In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Tag: Human Rights

black girls like us

look. i am not abusive to my kid. not even close. and neither is her father.

she is a happy, healthy three year old. she speaks three languages, loves to dance middle eastern style, and explains to strangers that ‘mama is from america’ but she is from bumblebee (the name of her preschool).

but, us american society, history, government is abusive to black children.

and egyptian society and government is abusive to black children. i know this cause i worked with sub saharan african refugees in cairo. i worked with ex child soldiers and teenage sex workers from sudan, refugees from eritrea and ethiopia. they are stuck here in limbo, cairo, legally segregated from the rest of egyptian society, not allowed to attend public schools, hospitals, racially profiled by the police, making 150 dollars a month is a considered a good job, living in ghettos, and struggling to either be repatriated or moved to europe, the usa, or australia.

they have been my teachers, my students, my friends.

some of them are mothers, and many of them didn’t have a real choice in the matter.

a lot of them look like me.

a lot of them don’t have the luxury of child free spaces, because many of them are children, themselves.

i know what abuse is. i grew up with it, day after day, year after year. and there are times when i would rather have my daughter with me at a bar, than with a babysitter that i barely know.

i work really hard so that my daughter knows that she is a person. because it is rare for black girls or women to be allowed to be people, a full fledged person, in this world.

being a mother isnt always a choice, not yet.

so, when i was in the west bank back in the summer of 2006, israel was bombing lebanon, and i realized i might be pregnant. my partner was in the states at the time, so i had to rely on a couple of friends to help me procure a home pregnancy test in israel since we couldnt find one in the west bank. as we were sitting in the park in jerusalem at night, eating cake, and hiding from the guards, one of my friends explained that she would most likely not be able to have kids. i nodded my head. and then she went on a small rant about how immoral it was to have kids, and be a breeder.
whoa. that word, breeder, was like a smack in the face. i wont go deep into the racial implications of that word, but as bfp pointed out earlier this week, black women in the states have historically been forced to be pregnant and to produce offspring, but not to be a mother. being able to not choose to bear a child can be a privilege. and so can being allowed to be a mother.
later that night when i was finally home, i saw the two pink lines appear on the plastic wand. and my suspicions were confirmed, i was ‘with child’.

i was pro choice before i became pregnant, but it was being pregnant for ten months that made me proclaim, loudly, to anyone who would listen: i am so pro-abortion because no one, and i mean no one, should have to be pregnant if they dont want to! anyone who thinks that adoption is an alternative to an abortion is nuts, it totally ignores that you have to be fucking pregnant for a fucking year first.

i know that giving birth, and/or being a mother is not always a choice. in a lot of the world a safe abortion is not necessarily available. here in egypt, is in a lot of the world, abortion is outlawed. and even in countries where abortion is legal, it can be out of the price range for the majority of women. in a lot of countries, an abortion is not feasible for a woman because of the red tape that she needs to go through. or the distance that the nearest clinic is. or if her family or partner discover that she has had an abortion she will be turned out of her house with no resources, no money, no job, no safety net, nothing. or she will be beaten. or the only type of abortion available are so dangerous to the woman’s health that she risks her very life in having one.

in the eastern congo, rape is used as a primary weapon of war. and women are kidnapped and raped for months until they become pregnant, then they are set free in the mountainous jungle. abortion is illegal in this country. and i talked with methodist christian ladies who were working day and night to be able to provide the morning after pill for every woman they can in their region. the work they do is but a drop in the bucket. they never have enough supplies.

maybe its because i grew up around girls in the states who didnt have a choice to become a mother. they had sex. they got pregnant by accident. and then they were stuck, threatened, beatened with no resources to be able to get to a clinic, that i dont assume that a woman chose to give birth; simply because she cares for her child. nor do i know what kind of internal choices she has made to be able to love a child.

i do know that it took everything inside of me to not start crying and never stop when i sat in rooms full of congolese rape survivors nursing their children. i know that they told me that their children were a gift, and i believed them.

this is why i work hard to do what i do. why i created the lilith plan. provide alternatives to clinical abortions that are not always available and can be traumatizing even if available. i research plants, herbs, flowers for their abortifacient qualities. i study acupressure texts. i build del-ems. i make the information available through any means i can find. cause a lot of women, women that we see everyday with their children never had the choice whether or not to become pregnant or be a mother. they walk by us, not screaming their life stories at us. and we judge them, not even with the little facts about them that we have, but with the stories and narratives that we make up about them in our heads.

i saw the lilith plan in a vision one night as i was meditating. and am slowly working to make it a reality.

