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| Current
Issue: Vol. 15/1 (48) |
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As one of the founders of a small nongovernmental organization called
the Network of East-West Women, I was preoccupied in the early 1990s
with keeping a little list of the difficulties facing the often isolated
and beleaguered Eastern and Central European feminist colleagues who
made up half the Network membership. The list might have been named
“Regional Reasons Why People Reject Feminism,” and it grew
and grew, including reasons I respected and reasons I didn't, but above
all including a variety of reasons, a richness of reasons from every
quarter of both public and private life. Dissidents had their rationale
for disliking feminism and so did former communists, and on and on.
Of course a shadow list of my own numerous difficulties as a feminist
organizer in the United States was always running along parallel to
my Eastern and Central European one -- but the differences were great
and often illuminating, leading me to think at the time that an East-West
conversation would give us all a new depth of understanding about our
local and international situations. Different as we were, we were also
all, precipitously, "postcommunist," a state of confusion
I for one wanted to experience in the company of others.
Feminists in the region had a discourse dilemma unfamiliar to their
Western visitors: they couldn't start with a critique of the patriarchal
family, because the family had been the bulwark of resistance to communism
and was the often beloved place of privacy, trust, and survival. Nor
could they use the old language of communist “emancipation,”
because many remembered those old solutions to “the woman question”
as crudely instrumental and hypocritical, not what women themselves
had identified as their self-interest. Finally, they were tempted to
embrace the general enthusiasm for new free markets, only to find that
women's fate in these markets was often the dark side of the new dawn.
But how were they to mount a popular critique of the very freedoms so
many others were celebrating, just when everyone seemed to be declaring
a renaissance? These, then, were activists trying to use the category
“women” against the grain. They were up against not only the
new traditionalists in the post-communist countries, but also against
many of the new free-market democrats, who like their women to be free
and flexible -- not in the feminist sense, but as in “flexible
labor pool.” In Eastern and Central Europe, resistance to feminism
was overdetermined. Feminism as a political movement was homeless.
Enter Western feminisms -- or, rather, U.S. feminisms, to take the examples
I know best. Each post-l989 East-West encounter has had its own dynamics,
but
however different the two sides can sometimes seem to each other, the
binary dissolves in the ironic fact that post-1989, and post-backlash,
U.S. feminisms have arrived as visitors to the East trailing their own
increasing marginality and conceptual confusion from home. As disparate
Western feminisms move across borders in the accelerating round of international
activity which I will damply abbreviate as “globalization,”
the likelihood of wasted effort, of misunderstanding, and even of what
I consider damaging uses of the categories of gender analysis multiply.
I offer here, first, some examples of such limitations in the current
diaspora of Western feminist ideas in Eastern and Central European contexts,
and, second, a caveat against letting these weaknesses overwhelm the
urgent project of finding vital new entry points for feminism East and
West.
Examples of How Western Feminist Fragments Circulate in Eastern Central
Europe and the Former Soviet Union:
Gender
as a Convenient and Often Oversimplified Explanation for Complex Problems.
Sometimes in Eastern Europe, the category ‘gender’ gains currency
as a foreign import that holds out promise as an explanatory model.
Often, though, it displaces other models or obscures them -- most commonly
‘class,’ which in post-communism is still a much discredited
structure of explanation.
In Osh, Kyrgyz women organizers identified the gendered character of
the new poverty: Where there had been 70 daycare centers in l992, in
l997 there were 20, as women were forced out of the workforce and back
into unpaid care of children at home. But the gendered nature of the
new unemployment was a local adaptation to events happening very far
away. Gender inequality is a necessary but not a sufficient description
of the new immiseration in Kyrgyztan. As a category standing alone it
is both weak and misleading.
As Carole S. Vance has argued, one might include current human rights
work on the trafficking of women as yet another example of how class
sometimes gets obscured by discussions of gender. The language of antitrafficking
campaigns often describes innocent or passive female victims who need
rescuing. But one could describe the same phenomena very differently
as a new form of poverty, as a new mobility of people and money, in
which women make choices under terrible new economic pressures.
Take for example this exemplary exchange between a feminist from the
United States and one from the Czech Republic: The Western feminist
bemoans the line of young Czech prostitutes along the road near the
border with Germany. The Eastern feminist responds that yes, there's
a terrible new problem with the currency differential between Germany
and the Czech Republic. The Western feminist thinks, “What low
feminist consciousness!” The Eastern feminist thinks, “Why
do these Western feminists see sexuality as the sole key to women's
oppression?” Yet this idea, that sexuality is at the center of
the new disempowerment of women in the region, is the one that garners
attention and funds from Western advocates, and therefore often becomes
the main issue for women in the region as well. Trafficking is indeed
an alarming problem, but kidnapping is already illegal. What is flourishing
without much censure is the economic manipulation of women in the new
order. It is easier to arouse outrage by conducting antiprostitution
campaigns than to construct a politics that criticizes the unregulated
flow of capital and confronts women's further loss of economic and social
power both at work and at home.
