selftravels2010

     When the Facebook event for Toronto’s Slutwalk first came to my attention, I was quickly captivated by the hype. On the same day, nineteen of my friends listed themselves as attending. Some were grad school colleagues, some were activist friends, and, most excitingly, many were young former students of mine in their teens and twenties who come from different political and social spheres. At the time I understood the event as reinforcing a few key feminist messages - that women are never responsible for the sexual assaults perpetrated against them, that women have the right to wear whatever they want and behave however they want without being made to feel responsible for sexual violence, and that when legal professionals put the focus on sexual assault victims’ clothing or behaviour, they are perpetuating the sense of entitlement men have to violate women physically, verbally, and emotionally. In considering the use of the word ‘slut’ in the event’s name, I admit that I am not someone who is eager to claim the word slut for myself, I have reservations about the re-appropriation of language, but I also feel there is a radical power in contesting social norms and I understand why women would feel empowered by claiming the word in order to resist the normative assumptions within it. So, I was drawn the event, I was excited by the appeal, and I went with minimal concern about the name.

     When I arrived on the lawn of Queen’s Park for the march, it took about 20 seconds for a sense of discomfort to set in. I looked around and felt profoundly out of place because I saw so few people of colour. To be clear, I attend rallies, protests, marches, lectures, and conferences all the time in Toronto and I can’t think of ever having had this feeling before. One would imagine, for example, that Take Back the Night would attract a similar demographic but when I went last October there seemed to be a different group. I saw many women of colour, working class and poor women, queer women, and women with disabilities. While I only knew around twenty people there, the crowd had a familiar vibe, a vibe I know from so many Toronto events. Slutwalk, however, struck me immediately as a whiter and more middle-class event. It also struck me as more upbeat somehow, more fun. I have heard people repeatedly arguing that Slutwalk uses clever branding and I started wondering what this branding was doing.

     In particular, I wondered about the way people seemed to be relishing in the dressing up aspect of the event. Women seemed to be having fun wearing short skirts and high heals and makeup, which, in itself, I would argue, is great. Of course women should wear whatever they want and should enjoy themselves. But somehow the combination of a fun march consisting of mostly white, mostly middle class, mostly young women wearing their sexy best and loving it got me thinking a little more about what was going on.

     Even though I don’t want to get too academic about this, I have to say that my feminism has been greatly influenced by my professor, Sherene Razack, a critical race feminist. If you are academically inclined and haven’t read her articles “Race, Space and Prostitution: The Making of the Bourgeois Subject” or “Gendered Racial Violence and Spacialized Justice”, you really should. Sherene has helped me to see the way systems of oppression (patriarchy, racism, capitalism, heterosexism, ableism, etc.) operate through each other. In other words, they are not independent systems, they are connected and rely on each other. In this case, the type of analysis I’m talking about would say that if you want to understand how patriarchy works, you have to understand racism and classism as components of it, for example. If I apply this analysis to the term ‘slut’, I see that it’s obviously a term used to police female sexuality and therefore is obviously a sexist term. But ‘slut’ is also a classed term. To be a ‘slut’ is to be outside of the realm of middle class respectability. So when a middle class white woman gets labeled a slut, her class status is called into question. ‘Sluttiness’ is associated with ‘trashiness’ and with being low-class. When we understand ‘slut’ in this way, I would argue we see that working class and poor women are already considered ‘sluttier’ than middle class women. This would suggest that the violability of lower class women’s bodies is naturalized in some ways. I argue that ‘slut’ is also a raced term. If you consider the operation of colonialism and racism in North America it is clear that the bodies of racialized women (here I’m talking specifically about Aboriginal and Black women) have been assumed to be available for male pleasure all the time. This is evident historically but even in the contemporary moment, I can’t imagine that anyone would argue that working class/poor and racialized women don’t suffer harsher sexual violence than other women. My point is that ‘sluttiness’ is naturalized for some groups or categories of women more than for other women. It is used at different times to police different bodies in different ways. This is important, I think, in considering why Slutwalk appeals more to white than non-white women. (To be clear, I’m not trying to argue that many middle class white women don’t experience the full brunt of sexual policing through the denigrating concept of the term ‘slut’, nor am I arguing that race or class are the only variables in naturalizing the violability of women’s bodies, I’m just pointing out that as people are differently positioned they may experience the term differently.)