What I Wish Rachel Maddow Would Say to David Vitter

***TRIGGER WARNING: Descriptions of homophobic and transphobic violence***

It’s come to light that noted misogynist David Vitter, the Senator who protected his women’s rights staffer after he slashed his girlfriend with a knife and threatened to kill her and who doesn’t think abortion is a “women’s issue,” is also a raging homophobe. I know, I was shocked too – I’ll give you a minute to pick your jaw up off the floor.

This episode of “Saw That Coming From 100 Miles Away” involves Vitter’s comments on a right-wing radio show this morning about MSNBC host Rachel Maddow and her high school yearbook photo, which has been making the rounds on the internet. Vitter commented the photo “must have been a long time ago” because Maddow was then “looking like a woman.”

All the mainstream media I’ve seen on the incident shies away from using the “H-word” (HOMOPHOBIA), instead taking the cowardly route of assuming their readers will know why this is wrong and worthy of comment. This is shameful.

I’d bet the first journalist in the MSM to take this on will be Rachel Maddow herself, who has a history of taking on ridiculous criticism with humor and grace and at the same time, packing a powerful political punch. I’m a huge fan of Rachel Maddow and have devoted hours of my life wishing I could write for her show. If I did, here’s what she would say to Senator Vitter:

“It’s come to my attention that Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, made a funny on the radio by suggesting that my high school yearbook photo must have been taken a long time ago because in it, I look like a woman. I can only assume he’s referring to my short haircut and business suits, which don’t fit into his personal idea of what a woman should look like. Senator Vitter, I’m not one to make this accusation lightly but your comment on the radio was an attempt to get a cheap laugh on the fact that I am a lesbian. It was a political play to your constituents, who you evidently believe vote based on hate and bigotry. This, I think, is incredibly disrespectful to the good folks of Louisiana.

I think I’ve proved on this show that I have a sense of humor but this time I’m not laughing. For many people in this country and around the world, failing to fit into a random individual’s profile of what a man or woman should look like is no joke. For many, it is the difference between getting a job or not, the difference between getting into and remaining at their educational institution of choice or not, the difference between being able to safely use a public bathroom or not. For many, not fitting neatly into a gender category is a matter of life and death.

Senator Vitter, I’d like to tell you a story about a young woman named Sakia Gunn. Like me, Sakia Gunn had short hair and dressed in a more masculine way than, inferring from your comment, you’d think is appropriate for a woman. In 2005, fifteen year-old Sakia and her friends were waiting for a bus in Newark, New Jersey when they were approached by a group of men who made sexual advances toward them. When the women refused, stating they were lesbians, the men pulled out knives and started yelling homophobic slurs. Sakia was stabbed in the chest and she bled to death, in the arms of her best friend, in the middle of the street.

Let me tell you another story, Senator, about an eighteen year-old transgender woman named Angie Zapata. Again inferring from your comment, Angie Zapata, with her long hair and form-fitting clothes, fit the bill in terms of what you think a woman should look like. At her murder trial, Allen Ray Andrade’s lawyers claimed that since Angie looked like a woman their client just couldn’t help beating her to death with a fire extinguisher when it was revealed she was born biologically male. Angie Zapata wasn’t brutally killed because she looked like a woman; she was a woman. No, she was savagely beaten to death because of the type of hate you’re peddling, the kind that says a person’s gender expression, how they choose to dress and present themselves, and by extension, a person’s gender identity, how they choose to identify regardless of their gender at birth, are reasons to see someone as less deserving of respect, as less than human.

Senator Vitter, I’m not addressing you personally tonight because I was offended by your joke. I’m addressing you because your type of hate impacts the lives of thousands of Americans who do not, without regard to their sexual orientation or gender identity, fit into capricious standards of what it means to look “male” or “female.” It’s time to toss these standards out the window because they are meaningless, destructive and sometimes, deadly. Moreover, it’s time to legislate against the hate bred by these standards by passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, known as ENDA and currently proposed in the Senate, that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, which includes appearance, or mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, with or without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth.

