African Men and Feminisms: Panel Reflection

The panel on African Men and Feminisms held at Barnard College on March 12, 2014 included three men who presented issues directly paralleled to those discussed in our Feminist Theory Colloquium. Those issues included topics such as Feminism in the public and private spheres, men’s perception and treatment of female bodies, and the fear of the word “Feminist” in African male circles. The three speakers responses to the panelist’s questions were enlightening and resonated with readings discussed in class, though their responses were often more enlightening in what they didn’t say or how they chose to phrase their words.

The first question presented to the panelists was how they, as African men, responded to the term “Feminism” in both their professional and personal lives. Interestingly, all the three men responded in terms of what Feminism meant to them in a personal setting, avoiding the question of how it affected them in their professional work. Doe and Odede chose to share remarkably similar stories of being raised in homes in which their sisters and their mothers’ strength taught them about equality in the home and therefore about Feminism. The two men then shared how they eventually came to notice a disparity between how their sisters were treated in the home and how they were treated in public spaces. Most powerful of all revelations during this question was Yahya’s admittance that he benefitted directly from the discrimination set against his sisters. He shared that during his childhood, when his family did not have enough money to send all of the children to school, he and his brothers were prioritized, while his sisters were only sent to school when there was money to spare. What’s more, Yahya claimed that no one in his family, including his sisters, saw this as unfair. The choice to prioritize the boys’ educations and futures was completely normalized in his household, and so for him, he experienced less of a disparity between his public and private spaces, for in both instances, the women were not treated with equality.

A related thread of conversation developed when Doe asked how it might be possible to bring the equality he felt in his home to the public sector in which he felt a gendered disparity. Kimberle Crenshaw is an apt theoretician to turn to in grappling with these dilemmas, for she analyzes the ways in which Black women need to be legitimized in a realm other than the private through the law’s recognition of their agency. In “Demarginalizing the Intersection,” Crenshaw contends, “These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated” (Crenshaw 140). Though Crenshaw is specifically speaking about African American women, her argument that the political structure must be reorganized in order to normalize a group that is treated as invisible in the public eye still applies to the African women of whom the three men spoke.

The second issue raised by the panel was the issue of men’s perception and treatment of women’s bodies. Unfortunately, none of the panelists seemed to have a concrete answer for “what to do with” women’s bodies, and avoided using theoretical language to justify their views. All three men essentially answered that a man’s perception of a woman’s body is formed at home during childhood, and so when a man abuses a female body, this likely stems from a misguided lesson taught by (presumably) his mother. Later, in our class discussion, Leymah Gbowee argued that their answers victim-blamed women, for if men are meant to be socialized by their mothers and yet go on to rape and sexually assault women, the fault rests of the shoulders of the women who raised them, not on the shoulders of the attackers.

Nonetheless, the panelists comments resonated with Butler’s idea in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” of the body as “an historical idea’ rather than ‘a natural species’” (Butler 393). This notion that the body as gendered and sexed throughout history translates smoothly to the panel’s notion of bodily perceptions forming in the private sector of the home. According to the panel’s standards, Butler would seem to claim that the history of mistreated female bodies is what creates future mistreated female bodies, and so when a mother bestows upon her son lessons of the historicized body, she is drawing on a conception of the body with which she has grown up, and thus this is one way of normalizing violence against the female body. However, Gbowee’s point still rings true that for the panelists to place the blame upon a the mother is to take away any fault of the abusing man who acts violently against a woman’s body.

The third and final key issue raised during the panel was the question of why “Feminism” is an intimidating word for men, and how this fear factors into the privilege of being born and raised in a privileged gender. Yahya answered by suggesting that when one enjoys a position of privilege, one is often unwilling to give up that seat in the name of something like gender equality. It is for this reason, he explained using the term “ignorance of privilege,” that African men fear the term Feminism; to them, it means women dominating men, and ultimately changing the status quo with which the men are comfortable. “Feminism,” for these men, implies a notion of change that would knock men out of their seats of power, which is something that they inherently rebuke.

Interestingly, when discussing this question in class, Gbowee remarked on how all three men themselves seemed to demonstrate a discomfort with the word. Gbowee noted that what Yahya referred to as “ignorance of privilege” could also be called the “joy of power,” claiming that when these enlightened and educated African men struggle to grapple with their own privilege in defining Feminism, a poor bar is set for African men who remain much less enlightened and educated. Evelyn Hammonds comments on the status of privilege in “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” stating that, “Michele Wallace invokes the idea of the black hole as a trope that can be used to describe the invisibility of black creativity in general and black female creativity specifically…the observer outside of the hole sees it as a void, an empty place in space. However, it is not empty: it is a dense and full place in space” (Hammonds 138). Though, like Crenshaw, Hammonds is referring to African American women, her framing of privilege certainly harks back to the situation of African men in relation to the black hole that contains African women. Men on the outside of the hole can’t see the black hole, and so they are unaware of the fact that by standing outside of the black hole in visible light, they are standing in privilege. Their obliviousness to their own privilege is what Hammonds, Gbowee, and the panelists (to a certain degree) scrutinize and label as the primary reason that more men do not become involved in Feminism. As Doe presented it, “We are not conscious or aware of our privileges because we are trapped in a system that produces divide and exclusion…Men need to have the reflection that they are privileged and then need to take the next steps to use their privilege to help. It doesn’t matter that we’re born in privilege or wealth, we need to be conscious that if this privilege excludes others in society, we should ask what actions can I take to transform and step out of my comfort zone? The challenge to men is to step out of our comfort to break the shackles placed on women” (paraphrased from the Conference).

In the end, the panel on African Men and Feminism spoke to African men’s role in the Feminist Movement in what was not said. When the panelists addressed how they came to understand the meaning of the term “Feminist,” they spoke only in personal terms, exhibiting a potential discomfort with applying the term to their own professional work (all of which falls under the definition of “Feminist”). Later, when discussing African men’s position in relation to the female body, the men used language that implied a displacement of blame from men and onto the women in their lives. All in all the panelists seemed to exemplify some of the issues which they were trying to combat, which was ultimately telling of the attitudes towards women and Feminism in Africa in the current moment.

Collective Bibliography 

• “African Women’s Rights & Resilience.” Barnard College, n.d. Web. 28 Mar. 2014. http://barnard.edu/events/african-womens-rights-resilience.
• Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. Print.
• Barnes, LaShanette and Bruno, Peter J. “Feminist Theory Colloquium Glossary.” New York. 14 Mar. 2014. Assignment.
• Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge: New York and London, 1993.
• Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demariginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” The University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989: Feminism in the Law: Theory, Practice and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989. 139-67. Print.
• Fields, Barbara. “What One Cannot Remember Mistakenly.” History + Memory in African American Culture. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally, eds. Oxford: New York, 1994.
• Gbowee, Leymah. Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. New York: Beast Books, 2011.
• Grosz, Elizabeth. “Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of Reason.” Feminist Epistemologies. New York: Routledge, 1993. N. pag. Print.
• Hammonds, Evelyn. “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. 1994.
• Pray the Devil Back to Hell. Gini Reticker. Balcony Releasing (US), 2008. Online. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/women-war-and-peace/full-episodes/pray-the-devil-back-to-hell.
• Rubins, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Toward and Anthropology of Women. Rayna R. Reiter, ed. New York/London: Monthly Review Press, 1975.
• Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The “American” Connection. (Summer, 1987), pp. 64-81

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