Current
Challenges to Feminism: Theory and Practice
Restoring feminism’s emancipatory project 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, 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.
By Delia D. Aguilar
Bulatlat
For much of the period from the 1970s
through the 1980s 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 naivete 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
waived 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.
Legitimacy of “women’s
issues”
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 1980s titled The Feminist Challenge which
underscored the indispensability of feminism for the revolution. (By this
time courageous revolutionary Filipino women had boldly adopted the term
"feminism" and bestowed it with substance different from 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?
Success of women’s
movements
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 1980s,
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 levelling 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 those writing at present 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 somewhat perplexing as
well; 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.
“Like part of the
family”
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, intentional 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). Few deign to recall
aforementioned materialist perspectives on household labor. (Similar
conceptual tools are applied to sex work, earlier known by the name of
prostitution, now presented in terms of "desire" or "emotional 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 (totalling
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.
Spontaneous individual
acts
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 1970s, 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. Bulatlat
Works Cited
Anderson, Bridget. 2000.
Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic
Labour. London: Zed
Books.
Constable, Nicole. 1997. Maid
to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Davies, Miranda, ed. 1983.
Third World, Second Sex: Women's Struggles and National
Liberation. London: Zed
Press.
Ehrenreich & Hochschild, eds.
2003. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers
in the New Economy. New
York: Metropolitan Books.
Epstein, Barbara. "Feminist
Consciousness After the Women's Movement," Monthly
Review (September
2002), vol 54, # 4.
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 2001.
Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring
in the Shadows of Affluence.
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. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Parrenas, Rhacel. 2005.
Children of Global Migration: Transnational Family and
Gender
Woes. Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press.
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