Global Feminism in a Conservative Age: Possibilities and Pieties Since 1980
Stansell, Christine
ARTICLES Global Feminism in a Conservative Age Possibilities and Pieties Since 1980 CHRISTINE STANSELL In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s election brought the New Right to Washington. For...
...They cautioned the opposition to stay away from the sensitive subject of a husband’s rights under sharia law...
...Yet who could object...
...Feminists were quick to condemn male violence as the work of iconic villains, but reticent about criticizing any one ruling party or regime, lest it be construed as neoimperialist...
...In Africa, women across the continent responded with excitement...
...When I visited Cambodia in 2003, American attempts to stop trafficking in women were the American issue of the day—some said it was the only issue the U.S...
...their complaint was that less erotic issues like capital flows and labor migration failed to draw the same outrage and donor interest from the United States...
...Faced with blockage at home, one response of American feminists was to reorient their political ambitions to women’s movements abroad...
...This was especially true in countries where ethnicity, state indifference, and/or religion sanctioned brutality against women in the name of tradition and custom...
...The importance given to the subject of violence against women was the Americans’ signal contribution to expanding international discussions in the period after 1980...
...The new attention pulled these debilitating and deadly exercises of power out of the obscure realm of whatmendidtowomen and gave African feminists international norms to draw on for legitimacy...
...In the late 1990s, Protestant evangelicals seized on the issue in a calculated effort to expand their base through the vehicle of human rights, allying with feminists to produce the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, signed into law by President Clinton...
...The man was arrested and indicted for homicide, but Hauwa’s father professed sympathy for his travails and asked that the case go to a sharia court as a family matter...
...The new activism against violence yielded victories, or planted the seeds of future victories, in the otherwise dismaying period of the backlash against Roe v. Wade and the Equal Rights Amendment...
...Laura Secor, reporting for the Nation from the Vienna Human Rights Convention in 1993, was quietly scathing in her account of the women’s sessions: at one, Bangladeshi women sat silently in the audience while Catharine Mackinnon denounced the rapes happening right at that moment in the Bosnian War as “unprecedented...
...Knowing little or nothing about the stakes and the contenders, it was impossible for American women to take political positions, because male violence was seen as an autonomous force, not a practice of a particular militia or army, supported by a mix of political forces...
...There were (and are) so many terrors, hardships, sorrows, and injustices that afflict women the world over: why this particular set...
...Sexual violence “transcended race, class and cultures, and united women worldwide in a common cause,” reported one delighted American participant at the Beijing conference...
...Yet in reality, clitoridectomy was a complex social practice embedded in rites of womanhood, and carried out by women...
...When she repeatedly ran away home, the man punished her by chopping off her fingers...
...but for women and men fighting Islamic conservatives in Nigeria, as elsewhere, the conflict about male power was inseparable from the fight for democracy...
...They showed that the tragedy of child marriage had more widespread outcomes, too, in the plague of terrible injuries to girls’ reproductive capacities when they were impregnated right after their first menstruation...
...American feminists directed energy, sympathy, and money into the global movement against violence, but they displayed little interest in the politics and problems that nourished violence in those other places...
...Thus clitoridectomy, sexual harassment, and date rape all joined the cluster, by the 1990s residing alongside the mass rapes of women in the Bosnian War and Rwandan genocide...
...While feminists and male dissidents raged at the “male cartel” that ran the Nigerian legislature, the officially sponsored national women’s organization and the Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations rushed to downplay the tragic outcome of a system that operated to bestow virgin girls on older men...
...Not all trafficking was sexual trafficking...
...How did sexual violence become such a popular issue for American global feminism— arguably, the dominant issue...
...Coerced labor in the sex trade—what came to be called sexual slavery—was SPRING 2010 DISSENT 51 GLOBAL FEMINISM entangled with poverty, official corruption, labor flows across borders, and forced migration...
...In India, women’s rights to land, for instance, denied and violated in so many places, turned out to be a major protection against domestic abuse...
...It’s hard to talk in critical yet subtle terms to a panel made up largely of Third World sextrade victims, older nuns and moral champions,” she observed...
...ambassador cared about—in a country of oneparty rule by a political strongman where all indices of health and welfare (child mortality, crop yields, education, income levels) were plunging...
...At the Vienna Conference for Human Rights in 1993, feminists scored a victory in inserting women’s rights into the agenda, but the preoccupation was with sexual violence—which again expanded to include “sexual exploitation...
