itself up. And each leaf, exhausted from sucking on a body that can no longer give, softens—beyond hunger and all sapped out. It is the time of weaning. Feed yourself or starve. Lily pads curl to begging bowls. Queen Anne’s Lace shrinks to fetal position, tight as bud but black and dry.
How strong the glue to catch and hold. How terrifying the necessity to be let go. Yesterday I found myself lost in the woods, turned, walked towards, away, who knows. Crows plotted in the high trees. A tangle of barbed wire locked on my ankle, bit down hard. I’d forgotten how in September darkness lowers early, how chill wakes in damp corridors. So I sang my old September song of new school pencils, Poetry 101and Intro to Philosophy, posing what sense does it mean to be lost to one who’s never been found. Three hours later, I found out.
Kirsten Justesen Surfacing/ Oven vande #2, 1990, Laks / Kapisilik / Salmon, 95 x 90 cm , Surfacing/Oven vande, A series of 16 C-prints / pigment prints size 1:1 with salmon, turbot, lumpsucker and seal in a edition of 7 Š 1990 Kirsten Justesen.
FEMINISM APPROPRIATED BY NEO-LIBERAL AGENDAS A CONVERSATION BY KALPANA WILSON AND BRINDA GANGOPADHYA LUNDMARK
Dr. Kalpana Wilson is a Senior Fellow in Gender Theory, Globalisation and Development at the LSE Gender Institute. Her research focuses on the relationship between neo-liberalism, gender and concepts of agency, experiences of women in rural labour movements, and how ‘race’ is inscribed in development. She is a member of the Freedom Without Fear Platform, (www.freedomwithoutfearplatformuk.blogspot.co.uk) and of the South Asia Solidarity Group, www.southasiasolidarity.org. BGL: Your work focuses a lot on how feminism to development – which the World Bank calls has been appropriated by neo-liberal agendas and in particular how the concept of “women’s agen- ‘Gender Equality as Smart Economics’ - depends on highly gendered ideas that adolescent girls and women will inevitably be more altruistic, a neoliberal framework of development. Can you more responsible, more hardworking than men, elaborate more on that? without questioning the whole array of ideologKW: One of the things I am very interested in is the tremendous capacity which neoliberal dis- ical and material structures which tend to compel women to behave in particular ways. And without courses have to incorporate critical ideas, and questioning the exploitation involved in an transform them in the process into something approach, which assumes that women’s capacity to compatible with neoliberal global capitalism. I think this is what has happened with some key pletely ignores and marginalises women’s collecfeminist concepts. One of the very important ideas coming out from different strands of tive agency in transformative struggles, which are challenging and resisting the ravages of feminism has been the importance of recognising neoliberal capitalism. women’s agency. But if we look at the way the ‘agency’ of women in the global South is increasBGL: You have talked about the narrative change ingly emphasised within development interventions, we are witnessing now – by and large thanks to by international NGOs, or institutions like the post-colonial feminists - from portraying “Third World women” as passive victims, to representing the effects of continuing structures of oppression them as empowered “superwomen”. In the UK Feminista and exploitation, implying that as long as women are exercising agency, we do not need to consider Summer School you asked: Is this really feminist? these structures, because women are making choices Can you tell us a bit more about that? KW: Well of course there are many different –even when in reality these are impossible choices strands of feminism, but what I was trying to do – such as choosing survival. And secondly, in was make people at the Summer School question these contexts ‘agency’ has come to mean something some of the representations which they were encountering which appeared to be ‘positive assumed entrepreneurial potential – their ability to ‘succeed’ in the market, within the very images’. The contribution of postcolonial feminists limited parameters which the neoliberal model like Chandra Mohanty, - as well as of Black and Third world feminist activists in movements from allows – we can see this for example in Nike’s the 1970s onwards - in challenging representations ‘Girl Effect’ campaign or in a lot of the publicity
of ‘Third World Women’ as a homogenous category of passive victims is immeasurable. It is a battle that is far from over – we only need to look at the way women in Afghanistan – or Muslim women in Britain – are portrayed in dominant discourses to see this. But what has happened is that at the same time a new set of images has developed in which women are portrayed as dynamic, contented productive workers who never get tired – we see this particularly in the images promoted by Oxfam and the other big development NGOs. What is especially interesting is that these images are very close to many of the images produced in the colonial period – for example in advertisements for the tea produced on British owned plantations in India and Sri Lanka which showed women workers. There is also the same underlying implication that all is well within an imperialist global order. And like the representations of ‘Third World women’ as passive victims, these are highly racialised representations – this is something I look at in more detail in my recent work on ‘Race’,
Apart from Britain I am most familiar with feminist movements in India, where feminists are currently involved in movements against corporates grabbing land and using rape and violence against women to try and crush resistance in which women have been at the forefront, against the patriarchal fascist Hindu right which currently controls the national government and is completely committed to neoliberal policies, alongside moral policing of women and targeting of religious itarisation of Kashmir and the Northeast of India and the war being waged on women there…. For a more detailed discussion of some of these issues please see this interview with Indian feminist domwithoutfearplatformuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/ indias-anti-rape-movement-experiences.html). BGL: What is transnational feminist solidarity for you? KW: For me the starting point for transnational feminist solidarity has to be where you are. It cannot be about offering ‘help’ to people
BGL: Can you mention some feminist initiatives or movements that you believe are common ground, identifying overarching structures, resisting neo-liberal agendas? while at the time recognising differences and KW: also acknowledging inequalities of power and and in any case there are so many across the privilege. I think this is something Chandra world in different contexts – right here in Mohanty expressed very well in her 2003 article Britain there are for example the movements ‘Under Western Eyes Revisited – Feminist Solidarity against detention and sexual abuse of refugee through Anticapitalist Struggles’ where she calls women, struggles of women workers against neo- for a ‘race-and-gender-conscious historical mateliberal casualisation and racism like Justice for rialism’. I am currently involved in the Freedom Cleaners, the resistance to the massive cuts in Without Fear Platform which initially began with resources to combat domestic violence – particu- a number of black and ‘minority ethnic’ women’s larly for women of colour, as well as to the organisations and individuals coming together in - solidarity with the massive anti-rape movement lance which accompanies this, and many other which took place in India last year. We wanted interlinked movements. And feminist perspectives to make the voices of activists directly involved are essential to an understanding of contemporary in the movement heard here, and at the same time imperialism – for example to understanding counter the racist, imperialist discourse which Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, and these pervaded the media coverage of the movement in perspectives are being voiced within anti-impe- Britain – which was basically saying that Indian rialist movements in many different contexts. men or South Asian men were inherently and
exceptionally violent – by making the connections with movements against gender violence against here and elsewhere. Since then we have been involved in organising a number of campaigns, protests and public events – most recently we held a public meeting on ‘Women Resisting the Racist ‘Security’ State’. And we have been continuing to think about what transnational feminist solidarity means and trying to build our political practice around that. We would welcome people who are interested in getting involved!
William Lukas, Untitled, 2013 Š 2013 William Lukas
FRESHEN UP A COMMENTARY ON TOILETS, LABOUR, PERFORMANCE AND CASUAL MISOGYNY BY HAROLD OFFEH
Freshen up, Freshen up. You gotta Freshen up! No soap, no hope No splash, no gash No Armani, no punani You touch it, you wash it No spray, no lay No tissue, no issue No No No No
wash, no nosh gum, no cum money, no honey cologne, go home alone
No No No No
designer, No vagina money, No honey CK, No BJ Paco Rabane, you go home with a man
Freshen up for punani, punani, punani Freshen up for punani, punani, punani. We love pussy
What is presented above is an edited version of the subcultural phenomena, known as the Freshen Up song. This half rap, half sung refrain can be heard in various public toilets from Manchester to Magaluf. It’s usually sung by African men, working for tips as toilet attendants in pubs, clubs and bars. The song is usually performed to drunken young men in an attempt to garner cash tips. the amused and self-congratulatory punters of the toilet attendants. However, I’m interested in what lies beneath the humour of the song? What happens when the joke is used to mask exploitation and prejudice? I believe the song as a slice of contemporary culture provides an insight into some of complex dynamics of labour, power, race and gender. While the abject location of the toilets provides a seemingly comic backdrop, it also reinforces the hidden baseness of some of the persisting issues of social injustice. Banal, puerile, vulgar, disgusting, funny, comic or just plain entertaining? The song Freshen Up may embody some, all or none of these. In discussing it, I don’t intend to make any grand or doing is asking questions, informing myself and then sharing my investigations with whoever might be interested.
most private of needs in a social context. Add to this complex mix of service, patronage, labour rienced it many times as a customer searching for change for tips or avoiding washing my hands to escape a handed paper towel. But I wanted to get sense of what it was like to serve in this space.
I come from a Ghanaian immigrant family who have and still do earn their living from cleaning the halls, corporate meeting rooms and the toilets of many public spaces. But it is the particular situation of the toilet attendant that was unique to this experience. This initial experience really brought home how much power the role has. It is a socially powerful position. Anyone who has ever been caught short, desperate for the WC will know what a vulnerable position it is to be in. This vulnerability on the patron’s part creates a strange interaction with the toilet attendant. In to pay and receive an appropriate service in return. As a consumer, you are clearly aware of making a choice about whether you choose to purchase a service or not. However, with a toilet attendant, that choice is often taken away. As a customer or patron, you are literally confronted with the service provider. And more often than not, it is a service you might not choose to purchase. The customer is then put in a position where they have to confront the economics of this form of labour.
toilet attendants’ unwanted labour and ensuing request for a tip can be very problematic and for some, quite disturbing.
These can range from addressing customers with a friendly “hello” to singing the Freshen Up song. Other efforts involve handing all customers paper towels or offering more elaborate services like perfume, gum or lollipops. While this might seem rather benign, each of these actions forces the customer to engage with the attendant. By taking the towel, you are receiving that person’s labour, which forces you to make a decision about whether or not to reward that labour. The power of the attendant can lie in the latent potential of an awkward and embarrassing situation that some customers will want to avoid at all costs. The attendants do understandably take advantage of the awkwardness of the situation. Approaches like the Freshen Up song work because they help negate the uneasiness and can cleverly provide a convivial and friendly welcome.
and other offers by the need to generate an income from a form of labour that can very often operate outside of the employment regulations that include a minimum wage. In reality, many can only make money from tips alone, making the need to service customers more pressing. Many attendants, particularly in bars and nightclubs, can be subject to violence and abuse from costumers – many of whom are annoyed by what they see as an unwanted service. In 2003, tabloid darling Cheryl Cole was convicted of assaulting a toilet attendant Sophie Amogbokpa in Guilford, Surrey. The incident was apparently started by a dispute over an unpaid lollipop. The underlying economic context of the participating in exploitation. However, for the patron in the moment of encounter, the underlying dynamics of exploitation are overlooked due to the awkwardness of the power imbalance.
