“At every women’s gathering the divisions of race, class, nationality and ethnicity erupt, tearing the unity that brings women together. . . . We can pretend that differences do not exist, or we can explore them, and in the process reformulate feminism itself. The latter is more difficult and painful, but indispensable, if sisterhood is to become more than a slogan.”

Asoka Bandarage, “Toward International Feminism,” 1994

“[A] vision of global feminism should be one which engages women at all levels of society in all aspects of their lives, encouraging productive diversity rather than homogeneity, while proposing a pro-active redistribution of power, rather than reactive critique of its current allotment.”

Renee Martyna, “Whiter Global Feminism?,” E-merge 2000

This issue of Briarpatch is about opening our activism to new voices and new perspectives. As Naomi Wolf recently observed, “our (Western) moment of feminist leadership is over now, for good reasons. . . . [T]he leadership role is shifting to women in the developing world.”

To be clear, Wolf is not suggesting that Western feminists have won their battles and so are free to retire to Guatemala or Thailand to help those poor other women win the same battles. Rather, her point is that feminism in the West/Global North (I use these equally inadequate terms interchangeably) cannot be universalized, and that feminism has so far failed to address the economic inequalities, local and global, that have seen some women prosper while the majority have only suffered increased economic insecurity. The antidote – global feminism – could equally be described as majority feminism.

Like the labour movement, the feminist movement in the Global North has grown gradually more conservative over the past two decades, fighting (and often losing) rearguard actions to hold onto the rights and privileges previous generations had won, rather than seeking to broaden those victories across lines of race, class and nation. Western feminism has largely bought into the unequal rewards of global capitalism and become complicit in the imperial project: we occupy Afghanistan as supposed liberators-of-women while those same women slide deeper into poverty and insecurity. We import Filipino women to care for our children and Mexican men to grow our vegetables while women in Chinese and Haitian sweatshops sew our clothes. We rail against the misogyny of Islamic fundamentalism but have too little to say about the Western militarism and IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Programs that fuel it.

We must remember that our struggles for gender equity, work with dignity, personal security and ecological integrity are interconnected, that one form of oppression feeds another, and that capitalism thrives on and deepens all these various oppressions. As Johanna Brenner saw clearly back in 1993, “[t]he solution to the political impasse facing feminism cannot come from feminists alone,” but requires “a serious and disruptive challenge to capital” (New Left Review, July/August 1993).

The feminist political impasse Brenner identified 17 years ago has persisted, and meanwhile capital has gone increasingly global – a challenge that requires feminism and trade unionism alike to go global, too. Effective challenges to gender and class oppression must come from and respond to those who bear the brunt of such oppression; they can’t originate with those who have benefitted from it. Acting on this realization requires looking both outside our borders and inside ourselves.

As Arundhati Roy has said, “The battle lines are not drawn between women and men. They are drawn between particular world views.” We must recognize that the next wave of feminism, if there is to be a next wave, must come from the South, and orient our activism accordingly.

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By Teresa Krug
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2010

Even after the doctors had left, the Peruvian alpaca sweaters lay neatly folded in the large suitcase near the entrance. The clothing had been carefully selected, packed and transported to the edge of town the previous day in the hope that a group of foreign doctors who were passing through the area might take an interest. After perusing the collection, however, the foreigners purchased the inexpensive finger puppets in lieu of the pricier sweaters, hats and mittens. Pressured to compete with the market prices in downtown Arequipa, the knitters had even offered a discount.

The knitters, who call themselves Ñaña (meaning “sisters” in the local indigenous language, Quechua), are constantly mindful of their struggle to earn a living wage. Located in the dusty, depressed community of Alto Cayma on the outskirts of beautiful Arequipa, Peru, Ñaña’s three-room workshop offers its members a refuge from past hardships and current struggles. Inside, the women are welcomed and supported by one another.

Though their genuine alpaca clothing is far superior to the products sold in the city centre, foreign tourists don’t know – or care – about the difference and are often unwilling to pay the premium. Accustomed to paying essentially pennies for souvenirs in Southern countries, buyers bargain the city vendors down from their already too-low prices to prices that oftentimes do not even cover the original costs.

Because of this, the members of Ñaña have refused to sell their products in the local markets for the last few years. The members are instead focusing on a much wider, global clientele. As the women regularly remind themselves, they must “salir adelante.” Roughly translated, this means to “pull through” or “forge ahead.”

“I want it to be a big business, to be able to export,” explains Andrea Gutierrez, one of the founding members of Ñaña. “That’s my dream.”

The story of Gutierrez’s life resembles that of many of her compañeras. As a child she experienced the crushing effects of losing five of her 13 siblings to poverty-related deaths; as a teenager she worked long hours tending to animals and working for a street vendor before becoming a single mother at the age of 20. Forced to relocate to Arequipa, she began grueling fieldwork to support her son.

Around the time of her second son’s birth two years later, she connected with a friend and began spending afternoons knitting. The hobby had never gone beyond generating a small side income, but now it seemed more lucrative.

Until 2004 the women would meet and knit every Wednesday; it was still necessary to hold other jobs to support themselves. At first they spent the entirety of the day and well into the night knitting in someone’s home. They would then walk an hour from Alto Cayma to Arequipa’s city centre because they could not afford a taxi or bus. For all their efforts, they would be rewarded with roughly $3 for a pair of mittens.

“I was fine, but the prices just didn’t go up,” Gutierrez said.

Eventually a place to knit and market their products was arranged by a local priest in Alto Cayma. Other resources began trickling in and more women began to join. Today there are a handful of regulars with another 15 or so who cycle through. Some of the women have been knitting their entire lives; others have only just begun. Some still hold other part-time jobs. The vast majority of the women have children. All want to improve their knitting and expand their business.

Yeny Narcy Panta Coripua, who began knitting when she joined the group, credits a lot of her success to Gutierrez, who always pushed her to learn.

“Yes, you can. You have to come, you have to come,” Coripua said Gutierrez told her when she doubted herself.

Coripua began working as an empleada, or domestic worker, at the age of eight to support her four siblings when her father passed away and her mother abandoned them. At the age of 20, pregnant and alone, she too came to the Arequipa area. She worked as a money changer for the local buses and later owned a food stand before meeting her now-husband. She eventually found Ñaña because her second-born child attended daycare in the same complex. Knitting through Ñaña has now provided her with a sense of independence and self-worth that former jobs could not.

Whatever their backgrounds, the women share one common goal: expand Ñaña for the benefit of everyone involved. When speaking about their objectives, they use “we” and “us” rather than “I” or “me.” Their struggle continues to be an uphill battle as they resist the urge to sell their products for less than they are worth. Their name is also still relatively unknown and the current recession has not helped their business. Fortunately, they have established connections with a few fair trade stores and high schools in North America. Despite the odds, they are determined to continue forging ahead in search of financial independence for themselves and their families.

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Illustration by Kim Sokol

By Erum Hasan
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2010

I was 14 years old, riding a Parisian metro on a Friday evening, no doubt bound for some teenage mischief. The peace of my journey was interrupted when a woman wearing a burqa entered the compartment, accompanied by her husband and young son. The three of them, visibly tourists, looked at the metro maps in clear view of everyone else in the car.

This is a scene that occurs many times a day in Paris: tourist families mapping out their routes in the web of the metro underworld. But this family was different; the protagonists were atypical. I remember my horror at the whisperings, the looks, the nudges, and even some finger pointing at the woman in the burqa. A woman sitting across from me sighed exasperatedly and mumbled something about “these Arabs” and how they treat their women.

I was embarrassed and angry at this family for having entered this very public realm of which I was a part. I didn’t want my co-commuters to be judging all Muslim women relative to this one with her covered face. It was challenging enough to be a Muslim teen in Paris without having to take on this iconic image of the burqa-clad woman that had disturbed the cultural uniformity on that metro car. Feeling resentment for her and the response she was eliciting, I looked away, hoping she would disappear quickly.

The Muslim woman is often portrayed as lacking agency, subjugated and controlled by the men in her life. Trapped behind a veil, vulnerable to honour killings, her body is seen as a dominated space, one over which she apparently has no control. This is a common stereotype. It crops up frequently in Western media, especially when military offensives in Muslim countries are in the offing, and the oppressed Muslim woman is paraded about as justification for military intervention.

The burqa, chador or niqab (henceforth used interchangeably), a loose-fitting robe worn by some Muslim women that covers the body from head to toe, is one of the most powerful symbols of women’s subjugation under Islam. This garb is often presented as an existential threat to the West, capable of destabilizing the very foundations of our liberal democracies.

