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awohlwen · 4 years

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Feminism Around the World

Anna Wohlwend

Feminism Around the World

When I found out this was one of my options of online English classes to take, I was hesitant but intrigued in this choice. I had never taken a feminist based course before, nor had I found myself to be a huge feminist. Like I said, I never thought of myself as a huge feminist, but I definetely believed in equal rights, equal pay, stereotypes, gender inequality, etc., I just never saw myself as what everyone else sees as the stereotypical feminist who never shaves their armpits. Looking back at my preconceived notions of that stereotype, it only makes me laugh now because there is so much more to being a feminist than having hairy armpits and hating men, and not only that, but there are so many different levels and perceptions of feminism someone can have. I am proud to say that I support feminism stronger than I did before, and I am not ashamed at all to tell people that. This course gave me so much knowledge I did not have before, and I am eternally grateful. The material that stuck with me the most was learning about all the different women all over the world. I would have never been able to acquire so much knowledge about so many different cultures, countries, and religions from any other course or experience. It gave me a chance to understand and sympathize what women different than myself must endure, and it is extremely interesting to find out.

I did not realize how little I knew about other women of different cultures, countries, and religions until I took this class. I had my assumptions and guesses, but never anything factual. After reading, watching, and annotating all the class material, I only realized how little I knew, but loved how much I was learning. From the very beginning when we watched the TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” I learned about a woman from Nigeria and some of the stereotypes surrounding her and her country. She stated, “I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come home nearby rural villages.” The only things I feel like I know, or thought I knew, about Africa and the people that live there are that they are poor and don't have everything here that we do. But obviously from the video, I was very wrong. I feel as though we are taught that Africa is this weak, poor, distraught country that constantly needs help, when in fact it may not be. After watching the TED talk, I felt compelled to learn more about Africa's truths, rather than what the media tells us. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie continued to go on and explain her experience when she came to the United States for school and how her roommate reacted. “So, after I had spent some years in the US as an African, I began to understand my roommate’s response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from the popular images, I too would think Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.” This portion of the video really opened my eyes because as an American, the media is a huge component of daily living. While as a nation we can make decisions on our own, the media plays a large part in how to sway it. The roommate did not even realize, nor do I think we realize, that unconscious judgements were made immediately as soon as she heard Adichie was from Nigeria. I think because we are fortunate, uneducated, and brainwashed that Africa is this country in need, we see third world nations as incapable without our "help."

One of my favorite reads from the semester and one that gave me some incredible insight was the Introduction to Global Women’s Studies. I felt really excited to learn about global women, especially all the factual and proven evidence behind gender inequality in the world, because then I will have a more knowledgeable and educated basis when talking to people about it. Along with learning more about gender inequality in our own country, I was probably even more intrigued to learn about other countries. I knew very little about cultural, social, religious, and traditional expectations of women in different countries, but I did know that it is completely different than the US. One interesting point the book made was about intersections in gender, the author stated “Global women’s studies also examines intersections between gender and other variables such as race, class, and sexual orientation.” I had never even thought about that aspect of feminism, but there are definitely different expectations for women of different color, race, religion, etc. “The global study of women is rich and rewarding because it requires that we learn about different customs, religions, and forms of government and that we imagine what it would be like to be a woman in another culture.” I thought this was a great aspect of the class, especially for the females, to understand what other women in different countries go through. Many of us will not have the opportunity to see first hand what they go through, so this is a close second.

Another one of my favorite articles we read was Under the Western Eyes by Chandra Mohanty; it gave the reality of western literature and the idea it portrayed of women. Before reading her article, I had never thought about or realized the truth behind her points. Western literature was written to portray any women besides white women as inadequate. Monanty states, "Western feminism is an exclusive and convoluted model which does not apply to women globally. It imposes the idea that white, affluent women are the norm of perfection and that all women should be envious of them and cannot achieve the same status without the same appearance and privilege". Europe has predominantly been white and glorified white women as being the "ideal" look and even thought that the paler/whiter you are, the more attractive you are. Which that in itself is quite disgusting, along with the fact that any other woman that is not of this expectation should be jealous of the "perfect" western woman. She also explained how there are so many stereotypes and preconceived notions about third world women. “What I wish to analyse here specifically is the production of the “third world woman” as a singular monolithic subject in some recent (western) feminist texts.” Monolithic means a large, powerful, and intractably indivisible and uniform. The point that she made about the need to talk about the production of a "third world woman" is so important, especially as women from the United States (a first world country), because we categorize women from "poorer" countries to automatically have completely different problems than the women, like us, do. I felt like as a nation we still saw women from third world countries as poor, weak, little women that needed our saving because they have so little power and rights, when in all reality, I had no idea the things women had to deal with and struggle with for their own feminism. The average person does not know factual evidence or statements about what women from other countries experience, and yet it is so common to act like we do.

