http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/aguilar181006.html
Current Challenges to Feminism:
Theory and Practice
by Delia D. Aguilar
For much of the period from the 70s through the 80s, I was quite concerned
with the way in which Third World movements for national liberation were
sidelining women's issues and relegating these to the background. In this
piece I centerstage the Philippines which I believe may serve as an
illustrative case. Let me try to explain what I mean. It wasn't that women
were ignored or were not considered important for the revolution, because
they could be found in organizations of various kinds and proved to be
dependable and committed workers. It also was not that the platform for
national liberation failed to articulate a position on women, because it
did. But I think it is fair to say that women's oppression was
conceptualized almost exclusively along productivist lines so that male
chauvinism -- or the everyday conduct of men, both as individuals and as a
group -- could easily escape scrutiny or criticism and, therefore,
correction or redress.
Stated theoretically, my critique was lodged at an economistic stance that
could not take into sufficient account the social relations of gender, or
the distinct and separate character of female subordination; indeed, this
was a protest similarly expressed by women against their revolutionary
parties in other parts of the Third World (Davies, 1983). Filipinos writing
at the time situated women's subjugation in their roles as factory workers,
as prostitutes, and as domestic workers deployed overseas, all of which were
presented, accurately enough, as a consequence of the Philippines'
neocolonial status. Overall, the aim was to highlight class -- to be
precise, the extraction of surplus value constitutive of labor/capital
relations -- and the marginalization of practically all else. For example,
precious little was observed or remarked about the home or family and the
gender inequality spawned by the division of labor occurring within this
site. Nor was there any questioning of male authority and male privilege,
or attention to quotidian gender interactions. My point was that without
the necessary interrogation, gender asymmetry would remain naturalized,
accepted as the normal state of affairs, and continue to place women in a
materially and psychologically disadvantaged position.
Economism assumed the emancipation of women (note that "feminism" during
this period was anathema) to more or less mechanically transpire with a
change in the mode of production. Yet the experience of women in then
existing socialist countries contradicted the naiveté of this belief (Kruks,
et al, 1989). Moreover, the subsumption of the interpersonal or cultural to
the economic made the movement's interest in women appear as purely
instrumental; that is, it caused one to wonder whether in fact the
movement's consideration of women was based chiefly on its perfectly
understandable need for recruits. My queries were waved aside through
references to women who were "red fighters" ( i.e., in the New People's
Army) in a move by comrades to invalidate my complaints. These were offered
to me as proof that women were now liberated, catapulted as they were into
what was regarded as the most esteemed form of struggle. What better
evidence than this of their having breached gender convention? I was also
told in not so many words that, because of my location and long-term
residence in the United States, I had been afflicted with the ills of
Western feminism which from a revolutionary perspective by definition was
individualist, bourgeois, and divisive.
I tried to push for the legitimacy of "women's issues," writing that these
called for an altogether different type of thinking, one that went beyond
the strict boundaries of class analysis and production relations and,
although in the end determined by production, mandated independent scrutiny.
At the very least I wanted gender inequality in its various dimensions
discussed and dissected, maintaining that cultural forms, particularly when
unexamined, tend to survive changes in the economic base. From today's
viewpoint, the questions I raised were hardly world-shaking. Along with
other women, I argued for a semi-autonomous women's organization that would
enable such an inquiry, allowing women the necessary space to explore how
feminism could move the revolution forward, deepening and fortifying it. A
book I wrote in the late 80s titled The Feminist Challenge underscored the
indispensability of feminism for the revolution. (By this time, courageous
revolutionary Filipino women had boldly adopted the term "feminism" and
bestowed on it substance different from feminism in the West.) In it I
tried to make the case that no movement for revolutionary change could
achieve a new, truly humane social arrangement without seriously addressing
the challenge put forth by feminism.
Fast forward to 2006. Crucial concrete, material changes have occurred that
have altered the worldview of progressives in fundamental ways. Most
critical among these are the collapse of the Soviet Union; the relatively
slow but steady economic policy shifts in China; and the rightward turn in
the West precipitated by a neoliberal strategy, all of which have been
accompanied by the decline or demise of revolutionary movements worldwide.