Related problems arise when the category displaced by ‘gender’
is ‘race.’ Many Eastern feminists argue that racism is not
a relevant issue for them --a familiar tragic error in the making. Many
other Eastern feminists recognize that they may well be more like African
American feminists and feminists of the South in their priorities and
interests than like the mostly white U.S. feminists who seek contact
with them. “Which Western feminism?” is always a useful question
as Eastern feminists sort through various imports, which offer quite
varied interpretative frameworks. In each situation, ‘gender,’
‘race,’ and ‘ethnicity’ have complex, changing relationships
with each other, and there are no short cuts for arriving at an inclusive
politics. Western paradigms may or may not apply, though knowledge of
past feminist failures to confront racism should sound a powerful warning.
Feminism as a Variable in Uneven Development.
Western feminism has produced long laundry lists of demands, but each
item has its separate fate as it migrates into the discourses of other
cultures. Take the liberal divorce law in Romania. One Romanian feminist
lawyer expressed the wish to get rid of easy divorce in Romania. She
observed that it was mainly men who wanted divorces, to escape their
family responsibilities. Women rarely seek divorce, because a divorced
woman is so disempowered in Romanian culture, so isolated, so ostracized
that the freedom is rarely worth it. Western feminists got depressed
at the idea of a Romanian feminist campaign against easy divorce, and
in the long run they are probably right that a no-divorce law is hardly
a solution to women's problems in the family. But what the Romanian
feminist was expressing was the inadequacy of legal reforms without
the cultural and economic revolutions that would support women's independence.
New Right women in the United States expressed similar criticisms of
a feminism that they
felt was stripping them of traditional protections without giving them
enough
in exchange. In Deirdre English's wonderful phrase, they “feared
that feminism would free men first.” Feminism is a social revolution.
Without general social discussion, consciousness raising, and a public
expression of pain
and dissatisfaction, the letter killeth.
Problematic
or Powerless Structures Authorized by Feminism.
In the former communist countries, it is an urgent task to invent new
forms for politics, to develop civil society, free associations, the
idea of voluntary public
participation. However, the invention of voluntarism, and specifically
of female
voluntarism, in the East coincides with the dismantling of social citizenship
and the decay of social entitlements there.
Now that Eastern governments are abdicating responsibility, the scene
looks much more like the United States, where private time and money
are constantly trying to fill the holes in the social safety net. In
the East, powerless, local nongovernmental structures are trying to
compensate for the pain and chaos caused by failing governments. In
this situation, the small-scale women's NGOs so valued by Western feminists
and Western funders often fail, reconfirming the general idea that women
are politically and economically marginal and powerless.
To counter this trend, Eastern feminisms would need to ask for bigger
government in countries where most think that depending on the government
is bad. They would have to argue that getting money and attention from
government is necessary, that it is not a return to centralism, that
resources from government can increase rather than decrease social freedoms.
But such an argument is hard to make, given the so recent totalitarian
past.
Gender as an Intellectual Variable Emptied of Political Resonance.
There is a small scramble to establish Western-style women's studies
programs in Central and Eastern European universities. In the U.S.,
mass women's movements were the initial source of energy and knowledge
for such programs, programs which claimed legitimation from these democratic
roots for some years. But the East has much smaller, much more embattled
movements. A university program could not currently gain legitimacy
from the status of local movements alone; it often needs to establish
an elite, with its legitimation coming not from local thought and research
but from Western sources. Indeed, the very idea of an intellectual enterprise
linked to a locally active political movement is anathema to former
dissidents who were kicked out of universities for their refusals to
toe party lines. The fantasy of a university with no politics whatsoever
is cherished, so that when feminist research ideas knock on the door
for entry, they must leave their ties to social movements outside --
or stay outside themselves. Local feminist intelligentsias are now contesting
both alienating imports and local resistances, but their work is uphill.
Gender
Difference as a Way to Restructure the Workforce.
The Network of East-West Women has raised money to give its members
in the East computers and computer training. Sometimes the power and
freedom this gives is a delight to Western organizers' hearts. At other
times, the same organizers might well feel a frisson of anxiety: have
they merely offered a training program to prepare a new underpaid class
for dreary office work to come? As women seek new forms for work, they
need to be aware of these larger patterns of change within which they
shape their demands and desires. Women often want work that is part-time,
flexible, and mobile. Be careful what you wish for. Mobility without
security or benefits will surely be the prevailing form of exploitation
for many workers in the future. The point is not to give up on dreams
of mobility and flexibility -- both are values and work conditions that
are here to stay -- but to recognize the need to bring these changes
into politics, to establish new rights and protections under this new
regime of fast circulating capital.