     Of course, the best interpretation of Slutwalk is that it is intended to contest all kinds of bodily policing and sexual violence. I think in some ways it succeeds. But this is why it’s important to think about the effect of the branding of Slutwalk. It seems to me that part of the appeal of the event comes through a sense of fun and excitement, a fun and excitement that is produced through the idea of transgression. Claiming the word ‘slut’ seems fun and exciting because it’s ‘naughty’. Two things stand out to me about the fun, sexy, naughtiness of ‘slut’. The first is that, as I’ve tried to argue above, for women who are already assumed to be ‘sluts’, whose bodies are naturalized as violable, there is little fun in claiming the term. My second point is that the sexy badness of it all relies on the very boundary between respectability and degeneracy that my understanding of feminism seeks to uproot. It keeps in place the line between ‘good’ women and ‘bad’ women, a line that I have argued is raced and classed. Some middle class white women can play with this boundary because they may have the ability to re-enter white middle class respectability as soon as they change their clothes. This is not true for most women. The stain of ‘slut’ sticks on some bodies more than others.

     This post is not a critique of the organizers or even the event. Like many, I found the idea behind the event compelling. It succeeded in getting me out into the street. It has brought to light (once again) the legal and social injustices faced by women who survive sex crimes, perhaps even to people who haven’t been paying attention to this discussion for the last few decades. In presenting the point that this movement is marginalizing to some women, I’m only interested in enriching the discussion. I’m interested in reminding those middle class white women whose position on and experience of Slutwalk is different from mine, that they inhabit a specific space in society, that their experiences are not universal, and that their feminist norms sometimes come at the expense of women who inhabit different social positions. In fact, I’m not saying anything new. This problem has been central to the feminist movement. Social movements should always keep their eye on who is left out of them, who is marginalized.

     Transgressing social norms can be important. The radical expressions of the early gay liberation movements served to challenge various normative assumptions about sexuality, gender, and family. I would say that type of transgression was also transformative. My fear about Slutwalk is that it is transgressive but not necessarily transformative. My fear is that if middle class white women are attracted to the sexy badness of Slutwalk without a consideration of the way their ability to step in and out of their own self-designated ‘sluthood’ serves to sustain the naturalized ‘sluthood’ of others, they are doing little to subvert the norms that allow women’s bodies to be deemed violable.
 

The other day in class, we were having a very exciting discussion about this:

In The Playroom

If you don’t want to click on it, I’ll explain briefly that it’s a link to a photo exhibit called In the Playroom, in which the artist took photos of children playing within installations made to reproduce tragedies that so many of us have witnessed through the media.  The exhibit was considered controversial because of its use of children.  Anyway, I thought it was all interesting, particularly our discussion of the Abu Ghraib images.

Somehow, this discussion moved to the niqab/burqa, which had me fidgeting with excitement for the rest of the class.  I love the prof and the material and the links to things I’m already very interested in.  Ok, I’ll stop saying “excited” – you get it, I love school.  Anyway, after class our prof sent us a powerpoint she’d received about the burqa in Afghanistan that was probably just a more thorough and graphic depiction of all of the ways I’d ever heard or seen the burqa used to represent those who defend it or wear it as: primitive, oppressed (actually, imprisoned), isolated, worthless, and lacking an identity.  Of course all of that suggests that those who don’t wear or defend it are modern, free, integrated, valuable, complete people.

Which is why it was with great fascination that I watched this:

 

Slight aside: I actually heard about this video while walking down the street on Saturday night.  I ran into some acquaintances and one of them brought it up.  I mention this for two reasons – one is that I love that my new student world includes more and more people who can have conversations about controversial, political things I care about during accidental five minute conversations.  Two is that before watching it, after hearing it only described, I said, “That’s kind of cool.”