Speaking less of imperialism than of globalization -- understood to mean the
way in which all the nations on the planet have been successfully integrated
into a capitalist world order -- contemporary activists (revolutionaries no
longer) aim their blows at corporate rapacity but fail to make mention of
the exploitation entailed in capital's extraction of surplus value. Thus,
visions of an alternative system, though again re-emerging post-9/11 after a
period dominated by the catchword TINA ("There is no alternative!"), are
vague and blurry at best. This outlook has additionally projected national
liberation struggles as outmoded, passé, and retrograde, capable merely of
reinstituting the negative characteristics of the old society they claim to
replace. On the whole, progressive thinking has staged a pronounced
retreat. When anti-corporate and anti-globalization activists declare
hopefully that a new world is possible, the majority most likely imagine a
kinder, gentler, "humanized" version of capitalism, definitely not the
socialism or political utopias of yesteryear.
Such a reformist posture seems particularly ironic when juxtaposed with the
increasingly undeniable fact that globalization has intensified poverty and
widened class fissures within and among nation-states to an extent
heretofore unknown. Now even more conspicuous as well, the phenomenon of
uneven development inherent in capitalism inevitably means that class,
national, and racial divisions among women have also become impossible to
ignore. Given this, how has feminism -- if one might now speak of a global
trend -- responded to these glaring schisms?
The success of women's movements around the world is manifested in today's
acceptance by the general public that it is only right and just for women to
be the equals of men. Without a doubt, it has been the pressure of women's
mobilizing that has driven international bodies (the United Nations, for
one) to issue documents on women's rights, in turn forcing member nations to
comply (at least in form) or to make concessions. It must be remarked that
in the global North mass women's organizations all but disappeared in the
early 80s, consigning feminism pretty much to the academy. Equally worthy
of comment is that by then there was no danger of a rollback of feminist
thinking as it had become securely established in the popular consciousness.
However, it is also true that with the withdrawal into reformism of the
progressive movement as a whole, feminism has been correspondingly tamed.
More precisely, as Barbara Epstein (2002) contends, Western feminism has
devolved into a cultural current and is no longer the movement for social
transformation that it once was.
What ramifications might this shift hold for international feminism?
Indeed, globalization processes, notably the information industry and
high-tech communication, have facilitated women's networking across national
boundaries so effectively that it is now possible to speak of a global (most
choose to say "transnational," which has a falsely leveling effect)
feminism. Such a development implies, for one thing, that my concerns of
some three decades ago have been drastically reversed and turned upside
down. If my main worry then was that the sphere of reproduction and the
cultural were shunted aside by a productivist orientation, today it is the
complete opposite. Relations of production are left untouched -- why deal
with this realm at all when the existing system is to be merely reformed,
not overthrown? -- and research interests diverted to cultural and
discursive tinkering. I believe that the domestication or taming of
feminism has rendered it unable to adequately come to grips with pressing
issues brought on by the global market, which is truly an unfortunate turn
of events.
How, for instance, has feminism treated the diaspora of Third World women,
those from impoverished classes of the global South? Women are now in the
workforce in such unprecedented numbers that they can be rightly referred to
as constituting the dynamo or engine that propels globalization (Horgan,
2001). Moreover, it is women's diaspora that stands out as the most
striking, because most visible, feature of globalization. Yet the dispersal
of women of color to practically all corners of the globe and their
insertion, as maids, into the private homes of well-heeled women seem not to
bother Western feminists too greatly. What is curious is that second-wave
feminists once situated women's oppression at the heart of the family -- in
the household gender division of labor, to be exact. Insisting that the
household work that women perform is real labor, not an act of love, they
introduced household and family relations as the most important arena of
gender conflict, demystifying its presumed sanctity. Generating numerous
publications, articles as well as books, what became known as "the domestic
labor debate" sought to identify the precise point where the extraction of
surplus value might be located, a theoretical exchange that consumed a great
deal of intellectual energy at that time.
Those "chore wars" have obviously come to an end, the gender tensions these
produced finally resolved, and not because properly enlightened men are
picking up their proportionate share. Menial duties traditionally assigned
to women and housewives have been turned over to Third World domestic
workers, dramatizing racial/ethnic, national, and class differences in the
most blatant, awkward, discomfiting ways. But, perhaps, for feminists
today, the old "sisterhood is powerful" slogan looms too distant now for
this situation to cause even the slightest embarrassment. Suffice it to say
that one hears of no attempt to invoke that rallying cry these days. Why or
how personal interactions with subjects so profoundly set apart by class,
race, and nationality have managed to escape examination is still somewhat
perplexing; this baffles, particularly in view of the fact that
"intersectionality" is a reigning paradigm in women's studies. Of course,
in this approach, gender, race, and class are conceptualized as intersecting
identities, all equal in impact, rather than as a set of social relations
where class exerts a determining power.
