Women's Rights and Transnational Feminisms: Panel Reflection

“Most women in Africa do not have any kind of choice” when it comes to strength and resilience according to Amina Mama. During the conversation on Women’s Rights and Transnational Feminisms, themes of listening as a strategy of transnational feminism, leadership and accountability, and transformation through transformative thinking emerged. When thinking about these key issues, I find it useful for me to consider the theoretical framework of the body. I understand body to mean the social positioning that is contextually situated in space and time in relation to others in a hierarchal order of power; a unified compilation of parts assembled together like a body of knowledge. In this context, I see women’s rights and transnational feminism as a unitary body—womanhood. The body is comprised of separate parts—Global South and Global North, in which divergent ideologies exist—among African women and in relation to Western Anglo and European women.

In discussions about listening being a necessary strategy of transnational feminism, I find it helpful to use the conceptual framework of the body, specifically the black female body as a site of agency, redress, and resistance found in the Leymah Gbowee’s work in Mighty Be Our Powers. It is useful to consider the act of listening as a site of agency. By this, I mean listening becomes the capacity to act, to move, and to possess self-determination as confined within space and time, as well as one’s social position (Barnes and Bruno 1-2). Acclaimed feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz writes, “If bodies are traversed and infiltrated by knowledges, meanings, and power, they can also under certain circumstances, become sites of struggle and resistance, actively inscribing themselves on social practices” (Grosz 199). What becomes apparent in the panelists’ discussion is the importance to speak about one’s experiences, to have those uniquely different experiences genuinely listened to, and truly heard by being acknowledged as equally valuable. In other words, to actively listen is to “speak, without necessarily talking” (Grosz 199). In this way, listening becomes a site of agency; leadership and accountability becomes a possibility for redress, and transformation thereby creating a point of resistance.

Of all the panelists, Mama’s position is the most oppositional. According to Mama, existing global systems perpetuate militarism and neoliberalism, in which systemic economic and political inequalities thrive. She argued that until there are systems in place that legally protect women’s rights, the efforts and gains made by African women’s movements are undermined. This speaks directly to the work Mama does as an educator and scholar in teaching across boarders about globalization, methodologies, and pedagogies. In this way, she pushes back against Disney’s advocating for reproductive rights. Rather, she posits transformation through transformative thinking within African women’s discourse as a means of re-conceptualizing our concepts and categories from the beginning. In her opinion, this is most crucial before engaging in talks about transnational feminism. Likewise, according to Mama structural global inequalities need to be acknowledged, because systemic differences, positionalities, and politics are different in different locations.

I find that Mama’s position was the strongest in terms of situating the concept of rights within the context of globalization’s serious consequence, the diminishing rights women experience globally as a result of militarism and neoliberalism. In this way, she challenges feminists to go back to the drawing board and re-conceptualize concepts to combat these devastating effects. It is her position of resolving issues within the African women’s movement before engaging in transnational feminism that was to me the weakest of her positions, because these exclusionary tactics implicitly maintain positions of inequality. It would seem that inclusionary tactics would be more beneficial in breaking down barriers on inequalities.

Disney offered a Western feminist viewpoint that exposed Western feminists’ self-defined position of superiority that consists of jet-setting around the world imbuing their liberal one size fits all brand of feminism. Through her filmmaking, social activism for women’s rights globally, and her philanthropy, Disney observes Western feminist narrow views as a detriment to the global women’s causes their efforts are supposed to support and help. Moreover they contradict themselves by offering African women all but the essential resource they need—money. Furthermore they do not trust African women to make the best and most efficient choices regarding how to use the resources offered. In this way, Western feminists’ fail to truly listen to the African women’s needs, and therefore do not really hear and value their experiences and expertise they bring to the table. According to Disney, listening should be a radical act, not a passive act. What she means by this is that the listener needs to be actively engaged in the communication process by actively hearing what is being said.

Disney’s position is the hardest for me to accept, because it is the one that I can least identify with. While I am a black American female, I cannot relate fully to Western feminism. Western feminism is, to me, a privileged, white, middle-class discourse that is problematic because it implicitly marginalizes African women and Third World women. In this way, it challenges me to ask where I, as a black American female, fit in the feminist discourse. Evelynn Hammonds’ concept of a black hole (Hammonds 139) was made more salient by my female Nigerian classmate’s claim that, as an American, I enjoy a privileged status in relation to Third World women. A statement I simultaneously acknowledge and deny, as it is a privileged status that my personhood simultaneously positions me in a situation of inequality in the US.

Tamale presents the most unifying position of all the panelists. According to her, feminism has always been global. As such, transnational feminism represents the political and conceptual struggles feminists attempt to transcend, for patriarchy reaches worldwide, and thus, the backlash of women’s gains is global. She maintains that all women are global citizens within the women’s movement, thus gains of one represent gains for all, and the inverse is true as well. As a legal scholar and feminist lawyer, Tamale believes women are entitled to rights; yet she shares a similar position to Mama, that the discourse on rights needs to change to a framework of economic and social justice. This is in line with her legal and political work.

Also, Tamale leveled a direct critique at Western feminism and the assumptions they bring into collective spaces. According to her, listening as well as theorizing listening needs to be approached without assumptions about each other, because each person has a different experience and history. She was critical of American feminists’ lack of acknowledgement of how such differences take on different meanings for African feminists. Tamale’s position was the most succinct and direct of all the panelists. She did not hold back on the necessity for Western feminists’ to learn how to listen critically to all women in the women’s movement.

Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi’s position speaks to leadership and accountability within African women’s movements. It was important for her to acknowledge gains and successes within the women’s movement. Such gains speak to conversations that have provided the language for dismantling systems of patriarchy. These are valuable tools in the African women’s toolkit. Adeleye-Fayemi’s position as first lady of the state of Ekiti puts her in a position to champion the women’s movement agenda within her husband’s office. She argues that while there are women in political positions, more are needed. However, not just for numbers sake, but to actually advocate for change within the political arena. Adeleye-Fayemi’s activism reflects the work she does teaching African women to be leaders. Similar to Tamale, she critique’s Western feminists’ for not acknowledging African women’s scholarship and contributions to feminist scholarship, as well as being seen as not having agency. Adeleye-Fayemi, as well as the other African feminists, finds it deeply insulting that Western feminists do not acknowledge that African women have always resisted patriarchy. According to her, there is “unfinished business” when it comes to bringing equality within the transnational feminist movement. Adeleye-Fayemi’s position’s strength is in its call to women advocates in the political arena, as well as striving for equality among transnational feminism.

In conclusion, in theorizing the body, specifically the black body, key to Western feminist theorists’ understanding is the ability to situate the black female body in the African context. By doing so, race as it exists in American ideology of imperialism, capitalism, racism, and sexism is removed. In doing so, Mt. Kilimanjaro that oral historian Karen Fields writes about in What One Cannot Remember Mistakenly emerges as visible racial structure existing in America. How it is navigated reveals an invisible topography of race, class, and gender within the landscape of a dominant social order. This is an especially poignant point for me, a black American female, new to the feminist theory colloquium. Previously unaware of the implications of social, political, and cultural structures so ingrained and internalized in my understanding of daily life, I navigated around these huge social structures without a thought.

• “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.

http://www.tb-credit.ru/dengi-na-kartu.html http://www.tb-credit.ru/znk.html