Gender
as a Grant.
In her studies of Russian Non-Governmental Organizations, anthropologist
Julie Hemment identified a number of distortions introduced by Western
granting organizations. Foundation priorities keep changing, leaving
new, hard-won institutions such as battered women's shelters in the
lurch. One dispirited Russian feminist organizer told Hemment: “We
used to live from party congress to party congress. Now we live from
grant deadline to grant deadline.” The point is not that Western
grants are intrinsically bad or politically contaminated. There is no
pure money from any source. The point, rather, is to recognize the need
to sustain the work begun in “gender’s” name. Local feminists
deserve much support as they face the inevitable difficulties involved
in making an unfamiliar set of gender concerns visible and meaningful
in their own communities. But, in worst-case scenarios, foundation support
merely makes the untranslatable term fashionable, bandied about as a
new way of talking, as in one Russian health activist's remark: “Prostate
cancer is a gender problem.”
* * *
I intend no intrinsic insult to contemporary feminist activity by describing
these moments of illfit or illiberality in the current dispersion of
feminist categories. Rather, these are cautionary tales for committed
feminists who hope feminist activism will prove agile enough, responsive
enough to a changing situation, so as to last them a lifetime. Thirty
years into this wave of the feminist project in the West, anomalies
like the ones I've been describing are everywhere. It is no fault of
feminist movements that their categories have often been descriptive
and politically productive, so that bits and pieces of feminist analysis
now crop up in unlikely combinations. In the United States, for example,
feminism floats around in the heads of right-wing senators, who use
it to modernize their old song of seduction and sin; now they say that
Monica Lewinsky is the victim of
sexual harassment! Such acts ofappropriation are proofs of the staying
power of feminist sensibility.
Nonetheless, feminists are right to worry about the after-life of their
initiatives, the long journeys of their ideas. Critical hindsight is
of great value in keeping feminism alive, a project under constant reconstruction.
Finally, though, I have an even more urgent reason for exploring feminist
migrations that seem to me to be wasteful or wrongheaded, beyond the
project of self-awareness and critique. I want to forestall a move I
see coming: those political thinkers and activists with little personal
stake in gender as a category on which to base thought and action will
seize this time of dispersion and necessary rethinking as a chance to
underrate the importance of having an independent feminist movement
at all. Using its current weaknesses as an excuse, these often otherwise
progressive voices will argue that political movements based on identity
were always divisive and dreary and, now, thank heavens, they are dying.
In this time of renegotiation of almost all post-Cold War political
relationships, this common willingness to let feminism disappear in
both East and West signals a dangerous absence, a failure of new political
discourses to register women's aspirations for economic and social equality.
The best course for feminists is to embrace the doubts, to embrace the
“homelessness” of feminism. In the United States, I see the
current feminist recognition of the differences among women, of our
inevitable lack of unity, of feminism's fragmentation, as an advance.
We are homeless in the positive sense that we are now out in the political
world where no movement piety or automatic affiliation can be taken
for granted. Feminism is not automatically a vanguard, an authority
on what is to be done post-l989; if it is to contribute to a revitalization
of politics, feminists will have to develop a worldview from which action
can develop. Nor is there anything solid or eternal in a commitment
to feminism alone, or feminism in the abstract. Incomplete and in process
as feminist projects now are, those who choose to call themselves feminists
must seek alliances with other groups that, like ours, are inventing
themselves in a swiftly changing context.
Let me state the nature of the opportunity. “Gender” is not
a nation to which anyone is required to migrate. It is, rather, a variable,
a central one in the future ways in which labor, government power, and
economic activity are all going to be structured -- not to mention daily
psychic life. Feminists have a long and distinguished history of debating
the currently contested key concepts of public and private, and feminist
initiatives and political forms have great potential to widen democratic
participation. In the current inflation of rhetoric about “the
global,” it is easy to lose sight of the future actors who might
demand social justice or call for fundamental changes. Just now such
ambitious movements are on the defensive, uncertain about their future
course. But, to take the example at hand, the current weakness of feminism
is no reason to turn away from politically confronting the specific
problems of women, or from building on the feminist movement's accumulations
of knowledge and power. Independent feminist movements can be of inestimable
value. Are new forms of exploitation and political powerlessness to
be contested -- or not?
This
is a brief excerpt of a piece that appeared in The American Society
of International Law: Proceedings of the 93rd Annual Meeting.
Ann
Snitow is founder and chair of the Network of East-West Women and teaches
at the New School for Social Research.
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