markers of cultural identity

various things in my life have been keeping me busy these days, so that i'm finding little energy to write.  but i've had a bit of time to read about the whole patricia arquette oscar speech thing and intersectionality, which reminded me about another issue related to race.

i don't watch many TV programmes, but favourite ones tend to be legal dramas.  from "LA law" to "ally mcbeal" to "the practice" to "the good wife" (not so much "boston legal", unfortunately).  so i was definitely interested in the new series "how to get away with murder".  i've watched the 3 episodes that have aired, and i really like it.  i love the centering of black people, the strong character development of them, i the central character in both her toughness and vulnerability.  in much the same way as i love the character of kalinda sharma in "the good wife".

the only thing that bothers me with the show is, on the face of it, pretty trivial.  it's that the hair of the black women on the show is invariably straight.  i'd have to go back through the 3 episodes to confirm, but it seems to me that there wasn't any major black woman on the show with the tight curls that many african women have.  i've looked at images of viola davis, and it seems to me that is her natural hair style.

the thing is that it isn't just this one show.  it's a thing with most movies, tv shows, music videos, most of popular culture.  it's a thing that has been written about a lot in america, and here's just one article.  it's a thing that's rooted in american history, where blackness has historically been considered bad, unworthy and the expression of blackness disdained.  it's about a history where black women have had straightening products pushed on them for decades, with the notion that having straight hair makes them more acceptable (reminds me of the whitening cream marketed so strongly in many asian countries).

this is not about viola davis and her individual choice - she gets to present herself how she pleases, as does any black woman.  i certainly don't think of any one of them as sell-outs for choosing to have straight hair.  it's more about a show that is going past so many stereotypes but still adhering to this one.  it's about how a natural marker of identity (and yes, i know that not all african women have natural curly hair) is erased from popular culture - unless it's a period drama.

we have a parallel here in nz, with maori.  the way that moko are treated in every day kiwi life is quite similar.  they're considered unacceptable for employment; they are often viewed as something scary or suspicious; they are rarely seen on our tv screens or in our newspapers.  they seem to me to be an aspect of cultural identity that has been sidelined instead of celebrated.  i can't speak for maori in general, or any maori person specifically, so apologies if i have this wrong.  but could it be that a lot more of them would choose to have one if there wasn't this erasure and negativity surrounding the practice?

i guess these issues are of importance to me because i wear one of aspect of my identity so very visibly, and by choice.  i pay consequences for that choice, of course.  daring to have a marker of identity that is so different from the majority can be seen as an affront, a challenge to the status quo.  hence there can be pushback.  so be it, i find that's not enough to stop me.

but i do know that it shouldn't be so.  i shouldn't be getting push-back.  neither should anyone else, simply for making an overt display of who they are.  or for sporting a marker of cultural identity.  that's why i want this show to be braver, stronger, more challenging of stereotypes than it already is.

GAYTMs, diversity and respect

"Diversity" is a problematic concept.  I use it sometimes because it's a shorthand way of saying I don't think the most powerful or visible are the best or even the only.

But it doesn't work in lots of ways. Because implicit in the idea of "diversity" is plurality sure, but there's no way of marking the fact that the different positions are valued differently in existing power relations.  So I can say I love the diversity of the suburb I live in - which is true - but that doesn't allow me to note that queer young people in New Zealand have significant housing problems due to homophobia, biphobia and transphobia.  Or that our state housing is woefully inadequate for families which do not fit the Pākehā middle-class nuclear ideal.  Or that my suburb is land stolen under colonisation.

Diversity maybe works least well around capitalism.  Those interested in justice don't really want diversity of incomes do we?  We want equity.  We want an end to greed.  We want social and material arrangements that make sure everyone has enough to eat, a warm place to live and the capacity to thrive.

These philosophical issues are part of the irony of the GAYTM debate, part of ANZ's marketing in Australia last year, introduced just this week in Aotearoa to time with major queer festivals in Auckland and Wellington.

GAYTMs "celebrate diversity and inclusion for New Zealand's rainbow community."

ANZ's chief financial officer, Antonia Watson, the executive sponsor of the bank's Pride Network, said it aimed to encourage staff to be themselves at work.
However, she said the move also made good business sense for the bank, "given the make-up of our staff and customers".

The language is fabulous, the GAYTMs are pretty and profits from non-ANZ cards will go queerly to underresourced queer community organisations.  And as part of this burst of publicity for ANZ, they have been awarded the Rainbow Tick.

“We believe that celebrating a diverse New Zealand is not only the right thing to do but also makes good business sense given the make-up of our staff and customers,” says ANZ Chief Financial Officer Antonia Watson, who is also the ANZ Pride Network’s executive sponsor.
“The GAYTMs represent values that are important to all of us: respect, inclusion, equality and acceptance.”

The Rainbow Tick gives organisations queer mana - they are officially inclusive and treat us as well, you know, staff and customers.

Except I'm not sure I want to be treated like one of ANZ's staff.  Well, not all of them anyway.  Last year ANZ was super lucrative, making a $1.7 billion profit so the New Zealand chief executive could give himself a 15% pay rise up to $4.7 million.

Celebrating a diverse New Zealand for ANZ didn't extend to offering their staff 15% pay rises.  In fact, staff began striking from late last year, culminating in national action on Christmas Eve, because they could not get a 5% rise across the line, nor could they get ANZ to agree that having 20% of staff prepared to work without set starting and finishing times or set days of work was adequate.

Despite their commitment to diversity, ANZ needs all new staff to be prepared to have their working hours change month by month.  Hard for parents, caregivers, people with study, voluntary work, sports, music or any other kind of commitments really.

The hypocrisy of ANZ's pinkwashing - and make no mistake, this is inspired marketing - allows their behaviour with their real staff to be minimised.  From The Financial Brand:

Key Insight: This is what smart, savvy brand builders do. ANZ has transformed the otherwise mundane activity of withdrawing money into a branded experience that has helped the bank generate huge amounts of name awareness.

But the chief concern for me is that when the queer community lines up behind GAYTMs, when we offer these kinds of workplaces a Rainbow Tick, we are saying that shiny things for queer people are more important than worker's rights.

Like these are different things.

Queer people's rights are workers rights.  You cannot be a good employer for queer people just by talking about respect and diversity.  You have to also offer working conditions that are acceptable for all workers, because queer people need to know what time their day starts and ends too.  We need to know we will have enough money to feed ourselves and our loved ones, even if we're not a chief executive.

