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May 17, 1999
FUNDAMENTALIST SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ATTACK FEMINISM AS PART OF THEIR WAR
ON MODERNITY; THE LEFT IGNORES CULTURAL MOVEMENTS AT ITS PERIL.
World Culture War
by MEREDITH TAX
In the past ten years, nationalist, communalist and religious fundamentalist social
movements have surfaced all over the world, moving into the power vacuum created as
local elites have been overwhelmed by the new global
financial ruling class. The emerging struggle is not between East and West, as Samuel
Huntington would have it, but within both; it is a struggle between the forces of
globalization and the atavistic social movements that
have sprung up to oppose it. Civilian populations, especially ethnic minorities,
women and children, are caught in between. Among such movements are the Taliban in
Afghanistan; the Serbian nationalist movement (and its o
pposing counterparts elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia); Islamic fundamentalist
movements in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere; the Hindu communalist movement in India;
the Israeli settler movement in the West Bank; and a who
le range of militantly patriarchal Christian groups, from the militias to Operation
Rescue, in the United States.
These movements have in common a desire for racial, ethnic and religious homogeneity;
an apocalyptic vision of purification through bloodshed; and a patriarchal view of
women and the family. I call them atavistic because
of the way they yearn back to a mythic past, often the age of barbarism, when their
nation, tribe or religion was great. ("Atavism: Biol. the reappearance in an
individual of characteristics of some more or less remote an
cestor that have been absent in intervening generations." American College Dictionary)
In Israel, to take one example, religious fundamentalists who believe they should
control all the land that was biblical Israel's at i
ts point of greatest territorial strength have repeatedly brought the peace process to
a standstill. And in the United States, a cadre of religiously driven conservative
leaders paralyzed the federal government for more t
han a year in their campaign against the Sixties and Sin, both exemplified by Bill
Clinton.
As central to such movements as ethnic or religious homogeneity is the control of
women. Atavistic social movements attack feminism not only as an obstacle to such
control but as part of their war on modernity itself, for
, like other movements for social and political rights, feminism is inescapably
secular and thus part of the project of modernity, opposed to older forms of social
organization in which women's needs and voices were subsu
med into a communal or religious entity represented by male elders. Even in countries
where the women's movement is led by female versions of tribal elders, feminism
resists being swallowed up in male definitions of the c
lass, the nation, the community; it sticks in the craw. Add to this the threat of
female sexual and reproductive autonomy, then place both in the context of a volatile
world situation where local males are losing power an
d the family has become the last bastion of unquestioned male authority and privilege,
and what have you got? A world culture war, in which feminism becomes the scapegoat
for every frustration and women become the focus o
f every contradiction.
This war takes culturally specific forms in each country, targeting poor women,
because they are most vulnerable, and feminist intellectuals and organizers, because
they stir up the others. Last month in the Bronx, Tabith
a Walrond, a 19-year-old African-American, was tried for homicide in the death of her
infant son. She had been breast-feeding him; her milk was insufficient, and he died of
malnutrition. The prosecution also charged her w
ith second-degree manslaughter and endangering the welfare of her child by failing to
get him emergency medical care when his condition became acute. But Walrond was unable
to get medical care for her son; she was repeate
dly denied a Medicaid ID number by a city administration that has shown an unholy
eagerness to get women off the welfare rolls regardless of what will happen to them
and their children. Tabitha Walrond is but one example
of the way American women are caught between the drive to cut government spending and
release capital from all constraint on the one hand, and backlash tendencies invoking
earlier, more patriarchal forms of social organiz
ation on the other.
To nationalist, communalist and religious backlash movements, feminism, no matter how
rooted in local conditions, represents the globalizing forces that are undercutting
patriarchal traditions. For them, it is intrinsical
ly foreign, a fifth column undermining their efforts at unity. This contradiction is
vividly apparent in the former Yugoslavia. Relatively weak before the Yugoslav
federation began to unravel, feminist groups in the vario
us republics did their best, in the summer of 1991, to come together against war; they
even attempted to stage a women's march from Zagreb to Belgrade that was supposed to
"surround the generals with a wall of love" (it w
as stopped by Serbian troops). During the wars that ensued, when most other contacts
between the former republics were broken, some feminist groups stayed in clandestine
communication and developed into pacifists, helping
men who were hiding from the draft and moving into the leadership vacuum left by the
men's absence. Many of these activists had done advocacy for battered women before the
war; they moved into work with women war victims
in the belief that rape in wartime and domestic violence are part of the same
continuum, enraging nationalists by refusing to focus on the ethnic motives for rape.
