Adair Kleinpeter-Ross

In second panel of the African Women’s Rights and Resilience Conference, three key themes emerged. The first was the invisibility of (male) privilege, the second was an expressed fear of feminism, and the final theme was the way in which women’s rights could benefits entire communities. Regarding the first of these themes, Mohammed Yahya summarized the invisibility of male privilege among most African men succinctly and honestly when he stated that growing up he never recognized the inequality between himself and his sisters, even when his schooling was prioritized over those of his female family members. Doe, too, spoke of his ignorance of his privilege when sharing how long it took him to realize that he had more of a voice than his sisters in public, and the causes of this inequality. Despite the fact that both Doe and Yahya work at UNDP in positions that prioritize the advancement of women, both stressed the responsibility of women and feminism to raise awareness about the privilege society affords to men. To Yahya, “feminism should awaken ignorant privilege.” Odede agreed with this characterization of privilege as something that needs to be revealed or uncovered by arguing that he had the most success in his activist work in a village in which he focused his efforts on educating men about their privilege. Despite this, his work primarily focuses on education for girls.

The discussion of the invisibility of privilege highlighted the strength of Gayle Rubin’s conception of the construction of sex and gender. Inherent to Rubin’s “sex-gender system” is that it extends beyond interpersonal interactions, making it a system that is abstracted from individual action. In other words, the sex-gender system does not require the active buy-in from male individuals to affirm, create or enforce gender inequality in their relationships, but rather has manufactured “products” on unequal footing before any opportunity for interpersonal interaction had ever existed. The three panelists demonstrated that the sex-gender system is capable of hiding privilege from those who possess it. While all three agreed that a significant responsibility of feminism was to educate men about their privilege, I argue that this configuration conforms to patriarchal expectations, in that it requires women to shoulder the burden of the ignorance of men, and continues to cater to the needs of the privileged. Furthermore, it requires women to prioritize addressing patriarchy within relationships, rather than at the level of the sex-gender system. How, then, do we conceive of a system that can effectively educate men about their privilege without further disadvantaging women? The panelists highlighted the need for a more holistic approach to feminist education—one that not only prioritizes the needs of girls but also educates boys about the privileges they have, and the responsibility to equality that such privilege requires. Odede’s activist experience educating village men, as a fellow man, about their privileges, offers a potential model to prioritize this type of education without making it an added responsibility for female feminists.

A striking theme of the panel was the fear that all three panelists openly expressed, towards feminism and even, at times, towards the individual women at the conference. This was particularly true of the moderator Abena Busia, who embodied the strength and education that Yahya, Doe, and Kennedy used to characterize a feminist. While all three panelists did not name personal fear of the power of feminism, aside from expressing nervousness about speaking on the panel and in relation to Busia, all emphasized that the fear of men was a significant obstacle to feminism, although each articulated the fear in slightly different forms. Yahya discussed the fear of educated women in particular, saying that even educated men found them undesirable for marriage out of fear of the power that such a woman could hold even in the private sphere of marriage. Doe discussed the apprehension at his own organization, WNEP, when a group of women wanted to split off to form their own group; he framed this fear as caused by a larger system (patriarchy)’s resistance to change. Odede, on the other hand, mentioned the way that police had fled while attempting to arrest activist Wangari Mathaai when female protesters began to undress.

Although the examples of fear the panelists named were disparate, they illustrated an important and central theme undergirding to the conversation: the goals of feminism represent a loss of power and privilege that seems to loom large in the minds of many men. As Yahya questioned, “why would one give up power when you’re born with it?” If gender, like race, has been theorized as a relationship to power, the panelists’ self-professed timidity in the space filled with powerful African women, and interactions with the strict moderation of Busia, embodied in many ways what men stand to lose with the “success” of feminism. Although the panel sought to address the question “what is the role of men in African feminism?” the fear that underpinned the conversation begs the question “can there be a role for men in African feminism?” While almost every individual is part of structures that contribute to the oppression of women, even the most ardent male feminists are particularly implicated in the systems that give them power, even, often, the power to deconstruct such systems more effectively than women. Feminism must develop ways in which men can be an integral part of the fight for gender equity, while simultaneously addressing the ways in which their conceptions of feminisms may be necessarily limited by their relation to power.

Although not explicitly linked, the expressed fear of feminism also informed the way that women’s rights were framed within the discourse of human rights. Yahya positioned women’s rights within broader goals of economic and societal development; in his work in Afghanistan, for example, Yahya described stressing the economic benefits that the country was losing by limiting the rights of women saying, furthermore, that “a society that deprives women of rights is not a stable one.” Similarly, Doe’s work as a peacemaker highlights the value of empowered women in creating lasting peace and stability in regions, and argued that breaking the “system” that disadvantages women is key to increasing the potential of entire societies. Yahya and Doe’s opinions seem to be in line with the work of their organization, UNDP, which is directed towards human rights rather that feminism more specifically. In this way, women’s advancement is but one of many tools that can be used to develop the societies in which Yayha and Doe work. Odede, too, stressed the key to feminism to be a process of involvement and mutual benefit rather than opposition, which he embodies in his quest to educate girls, hoping this will be a tool to eradicate poverty in the Kibera slums.

Yet despite the positive work that all three panelists have done around women’s rights, the discussion of women’s rights as a key to “human development” (in a way that connotes economic development) is reminiscent of Rubin’s discussion of Marxism in relation to the oppression of women. Even in a discussion on how to advance the rights of women, the panelists discussed women in terms of their production value, of their potential to increase the development and security of their societies in a neoliberal configuration that supports capitalism and militarization. Although this conception of gender equality may have originated from a genuine place of activism for women’s rights, it is telling in the context of the fear of feminism discussed above. What is lost in framing women’s rights in a way that eases men’s fear of losing power, and emphasizes what they have to gain? I argue that a true discussion of women’s rights must conceptualize feminism as something much more expansive than the current human rights discourse, and as something that seeks to interrogate the underlying causes of women’s oppression. I believe that capitalism, militarization, and neoliberal understandings of security, development, and sovereignty exist as antithetical to the equality of women, not as ideals for which women’s rights should be advanced. To support women’s rights in a way that also supports values, such as militarization, across the world is to fail to actually dismantle the structures of women’s oppression and instead forces feminism to stay relegated to the periphery. I argue that feminism must draw inspiration from Anzaldua’s conception of the borderlands in imagining a theoretical space of opposition outside of those spaces (namely, the “human rights” sphere) into which it is being directed by forces, such as capitalism, that ultimately do not align with feminist values.

The panel featuring Doe, Yahya, and Odede illustrated the constraints of male feminism, not due to a failure of the panelists to do significant feminist work, but precisely because of their vast involvement in such feminist activism. All three men have made significant contributions to the lives of the women they work for, but still struggled to articulate in the panel a vision of feminism that surpassed their own position of privilege in imagining a future that existed outside of current hierarchies and structures of power. The opacity of privilege and the threat of feminism pervaded the discussion in a way that suggests that the involvement of men in feminism cannot be divorced from much work to educate men on the experience of women. Ultimately, I believe that this panel indicated the importance and need for activists, especially male activists, to listen directly to women to inform their work and their conception of their role in feminism.