This message was reinforced in October 2009 when a Canadian organization called for a ban on the burqa. Surprisingly, this demand came from the Muslim Canadian Congress, a self-proclaimed progressive organization that stated: “The Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) is asking Ottawa to introduce legislation to ban the wearing of masks, niqabs and the burka in all public dealings. . . . [N]ot only is the wearing of a face-mask a security hazard and has led to a number of bank heists in Canada and overseas, the burka or niqab are political symbols of Saudi inspired Islamic extremism.”

Such a demand seemed odd when other issues of concern to Muslims were burning up the headlines, including government resistance to Omar Khadr’s repatriation, the war in Afghanistan, Muslim Canadians imprisoned abroad, and human rights concerns around security certificates. One has to question: is the MCC’s request really about protecting the Canadian public? (After all, how many bank heists have been undertaken by burqa-clad bandits?) Is it made in the name of emancipating Muslim women? Is liberation from the burqa really a pressing issue for them? Or is the MCC’s statement symptomatic of another tendency: some Muslims reproducing the same othering they have experienced in the Western world within Islamic groups, so as to render themselves acceptable to the general (Western) public at the cost of further isolating a disenfranchised group of women?

In non-Muslim circles, the opposition to the burqa has been open and vocal. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has stated the burqa is “not welcome” in France and that it reflects “women’s subservience.” In Switzerland, the image of the burqa was used in propaganda materials to support a constitutional ban on building minarets. In Belgium, many cities have prohibited face coverings, fining women who offend. In the United States, a rule adopted by the Michigan Supreme Court may allow judges to demand that witnesses remove their religious hair coverings while testifying. And in Quebec, the question of banning the head scarf in public service jobs was raised in provincial legislature by l’action démocratique du Québec and the Parti Québécois. However, this subject is not only taken up by politicians eager to weigh in on what the ideal citizen’s aesthetic should be. It is also a bête noire of some Western feminists who see the burqa as a threat to women’s autonomy and to the political gains made by feminists in the last few decades.

Indeed, the debate over Muslim women’s attire in the West has been shockingly one-sided. Few questions have been posed about why we equate visible hair and short skirts with women’s liberation or with greater access to power. The voices of women in burqa are seldom included in the dialogue – rather, these women merely become mere objects in our subjective narrative. Their bodies – their covered bodies – become fodder for our assumptions about their repression. “They” are made into one big category, an amorphous symbol of generalized oppression. What is rarely noted is that “they” as a category are not permitted to participate in this discussion. Just like the unseen patriarchs who are assumed to be cloaking women in repressive garb, many of us feminists make Muslim women’s bodies a screen upon which we project our politics and fears. Instead of opening a dialogue about the desires, aspirations and power struggles of this group of women, we substitute the burqa as a totem of all that we oppose. No one really asks those who wear it: hey, would you feel more emancipated if that thing was off your head?

The marginalization of burqa-wearing women in Canada and other Western nations is no real surprise. After all, the attire stands out in stark contrast to our mosaic of polar fleece. More surprising is how this narrative of the repressed woman is picked up, repackaged and reproduced within immigrant communities from the Global South. The crusade against the burqa is presented in Muslim circles as a progressive discourse reflecting modernity and Western know-how. A new dichotomy is thus created: the modern, free, Western Muslim woman who repudiates the traditional, shrouded Muslim woman. This dichotomy is not unlike the division between the stereotype of the free, modern Western woman and Muslim women in general – it just allows some Muslim women into the privileged space.

The Muslim Canadian Congress, which has often mirrored the language of the Conservative government on issues such as the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008, and which lauded the cutting of funding for the Canadian Arab Federation after Minister Jason Kenney got into a name-calling match with its president, is not alone in calling for a burqa ban. Feminist reporter Mona Eltahawy began her op-ed in the International Herald Tribune with the words: “I am a Muslim, I am a feminist and I detest the full-body veil, known as a niqab or burqa. It erases women from society and has nothing to do with Islam but everything to do with the hatred for women at the heart of the extremist ideology that preaches it.” This perspective is further echoed by Quebec feminist Djemila Benhabib, who has described the burqa as a tool for extremists. When the Fédération des Femmes du Québec did not support a ban on the hijab in the Quebec public service, Benhabib condemned them for “sacrificing millions of women who are fighting for their lives.”

Though valid as personal opinions, these statements rely on broad and sweeping assumptions about the experiences and stories of Muslim women who wear the burqa. In Eltahawy’s description, women are “erased” by the burqa, while Benhabib portrays all burqa-wearing women as being controlled by fundamentalists. Such blanket judgments leave no space for the diverse needs and wants of traditional Muslim women to be articulated, and the packaging of their bodies becomes the only topic of discussion. Single stories are presented as universal truths, rendering the affected women more invisible and less entitled to express their own wants and needs.

Contrary to Eltahawy’s point, women who have independently chosen to don the burqa in the West are anything but invisible. It is, in fact, their very visibility and their obvious rejection of mainstream dress codes that creates a sense of discomfort for many. The burqa is unfamiliar, stark, mysterious and unknown, and does not blend in neutrally. Portraying the wearing of the burqa as a symbol of male, religious militarism, as Benhabib does, discounts any other reason that a woman might want to wear it: for identity, cultural values, political symbolism, anti-consumerism, protection, countering the hyper-sexualization of women or religious belief. Both Benhabib’s and Eltahawy’s objections do exactly what they accuse the burqa of doing: they silence burqa-wearing women and deny them agency by imposing one narrative on their behaviour.

There is no doubt that many women are coerced or pressured to don the burqa or are required by law to wear it – Afghanistan under Taliban rule being a prime example. Such coercion should of course be resisted. However, in other places, women have been forced to remove their coverings, making some feel as exposed as if they had publicly bared their breasts. In 1936, the Shah of Iran banned the burqa, giving rights to police officers to tear off burqas with scissors and knives in order to “modernize” women. In Turkey today, women wearing the burqa are not allowed to attend public universities. Strict decrees one way or the other are equally corrosive of women’s autonomy.

Key to this story of the wrapped-up and controlled Muslim female body is the marginalization that many Muslim women have experienced in mainstream Western circles – a marginalization that is now being replicated by some privileged Muslims. After years of struggle in which women of colour, low-income and lesbian women have challenged their ”othering” by white, middle-class feminism in Canada, we now see parallel inequities being reproduced within Muslim feminism.

The most alarming thing about the new othering of (some) Muslim women is not that there is a public difference of opinion. Indeed, we should welcome dissent and dialogue – for all women are not the same, nor should they have the same opinions. Rather, it is that white, middle-class feminism, which has excluded many who come from other social, ethnic and religious groups, has come to represent the model of feminism being espoused by immigrant communities in the Global North. Instead of carving out an authentic feminist path, where the focus lies on autonomy, agency and anti-oppression, some Muslim feminists have allowed cosmetic issues like the burqa to take precedence over more bread-and-butter issues.

And reproducing this divisive discourse pays off in the West. Although challenging the burqa in other parts of the world can involve serious risks for women, burqa bashers in the West are widely celebrated. When the Muslim Canadian Congress issued its statement, the story made headlines in all three national newspapers. When women such as Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam Today, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel, pen their books, they remain on bestseller lists for a handsome period of time, basking in media attention. It is popular for Muslim women to denounce other women within the Muslim community as backwards and proclaim oneself a progressive; it is far more difficult to speak out against broader marginalizations and one’s role in reproducing them.

Progressive women in Muslim communities must question whether they are simply mirroring broader societal inequalities and further isolating already-marginalized women when they request bans on women’s attire. There will always be differences of opinion around the burqa. Some will find it vile and imposing, others will find it liberating not to share their cosmetic selves in the public realm; some will find it incompatible with Islam, others integral to their faith. The point is to foster a safe space where these differences of opinion lead to a conversation with, and empowerment of, those most affected rather than to exclusionary demands. The focus has to be on the agency of women rather than on their objectification. Single stories should not be used to deny or dismiss the multiplicity of women’s experiences. The politics of the burqa, whether through its imposition or through a ban, should not be a weapon for alienating women and limiting their choices.