One of the most consistent and effective antinationalist groups in Serbia is Women in
Black, who held demonstrations against Serbia's war machine every week for seven
years--and every week were denounced and threatened as
traitors--until the NATO bombing closed down the small amount of political space that
had been available for autonomous women's activities. On their seventh anniversary,
they issued a statement that read, in part: "I con
fess to my longtime antiwar activity...that for the entire war I crossed the walls of
Balkan ethno-states, because solidarity is the politics which interests me; that I
understood democracy as support to antiwar activists
/friends/sisters--Albanian women, Croat women, Roma women, stateless women; that I
first challenged the murderers from the state where I live and then those from other
states, because I consider this to be responsible pol
itical behavior of a citizen...that I took care of others while the patriots took care
of themselves."
Women's political activism became a point of contention in Croatia last June, during a
Zagreb television panel on the status of women. One of the male participants published
the following post-mortem in the government pap
er Vecernji List; his association of feminism with the foreign, and his panic at the
idea of women's controlling their own sexual, reproductive and political lives, are
palpable: "These women, who speak the loudest in def
ending women's rights in the family, present in their personal lives a model that
directly opposes that of the ideal and desirable Croatian family (that is, they are
married without children, are old but unmarried, etc.).
... Although they oppose the laws of nature, they would like to impose laws in
Parliament. Without the support they receive from abroad (in the form of promotions,
money and awards from international organizations), they
are quite insignificant, and only through this support do they gain some importance."
Elsewhere, the successes of the women's movement are also seen only as symptoms of
globalization, rather than as the result of an autonomous movement for female
emancipation. Every gesture of solidarity, every offer of su
pport from abroad, increases the danger that local feminists in such places will be
called tools of the United States or the World Bank.
The situation is complicated by the fact that the World Bank does have an agenda for
women: It wants them to have enough education to read instructions for birth control
pills, to have enough freedom to work outside the h
ome in export processing zones and to have enough money to feed themselves and their
children. The World Bank has understood, in sub-Saharan Africa at least, that women
keep some societies from falling apart completely, a
nd for that reason it wishes to support their efforts at financial independence. But
that does not mean it will intervene to protect them when things turn nasty. In
Russia, for example, women have borne a disproportionate
share of the burden of economic transition and the disappearance of social services.
According to Nadia Azhgikhina of the Association for Russian Women Journalists, more
than 70 percent of those fired from industrial job
s are women and only 12 percent of Russian women now have access to adequate
healthcare.
While poor women and children are the largest group of victims in the global culture
war, feminist writers, educators and organizers are those most deliberately targeted
by atavistic social movements, because they give vo
ice to the discontent of others and describe their misery. As president of Women's
WORLD, a global network of women writers fighting gender-based censorship, I hear many
such cases. Take, for instance, women writers in Ko
sovo. Did you assume there weren't any? This, according to Sazana Caprici, editor of
the Kosovo feminist literary magazine Sfinga (Sphinx), is part of the problem: "The
Yugoslav state authorities do their best to deny not
only the existence of Albanian women writers, but the very possibility of the
existence of such a category of Albanian women.... Among Serbs [government propaganda]
has created a stereotype of the Albanian woman: an uned
ucated woman utterly subjected to her husband's authority.... Albanian men, on the
other hand, make use of this propaganda to reinforce their control over Albanian
women. Every time women try to speak up against their inf
erior position, they are accused of being in the service of the state, which in Kosovo
is considered a foreign occupier."
In Zimbabwe, where the Mugabe government has been arresting journalists and
persecuting gays and lesbians to distract from social unrest and economic crisis, the
Supreme Court has just undercut all laws protecting women,
in a 5-to-0 decision that cannot be appealed. The Court ruled that, following African
cultural traditions, a woman should be treated as a "junior male." The government has
also targeted individual feminists. Patricia McFa
dden, an outspoken African feminist born in Swaziland, was subjected to a 1997
deportation campaign that may well recur when her two-year visa expires this December.
She had made herself unpopular not only by defending ga
y rights but by calling for a new, more aggressive political direction for the women's
movement. As she put it in her speech to the 1998 African Women's Leadership
Institute, the African women's movement is "taking over t
he civic responsibilities which the state should be shouldering, and we are not
critically asking ourselves whether this is our agenda or it is an imposed agenda....
If we continue to separate the private from the public,
our Movement will die, and we will be wrapped up in welfarism and catering for
everyone else's needs, and we will never reach our political goals."