So, now, after watching it, I’ll be honest, I still kind of think it’s interesting and maybe cool but I’m critical of my response.  And I shall explain why.

If you didn’t watch it, you really should.  But just in case the video doesn’t work or you’re very lazy, it is a video of two women in high heels, short shorts, three-quarter sleeved black tops, and long veils covering their heads and faces (but not their eyes) walking along Paris streets.  I think it is worth noting that the women are fair-skinned.

The film is called “Niqabitch” and includes images of these two women strutting, posing to have their photo taken, and stopping in front of government buildings.  In the background is a rap song with a chorus that says “If you don’t like it then hey fuck you.”  Much of the video focuses on the onlookers who stop and stare at the “niqabitches”.  Many smile and take pictures.  The women often wave enthusiastically and pose with bent legs like models.  One of the most interesting elements of the video for me is that they black out the eyes of the spectators with small rectangles.  The “niqabitches” appear to flirt with some of the men and, also, notably, most of the people shown looking at (and looking quite pleased about) these women are, in fact, men.

Obviously the people who made the video are critiquing the country’s niqab ban, which is one of the reasons I said it was cool when I first heard about it.  The other aspect that appeals to me is the way it plays with our conceptions of who wears clothes associated with Islam.  As someone who often feels that people misread the meaning of my clothing, I like the idea of playing with symbolism.

At the same time, I think the video actually reinscribes notions about who can be what kind of subject.  The whole video aims to be transgressive – from the use of “bitch” to the music (rap, “fuck you”), to the strutting, to the bare legs.  This type of transgression for women is very much associated with “freedom” against which, of course, the niqab is always contrasted.  The fact that the women appear white makes it difficult to see them as representing the racialized niqabi, the immigrant that France so fears.  So what does it mean for the significance of the anti-niqab law to have sexy, white, veiled women swaggering through the street?  I’m not sure, but I am sure that the video is reminding us that men like it.

I remember when I was in high school, a male Pakistani friend of mine told me that he, a few years earlier as a young teen, had travelled to Pakistan and had come across a woman in a niqab.  He said that he found his curiosity of what lay beneath that veil so unbearable that he pulled it off the woman.  He said he was right, she was beautiful, and that to this day he finds women in niqab sexy.  This was instructive for me because at the age of 16 or whatever, I had given very little thought to the niqab and none to the idea of its allure.

I also very recently re-read Frantz Fanon’s essay “Algeria Unveiled” in which he talks about the role of Algerian women in the war of independence and the representations of the veil within that battle.  One of the things I found most fascinating was Fanon’s contention that French men were frustrated by their inability to see (veiled) Algerian women.  Fanon's idea is that the woman's ability to see her colonizer without reciprocity gives her a power that the colonizer wanted to interrupt.

I raise these two stories to point out the power dynamics at work.  In the first story the veil stands in for female sexual attractiveness.  The veil becomes an obstacle to the completion of a heterosexual male fantasy and, when present, an enticing reminder of the possibility of the satisfaction of his consuming gaze.  In the second story, the veil represents the obstacle to the colonizer’s ownership over his subjects through his gaze.

What is interesting about the video is that it raises (and perhaps answers) the question of which part of a woman makes her a person.  Many, many people have argued that one loses one’s identity when the face is covered. I think most of us see our faces as our selves.  And yet these women, with their bare legs, are smiled at, photographed excitedly, checked out, bantered with, etc.  The video does not show the hostility that I know firsthand is consistently meted upon a niqabi who is entirely covered.  This suggests to me that a woman comes to personhood not when her face is visible but when (edit: some other highly sexualized part of) her body is visible.  This disturbing point is something I’m not sure the video makers really question.  Essentially they are throwing their own bodies into an ongoing ideological battle that I find concerning because it appropriates women’s bodies.

Lastly, I mentioned that I found the blocked out eyes interesting.  I read it as your ‘gaze is your problem, not mine’.  I like the statement.  And yet, so much of the video involves the women posing for photographs which signifies a more permanent gaze.  It makes me think more about the way women get objectified through photography and the way that we attain our status as modern subjects by turning ourselves into commodities in the form of photos.