Being from the Global South does not insulate one from reproducing oppressive discourses. As feminists from the Global South become more influential, armed with degrees from prestigious British, American and Canadian universities and well-versed in polished English, they must remain open to the opportunities to break from the historical trajectory of previous Western feminist movements, to carve out novel feminisms. A Muslim woman wearing a full-length “burqini” in a Parisian pool may have been called “archaic” by the mayor of Paris in August 2009, but feminists must be willing to listen to that burqini wearer’s voice to avoid being guilty of the same oppressions.

Perhaps we can take a cue from the Council of American-Islamic Relations-Canada (CAIR-CAN), which lobbied against the burqa ban, emphasizing the need to focus on rights rather than limitations:

“… [I]f a segment of Canadian Muslim women believe that wearing the niqab is part of their religious practice, then they must be allowed to freely do so. The principle must be extended to all religious practices, provided the practice does not infringe upon the fundamental rights of others. The marginalization of Muslim women must be countered with public education and anti-discrimination efforts, not with the state’s dictation on how one may dress, which only serves to further marginalization instead.”

Riding the metro in Paris, my sensitive 14-year-old self reflected and amplified the discomfort of those around me. The object of my angry embarrassment became that burqa – and the woman wearing it. Today, though, I would be frustrated not by that woman’s clothing choices, but by the assumptions fuelling the contempt of my co-commuters: their intolerance and their fear of difference.

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By Angela Day
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2010

Hondurans’ resistance to the June 2009 coup has shown spirit and determination, with thousands of people resisting the theft of their democracy despite curfews, cops and targeted killings. The roots of this resistance run deep, anchored in organizations like COHAPAZ, the Honduran Committee for Peace Action.

COHAPAZ, a grassroots social justice organization, is comprised of an intricate network of militant women in the communities surrounding the capital, Tegucigalpa, where they have been organizing for over 30 years. Their mandate is to “fight poverty and create justice” in Honduras. What that immense task looks like on the ground is a multi-generational network of mostly women activists, a vibrant urban agriculture movement and frequent popular education workshops. They regularly organize popular assemblies, demonstrations and ad hoc workshops in these materially poor communities where even access to clean water is a political struggle.

In 2006, when I was living in Tegucigalpa, the women of COHAPAZ were facilitating weekly workshops on water conservation, small-space gardening, composting, and the perils of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which was about to be signed between Honduras and the U.S. I was struck by the distinct, steady feminism of the group’s four main coordinators – Doña Blanca, Doña Candida, Doña Hilda and Doña Marigsa. They are all between 65 and 80 years of age and have been politically active for most of their lives.

The coordinators of COHAPAZ see community organizing as a means of taking control over their own lives and challenging systemic inequality. “Community organizing is crucial to resistance,” they wrote in a collective statement in January of this year. “It helps communities recognize their rights, and especially the rights of women and children.” The Doñas explain that by building solidarity within marginalized communities around Tegucigalpa, they are better able to identify and denounce human rights violations. Their movement becomes what they call a “mechanism of protection.”

The COHAPAZ meeting spot is attached to a free medical clinic off a curved street, only notable because there are frequently people lined up outside with kids and babies in tow. The clinic is run by Dr. Juan Almendares, a long-time human rights activist, who works tirelessly to offer medical consultations and keep the clinic running. He is a long-time supporter of COHAPAZ and sister organization Movimiento Madre Tierra (MMT). MMT is supported by Friends of the Earth International, and while their mandate overlaps with that of COHAPAZ, with a focus on social and environmental justice in Honduras, MMT is active nation-wide, working with rural communities affected by the mining industry and large-scale agricultural development.

When I asked Dr. Almendares about the legacy of COHAPAZ, he explained how instrumental these grassroots women’s organizations have been in Honduran human rights movements. “The women have learned a lot about natural medicines, first aid, and birthing through their community organizing.” Pursuing health may not necessarily seem revolutionary, but he says, “health is directly linked with the ability of these women to participate in political action that benefits their communities.”

Honduras is considered one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere, second only to Haiti. Over 70 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line, and the country relies heavily on remittances from Hondurans abroad; these remittances comprise the bulk of the country’s GDP. Accurate measures of how many people participate in Honduras’ informal economy are hard to come by, but on the denuded hillsides where the women live and work, stable jobs are rare.

One day, as I walked with Doña Blanca along the dusty streets of her colonia (suburb) of Bella Vista, she filled me in on the neighbours’ gossip. When I asked her why there were so many women around, but so few men, I came to understand the phrase “se fue a los estados,” a phrase I would often hear repeated. Someone in almost every household had “left for the States,” increasing the need for the women to establish strong networks of mutual aid and economic self-sufficiency.

This was before the 2009 coup.

The military removal of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was a flashback to the Latin America of the Cold War era. On the morning of June 28, when Hondurans were preparing to vote on the formation of a constituent assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution that had been instated in 1982 with heavy U.S. influence, over 100 military men swept into Zelaya’s home and put him on a plane to Costa Rica.

Immediately, nation-wide mobilizations and a general strike ensued, precipitating what became known as la Resistencia. In the face of foreign interference and a new administration backed by the Honduran military, the persistence of community-based resistance is even more remarkable. Dr. Almendares says this is in part due to groups like COHAPAZ: after years of organizing, they know how to be savvy and resourceful in volatile contexts.

However, state repression in Honduras has increased dramatically since last summer, adding a new dimension to COHAPAZ’s work. A January 2010 declaration from the Washington-based Center of Economic and Policy Research states that “the dictatorship has committed an array of human rights abuses including killings, beatings of demonstrators, detentions of hundreds of people, and attacks on media outlets.”

According to COHAPAZ, the terror created by the coup regime permeates society – everyone knows of someone who has been assaulted, detained or assassinated. “Still,” the elderly women tell me, “despite the repression, our popular education workshops have continued and the majority of women in our communities are voluntarily participating in the resistance.” Since last June, they have focused on making sure their fellow compañeras are well-equipped with the knowledge and health needed to ensure a vigorous presence in the resistance.

Furthermore, they say, “We are more united than ever before.”

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Blind women line up at a hospital in Chitrakoot, Madhya Pradesh, India

By Heather Wardle
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2010

Over the past decade, much has been written about female literacy and how access to even a basic education can reduce poverty and improve the lives of women and girls. But for millions of women in the Global South, it is access to eye care that they need most.

Thirty million women and girls are blind and many millions more have debilitating low vision. Even though two-thirds of the world’s blind are women or girls, in many countries men’s access to eye care is double that of women. This means that millions of mothers can’t see their children’s faces or protect them from harm, that girls cannot go to school or reach their full potential, and that even those with mild vision loss can’t pick the stones from their daily rice. The cost in human suffering and lost productivity is immense. Yet, 80 per cent of global blindness is either preventable or treatable. The leading cause of blindness is cataract; sight can be restored with a 15-minute cataract surgery that costs $50 or less.

Rose Mollel was just a baby when her vision began failing. By age three, she was blind from bilateral cataracts and could no longer see her family’s cattle or the world beyond her Masai hut in Tanzania.

Her mother was desperate to get care for her daughter, but the family was poor and Rose’s father did not see his daughter’s eyesight as a priority. “My husband and I argued so much about getting Rose to hospital that I had to leave my two kids and return to my parents. For three months, I dared not go back to my husband because I was scared of him, but the desire to restore my daughter’s sight still burned in my heart,” said Rose’s mother.

Eventually Rose’s grandfather intervened and insisted that Rose receive care. Rose had surgery on both eyes and had her sight restored.

Rose’s story illustrates some of the many barriers that women in the South face. Lack of decision-making power, no economic freedom, the inability to travel freely, and a lack of education and understanding about their own health are some of the obstacles women and girls face. The result is that millions suffer needlessly.

One woman who is leading both her country and region in redressing gender inequality in health care is Herieth Mganga, the gender and blindness coordinator for the Kilimanjaro Centre for Community Ophthalmology in Tanzania. Unique in Africa, Mganga’s job is to train teams of “sentinels” – village women who have been taught to look for and recognize eye problems in children and women and to assist them in seeking care.

Sadly, this important gender and health work is not funded by the Tanzanian government, which was required to reduce public funding for health and education in 1986 under a Structural Adjustment Program imposed by the International Monetary Fund. Instead, the program relies on support by international development groups like Seva Canada, an eye care charity based in Vancouver.

Would it be better if governments recognized and funded women’s health initiatives rather than relying on donor agencies from the North? Absolutely. But in the meantime, programs like Seva’s that build local capacity must step in to relieve unnecessary suffering.