In collecting the various versions of the Freshen Up song, my initial interest was in these social, cultural and racial dynamics played out in the YouTube versions of the video. What becomes increasingly apparent is the language and the casual appropriation of degrading and misogynistic language put in the service of entertainment and ultimately, money. So far, so what? Well, that is my point, slight and obvious as it may appear. We’ve come not “so
see the young men gather and chant as the toilet attendants exploit that basic premise of a lads night out – namely, to go home with a girl and “Any will do!” So make sure to “spray” in order to get a “lay.” The women are seen as products to be acquired (Sometimes literally) as part of the lad’s night out or Stag do package. The whole endeavor of a lad’s night out becomes another sport and the toilet attendant provides an entertaining interlude. While you might argue there is nothing wrong with young men collectively having a good time and wanting sex, the increasingly commericalised culture that feeds that narrative sets up a number of problematic mythologies – in particular, that women exist to service men’s sexual desires. What perhaps is more disturbing is the effect on many young women in terms of their own body image and the ensuing perceptions of themselves. As
continued evidence of this culture, I would refer anyone to the UK’s biggest selling daily newspaper,
that is often only paid through money earned from tips alone and doing so through pandering to their customers’ misogynistic dispositions/sense of humour. The songs and banter are entertainment minstrels who were painted with absurd blackface. They are forced by pragmatism to perform a racial stereotype that conforms to racial prejudices. That they choose to do it while reinforcing sexism appears to be collateral damage. What is further important to acknowledge in this discussion of the toilet attendant is the the mix of public and private. The fundamental function of the space remains the same whether it’s
banks of cubicles and/or urinals with wash and dry facilities. But throughout the 20th century, these spaces have become corrupted and subverted. The male toilet in particular is a contentious There is an underlying and unacknowledged sexual charge that is induced by the fear or expectation
attendants of yore were there to provide an attentive and quality service. Contemporary toilet attendants – particularly in aspiring nightclubs – are as much there to police these spaces and
A common strategy to deal with this dual role has been the creation of a convivial space. The toilet becomes an extension of the club or bar with music from the club often piped in. The attendant plays host and patrons enter an environment that is shaped and formed. This space negates much of the homoerotic awkwardness by the creation communal hyper heterosexual space. These toilets, many of them evidenced on YouTube clips as the back drop to the Freshen Up song, adhere to the fading humour abounds) and birds (There are various references to sexual prowess and the need to “pull” women). These toilets become social spaces where friends interact, confer and joke at the cost of civility. Like American fraternity houses, the mix of alcohol and testosterone creates a culture of idiocy that many attendants pander to and exploit as they play jester to drunken fools. The Freshen Up song is a manifestation of this particular environment, one that is fed by the unique circumstances These are just young people having fun wh playful banter and jokes. My objection is not the drunkenness or male high jinx, although you could make coherent objections to those things. I think this
about equality. Race, gender and class inequality are passé and seen as not really affecting the mainstream. Young women hate feminism, black people are visible in the media and sport, and the otherwise known as the feckless and work shy.
There is a reluctance to question and examine the world we live. This is nothing new, but manifestations of this are varied and shifting. A closer examination the context of the attendant highindifference to examine patterns of behaviour according to class, race and gender, and the disturbing, underlying social and economic causes. The Freshen Up song is a joke. As someone who often employs humour in my work, humour can often be used to negate and belittle a critical awareness and understanding. My very simple point is that casualness creates anti-critical environment, where to question behaviours and their impact on wider cultural spheres becomes a no-no – the suggestion being you can’t take a joke. The real joke is the continuing complacency in the face of ongoing prejudice.
YOUR ASS BE SPREAD (AND OTHER FEMINISMS) A SUBVERSION BY A. JOSEPHINE BUDGE The squeak of my bicycle pauses,
“S’cuse me, are
you
mixed race?”
I am not in the mood, and have heard this too often. Something about his loping gait puts my guard up and,
“It’s none of your
fucking
business.”
A little hostile perhaps, but learned from experience - short and sharp causes the least collateral damage. “Ah, it’s just you look like you’re mixed-race, you’re so sexy, you got a big ass, yeah, you look like you’re mixed race with your big ass, mmmm, your ass be spreading.
You’re, Ass.
Be.
Spread, like,” It tumbles out of him; layer upon layer of antagonising judgment, writing over my body, my bicycle and my ‘big ass’ as though I had spent a lifetime growing them just to be a canvass for his misplaced sexual advances; his encroachments on my personal space, my evening, my ‘spreading ass’.
“You’re so sexy.” He concludes, like there was nothing else to be said and I would be mad not to jump off of my bicycle, tear off my clothes and throw myself at his wide-spreading-feet.
“And you have absolutely no brain. Fuck off.” bulbous ego.
masturbated at on the streets and in trains. And the anti-feminist groups want to tell me that we have achieved equality?
Brussels, Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco, Canada, Mexico, Ireland, Ukraine, Peru, and even Vatican City.”1 2013. And those were just the ones on twitter.
I cycle away. (What else can I do?) Hardly hearing his curses and abuse, my body is
so heavy with disgust,
my space, my privacy
invaded.
His eyes and his words creeping underneath my dress to paw me all over, leaving could not think of a single thing to say that would get through to him. Nothing that saying was okay. Being curvaceous - and yes, you guessed it - mixed-race, the demographic to whom I am most attractive may just tend to be black men. Especially older black men. into the skinny, white, blond image of what ‘beauty’ is supposed to be?
glances, attitude and repose that encourage such advances? Am I being ‘snobby’ in my disgust? Is this a class issue, a race issue? Or just a gender issue - because sexism is not a cultural allowance or racially exclusive. Being a black man certainly does not give you some kind of cultural-go-free card to harass women on the street under the guise of ‘being complimentary’ or ‘appreciating what you see’. “I call her gorgeous and ‘di girl won’t even smile” more than an audible whisper, intentionally heard, quite deliberately projected to incur guilt on the back of my mind. My mind that ignored him, eyes that saw him coming from the bottom of the road and refused to cross the street, or take another way.
against the gender-focused persecution of women by men of colour. Our current political language thrives in this environment, pulses with the convictions to persecute some issues whilst never quite approaching others. Leaving the battles of FGM and forced marriage - matters which, according to a neo-colonialist liberal ideology do not concern ‘us’ except within the power balances of ‘saving the uncivilised blacks’ - to A voice that, just weeks later, would see the equal pay gap widen to a difference 3 of 13%2 less for women in Britain without batting an eye.
idea of physical attractiveness - how I score-up on your personal 1-10 list of what
Woman according to you.
Interrogating street harassment by black men, has nothing to do with the ‘whitemiddle-class feminists’ being racist towards the ‘black feminist group’, it is about standing up and refusing to discriminate - because sexism is not a cultural allowance or racially exclusive. Nor am I saying it is a racially exclusive experience, I have
which the police and judicial system simultaneously turns a blind eye - with relation to women’s rights - and persecutes ruthlessly - with relation to gang violence and terrorist suspicion. In Ghana I am a chocolate and vanilla swirl fantasy, a green card, a hot fuck, and a ‘better-educated-if-more-approachable-white’ all at once. Here, I do not know. I like to hope that the men who cat-call me on the street are not just buying into a shade-ist sense of elitism, but, it is not all women. It is not vagina-on-legs-thing.
a
What do they want of me? I have no lack of passion to expose the emasculation and general disempowerment of black men in this society that leads to gang culture, unemployment and a criminal record before you are 18, That leads to a short sharp shock with a machete in your hand and blood all over the pavement.
about our lack of equal opportunities in this ‘multicultural utopia’ - London. Prisons within ghettos, within council estates, within boroughs, within league tables, within London.
But one rung below the disenfranchised Black Brit is usually his Black British girlfriend. Is he searching to assert his power on a street I thought was mine as much as his, before -
“S’cuse me, are you mixed race?” - for lack of feeling it anywhere else in society? And am I to break a dysfunctional cycle born of a white exoticism, neo-colonialist power-struggles and a fear of black sexuality, a fatherless generation and a historically racist class system all in a smile, or a phone number? Or even a night? Is it I who must indulge/allow/patronise? “Or is it society that needs changing?” I will not look down upon you - harasser of Old Street Station, I will not give you that satisfaction. I expect you to take responsibility for your words and your actions, if not in spite of being black then because you are so, because I expect you to set an example better than all they tell you that you can be.
As second, third and even fourth generations of multiculturalism, we need to hold a line when it comes to sexism and street harassment, both everyday and otherwise.
It is not cultural, it is degrading. It is not religious, it is sexist. And they have. No. Right. Women of all colours have been bending to accommodate the growing disenfranchisement and disempowerment of men for too long. The seemingly unwanted public masturbation, to cat-calls and staring at us as though we are meat on the market, to rape only fuels the fervour that women are less, women are objects, and we exist to satisfy men.
Ha!
I want to believe that black men can be better, not in the minority, but in the majority, ships came.
- Minus the swagger and the fuck-blink-eyes.
“S’cuse me, are you mixed race?”
“Uh, yes, I’m half English, half Ghanaian.”