Instead of probing the immensely complex dynamics of class, race, and nation
in mistress/housemaid relationships, feminists conducting research about
domestic workers mainly recount what employers tell them, that they treat
their maids "like part of the family." Or they invent concepts that,
intentionally or not, obscure the glaring status disparity in the
relationship (forgetting that status is always relational): notions like
"personalism" (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001), presumably a variety of maternal
benevolence that is extended by the fair-minded to her "Other." Or they
emphasize domestic workers' "agency," revealed in the manifold ways
subordinates by sheer necessity learn to manipulate and resist the authority
of their superiors -- simple survival mechanisms, in other words (Constable,
1997). (Similar conceptual tools are applied to sex work, earlier known by
the name of prostitution, now presented in terms of "desire" or "emotional
labor.") Few deign to recall aforementioned materialist perspectives on
household labor. Among these few are Barbara Ehrenreich (Ehrenreich &
Hochshild, 2002), who writes that feminists ought to feel a "special angst"
about how a privileged woman's safe haven easily transmutes into a sweatshop
the minute a hired domestic worker of color steps in, the former's
magnanimity notwithstanding. Another feminist, Bridget Anderson (2000),
argues that domestic work is not labor just like any other. She asserts
without equivocation that what is involved in the transaction is not the
sale of the domestic worker's labor but her personhood, her very self. But
these are minority voices.
Let us now turn to Filipino and Filipino-American feminists writing about
this same subject, or the topic of migrant workers generally. How does
their approach differ from that of Western researchers? From the
productivist framework that I sketched in the beginning? As I previously
remarked, the connection of migrant labor to the mode of production has
either been made tenuous or extinguished entirely. In fact, it has become
obligatory to preface one's argument by denouncing any account that smacks
of "the economy." It is definitely not academically smart today to refer to
poverty as a motivation for seeking employment opportunities overseas;
desire for adventure and independence, perhaps, or maybe the need to escape
patriarchal domination or domestic violence.
Never mind that a staggering 3,000 Filipinos leave the country each day (70%
of these female), the majority landing jobs as domestic workers; or that it
is their remittances (totaling over $12 billion this year) that enable the
government's debt servicing to international financial institutions.
Rather, the trend is to go for "nuance and complexity"; this is shorthand
for a concentrated focus on cultural factors in the micropolitics of
everyday life in a way that I would have enormously welcomed in the past,
except that this time the mode of production has been scrubbed out of the
picture. This is not to deny that terms like capitalism, imperialism, and
colonialism are necessarily avoided, but these are discursively formulated
and culturalized as well, amounting, in effect, to mere rhetorical
flourishes. When they are not, they serve only as backdrop for the real
story, which is that of individuals and their personal relations.
An example should serve here. A study of the children of Filipinas working
abroad explores husbands' responses to their wives' prolonged absence and
concludes that, contrary to the researcher's expectations, men have refused
to pick up the slack of childcare (Parrenas, 2005). They are thus unable to
maneuver any substantive "gender border-crossing" that might cause a
revision of traditional sex roles. Again, this line of attack would have
been tremendously useful in the past when there was a firm understanding of
the influence of systemic forces, but current abstention from "economics"
leads nowhere near any project for radical societal transformation. Had the
author deployed a macro framework with a concrete analysis of global
capitalism, she might have arrived at the conclusion that no disruption in
gender roles of any consequence can occur without the requisite structural
and institutional changes.
By today's reckoning, "resistance" has become reduced to everyday
spontaneous individual acts not involving much political deliberation. To
repeat, the simple survival strategies of migrant workers have been elevated
to the category of "agency," ostensibly to demonstrate their empowerment and
to dispel the slightest suggestion that the oppressed may be passive
victims. (Let us hope that President Gloria Arroyo's recent proclamation of
Filipinos' "supermaid" status does not serve to amplify this tendency.) To
go even further, their very identity as transnational border-crossers is
shown to always already exemplify opposition. For aren't picking and
choosing which facets of the old culture to retain and the new one to accept
already performative acts of hybridity, and therefore in themselves acts of
defiance? And how are notions of oppositionality arrived at? First, by
positing that "inbetweenness" or transnational subjects' location in the
interstitial spaces of nations and cultures inevitably produces
transgression as they must navigate across literal and metaphorical sites
and negotiate their multiple, fluctuating identities (read: displaced from
home, migrant laborers wind up summoning all the coping devices they can
muster to keep body and soul together in an estranged, alienating, and
exploitative milieu). Second, by radically readjusting the viewing lens to
zero in and focus wholly on the personal or private, magnifying the import
of individual actions and interpersonal connections while obfuscating
disturbing political landscapes.