You can contact Rainbow Tick here if you want to let them know this pinkwashing doesn't work for you.  Or even better, you can support workers rights at ANZ by telling ANZ here.  First Union are updating where negotiations for ANZ staff are at regularly here.

hoping for the best

so, where to start on this susan devoy thing?

i guess the place to start is that this a difficult thing for me to talk about.  because i'm dependent on the person who will be race relations commissioner in so many ways.  i need to depend on her being the voice standing up for people of colour.  i need to count her being willing to step in and stand up and fight when i can't fight or when my voice isn't loud enough or strong enough to be heard.

because her voice is strong enough to cut through - it carries the full weight of her office and the institution that stands behinds her.  it opens doors that aren't accessible to me, in that she is much more likely to be granted entrance into organisations or given interviews with people than i am.  she has access to funding and support structures that i don't have access to, at least not in the same way.  in fact, sometimes she gets to be a gatekeeper in regards to my ability to access that support.

if she fails to act or to speak, she won't suffer the consequences: i will, or some other marginalised person and/or community of colour will.  if she fails to do her job properly, i will find it harder to fight the discrimination i face in my day to day life.

i've written plenty of times about the support either myself or my community have received support from the previous race relations commissioner.  when the danish cartoons were published, he stepped in immediately to organise a meeting with leaders of various faith communities and the editor of the dom.  that allowed a crucial piece of dialogue to happen and affected how the issue played out in the media over the coming days.

when greg o'connor, head of the police association, decided to go public with his criticism of a new police policy in relation to burqa-wearing drivers, the race relations commissioner organised a meeting between myself and mr o'oconnor. at this meeting, myself and a friend were able to explain to mr o'connor the impact of his words on the lives of women in our community, and it was an incredibly powerful meeting.

when i decided to take on an op-ed in the waikato times, he offered me not only his sound advice, but also the supporting cases and the institutional support i needed to achieve a successful outcome.

there are plenty of other examples i could give, but i think this is enough to give you an idea of just how important this role is to me personally, in my activism and advocacy, and in my ability to feel like i could possibly make a difference to the world i live in.  and because i am dependent on the person in that role doing not just a good, but an excellent, job - well, that makes me afraid to criticise the new appointee.  to criticise the appointment risks me getting offside with a person who i desperately and crucially need on my side.

so in a way, i'm silenced by my need, by the very marginalisation that the position is supposed to fight against.  and yet i'm very afraid that a person who finds burqa's "disconcerting" is not going to be able to advocate effectively for burqa-wearing women when, for example, they are refused entry on public transport for no good reason.  i'm afraid that someone who complains about discord on waitangi day and is so unaware of the experiences of people of colour on australia invasion day that she actually holds it up as an example for us to follow - is such a person going to be able to advocate effectively for maori?

and yes, it is great to have a woman in the role.  but it would have been better to have a woman in the role who had had some experience of marginalisation based on race, nationality and colour.  because experiences of marginalisation aren't transferrable.  just because you know what it's like to be marginalised as a woman doesn't mean that you understand the issues or the experiences of people who suffer a difference form of marginalisation.

if that was the case, then there would be no tension between feminists and the trans* community.  but we on this blog have first-hand experience of that tension, and i'll be the first to acknowledge that we didn't handle it particularly well.  and there would be no tension between white feminists and women of colour.  but there is a huge amount of such tension, and there have been screeds of words written about that by women of colour around the world and a whole thing called intersectionality.

so when judith collins makes the statement:

"Frankly she's the 10th person in the job, the first woman, and that speaks volumes about the way in which women, particularly ethnic women... have been kept out of the race relations debate."

it makes me pretty angry.  because our new appointee is not an ethnic woman, so this appointment will not change the fact that ethnic women are being "left out of the race relations debate" - if in fact we are. for ms collins to say so means that she is ignoring the work and the words of wonderful ethnic women activists across the country, just to make a rather spurious point in support of her appointment.

i don't know how ms devoy will do in this role, and i don't want to undermine her from the start because, as i said, i desperately need her to do well.  in her interview with radio nz this morning (morning report, 7:39am), she expressed a willingness to listen and learn, so i will hope for the best.  what else is there to do?

faith & feminism

so back in july, chally at zero at the bone sent some questions on feminism & faith.  since they weren't easy questions and since i'm an ace procrastinator, i didn't get around to answering them til this month.  she has now put up my answers at her blog, so if you're interested, i'd recommend you go on over to her place to have a read.

i've closed comments on this post, because i think it's better that any comments are put up over there.

some links

i've been reading some good stuff in the last couple of days.  i've been directed to some of it by twitter, some by facebook & some from various blogs.  apologies for the lack of attribution - it would take a while to find all the sources.

first of all, regardless of what you think of her politics or the stance she has taken regarding peter slipper, this speech by julia gillard is well worth listening to in its entirety (sorry, i can't seem to embed it, though i'm not so good at that anyway.

great piece at the guardian by a nigerian woman, in response to a dismissive tweet by caitlin moran.  avoid the comments which are pretty nasty, even for the guardian.  it's funny how people from the majority group suddenly want minorities to start defining themselves in any way at all, in order to talk about marginalisation.  suddenly we should all become "one people" and not highlight differences - as if somehow this would make the marginalisation go away.  of course it wouldn't, it just means that the majority group can keep acting like it doesn't happen, even as they themselves keep discriminating.

from the above piece, i was directed to this post at racialicious, telling us about the origins of the phrase "women of colour".  i did not know any of this history, even though i use that term constantly and have always found it to be a phrase of solidarity.

another excellent post at racialicious about intersectionality, and the problematic issues in framing re a documentary about violence against women in developing countries.  i haven't yet read an article linked to in the piece (pdf), but hope to get to it soon.

i also loved this translated speech regarding islamic feminism, but more specifically on decolonising feminism.  and possibly related (and possibly not), this is a post that shouldn't have had to be written, in defense of a young nz'er of palestinian heritage who recently won the AMP scholarship in a vote-off.

not your exotic

via facebook, i loved this:

feminism & the war on terror

via the ever-wonderful ruth desouza, this is really worth listening to.  while i wouldn't agree with everything she says, i think she provides some really challenging perspectives:

who hates who?

i've been meaning to write a post about mona eltahawy's article published in foreign policy, entitled "why do they hate us".  if you haven't heard about it yet, it's a piece that details misogyny in the middle east, and has caused quite a bit of controversy.

the controversy lies in something i've mentioned many times here: that it is very difficult to deal with issues of misogyny when they intersect with racism or bigotry.  in other words, the very act of raising issues of misogyny is likely to increase the level of discrimination faced by the very women who are the subject of misogyny.  in other words, the way you frame the debate very much determines whether or not that group of women will continue to be stereotyped as helpless victims in need of saving, as women who have little agency or ability.

as i read the first few paragraphs of the ms eltahawy's piece, my heart sank a little.  they were based on fiction, but are definitely part of the reality of many women's lives.  but not just arab women: there are women all over the world who are used for sex by men who have little concern about women's desire or pleasure, who are trapped in relationships for various reasons but very often related to poverty.  not only that, but islamic law actually requires husbands to ensure that their wives have sexual satisfaction within the relationship.  but ms eltahawy mentions none of this - you don't get that kind of context at all.