I felt a bit intimidated to speak my mind and I just thought you looked like a really lovely person. I’d like to know someone like you. S’cuse me for being forward but, my names James, what’s yours?”
male colleagues’
Sarah Wilson, Bottled gown, 2011 Š 2011 Sarah Wilson
AGITATING FOR A SAFE PUBLIC SPACE AN ESSAY BY LINA AHMED ABUSHOUK
One of the primary objectives of women’s eman- Amin, like the British colonial government, viewed cipation in most contexts is the disruption of the veil to be emblematic of the backwardness of the private-public sphere dichotomy. Women seek Egyptian society.3 However, unlike the British, to become participatory members in the public he did not view it to be representative of the sphere, which was generally reserved for men. Of “backwardness of Islam”; rather, Amin regarded it course, the methods women used, and continue to as a cultural, not religious, prescription. use, differed depending on the context within which the emancipatory movement took place. In For Egyptian women, the act of unveiling came the past, the most important gain from women’s to represent a move away from the “backwardness” inclusion was the right to self-determination in the political realm, allowing them to voice their a new class of educated women, capable of entering the workforce. The removal of the veil in Egypt their lives. Women’s participation cannot be equated with the right to vote, though this is a Turkey; instead it represented modernity and crucial and fundamental aspect of women’s eman- advancement. Amin, and his supporters, had cipation. In most scenarios, women had to gain created a social and political climate that access to the public sphere before they could demand and agitate for suffrage. The mere presence safe public sphere through unveiling. I would of vocal and engaged women in this male dominated posit, however, that the creation of a safe public space in Egypt was not solely dependent on the take up their issues. removal of the veil. In fact, a substantial number of women who entered the public sphere, breaking In the Middle East and North Africa, in the the barrier between the private and public, to early twentieth century, men in public, and women pursue education and work remained veiled. Rather, in private, began to make demands for women’s shedding the veil was a way to publicly announce advancement. In 1899, Qasim Amin, an Egyptian and signal a mental and, subsequently, societal jurist and public intellectual, wrote, Tahrir al- shift. In other words, if one regards the veil Mar’a (The Liberation of Women) which came to as an extension of the private into the public, in that, it allows women to move through the other parts of the Middle East.1 Amin’s theoret- public without fully being ‘visible’, then the ical arguments for the advancement of Arab and veil’s removal becomes a means for Egyptian women Muslim women, but particularly Egyptian women, to denounce the last frontier of privacy and drew heavily on European thought, as his gener- demand to be seen and heard. Essentially, the 2 Amin meaning that Egyptian society associated with made two bold demands that he believed would lead the veil is what in Amin’s eyes necessitated its towards emancipation. First, he called for the removal. By the time Egypt gained its independright to education for all women, a suggestion ence in 1923, the national persona of the Egyptian - women became an “image of a woman in a knee ing nationalist elite. Second, he called for the length skirt with high heels and bobbed hair”. unveiling of women, which gained much less support.
Alternatively, if one considers the women’s emancipation movement in the Sudan, which took place much later than Egypt, occurring in the mid-20th, then one is presented with a movement that did not unveil and perceived unveiling to be detrimental to its cause. For a start, the Sudanese version of veiling was not a headscarf. Instead, Sudanese women in the primarily Muslim north wore the tobe, a four and a half to seven meter long piece of fabric that is wrapped around the entire body. The tobe, unlike the veil for Egyptian women, was not associated with “backwardness”. On the contrary, both Sudanese women, and the governing colonialists, thought that the tobe was the most appropriate, on a functional level and in terms of social acceptability, attire for the hot and dusty climate of the Sudan. Commenting on the importance, or rather unimportance, of attire in relation to women’s emancipation, Ina Beasley, a British colonialist who worked on women’s education in the Sudan, remarked that, “It is very possible that every woman there [in Egypt] who wears European clothes is by no means free of harem shackles.”7 Beasley, like the Sudanese women’s emancipation campaigners at the time, viewed the tobe as graceful attire that “added much to the charm of slender beauty and 8
It is uncontroversial to suggest that one of the goals of a women’s emancipation movement is to allow women to live with dignity. Therefore, if we accept Ina Beasley’s contention that the tobe provided just that, it then becomes easy to understand why Sudanese women saw it as an aid, rather than a hindrance in their struggle for entry into the public sphere. One of the most prominent and respected women in the Sudanese emancipation movement, Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim, a founding member of the Sudanese Women’s Union (SWU), envisioned an indigenous women’s movement. She believed, “the tools of the women’s movement did not need to be borrowed from other countries or regions, they could readily be found within Sudan’s own religious and cultural structures. Similarly, Sudanese women did not need to look
elsewhere for other modes of dress or standards of behavior. The tobe sheltered women’s bodies in a way that was beautiful and right.”9 However, many women within Ahmed’s circle of peers, and future feminists, would come to see her version of feminism as puritanical and embedded in a may be true, it is important that her actions are understood within their social context. The decision to insist on the tobe, as the chosen attire in which women would enter the public space, was a deliberate one. When she was elected chosen to uphold an image of myself as a traditional, respectable, family-oriented woman in my private life. This image gained me the credibility that allowed me to be radical and outspoken in my public life.”10 Ahmed lifted the veil that divided the private and public spheres, but chose to maintain that which physically cloaked her, because she believed that veiling made her public visibility culturally permissible and legitimate. The tobe allowed the women of the SWU to adopt and preach progressive ideas, like the promotion of women’s education and demanding that an end be put to Female Genital Cutting and other “harmful” beauty practices, while still maintaining a sense of social acceptability. The conservative social and political context in which they operated meant that a safe public sphere for women’s inclusion could not have been established if women like Ahmed and
in power, men, take these women and their movement seriously. Furthermore, in an era of anti-colonial struggle, it meant that the cause of women’s emancipation was not seen as a Western import, but as something indigenous to Sudanese and Islamic culture. The actions of SWU and other Sudanese women undoubtedly changed the course of women’s emancipation in Sudan. Women became visible in many arenas of public life. As time went on and fashions
public presence that some of them even began to shed the tobe.11 Sudanese society paid little attention to their new attire, allowing these women to maintain and continue to play their roles in public life, because Sudanese society itself was changing. These ongoing social changes changes taking place. Fortunately, the two coup
decrying the sentence, Hussein was acquitted. Was Hussein’s case a victory for women’s rights and women’s public safety in the Sudan? Looking at the history of women’s emancipation and women’s safety in the public sphere in the Sudan, it is evident that women were never subjected to such brutal policing of their bodies and attire. Certainly, women made the choice to dress con-
and general political strife taking place between
of women in the public sphere.
that was a strategic decision in keeping with the times. Today, many urban women in the Sudan continue to wear pants, but they are not tried as Hussein was. There is the potential that they could be, but it is not enough to deter them. Hussein was a journalist who was critical of the
In 1991, the Islamist National Congress Party, that came to power in 1989 through another coup d’état, employed Sharia law to formulate Article
Penal Code 1991 was, to a certain extent, a tool of convenience that the regime could use to silence her. The message that the government
Article greatly limited women’s safety in the public sphere and reads, “Whoever does in a public place an indecent act or an act contrary to public
public political visibility was no longer something that she was allowed to determine on her own terms. The public was no longer a sphere that the modern Sudanese woman could safely navigate in the same manner that Egyptian and Sudanese women had in the past; it belonged to the régime
down women’s advancement. It was only in the late 1970s, during the dictatorship of General Gaffer Nimeiry, that a conservative form of Sharia law12
public morals or causing an annoyance to public
both.”13 This ruling was used in July of 2009 to arrest the now infamous, “Pants Lady”, Lubna Hussein, and eleven other women for the “crime” of wearing pants in public. Close examination of the Article’s wording shows that it is not clear that pants fall under the category of being “obscene” or “contrary to public morals”. Nevertheless, ten out of the twelve women arrested that day pleaded guilty to the charge and received ten lashes each. Hussein demanded a lawyer and a trial, which she received, but was sentenced to forty lashes. Hoping to bring attention to the case, Hussein exercised her right to a public audience. She invited local women’s rights organ-
Based on the narrative of women’s emancipation in Egypt and the Sudan, I do not think it would be presumptuous to say that the process of emancipation is not linear. Rights won by women in a certain period can easily be overturned in another - women’s emancipation cannot be separated from the political context in which it operates. But what remains most clear, at least to my mind, is that women, no matter where they are, must continue to agitate for a safe public sphere, because without it, our voices go unheard and our issues remain undiscussed; our methods may differ, and necessarily so, but our goal is the same.
ibid ibid ibid Of course, it must be understood that even
anything, this is indicative of the fact that there
THE PERSONAL AS POLITICAL A POEM BY ALOK VAID-MENON if the personal is political then is there any part of my body that does not belong to the movement? can my lung breath for itself or must it also gasp for the revolution? do my feet walk for themselves or are they only preparing for the march? does this brown exist outside of struggle? does this queer matter if it’s no longer transgressive? this gender if it can no longer dissent? if the personal is political then i wonder if the revolution asked for consent picked up a microphone and pronounced ‘PAIN’ and the papers reported ‘POLITICS’ the next day and i wonder if there are politics without pain these days? when we must use our tongues as knives and scrape off all of the color, all of the violence and place them in petri dishes for you to consume like soundbytes, like each piece of me is an intersection for your theory, like all we are is a constellation of trauma and quotes and broken if the personal is political then do i own these samples? do i own the pain? do i own myself? how many tears i make you shed how many paradigms i make you shift
if the personal is political then how many hours can i sleep tonight? how many boys should i kiss? how many lies must i tell? until i prove myself activist or rather prove myself boring prove myself happy if the personal is political than can we be happy when our very politics resemble the nightmares we are trying so desperately to wake from? if the personal is political then will you love me when i turn off my phone? will you forgive me if i am late to work? will you respect me if i miss the meeting? will i matter if i am incapable of crying? will i matter if i am incapable of bleeding? do we matter if we are incapable at all?
ANTAGONISM A CONFESSION BY ELLA JAX
When I was asked to write about antagonism, I was completely determined to write about Conchita Wurst versus the LGBTQ backlash. After a few failed attempts, I realised that, once again, my lofty ambitions clouded my judgment, and that I about myself and what antagonism means to me.
many things, but familiar with fancy English words is not one of them. I had to look up ‘antag-
Antagonism (n) 1. an active hostility or opposition, as antagonism between the liberal and the conservative parties. Her plan to become an actress met with the antagonism of her family. 3. Physiology an opposing action, as by one muscle in relation to another.
1. Love girls and feel the urge to fuck them.
is where I have some trouble.) Even though I might not follow these (completely made-up) rules of lesbianism, it really is how I want to identify. If someone questions my decision to do so based on rule number two, I usually reply with a smashing line like, “I said I was a lesbian. I never said I was a good one”. But the truth is that I hate my failings as a lesbian, and I hate the “hetero devil” inside my head. Antagonism! See?
fat-activist part. I am a fat lady, a curvy kitten, and I’ve made it my job to tell everyone how much I love my body and how they should love theirs about this, as well as posted an obscene number of inspiring photos of myself in a bathing suit
tion felt like hitting the jackpot in terms of This might sound weird (and I assure you it is) but every part of my identity contradicts every piece of clothing, no matter how gorgeous, refuses to match.