I received your apology this afternoon, Senator, and your explanation that you were simply joining in on a joke made by the radio hosts. I accept your apology, sir, but not your excuse: you are a United States Senator and as such you have a responsibility to stand up and correct anyone making bigoted slurs against American citizens. It’s to the American public, not me, sir, that you still owe an apology – and actions that make good on it.”

**This post was edited by the author on July 17th to add a trigger warning for depictions of homophobic and transphobic violence.

Outlaw Clothing: Burqas, Islamophobia and Women’s Rights

The ongoing quest of the French government to preserve their country’s “secular traditions” came to the fore once again Tuesday when the lower house of France’s parliament voted to ban women from wearing any face-covering veil, such as the infamous burqa or the less “extreme” niqab — a move obviously targeting French Muslim women, of which perhaps 1,900 wear a face-covering veil. France has the highest population of Muslims in Europe, comprising about 5 million of France’s population of 64 million people.

I’m sure you remember the “no hijabs in public schools” ban France passed in 2004 after almost a decade debating it, barring students from wearing a headscarf or any other piece of clothing that would indicate the religion of the student wearing it. To be fair, that does include Jewish yarmulkes and cross necklaces, however, the surrounding debate was particularly focused on the Muslim hijab. It just seems that since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Western countries have been not-so-subtly putting their Islamophobia on display.

Of course, this is not to say that all Muslim women disagree with the banning of the burqa or niqab. Some Muslim feminists have spoken out in favor of the ban. I fully support the right of Muslim women to not be forced to wear face-covering veils. However, I think banning religious clothing at the governmental level is taking the issue in a scary direction. I believe in choices, and banning burqas and niqabs eliminates the ability of women who actually wear the veils of their own volition to continue to make the choice to wear them, however few the women may be that make that choice. The author of the Huffington Post article, Caryl Rivers, makes a lot of good points, but I really do believe that in order to truly gain equal rights for Muslim women in their culture it’s going to have to come from changing Muslim men’s “hearts and minds” and not changing Muslim women’s clothing.

In the Salon article linked above, Eqyptian feminist Mona Eltahawy states:

I support banning the burqa because I believe it equates piety with the disappearance of women. The closer you are to God, the less I see of you — and I find that idea extremely dangerous. It comes from an ideology that basically wants to hide women away. What really strikes me is that a lot of people say that they support a woman’s right to choose to wear a burqa because it’s her natural right. But I often tell them that what they’re doing is supporting an ideology that does not believe in a woman’s right to do anything. We’re talking about women who cannot travel alone, cannot drive, cannot even go into a hospital without a man with them. And yet there is basically one right that we are fighting for these women to have, and that is the right to cover their faces. To tell you the truth, I’m really outraged that people get into these huge fights and say that as a feminist you must support a women’s right to do this, because it’s basically the only kind of “right” that this ideology wants to give women. Otherwise they get nothing.

I agree with her on basically every point she makes, yet I can’t reconcile my feelings about government-enforced bans on religious clothing. I just don’t think that simply legally preventing women from wearing burqas, niqabs, or hijabs is going to cause transformative change in Islamic culture. This is a crude analogy, but it seems like banning black women from relaxing their hair. Yes, black women would be unable to cowtow to the oppressive beauty standards forced on us by Western culture, but would their minds be freed as well? Would black men suddenly stop desiring women with long, straight hair? With the banning of burqas and niqabs, are sexist, oppressive Muslim men and the governments they run suddenly going to stop treating women like second-class citizens? I don’t see that happening. Western governments using women’s rights as an excuse to ban Muslim religious garments just smells like Islamophobia couched in “progressive” rhetoric. Some leaders in the U.K. have actually voiced their concern over the “growing threat of Islamism“.

So what can we expect this ban on face-covering veils to do for Muslim women’s rights in France? Eltahawy had this to say:

What I hope it will do is that it will create a situation where a woman can say to a man, look, you know that I have to go out and work so that we can continue to live here, and I can’t go out with my face covered, even though you want me to, because that’s what the law says. I hope the law gives women this kind of out. I have no idea if that’s actually going to happen or not.

