Third World resists feminism

by Rinita Mazumdar

Daily Lobo columnist

The word feminism evokes anger, curiosity, disdain, laughter and jeers from men and women around the globe. In so far as this reaction is concerned, feminism shares its fate with other resistance and new social movements, such as the workers' movement in the 19th century. Interestingly, these movements resist the hegemonic way of thinking about social institutions.

Feminism is a modern movement and resists the way patriarchy gives power and control over natural resources, labor and sexuality of women to certain groups of men. It originated in the 19th century in the Western world against the exclusion of women from political representation. Later, it assumed many forms of which one powerful trend is to politicize the notion of privacy and question the hegemonic and natural way of thinking that personal relations are apolitical and the state should not interfere in people's personal lives. "The personal is political" is a way of thinking which is original to feminist theory and politics. While women have gained some political rights in Western societies, feminism is much needed. It has crossed the nation-state borders and traveled elsewhere via colonization, globalization, migration and information technology. The first feminists in the West faced serious challenges because it was deemed ridiculous that women should have the right to vote. Such challenges to feminism have not gone away but only changed.

Let us cross the nation-state and go into the Third World. A new kind of challenge emerges for traditional intellectuals who identify themselves as feminists in these spaces. First, the question asked by most middle-class citizens in the Third World is: "What relevance can a resistance movement originated in another century in another continent have for Third World women who have other problems to consider such as poverty and

colonization?"

Incidentally, people who argue against feminism are often the ones most vocal about introducing globalization and Western multinationals on the ground that a deregulated market would solve the problems of poverty.

A different challenge comes for feminists from Western intellectuals. While the question posed by native elites centers on the futility of feminism, the one posed by people in the West centers around the civilizing mission of feminism in pre-civil societies of the Third World. Most mainstream books and media use about five categories to describe Third World women - itself a constructed category in Western discourse. Women in the Third World are veiled, oppressed, can multiply at a tremendous speed, have unending endurance to familial pressure and accept abuse. While many of these are true, these categories are dehistoricized and decontextualized. What is interesting in this discourse is the absence of Third World women's oppression via poverty and lack of resources. Neither are imperialism and unregulated capitalism seen as oppressive structures.

Moreover, nationalists in the Third World have constructed their identities around women, another challenge for feminists across the globe. This may be called the other side of globalization. Most citizens of the middle class in the Third World have an ambiguous attitude towards globalization - while supporting the material aspect of globalization, they also fear a loss of cultural identity. They have responded to Western material hegemony by dividing social space into two spheres - the material and the spiritual - where the former represents the West and the latter the Orient.

The spiritual sphere has been equated with women, who have kept the original identity of the nation or culture intact via their "chasteness" and "sacrifice" and by being "good mother s" and "good wives," as opposed to Western women's promiscuity and selfishness. Naming these areas of oppression and bringing them to the forefront are the most crucial challenges for feminists of the Third World. For them, the personal is intensely political because the lives of those they represent are organized by powers of the state, global economy, nationalism and imperialism.

The feminist message of the personal being political is more important today than ever before. If nation-states and nationalism oppress women, then they also oppress many people who have no nations and are deprived of their fundamental rights. Further, if colonial representation and global capitalist hegemony oppress women, then they also oppress millions of other workers around the world. Then feminism, in our century, can then no longer be tied to women's rights. It is a movement for people's democratic rights, and herein lies its most significant challenge.

Feminists need to organize and be in alliance with other groups of people for whom the personal is also intensely political, for they experience the power that shape their lives every day and are unable to resist that power alone. Who they identify as allies and how they disseminate the knowledge that personal issues are also political will be the biggest challenge for feminist activists and intellectuals in the coming years.

Rinita Mazumdar is a lecturer with the women studies and philosophy departments.