I do all this and I really do think that I help in making people feeling better about their giant arses. But the thing is, I do not always believe it. I know it is not true but I have always had this strong feeling that I would be easier to love in a skinnier cover for this personality. I see less charming and less heavy friends of
This I am very clear about. There are not many rules when it comes to
their beautiful, while I – even with my charisma turned up to the highest level – always seem to be cast as the fat sidekick in someone else’s movie. But I do love my soft body – I really do
– just as much as I hate it. I am also funny (probably a consequence of being a fat kid throughout school). I love being funny but, really, I would give anything to be serious and – dare I say – mysterious. I am white. And by white, I mean extremely white – I make Snow White look tanned. The darkest shade I could ever accomplish from tanning is a anyone’s standards. But I also have all the privileges of being white; I never get harassed or discriminated against because of the colour of my skin. For this, of course, I would be completely full of shit if I were to say that I am lucky to have been born with very little pigment in a world where darker shades in many ways seem to determine your worth. I am a feminist. I really believe in feminism, especially the queer, intersectional kind. I have been through a lot of phases as a your best argument is about how boys can fuck as many women as they want without the risk of being called “whores”; then, the “old-fashioned, left-wing feminist phase”, where you learn about through several others before becoming the queer, intersectional feminist I am today. I breathe feminism and I could not stop even if I wanted to. Nevertheless, every time a man (most often, it’s a man) makes fun of the feminist movement, or I get threatened online because of something I have written or someone tells me that I am a feminist because of my ugliness, I want to stop calling myself a feminist right away. Luckily, this only last about three seconds before
This is how I work. I know what is right and what my feelings are about most things, but I am in a constant battle with myself over the silliest
things. I have constantly contradicting feelings about myself and my identity. Antagonism. I am not sure I have quite got the academic sense of the word yet, but I have found what it means to me and that has got to count for something. I am no academic after all. I am sure I am not alone in my doubts or in my contradicting feelings, being my own worst enemy in every way. I am sure we have all felt like this about a lot of things at one point or another. It feels a lot like the cartoons when the main character has an angel and a devil on each shoulder trying to navigate through life. I guess it is okay as long as we do our best to choose the angelic side of our personalities, and try to be nice to ourselves and the people around us. Antagonism is very present not only in the politics and the world around us, but, ultimately, even in our very bodies and minds. But I guess we would not be very interesting without it, would we?
Siona Benjamin, Finding Home#61 Sarah and Hagar (Fereshteh), 2004, gouache and gold leaf on wood panel 18” x 24” © 2004 Siona Benjamin
SIONA BENJAMIN AN ART CRITICISM BY MATTHEW BAIGELL
The idea that the history of modern art has followed some kind of evolutionary, mainstream sequence—Impressionism followed by PostArt, she says, serves that purpose. It is Impressionism, followed by Symbolism, followed her vehicle for viewing the world, as she says, by Fauvism, et cetera—never made much sense to “outside the bubble of one’s own country, religion, me. It imitated a pattern more appropriate to the and race.” Based on her remarkable early schooling study of biological species and, besides, it and adult studies, she hopes that her art will omitted many wonderful artists whose works did to whatever extent possible, make the world a better place in which to live—not a bad idea given the market-driven art world of today. Raised instead of a single central stream and that the in an observant family in a predominantly Hindu different currents do not have to move in the and Muslim country, she was educated in Catholic same “forward” direction to be considered valid and Zoroastrian schools. She also took art classes and interesting. One of these currents involves in Mumbai. After arriving in the United States artists who combine in their works elements of degrees from the University of Illinois (painting) point of view based on varying combinations of and the University of Illinois (theater set design). national, religious, and/or ethnic backgrounds. In the following decade, she began to study the Hebrew Bible as well as Midrash (legends and One such artist is Siona Benjamin who observations based on the Bible).The Hindu goddess, Kali, associated with power, time, and change, as well as event-making women in the Hebrew Bible includes in her work stylistic elements and subject matter derived from her Jewish and Indian heritages, her strong feminist concerns, and her American experiences as an artist and woman of color. She feels that she will never be able to this unnerving but also seductive because she will always inhabit that spiritual borderland that lies somewhere between open, free space and -
phrase) in which she has lived, she does not want to be limited by them. When she says that she feels she is Indian, American, Jewish, and to acknowledge and to integrate her multiple
her equally. Her stylistic antecedents include Persian, Christian, and Jewish miniatures as well as American Pop Art. As she has said in regard to intentions, “In this trans-cultural America, I feel a strong need to make art that will speak to my audience of our similarities not our differences, as I feel I can contribute to a much needed ‘repair’ (tikkun) through my art. I would like my audience to re-evaluate their notions and concepts about identity and race, thus understanding that such misconceptions could lead to racism, hate, and war.” In effect, she is a post, post-modern artist, preferring to communicate her feelings and convictions to her audience
Siona Benjamin, Finding Home#74 Lilith, 2005, gouache on wood panel, 22” x 28” © 2005 Siona Benjamin
rather than engage in irony, dissembling, and ambiguous meanings. One very noticeable feature of her work is the blue color she uses. She says that very often she looks down at her skin and it feels as if it has turned blue. “It tends to do that,” she says, “when I face certain situations, such as are unlike themselves. I have therefore over the years developed these varied blue-skinned characters as self-portraits who assume multiple roles and forms, theatrically reenacting many ancient and contemporary dilemmas. I employ them as social and cultural agents in raising provocative issues about identity, immigration, and the role of art in this transcultural world.” Beloved
allowed Abraham to have a child, Ishmael, with her servant, Hagar, but when Sarah gave birth to Isaac, she had both Hagar and Ishmael exiled. Benjamin shows the two reunited in an embrace despite the relevant passages to the contrary in the women. Men on the right hold out their hands in friendship but bombs are strapped to their chests. The soldiers on the left have lost limbs and will probably not be able to protect the women. Obviously a comment on the Israeliincluded Muslims in India and therefore remembers shared similarities rather than unbridgeable differences, hopes the two women will be able to
the ancient and the modern, forcing a confrontation of unresolved issues.” Basically, her position is to seek tolerance in diversity. Acknowledging her status as an outsider, she often portrays those biblical women she wife mentioned only once in the Bible but without
created, like him, from dust rather than from his body and thus his equal. Therefore, she would not accept a secondary role. Angering God because she called Him by name she was banished from Eden and became a mother who lost hundreds of her own children and became a menace to other children. She also is supposed to have seduced and killed single men and was potentially harmful to nursing mothers.
feminist and even has a journal named after her. Benjamin has created a sub-set of works within the fereshteh series that honors her. In one Fereshteh)
tallit (Jewish prayer shawl), the snake armband (Hindu), the hamsa (Moslem), and the bullet sug-
war widow, woman soldier, and rape victim, presents her as a strong woman facing down her opponents and detractors—a survivor and heroine.
bodies and the red drops of blood suggest otherwise.
The terrorist attack in 2008 on the Chabad House in Mumbai, the Jewish educational center and synagogue, transformed Siona Benjamin’s art
As she has said about the Fereshteh (angels in Urdu) series now numbering close to seventy individual works, “I explore the women of the Bible and bring them forward to combat the wars and violence of today in a midrash of intricate paintings. I attempt to create a dialogue between
of media coverage of the event in which six of the occupants in the House, including the Rabbi and his wife, were killed, she returned to India several times to photograph the faces and record the stories of individuals within the Bene Israel group before it will probably disappear from
existence because most of its members have already immigrated to Israel and the United States. A series of trips into her past as well as confrontations with present events, Benjamin has both relived aspects of her youth and at the same time wonder,” she has thought, “if they could be the ghost images from my past and childhood. I am weaving new and old stories. Are these faces from dreams and memories or are they just other faces from passports, immigration cards or perhaps from my parents’ photo albums? It is with these faces and stories that the rest of the world, I
hope, will come to know more about the Bene Israel Jews in a very transnational India.”
encapsulates her attitude whether her art is biblically inspired or responsive to events of a gymnast, based on Persian/Indian miniatures, balanced precariously, and Hebrew letters in the borders. Benjamin appears always ready to travel back and forth in time and is ready to incorporate ancient and modern experiences into her art based on her imagination and personal experiences.
Siona Benjamin, Finding Home#57 Passport Photo, 2004, gouache on paper, 13” x 10” © 2004 Siona Benjamin
DOMINIQUE CHRISTINA A POEM
It is always Quiet in this house. God stops Speaking to Women who Become Him. There Is No Such Thing As Prayer.
WHERE MY FEET TAKE ME AND WHERE THE WORLD WANTS ME TO BE A COMMENT BY TINA MBACHU
been ascribed with the least favorable of ad-jec-
frameworks that uphold such behaviours and attitudes.
the lack of understanding for those who chose to live a nomadic lifestyle, including myself, but also fail to capture the richness that is encap-
Let me clarify here that I am a nomad by choice. Travelling to me is not simply a privilege but essential to my existence. I travel to work, to get away from work and to feel exhilarated all
feel of roaming, of constantly discovering the ever-new sensations that exist in this world – sensations that we otherwise do not give second thoughts to in our monochromatic lives, especially as women. As a woman, this richness is important be-cause we discover alternative ways of being than we are otherwise accustomed to.
tend to perceive me as a yet-to-be adult, afraid to settle in one placeAfter the initial awe of hearing about the breadth of my traels, the usual don’t you chose to to be an adult?” these ques-tions ensue, it became awe lay a sense of
stay in one place?” “Are afraid and so on so forth. Based on and interactions that would clear to me that beneath the pity – pity for me not settling
free and open, rolling through time and space, past, present and future. These restless feet of with families and friends. And of course, creating mine never hesitate to cross boundaries and to a family of my own. pack up and leave – to experience something valuable and new. The feeling never hits me until I am at the destination airport as I encounter – after of course having been ripped off by either the taxi or bus driver. Regardless, I am somewhere in tropical places), the lax and corrupt airport new with languages, food, landscape and people administration, the mix of local languages with English – each always enticing to the nomad. In South African house music in the mini vans called some cases, I notice ‘looks’ that are thrown my taxis playing along the road from Johannesburg way by both women and men, and I delightfully to Pretoria, the Arabic songs in the taxi, from imagine their thoughts along the lines of “That the airport in Tunis to a tourist hideout outside little girl – why is she travelling alone?” Of of the city, the heatstroke that greets you at course, some individuals have voiced their insecu-rity of walking along some parts of Oslo dangerous to travel alone”. This is true. The as a black female. I have, at least even for a world is not exactly safe for girls and women. I have experienced certain disturbing situations scribed to men and women in their home cities. that convinced me so and I ridiculously blamed But as a woman, I feel for a fragment of a second my blatant trust towards others and naivety, rather than look at what is inherently wrong with consequentially evaded the social requirements those individuals and the larger socio-cultural and responsibilities associ-ated with woman-ness.