The good news is that with a relatively small amount of funding, programs that address the eye health needs of women and girls can be established and replicated. Part of Mganga’s role is to train other gender and blindness coordinators throughout eastern Africa.

There is a very clear correlation between sight restoration and poverty reduction. It is estimated that the global cost of blindness is $42 billion annually and the productivity generated by a single cataract surgery is fifteen times greater than the cost of the surgery.

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The sugary crazy with the gendered glaze: The Ottawa Cupcakery's Fairy Princess Pink cupcake

By Ondine Park and Tonya Davidson
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2010

In the summer of 2009, on a humdrum Edmonton afternoon, three of us went out for cupcakes. Fellow sociologists, knitting buddies and feminist reading group pals, we found ourselves at Fuss, a cupcake, gelato and coffee shop all rolled into one. It was there that we began to ponder the phenomenon of cupcake shops that seem to be popping up everywhere.

Cupcake shops are proliferating wildly, marketed to adults but with a frosting of childhood nostalgia. Sweet, pretty desserts adorned with opulent icing, cupcakes are the pinnacle of childhood treats, and embody the “sugar and spice and everything nice” notion of girliness. But rather than just representing a sweet indulgence for a sugar-addicted culture, does the nostalgia fuelling the cupcakes craze signal a broad cultural yearning for another time and another way of being – the seemingly glamorous Mad Men life when women hand-crafted little cakes for every single one of their bambinos? As we licked the ganache off our lips and the sugar crash hit, the question sent a twinge through our feminist political sensibilities. We asked ourselves: was this trend sexist and infantilizing? Or is it a case of third wave feminist entrepreneurs reclaiming and celebrating kitchen craftiness?

Nostalgicakes

According to Heather Holbrook of Isobel’s Cookies and Cupcakes and Claudia McGuinness of the Cupcake Lounge, both in Ottawa, cupcakes are all the rage for three key reasons: nostalgia for home-baked goods, the Sex and the City-inspired hip factor, and the near guilt-free indulgence they represent for North America’s chronically dieting population (cupcakes are small, after all). Pre-feminist nostalgia, pop-feminist glitz and post-prandial guilt seem to be the perfect ingredients for the female-focused micro-economy behind the cupcake fad.

And indeed, in the last few years, cupcakes and cupcake shops – especially ones oriented towards women – have proliferated across Canada, North America and beyond. (Check out www.cupcakestakethecake.blogspot.com for a list of international cupcakeries, which can now be found on every continent except Antarctica.)

Edmonton’s The Cupcake Shoppe invokes nostalgia explicitly with its slogan: “Nostalgia has never tasted so good!” Since cupcakeries are a new phenomenon, clearly the shops themselves are not the source of nostalgia. Rather, they rely on a nostalgia evoked by cupcakes themselves. It seems to us that this nostalgia revolves around two things: the association of cupcakes with an idealized childhood, and the consumption of cupcakes as an expression of a particular, infantilized and domesticated femininity.

The taste of childhood past

Cupcakes are diminutive, delectable, and individually made and decorated. They evoke the nostalgia both of an earlier era and of childhood itself. Take a peek at the many e-cupcakeries on the web or walk into your favourite local shop and a theme of cozy 1950s domesticity, elegant Victorian charm or rustic quaintness pervades. The ornamented, dainty morsels simultaneously call to mind the luxury and the simplicity of a storybook past in which the everyday world was beautiful and manageable, with enough time to pay attention to small details, no matter how fussy or frivolous.

McGuinness agreed that cupcakes remind us of another era: “I think it’s from the 1960s . . . when moms stayed home and made their children’s birthday cakes.” She continued to reminisce: “I grew up in the 1960s, when mom stayed home. My mom didn’t go to work until I was 13.” Cupcakes also inspire nostalgia of a happy childhood, then. They remind us of caring relationships, special occasions or treasured memories of a childhood home, which were all marked by cupcakes – or, more precisely, which could have been marked by cupcakes.

For some, cupcakes call to mind specific childhood memories. Cupcakepreneurs often declare that their idea of making a business of cupcakes is rooted in their own childhood memories. Both Holbrook and McGuinness fondly remember baking cupcakes with their mothers. “I think it just brings back – anything that’s baked right brings back – what your mom used to do,” Holbrook says.

But for most people, this cupcake nostalgia is premised on an ideal, if not always a lived reality, of stay-at-home moms indulging their children in home-baked goods. Whether or not the average cupcake consumer has such memories, there seems to be a sort of collective memory or wish attached to cupcakes, revolving around effortless fun and celebration, being cared for, comforted, and indulged: the perfect childhood that could have been.

”For my princess”

Perhaps cupcakes are a reminder of being a kid, or an excuse to be childlike, but in their contemporary guise as a pop culture phenomenon, cupcakes predominantly seem to be made to elicit a very particular kind of childhood nostalgia, namely a yearning for an indulged, pampered girlhood spent baking small things in light-bulb ovens, presiding over tea parties and lemonade stands, and playing dress-up. And this nostalgia is targeted at women.

Though cupcakepreneurs will point out that men make up a significant part of their clientele, cupcakes are girly. High-end girly, gourmet girly, whichever way you bite into it, they are girly: sweet swirls of pink on pink in a pleated, wax-paper apron.

When we asked Elizabeth Routly, co-owner (with Julie Thompson) of the Ottawa Cupcakery, which cupcake she would describe as the most masculine, she suggested, “the Rock my Road – it’s our variation on the Rocky Road. It’s a chocolate cupcake filled with caramel and toasted pecans and topped with a marshmallow buttercream.” Nuts, the intense flavour of caramel, and a smoky whiff of marshmallow makes for a manly cake.

Meanwhile, the most popular cupcake the Cupcakery sells is the “Fairy Princess Pink cupcake,” which is described as “perfect for your little fairy princess.” But it’s not just for little girls. Routly says she receives many orders for this cupcake from men buying them for their wives or girlfriends, accompanied by gift tags declaring “for my princess.”

In contemporary urban cupcakeries, cupcakes are caught in the in-between world of girls dreaming about future womanhood and women playing the fantasy in reverse, revelling in nostalgic girlhood as an escape from their everyday lives. While men, to a limited extent, also indulge in the delicious trend, it is primarily women who make a business of cupcakes and other women and children who consume the cupcakes they sell.

Your mama’s cupcakes

As the tag line for the Ottawa Cupcakery suggests, the new wave of cupcakes are “not your mama’s cupcakes.” They may hearken back to your mama’s (or someone’s mama’s) cupcakes. This is largely their appeal: they’re kitschy, nostalgic, sweet and carefree, like childhood birthday parties. However, these cupcakes weren’t squeezed through the strictures of 1960s gender norms – they are the fruits of third-wave, do-it-yourself feminist practice.

Contemporary cupcake bakers see their enterprise as participating in a feminist appropriation of traditionally feminine (domestic) skills and crafts in order to honour and respect women’s heritage while simultaneously carving out new modes of self-expression and self-sufficiency for women. Auntie Loo’s Treats, a vegan bakery in Ottawa, epitomizes a feminist spirit of DIY production. For Amanda Lunan (aka Auntie Loo), owning and operating a bakery is a perfect moment of feminist reclamation:

I think [it’s] almost empowering to be taking ‘women’s work’ and turning it into a business. For me it’s one of the ultimate feminist things you can do. Baking’s something special that my mom showed me how to do; and I’m proud, and she’s proud. She was running the register on the opening day; everyone was asking, ‘Where’d she learn how to cook?’ And my mom was saying, ‘that was us! We were at home in the kitchen.’

Auntie Loo’s cupcakes reflect feminist politics both in the woman-owned-and-operated grassroots model of the business and in her choice to use high-quality, vegan ingredients – practices shared by many other cupcakepreneurs with whom we spoke.

In spite of the patriarchal femininity, frothy girliness and fantasy play inherent in much of the imagery that surrounds the contemporary cupcake phenomenon, many cupcakepreneurs take very seriously the politics of cupcakes. Cupcakes are made of food staples that are among the least equitably traded commodities in the world (sugar, milk, flour, chocolate, spices). As such, they participate in a global system of trade that makes many people’s everyday world much less joyful and beautiful. The cupcakepreneurs we spoke with insist upon fairly traded products for their ingredients.

