Esha Akhtar '21 — The Limits and Success of Transnational Feminism and Palestinian Solidarity

The Limits and Success of Transnational Feminism and Palestinian Solidarity

Esha Akhtar ’21

Edward Said’s Orientalism provides a theoretical framework for the tendency of the West, or the Occidental, to “speak over ‘’ the East, or the Orient (2). Said argues that historically, the “West,” countries like England, France, and America, have centered their biases and stereotypes in their depictions of the East. Therefore, the image of the East that is popularized in the West is not an accurate representation. Rather, it is a result of “an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness” (6). Indeed, with the rise of transnational solidarity and global feminist movements, the power dynamic between Western women and Third World Women has fallen into Orientalist traps. In the context of Western feminism and the Middle East, particularly the struggle for Palestinian justice, there is such a tendency for Western feminists to “speak over” the voices of grassroots Middle Eastern organizers. Transnational feminism has, in fact, failed to create meaningful resistance in the Middle East because white feminists’ universal feminism is rooted in Western, Islamophobic narratives. However, Black feminists in America have shown, particularly through Palestinian organizing efforts, that by recognizing and working within differences, instead of rejecting them, it is possible to create effective transnational feminist solidarity.

For many white, Western feminists, universal feminism is rooted in a culture of neoliberalism and Islamophobia. Many white feminists are unable to fully recognize the complexities of the barriers for women in the Middle East, and as a result, they blame broad ideas of Islam as the primary reason behind their oppression. In her book Freedom is a Constant Struggle, long-time activist Angela Davis describes neoliberalism and how it “drives us to focus on individuals, ourselves, individual victims, individual perpetrators” (137). She then poses the rhetorical question, in the context of global racism: “how is it possible to solve the massive problem of racist state violence by calling upon individual police officers to bear the burden of that history and to assume that by prosecuting them, by exacting our revenge on them, we would have somehow made progress in eradicating racism?” (137). Similarly, global feminism often critiques women’s oppression in the Third World without a sufficient consideration of the systems that lead to their oppression. Ignorance stems from the assumption that there is a “universal” feminist experience where gender and sexuality is the primary axis of mistreatment in women’s lives. However, such an idea is an incredibly misguided and privileged understanding as one Saudi Arabian artist and activist, Ms. Safaa, has talked about at length. Ms. Safaa describes the social media hashtag, #StopEnslavingSaudiWomen, which portrayed Saudi women as “enslaved and helpless individuals,” as an example of Western feminism’s limited ability to show solidarity to women of the Global South (Abdelhy). Ms. Safaa expresses that “sometimes it’s patronizing and condescending, the way I, as a Saudi woman, have been spoken for and about. Don’t say Saudi women don’t have a voice. We have a voice. You just haven’t been paying attention” (Abdelhy). This type of global feminism does not recognize the role women in the Global South have played as agents of their own liberation, and it ultimately renders them voiceless to the world.

In the early 1970s, Angela Davis visited Egypt, and while she was there, she noticed similar tendencies in the way the West viewed Egyptian women. At a conference, Davis was asked to speak about the tradition of female genital mutilation in Egypt, and she immediately recognized it as a form of subliminal racism. She reflects how, “As an Afro-American woman familiar with the sometimes hidden dynamics of racism, I had previously questioned the myopic concentration on female circumcision in US feminist literature on African women. This insinuation seems frequently to be made that the women…where this outmoded and dangerous practice occurs would magically ascend to a state of equality once they managed to throw off the fetters of genital mutilation — or rather, once white Western feminists (whose appeals often suggest that this is the contemporary “white women’s burden”) accomplished this for them” (Salem 251). By drawing this parallel, Davis shows how her experiences as a Black woman in America make her more aware of the ways in which well-meaning “feminist crusades” to save Third world women from oppression are often rooted in patronizing attitudes. Her language, “accomplishes this for them” points to the tendency for these outsiders to speak over the oppressed. A power dynamic hence exists in transnational feminist movements — Western feminism speaking over the Third World and determining what is good for them based on their Western understandings of the world.