Or so I think. The expectation to lead a linear life, constituting school, marriage and starting a family, and preferably in the context of a single geograph-ical space, always follows me as a woman..
room to be critical. Consequently, women must be
manifest their feminism in real life. With the women remain constant across these spaces.
While I think I have escaped these social boundaries by travelling, my responsibility to friends, families, and other loved ones always remain in constant communication with my friends and families, keeping them up to date with my weeks, I become increasingly embedded in my local setting, and communication with anyone outside of this envi-ronment becomes very minimal. I do not do this on purpose - it simply happens. that although my responsibility to myself is primary – to be free, to avoid spiritual stagnaavoid social repetition, the perception of me cultivated by those I encounter in my travels always stems from my commitment to my family and social status (i.e. economically, but also in terms of romantic relationships). There is always a reference to social expectations, How do I have time to cook in the evening? Do I have a boyfriend? No? I should get married soon and settle down! So much travelling is not good for a woman in her mid-twenties! This is when I should
And of course, having to adapt to the life in my new environment means that my interac-tions get trapped in more than social expectations, but also cultural and spiritual – two additional forces that restrict my ability to discover and express my true self. In a weird way, while travelling has allowed me ample opportunities to multiple modes for self-repression.
without a doubt that culture is important, but there are certain elements of it that continuously work at the detriment of women. In many societies, men are placed at the forefront. They govern culture to ensure that all members of society play their part. Mostly, it is societies that have experienced exploita-tion and socio-economic deprivations, and the consequential relocation of their cultures, which end up with a static concept of culture. The sole aim is to rediscover their re-pressed history and sometimes with the aim for development. While this is important, the temporal and spatial, the past and the be-yond,
While I always acknowledge these pieces of advice as coming from places of love and concern, it also dawns on me that I really haven’t escaped
past and the present. These two do not always work well – particularly for women as they now prescribed roles, and the now, the modern world,
different people, and the same expectations of me as a woman that can be found anywhere else in the world. While the expectations remain the same, the pressure to follow through with them differ across contexts. For instance, in certain parts of South Africa (the urban areas such as Johannesburg and Pretoria), I experienced more liberty in challenging these societal expectations of me, whereas in the countryside, there is little
determine their life’s trajectory. Finding the perfect balance of modernity and tradition becomes tradi-tional culture, while still being a modern selves in an antagonistic relationship with men of the same culture, as they strive to challenge and reshape these relationships and the patri-
archal structure within which it is shaped. It is clear that culture is not static – as such, the past and present cannot co-habit. It be-comes imperative then to understand (as across cultures) that within cultures there are differences based on gender among other things. These differences must be collectively renegotiated so that the expression of culture is no longer conciated by all as they work towards the social and
recognition that culture only presents a partial and not a total sense of identity for the individual. As a youth visiting rural South Africa, I could not evade some of these social and cultural expressions that I temporarily had to embody. not only appear ungrateful, but your refusal can also be interpreted as an antagonistic expression towards the beliefs and practices of locals. Any attempts to express my feminist beliefs when told not to wear trousers so often, or not to wear short skirts (meaning knee length) was met with stubborn instructions by elders on how a decent girl should behave. One evening, after I grudgingly went to church to please my host mother, two elder men with the stench of alcohol all over be careful to walk around like that here, respect yourself”. Their tone was arrogant and to some extent threatening. I stood still, and upon I was wearing a long sleeve dress little beyond my knees, and a pair course, my host family told me to but no matter how I try, this story at the back of my mind.
that went a of heels. Of ignore this, has remained
A few days later, on my way to the market, I and boy. It was a frightening scene. The boy, about age sixteen, and the girl the same were
boy’s advances on her. She had a son and was more interested in someone else. The girl’s neck was gripped and held tightly under the boys’ arms so that he continuously rained punches on her head and face. Trou-blingly, she kept screaming, “It is not by force” as she was continuously being used as a punching bag. The boy’s friend was idly standing by, and a small crowd of both youths and elders was forming. At my attempt to intervene, I was held back by my host sister. It was dangerous for me to intervene as a girl, and anyways, we didn’t know what their is-sue is so “We shouldn’t interfere”. The crowd shared this sentiment and to the girls’ det-riment, she was the boys’ minutes simply for saying no. No police was called, and the community did absolutely nothing. It was continuous “It is not by force” statement, she in no way considered herself his lover. The entire community, through their silence, par-ticipated in the maintenance of a culture of violence. In doing so, they are telling girls that you must listen to men and do what they want, regardless of the consequences to you. The situation is more complex of course, but nothing can justify an entire community’s betrayal towards securing safety for young girls and women. I can only imagine, and hope that the girl’s parents intervened at some point. This incident reminded me of another – a brief fragmented memory. All the memories are shadows, lingering in the background, teasing, still not very coherent. The similarity lies in the community’s silence, the lack of personhood of young girls. {She remembers the other cousin – a very distant one. One day, he had cornered her in the back of had her small towel wrapped around her budding breasts. When he touched her, she felt the sensation and it teased her. Then her back touched the wall with a force that left her breathless,
from time past and to the present, she had told the back and she could so very easily tell her and he would be in trouble. Except she really couldn’t tell. Liberty of speech was not to her advantage during her early years. With a heavy push, her back was slammed to the wall. How she wished to say something. But it would make no difference. As shadows move from the past to present, she remembered: telling would not be to her advantage, you see. She was alone in a sea, with others who had formed cliques, who had allies. She was alone. So she dares not say, for fear, that she will become more alone – the silent glares, hateful glares that she would endure. Years later, her sentiments would be proven accurate.} Patriarchy does not only mean that men oppress women – it also means women oppress themselves patriarchal values. As a young black nomad, the question will always remain, how do I transgress these challenges – culture and societal values so as not to offend host families?
Š Hsia-Fei Chang
RAISE ME TO BE A LEADER AS WELL, SAYS THE LITTLE GIRL AN ESSAY BY GODESS BVUKUTWA
From a tender age, girls in many Sub-Saharan cultures start their training in how to be a wife and mother. This, of course, starts with the types of toys that we choose for little children to play with. It is as if there is a constitution that decrees that boys should play with toy guns, Batman and Spiderman, whilst the same law claims that girls should play with dolls, toy houses with tea sets, little brightly-coloured princess dresses and the like. The truth is that there is no such law that orders people to choose different toys for boys and girls. It is just a decision made by patriarchal society that trains girls and boys on what they should be like, how they should behave, and what expectations they should ness that society then expects of them as men. Boys will aspire to drive cars and aeroplanes from a very young age, as well as saving damsels in distress, just as superheroes are expected to. In the meantime, what is happening to the little girl? She is playing with the pretty doll with its long hair and colourful dress. Then, years later, we wonder why looks and appearances are more important to females compared to males, and why girls are judged more on their appearances than on their intellect. Yet, society does this to women as little girls through gender coded play toys and repeated emphasis on Barbie and princess dolls with pretty clothes. And then we wonder where the notion that girls need saving comes from? It is always little princesses who get saved from the evil dragon, rather than young men who then become the heroes. Isn’t this what little children’s books having been telling us all these years? That men should feel the need to protect and take care of women and that women should feel the need to have men take care of
them? Evidently, this is not only a Sub-Saharan African problem; it is a global challenge. A lot of questions on why there are fewer women in the boardrooms and in leadership positions, and why there are fewer women drivers and pilots all over the world, can be answered by visiting a toddler’s playroom. However, in Sub-Saharan cultures, this is taken a step further because of a patriarchal culture that is still more apparent than that of the Global North. Little girls learn even to carry babies on their backs, by having their dolls tied to their backs, and also pretend to feed the babies. In Zimbabwe, young children play mahumbwe. Mahumbwe is loosely translated as playing house, where children pretend to be mothers and fathers. You never see the little boy, for example, fake you see the little girl fake driving the car; it is always the boy who drives the little wire cars. In addition to this, girls’ and boys’ chores are mould of a future wife and mother from an early age. However, it should be noted that most of the chores that are meant to be for boys and men, girls and women almost always do too. It is common knowledge that almost all girls in the same rural community grow up doing these “boy’s” chores regularly; besides their own designated cooking, cleaning, washing, and child care which men rarely do. In fact, it becomes unclear what men’s actual chores are in Sub Saharan African cultures, because women are also seen doing these chores. Moreover, when girls and boys are older, they have different curfew times. While it is normal for girls to be at home before the sun sets, as they are expected to do when they are married, boys can come in late at night, and they will
in the olden days, girls used to have deep talks and receive counsel from their aunts or grandmothers, but, in these modern days, most families now live far apart, and people no longer live as extended families. Thus, girls now rely on kitchen parties which take place prior to their wedding day. This could be a traditional wedding, or a modern day white wedding. Kitchen parties are there, not only for women to party and shower the bride with gifts, but primarily to give the bride advice and counsel that she will need when she enters her marital home. A girl is told the dos and don’ts of marriage, such as how to take care of her in-laws, how to make her husband happy, and how to behave during sex. Inasmuch that some of this information is undeniably helpful for a new bride, it worryingly tells women to be submissive, and to do what her husbands want her to, in order to make him happy. This advice emphasises that the husband is the head of the family, and in order to be the perfect wife, you have to be submissive and try to make personal feelings. All that you were brought up hearing is brought back during the kitchen party and re-emphasised. I know some readers would say that these roles and behaviours come naturally to boys and girls, but this is not true. Girls and boys learn these social behaviours. We all learn how to be a ‘boy’ or how to be a ‘girl’ depending on the expectations of a particular society. John M. Grohol,
stereotypes within their children…” “[t]hey turn into the kids we, by and large, imagine them to be. Parents don’t usually do this consciously, of course. It is the stereotyped roles hammered into us at an early age, reinforced by consumerism and toy makers and commercials, and our own mothers and fathers. Boys are athletic and competitive, while girls are less so, and more social and emotional. These are stereotypes we imprint on our children; they are not naturally this way.” In the early days of my career as a women’s rights activist, I was a volunteer facilitator for Girl Child Empowerment Outreach programs, a community-based organisation in rural Zimbabwe. We went around primary schools in this area raising awareness on gender issues and child abuse issues. We asked primary school girls to do timelines of their normal day, and then asked them to do timelines of their brother’s or male relative’s of the same age with whom they lived with. What came out was an unsettling revelation of the responsibilities that these young girls between ten and twelve years had. A lot of these
ones before leaving for school; whilst the boys would wake up later and take out the livestock, bath with the water the girls had fetched and heated, and then go to school. After school most girls of this age would have to rush back home
as we thought’, makes reference to Lise Eliot’s, turn into Troubme gaps- And what we can do about
differences that parents believe are innate or nature-led are not. Motor skills? The same. Ability to have deep emotional feelings? The same. Aggressiveness? The same. Why do we observe such differences in little boys and girls? Because parents often unconsciously reinforce the gender
evening meal, bathing younger children, and then bringing in the livestock for the night; whilst the boys would be playing soccer or some other game outside. At one school we asked boys between the ages of 10 and 12 why they thought their timelines were so different from those of the girls in their class, and one little boy stood up and said that this was because girls would get married one day, and would have to do these jobs in their new homes. What this little boy said, though unfortunate,
In retrospect, I realised how true this was for me and my sisters. When doing some tasks that women are traditionally supposed to know, if we were not doing them well enough our mother would say things like, “Hatidi zvekunyadziswa hedu.” By this she meant, “We don’t want you to embarrass us when you get married”. This is why girls’ education is not deemed as important as boys, because after all girls will get married and be looked after by her husband. This is why only boys are raised to be leaders and achievers, because they will be tomorrow’s household, community and national leaders. This is why no matter how much success a woman has in her life, how much educated she is, her worth is measured by her marital status. Women who are not married are not respected as much, which has been the plight of many women’s rights activists, because by not being married, they are called bitter women, who want to make every other woman as bitter and unhappy as they are. This links to the education system and the curricula used by most schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. As a Grade One or Grade Two pupil, we used to read books with dialogue, such as “Ona Baba. Ona Mai. Ona Baba vanoenda kubasa. Ona Mai vanoumba hari”, which translated means, “Look at Father. Look at Mother. Look at Father going to work. Look at Mother moulding a claypot.” Of course with a lot of work from women’s rights groups, a lot of this content has become more gender sensitive, but recently I was disappointed to see that one of the Shona books was still being used in primary schools. This book is a 1980s publication and contains a lot of gender
insensitive content, and sometimes this content is not even true about the two genders. In my Master’s thesis on research in gender discrimination in the education sector, I found out that STEM subjects curriculum developers were mostly men, and this made me question as to whether this are a tiny minority compared to numbers of men. This is food for thought. In conclusion, it is astonishing how much children get to know their socially expected behaviours, attitudes, and roles at a young age. Even more astonishing is how this education affects gender roles and stereotypes and turns little boys into achievers and future leaders, whilst girls are turned into future wives and mothers. These behaviours and attitudes are learned; so it is overdue for little girls to be explore her superhero nature. Whilst little boys need to start combing a Barbie doll’s hair, making tea for it in the teacup set, and exploring his caring and emotional side. After this we should review our education system, and see whether it is contributing to having more men in boardrooms and in STEM subject industries. But we must remember, somewhere out there is a little girl crying out to be a superhero and not just be the princess, to be raised as a future leader not just as a future mother and wife.
