Neither Whores Nor Submissives

Amanda sent me this article about a French feminist organization that focuses on Muslim communities in the ghetto. It’s an interesting topic, and the group — Ni Putes, Ni Soumises (Neither Whores nor Submissives) — is doing some good work. Unfortunately, the article falls into a lot of the same traps that the Western media always seems to when discussing women and Islam: They frame the issue in Western terms, according to the stereotypes of what we think about Islam and what we think causes women’s oppression in the Middle East and in Muslim communities.

But that said, the organization is taking some interesting tactics:

The group’s name is provocative — and intentionally so. “Not whores” is aimed at young thugs who refer to all women except their mothers as whores, while “not submissives” is directed at intellectuals, politicians and other observers to alert them that merely because these women are oppressed, it does not mean they are simply passive.

From the perspective of a young America feminist, a title like this merits mixed reactions — on one hand, I’m happy to see that Muslim women are taking a stand against media images of them as submissive and passive. But on the other, I always bristle at slut-shaming and the need to distance oneself from the “bad women.”

However, this isn’t my feminism, and women from different religious and cultural traditions are going to define their feminism very differently from mine. Even the term “feminism” is an issue — it’s a Western term, and by using it to describe the women’s movements in non-Western countries, we’re essentially naming their movements for them, instead of allowing them to name themselves as they see fit. It’s no wonder, then, that many women’s rights crusaders in non-Western nations attempt to distance themselves from the word “feminism,” and deny being feminist even when they dedicate their lives to women’s empowerment. Here, of course, we’re talking about women in a Western nation (France), but it’s a particular segment of the population, whose traditions and cultural history is not French.

Point being, feminism and the struggle for women’s rights is going to look different in different cultural contexts. And one of my personal struggles as a Western feminist is how far we let the term “women’s rights” be stretched, what we allow to be encompassed within it, and whether it matters where and how these movements are happening.

As an example, women’s movements in certain nations — Egypt and Morocco, for example — have centered around family rights. A little over a decade ago, Morocco saw a massive overhaul of its family law, with a new Sharia-influenced law being introduced that was more fair to women than the previous laws, but still far from perfect (for example, if a divorced woman re-married, her children went to her ex-husband). Family law in Egypt has been at the forefront of political discussions for a while now. And women’s rights activists in these countries seem to be less interested in the kind of Western, highly individualized feminism that I espouse, and focused more deeply on collective rights. The Western academic exercise of separating physical sex from socialized gender doesn’t translate particularly well in these countries. People are defined by their relationships to the community, not as much by their individual accomplishments, and the goals of women’s movements are legal equality in the family, political rights, rights for mothers and children, etc — but the fierce individualism of the West isn’t such an ingrained value.

So how does a Western feminist react to a feminism which continues to place motherhood and familial roles in the forefront of women’s lives? How does a Western feminist react to a feminism which, though opposed to female circumcision, points out that Western meddling in the issue encouraged social conservatives and religious leaders in certain countries to take a stand favoring it? How does a Western feminist react to a feminism which relies on supposedly innate, God-given gender roles?

It’s not easy, and many people have written about the clash between cultural relativism and a dedication to human rights. A human rights perspective, at least, offers us a baseline. But it doesn’t give the answers to tough questions about how we define gender equality, and which cultural values can be defined as “feminist” even if they directly clash with our ideas of what feminism is.

These cultural values also differ from country to country and culture to culture. There’s a knee-jerk reaction in the Western media to assume that all Islamic countries share values and cultural traditions, and that they all face similar problems, especially when it comes to gender issues. This, of course, is not the case — Muslim immigrant communities in France face far different challenges than woman in Somalia, or Kazakhstan, or Indonesia, or Kuwait.

So I’m glad to see a group serving Muslim immigrants in France that was created and is run by women who are part of that group. It’s an interesting organization because it attempts to blend two different cultures, and address women’s rights in both contexts.

The main pillars of the movement are the concepts of laïcité (neutrality, or a kind of staunch secularism), egalité (equality) and mixité (the concept of the sexes living together, or “mixing”).

“It is actually consistent with the history of the French feminist movement. Where it diverges is its focus on women in lower-class neighborhoods,” said Laura Levine Frader, chair of the history department at Northeastern University and an expert on race and gender in France.

“Ni Putes Ni Soumises takes the expression of feminism one stop further … by addressing the very, very real concerns about violence and power and the submission to masculine authority in the poor neighborhoods,” said Frader, the co-editor with Herrick Chapman of the recently published “Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference.”

This, obviously, is a good thing, and this group is doing great work. Some day, when my brain is working a little better, I’ll try and flush out these thoughts on cultural relativism and defining feminism more thoroughly.