Dr. Shehida Elbaz, a scholar that accompanied Davis on her visit to Egypt, remarked how “Women in the West should know that we reject their patronizing attitude. It is connected with built-in mechanisms of colonialism and their sense of superiority. They decide what problems we have, how we should face them, without even possessing the tools to know our problems” (257). More specifically, this racism is a form of Islamophobia that suggests that the single barrier to Middle Eastern women’s freedom is their sexual subjugation in Islam. Dr. Shehida Elbaz continues to elaborate how at the conference, there were two separate talks. The one on England was “Women and Politics,” while the one in Egypt was “Women and Sex”. This distinction suggests that the organizers of the conference, who were Western feminists, regarded British women’s participation in politics as more important than Egyptian women’s participation. Again, the nuances of Egyptian women’s struggles are chalked up to mere sexual oppression. Scholar Simona Sharoni describes this as “an exclusionary feminism that privileges gender as the only axis of inequality” (664). These women do not recognize that factors like imperialism and colonialism, products of neoliberal thinking patterns popularized in the West, also play significant roles in the material experiences of Egyptian women. There simply is no universal sisterhood based on just gender and sex. Neoliberalism perpetuates a “lack of structural analysis,” a focus on “diversity” instead of “difference,” and thus, devalues the recognition of the complex factors like imperialism and colonialism as significant factors in shaping the material experiences of Egyptian women (Davis 79).

This oversimplification of Middle Eastern women’s oppression as a result of their religious faith is the same Islamophobia that Israel has weaponized in Palestine. One Israeli billboard depicts Gaza as a hypersexualized woman wearing a Burqa, a traditional Muslim garment. The woman’s legs are exposed, she is wearing high heels, and the caption, written in Hebrew, reads “Bibi, next time finish inside! Signed, citizens in favor of a ground assault” (@davidsheen). Seeing that “Bibi” is a nickname for Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but also the Hebrew word for “finish”, the Israeli poster is nothing more than double-entendre that both advocates for finishing the drone strike and hypersexualizes a covered Muslim woman (Sharoni et. al. 656). Ironically, this billboard created by the state, Israel, who is actively oppressing Palestinians, closely mirrors the reductive thinking by global feminists that Islam is the primary force of oppression for Middle Eastern women. Global feminists and the Israelis, the very oppressors of the Middle Eastern women these feminists claim to be saving, thus function from similar ideologies.

In Palestine, these neo-liberal thinking patterns have manifested in the rise of “professionalized feminists NGOs,” which have shifted the focus of local, grassroots organizing in Palestine to a global stage that overlooks and neglects the specific needs of Palestinian women. Jad, a Palestinian feminist organizer, comments how “the discourse of ‘peace negotiation as the only option’ [that has been popularized by global NGOs] marginalizes… what can be called ‘a home homegrown feminism.’ [This hegemonic discourse] is driven by new liberal and universal discourse on women’s rights.” These global NGOs narrowly view women “in isolation from their context,” whereas grassroots “militant” Palestinian feminist organizing seeks to “liberate the country and women [at] the same time” (Mohanty 984). By disregarding the actual desires of Palestinian feminists, global feminism has appropriated, distorted, and to use Said’s terminology once more, “spoken over” the struggles of these women to the point that its solidarity has become somewhat ingenuine.

However, Black feminists in America have been able to show effective transnational solidarity because they know how to work within differences and critique the same structures of oppression as Third World women. They do not assume that the differences amongst Black women and Third World women “did not exist, or were not potentially divisive” (Salem 247). In an essay titled “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”, the radical Black, lesbian feminist Audre Lorde expands on this dynamic that guided Angela Davis’ experiences in Egypt. Lorde explains that “advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. For difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic” (111). Unlike most Western feminists, Black feminists, who have been “forged in the crucibles of difference” as a result of their subjugation in America, recognize the multilayered systems of oppression that impact the experiences of women in the Third World (112). Their own experiences have taught them that there a universal feminist solidarity cannot exist without an acknowledgement of the different ways women experience oppression. These differences then serve as, in Lorde’s words, the impetus “from which our creativity can spark like a dialect”. Differences deepen, not impede the women’s work.