The wrapper

At Fuss, where we initially pondered the relationship between cupcakes and gender, we wondered whether cupcakes were just the latest consumer trend fuelled by nostalgia for a kitschy, idealized mid-century past – a past that was quite stifling for women in North America – and whether the trend might draw a little too heavily on an ideal of infantilized femininity. Maybe cupcakes are to baked goods what Everybody Loves Raymond was to sitcoms: familiar and briefly satisfying, but leaving a bitter aftertaste.

What we found in talking with impassioned and politically aware cupcakepreneurs, however, is a more nuanced picture. McGuinness tells of a time when she made a dozen dark chocolate cupcakes for the 50th birthday of a client’s husband. Each cupcake was topped with a fondant-sculpted Guinness can of beer the size of a child’s thumb: little tiny fondant beers, diminutive and sweet, yet dark, frothy and suggestive of that most masculine of ales. In the great, endless menu of cupcake flavours and combinations being developed by cupcakepreneurs, it seems that while some sell cupcakes like so many other commodities of prepackaged nostalgia, new room is also being created for umpteen new relationships between our gendered selves and the food we eat.

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Over 2,000 statues fill the walls of Vientiane’s Wat Si Saket, the Laos capital’s oldest temple (built in 1818). (Photo: Nikko Snyder)

By Gita Tewari
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2010

It’s the last day of the week-long Living Buddhism class I’ve been attending at Wat Songdhamma Kalayani, an all-female temple in Nakhon Pathom, Thailand. After our morning chants and prayers, we have set off on an alms round with nuns and novitiates from the temple. We make our way from the temple grounds into the surrounding community, where groups of people are waiting along the street and in front of their homes to donate food and other supplies to the nuns.

We walk quietly, in single file. It is still early in the morning and the air doesn’t have the oppressive humidity to which I have grown accustomed. We see male monks in their saffron robes down the street from us, also making their daily alms rounds.

When a man kneels reverentially in front of the young female nun leading the prayers, I finally understand the religious clergy’s resistance to ordination of Bhikkhunis (the highest order of Buddhist nuns) in Thailand. In a country where even the King defers to monks, the implications of allowing women to inhabit the same spiritual plane as men would have a profound effect on a country that is still bound by ancient traditions.

There is a glass ceiling for women seeking spiritual advancement in the Buddhist temples, or “wats” that dot the Thai landscape. Women who seek to be ordained as Bhikkhunis, the highest order of Buddhist nuns, possessing equal status to monks, continue to experience significant resistance from the religious clergy and more conservative elements of Thai society.

In this country of over 300,000 monastics, Dr. Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, whose ordained name is Dhammananda Bhikkhuni, is a trailblazer in the movement to create a Bhikkhuni order in Thailand. She is the Abbess of Wat Songdhamma Kalayani, about a half-hour’s drive from the outskirts of Bangkok, in the ancient city of Nakhon Pathom.

Woman seeking sangha

I became familiar with Dhammananda and the barriers facing female monastics in Thailand in an accidental, tourist kind of way. In the midst of what might be termed an existential crisis, triggered by the worst economic crisis in decades, a year-long dry spell in freelance work and some personal setbacks, I found myself increasingly drawn to learn more about Buddhism, with its focus on the self as a starting point for all change – not unlike the famous quote by Mahatma Gandhi, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

I had read a few books on Buddhism, but found myself wanting to find a sangha, or spiritual community, where I could deepen my understanding of the theory and practice of Buddhism through formal practice. I had naively assumed that finding a Buddhist monastery to stay at for a few weeks or a month would be a somewhat simple proposition – according to the articles and online posts I had read, western men who sought to learn more about Buddhism seemed to have no trouble finding a monastery where they could receive daily teachings from monks or lamas. But to my dismay, I discovered that temples with female abbesses and novitiates (nuns in training) are practically non-existent in Southeast Asia.

After some searching, I learned of Wat Songdhamma Kalayani. They were holding a “living Buddhism” class starting in a few weeks that was described on their website as a “program designed for non-Buddhist, English-speaking international visitors who would like to learn about the basic concept of Buddhism, living in a monastic setting at the only Thai female monastery.” Participants were asked to wear white and observe the eight precepts: no killing, stealing, sex, lying, intoxicants, eating after noon (they relaxed this for westerners), entertainment or high beds.

Our daily schedule included an hour and a half of chanting and meditation each morning and evening, four hours of lectures, handicrafts hour (in which we learned origami, the ancient Japanese art of paper folding and other crafts to promote mindfulness), and “community time” in the evening, which often involved weeding in the garden.

I arrived at the monastery during Sunday prayers. The temple is located off a busy, six-lane highway. Visitors are greeted by a large, gold, laughing Buddha statue that is visible from the highway. I was taken up to the second floor of the temple to meet the Venerable Dhammananda, a tall woman in her early 60s with a shaved head, wearing orange robes. Novitiates and locals (men and women) were sitting on the floor while Dhammananda led the prayers and chanting in Thai. The other three individuals who had registered for the Living Buddhism class – a woman from New Zealand who lives in Bangkok with her husband, a Belgian woman who had been attending the monastery for a few years now and a Thai doctor from Chiang Mai who led our nightly meditation sessions, wouldn’t arrive until the following day.

Culture clash

Most Buddhists in Thailand practice Theravada Buddhism. This is the most conservative form of Buddhism, dedicated to preserving the teachings and practice of the Buddha in their original form. Thais believe they are accumulating merit – which will allow them to be reborn in better circumstances – by giving donations to support the monasteries and build new temples. Nearly all Thai men spend a few months in temporary ordination at a Thai temple at some point in their lives.

The social prestige of the monastic life has begun to fade, however. Many of the seminarians I met encountered the disapproval of their families when they expressed an interest in ordination. For instance, the mother of a nun I met who had recently graduated with a BA degree had not wanted her to become a nun; she wanted her to use her degree to get a well-paying job. Another nun I met had been married; both husband and wife decided to join a temple after they retired and their children were grown. Some seminarians are trying to escape abusive situations. Many of the younger seminarians will return to lay life after a few months. One said she had a life-threatening medical condition that the doctors were unable to treat. She said it was only after meditating for hours every day that she started to recover. This led to her desire to join the monastery.

Living Buddhism

While Thai attitudes toward sexuality and female autonomy are quite relaxed compared to many places, cultural attitudes towards women among the country’s Buddhist clergy remain quite rigid. The traditional stance against the ordination of women has been described by one writer as an example of how “the egalitarian ideals of Buddhism appear to have been impotent in the universal ideology of masculine superiority.”

As Rochelle Jones wrote in a 2005 report for AWID, the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, “Women in Thailand are supportive of Dhammananda’s quest [for female ordination], asserting that monks do not know how to listen to women’s needs and problems in the community and are educated to avoid women. The temple of women in Nakhon Pathom gives them confidence and support from the Buddhist community they have never had before. In Thai culture, monks are not allowed to touch women, and Buddhist nuns in Thailand are given a lower rank than even the youngest monk, and are relegated to the more menial tasks in the temple, such as cleaning and cooking.”

In Thai culture, it is believed that, if you were born a man, it means you accumulated more merit in a past life than if you were born a woman. One of my classmates, who is the president and a long-time member of the Soroptimist International Club in Thailand, an international humanitarian organization that works to advance the status of women worldwide, explained to me that this is why poverty-stricken families will allow their daughters to become sex workers if it means that the sons can continue on with their education.

Dhammananda is concerned about the disparity between the core teachings of Buddhism and how it is practiced by the lay population. There is more public emphasis on the rituals of Buddhism, such as accumulating merit by giving money and alms to the temples, and less on understanding the more complicated notion of dukkha (suffering) and how to achieve Nibbana or Nirvana (enlightenment).

She took us to another temple in Nakhon Pathom to see for ourselves. The scene was a buzz of activity with families milling around. There were many opportunities to give offerings with incense and perform other merit-bearing activities, but it didn’t feel particularly spiritual to me. This was a real-life example of the intersection of Buddhism as a spiritual ideal and Buddhism as practiced in a living, breathing society.

My Belgian classmate has been going to the monastery for a number of years now. She is a physical therapist who, in her spare time, is researching the role of women in Buddhism. She first met Dhammananda in 2003 after the Abbess was fully ordained in Sri Lanka, and travelled with her throughout Thailand. During that time the Abbess encountered much hostility and received death threats. Dhammananda was the first Thai woman to be ordained in the Theravada monastic lineage, but her title is not recognized by Thailand’s religious authorities. She continues to experience open hostility from lay men and monks who believe that female monastics are illegal and corrupt.