JELILI ATIKU A PERFORMANCE
Oginrinringinrin is a Yoruba word, which literally means deep insight. It is used here to refer to the potentiality of human body as it becomes symbolic contents that will aid the expansion of human awareness on critical issues of human values and security. The performances transform public space as an artistic process for human recourse and inferences. The adopted (/will adopt) the technique of dance, theatric actions, text, video, installation, photography and mixed media; and more so, as a principle; appropriate(d) Egungun technique.
Jelili Atiku, Ologbere (Oginrinringinrin II), Slussen / SÜdermalmstorg/Fylkingen Stockholm, Sweden, April 11 2014, during PAL (Performance Art Links) International Festival. Photo by Priya Mistry. Š Jelili Atiku.
I HAVEN’T SEEN THE SUN A POEM BY AYO AYOOLA-AMALE A small habitat stood on a mountain and my huge legs quietly whispered songs from the unspoken dawn. I lifted my legs and walked on the moon. How old this fresh legs are, running after me. A famished minstrel cries within yet beauty was found in homeless drums. A hungry castle, coarse-grained as marble and bumpy, Hardened bitter in hunger and thirst on top of the fault that stood. Out came the golden cheeks full of heavy streams gushing down like volcano that woke the hidden depths of pain. I later learned that i know but did not know. The world just dropped in. I haven’t seen the sun. So long my eyes turned to deserts, Then i returned home. Would my legs be peering out the window? Nothing new had happened.
Legs, 2014 Š Daniel Regan.
REIMAGINING THE GENDER PARADIGM A CONVERSATION BY ATO MALINDA AND GABRIELLA BECKHURST
GB: Your previous performance works have dealt with challenging issues such as incest and sexual abuse in Games (2013) and the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Prison Sex I (2008). Additionally, Is Free Dumb (2010), which was performed outside the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi, addressed freedom and equality of women, and yet a symptomatic turn of events resulted in an unlawful arrest and a refusal to acknowledge the performance as art. What drives you to work denies your engagement?
AM: I believe that the tacit quality of art allows us to express certain subjects that initially may appear unapproachable. Games was a was called Mourning a Living Man and was about my own experience of sexual abuse at the hands mance is a double channeled video, with the combination of both videos being from the viewpoint of a recollection. The two women represent a same-sex relationship. Their communication is
stated by J.L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words. One woman speaks English, the other French. The woman who speaks in French recites a poem by Nikki Giovanni called ‘Choices’. The wife is the representation of my mother; a bit ethereal and unaware of the incestuous relations in the house; and in the domestic situation, not as prominent as her ‘husband’. Although this domestic
‘father’ articulates his statements to the ‘wife,’ but they could also be directed to the unseen both mother and daughter and leaves them both. The chopping of the carrots directly represents castration, but also represents the castration ceases his performance as his daughter’s superego. This video is the representation of dysfunctional domesticity, with miscommunication, incest and/ or adultery achieved through gender performance. The daughter is represented in the second video as archival footage of me and my father during my childhood. This video is a recollection of video’s dynamics and shows my father’s head multiplied in place of other people’s heads in the sequences of sexual abuse, but also to the abuser’s narcissism. I made Prison Sex I, when I was in London in 2008 and working with a London-based NGO called Forward UK. They work primarily on eradicating FGM and child marriage. I have worked with them since about 2007, and still work with them. It other African women on empowering African women who are not afforded basic human rights; the most important being the right to person. To my recollection, I conceived Is Free Dumb, as a very simple performance. Essentially, all I wanted to do was read in the streets of Nairobi! Of course I set a context for this reading. I placed myself in a cage, baring my shoulders with my body wrapped in an East African leso. This is not uncommon attire for East African
women in their homes. So I wanted to highlight the quotidian and bring the private into the public. In the morning that the performance began, I set out in this attire, reading popular black wooden cage. I wanted to understand the reading of traditional and contemporary as a Kenyan woman, and discover why indeed I felt caged. However - yes - the Nairobi police force did not take kindly to this experiment, and I was imprisoned for eight hours in downtown Nairobi. Of course, this result says a lot about the climate in which I was operating and indeed answers the question as to why I was feeling like a caged woman. Since that performance, the city council of Nairobi (and the police) has gotten a little more lenient, as is my understanding. There is something very basic and intrinsic that leads me to do the performances that I do. feel that my politicised black, female, queer body is both protected and respected. I feel the only way to do this is to be a part of the conversation. GB: You have previously talked about the importance of performing as an agency that connects performer and audience. A space by which both enter a dialogue bound by human experience, what AM: Yes, I feel that all art is bound by its audience. I always say that once I create a drawing it is no longer my piece of art (even if I still own it). Once the act of creativity occurs, communication transpires. And one cannot own a conversation. Even if no one sees the work, a potentiality remains. Of course the connection with the audience is more direct with performance. perform in front of complacent audiences. It is important to me that the audience knows that they are part of the performance and conduct themselves in such respect. As with all performance artists, corporeal context is important; race, class, sexuality, geography, etcetera, all
important factors. All these social factors do not exist without both the mirror stage and the Other. A congregation of Egos makes the world interesting, but also ensures that complacency is relegated. GB: I am interested in how certain geographies implicate your performances, i.e. how might a European audience, such as with the exhibition Games (2013) which took place in Berlin, compare with other audiences, for example those in Nairobi? As well as digital audiences, which you further exhibit the works after the performance has taken place? AM: live performance in Incommensurable Identities the cadre of my performance Tracey Rose who has in the
Europe, entitled (2011) was done in colleague and friend past empathetically
is viewed in a European context. As well as discussing the performative body, I also wanted to situate the performance within European perperformances. So what you saw was an African I wanted to speak about the perceived incommensurability of Africa and Europe. Are Europe and Africa commensurable? I do not know! The issue with performing on the African continent is as interesting one, but not comdifferent ways both audiences prescribe and inscribe their beliefs upon my body. GB: The theme of this year’s Dak’Art was ‘Producing the Common’, how did the work you performed, Mshoga Mpya, or the New Homosexual engage with this concept? AM: Mshoga Mpya was the result of almost a year’s worth of research on queer space in Nairobi. It engages with ‘Producing the Common’ because the very intimate one-on-one
performances that took place within a small bricolage cubicle were taken from a conversation of life stories with queer Nairobians. It spoke to the homophobic human rights record of African states. Beside the cubicle lay a textual map that described with everyday vernacular how to get from my home to spaces each queer person delineated as safe space. GB: The title, it seems, addresses demand for a new model, or a future archetype of sexuality. Could you speak about the implication of gender neutrality in Mshoga Mpya, of positing yourself as an androgynous vessel? AM: The use of the word ‘homosexual’ is a reference to the biological history of sexuality. Foucault describes the thinking around the homosexual physiology in the 18th Century in The History of Sexuality; it was thought homosexuals certain regards. The addition of the word mpya, or new, implied that there was an older case. I wanted to subversively attack the notion proliferated by African politicians that homosexuality is an import from the West. In fact it has always been on the African continent, and we are the new homosexuals. Unfortunately, the androgynous intentions were not played out the way I intended in the performing of Mshoga Mpya, or the New Homosexual. The intention was to be representative of as that a transgender man could just as easily pass for a gay man. The malleability of gender is a beautiful thing. GB: In Butler’s reworking of gender performativity delineated in her 1993 text Bodies That Matter, she cites that gender, in certain instances, acts as a vehicle for what she calls ‘phantasmatic transformation’; or a promise of rescue from poverty, abuse, homophobia, and racist delegitimation. How far would you agree with Butler’s notion of the law as an overarching symbolic threat, that the law “compels the shape and direction of sexuality through the
installation of fear”? AM: I would agree with Butler; the law, through the abjection of certain bodies, dictates sexuality. Uganda is a good example of this. Through the passing of the anti-gay law earlier this year, the Ugandan government is able to not only control sexuality, but also the sexual imaginings of its people. I have seen interviews with Ugandan people who believe homosexuals should be killed. Not just imprisoned; they believe someone should lose their life for being a homosexual. This leaves little room for discussion. This law has validated such thinking through viability. In Kenya, acts of sodomy have a fourteen years penalty. About prison, Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o says that “prison is the space in which the state performs its power”. The threat of prison under law deters from performing same-sex desires and therefore contributes towards the determination of national sexuality. GB: Alongside your practice, which also comprises installation, drawing and painting, you are also a curator. As part of a year-long programme dedicated to personal liberties within the context of freedom of speech, sexuality and homophobia, as devised by Raw Material Company in Dakar, you co-curated with Koyo Kouoh Precarious Imagining: Visibility Surrounding African Queerness (2014) featuring Zanele Muholi, Andrew Esiebo, Jim Chuchu, Kader Attia, and Amanda Kerdahi M. It was met with local and international publicity, mostly due to its alleged forced closure a couple of weeks after opening. How was the exhibition received in Dakar? AM: In the context of the ‘Biennial Off’ programme, the audience was wonderfully receptive. GB: the media met with the exhibition’s intended purpose? AM I think the exhibition went very well. Unfortunately, Raw Material Company had to close it early for safety’s sake. Muslim council men accused Raw Material of promoting homosexuality
against the gallery. Luckily no one was hurt, and no work was damaged. However, I found that although the media appeared to be on our side, there was a large element of sensationalism that was counterproductive. I understand that journalists want to get the story out and read by as many people as possible, but exaggerating the circumstances or incidences is not the way to do it. Non-heteronormative sexualities are a sensitive topic on the continent, and reporting extremities will not help those of us who live here.