which is a pity, because the lives of these women, who are used or trapped, they need to be improved.  and cultural change is part of the process, as is structural and political change.  all of these are required, and her main point that there is a danger of women's rights being lost in the aftermath of the arab spring is a very important and valid one.

she accepts a lot of the criticism of her piece, and responds by saying that she had made it deliberately controversial just to kick-start the conversation. you can hear her saying this during a debate with leila ahmed:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

incidentally, i have a book on women in islam by leila ahmed on my bookshelf, but this is the first time i've seen her speak and i was much impressed.  i think she brought a lot of good points to the debate, and you can read her thoughts as part of a suite of responses at foreign policy here.  the links to the other 5 responses can be found here, and though it was separate from the main issue, i did like the critique of the photographs accompanying ms eltahawy's piece contained in the 5th piece.

as always, my facebook friends provide me with valuable insights, and here is a comment from one of them:

Eltahwy's piece - whether well intended, providing advice for women, pointing to problems that exist within the context of the revolution period- can only be sustained by a racist orientalist narrative that juxtaposes a Western emancipatory culture with Arab and Muslim society as regressive and misogynistic. Moreover, what is missing in the critiques of Eltahawy and broader feminist debates is under what notion of woman, freedom, equality, subjectivity and autonomy is Eltahawy's feminist critique of Arab and Muslim society operating under? People like her talk about oppression, freedom, etc. as if they're neutral categories and have universal meanings. This isn't a cultural relativist argument, rather, it is pointing to the fact that when Western observers like Elthawy judges and scrutinises other societies and their practice, they are participating in an arrogant assumption that they know best and their version of freedom, agency, and desire - as such should be applied uniformly. Lord Cromer and Laura Bush echoed similar sentiments. Further, they also rely on the assumption that FGM, rape, virginity tests, etc. should only be understood within a uni-dimensional narrative. How do you reconcile the reality that FGM is largely enforced by women themselves? Or are going to fall into the 'false consciousness' trap? Moreover, Eltahawy's entire career has been reliant upon pitting herself as liberal, free, enlightened against her abject and silent sisters of which she alone has a permission to narrate their experiences for they have the inability to speak for themselves. This is Said's Orientalism 101 and the fact that Eltahawy is Arab and Muslim doesn't change her incredibly racist views. The fact that she is unaware of the implications of everything she writes and even supports the banning of niqab in the context of a rise in Islamophobia in the West reaffirms her parochial and naive politics. Her voice SHOULD be silenced through discrediting her in whatever way possible; I'm not interested in the postmodernist argument that every voice has a validity, authenticity and value to be heard when these narratives are deployed to wage wars, structurally marginalise entire communities and perpetuate racist views that dehumanise others. They are products of colonial mimesis: mimicking the voice of empire. The greatest irony here is that Eltahawy participates in the ultimate violence against women and Islam: an epistemic violence that erases entire histories and cultural realities with a narcissistic cry of self-righteous indignation.

all of this does ignore the fact that ms eltahawy was herself the subject of extreme violence, which is also likely to inform her views.  and it also doesn't help us solve the conundrum: what is the right way to raise & discuss these issues?  what perspective would work and how do we achieve real change?  and when we talk of change, what is the change that is best for those women living in that environment, as opposed to the change that we, sitting so far away, would want for them?

i certainly haven't arrived at any satisfactory answers to those questions.  if anything, i'm involved in trying to provide practical support through the provision of social services (at a governance level rather than hands-on provision), but this doesn't foster cultural, societal or political change.  the only organisation that seems to be attempting the latter is shakti, but their approach is similar to ms eltahawy's, only more so, and i'm personally very uncomfortable with it.  somehow we have to find a way to improve women's lives while also ensuring we don't exacerbate views like this (yes, that would the same fred barret from tirau who i wrote about here, still going strong).


i'll just finish off linking to some more reading on this issue, if this post wasn't enough for you, a couple of which i got from here (a piece supporting ms eltahawy, and rightly pointing out that a great deal of the controversy surrounding Eltahawy’s essay, revolves around who she is and what her perceived intentions are, rather than what she stands for or the issues she raises).  there is this piece in the guardian which i really liked (avoid comments), and this piece in the atlantic which raised some good points but started to get a little too apologetic for my liking (the comments are relatively not so bad here, at least for the first half, and worth a quick look).  and finally there's this piece, which is sort of relevant in that it deals with islam & feminism.

dealing with abuse

a post on emotional abuse from an unexpected source. i agree with most of it, and many of the bits i don't agree with have been covered well in comments. i would hesitate to say that one form of abuse is actually worse than another (physical abuse can be pretty awful), but i'd really recommend going over to cactus kate's blog to have a read.

and funnily enough, as i was in the middle of reading this post, i was rung by a person who wants help to write a report to support a woman who is applying for residence under the victims of domestic violence category. some of the most vulnerable women in the country are those who are here without residency status of their own - their partner has a work permit or they have married/ entered into a relationship with a nz citizen or resident.

in the latter case the partner will threaten loss of support for her residency application if the woman tries to leave or tries to tell anyone about the abuse. he may also hold her passport to prevent her leaving the country. in other cases, because divorce is stigmatised in some cultures or because she has entered the relationship without the consent of her family, going back to her country of origin will be as abusive or dangerous to her as staying in this country. she feels completely trapped.

hence the domestic violence category for immigration, which was won through significant lobbying by some strong ethnic minority women in this country. it at least gives these women an option to leave and try to build a better life in nz for themselves and any children they might have. but even if they take that option, they have to survive with little support - they are often isolated from their communities by their abuser and possibly by a sense of shame. it's hard to survive when you don't have a circle of friends and family to call on, and when you are feeling a lack of self-confidence due the type of emotional abuse that cactus kate describes.

this is why i find that my involvement with shama (hamilton ethnic women's centre) is so important and valuable to me. at least there is a place to go where these women will find active support in dealing with agencies and the legal system, as well as programmes they can join to help them build up a social network.

i'm really hoping that this particular case goes well and leads to a happy outcome for this particular woman. none of the options are wonderful, but i think this is the best one for her. it does, ultimately, depend on the community around her to welcome her in and make her feel a part of it, regardless of her ethnicity or theirs.

anatomy of a story

it's taken a bit of work, but we finally have a wonderful piece in the herald on sunday, finally giving a positive narrative about nz muslim women. that is hugely important in itself, but to have it supported by this editorial makes it even more special.

i thought i'd spend a bit of time writing about how this story came about. i know bryce johns from when he was editor of the waikato times. i found him to be incredibly supportive any time i approached him with an op-ed piece or an idea for a story. i'd pretty much lost touch with him since he shifted to HoS, but had occasion to email him about something. his response was prompt as always, and in an email exchange about various bits and pieces, i directed him to this piece i'd written.

he suggested that they could do a feature article, and he'd pass the idea on to the appropriate person. i got contacted by susan pepperell about 10 days ago. we set up an appointment for the friday before last, and i spent about 45 minutes with her. we then met with some of the young women in the mosque on sunday, which took about another hour. in the meantime, susan had also talked to aliya danziesen, who was out of the country at the time, and kate parr at pirongia forest park lodge.