I can’t get behind legislation like this when the only benefit for women would be that you get to tell your husband that you’re required by law to not wear the veil, and the many benefits for the government and Islamophobic French people include not having to be visually reminded there’s Muslims in their communities and also stopping the spread of “Islamism”. I don’t trust the women’s rights angle at all from Western governments when it comes to Islam. We continue to ally with countries that do much more than just expect women to cover themselves head to toe when in public — we’re in bed with countries that beat and jail women who have been gang raped and impregnated because the rape constituted the woman committing adultery. I personally don’t think her lack of burqa helped at all in that situation.

So I’m not exactly joining the cheerleading squad because France decided its Islamophobia was good for women’s rights. Of course I don’t want Muslim women to be forced to cover themselves head to toe. But I firmly believe true change in the Islamic world will never come via simply outlawing certain types of clothing, and I question the veracity of France’s reasons for doing so. The fact that they’re mentioning things like “defining and protecting French values” sounds eerily familiar and to me, is more of a nationalist concern than a concern for women’s rights.

There needs to be substantive change in Muslim men’s attitudes towards Muslim women rather than superficial change mandated by a government that seeks to erase those parts of immigrant populations they find distasteful.

Oscar Grant, Audre Lorde, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the question of loving our enemies.

[Trigger Warning: discussions of sexual assault and deadly State force.]

Love your enemies.

For feminists, is there any phrase more terrifyingly reactionary?

Love your enemies. Even the one who assaults you in private and reaps accolades as a brilliant community organizer in public. (One of my mom’s former boyfriends.)

Love your enemies. Even the ones who throw cherry bombs at you in the school bathrooms. (My dad’s fellow students at Yale, in the 1950s.)

Love your enemies. Even the one who tells you women should be seamstresses, not lawyers. (Opa — my mom’s dad.)

Love your enemies. Even the one who tells you, as a child, to bit down on your lower lip so it won’t grow too big. (Grandma — my dad’s mom.)

Love your enemies. Even the white police officer who shot and killed you while you were lying helpless, face-down on the ground with another officer’s knee on your neck. (Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Black man killed Jan 1, 2009 in an Oakland subway station.)

Jury deliberations began yesterday for Johannes Mehserle, the Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer who fatally shot Oscar Grant. All of Oakland awaits the verdict. Both police and non-profits are making preparations to quell the “violence” anticipated after this “deadly lightning rod” of a trial.

Deadly? Violence? According to CNN’s coverage, not one single person was seriously injured in the 2009 protests following Grant’s death. Nobody injured, let alone killed. Windows were broken; dumpsters set afire. Is this violence? Sounds more like property destruction to me.

Whatever happens, whether riots flare up or not, things will once again settle, and the ordinary state violence will resume as usual. After all, there’s only one individual on trial — not an entire racist police force armed with deadly weapons. Not an entire patriarchal, militaristic, anti-immigrant, plutocratic (ruled by wealth) law enforcement system. Not California, the US state running “the largest prison system in the Western world.” That won’t be standing trial anytime soon. So what are we supposed to do?

Love your enemies.

What an injunction, huh? Just how are we supposed to achieve this? And why?

The “how” I’ll leave aside for now. Let’s focus on the why.

Why should we love our enemies? Why not hate them? Or at least get angry?

Audre Lorde, one of my all-time favorite feminists, has one answer. With hatred we harm ourselves, and anger only takes us halfway to where we need to go. From “Eye To Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger”:

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Genital cutting as “research” at Cornell University

UPDATE: In the comments, many people have pointed out that these surgeries appear to have been done on intersex children. I have updated the post to reflect that.
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Several readers have sent on this story out of Cornell University (trigger warning on that link and the rest of this post), where a pediatric urologist is performing “nerve-sparing” genital surgery on young children who are deemed to have over-sized clitorises. He basically removes large portions of the clitoral shaft, leaving the glans, and then performs annual follow-up exams which involve stimulating the childrens’ clitorises, labia and inner thighs with a vibrator and asking them if they feel anything.

Um.