Molecular Biology at the University of Texas at Austin, and has a Master of Fine Arts from Transart
exhibited at Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst Urbain de Douala in Cameroon and the Karen Blixen Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discur
Image on previous page: Ato Malinda, Film still, 2013 © 2013 Ato Malinda
AWAITING THE RETURN OF THE GOLDEN GODDESS A PERFORMANCE BY DIMPLE B. SHAH Talking to the Holy Ganges – The story is not new … I stand on the river bank … in front of the calm ing the black city and hopeless light ... the bodies getting the heat smelling of death … mourning is everywhere … it is time to mourn for lost souls who were burnt to death, who were dragged, crushed, hit and brutalised. They have come long way, like these clay pots dragged along the path in small lanes, streets, roads, cities, and countries. It time to heal our body and mind which is blacked with the pain of lost souls … Holy Ganges will you take … the burden of these lost souls … we need to heal in mass, we need to cover the burnt body, we need to cover our wounds, we need to heal our minds of not one but in mass … heal our minds and hearts blackened by pain, we need the touch of golden Yellow, we need touch of Yellow Root … Are We Still Waiting for the Golden Goddess …?
The last performance of KIPAF event was performed by me, in Nimtala Ghats, near where the cremations are done by the riverbank of the Holy Ganges. The performance was about mass healing, where I and my audience (com mon people) were healed in a ritualistic act of showering Golden turmeric on me, and, in exchange, I distributed turmeric root to heal my audience. Awaiting for the Golden Goddess, which was concerned with and commented on issues of rape and sexual violence, especially the rape case which happened just two weeks before the event in Kolkata. This performance was about the use and throw attitude of people in respect to women. In this performance, the turmeric root stands for fertility, sacredness, and also the healing elements for rape victims. My performance was an attempt to provoke the general public to think about the issue of sexual violence, to make them ask questions regarding this issue, and to be sensitive to this problem; so, hopefully, they do not just think about it, but also act upon it and pledge to create safe cities for women and girls where they can move around safely. The female body needs to be cleansed from the and it needs to be healed.
I walked the stage wearing a yellow dress naturally as the mother during coloured by turmeric water to sym bolise purity, fertility, and cleansing. the pots are lit as lamps By cleansing and healing to celebrate motherhood my body, I also repre- and the power of women. sented cleansing the mass In my performance, the female population in audience interacts in this India. I walked the stage ritualistic act of healing with an audio speaker con- and cleansing the body by taining the news of rapes applying turmeric paste from all over India and on me, and, thus, particcrying sounds. The main ipates in a community purpose was to make the effort to think about the audience feel uncomfort- issue of sexual violence able and provoke them to and rape. do something about it. I wanted to make them take the effort to think about, and to act upon, the issues raised. I used a hundred small clay pots that were tied to each other and then dragged through the streets with ropes. In the process, many were broken and crushed. The clay pots were important, because, in everyday life, it is an object used for drinking tea and forms an essential part in representing Kolkata and Bengali culture. Metaphorically, the pots represented the position of women as objects that are carelessly looked upon without much care in our society, even though they are sensitive, essential and fragile, and need to be taken care of by us. Traditionally, clay pots also represent in Indian culture the womb, especially in Gujarat and Kolkata where Goddess
Dimple B Shah, Awaiting for the Golden Goddess, Nimtala Ghat, Kolkata, 2014, performed at International Performance Festival. Photo by Augustine Thilak. Š Dimple B Shah.
TIPPING POINT AN ACCOUNT BY BISHA K. ALI
I write this eight days after the inciting incident. I sat at my usual petrol station. I’d just bought a pack of wine gums, and I wanted to put them in my mouth as quickly as possible. In the kiosk the gentleman at the till remarked on my appearance. My driver’s license happened to be on show - he kindly pointed out how pretty I was and asked ‘just how old is this photo?’ I didn’t care—I had wine gums. I get back to my car, glad that this time the other guy had not been at the till—the guy who usually asks me if I’m still unmarried. I wonder if he asks any of the customers with penises the same question. wine gum or two, put my seatbelt on and continue my quest across London to a gig. A car pulls up beside me, with two young men, who immediately begin leering at me, smiling, waving, staring, shouting out. I can’t make out what they’re hearing—I’m playing Rufus Wainwright too loudly and it’s entertaining watching them mime along. I give them a dismissive look, that in my head says “fuck off,” but in their heads says “please shout and stare some more.” I turn away, hoping they’ve stopped, suddenly self conscious about my goddamn wine gums. I notice that they continue. And continue. And continue. Usually, I would drive away, shake my head, be a little mad, feel unsettled, then get on with my day. I’m a woman. I can take it like a woman, damn it. Then I remembered the gig I did last year at a rowdy lesbian club in Soho. Man, it was a good gig. It was one of those lovely moments in performing when the audience is on board with you, they get what you’re about, they understand the core of where your humour is coming from and want to hear more. These are rare. It was awesome. I stuck around until the end of the night, and a gentleman from the audience struck up a conversation. The MC had mentioned that I “You know, you’re good, but you’re never gonna win.” “Oh?” “Yeah, you’re not conventional enough. Your material, who you are, how you look.” “OK.” “I mean, you don’t look bad, you’re just not conventionally attractive. You’re not good I noticed you have a great ass. But that ass won’t win you the competition.”
“OK.” I went to leave. There were a bunch of audience members who had come up and said nice, non-invasive things that didn’t make my skin crawl. Some invited me outside for some smokes, and one asked me, politely, with clarity and restraint, if I found her attractive, and if I would be up for coming back to her place for sex and gear. It’s not really my thing, but the exchange felt non-aggressive, non-predatory, genuine, and one borne of some kind of weird respect. When I turned her down and said she seemed lovely, but I’m not really sexually attracted to women, and also, what is gear; (cocaine, naive young girl at comedy club, cocaine,) she explained what she meant, was kind, thanked me again for the performance, introduced me to her friends, we all chatted, it was lovely. I went back inside to say good night to the promoters and thank them for having me on. My ass-fan was still there. He came up to say thanks again, good night, and as I turned to leave, grabbed the afore mentioned ass. I was embarrassed and shocked, and left, quickly. human managed to smack that feeling right out of my asshole. Anyway, that was then, this is now. These boys are still leering at me over a petrol pump. I roll down my window, and in my head I’m still asking myself “Why am I doing this?” Then I remember that one time a few months ago I was driving back from my other half’s place. I was alone, at midnight, trundling along in my mini in Peckham, my windows down because my air conditioning is a vicious piece of shit. I sat at a red light, jamming to Boston, when a man turns the corner on his bicycle, rides up to my car, grabs the door frame, leans in close and blows a smooch into my face. His lips don’t make contact with my skin, all I got was the caress of his breath. He drove on. I rolled up my windows with desperate fury and made my way home in the cloying heat. A few weeks later, on the same journey home, this time around one am and nearer to where I live, two men in a car were driving incredibly dangerously. They tailgated me, overtook me and broke hard, forcing me to break and change direction. There was little place else to go. Eventually they forced me into the side of the road, pulled up beside villains and one of them stuck his tongue out in a way that implied they meant more than a quick lesson in quantum physics. I don’t mean to brag, but I’m a great driver, so I pulled out quick and lost them by the time I got to my door. Those are some of the reasons why I did what I did at the inciting incident. Reader, I said something. With my actual mouth. pump between us, my foot’s on the accelerator, I am Bonnie, I am Clyde. “Hey! What do you want?” I asked.
“What’s your name sweetheart?” “Why are you asking me?” “Come on just wanna get to know you.” “Why?” “What do you mean?”
“Hey we just wanna make friends.” “There are a bunch of people here on this forecourt. I’m the only woman, by myself. Why are you doing this?” I thought, if I force them into introspection, they might change. They might not leer at women by themselves, or in groups, or in general. They might think, ‘hey, that’s another human being, just like me! Man would it suck if two random people came over and kept staring at us, shouting at us, and didn’t stop what they were doing even though we made it clear that their attention was making us uncomfortable.’ Alas, I had not made my point. In a moment of reactionary frustration, I did what I pledged I would never do. “If I was your mother, and two guys did what you two are doing, what would you think?”
Uh oh. I hit a soft spot. A woman he actually respects and cares about. It’s not his fault, this kid can’t make logical extrapolations! “Why don’t you just think about how you treat people?”
“Why are you being so rude?” My brain exploded. For a moment, I was outside of my body, and I was hysterical and I screamed in his face. Not words, a growl of hysteria. They were laughing, but so was I, from outside of my body. There I was, Rufus in the background, screaming noises in frustration. I didn’t realise I was so upset until then.
