[DEBATE] : The fixation on white feminism
Peter Waterman
p.waterman at inter.nl.net
Sun May 28 19:47:02 BST 2006
I haven't counted, but it is my strong impression that most of the male
contributions on feminism in this recent exchange have been about Bad
Feminism.
Does this tell us about feminism - after all a many-splendoured thing - or
about left male attitudes toward such, Black, White or Whatever?
PW.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Pithouse" <Pithouser at ukzn.ac.za>
To: <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2006 6:40 PM
Subject: [DEBATE] : Re: Harvey and racism
The tennor and content of this response says a lot more about Charlene than
Ebrahim and is, really, appalling. Ebrahim makes the entirely reasonable
(and in fact urgently important) point that gender analysis needs to be
linked to race and class and that the dominant feminist discourse is weak in
this respect because it is dominated by white feminists who are reluctant to
do this. This does not make him a racist. On the contrary it makes him a
critical and dialectical thinker concerned with looking at the
inter-relationships between different social forces and phenomena. It makes
him some one asking for more sophistication in our analysis. It makes him
someone asking for a feminism that can actually work - not in the sense of a
discourse that works for the people trading in it but one that has some
prospect of becoming part of the common sense of society.
There is a very long and widely attested to history of white feminisms being
used to justify colonial and post-colonial modes of imperialism. And it is
not just the World Bank that does this now. Feminist discourses are also
misused by NGOs and, at times, left activists, to reinscribe white and
northern modes of domination. I have experienced a number of instances where
highly privileged white women from the North have misused feminist
discourses to demand and defend a casually assumed right to a position of
privilege with regard to oppressed communities here. This works not only by
rejecting the agency of poor African men as inherently and neccessarity
tainted by sexism but by also assuming that the poor African women who work
with those men are culturally blind to their sexism. Thus the Northern
missionary returns as the Northern radical. Of course feminism is not the
only discourse that can be used to reinscribe white and Northern dominance -
there are many others, that include technicism, the assumed priority of
'global' solidarity over 'local' struggles and so on. And of course it is
very true that anti-racist and anti-capitalist discourses have very often
been used to sideline anti-sexism. But Harvey was not doing this. He was
asking for a sophisticated and integrated view. To say that anti-racism
needs to be linked to a class and gender project is not to be racist. To say
that anti-sexism needs to be linked to a class and gender project is not to
be sexist. To say that all liberatory discourses can, deliberately or
inadvertently, be misused is not to be against liberatory discourses. It is
to be for serious thought about them and how they can be productively
connected.
Ran is quite right to point to the fact that our Manichean impasse with
regards to AIDS is (and I am paraphrasing from memory here because I had to
delete his email) because Mbeki has read the AIDS discourse as racist.
Mandisa Mbali's work in the history of AIDS has convincingly demonstrated
that this is correct. It is a fact that much of the early scientific AIDS
discourse included in amongst its good science a whole lot of crude racist
thinking about African sexuality. Of course Mbeki is wrong to reject the
whole discourse along with its early racist elements but people who fail to
understand the long history of how African sexuality has been racialised and
pathologised by the West are also, seriously at fault. In the case of AIDS
we will only transcend the Manicheanism that has produced this disasterous
impasse when the good science is very firmly seperated from the racism that
is often associated with it. And, I am afraid, we are a long way from that.
At UKZN the largest requests for my time from academics are from white North
Americans and Europeans who are here to study African sexuality and who move
from the premise that is is pathological (and that the AIDS pandemic is
solely due to this rather than structural factors like poverty, migrant
labour, poor health care etc). This is the same premise that has been
central to European racism and colonialism for hundreds of years now. One of
the most neglected insights of Fanon (often reduced by racist white thinkers
to a mere theorist of violence) is about how Manicheanism can be over come
with regard to colonial medicine. He writes that this will only happen when
the Doctor becomes 'our Doctor' ...'living the drama of the people'. i.e.
when medicine is not opposed from above via the colonial state but becomes
part of the cultures of resistance. This why TAC have been so important in
overcoming this Manicheanism. They have rooted their struggles for reason
with regard to AIDS within the matrix of popular struggle and in the
lifeworld of the people in whose name they do their work. This is so much
better than another condescening lecture from a European NGO or academic.
Something similar needs to be achieved with feminism.
I would guess that the impass with regard to gender on this list is because
the feminism here is overwhelmingly of the white middle variety that
pathologises African men without taking anti-racist and anti-bourgeois
thinking seriously enough. Given the history of complicity between white
feminisms with class and race oppression there are times when such feminism
can and should be read as an attack by African and working class/poor men.