then i got a call on wednesday, asking for a photo shoot involving an action shot. kate had originally organised for a session at the rock-climbing place in hamilton, but what with my work commitments & the young women being busy at university, it took me almost two hours on the phone to set up the shoot out at the lodge on thursday morning. it was another two and half hours driving the young women and the photographer (stephen barker, genuinely nice guy) out to pirongia, having kate set up the abseil and doing the shots. most of this time (friday, wednesday & thursday) had to be made up by me working longer hours at work. radiya had to rearrange a tutorial to be there.

the end result is, needless to say, fantastic. but i just wanted to highlight how much energy it takes to get just one piece in the paper. how much co-operation, and the level of support from the publication itself. i know all stories don't involve so much co-ordination, but they all involve time. a smaller piece in the waikato times last monday (you can find details on my own blog here) also took up a reasonable amount of time. and because contact was initiated by the paper, the focus was on much more negative aspects, though they had the same information that HoS had.

the point is that it's seems so much easier to put out negative stories, to run negative narratives. the burqa-wearing women prevented from using public transport generated a huge level of coverage and comment, dealing with a small minority of the muslim community but impacting on the whole community. it's not so much the stories themselves that were so much the problem, but the commentary it engenders - plenty of it full of hate, misinformation and straight-out bigotry (looking at you there paul holmes).

as a minority community, it's pretty hard to counter that kind of thing. there's so much of it and even one article giving an alternate view takes a significant amount of effort. i have to say that i've been heartened by the people who have been supportive in their own spheres of influence - whether it be facebook, blogs, comments on websites, discussions with friends or family, pieces in more mainstream media.

it means a lot, to me personally and to our community. we're not perfect, there are things that need changing, as is the case with all communities. but as i've always said, it's so much harder to push for those changes when you're feeling under siege in a hostile environment. every little bit of support counts.

so huge big virtual hugs to bryce johns, as well as to susan pepperell and stephen barker. and especially to aliya danziesen and the young muslim women of the waikato, who are amzingly awesome. just a final comment for accuracy: it was aliya who set up the organisation and whose vision & motivation drives the group. i'm very much a support person.

Slutwalk: Walk of Shame or McFeminism?

i'm going to reproduce this piece by kamayani sharma, which a facebook friend directed me to. i think it raises an interesting perspective on slutwalk in the indian context, and how well that protest translates from toronto to delhi. the comments on the facebook page are worth reading as well.

i don't agree with everything in the piece (the title of the piece particularly annoys me, though i've reproduced it), but the class issues are particularly relevant. and i 'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that the only way for women's protest to get mass media attention these days is if there is sexualisation involved in some way. would the slutwalk have received so much attention if, as ms sharma points out, women were to wear the actual clothes they were wearing when raped or assaulted? i know that was one of the points underlying slutwalk - that it doesn't actually matter what you wear, because your choice of clothing isn't going to make you safe or put you in danger. what i mean is that the attention these events received was because of the sexualisation, and that same message packaged in a way that didn't have overt sexualisation would probably have been ignored. and it bothers me that the best way for women to get attention is still through sexualisation. but maybe that's just me.

anyway, enough from me. here is ms sharma:

The common Indian slut is a girl who has had the audacity to have had consensual sex and the naiveté to expect nobody to judge her for it. Her natural habitat is some tree-decorated borough in a metropolis, her upbringing privileged and her lifestyle equipped with all the trappings of bourgeois affluence – a good education and considerable freedom and support to do what she wants. The common Indian slut, therefore, is not so common. She is part of a teeny tiny minority of women in this country who can hardly be regarded as representative of the Indian woman and her ordeals. Yet, Slutwalk or Besharmi Morcha is exactly that – an attempt to gloss over the range and depth of oppression that Indian women have to put up with in order to lionize a sudden upper middle-class urge to do something...anything.

It took mass action in Toronto earlier this year to galvanize Delhi’s public into convening and protesting, clearly indicating that the march is really being led by people who are heavily influenced by the “Western” media. Now, I am not suggesting that just because this rally was organised by a certain class or set, it is to be dismissed. It’s because this rally constitutes only that certain class and set, that its political and intellectual commitments appear wobbly. It is not reverse-classism to denounce SlutWalk as the act of well-meaning but ultimately ill-read girls for whom public life is a series of strolls from a metro station to a waiting car, usually in a gaggle. The Facebook group for the event had women saying things such as, “I believe the greatest freedom is the freedom to wear what I want.” The problem with a statement like this is that smacks of a sociocultural advantage that very few women in India can even dream of, much less demand. The freedom to wear what you want is all very well but what about the freedom to even be on the streets wearing what you want?

In an article I recently read, Annie Zaidi touched upon something that I remember saying to a friend when I first read about the SlutWalk. The word ‘slut’ itself is such an endemic term; who uses it and who gets called it? Certainly not sex workers and punters; or blue collar migrant labourers from rural regions stuck in a time warp where women must still behave according to medieval gender roles or risk abuse worse than being called names; or the lower middle class city dwellers who propel their ascent by keeping orthodoxy towards their females well-oiled, if somewhat disguised by a patina of status production activities like ‘education’. So who? It’s rich kids who can be openly promiscuous without any real repercussions that do the slutting and the slut-shaming. Of course, that doesn’t make the term less problematic in this context either since it still targets only the girls and has troubling implications for the potential to construct healthy sex-positive self-images among young ladies. BUT. That is not the point. The point is that the term ‘slut’ has such a supremely restricted role that it cannot be appropriated as a tagline for any truly feminist argument against the status quo. We cannot ‘take back’ a term that was never ours to begin with but is a verbal graft that runs out of meaning beyond the confines of the microscopic group of Indians who would use it.

Women in India are not harassed for being ‘sluts’, they are harassed for being ‘women’. Period.

Their sexual history is irrelevant, their clothes don’t matter. The fact that they dare be in a place that only men should be in – that’s the problem. Sexual crimes are always about power, about who is in charge. Indian men feel increasingly emasculated and threatened when they see women in areas previously dominated by them and in their struggle to re-establish authority, they resort to the violence of sexual assault, whether it’s verbal or physical. In the minds of most Indian men, there is no such thing as ‘slut = sexually free woman’. There is such a thing as ‘free woman = target for sexual assault’.

The fight to be out on the streets is really what this protest should be about. Out on the streets whenever we want, wherever we want and yes, wearing whatever the hell we like. This is a tussle for public space – the Indian male’s sense of entitlement and the Indian female’s sense of deprivation – against the interplay of slowly weakening traditions and reactionary backlashes occurring in the conflicts between the urban and the rural, the poor and the rich, the heterosexual and the homosexual, the man and the woman. This is about the patriarchal codes that control our commons and civic spaces. This is a battle for the right to walk unmolested through any strip of land within the Indian border. This is about equality. This is about all women, from prostitutes to rag pickers to factory workers to university students, having the liberty to go about their business when and how they see fit. How is that possible when this spectrum of concerns has been reduced to pseudo-political pageantry meant to appease “good girls from good families”?