Dhammananda’s mother and grandmother were both strong advocates for female ordination. Her grandmother was instrumental in the creation of a female order of monks in the 1920s, though King Rama V banned the practice in 1928, and her mother became the first Thai Bhikkhuni since ancient times when she was ordained in Taiwan in 1974 in the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, an ordination that was not recognized by the Thai religious establishment.

In 2005, the initiative 1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005 included Dhammananda among their list of nominees for the prestigious prize. She has two grown sons and is also a grandmother. She received her PhD in Buddhist studies from Maghda University in India and taught Buddhist philosophy at Maha Chula Sangha University and Thammasat University in Bangkok for many years prior to becoming the Abbess of the temple that her mother founded. She has also authored a number of books on Buddhism. In Dhammananda’s past life, she hosted a popular television talk show for many years called Life is Not Without Hope. After she decided to ordain, she filed for divorce from her husband. In a 2003 interview with Buddhadharma magazine she recalled, “I told my husband that I wanted to follow my path, that I wanted to do something much more meaningful than sit at home being an old lady.”

Reality check

Sri Lanka is the only Theravada Buddhist country with a history of female ordination. The country re-established a Bhikkhuni Sangha in 1996 with assistance from Korean and Taiwanese Bhikkhunis from the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. Meanwhile, the male Supreme Sangha in Thailand continues to resist the ordination of Bhikkhunis. In 2002, a Senate Subcommittee submitted to the Supreme Sangha Council that women should be given permission to be ordained, but thus far, the appeal has been denied. In November of 2009, the Wat Nong Pah Pong monastery in Thailand expelled an Australian abbot for ordaining Bhikkhunis in Australia, and issued a statement to its affiliated monasteries throughout the world affirming, “the Sangha does not accept the act of ordaining Bhikkhunis on this occasion and holds it as void.”

Dhammananda continues to write and speak about issues that centre around “socially engaged” Buddhism, including Buddhism and ecology, Buddhism and poverty, feminism and Buddhism, Buddhism and prostitution and Buddhism and education. As she told the Bangkok Post in a 2001 interview, “I know there is some resistance out there. It is not my intention to stick out and provoke anybody. I will try to honour everyone. I will try to be a supatipanno, to be a female monk with good conduct. Time will tell. If society believes this is a worthy role, then people will support it and consider it another alternative for women.”

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By Brittany Shoot
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2010

Marilyn Waring’s decades-long career has been as varied as it has been influential. She was the youngest woman elected to the New Zealand Parliament, is a long-time activist for lesbian and gay rights, and has tended her own goat farm for many years. In the wake of the global financial crisis, the revered feminist economist’s perspective on the changing relations between the Global North and South and the changing face of feminism are particularly salient.

Waring’s groundbreaking 1988 book, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth, is among the most authoritative books for advocates of women’s economic rights around the world. Her most recent collection, 1 Way 2 C the World: Writings 1984-2006, is a compilation of essays from her years travelling and working in Canada, South America, Africa and Asia.

Waring recently spoke with Briarpatch about the state of women’s rights in the Global South and how women in the North can support southern resistance to economic inequality.

Briarpatch: How have indigenous women’s movements around the world been responding to the global economic crisis?

Marilyn Waring: Indigenous populations around the world are under huge pressure from developers. In many places their collectively owned land has been sold out from under them and exploited, largely by multinationals and sometimes by government-to-government agreements, more recently in partnerships between China and various countries in the Global South.

Take forestry rights, for example. When you move into a forest in an indigenous area, you are not just removing building and construction materials, you are also completely ruining the chemist’s shop and removing a great deal of subsistence food, whether it’s mushrooms or honey or berries or a whole range of other things. You destroy whole livelihoods – the whole basis for well-being of large populations of people goes under when mining or timber consortia move in. All of this has gotten worse. When you enter a recession, the poor get poorer.

The economic crisis hasn’t diverted indigenous women from their key strategies around land tenure, however.

You’ve written a great deal about the rights of unpaid women workers – women whose primary responsibility is the care of family members and the maintenance of the household. How has the gender disparity in unpaid work changed – both in the Global North and South – since you wrote Counting for Nothing in 1988?

The work that I am engaged in with the Commonwealth Secretariat, developing tools for doing a gender-sensitive budget analysis, is going to be really challenging for a lot of countries to cope with when we really expose the full-on exploitation of women’s work by the State.

You can’t make sweeping statements about unpaid work in the Global South anymore. In Central and South America, where the predominance of national statisticians, especially in leadership positions, have been women, there is certainly a major move to start to make women’s subsistence work visible.

In at least one program, the Stephen Lewis Foundation is paying caregivers of HIV patients. It’s a real breakthrough; it’s a first. It’s happening simply because the women applied for it.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy commissioned a report by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and other prominent economists that called for the recognition of subsistence work and new indicators of well-being in place of growth. Many people called me and said, ‘Marilyn, they got there 25 years after you!’ Sometimes it takes a very long time, or it takes something like a global recession.

Newspapers keep saying that we’re coming out of the recession. Well, nobody’s going to come out of recession for 20 years because we’re all going to be paying for all of their make-work economic investment schemes, which overwhelmingly were for infrastructure. As I say to my friends, ‘Look how many women are employed in that!’ Where’s the investment in the infrastructure of hearts and minds, which is probably the most important investment a country can make? Meanwhile, the recession means an increase in the care and household work done by women as household budgets adjust to accommodate the recession.

In 1 Way 2 C the World, you detail a number of problems in specific countries in the Global South where abortion is illegal or severely restricted. What kinds of economic consequences do abortion constraints present for women in these countries?

In many parts of the world, women without access to reproductive rights are anemic, are malnourished and are in no physical condition to bear a child or to care for it. Their own provision of breast milk is usually inhibited or unavailable. The large families that occur when contraception is not available in any form means that women’s capacity to engage in paid, informal or subsistence activities is hugely compromised.

You’ve written about some of the ways militarism originating in the Global North has an enormous impact on women’s sexual freedom and safety – primarily the lack thereof.

In the last decade, we’ve seen that we aren’t just dealing with Western militaristic engagement. We can look at countries like Burundi, the Congo, Uganda and many parts of Eastern Europe where civil wars, border disputes and invasions have used women’s bodies as weapons of the war. While the warmongers boast of increasing strategic accuracy of weapons – which supposedly only take out military targets – the outcome is in fact growing numbers of civilian deaths, largely women and children.

Now it is understood that rape of women is a weapon of war and a war crime. Almost anywhere where we have tribunals following military engagement, we have mothers and daughters who have seen their siblings and parents raped, treated shockingly and sometimes killed. The difference now – it is hardly something to be celebrated, but it is worth noting—is that women are stepping forward. Women are having the courage to appear as witnesses. The crime is recognized. There is enormous advocacy around the world for recognition of forced or coerced prostitution as a war crime. It is no longer hidden under the table. We no longer pretend it doesn’t happen.

At the same time, of course, we all now know – from Iraq in particular and from the scenes at Abu Ghraib – that men and women in military units use sexual humiliation of men and various forms of sexual torture of men in their warmongering as well.

What are some of the ways feminists in the Global North can support women’s efforts in the Global South?

I think the most important thing is to treat the women of the Global South as experts in respect to their own lives. Instead of presuming that we know how to help them, we should ask them what the most important investment that we could make might be. The answers can vary enormously. When we asked that question of South African women under the apartheid system, they said, “Boycott. Even though it hurts us, boycott.” It’s not for us to be constantly determining the priorities.

A lot of it is a test for us. When it comes to the question of prostitution, personally, I’m an abolitionist. But if women in the Global South say to me, “Marilyn, we need you on the front lines fighting for the rights of sex workers,” that’s what I’ll do.

Too frequently, our assumptions are shallow and ill-considered. I think of the women from the North lobbying the invading states in Iraq to get a commitment to a proportion of women’s seats in the Iraqi Parliament in the new constitution. Meanwhile, Iraqi feminists were desperate to stop any constitution that was not secular. Ignoring that issue was a tragic presumption from the women of the North.

I was just in Jordan and Lebanon. There, the message was, “We don’t want your sympathy, we want your solidarity.” So I had to work with how that translates and what it means. It means getting rid of paternal (or maternal) approaches to politics. It means asking myself some really hard questions. It means committing to “do something.” About 48 hours later, I was asked by a major New Zealand magazine for an idea that would change the world. Obviously, they wanted me to write about a restructured GDP or something. So I wrote about a free and independent Palestine and peace in the Middle East. That’s what I’d just been challenged with, and I was glad to have somewhere to put it.