I’m wary of my own initial response because I think I’m seduced by the discourse that being rebellious automatically makes you clever, progressive, cool, and therefore, somehow, right.  The truth is, I think the video participates in producing the fully covered niqabi as the primitive other and the clever ladies who made this video as badass.  I’m not sure it does anything to make us rethink the racist anti-immigrant rhetoric that brought about the law in France in the first place.

Friends (all three of you): please feel free to critique my arguments or share your interpretations of the video.

A few weeks ago, as the Park51 Islamic community centre debate was reaching its (first) zenith, a respected friend of mine posted a comment on Facebook arguing that praying in an Islamic centre so deeply contentious to fellow citizens would violate the humble spirit encouraged in Islamic worship.  Because I think highly of the woman who expressed the opinion, I thought about it hard.  She is, I feel, a more spiritually oriented person than me, and I considered the possibility that I had been overlooking a greater moral question.  No matter how I’ve tried to spin it in my mind, however, I haven’t been able to conclude that conceding to unjustified emotions  rooted in prejudicial beliefs about Muslims, can be the morally superior direction.  I’m not going to rehash all the reasons that feeling offended by the construction of this community centre is bigoted and wrong because I’ve read at least 100 articles that have made just this case.  The arguments are obvious and are everywhere.

This brings me to my response to Tariq Ramadan’s piece from this weekend’s Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/10/AR2010091005366.html).  In it, Ramadan argues that Muslims should be sensitive to America’s “understandable fears” of Islam and should work to build bridges with non-Muslim Americans by, among other things, not building the Park51 centre.  I heard him debate Moustafa Bayoumi on Democracy Now the other day and his basic argument, it seemed, stemmed from a belief that the battle over the community centre puts Muslims in a defensive position.  He argued that it would be better for American Muslims to proactively overcome ignorance by letting non-Muslim Americans get to know them better. 

And here is why he is wrong.

Immediately after 9-11 the number of Americans who expressed fear or mistrust of Muslims was lower than it is today.  Are Americans becoming more ignorant about Islam and Muslims?  Although it’s not hard to imagine that many people still know nothing or next to nothing about Islam, if you listen to the people who attended the Glenn Beck rally, or the people who comment on any YouTube video, or the people who oppose the Park51 construction, they can all spout off things about jihad, Sharia, and the Koran.  Of course, most of what they say is desperately wrong.  Maybe they aren’t “average” Americans, and maybe they get all their information from Fox News, but it still leads me to the conclusion that simply putting out more information will not help.  In fact, many groups have been doing exactly what Ramadan suggests since 9-11 and this is where it has led us.

Ramadan and others have argued that 50% of Americans can’t be xenophobic and racist.  Can’t they?  Western societies are built on colonial exploitation, imperialist civilizing missions, and racial ordering, to name but a few ways that racism is embedded in Western cultures.  Ramadan acknowledges the long history of anti-Islamic thinking in the West and still persists with the argument that American sentiment in understandable.  He distinguishes between xenophobia and what he calls “understandable concerns” or an “identity crisis” caused by changing demographics in the West.  So people are afraid that their countries are becoming less white and that’s not racist?  Or they’re scapegoating immigrants for war and economic instability and that’s not racist?

Ramadan ends his piece by warning against isolationism.  You get this vague idea that there Muslims hiding out in mosques somewhere not talking to anyone except each other.  I don’t know what ghettoized Muslim communities in Europe are like, but right now I’m confident that if there are isolated Muslims in North America they comprise the tiniest fraction of the overall Muslim population.  For  now, that is, until they are pushed out of Manhattan or prevented from wearing the clothes they want in Quebec.

I reject the framing of the issue as petty rights-grubbing versus gracious compromise.  It’s about the struggle for pluralism and equality.  If we want to pray humbly, we can do that in our homes.  If we want to keep participating in civil society, that we have to do by publicly agitating against the surging forces of bigotry. It’s a crucial moral battle.