SlutWalk is an annoying, antifeminist paradox. It is recreational hacktivism of the kind which topples over the very ideas that it is meant to uphold, by tearing down feminism (from Toronto to Delhi) and pandering to ignorant notions of patriarchy-friendly (!) ‘gender equity’. It packages serious issues that Indian feminism has been dealing with for years into a designer occasion that plays right into all the conventions and clichés that femininity worldwide is expected to conform to, challenging nothing and confirming chauvinist male attitudes by reassuring them that all the ‘sluts’ *giggle* really want is the licence to wear really tiny skirts and won’t they allow that pwetty please?

Something far more sensible and sensitive is Take Back The Night, wherein people stay out all night at a candlelight vigil to talk about their experiences and come up with safety solutions, or to a lesser degree Blank Noise’s ‘I Never Asked For It’ campaign which had women from all over the country send in the clothes they were wearing at the time of assault (unsurprisingly, full sleeved salwar-kameezes made the cut thus proving the concern about ‘wearing what I want’ redundant) and arranged a clothes drive on one of Bangalore’s busiest roads. Both these campaigns are inclusive and interactive; they enable members of communities, castes and classes across a very wide scope of locations to participate in constructive and meaningful dialogue and improve their society’s understanding of feminism and gender violence outside the home.

What does SlutWalk do? Provide weekend entertainment for some advantaged young women like politics in a Happy Meal?

a women's revolution

got this via email about developments in saudi arabia:
As election centers across Saudi Arabia opened on April 23 for voters to register for forthcoming municipal elections, groups of women turned up asking to take part.

As expected, they were turned away -- women will not be able to stand or vote in September's municipal elections -- but just by showing up they had made their point.

This was one of the first public acts of the newly-formed "Saudi Women Revolution," a movement set up to campaign for the end of Saudi Arabia's discriminatory laws.

Their chief aim is ending male guardianship, which means Saudi women often need permission from their husband, father, brother or even son to work, travel, study, marry, or access health care, according to Human Rights Watch.

They also want to be allowed to drive, which is forbidden for women in the Kingdom.

The Saudi Women Revolution was started as a Facebook page and a discussion topic, or hash tag, on Twitter in February, by Nuha Al Sulaiman.

as you would expect from a piece by CNN, the whole article has a very western framing. but the one thing that i really do appreciate is that the narrative is not the usual "oppressed eastern women need saving", but rather "strong eastern women are taking up the fight".

then there is the whole social media thing, again showing itself as a powerful tool for connecting and organising. not only that, but providing access to information & ideas from outside of the country. now i know that saudi has very strong controls on the internet, but they obviously haven't yet taken the step of blocking social networking sites. that may indeed be a possibility.

and finally, i would also have to say that the arab spring has inspired people around the world, and i suspect this group have also been motivated by what they have seen happening in other countries. i wish them all the best in their endeavours, and hope to hear some good news coming out of saudi in the near future.

erased

i've been thinking twice about posting on the women in that photo - the one of mr obama et al watching the killing of osama bin laden - being obliterated from the photograph before it was published in a religious newspaper.

i hesitate for a number of reasons. mostly because i hate how people will take some bizarre thing done by some group of muslims in the world and use that as an excuse to point fingers & ridicule us all. and i hate how i'm supposed to be on the defensive when such a thing happens, or how i'm supposed to somehow explain the thing away or loudly say "that's not me, i don't believe in that" and distance myself even though i really don't feel i have any obligation to do so. especially when other groups don't have the same expectation placed on them, and neither should they. and also because all types of people from all kinds of demographics do stupid stuff, and i don't at all believe any unrelated third person from the same demographic should be held responsible in any way.

another reason is that there is a whole history of anti-semitism that has been going on for many centuries and had caused the deaths of millions across any number of countries. to throw something out there that could potentially add to all of that, regardless of the wrongness or rightness of the particular issue, just feels like an awful thing to do.

then there is this whole thing about how muslims apparently all hate jews and here i am being a typical muslim hating on a jewish community. of course those who have read any history or happen to meet people from a variety of communities quickly learn that myth isn't true. but still the stereotype exists & it's pretty much impossible to ignore the context of the environment i'm living in when i assess the impact of highlighting any particular issue.

more than that, there'll be the underlying subtext of me trying to deflect criticism of the muslim community by saying "look, they're just as bad". even if it wasn't my intention to do so, that suspicion remains.

but let's think even wider. there isn't just the anti-semitism and the islamophobia that i'm dealing. there's also that group of people that love to hate on anything religious and to blame religion for all the ills of society. and somehow they think that's ok, since they hate and blame all religions equally. to me, that is the equivalent to someone saying to me "oh don't worry, i've just said nasty about indians, but i feel equally nasty towards africans, chinese, and everyone who is a different colour to me". would you even consider not calling such a person racist? the racism doesn't have a lesser effect just because you're equally racist to people from a variety of different races.

if i choose to highlight this particular act in this particular paper, published by this particular religious group, the haters are all going to be like "see those religous nutcases! all religions are stupid and the people who follow them are spectacularly so".

so. maybe it's best if i just let it go. even though it does totally annoy me that women are completely erased from the picture on the grounds of religious belief, and the constitutional first amemdment has been used to justify doing so. powerful women who have worked hard to achieve their positions (and continue to work hard) don't get to be in the picture.

even though i feel that way, i don't live in a vacuum and i'm too conscious of the undercurrents that surround me. so i'm not going to link to the picture or to anyone who has written about it. the only reason i raise it at all is to raise all those other issues and to try and think about a way we can do this (ie express our outrage) without making things worse. i still haven't come up with an answer to that.

commenting note: i've thought about turning comments off for this post, but i won't for now. i will ask people to be respectful of all people of faith and those who don't believe in any religion, equally. moderation will be tight on this post.

To learn more...

In October of last year, this blog was part of a debate about Te Papa and the tikanga they used for some taonga.

As a follow-up to that I wanted to draw attention to Kim's post The tapu of taonga and wāhine in a colonised land.

Her post discusses lots of different aspects of the collection itself, the tikanga, and the debate about it in the media and on blogs:

And this is the real issue, while Māori must understand a European worldview and law to survive in this land, colonisation has meant that very few people have any understanding of mātauranga Māori, or, in fact, of colonisation. Whenever an issue requires some understanding, whether it be the significance of te reo Māori, or kaitiakitanga, or whatever, the ignorance of most New Zealanders makes dialogue impossible. And thanks again to colonisation, this creates a problem not for those who are ignorant, but for Māori. Māori must repeatedly start from the beginning and attempt to explain their whole culture—this occurs in conversations, the media, court hearings, tribunal hearings. At some point, tauiwi need to take some responsibility for understanding the indigenous culture, and for understanding how their ignorance contributes to cultural imperialism, to Māori perspectives being marginalised and foreign in their own land.