...They were frequently backed by local authorities, tribal law in states with mixed judicial systems, and sharia courts in Islamic states...
...From the Left to the center to the Right, the cause was irrefutable...
...No one had to be aware of the historical antecedents to replay them: they were coded into the feminist DNA, American women were blocked and stymied at home, but they could still see themselves as powerful rescuers of their weaker, less capable, endangered younger sisters abroad...
...When George W. Bush took office, he made antitrafficking measures the centerpiece of his foreign policy on women’s issues, even as he implemented draconian restrictions on American funds for family planning which decimated programs in poor countries...
...Moved back and forth between the hospital and local healers, the child died after several months...
...the sharia court overturned the sentence on appeal...
...But beatings, rapes, and child marriage were parts of daily life...
...Government officials and defenders of socalled Islamic tradition sided with the father and the husband...
...Similarly, in India the same year, feminists investigated an episode of sati, or widowburning, touted by its defenders as an outpouring of indigenous and genuine Hindu religious sentiment...
...A supposedly traditional ritual was in truth sponsored and underwritten by very modern, urban men jockeying for support to advance their own interests by using the specious cover of Hindu revivalism to demonstrate their clout...
...In Nigeria, sexual violence could not be attacked without also taking on sharia courts, whose autonomy stemmed from state concessions to Islamic parties...
...It was the one form of feminist activism that proved able to draw rightwing support...
...Issues such as sexual discrimination at work and lack of opportunities in higher education were irrelevant to the vast majority SPRING 2010 DISSENT 49 GLOBAL FEMINISM of rural African women...
...Not until Afghan women succeeded in drawing American feminists into their cause after the Taliban seized power was there a sustained outcry...
...donors merged violence against women with “sexual slavery...
...At Princeton, where I was teaching in the nineties, ardent young feminists sought summer internships with NGOs in India and Southeast Asia in order to pursue their dreams of rescuing girls from brothels, and no class on global feminism was complete without the obligatory discussion of sexual violence...
...universities set up counseling centers and educational programs...
...A second, less obvious reason was historical, I think...
...As for prostitution, another subject conflated with violence, not all prostitution was violent, and not all commercial sex was coerced—except in the sense that poverty drives women to prostitution, along with other demeaning and exploitative employments...
...It was one set of issues that generated unity, even as so many other fault lines developed...
...ARTICLES Global Feminism in a Conservative Age Possibilities and Pieties Since 1980 CHRISTINE STANSELL In 1980, Ronald Reagan’s election brought the New Right to Washington...
...In the United States, however, the growing furor over sexual violence turned on extremely “thin” understandings of life in other places...
...Stories of brutality, escapes, captures, violations, torture, and dishonor, featuring many varieties of male villains—Thai pimps, Russian mobsters, soldiers in Congo, Mexican boyfriends—appealed precisely because they mobilized sympathy yet demanded little effort to understand the particular motivations and purposes of the institutions, perpetrators and victims...
...There, a conjunction of international politics, human rights pressure, protest in Nigeria , and feminist activism—including Amina Lawal’s dedicated lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim—converged...
...Who truly spoke for the masses of women...
...Yet conflating the situation of women in liberal democracies with that of women living under dictatorships or theocracies, while rhetorically effective in the United States, ignored the 52 DISSENT SPRING 2010 GLOBAL FEMINISM fundamental facts...
...Forced prostitution and sexual trafficking were the causes du jour...
...This essay is excerpted from The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present, forthcoming from Random House and printed by permission...
...conservative women joined with the regime and religious extremists to defend unfettered male power over female family members...
...Mackinnon either did not know or chose to forget about the widely reported mass rapes by Pakistani men in the Bangladesh war in 1970, when women were imprisoned and forcibly impregnated to give birth to “true Muslims...
...Even in the dire circumstances of 1939, the fixation on trafficking still united the International Women’s Association, which, as Hitler marched into Poland, passed resolutions against international prostitution and the white slave trade at its last meeting before the war...
...Labor, reproductive health, land rights, and education all paled beside the lurid details of male violence in countries where women had little or no recourse to the law...
...Sexspecific violence was inextricable from the plague of wars and insurgencies that laid waste to large parts of the world...
...But easy identification substituted for political debate...
