Posts tagged Identity
Posts tagged Identity
“The recent article, “To Be Anti-Racist Is To Be Feminist: The Hoodie and the Hijab Are Not Equals“ has sparked quite a bit of debate, most notably around issues such as race, gender, ethnicity, privilege, and religion. Because of this, The Feminist Wire has created space for a response to the author of the article.”
One of the best rebuttals I’ve read online. This might just clog your dashboard up (it’s a tad lengthy) but if you’re interested in understanding why Muslim feminists like us and our allies are so irritated by the white privilege some of our Western peers exhibit, here’s something you should read concerning the Al Awadi tragedy. Many feminists display massive amounts of (intended or unintended) racism and Islamophobia.
An article recently published on The Feminist Wire’s website and circulated via its facebook page has prompted this note. In her article, “To Be Anti-Racist Is To Be Feminist: The Hoodie and the Hijab Are Not Equals,” Adele Wilde-Blavatsky attempts to address the important question of what it means to be an anti-racist feminist in the 21stcentury. Her article, however, serves to assert white feminist privilege and power by producing a reductive understanding of racial and gendered violence and by denying Muslim women their agency.
In her article, Wilde-Blavatsky takes “issue with … the equating of the hoodie and the hijab as sources of ethnic identity.” Oblivious to the important cross-racial and cross-ethnic connections and solidarities made in light of the tragic murders of Trayvon Martin and Shaima Alawadi, the author contends that the hoodie and the hijab cannot be compared because “the history and origin of these two items of clothing and what they represent could not be more different.” For her, Trayvon Martin’s hoodie signifies a history of racism, whereas Shaima Alawadi’s hijab signifies only male domination and female oppression. Revealing her own biases, Wilde-Blavatsky writes, “The hijab, which is discriminatory and rooted in men’s desire to control women’s appearance and sexuality, is not a choice for the majority of women who wear it. The hoodie, on the other hand, is a choice for everyone who wears it” (emphasis in original).
As feminists from diverse backgrounds, we value challenging, difficult, and necessary conversations on patriarchal violence within all our communities. We also recognize the importance of having an honest discussion about how racial hierarchies, discrimination, and prejudice differently impact racialized communities (for example, as blacks, Muslims and/or black Muslims). What we do find deeply problematic, however, is the questioning of women’s choice to wear the niqab and the presumption that this decision is rooted in a “false consciousness.”
We also take issue with Wilde-Blavatsky’s depiction of the violent motivations behind Alawadi’s murder. Wilde-Blavatsky states, “Scratch the surface and what is underlying racist fear and violence is an all-pervasive global culture of male power and domination.” In writing this, the author has all but stripped women of colour of an intersectional understanding of violence against women, one that is attuned to both patriarchal and racist violence. Instead, Muslim women and women of colour feminists are reduced to a piece of cloth and the experiences of people of colour and practioners of an increasingly racialized and demonized religion are repeatedly questioned and denied.
To us, it is deeply troubling to be patronized by a person who insists the hijab is never a choice made of free will. But what is even more saddening is that such opinions are being propagated on a feminist site with a commitment to highlighting the consequences of the “ill-fated pursuit of wars abroad and the abandonment of a vision of social justice at home.” The consequences of such wars have included the demonization, incarceration, and oppression of Muslim men, women, and children at home and abroad.
As feminists deeply committed to challenging racism and Islamophobia and how it differentially impacts black and Muslim (and black Muslim) communities, we wish to open up a dialogue about how to build solidarities across complex histories of subjugation and survival. This space is precisely what is shut down in this article. In writing this letter, we emphasize that our concern is not solely with Adele Wilde-Blavatsky’s article but with the broader systemic issues revealed in the publication of a work that prevents us from challenging hierarchies of privilege and building solidarity.
Bolded emphasis mine. Glad TFW published this. Limiting a woman’s plight to patriarchy only is robbing her identity of the diversity of her background. Shaima’s case wasn’t ‘patriarchy’ (only, if) but a clear case of racism and Islamophobia. Something that Adele Wilde-Blavatsky failed to enunciate.
My book is structured in terms of the double meaning of “terrifying Muslims.” The first meaning of “Muslims that are terrifying” is explained through the framing of racial representations, depictions, and rationales that depend on a system of social hierarchy. In the second meaning of “to terrify Muslims,” I describe the process of disciplining and policing this racial logic of the first meaning to the demands of globalization.