I recommend reading whole post.

in support of exclusion

as i mentioned on my own blog a couple of days ago, i've been busy this week doing the taku manawa human rights facilitation programme. one effect is that i'm away from the internet all day & am so busy in the evenings trying to catch up with various things that i don't have time to engage on the blog.

i've been reading what maia has written regarding the wellington young feminists' collective and the various (and often angry) responses to that. i'm sorry that i haven't been able to support her in that discussion, and honestly feel a litte initimidated and nervous about treading into that territory. however, as part of the course, i have to give a 3-5 minute speech tomorrow (huge challenge for me in keeping it that short!) on an aspect of human rights, and this whole issue maia raised & the discussion around it has been churning in my mind all day.

so i'm going to be talking tomorrow about inclusion and exclusion, because i think we don't have enough decent conversations around that. and when we do try to have those discussions, it becomes quite distraught and pretty emotional very quickly. which is not a bad thing. emotion is important, the way people feel about an issue is important, and the fact they are moved to anger or hurt or frustration - well, that needs to be expressed.

but most importantly, disagreement (or maybe dissension is a better word) is a healthy thing. i was concerned by many commenters on maia's thread dismissing the issue she raised as trivial, unnecessarily disruptive & causing feminists to nitpick with each other. i have a very different view - i think that it is in the discussions around small things that the big issues get raised. the raising of the seemingly trivial or minute actually opens the door into things that have major implications, and it allows us to explore our own assumption and the way we are interacting. despite all the anger and some nastiness on that thread, i found so much of value, so much to think about and it made me challenge my thinking about something that i would otherwise have passed by without even noticing. i really don't see how that can be a bad thing.

i know that it's difficult, when there's a group that thinks it has a shared understanding, to dissent or disagree on something, knowing that by doing so you are disrupting that sense of common purpose. and it is highly likely that those with the most power within the group will feel attacked by the challenge. how they responsd is critical: to dismiss the dissent is actually dangerous to the group. it stifles the expansion of thought and the exploration of ideas. it teaches individuals to keep silent when they feel hurt or excluded, and so those individuals disengage from the group and something valuable is lost.

however, there is another side this notion of being inclusive versus feeling excluded, and this is what i'll speak about tomorrow. a lot of the field of human rights is about inclusion (and i don't claim to be any kind of expert in this area, 3 days of training so far can only give me a very shallow overview). it's about behaving in a way that makes others feel welcomed and valued, makes them feel part of the group.

but that very notion, the notion of being inclusive, actually excludes some people. it excludes the people who don't want to be inclusive, who want to stick to their prejudices and who want to make moral & ethical judgements based on the characteristics of another. so, in other words, we are actually not being inclusive when we take a rights-based approach - we can't be if we are to protect those very rights. if we are totally inclusive, then we in fact say that human rights don't matter.

the problem then comes down to who we exclude and how we exclude them. who decides? how do we draw our boundaries so that each individual can clearly determine whether or not they fall within them?

the problem becomes even more difficult when various rights compete against one another. we see that most clearly on this blog at the intersection of ethnicity/race and gender. some of the discussions we've had around the te papa memo on menstruation, for example, or on discussions about the burqa. to generalise, there are times when a person's right to practice their own religion or cultural traditions will clash with the right to not be discriminated on the basis of gender.

i can't find the post now [ETA: ok, i've finally found it], but i do recall writing one where i argued that the wearing the burqa was not a feminist act, even though it is a valid choice for women to make. in that case, i'm excluding women who wear the burqa from the tent of feminism, even though i totally accept that they themselves may believe they have made the choice to wear it from a position of strength and empowerment, and even though they may come under the tent on many other issues. so one person can be both in and out, can be a feminist on some issues and not on others. similarly, i believe that the whole boobquake thing was not a feminist event, even though the majority of those who took part thought of their own participation as an act of empowerment. (i won't go through all the arguments regarding my position on that, as it was very fraught at the time, and i'm only raising it as an example of drawing boundaries.)

but again, we come back to the basic question: who decides? and on what basis?

for many of these issues, the community or the group has to decide. it decides based on debates on a variety of forums, and through these, coming to a shared agreement. of course, there are plenty of times when agreement doesn't happen, when a whole subset feel excluded and rejected, and might leave the group to form another. or the whole group just collapses because no resolution can be achieved.

that is the reality and messiness of human interaction. but just because the end result is often negative (eg a split or collapse of the group or a failure to come to any kind of understanding), it doesn't mean that exclusion is bad, or that discussions about what should be excluded should be off the table. i think, in fact, that we don't have enough discussions about what should be excluded. we don't spend enough time at the edges, trying to determine where the boundary might actually fall. often, we're too afraid to have that discussion, and i know i've chickened out many a time because i just don't feel safe enough and strong enough to fight my point.

that's why i really admire maia (even though i've had my disagreements with her). she has done exactly that: challenged a particular boundary and stated why she thinks a particular post on a facebook group falls outside the boundary of feminism. having read through all the comments, i believe that her arguments are valid, though i might not agree with her solution & prefer alison's instead.

to conclude a rather long & rambling post, what i'm trying to say is that not only is it ok to exclude some things, it is actually crucial to do so. i'm saying it's important to have those difficult discussions about where the boundaries lie. and it doesn't really matter if we can't come to a consensus, because there are some principles that should never be compromised and people should stand their ground and fight for those. to take any other approach is to expect easy answers to difficult solutions, and is often to silence those who are feeling marginalised or hurting.

depends how you measure success

random lurker, a commenter here, popped over to my blog a couple of days ago to ask me what i thought about this piece in the wall street jounal about chinese mothers. it's written by a chinese mother, one amy chua who is a professor at harvard and has raised 3 daughters.

dr chua (i'm assuming the phd, given she's a professor) basically compares chinese parenting to western parenting. though she does make the effort at the beginning to say that she is using these terms loosely & that she acknowledges that many in both groups don't fit the stereotype, and what she labels as "chinese" parenting is practiced by people of many cultures & countries.

she then goes on to stereotype these parenting styles throughout the article, and her basic premise is that western parents are soft, chinese parents are tough but better because they expect & demand more of their kids. what she calls chinese parenting is really an autocratic & dictatorial style of family management, where failure is punished, success is rewarded, and giving up (for the child) is not an option. these parents are direct in their criticism of their children, because children can handle it, because it's better for the children, and because this motivates children to behave and achieve in ways that won't be criticised. in all, she believes this style of parenting is better because chinese children are more successful.

of course, feel free to read the full article for yourself, and let me know if i've missed out anything or if i've unfairly mischaracterised what she has tried to say.