I think that’s what our responsibility is. At the same time, I left Jordan with a seriously large number of pieces of needlework and fabric work by rural women in the typical income-generating situation, because that’s also what I could do.

There’s no one answer. But the important thing is not that we’re finding the answer we want, but that we’re asking the questions of the experts – the women of the South – and listening to their answers.

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Illustration by Kim Sokol

By Penelope Hutchison
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2010

We once called ourselves Radical Obnoxious Fucking Feminists. When we meet again 20 years later, I discover that both f-words make us wince. What happened?

The day after the reunion, the subject line of Kelly’s email reads: “Did you hear?” On August 4, 2009, the same night as four university girlfriends and I had gathered for a 20-year reunion, a man walked into a gym in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, and opened fire. In response to what his online diary described as years of rejection by women and his inability to get a girlfriend, George Sodini shot three women, injured nine others – all unknown to him – and then killed himself.

The coincidence is surreal. My undergraduate girlfriends and I had planned the reunion as a memorial of sorts to mark the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. On December 6, 1989, 14 female engineering students were shot to death by a man who blamed women – feminists in particular – for ruining his life. The event shocked and scared us because we saw just how far the backlash against women could go.

I swiftly type my reply to Kelly’s email:

“The shooting and killing of those women on the same night as our reunion is unbelievable. Clearly misogyny is still alive and kicking. Getting together with you all made me realize that perhaps we still can make change. Instead of enlisting as junior members of the raging grannies, maybe we can morph into some fabulous forty-something gang? Something to ponder.”

Not a single one of my former fellow activists responds to my email. My disappointment turns to depression. How is it that as 40-something professionals, we don’t feel we have the same power and voice and ability to make change that we once believed feminism offered us? What has happened to us? To the world around us?

In the wake of this latest killing, we won’t be gathering in the Queen’s University Women’s Centre to plan a candlelight vigil. Julie won’t be making a sign that reads “Misogyny kills.” Nothing but a brief flurry of emails.

It is not that my girlfriends don’t want to speak out about violence against women anymore. It is, I tell myself, that in our supposedly post-feminist age, such outbursts from savvy professional women seem uncouth and unreasonable. Now that women are encouraged to pursue an education, a career, and be sexually independent, many see feminism as a thing of the past. To ease our way in the world, women like me have given up any public claims to feminism, or have at least tucked it away in an unobtrusive corner of our beings so as not to offend.

We have become lapsed feminists.

The rise of ROFF

Twenty years ago, my girlfriends and I, undergraduates all, formed ROFF – Radical Obnoxious Fucking Feminists. We gained notoriety in the media for our political protests. A Globe and Mail reporter described us in November 1989 as a “shadowy group” that shook “the serenity of Queen’s, a campus renowned as a hotbed of social rest.”

On Valentine’s Day we planted stop signs around campus to mark the places where, it was rumoured, women had been sexually assaulted. During Orientation Week, we whitewashed the “Golden Tit,” the speed bump engineering students decorate each year with a pink nipple, and spray painted “ROFF” over top in purple letters. We organized a 24-hour sit-in in the university principal’s office with two dozen other women. The sit-in was a response to the administration’s failure to discipline a group of first-year male students living in residence who had plastered their dorm windows with slogans like “No Means Kick Her In The Teeth,” “No Means Tie Me Up” and “No Means Harder.” The signs were the men’s response to a “No Means No” anti-date rape awareness campaign on campus.

My ROFF girlfriends and I had come to Queen’s in the late 1980s believing the battle of the sexes was over. Instead, we faced signs on student ghetto houses with messages like “Bring Your Virgins Here,” “Show Your Tits” and “Why Beer is Better than Women: Beer Doesn’t Run to Tell the Police When you Rape It.” We met one another in classes on feminist jurisprudence, women in politics, literature and philosophy, and made the Queen’s Women’s Centre our clubhouse.

We were empowered by the possibil­ities feminism offered to challenge society’s power structures. We devoured the texts of writers like bell hooks, Catharine MacKinnon and Carol Gilligan, and the lectures of our young, untenured female professors who sparked discussion about the exploitation of women in a male-dominated culture.

The gender politics at Queen’s and other campuses across Canada certainly reinforced this perspective. We read about panty raids at Wilfred Laurier University where male students splashed ketchup on women’s underwear and hung them out for display. Blindfolded and bikini-clad mannequins were paraded through Carleton University’s campus. We saw the world anew, and it seemed a threatening place, full of hatred towards all things feminine. In feminism we saw hope; a way to make the world a safer place for women.

ROFF reunited

The release of the film Polytechnique, a dramatization of the Montreal Massacre, in early 2009 inspired me to track down my ROFF girlfriends and host a reunion. I remember how devastated we were by the massacre, how it felt like the culmination of everything my ROFF girlfriends and I were fighting against at Queen’s. After reading a review of the film in the Globe and Mail, I decided to re-establish contact with my girlfriends and engage in some collective soul-searching about our university activism. I was curious to hear about the paths their lives and their feminism had taken.

As Kim, Kelly and I gather around Kim’s living room table, noshing on low-fat, low-carb crudités, white wine and Diet Coke, Jen and Julie join in the reunion by teleconference from British Columbia and Nova Scotia respectively. Once we are past the niceties, the conversation turns to our feminist activism as undergraduates.

We laud ourselves for our political protests and remind ourselves how the media attention we got for the sit-in sparked a national debate about sexism on campuses. Toronto Star columnist Michele Landsberg wrote at the time that “women from all over Ontario have written me letters of blazing indignation about the sexist hazing they receive at universities in this province. Some of the language they endured – language on banners and T-shirts – would make you faint with shock.” We talk about how our actions helped raise the issue of systemic discrimination against women in universities, and how that discussion spilled out into the workplace and onto the streets until it became a matter of public debate.

Despite the pride evident in my ROFF girlfriends’ voices, not a single one of us identifies professionally as a feminist today. “I don’t say I’m a feminist, but talk more about social justice issues. They are much broader than gender politics and that language,” says Jen, director of a network of HIV/AIDS organizations in B.C. After a brief stint articling at a corporate law firm in Vancouver left her miserable, she took on advocacy work in the predominantly gay HIV/AIDS community in the mid 1990s. There she used her legal expertise to help those with HIV/AIDS access Canada Pension Plan and B.C. benefits.

For Jen and many other women today, the discourse of gender politics is a thing of the past, its legitimacy giving way to other issues – social justice, the environment, antiglobalization, etc. Julie, now general manager of a non-profit arts organization in Nova Scotia, was ROFF’s leading agitator. She has continued to be a vocal proponent for change, working for a London, Ontario, homeless coalition and eventually running for the NDP in the riding of London North Centre in the 1990s. Now living in a hamlet near the Bay of Fundy, she describes her current political activism as more locally focused. Managing a theatre company, running artist retreats and art camps for kids where discussion centres on issues like the environment and mental health, she says she’s “gone from making bigger changes and contributions to smaller local things. I feel like I have more personal impact this way.”

As we aged, we began to choose more manageable goals, but the playing field also shifted. At the same time as we were launching our careers, falling in and out of relationships, acquiring mortgages and having children, society was rebranding feminism as irrelevant. Feminist scholar Angela McRobbie says this is not a straightforward right-wing backlash against feminism. Instead, feminism has been incorporated into this new “post-feminist” landscape through media depictions of independent, sex­ually liberated women like Bridget Jones and Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw. These images of strong, educated and sexually independent women (who also happen to be white and middle-class) give the message that equality between the sexes has been achieved, and suddenly feminism is passé.

It is not that the feminist demands for equality have been met, however. It is that in this new social and cultural landscape, the language of feminism has been delegitimized. What happened for women like my ROFF girlfriends and me is that in one way or another, we have all had to make the bargain so many ­middle-class women come to make to find success in our personal and professional lives. The bargain is this: women can be powerful as long as they give up their claims to feminism and the notion that women are unequal and marginalized in society.

‘Post-feminist’ malaise

Kim, a single mother with a high-status job with the government of Alberta, outwardly personifies the changes feminism has undergone in the intervening years. She has transformed from a curvaceous, bohemian-dressed, unruly-haired brunette to a thin, blonde Gabrielle Reece look-alike in tailored suit and heels.

