Contradictions at women's conference
Editor’s note: In the July N&L we discussed
the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Conference. Below are
reports of several workshops.
“Women as Third World Citizens,” was so permeated by
postmodernist thinking that it offered little of the internationalism found in
revolutionary feminist and Third World theory.
Laura E. Sjoberg was to speak on Iraqi women, but had
decided not to because “stories about women in Iraq have endings with
consequences” for which she did not want to be responsible. Instead, she
discussed her agreement with Jean Baudrillard that “inquiry into reality
removes us from truth.”
Gurleen Grewall’s paper, “The Case Against
Development,” described Indian women’s movements against new dams and
destruction of subsistence farming which had fed people and preserved the land
better than the technology of the “Green Revolution.” The other panelists
were Helena Halperin, who described women’s cooperative ventures in Kenya, and
Wairim Njambi, a Kenyan, who spoke about women-to-women marriages there.
In the discussion, I gave out a flyer about Iraqi
feminists, suggesting we COULD say something about them--and help them. I warned
against failing to mention that one Indian feminist Grewall discussed supports
the fundamentalist BJP government. Njambi objected to criticizing Indian
feminists’ support of the BJP: “You American feminists supported Clinton.”
Of course, I said that I did not, and that those who did had set back the
women’s movement.
--A.J.
*
* *
At the session on “The Politics of Place in Latin
American Women’s Literature,” a paper was presented by a Brazilian woman,
Erica A. Salles, about the book CHILD OF THE DARK by Carolina Maria de Jesus. It
was great to hear the cross-generational dialogue with the poor Black woman
living in the 1950s in a Brazilian FAVELA (slum).
The workshop on “Women in Black” (WiB) focused on
academics as participants in the movement. I learned about WiB beginning as a
silent protest by Jewish and Palestinian women against the Israeli government in
support of the first intifada in Jerusalem in 1987. It spread around the world,
including women demonstrating in Belgrade against Milosevic’s genocidal war.
Lee Sharkey spoke of how silence can transform political
protests. She gave a historical sweep of women’s mourning as a form of
political action since 1955.
This workshop showed feminist contradictions in the
movement. Mary Joe Aagerstoun started a WiB Art Project. But the participants
could not agree to send their creation to Israel because they did not know how
to distinguish their opposition to all wars, including Palestinian extremists’
condemnation of the existence of Israel. The inability to define their
opposition to war in ways that cannot be confused with non-liberatory opposition
caused the death of this project.
--Urszula Wislanka
*
* *
There were three fascinating presentations at
“Neo-liberal Fare, Day Care and the Red Scare: Making Socialism Relevant
(Again) in the Classroom,” a workshop that aimed to “consider how feminism
and socialism can be introduced in courses that focus on women and development,
religion, and feminist history.”
Kristen Ghodsee briefly traced the history of the women’s
movement in the U.S., stressing how it “was always connected to issues of race
and class.” She mentioned Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai as socialists
who “saw sex as fundamental to revolution. Even in the French Revolution women
were an issue.” She said that NWSA’s program links gender, race and
ethnicity but seems scared of class. She wants to “question what is going on
with the absence of class and feminism’s ability to deal with late
capitalism.”
In the discussion I brought up the left’s failure to
project a liberatory vision of the future because each presenter touched on how,
as Ghodsee put it, her students didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine, how an
alternative economic society could be structured. She said, and the other
presenters agreed, that it was “hard for her students to understand a
non-price-driven mechanism for distributing resources.”
--T.M.
Return to top
| 