I told my mum about what happened. I said I have to speak up for myself more, when it’s safe, because who else is going to stand up for me? And because I can, when so many people—men and women—suffer similar and much worse, but can’t stand up for themselves. So I have to do it a little bit every time, so that I don’t feel like a piece of shit after these little exchanges. She disagreed. This made me more mad. proud of it. I had always wanted a new car. For some stupid reason, it meant something to us. When we were working terrible, soulless jobs, when we were close to the bread-line, gling on the day we could get a new car. “The day I bought it, I took you for a drive. It was summer, beautiful sunshine, dry woman with her family pulled up beside us. She looked over at us, spat in our car, shouted “Paki family!” and drove off. I was ashamed. Ashamed of my colour, ashamed of her spit on back, ashamed that I was powerless, ashamed of the car we had dreamed of. I felt her hate inside me and I still feel it now—and that’s my fault. You have to let the hate and cruelty of others go. If you hold onto it, you’ll be telling your daughter these stories when you’re We argued for a while, back and forth, because I still believe that silence or brushing it off, while it feels like the only option, will hinder and not help. We shouldn’t have to say anything. It sucks that we gotta tell people “Hey man, don’t touch my ass unless I say you can touch my ass,” but if I could go back to that moment, I would ask him why he felt entitled to grab my ass. the receiving end of. The inciting incident was the tipping point for me—it’s made me understand that if I’m gonna get through life and stuff, I have to speak up for myself. sad,” and it feels good to say “I don’t like when you treat me differently because I don’t have the same genitals as you.” It partly alleviates the crushing smallness that is the result of this behaviour. I wish my mum could experience speaking up for herself. I wish that years of negativity and an environment that left her voiceless hadn’t stopped her from saying, “Hey, you have “Leave my family alone ya racist asshole.”
Get involved in ‘In Others’ Words’ by participating in Lauren’s IOW INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL EXCHANGE! Lauren will be expanding this work by traveling the world and photographing interested participants in exchange for life’s basic necessities such as food, shelter, transportaIndividuals of all ages, genders, identities, backgrounds, and abilities are welcome! Interested in participating? Email lauren@laurenrenner.com, subject line: IOW Travel Exchange! Lauren Renner, Untitled (Detail), from the series In Others’ Words © Lauren Renner.
GROWING PAINS A POEM BY CLARITTA PETERS
You want legs as long as buildings And hips as narrow as dark alley ways. Three quarters. Like a truck going over a tomato One quarter The amount of blackness that made you palatable for a white boy to date There are claw marks on my thighs. And spider bites on my legs, The marks of youth, growth and dirt Shining like Vaseline on clean bodies I didn’t expect to be told by girl next to me That she “didn’t like black girls”. I know now I was peppered in scars Because, People are often like mosquitoes, They want to bite you, Because you’re juicy I know now, I don’t suffer the lacks of white or black. I am a whole, Learning to love the fractions of my being I know now, That basing your worth on the love of others, Who haven’t learned to love themselves, Is just a bad idea.
I know now, That those tiger claw marks, Are the signs of a woman’s body. Stretching into heights I’m yet to reach I know now That being this me, With moderate breasts, Skin the colour of rust, And hands that show I write my mind, Is a beautiful thing. I know now, First day at my new school, And my mother, Who held my hand and asked the girl, If she, She already knew the answer to the question. I know that now.
Siobhan Barr, Fatty Patty, 2013, Giclée print on German Etching, 12” x 16” © 2013 Siobhan Barr
UNAPOLEGETICALLY UGLY A DECLARATION BY KATH READ
Every day, when I open my email, there are a plethora of emails detailing how ugly I am. Every day, someone leaves a comment on my blog, or sends me an email, or trolls my Tumblr, deeply intent on declaring me the ugliest person they’ve ever seen. They equate me to pigs, whales, elephants, hippos, manatees and all manner of animals, all
any value to me as a person. Now admittedly, mostly women are expected to be beautiful, or at least or trophies measured by their beauty. I want more from my life than being aesthetically pleasing.
adorable. Once upon a time, this would have hurt me deeply. I would have been terribly upset, it probably would have made me self harm, or driven me to isolate myself more, or stopped me from dressing the way I love to dress. But it hasn’t done that for a long time. Now before you deny my ugliness, which is a lovely thought of you, I want to say, it’s OK. I’m not writing this to have people dispute the accusation. You don’t need to tell me I’m not ugly, or even that I’m beautiful, to undo the shitty things that some people say to me. Because other than some irritation at having to deal with continued abuse and harassment, the actual words themselves don’t hurt me at all. I realised why today when I responded to an email that was actually lovely (not abuse, I don’t respond to those) from a woman who had always felt ugly and she told me about her journey to need to be beautiful, and I realised I don’t have that need myself. Not that I have any problem with other people needing to feel beautiful, but it’s just not there for me. I feel absolutely no obligation to be aesthetically pleasing to others. Oh don’t get me wrong, it’s always nice when someone refers to me as
important things in my life. It doesn’t diminish my intellect, my humour, my compassion, my dedication, my enthusiasm, my strength, my ability to love. These are, for me anyway, the yardsticks which I measure my success as a human being – not beauty. Let’s not forget, beauty is entirely subjective anyway. As much as there is a societal beauty ideal, it’s not the default of what all people features beautiful – for every single feature of it beautiful – even the very things we ourselves polar opposites of features beautiful – you can be attracted to more than one body type, or more than one eye colour, or more than one skin tone, and so on. I know I am. Think about the famous people that are seen as beautiful. One movie star or pop singer may be deeply desirable to one person, and then completely off putting to the next. Except perhaps for Tom Hiddleston, it seems
Personally, I’m attracted to people for more than just their physical beauty. A person can be physically stunning, but deeply repulsive to me. I can think of several famous actors who are lauded as being the ‘sexiest men alive’ yet
they have been violent towards previous partners, or have bigoted political beliefs, or are ignorant. further than external appearance. For example I’m attracted to an infectious laugh, gentle hands, quick wit, deep intellect … I also like crooked teeth, skinny legs, smile wrinkles, hairy bodies, big feet, fat bellies … all things that other people would consider very unattractive. A person doesn’t have to have all of those things for me people and am attracted to them, particularly when accompanied by those non-physical attributes that I like. That said, I don’t expect every person on the planet to meet my aesthetic. I’m not personally offended by encountering someone that I do not - in men in particular - that if a woman fails to be sexually attractive to them, it is a personal insult to them. I’ve heard of this referred to as ‘The Boner Principle’ - any woman who ‘fails’ to inspire an erection in a man loses her right to basic human respect by default. It’s the most unbelievably conceited attitude to think that you are owed attraction by every woman you encounter. I’ve got no intention of buying into that bullshit. My life is worth far more than being a pretty ornament that pleases others. If people think I’m ugly, I offer no apology and feel no I’m not here to decorate the world, I’m here to change it.
Kajsa Gullberg, from Unravelled, 2014 Š Kajsa Gullberg.
WHY YOU CANNOT BEFRIEND MAN AN OPINION BY AMANDA MUREN CEDERSTRAND
Any attempted friendship with a man consists of a constant element of humiliation. You must always be on edge, at any moment prepared to be served a – albeit thoughtless, unintentional – comment that reminds you of your subordination woman’s eternal curse. Because if you didn’t overlook it, if you called attention to his every faux pas, every time he wronged you and violated your limits, reminded you of, and reinforced, the disparate situation that you’re in, you wouldn’t be able to just “hang out”. If you acted as a man would and demanded that he acknowledged your equality ... But you know that you’re not actually equal, so you just keep quiet. You keep quiet and swallow your pride and your self-respect, and that’s what’s so horribly humiliating, because like a creature without pride, without self-respect - and you do it to enable the relationship! You mutilate yourself so he won’t have to see what it is he’s doing to you. And he will look down on you for what he thinks you’re doing to yourself and you will let him. You hide his evil from his he can keep his. And you know, deep down, no matter how much you love and respect him, that he doesn’t deserve it. As a female (cis or trans) trying to socialise with a straight male, you’re always sexualised. Of course this doesn’t mean that every straight man wants to sleep with you, but rather because of the heterosexual matrix, there’s always the awareness that you, technically speaking, could become sexually attracted to each another. And consequently you’re put in a sexualised relation where you as a woman are always the inferior. To him, it’s okay to play with this tension, joke about it, make playful advances. And it’s always
your job to dampen the shocks and neutralise them. Because you know that these jokes are only jokes as long as you don’t take them for something else. You are the guardian of your comradely relation, and that’s strenuous because you can never relax, you must always watch not to send out signals that may be interpreted as sexual. And that can be pretty much anything. Just being friendly for example. Offering a stick of gum. Asking how he’s doing. Listening when he talks. Acting like a normal goddamn fellow human being. You can’t! Since, in relation to a man, you can never be a a mutilated, incomplete thing. When non-feminists enter into feminist discussions, or comment upon them, they usually talk about misandry. Feminists usually retort that they do not hate men but the concept of masculinity. That, however, isn´t necessarily true, either. Actually, yeah, some of us hate men. beat, rape, humiliate, ridicule and belittle us. Misandry exists as well as misogyny, but is in no way equal to it and does not legitimise the liberal idea that “it takes two to tango”. This is an Israel- Palestine situation. The essential difference between these two is that misandry, just like Palestinian hatred for their occupiers, should, in my opinion, be armed. But that´s another discussion.)”. To be a woman in love with a man is to be so timelessly helpless; so terribly conscious of the stare at a photo of him, and everything about yourself you thought solid and valuable – your intelligence, your beliefs, your courage – immediately begins to crumble, leaving you limp,
impotent. You stagger at the frustration of your unworthiness. Everything you are, no matter its sum, is never going to amount to as much as him! Which means that he can never desire you as much as you desire him, simply because there isn’t as much to desire. Gender power relations work that and destruction and humour, your cruellest “doom” plans and most brilliant creativity, you´ll never be enough. And as long as we live in this patriarchy, you know that they’ll never let you forget him. You may have him and he may want you or even love you, but it will be with an unclouded, innocent love and the devastating privilege of ignorance. It is you who will be left, alone, with the dirty, dirty knowledge. The constant cruel the trauma of dealing with men.
FUMIGATE A POEM BY JULI WATSON
It’s a man’s world Black and white Wives and wenches Virgins and whores
Women pinned against the walls Their pained faces Their painted faces Empty vessels stripped of truth We are baubles and harridans Pushed into backstreets Filth put out with the rubbish and rats Throwaway misogyny Complacent captors Faceless females Commodities for cold consummation, mass consumption
COCO DOLLE, I WAS SHOT IN DAYLIGHT, 2008, video still © 2008 COCO DOLLE.
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