In their manifesto, The Combahee River Collective, a group of Black lesbian feminists in the1970s in Boston, express that “we realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. …We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression” (Combahee River Collective). This rhetoric closely resembles what Middle Eastern activists have said about global feminists’ involvement with their struggles. Thus, these groups stand in natural solidarity with one another. One photograph depicts the founding women of the Combahee River Collective, Margo Okazawa-Rey and Barbara Smith, along with other activists, protesting the Roxbury murders of 11 Black women with a sign that reads “Third World Women. We Cannot Live Without Our Lives” (Combahee River Collective). This statement implies that the Combahee River Collective’s inclusive politics comes from the organization’s recognition that Black women and Third World Women are often subject to similar forms of intersectional oppression on the simultaneous basises of religion, race, sex, and class (Combahee River Collective). Similarly, an anti-War poster created by INCITE!, a network of radical feminists of color, depicts a woman wearing a hijab, presumably a Muslim woman, and her children with a US military tank. The poster reads: “Invading armies have never liberated women of color and Third World Women… Only we can liberate ourselves” (Road). The invading armies can be read as a symbol for external feminists who encroach upon the Third World with their white-saviour complexes. Indeed, US military intervention often uses the excuse of “liberating” the Third World from economic and social dictatorship to cover its imperial pursuits, suggesting US and Western feminism functions in a similar way. It is not about truly saving these Third World women, but rather, exerting power and control. Similar to the Combahee River Collective’s message of self-sufficiency, this poster suggests a recognition that although not all feminists consider themselves “liberators,” those that do often ignore the best interests of the people whom they are liberating.

Aside from just standing in solidarity due to a mutual recognition of the myth of “universal sisterhood,” Angela Davis has pointed to the current Black Lives Matter movement as the culmination of decades of Black women standing in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for justice. Davis pushes for a “‘radical, working class, anti-racism, anti-colonial feminism,” which acknowledges the differences in women’s experiences by taking their political and social contexts into consideration (Csengeri 6). Davis identifies the parallels between the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, a tool of resistance Palestinians employ to economically target Israeli products and companies, and the Montgomery Bus Boycotts of 1960, both which were inspired by the South-African anti-Apartheid movement. In particular, she speaks to the similar gendered effects of BDS and the Mont- gomery Bus Boycotts:

Because black women domestic workers employed in the homes of white women relied on public transportation, the boycott created much tension and havoc in those white homes. Thus, married white women implored their husbands to bring an end to bus segregation so that black domestic workers could get to work and ‘normalcy’ could be restored to white women’s homes. We can see similar power relations in the Palestinian-Israeli context. As a strategy, BDS allows Palestinian women to develop an effective and compelling response to Israel’s human rights violations, largely because women around the world make most of the consumer decisions for their homes. (Sharoni et. al. 660)

Davis’ connection shows how not only how is BDS a feminist act of disruption, but also that it is rooted in a legacy of successful transnational solidarity. More recently, younger Palestinian activists have organized “Palestinian Freedom Rides” by boarding segregated buses in Palestine, getting arrested just as Black and white Civil Rights protestors did in the 60s (Davis 114).

By understanding that religion is not the singular axis of oppression for these Palestinian women, Black feminists in America have stood in meaningful solidarity with Palestinian feminists as they recognize the intersectionality of their struggles on more global themes like imperialism and colonialism. The basis of transnational solidarity must be a spirit of resistance to the actual problems at hand, not “the integration of individual women into existing power structures as a privileged mode of progressive social change” (Sharoni et. al. 985). For global feminists, namely those rooted in the tradition of white, Western feminism, a deep reflection on whiteness, class, and privilege is necessary in order for these women to understand how they contribute to hegemonic structures of oppression. Only then can they be more in tune to the actual struggles of the Third World women and stand in true solidarity with whom for so long, they did not understand.

Works Cited

@davidsheen. “Israelis sharing a misogynistic meme: ‘Bibi, finish inside this time! Signed, citizens in favor of a ground assault.’”Twitter, 17 Jul. 2014, 7:08 a.m., https://twitter.com/davidsheen/.

Abdelhy, Hadeel. “On Transnational Feminist Solidarity.” https://sites. duke.edu/dukemuse/on-transnational-feminist-solidarity/.

Combahee River Collective. (1977). The Combahee River Collective Statement.

Combahee River Collective. 3rd World Women: We Cannot Live Without Our Lives: We Will Fight Back! 1979. Photograph. https://www.loc. gov/pictures/item/2016648553/.

Cristy C. Road. Anti-war Flyer from INCITE!. https://modelviewculture. com/pieces/no-ivawa.

Csengeri, Natalie. “’Radical, working class, anti-racist, anti-colonial feminism.’” Socialist Lawyer 72 (February 2016). https://doi. org/10.13169/socialistlawyer.72.0016.

Davis, Angela. Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books, 2016.

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Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique.” Signs 38, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 967-91. https://doi.org/10.1086/669576.

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Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York, Vintage Books, 1979.

Sharoni, Simona, Rabab Abdulhadi, Nadje Al-Ali, Felicia Eaves, Ronit Lentin, and Dina Siddiqi. “Transnational Feminist Solidarity in Times of Crisis: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement and Justice In/For Palestine.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 17, no. 4 (2015): 654-70. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.