 

*I know it’s lame, but I couldn’t resist. :)

Like many of my friends, I often use Facebook to share articles about issues that preoccupy me.  I've been very careful, however, not to post anything about the Qur'an burning that is scheduled for this Saturday, September 11.

Even though I've been consumed all summer by the obvious anti-Muslim racism that seems to be growing and erupting throughout North America and Europe, I've refused to bite on the Qur'an burning because it seems so stupid and I'm reluctant to give it more attention than it deserves.  And yet I can't resist paying attention long enough to discuss why I think the event doesn't deserve attention. 

Although declaring "International Burn a Quran Day" is pretty hideous to me, particularly in light of the Fox News fueled hate-fest going on in the U.S. these days, I'm actually not overly troubled the act of Qur'an burning.  While many Muslims hold the Qur'an as sacred and treat it with the utmost respect - including washing before touching it, shelving it on the highest shelf, avoiding placing it on the floor, etc., I don't expect other people to share our perspective on the sanctity of a book.  Book burning, of course, is a symbolic act of dogmatic hostility and censorship. It's hard not to get swept up by the hints of Inquisition-type intolerance, but maybe that's my point. When a 50-member church that has gained infamy exclusively through petty acts of bigotry plans an event like this, its followers come across looking like querulous adolescents - at best - and certainly not like dangerous Inquisitors. 

It's hard not to think about the Danish cartoon fiasco. Although I am sympathetic to the free speech issues involved, I still find the decision to publish those cartoons troublesome.  My objection had nothing to do with perceived Islamic prohibitions against the depiction of the Prophet or any such sensitivities, but had to do with the responsibility of the press.  National newspapers wield a social power in no way comparable to that of the ironically-named Dove Outreach Church, and Jyllands-Posten's decision to propagate racist attacks against a minority group was legitimately met with alarm, criticism, and opposition.  (The form of the demonstrations, of course, is another matter.)

Unfortunately, the wrong-headed protests over the Qur'an burning event have already begun. It is my genuine hope that any Muslim groups planning opposition to the attention-seeking antics of a few wingnuts focus their energies on something else.  The Qur'an, as a physical book, doesn't need defending.  In the digital age it becomes almost silly to worry about the destruction of mass-produced texts.  If racism is the real issue, we have to remember that racism is about power.  Terry Jones and his followers only have as much power as we're collectively willing to afford them.

Last night I experienced a massive surge of exhilaration, comparable to what I felt when I submitted my report cards on June 25.  In June the emotions were easy to identify. Relief was primary, because I had just put an end to 10 months of stress.  Second was excitement at the anticipation of fun that summer always brings.  I also felt satisfaction, as one typically feels at the conclusion of hard work.  Giddiness was in there too because it was a spectacular, perfectly warm, sunny day.  I emailed the file with my marks and set off on what was supposed to be a leisurely morning stroll.  Instead, I bounced down the street and back, much quicker than planned, unable to control the kick of adrenaline that propelled my steps.

My emotions last night were more unexpected, if only because it was a gloomy Labour Day evening and I'd been fasting all day and was tired.  But my emotional progression started with this little thought: "Cool, I don't have to prep for tomorrow (and the rest of the year) like all the other teachers I know."  Then, I started imagining how I would normally be feeling on the Monday night right before school - in short, unprepared, anxious, and stressed.  I'm usually scurrying about my condo trying to organize folders and to print out course outlines and the first couple of days' handouts.  I'm the worst kind of procrastinator so these tasks never get done before the last minute.  I'm sometimes already feeling a little defeated even before the first day because, as interesting as my courses are, I don't have time to develop them as I want to. I even entertain, ever so fleetingly, the idea of calling in sick.  (Okay, that doesn't usually happen before the very first day of school, but it happens almost every other day of the school year.)

As I measured my current sense of freedom and anticipation against the pressures that seem unending during the school year, I was filled with complete elation.  That feeling alone validated any doubts I've had about whether taking a year off was the right choice.