Junaid Rana - Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (via Jadaliyya)
In the context of the United States, much of [Junaid Rana’s] book examines how Pakistani immigrants are located as people of color in relationship to their place of origin and religion. Thus, even as they are classified as South Asian American, because of their religion they are often understood as linked to or are mistakenly combined with Arab Americans. In this way, forms of racializing Muslims take Arab and South Asian Americans as a singular group, which confuses complex histories and geographies.
That’s right.
Although Pakistan’s cultural, linguistic, and historical affinity is to the South Asian subcontinent, in the post-9/11 Age of Terror, it seems to have shifted geographically to become part of the Middle East. In fact, in the global War on Terror, the Muslim world is increasingly imagined as a single geopolitical mass. Without doubt, the complex overlap of regions including South Asia, Central Asia, the Arab Gulf, and the broader Middle East, have intensified through the connections created by mass migration, satellite technology, and complex financial, social, and cultural flows. As Thomas Blom Hansen notes in the context of Muslims in India, labor migration provides global horizons to workers who imagine alternative possibilities and social landscapes through travel to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America. Although this form of globalization may be laudable, a refiguring of structures of social hierarchy and control is also emerging that distinguishes groups of people through categories of identity.
I creep back into my heteronormative shell in front of my parents. The return to the congestive closet after five years of open living is murder. My marriage to my filial duty is in competition with my emotional obligation to myself to be happy. The former is still not a human right in my flossy western vatan. How the fuck is that supposed to feel any better? What do I exactly celebrate this April on my fifth year anniversary?
Like any woman of color, I can’t simply give in to feminism completely. It is a Western ideology that does not mesh well with mine. It has its roots embedded in a history that not only had White men oppressing their own women but their women were equally involved in oppressing my indigenous people - men and women together. I refuse to obediently follow every postulate stated by Western, Eurocentric feminists. Does that make me an incompetent supporter of women’s rights? Does that render me unsuccessful in this march against oppression and malevolent patriarchy? Does that invalidate my opinion on how to bring gender egalitarianism about? Does that make me an adversary in this struggle? Does that make me a bad person?
My questioning of agendas should be taken as positive criticism for change. When a white feminist conducts a conference on gender equality, I want her to introduce me as a Human Being, not an example for her friends and sponsors to examine and exhibit and capitalize on. I want her to ask me what my thoughts are concerning feminism in academia. I want her to understand that there are compartments to my feminist movement; that feminism in my society in the professional realm is far different than feminism in the domestic dimension. I want her to understand that things are not simple. I want her to know that enforcing her idea of success, happiness and liberation on women alienated by her very own culture does not help. I want her to talk to my sisters, cousins, friends, teachers, activists, women from the village, women from the city, women from every corner of my country, my culture, my history before she even thinks of concluding her thoughts on how to define feminism around the world. I want her to open her mind.
I want her to know that the conference she conducted on academic discussions on women’s rights, while poorly-paid migrant workers - my brothers and sisters - are preparing lunch for their lofty thinkers only to get deported the next day, is no good when she can’t acknowledge her own participation in silencing the rights of those around her. I don’t want to be invited to seminars where someone indirectly hints at me wearing my “cultural attire” to show diversity. What am I? A mannequin for the lot? I want her to know that it is not necessary for anyone to have a post doctoral degree in women’s studies to speak about her own experience and to be regarded by the ones listening and reading. I want her to get rid of her own privilege before she goes on to highlight that of others. I am tired but undefeated of the constant sight of colored students who are expected and sometimes demanded to learn languages, theories, -isms that erase and appropriate but, worse, further colonize their history, heritage, culture and identity. Because recognition and validation in this world is otherwise nearly impossible.
I want the West to understand that my women and men and I will not adhere to every single idea stated from that corner of the world concerning emancipation and progress. I know the men of my culture have committed extreme acts of brutality against their women but it makes you no good when your ancestry points to lineages and more lineages of colonizers who tortured and enslaved both men and women of my culture. I am a feminist but consider the ineffectiveness of a title when sub-titles are added for further clarification, explanation and validation. When I speak on public radio or show up on TV, I have to explain my identity: A multi-cultural, anti-racist, Muslim feminist. Sub-titles are created when the primary title fails to encompass other identities, other voices. This is also why I have no issue with women of color creating their own movements like South Asian Women Equality, Womanism, Muslim Gender Equality, Racial and Gender Liberation, so on and so forth.