Bunking at her house for the reunion, I see how she organizes her life to meet all the demands on her time. Up at 5:30 a.m. to work out on the elliptical machine in her basement, she’s showered, dressed and feeding her boys by 7:00 a.m., shuttling them off to school to clock in at the office by 8 a.m. A full day at work is followed by a busy evening of attending to her kids’ after-school activities, meals, homework and bedtime. Her attention then turns back to the briefcase of work she’s brought home before her head hits the pillow at 11 p.m.

It is a rigid schedule but one that is reinforced through women’s magazines and TV talk shows that promote the message that working women’s demanding timetables show how competent we are because we can, and do, “do it all.”

Kelly and I have similar schedules to Kim’s. We’re both at the gym four or five times a week, working out with personal trainers to fit the thin, tailored professional woman mould. Kelly, the mom of twin boys conceived through donor insemination, manages a busy family law practice where as a legal expert to the federal government on assisted reproduction, surrogacy and ovum/sperm donor agreements, her services are in demand.

As a self-employed writer, I have the luxury of working in my home office but my day is still rigidly structured. Bouts of writing interspersed between meetings with clients, meal preparation, car-pooling my son between school and after-school activities, and trying to care long-distance for my aging parents.

By adopting these roles, Kim, Kelly and I have been able to achieve success in the still predominantly male workplace. The price we have paid for such success has been to have to distance ourselves from our earlier feminist identities, or at least from contemporary culture’s view of feminism as a juvenile, extreme dogma typically associated with hatred towards men. It is not that we believe that equality between the sexes has been achieved; it is that living the day-to-day practice of feminism in our professional and personal lives is much harder than we anticipated as young women. Feminism is a long historical movement; as individual women striving to find fulfillment in our personal and professional lives, it is hard to live that struggle on a daily basis in the face of a culture that tells you feminism is a thing of the past.

“In my circle of friends, I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist but wouldn’t say I’m not. I talk about broader social justice issues. Despite feminism’s efforts to be more inclusive of other issues, it’s not,” says Kelly.

As we recount the trajectories of our various career paths, the joys and challenges of raising boys (Kim, Kelly and I all bore sons) and the ups and downs of our sexual relationships with men and women, we recognize the irony of our situation. Feminism has played a significant role in making our professional, ideological and identity choices possible. As a successful lawyer active in Toronto’s gay and lesbian community, Kelly can partially credit the gains made by the feminist movement. Yet, like the rest of my ROFF girlfriends, she has come to distance herself from feminist rhetoric in order to succeed in the legal profession.

While my ROFF girlfriends no longer identify as feminists, they readily acknowledge the ample evidence that exists showing how women have not overcome the problems feminism sought to solve. “I firmly believe that as much as women think they are sexually liberated now and sexual equals to men, it’s crap. At work, if a man sleeps around, he’s unremarked; if a woman does, she’s labelled the office bicycle. That has not changed one iota,” says Kim.

According to Statistics Canada, women are over six times as likely as men to be victims of sexual assault, the majority perpetrated by someone they know. Women working full-time still earn 29 per cent less than men employed full-time; the gap between male and female earnings has not changed significantly in the past decade. Women are still the primary family caregivers, far more likely than men to have to take time from their jobs because of personal or family responsibilities.

Recognizing the imbalances of power women still face, my ROFF girlfriends and I reflect on how important women’s studies courses were for us as young university women, offering us a critical lens and analysis about the place of women in the world. But today, young women are losing those avenues. The recent closure of the women’s studies program at the University of Guelph, the under-resourcing of women’s studies in general within Canada and the complete disappearance of women’s studies as an undergraduate degree in the United Kingdom highlight how the discipline is increasingly seen as a soft subject, lacking academic rigour and based on dated politics.

Not so radical

As the wine bottle empties and our reunion winds to an end, the discussion turns to our love lives: new relationships bubbling up for Kim and Julie, Jen making peace with being newly single, Kelly and I in long-standing relationships. Perhaps we are no different from Carrie Bradshaw: strong, independent, professionally successful, yet still, in the end, looking for life’s fulfillment through our relationships.

It is evident that the politics and passion for change that first brought us together 20 years ago are gone. We once felt so powerful in our efforts to make the world a better place. Now, looking back, I’m disappointed in myself, and to some extent in my ROFF girlfriends, for not holding on to our feminist principles as we aged; for not fighting against the inequality we met in our workplaces and in our personal relationships; for what many might call “selling out.” I don’t think we’ve necessarily sold out; there is just so much working against us in this struggle for broader equality.

As the fall deepened and the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre drew near, I managed to put aside some of my sadness about the reunion and my ROFF girlfriends’ loss of faith in feminism as a tool for change. I know now it wasn’t that we were naive or too radical to realize that the feminist project was some impossible dream. Rather, it was that we weren’t radical enough to stop the backlash that has sidelined feminism as a force for change – that keeping feminism meaningful for younger generations of women has proven a harder task than we ever imagined.

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Lin Shiu: “I will work as long as I can work.” (Photo: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours)

By Jillian Kestler-D’Amours
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

The Hong Kong government has promised to look into introducing a statutory minimum wage, but so far, no concrete implementation plans have been made.

Lin Shiu, 65, walks into the small Hong Kong Women Workers’ Association office, still sweating from her morning shift.

Wearing a blue suit, baseball cap and fluorescent green mesh vest, she gratefully accepts a glass of water. In an hour, she must get back to work cleaning a luxurious Hong Kong mall.

“For my age, it’s difficult to find another job,” says Shiu, who works eight hours a day, six days a week, and makes $3,600 Hong Kong dollars ($505 CAD) each month.

“I will work as long as I can work.”

No minimum

Shiu is one of many female cleaning workers in Hong Kong who must deal with low wages, dangerous work environments and discrimination on a daily basis. She is also a board member and part-time organizer in a cleaning workers’ union, working to improve conditions in the sector. Shiu says that instating a minimum wage is the first, necessary step to improving the lives of cleaning workers.

“[The Hong Kong government] doesn’t really care about the workers. The policy is not for the people,” she says. “The minimum wage would help us.”

In 2006, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Donald Tsang introduced the Wage Protection Movement, a government program that encouraged corporations to offer cleaning workers and security guards wages at average market rates.

The Wage Protection Movement depended on voluntary participation, which was not forthcoming. The initiative shut down in 2008 due to insufficient involvement.

Today, the Hong Kong government has promised to look into introducing a statutory minimum wage, but so far, no concrete implementation plans have been taken.

Structural problems

In recent years, the number of women entering both universities and the workplace in Hong Kong has been on the rise. But according to Mei Lin Wu, the coordinator of the Hong Kong Women Workers’ Association, although more women are entering the workforce than ever before, most fall into the “working poor” category.

“This means that their income is less than the minimum wage of grassroots work,” she explains. “The gap between the poor and rich is the biggest in Hong Kong’s history and the number of poor families is increasing.”

In 2006, Hong Kong’s Gini coefficient (GC), a measure of income disparity, reached as high as 0.533, surpassing that of Canada, the United States, and most Asian countries.

During this same period, the proportion of lower-skilled jobs decreased from 56.9 to 50.6 per cent.

“There is a structural problem,” says Wu, adding that the present economic downturn and age discrimination also make finding employment more difficult for women with little or no formal education.

“Having working skills doesn’t mean you’ll find a job. The opportunity for women is not much, and opportunities are not equal among women,” she says.

In 2005, 31.5 percent of Hong Kong residents aged 65 and over lived in low-income households.

“[Hong Kong is the] most free economy in the world, but what does that mean? Those that do not have money are not free. It means that labour, gender, human rights and just issues are not easy to raise,” Wu says.

An uncertain future

Soon after Mary Songsirisakul Malee fell while cleaning a glass window at a Hong Kong shopping mall, she was told she had to return to work or risk being fired.

The 50-year-old, who still has health problems related to the accident, now works part-time cleaning offices and earns $1,200 HKD ($170 CAD) each month.

Like Shiu, Malee believes that a minimum wage would greatly benefit cleaning workers who, she says, are often further disadvantaged by the subcontracting systems prevalent in the industry.

“The policy does not take care of the workers. That’s why the workers always become the losers,” she says.

She adds that in today’s economy, paying into her retirement fund has been a struggle, even though her son provides her with some financial support.

“I will go back to Thailand if I can retire,” says Malee, who came to Hong Kong 30 years ago from Bangkok. “But I can’t imagine my retirement. I would have no safety, no security. I can’t imagine it.”

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