Camille Paglia recently wrote a number of gushing statements about Sarah Palin, but here’s the one that made my eyes roll the hardest:
I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.
It’s amazing how many wrong assumptions can be crammed into two short sentences. Twenty years after Chandra Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes, and we still have Western feminists advocating colonialism for the good of Third World women?
Feminists like Paglia still refer to a monolithic Third World, a categorization that assumes a homogenous oppression of all brown and black women. Of women who are characterized by all the stereotypes attached to the word “traditional” – backwards, primitive, uneducated, victimized, poor.
Paglia employs a very narrow frame in her analysis of feminism in the Third World, one that takes issues important to a specific subset of women in the countries like the US and universalizes them as a measure of the standing of all women. And even by that measure, she’s still off, because Third World women are also “ambitious professionals.” Third World wives and mothers, in fact, have occupied high office. In the Philippines, we even have our own attractive governor/former movie star who may be considering a run for vice president.
Why would Paglia assume that these feminist issues would be the ones needed in the Third World? The answer, of course, is that family and professional concerns are the issues important to mainstream feminists in the West. The phrase “expanding it…particularly into the more traditional Third World” drips with assumption of a Western-centric feminism, one that needs to be exported to the backwards areas.
Here’s some news for you, Ms. Paglia. Women in what you term the “more traditional Third World” have been engaged in actions that you would have recognized as feminist, had you bothered to look. You can see it in the Filipina womens’ militant indigenous tradition against mining in the Cordilleras, a tradition that dates back to the 1900s. In the work of groups like Ni Unima Mas, a coalition of transnational feminists activists campaigning against feminicide in Ciudad Juarez.
And yes, Third World feminists have been at it for some time now too. In 1869, for example, a Bengali sex worker wrote to the editor of a newspaper, arguing that sex workers should be entitled equal rights to medical examination. These are just a few of the campaigns that belie Paglia’s notion of the Third World as a feminist backwater.
I’m not saying that Third World women would not benefit from a greater engagement with their first world counterparts. We need to form coalitions and to act in solidarity towards addressing our common issues. But such solidarities will only be possible when we have real conversations about what those issues are, when feminists like Paglia recognize and listen to the vital woman-centered knowledge that are continually produced in our communities.
Now that is one exchange that would truly characterize a significant shift in feminism.
cross-posted at Racialicious
i was hoping that after the elections …palin would go away. i certainly don’t think she’s representative of progressive women, or open minded dems.
the winking into the camera? can you see thatcher, ghandi or clinton doing that? or even most of the oscar winning actresses!?
I know what you mean, goodbear. Yeah, that winking drove me crazy too. I guess one resorts to tricks when s/he has nothing substantive to offer.
[...] by Guest Contributor Tanglad, originally published at Tanglad [...]
I agree with your comments, but by continuing to use the term “Third World” aren’t you engaging in the same type of Western-centric viewpoint as Ms. Paglia? The term Third World is pejorative and antiquated. We are now called ‘developing countries.’
Hi Kimberly,
Welcome to the blog! Salamat for reading and commenting.
I agree that the term Third World (women) is problematic, it’s something I’m still thinking about. I think the pejorative use stems from western feminists’ appropriation of the term. Contrast that to Mohanty’s recognition of Third World “as a viable oppositional alliance is a common context of struggle rather than color or racial identifications. Similarly, it is third world women’s oppositional political relation to sexist, racist, and imperialistic structures that constitutes our political commonality” (Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, 7). So there’s a growing attempt to reclaim the idea of “Third World,” not in the previous sense that elides differences, but in terms of forming alliances (Spivak’s “strategic essentialisms”)
But yeah, I’m still working on this and am open to discussions.
What do you think?
The problem with replacing “third world” with “developing countries” is that not all such nations actually are developing; some are completely stagnant, or even losing what little they previously had.
Whoa, AR, are we actually going to agree on something?
Well, a qualified agreement, at least. My concerns with the term “developing countries” is that development is often conflated with a country entering the global economy. That’s the measure, if you’re not entering the global economy, you’re stagnant. As if capitalism is again inevitable, and that’s something I dispute.
The term Third World has some baggage too, but at least in Mohanty’s usage, it’s a geographical term. And it allows for woc and poc in the region to find commonality. It even allows for communities who don’t aspire to the “development” that’s mandated by globalization.
That doesn’t imply capitalism is inevitable, only that it is desirable. The attitude that desirable = inevitable is a Marxian conception largely held by those who have no idea how their system could ever actually be implemented and so leave the “details” up to allegedly irresistible historic forces. Of course, this attitude is not limited to those with Marxian ideals.
Besides which, international trade does not even require capitalism. A socialist nation would benefit just as much as a capitalist one from trade with the world at large. Most people accept that if a person were made to be live self-sufficiently, they would have a deplorable standard of living, but that two people working together could do a bit better, and more people even better still thanks to division of labor, specialization, and comparative advantage, regardless of technological level. This principle does not break down simply because the people in question are on different sides of a political line. The only reason there appears to be such a connection between capitalism and trade is that non-market economies rarely produce anything profitably enough to be worth trading.