So stop forcing me to believe you have purged yourself of racism, of cashing in on my experience and history. Stop telling me feminism is “perfect.” Stop telling me you’re here to “help” and “save” me and my sisters. The only person you need to save is yourself before you turn into a subtle instance of yet another colonizer.
I was having a discussion with several people on Twitter (mostly men and a few women) on how porn is not just dedicated to sexual gratification but a lot more than that. Little do viewers realize that the porn industry is notorious for its power in reinforcing ethnic stereotypes. A specific ethnic identity is limited and chained to a set of ‘traits’ and ‘characteristics.’ Asian women are shown as weak, easily dominated while Latina women are shown in roles of ‘spicy’ women with little control over their libido. In some clips, I have also seen Latina women portrayed typically as “illegal immigrants” in jail, indulging in sex with white police officers.
For an average man, the porn industry is simply about getting off to a few minutes of romping around in bed. For him, it is never about a women’s identity or control over her sexuality. It is never about ethnic stereotypes and reinforcement of racial images. But if you look closer, you’ll find financed racism in the porn industry where identities are toyed with and abused.
I remember viewing a clip shared by a friend once on how a white producer created a plot for a porn clip in which an “Iraqi” girl (read: a Latina girl wrapped in a hijab) had to “give her body” to a “brave” American soldier. It was beyond sickening.
You should read Darrell Hamamoto’s strong take on ethnic stereotyping in the porn industry. Here are excerpts of racial identities depicted typically in porn flicks:
Latinos and HispanicsPornography tends to stereotype Hispanic women as feisty, “hot and spicy Latinas”, sexy Señoritas, with a high sex drive and low impulse control. Many are portrayed as maids, illegal immigrants to the United States, or unfaithful wives. Since Latinos and Hispanics can be of any race (many are white Hispanic Americans, Mestizos etc.), cultural characteristics are sometimes portrayed via iconic items like South and Central American national costumes, sombreros, maracas, or Mexican dresses.
Asian womenAre viewed as sexually willing or submissive. Asian men are hardly portrayed in pairing with white women and not as common compared to white men with asian women porn. Asian women are mainly portrayed as the: “Dragon Ladies”, as servile “Lotus Blossom Babies”, “Innocent School Girls” in private school uniforms, “China dolls”, “Geisha girls”, war brides, or prostitutes. Japanese media have also at times sensationalistically promoted the stereotype of Japanese women overseas as “yellow cabs”.
Black performers
Large penis size in Black men is consistently emphasized in pornography, often by exclusively casting actors with larger than average penises such as Lexington Steele, Kid Bengala, Jack Napier and Mandingo. Men are often treated to stereotypes of gang affiliation, working class labor, and are overrepresented in gang rape fetish films. Also, they are represented as overly aggressive and demanding, and are performing with white women. Similarly, black women are often portrayed with large breast and buttocks, or ‘booty’. They normally play a submissive role while performing with a white male.
Homi Bhabha refers to this phenomena as racial fetishism as a fixation on other races being not different, but lesser or “mutilated” versions of the white male. Similarly, in her book “Racy Sex, Sexy Racism”, Gail Dines argues that “women of color are generally relegated to gonzo–a porn genre lacking any plot–which provides little glamour, security or status.”
When we describe ourselves as products of our environment, we usually think of class, money and parenting. Only rarely do we reflect on how our identities are shaped by space, and specifically by the random spaces of the modern city, what the historian Leif Jerram calls “the myriad nooks and crannies, backstreets and thoroughfares, clubs and bars, living rooms and factories”. We forget, for example, that the London Underground, now merely another element of our mundane daily lives, was once novel and exciting, forcing people to behave in entirely new ways.
No wonder, then, that in the early 1930s, the Soviet authorities saw the building of the Moscow Metro as the ideal way to create a new communist man. As hundreds of thousands of rural peasants flooded into the capital, taking up new identities as technicians and engineers, it seemed that a new proletariat was being born. “How many people,” asked a Pravda headline, “recreated themselves making the Metro?”
Pretend you’re anything just to be adored.