Not only did we learn about large-scale global feminist issues, but I learned and was fascinated about the minute facts about all the different countries, cultures, and religions we read and watched about. I had very little knowledge about any traditions of religions besides my own, so when we watched the “Radical women, embracing tradition” and “What it’s like to be Muslim in America” TED talks, along with reading Do Muslim Women Need Saving by Lila Lughod, I had the opportunity to learn a fair amount about other religions. For example, I learned from Kavita Ramdas’ video that when having children in India, having a boy is more desirable for a couple. I also learned that when an Indian woman becomes a widow, there are several different traditions that the woman must face, one being that the widow must wear white for the rest of her life because white is the color of mourning. Also, the bindi and the bangles are usually marriage markers, and by removing them, widowed women mark the end of the part of her life she cannot repair. Within Ramdas’ video, she also talked about her encounters with feminists different than herself, one being a Muslim woman who was in her late age but had not been married off, even though that is tradition in her culture. “...Women were running underground schools in her communities inside Afghanistan, and that her organization, the Afghan Institute of Learning, had started a school in Pakistan. [The Muslim woman] said, ‘The first thing anyone who is a Muslim knows is that the Koran requires and strongly supports literacy. The prophet wanted every believer to be able to read the Koran for themselves.’ Had I heard right? Was a women’s rights advocate invoking religion?” I loved this excerpt because Ramdas caught herself in awe when she heard this Muslim feminist trying to explain how two topics that usually do not go together, actually do belong and coexist. In Dalia Mogohed’s TED talk “What it’s like to be Muslim in America,” she gave her side of the 9/11 attack on New York, and her experiences of being a Muslim in this country. She began, “What do you think when you look at me? A woman of faith? An expert? Maybe even a sister. Or oppressed, brainwashed, a terrorist. Or just an airport security line delay.” Many of those assumptions would be thought of as true by some people, regardless the fact that being Muslim has nothing to do with Mogohed’s personality. Granted I was born the year of the attack so I didn't have my own previous knowledge, but from what I could tell, I feel like (white) Americans didn't have any problem with Muslims before the attack, it was only after when the real issues began. I honestly didn't have a lot of knowledge on the Muslim community and what their beliefs are, but I have been told before things exactly like this, that the women are oppressed and brainwashed. I'm not sure why people feel the need to go about spreading unnecessary and untrue things about a community they truly don't know much about, but it happens frequently. She continued to speak about the 9/11 attack, “Not only had my country been attacked, but in a flash, somebody else’s actions had turned me from a citizen to a suspect.” I cannot imagine how hard it would be to be a Muslim during and after the 9/11 attack. The amount of hate, distrust, criticism, and stereotyping you would receive on a daily basis would be so immense. Because of 9/11, Muslims will always have "the blame" for the attack, and they will always endure harsh stereotyping because of one incident. Not saying that 9/11 was not horrific, because it was, but the fact that one attack by a small group of people now determines how everyone else in that community is treated seems a little harsh.

It was alluring to learn about a concept I had absolutely no first hand experience to, and it is one of my biggest recommendations after taking this course. Lila Lughod spoke in her writing, Do Muslim Women Need Saving, about the hypocricies around stereotypes of Muslims. She wrote, “What is striking about these three ideas for news programs is that there was a consistent resort to the cultural, as if knowing something about women and Islam or the meaning of a religious ritual would help one understand the tragic attack on New York’s World Trade Center and the US Pentagon…” Shd is completely correct, learning about Islamic traditions or beliefs to better understand the attack on 9/11 would be like learning about Christianity to understand the KKK. There is little to no correlation! I could have understood if someone wanted to research ISIS to better understand the thinking behind the attackers, but Islam makes no sense. To add on top of that, they were interviewing the women to try and comprehend the attack. It wasn't even a woman who was part of the hijacking, but somehow the need for answers and explanations was thrown onto Muslim women, who weren't involved what so ever. “In other words, the question is why knowing about the “culture” of the region, and particularly its religious beliefs and treatment of women, was more urgent than exploring the history of the development or repressive regimes in the region and the US role in this history.” I think when we want to learn more about Muslims or the religion we often think we are educating ourselves somehow on why 9/11 happened. What we should be focusing on instead is how repressive regimes even come to be and why they do what they do. Repressive regimes and Muslims do not have anything in common unless we talk about them like they do, which often happens in the US and especially in the media. The experts should have been looking into our international relations with the country where the hijackers were from, along with political and historical issues in the country where they were from. There was no reason why they turned this into a religious and female "investigation." The only thing that came out of going after Muslims and Muslim women, is that now there is a huge social divide between pretty much everyone and Muslims. There is also a highly seen stereotype about Muslims and Muslim women. After reading the whole passage by Lughod, I learned so much about Islamic and Muslim culutres, and realized that some Islamic symbols, like the hijab, that we associate so heavily with deep oppression are in fact free-willed choices. It is important to start detaching these negative associations and start focusing on other ways to make social change.

Overall, this course let me attain knowledge and perspectives about women from other countries that I would have never been able to achieve without seeing first-hand myself. The minute to large scale details I learned about India, Muslims, Nigeria, and many other women across the globe was amazing. Feminism means different things to different people around the world, but there is one idea that is in common everywhere: we are strong and want to be heard.

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