as to my reaction, well, where to start. my own parenting style is much more "western" ie more relaxed than the dictatorial model which dr chua describes. not surprising since i've grown up in the west and am basically a westerner with an eastern ethnicity. however, when she goes through her experiences as a parent, they are quite familiar to me.

but i hate her labels so am not going to use them henceforth. i'm trying to think of terms that are less loaded and judgemental, but i'm struggling. so i'll go with autocratic and relaxed.

my gut reaction as i read through the piece was one of disgust. i tried to think about my own internal bias as i read, i looked at my reactions from all angles to see whether there were elements of racism, of a blinkered world-view that i was projecting on to the situation. was i simply being intolerant? those are difficult questions and i'm not sure i know the exact answer.

the basic problem for me is that the autocratic style she described didn't seem to allow enough respect of the children: respect of their wishes, their preferences, and sometimes of their essential humanity. she speaks of achievement, but it seemed to me that this achievement came at too high a cost. on the other hand, we haven't the voices of the children in this piece. we don't know how they feel about their structured lives, and maybe they're actually very happy. maybe the positive benefits of their achievements make them feel good about themselves and the lives they lead. even so, i don't think i could do.

on the other hand, i don't think i'm a completely relaxed parent either. i do expect my children to do well, i expect them to try hard. but i try not to criticise them for their failures, unless i believe that they really haven't put the effort in. in other words, the message i give them is "as long as i know you've worked hard and tried your best, i don't really care what result you achieve. i just want to know that you really, sincerely tried". i've also set more concrete expectations, but unlike dr chua, i'm not prepared to put the details of my children's lives into the public sphere and open them up for scrutiny, so you'll just have to guess at those.

i'm relaxed in that i've let them make their own choices about sport and music. i've let them make choices about the school they attend. i certainly haven't and don't intend to direct them into any area of study, though i've made a couple of suggestions. some of these suggestions have been ignored & that doesn't bother me at all.

my definitions of success tend to be quite different to dr chua's. i'll never judge my children's success by what they own, how high they reach in their career or such things. i want to know that they're happy with what they're doing and i want to know that they spend some of their time in serving the community they live in. i want them to have enough of a social conscience that it translates into action. but even with that, i'm not prepared to dictate it or criticise them for failing to do so. i'll continue to encourage them in that direction, but in the end it's up to them. even community service often depends on privilege - on having the time and money available to put towards those causes.

so. i can't say that i'm particularly impressed with the parenting style espoused by dr chua. i'm not impressed with the self-righteous tone of the article, nor with the stereotypes it portrays and buys into. it completely rubs me the wrong way, and some of that may be because i look at it with western eyes.

here's another review of the piece at racialicious, and they don't like it either.

wise women speak

there was an interesting event in nz last week:

“WISE WOMEN SPEAK,” an intergenerational - inter movement korero (forum) on the liberation of women and self determination featured Coni Ledesma, International Spokesperson of Makibaka: Patriotic Movement of New Women together with Ngapuhi leader Titewhai Harawira and activist lawyer Annette Sykes at the Auckland University, New Zealand, 10th November.

“In 1975 we marched to demand not one more acre of Maori land to be sold. Now more trade agreements are being negotiated above our heads without our participation,” activist lawyer Annette Sykes says as she points out that the capitalist neo-liberal agenda is the new form of colonization. Sykes challenged the participants, mostly students and young women to speak out and revive a strong women’s movement in defense of land, rights and self-determination. “With the Terrorism Suppression Act and Search and Surveillance Bill that allows installation of listening devices into our homes, the state’s actions are meant to silence us and tell us that it’s not right to demand land, rights and liberation.”

[...]

According to Ledesma, “It is important for women to find the correct analysis and understanding of the cause of oppression of women. Women's oppression is not a problem between men and women, but a matter of class oppression that began when classes in society emerged. The oppression of women will be fully eliminated, and the real liberation of women achieved when the system of exploitation and oppression of one human being by another will be abolished. Today, global monopoly capitalism operates on insatiable greed for profits at the expense of women, indigenous peoples and other marginalised sectors. Socialism will remove the conditions that have made women unequal to men.”

[...]

“One hundred years after the declaration of the first International Women’s Day, the International Women’s Alliance (IWA) was founded on 16th August 2010 in Montréal, Canada immediately after the successful Montreal International Women’s Conference attended by more than 350 participants from 32 countries. Faced with global concerns including indigenous struggles, developmental aggression, violence against women, racism, discrimination and genocide, resistance to wars and imperialist aggression, IWA aims to foster the creation and coordination of local, regional and international campaigns, to promote mutual support and the sharing of resistance strategies, and to mobilize women around the world in the struggle against imperialism, violence and capitalist globalization,” Ledesma shared with the forum participants.

Ledesma enjoined the women of Aotearoa to join the first assembly of the International Women’s Assembly in July 2011 in the Philippines.

photos can be seen here.

hat tip: marama davidson.

imperial feminism

interesting article from here:

IN A nation as rich in immigrants as Australia, feminists are rightly seeking to bring light to the sufferings of women who migrate from Third World countries with stories of abuse. However, on occasion, this feminist discussion slips into racist rhetoric that is oppressive to these women, just like the patriarchies they flee.

The use of marginalising language creates the figure of the faceless ''other'' - a woman who is shackled by ''uncivilised'' cultural practices and who needs to be schooled in the Western feminist ethos to ever have a chance at liberation.

This is not a legitimate form of feminism. We need to be aware of it to prevent the many female migrants in Australia from being exposed to what is known as ''imperial feminism''.

Imperial feminism is a term used by Pratibha Parmar, a black British filmmaker, to describe the struggles of black women in Britain in the 1970s, when the wave of feminism which emerged rarely captured the experiences of those women. If it did, it was often from a racist perspective. It claims to stand in solidarity with Third World women but in fact perpetuates stereotypes of these cultures as backward through the use of marginalising language and sweeping assumptions.

[...]

This simplistic ''us and them'' gremlin in modern feminist discourse must be recognised for the prejudiced creature it is and be eradicated. Only then can we truly begin to develop a meaningful and constructive dialogue that recognises the plight of women from grief-stricken regions of the world. These women are owed, at the very least, an unbiased voice to speak their narrative.

(link added by me). the rest of the piece is worth reading, it's not too long. i think it's relevant to the conversations we've been having here recently, and also reminds of the piece i wrote last month about the difficulty in speaking out about oppression within a minority community that is itself subject to oppression. i have many tales to tell about battles currently being fought, and not particularly successfully, right here in our country. but i hold back, because at this stage it feels like the telling will cause more damage than good.

the thing is to find a way where we can all fight together for the things that are important to us. unfortunately, often the things that are important to women from minority communities are not the same as what is highlighted by outsiders looking in. so, for example, if you talked to a group of muslim women, the burqa wouldn't be their greatest concern. not by a long shot. but if you wanted to know what their greatest concerns were, there would first have to be an environment where they felt safe to speak.