...Violence was inseparable from politics and reactionary religious regimes and parties: Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran consolidated power by implementing draconian interpretations of sharia to harass, brutalize, and murder girls and women who allegedly violated codes of sexual propriety, newly invented or recently resurrected...
...The new administration gave the green light to an antifeminist agenda that the Moral Majority, the Hyde Amendment, and Phyllis Schlafly’s StopERA had already advanced...
...and that the nation should do its part in stopping it...
...How to accomplish this was another question altogether...
...But at the same time, the use of patriarchy as the onesizefitsall paradigm and the dichotomy of injured woman/male aggressor was totally inadequate...
...The hospital also whitewashed the husband’s culpability, declaring that the child died because she refused to eat...
...But it was nonetheless radically different from that of women who had no recourse to the law or who lived effectively under a reign of domestic terror, with no alternative in sight...
...The next time she tried, he cut off her legs with a cutlass rubbed with poison, purposefully infecting the wounds...
...In Iraq during the height of the war, there was no government opposition, even rhetorical, to an epidemic of honor killings of teenagers who were abducted by rival Shia and Sunni militias, raped, and then returned to “shame” their families...
...Clitoridectomy, for instance, was a largely African practice that riveted popular feminist attention in the 1980s as a savage enactment of men’s fear of female sexuality...
...But the intense concentration held for developed countries as well...
...The subject of violence was not even raised at the first United Nations World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1976...
...She was betrothed at age nine to a cattle farmer to whom her father owed money and married to him at age twelve...
...Rape, torture, mutilation, and female captivity and enslavement were standard procedures of marauding militias and terrorist bands in Africa, from Liberia and Sierra Leone to Congo, northern Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, and Somalia...
...The turn to international work—newly termed “global feminism’’ –was enthusiastically endorsed and underwritten by U.S...
...SPRING 2010 DISSENT 53...
...More typically, protest flared up over an isolated incident, like the 2002 death sentence by stoning for adultery imposed on Amina Lawal Kurami, convicted for conceiving a child out of wedlock in another Muslim state in Nigeria...
...The chronic problem worsened as controversies over the role and treatment of women living under fundamentalist Islamic regimes moved to the center of international politics...
...The cultural clash between extremist Muslims and the West is not about democracy but about women’s equality,” advised Ms...
...There were so many different workshops on violence….that one could not have attended them all in nine days...
...As a political theme, sexual violence was both sexy and sophisticated, unquestionably evoking a satisfying horror in Western audiences...
...In the 1980s, Americans injected this perspective into international circles...
...The older emphases on employment, education, and property rights could not do the same work...
...In many places, fathers and husbands could mete out physical coercion, domestic forms of torture, and sexual abuse as they would, untrammeled by any contravening force of law...
...For all the sophisticated awareness and legions of wellmeaning humanitarian workers, the hope of feminist crusaders—that a vector of outrage, unleashed, could snatch the injured from the jaws of their oppressors—remained a fantasy, as much as it did for the Victorians...
...foundations and women’s groups from across the political spectrum, from Left to center—and eventually the New Right...
...Men’s and women’s interests were not identical, but neither were they utterly opposed: not all men flocked to the cause of the murderer, but many women did...
...magazine in 2004, naïvely assuming the two could be separated...
...American women could justly be said to suffer from the same state indifference, official neglect, and police collusion with perpetrators that oppressed women elsewhere: the claim to sisterhood was not entirely spurious...
...Male opponents of the government and Islamicization joined feminists...
...But the global feminist imprint allowed Nigerian feminists to divest the issue of its colonialist trappings and make it their own...
...It created an ersatz cosmopolitanism among feminists seeking international credibility...
...They exposed the episode as a politically manipulated murder in which the woman was in fact drugged and dragged to the pyre...
...At the end of the century, then, feminists had scored some sort of victory in this one regard...
...In Pakistan, authorities turned a blind eye on honor killings, when brothers, uncles, and cousins murdered women whose supposed sexual transgressions shamed the family...
...Through the decade, police adopted revised procedures for rape victims...
...Certainly an analysis that took the full measure of misogyny and male reprisals was essential to understand the churning outbreak...
...The opposition to child marriage had a long history tied to imperial rule—since the nineteenth century British women had been denouncing it as a heathen horror...
...For feminists, it was the culmination of a series of devastating setbacks...
...state and local governments provided funding for hot lines and shelters...
...For feminists from the third world, the spotlight on violence illuminated just how entrenched female subjugation really was...