Participants in the African Women's Leadership Institute made a list
of terms used to describe feminists in their societies: "Lesbians,
Power hungry, Emotionally deprived, Sexually frustrated, 'Beijing
women,' Sexually promiscuous, Unmarriageable, Against God's plan,
Castrators, Westernized, Witches, Women who want to have testicles,
Elite." US feminists, who have been targeted by conservatives for the
last two decades, have added another term: femiNazis. Twenty years of
conservative attack and media stigmatization have put us in a place
where even the "official women's movement," as it was called at the
UN's Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, has had to
fight for its life, while more radical alternatives are virtually
invisible.
Censorship of feminism has also become noticeable in education. The
State University of New York's board of trustees, largely appointees
of Governor George Pataki, led by Candace de Russy, has conducted a
two-year witch hunt among teachers at SUNY New Paltz in the name of
preserving standards and protecting the interests of taxpayers. Why?
Because the women's studies program had a 1997 conference on female
sexuality that ruffled a few feathers and was attacked in the Wall
Street Journal. A similar right-wing campaign, spearheaded by
religious groups on Long Island, resulted in a lawsuit against Nassau
Community College in which the plaintiffs argued that course
materials covering abortion, birth control, sexual behavior and
homosexuality were intended to influence students to reject
"traditional" Judeo-Christian religious attitudes toward sexuality
and adopt an antireligious ethic of "sexual pluralism." This past
February, however, Federal District Court Judge Nina Gershon dealt a
blow to creeping theocracy in the SUNY system by dismissing the case,
concluding that the course materials were designed to teach about
human sexuality as an academic subject, not about religion. And at
the University of Arizona, following a threat by the state
legislature to cut off funding for women's studies, the
administration has just polled its faculty to see how they feel about
putting the warning "course content may be deemed objectionable" on
some course syllabuses. The powerful grassroots Christian
conservative movement regularly launches school and library
censorship campaigns against any children's book that depicts an
"abnormal" family (like my own Families), has characters with anti-
authoritarian or irreverent attitudes, or even deals with magic,
since fairy tales are seen as an introduction to New Age religion and
Satanism.
If feminists are being targeted by reactionary movements all over the
world, one might assume that progressives would leap to their
defense. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Denunciations
from the right have been too often echoed on the left, from the
"defense of the family" in the mid-eighties to the attacks on
affirmative action and "identity politics" now. Some US progressives
today argue that the way to build a strong movement is to concentrate
on electoral or economic issues and forget about the things that
divide us. This strategy overlooks the fact that the fastest-growing
sectors of the work force, not to mention the labor movement and poor
people's movement, are full of women and minorities who do not check
their identities at the door.
Nor can a purely domestic approach to politics work in an era of
global culture war. It is wonderful to see the labor movement start
to come alive again. This reborn movement, however, will only be as
strong as its ability to learn from the diversity inside its ranks
and to build coalitions with the international movements for human
rights (including minority and gay rights), the environment and the
emancipation of women.
None of our movements will get very far unless we recognize the
centrality of struggles around culture. As we can see from the former
Yugoslavia, culture wars around questions such as national identity,
women's roles and minority rights have a way of turning into wars of
blood. The way we frame our issues now will resonate for generations.
Unity in the US progressive movement--not to mention survival, and
our ability to defeat the antidemocratic, atavistic forces that have
tied up the federal government for the past year--depends on
solidarity with all those attacked by racists, zealots and thugs, at
home and abroad--whether, like Tabitha Walrond and Amadou Diallo,
they are targeted merely because they are poor and black, or because,
like feminists the world over, they represent a threat to patriarchal
control of female sexuality and productive and reproductive capacity.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Meredith Tax, the author of The Rising of the Women, Rivington
Street, Union Square and Families, is president of Women's WORLD and
vice-chair of the International Committee of PEN American Center. She
can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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Om
7:56
+1200 (NZST)
From: Jools <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun, 16 May 1999 10:41:14 +1200
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Subject: [voyager] Re: New Scientist page freeze
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On 15-May-99, Athanassios Varamogianis had the perspicacity to write, and I
quote: "
> Hello Jools
> On 14-May-99, you wrote:
>> I couldn't close the 2nd window it opened and then couldn't close Voyager
>> at all. And I was losing memory of some sort. When I went to write this
>> note on YAM the red alert said 810000C Task 0022C358 - which is the most
>> interesting set of numbers yet for my red alerts :-) Whether that's the
>> YAM task or the Voyager task, I don't know.
> The Guru you have is from memory failure, So the problem I think is low chip
> memory, try to use less colors (e.g 64) and try again.
I only use 8 or 16 colours and images are turned off. This is a standard 1200
we're talking about here :-) (with 8Mb Ram but still the same old 2 MB chip
ram.
But thanks for the suggestion
jools
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