Guest post: Two world views

Cross posted

Adele spent a long time on The Hand Mirror, discussing what the furore around Te Papa meant for her (tahi, rua). She has put a detailed comment on my blog, describing Te Ao Taangata Whenua - the world view indigenous to Aotearoa, and how it contrasts with a Western world view. With her permission, I am posting her comment as a post.

Adele is our guest here. Please, keep any discussion courteous. If you feel tempted to hit the keyboards and shoot from the hip, could I ask you step away for a while, and think about how to phrase your comment so that it is at least civil, even if you don't agree with her, or you find things she says difficult. I myself don't agree with some things Adele says, but I appreciate the opportunity to learn more about Te Ao Taangata Whenua.

Kia ora, Adele!

***************

I am not wishing to dwell too much on the actions of Te Papa except to say that their process lacked foresight. What I would like to debate, however, is the sharing of public space between opposing worldviews – joined by a Treaty recognised in principles, if not fact. I use the term worldview to denote a discussion about ideologies more so than race.

The two worldviews I speak of are, to the left, Te Ao Taangata Whenua – the worldview indigenous to Aotearoa, and to the right, The Western Tradition, the worldview of the coloniser. Te Ao Taangata Whenua is used here rather than Te Ao Maaori because this term better acknowledges the many peoples indigenous to the whenua – nations of people identified as hapuu, or Iwi. The two worldviews are opposing because their cores values are fundamentally different.

The differences became officially manifest in two versions of a singular intent towards sharing place and space -Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the indigenous account and The Treaty of Waitangi, its English counterpart. Two versions in open conflict, such that nowadays, emphasis is focussed on spirit rather than substance and on principles rather than terms.

Developing a principled approach towards sharing place and space is also contentious especially as the worldviews in co-habitation are polar opposing in bed. One connects the spiritual, natural, and human realms via whakapapa. The other has mankind at its summit, holding dominion over the natural world. The hegemonic uplifts democracy as fair and just. The marginalised finds democracy unfair to the minority opinion. Our Gods are seventy plus in number, your God is money.

Despite being incompatible bed mates, there is a covering agreement to share place and space in partnership. The abusive relationship that currently passes for partnership is a hoohaa. There is an obligation on behalf of the state to actively ensure that taangata whenua (Maaori) have and retain full exclusive and undisturbed possession of not only the language but also the culture. That obligation extends to Government agencies. This argument has nothing to do with separating church from state.

Te Ao Taangata Whenua is not sexist. Our cosmology overflows with the power of the feminine. In Te Reo, the personal pronouns and possessive personal pronouns are gender neutral – there is no differentiation by gender. The significance of women is also symbolised in the language – whare tangata, the house of humankind, whenua – means both land and afterbirth, and hapuu meaning both pregnancy and large kinship group. We all whakapapa to Papa-tuu-aa-nuku, mother Earth – in other words, our worldview has strong attachments to the matriarch.

When the western worldview arrived in Aotearoa, it bought along dis-empowered women – mere chattels to their men-folk. It arrived into the world of the savage whose stories spoke of the strength and power of women. The missionaries, in particular, were heaven sent in destroying the heathen and the matriarch. Thus, in the retelling of the stories into written form, mana waahine was rendered impotent.

Mana waahine, today, continues to rage against the oppressive nature of the western worldview – the patriarch with a holier than thou attitude. Thus mana waahine and feminism are also bedfellows in dispute. Feminism, is fathered by the patriarch, and seeks merely to gain equality with their men-folk. Mana waahine, belongs to the matriarch, and aspires to regain the power and strength that rightfully belongs to her – emanating directly from Atua.

negotiating a way forward

so i've been avoiding the discussion here regarding the whole te papa issue - well, not so much avoiding it as not engaging in it. the discussion has been pretty hostile in places, with some good stuff in amongst it.

i have been taking part in some really useful discussions on facebook, as well as watching another discussion thread that had the heavy involvement of maori women and men. the latter i found really useful, because i was interested to learn about how maori see these issues, and where the debate is at with them.

i'm not sure yet what i feel about it all. i can understand the need to have debate when there's an element of exclusion being applied to people who don't share a particular set of beliefs - though i'm not entirely sure that's what is happening here. i think also that there is the natural conflict that arises when the values of two cultures are incompatible and one will have to give way to the other. i can certainly understand the frustration of a minority culture who have been the ones to give way for any number of decades, and have only recently been able to assert their own positions in any meaningful way.

on facebook, i gave a couple of examples where i've had to face what i can only describe as a clash of cultures. one was the example of having to hongi with males when on the marae, which was a situation i had to face back in waitangi day 2006. it's something i don't feel comfortable with, because of my own personal beliefs. on the other hand, i don't want to be disrespectful of the traditions of the people and the place where i am.

another experience was at a fiji day celebration in manukau back in 2008. they were having some kind of kava cermony (apologies for my ignorance of the proper wording). there i was, sitting right up the front, and desperately hoping that i wouldn't be offered any. given that it causes drunkenness when taken in large quantities, it comes into the category of alcohol & drugs ie a no-no for me. luckily they didn't offer me any, but i just don't know how i could have responded without giving offence if they had.

i can give lots more examples. there are times when compromise is difficult, and other times when it just isn't a good idea. when basic values of justice and equity collide with practices that seem to be grossly unfair, someone does need to take a stand.

is this one of those times? i'm still not ready to answer that question. the debate i saw amongst maori was quite varied. many were ready to move on from this practice, there were others who valued it. some of the differences in opinion were as a result of being from different iwi.

there's been a lot in the comments here about the reasoning behind the practice, some of it being summarily dismissed. others have interpreted the practice from the lense of their own cultural history, which has treated menstruation as something unclean, and have refused to accept an alternative explanation when presented with it. but the biggest problem by far is the notion that one groups cultural practice may be used to impinge on the freedoms of others outside the group.

it reminds me of the case some years back of the woman working at MSD who refused to sit at the back during a powhiri because she felt it was against her personal beliefs. there was a lot of noise around that issue, and i remember she ended up losing her job, though that was because of her going to the media without her employer's position. it's a similar issue though, and there needs to be a way to negotiate through these cultural clashes in a manner that is better than what we are seeing so far.

like one of the maori women suggesting a solution to my problem with the hongi. she first asked me what i would feel comfortable with. i said i could cope with a handshake, because it didn't involve the same degree of personal closeness. her reply:

If it was me in that situation, I would compose a short sentence to use as I approached each person. For example, "I am sorry I cannot hongi you due to my culture, but please accept my greetings" and offer your hand. Sometimes we need to be educated in the ways of other cultures too.

i thought that was a lovely solution, and a offered with an attitude of respect for my dilemma. i think it's possible to negotiate solutions and have people move forward if we could only approach these issues with a feeling of goodwill. there seems to have been too little of that today, and not just today but every time a similar situation comes up. often, movement happens best in incremental steps. pushing too hard just results in people pushing back.