Sometimes it takes just a bit of parody to shed light upon what verges on
the absurd. The current state of feminist theorizing, in my opinion, not
only severely limits our understanding of how the global market works but
also circumscribes the field of feminist action. That it is unequal to the
task of explaining how globalization is built on the backs of Third World
women, as it allows a few to move up the class ladder, is an understatement.
This task ought to be paramount if feminism is to restore its emancipatory
project. Undertaking it would require a solid comprehension of the basic
operations of the global economic order, first of all, and how it is
relations of production that underpin nation, race, and gender.
Without this encompassing frame, the international division of labor that
has engendered vast class, racial and national divisions among women will
remain concealed and worse, like male domination, become normalized and
naturalized. It is already proceeding in this manner when feminists resort
to phrasing their relationship with Third World "Others" in terms that
connote altruism, munificence, and compassion; or when, in the name of
"agency," they unwittingly attribute a native perspicacity and shrewdness to
housemaids' everyday coping. This merely echoes North/South relations of
power in a version of imperial feminism different from that of the 70s, but
imperial feminism, nonetheless. If current preoccupation with nuance and
complexity were to be redirected to illuminate the ways in which gender,
race, and nationality are ultimately grounded in production relations, the
resulting findings would likely depart radically from those of current
studies, for these would unavoidably recognize the necessity of mass
political mobilization, not merely the celebration of individual
oppositional acts. It would be a theoretical enterprise that could open up
the possibility of collective action, with social justice as the primary
item on the feminist agenda once again.
Works Cited
Anderson, Bridget. 2000. Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of
Domestic Labour
<http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Dirty-Work-Politics-Domestic/dp/1856497615> .
London: Zed Books.
Constable, Nicole. 1997. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina
Workers
<http://www.amazon.com/Maid-Order-Hong-Kong-Ethnography/dp/0801483824/ref=ed
_oe_p/102-4968168-4542531?ie=UTF8> . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Davies, Miranda, ed. 1983. Third World, Second Sex: Women's Struggles and
National Liberation
<http://www.alibris.com/books/isbn/0862320291%200862327520%200862327539/Thir
d%20World%2D%2DSecond%20Sex> . London: Zed Press.
Ehrenreich & Hochschild, eds. 2003. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex
Workers in the New Economy
<http://www.amazon.com/Global-Woman-Nannies-Workers-Economy/dp/0805075097/re
f=ed_oe_p/102-4968168-4542531?ie=UTF8> . New York: Metropolitan Books.
Epstein, Barbara. "Feminist Consciousness After the Women's Movement,"
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/0902epstein.htm> Monthly Review (September
2002), vol 54, # 4.
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 2001. Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning
and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence
<http://www.amazon.com/Dom%E9stica-Immigrant-Cleaning-Shadows-Affluence/dp/0
520226437> . Berkeley: University of California Press.
Horgan, Goretti. "How Does Globalization Affect Women?" International
Socialism Journal (Autumn 2001), issue 92.
Kruks, Sonia, Rayna Rapp, and Marilyn B. Young, eds. 1989. Promissory
Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism
<http://www.amazon.com/Promissory-Notes-Transition-Socialism-Resistance/dp/0
853457719> . New York: Monthly Review Press.
Parrenas, Rhacel. 2005. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Family
and Gender Woes <http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?book_id=4944%204945> . Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
________________________________
Delia D. Aguilar has written extensively on feminism and nationalism, among
them a book titled Toward a Nationalist Feminism published in the
Philippines. She recently co-edited a collection of essays, Women and
Globalization
<http://www.amazon.com/Women-Globalization-Delia-D-Aguilar/dp/1591021626> ,
with Anne Lacsamana. She was on the faculty of women's studies and ethnic
studies at Washington State University and Bowling Green State University
and now teaches at the University of Connecticut.
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