...it varied across locales and regions, and was not always violent and coerced...
...A decade later, at the World Conference in Beijing, sexual violence was a staple of discussion...
...It became from the American point of view a triumph in an otherwise vexed and clouded period...
...and the depredations of the Taliban after 1996 turned Afghanistan into Ground Zero for women...
...Hauwa Abubakar was a Muslim girl living in the northern state of Bauchi...
...Indeed it was possible that the problem was getting worse, as patriarchal societies everywhere clamped down on expressions of female empowerment that global feminism fed...
...Not all states were the same in their treatment of rape or domestic abuse...
...mental health professionals learned to attend to the role of incest, sexual abuse, and domestic violence in patients’ lives...
...The appalling death of Hauwa Abubakar in Nigeria in 1987 is a good example of how an obscure, individual tragedy came to public attention and set off an uproar over a brutal system of injustice that affected many...
...An enthusiast described the easy access to universality: “Despite vast differences in the way violence is manifested, be it as domestic battery or rape during wartime, the omnipresence of violence in women’s lives provides them with a unifying agenda...
...In the drastically altered climate, with the rightward turn affecting states and municipalities as well, feminist legislative and policy initiatives collapsed...
...The case turned into a cause célèbre for feminists and antigovernment protestors, the outcry lasting for months at the official collusion of authorities and police with the murder...
...Why the emphasis on clitoridectomy and not vaginal fistula, a devastating condition attendant on injuries in childbirth that inordinately affects postpuberty brides and is endemic in Africa...
...Patriarchal power was a necessary designation for what was happening, but it was not enough...
...Antifeminists now insisted that they did...
...As opposition to sexual violence gained ground in the United States, it bundled together many issues, some tangentially related, some unrelated...
...Violence against women was instantly recognizable...
...A penchant for hyperbolic and extreme depictions of universal male brutality, decontextualized, meant that American outrage marched across continents indifferent to distinctions among political regimes, social classes, and regional and religious conflicts . The designation of violence spread outward, an oil slick of male evil...
...They tied the coercion and murder of Hauwa Abubakar to the patriarchal context that justified it, the secular politics that turned a blind eye, and the religious politics that sanctioned the crime...
...Why has it been sexual trafficking in women and not labor battles—including the trade in female domestic workers, which is still the major form of trafficking...
...In 1983, an international conference heavily attended by Americans and funded by U.S...
...Linking violence against women to other issues allowed feminists to propose remedies that otherwise might seem extraneous...
...And who could not agree that violence against women should end...
...Ann Snitow, working in the Network of East/West Women at the time, wrote of the resentments she heard from her Eastern European coworkers about the American obsession with sexual trafficking...
...But at the third UN conference in 1985 in Nairobi, the topic generated scores of workshops and thousands of pamphlets...
...the polemical turn lumped together forced prostitution, prostitution otherwise judged voluntary, and consensual heterosexuality including marriage...
...The crusade against global violence against women was tailored for a conservative age...
...The appeal of the issue lay also in its universality...
...A flourishing international women’s movement looked to be a hospitable venue for American energies and ideas...
...CS is SteinFreiler Distinguished Service Professor in U. S. History at the University of Chicago...
...In the late nineteenth century, too, the women’s movement had looked out over the world and seen appalling male barbarism: polygamy, the harem, child marriage, sati, foot binding, and of course, prostitution—or white slavery, as it was called then, trafficking in women, as it was called later...
...For one, it was an elastic, highly portable category that required no knowledge about the details of any one country, economic context, or political situation...
...Secor found at the Vienna conference that political arguments were missing, yet none of the leaders minded...
...Revelations about violence against women as a central component of oppression—whether rape, domestic abuse, or sexual harassment—had surfaced early in feminist consciousnessraising groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
...Americans could agree that ending violence against women was a good thing...
...The preoccupation with sexual violence stirred up the passions of the feminist political semiconscious by transposing a Victorian dramaturgy of innocence and evil onto twentiethcentury globalism...
...Why domestic beatings and not land rights...
...This was embedding feminist struggles in a thick understanding that took 50 DISSENT SPRING 2010 GLOBAL FEMINISM account of a particular place and time, cast of characters, and the power relations that reigned...
...In rape and other matters of violence, the situation of women in liberal democracies left much to be desired...
Vol. 57 • March 2010 • No. 2