See my critique of the World Bank's book Voices of the Poor for a concrete
anaylsis of an instance of this:
http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?10,24,10,851 We urgently, very, very
urgently need to develop feminist analysis that are indisputably part of the
anti-racist and pro-working class/culture struggles. And, speaking about
this list, we need to ask, and very seriously, why it is that so few African
people have stuck around here.
The oldest and most enduring racist stereotype is of the black man as
rapist. Today in South Africa many black men in white (or Indian) dominated
institutions labour under the weight of this every day. Any feminism that,
consciously or not, repeats this most common and enduing of racist
stereotypes is racist. Charlene herself has sailed close to being an agent
for this kind racism in the past. Consider her comment in the Washington
Post, repeated in her Wolpe lecture, that made Mbeki so angry: "In Africa,
even if we develop a vaccine or distribute billions of condoms and the
continent is already awash in latex, unless we begin working on male
attitudes towards women - and that requires looking at the role of culture,
tradition and religion - we will get nowhere*" Now of course all culture and
tradition and religion needs to be interrogated with regard to all modes of
domination (race, class, gender, xeneophobia, sexual orientation etc). But
when African culture is singled out for the critical gaze (and European
culture is implicitly normalised - this was, after all, an appeal to the
readers of the Washington Post - an appeal which did not put America culture
and traditions under a critical gaze) in the context of hundreds of years of
racialised pathologisation of African people, culture and traditon, often in
the service of imperialism, it is easy to see why anti-racist hackles rise.
This is not to say that we must side with everyone who opposes Charlene's
very important polemicising around the high instances of rape and gender
based violence in our society. But we do need to transcend the Manicheanism
that leaves some people reading anti-sexism as racism and other reading
anti-racism as sexim. They way to do this is to, as Harvey has suggested,
try and think about these modes of domination, and the liberatory discourses
and practices that have arisen to challenge them, together.
Harvey was merely asking for more nuance. Smith's astonishing labelling of
him as racist is a deeply problematic response that, unfortunately, stands
as one more confirmation of what Harvey was complaining about in the first
place.
Richard
http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs
>>> clsmith at global.co.za 05/27/06 12:06 PM >>>
You're a racist Harvey, pure and simple. You know about as much as what
black women want as the man in the moon knows about cooking.
This list requires intelligent thinking - CLEAR writing - and not the
muddled obsenities you write.
----- Original Message -----
From: "eharvey" <eharvey10 at telkomsa.net>
To: "'debate: SA discussion list '" <debate at lists.kabissa.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 27, 2006 9:00 AM
Subject: [DEBATE] : Re: Demise of this list?
I said before, there are various shades of feminist thought, as there are of
Marxism. But a quick one about the kind of feminism I am a follower of. You
wiseacres on feminism should surely have read two books that will tell you
where more or less I come from on this matter and where I am going to.
Unfortunately, like with Marxism, white feminists are not keen on these
perspectives simply because it makes them uncomfortable about where they
come from and race-class-gender dimensions of their own lives. Lets face it,
ALL truths are hard to face. I cannot and refuse to talk about feminism
without talking simultaneously about race and class and it is in relation to
the latter respects that the discourse is weakest, but this is not seen
because the discourse is dominated by white middle and upper class
feminists! Black working class women have not had half their say, let alone
their full say in these matters, for the same material-social reasons that
disadvantages them in the first place in relation to white feminists.
1. Jouve, Nicole (1991) 'White Woman speaks with forked tongue': criticism
as autobiography'. Good for appreciating the race/class/gender dimensions
of the discourse and not get carried away with gender at the expense of
class and particularly race dimensions and how the latter very much
shapes the former.
2. Donaldson, Laura (1992) 'Decolonizing feminisms: race, gender &
empire-building'. The blurb of this one reads: " Perhaps the greatest
challenge to feminism in recent decades has emerged from African American
and 'Third World" women, who charge that white middle- and upper-class
feminists are (often unwittingly)complicitous with the agendas of white
supremacy and Anglo-European imperialism."
Enjoy the reading, then let us talk feminism!
-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas Henwood [mailto:dhenwood at panix.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 2:32 PM
To: debate: SA discussion list
Subject: [DEBATE] : Re: Demise of this list?
On May 25, 2006, at 2:00 AM, eharvey wrote:
> knee-jerk feminist zealots
Why is it that feminists are the only ones subject to this sort of
criticism? You'd never see anyone but a yahoo type "knee-jerk anti-
racist zealots," would you?
Doug
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