There are, of course, legitimate reasons to use vibrating tools to test sensitivity in patients who have undergone procedures which may cause nerve damage. But a few things are off here. First, why are we decreasing the size of a child’s clitoris without their consent? Yes, we are talking about clitorises which deviate significantly from the average size; but unless there is some actual physical problem, I have a hard time understanding why doctors should cut away at healthy tissue — at the risk of decreasing genital sensation — just so that a child’s genitalia fits the doctor’s aesthetic sensibilities. If the child in question is an adult and can consent to this kind of medical procedure, then that’s their business. But if we’re concerned about psychosocial harm, I’d say it’s a better idea to quit demonizing certain bodies as aberrations and embrace the fact that human beings have variable physical traits. And unless the body part that is deemed “abnormal” is creating physical problems like pain or discomfort, we should probably leave it alone until the person whose body is in question can decide what they would like to do.

In any case, we definitely should not be having children go to the doctor’s office, lay down and have their clitorises stimulated with a vibrator. Talk about potential for psychosocial damage.

For further reading, I would recommend Dan Savage’s take, and this piece at the Bioethics Forum.

Happy Juneteenth!

Happy Juneteenth!
[Image description: an illustration of broken chains superimposed over African art and a quote: ‘In accordance with a proclamation from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free…’ Big letters in the middle read ‘Juneteenth: June 19, 1865-Galveston, Texas.’]

Juneteenth is a celebration of the day the Emancipation Proclamation was made official in Texas and slaves were made a free people in that state. It’s the day Union General Gordon Granger and 2,000 federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to take possession of the state and enforce the emancipation of its slaves, and the annual celebration and recognition of human rights and autonomy began the following year.

There aren’t a lot of holidays designed to celebrate human rights, so celebrate, people! Happy Juneteenth, all!

[via JJP and all my folks on Tumblr]

On the Flotilla Disaster

I’m not going to write too much about this, but here a few articles that may be of interest:

Peter Beinart, not exactly an uber-liberal, writes that we shouldn’t blame the Israeli commandos for the flotilla disaster; we should look at Israel’s right-wing leaders, and their American supporters.

The New York Times op/ed page takes a fairly even-handed response, calling for an investigation and pushing Obama to take a stronger stance.

Tom Friedman writes something typically ridiculous, which seems to be based primarily on who his friends are and what happened when he was in Istanbul this one time. In a post which is truly a thing of beauty, Alex Pareene rips the column apart, and oh-so-accurately describes Friedman as “a barely literate cartoon mustache of oversimplification whose understanding of global politics is slightly less comprehensive than a USA Today infographic and who possesses about as much insight into world events as a lightly vandalized Wikipedia stub entry.”

Megan McArdle — also far from being a staunch lefty — further elaborates on Beinart’s point that the Gaza blockade isn’t only about preventing terrorism (although obviously that’s part of it), but is also a form of collective punishment.

Jeffrey Goldberg is more sympathetic to the Israeli position on this one.

Mattbastard also points out that the flotilla disaster is a side issue, and the real problem is the Gaza blockade.

Daniel Drezner doesn’t mince words when he says that Israel’s response is just fucked up.

Bradley Burston at Haaretz says that Israel is no longer defending itself; it’s defending the siege.

Finally, the importance of context when looking at the videos of the raid.

7-Year-Old Girl Killed By Detroit Police While Sleeping in Her Home

A 7-year-old black girl named Aiyana Stanley Jones sits in front of a poster of Disney princesses. Her hair is in braids with colorful clips at the ends. She wears a white shirt and smiles at the camera.

Trigger Warning for graphic descriptions of police violence and gun violence.

Aiyana Stanley Jones was 7-years-old. On Sunday morning, she was asleep on the couch in her family’s home.

Aiyana is now dead. She is dead after the home was raided by police. Police, searching for a murder suspect, threw a flash grenade through the window around midnight. According to Aiyana’s father, it landed on the couch, setting Aiyana on fire. A police officer’s gun then went off, and shot Aiyana in the head or neck.

Aiyana was asleep on the living room sofa in her family’s apartment when Detroit police, searching for a homicide suspect, burst in and an officer’s gun went off, fatally striking the girl in the neck, family members said.

Her father, 25-year-old Charles Jones, told The Detroit News he had just gone to bed early Sunday after covering his daughter with her favorite blanket when he heard a flash grenade followed by a gunshot. When he rushed into the living room, he said, police forced him to lie on the ground, with his face in his daughter’s blood.

“I’ll never be the same. That’s my only daughter,” Jones told WXYZ-TV.

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