This weekend, I was in the Bay area to attend a board meeting for the youth publication, Wiretap. Imagine my pleasant surprise to find a fellow desi blogger also on the board with me, Samhita Mukhopadhyay. A former desi riot grrrl, Samhita is now a blogger/editor for the popular Feministing.
The site editors and founders are motivated by their belief that young women are rarely given the opportunity to speak on their own behalf on issues that affect their lives and futures. Feministing aims to provide a platform for women to comment on and analyze these issues. Roughly 25,000 unique users per day visit the site. [link]
Sweet, a young desi voice in the historically non-diverse feminist movement! And a blogger! In a recent interview done with Alternet, Samhita informs us of the intersections of activism and blogging, a topic that I find fascinating and have written about through the lens of the South Asian American movement before.
But aren’t there drawbacks to leading a feminist movement through blogs?Samhita: Well, this is our activism; engaging with other bloggers. But yeah, we talk all the time about whether or not we are organizing the people we talk about or if we’re just computer nerds. We want to alliance-build. But is it always safe to sit behind your keyboard? No. I still don’t always feel confident or safe…
People come to the site, read my blog and say things like “Don’t get out of hand.” This is still the dominant view, and there is still such a gendered power imbalance, and it’s easy to get caught up in all that and think, “Well, you’re right.” People have told me I’ll never have a journalism career. Some say my writing is unbalanced and anti-white. But it’s not, not in this context. I write what I feel and what I see, through the lens of post-colonial theory.[link]
A quick perusal through her posts on Feministing show entries that do just that and highlight transnational feminist issues: the Hudood Ordinance, Columbian women try sex ban, Pakistani rape laws, and women praying in Mecca.
Back in 2004, I attended the March for Women’s Lives in DC with a small contingent of desi women – all of us decked in ‘This Is What a Feminist Looks Like’ gear. We were the only desi females we saw at the march. This was frustrating particularly because I feel that the desi women issues that affect all of us in this community, are often pushed to the boundaries of the mainstream feminist movement. Our issues of glass ceilings, hate crimes, higher rates of HPV, and lower weight babies are SAA feminist issues. For these reasons, I often feel that there is a certain amount of distance people like to create with the word “feminist”, especially in our community. But what does it really mean?
Feminism can be recognized in many ways. For me, it’s more about what our moments of resistance are as women: a mother kicking out her deadbeat husband for not taking care of their child; women with multiple sex partners; women earning power in board rooms. Taking back. Acting back. It’s complicated….<
p>Those chicks who flashed their tits in the 60s largely cater to the white middle class. They often don’t do enough to include women of color. I think what you see now is little clusters [of feminists] getting together on issues, like the Duke rape case. It’s fragmented, but once something happens, people rally. [link]
If you haven’t done so yet, I highly encourage you to add Feministing to your blog reader. Before signing off, I’d like to pose two questions for the mutinous – Do desis have a place in the feminist movement? Can/Do desi bloggers have a role this?
hhhh –
Another score for eugenics, that’s all.
Modern day society needs some serious re-vamping.
First, I don’t think its happening; it happened. Feminism became a dirty word. That sucks. I would argue in some ways the Feminist movement lost a lot of progress, or at least is making far less progress than it was at one time. I think you can find a correlation with the stigmatization of the word Feminism with the loss of strength of the Feminist movement. I don’t think what happened was that Feminist principles were thwarted; the caricature of Feminism won out over substance. If some people used the term Feminism to advance untenable ideas out of touch with most people; the fact that these ideas became synonomous with Feminism has more to do, I think, with backlash.
Also, the point is not lost that men speaking on feminism is hellllllaaaa annoying. I am annoyed doing it. But, for f’s sake; get busy y’all. Take back that initiative from the 70’s and rock out.
Also, to consider Third Wave fuck-me feminism; at times it seems close to another word for pandering for male attention. Madonna; was she in control of her sexuality?
And I think dudes have lost a lot as well; As men we have more avenues of expression and more life choices available to us when the Feminist movement is strong. When its not strong, the definition of masculinity becomes stagnant and constricting.
So, in essence, the act of resistance isn’t the fact a woman has had multiple sexual relationships, but that she refuses to accept that there is any shame in having done so. That’s seems much more reasonable than how I originally read the statement.
Yes Dan, and that’s why one of the first steps in “emancipation of women” is the (re)claiming of her own sexuality.
That reclamation will take different forms and shapes depending on the culture(s) she was brought up in or the culture(s) she is influenced by.
Example; Some western women who turn to Islam and don the burqa or niqab see it as a reclaiming of their sexuality. Whereas some burqa/niqab clad women who grew up in Islam throw it all away and see it as reclaiming their sexuality.
Then you have the Saudis who, when in Saudi Arabia are head to toe blacked out but when they vacation in the south of France……. well, that all comes off, (as well as other things). Then the black gloves come back on once they board Saudi’s official airlines that flies them back home.
OK, that’s a stereotype/generalization but I seen it!!!
I once read somewhere, that no one is ever completely useless, at the very least they serve as a bad example.
It’s no longer sustainable hun, time to step up.
Are my comments invisible or is there something wrong with what I’m saying? I tend to get zero response to almost everything I write. Why?
SM Intern:
I can’t see what is in post #57.
Thankyou! Someone needed to say it 😛
I think it’s interesting, and I suppose normal, that everyone automatically has looked at the feminist movement in America as a model…maybe we don’t fit into that model because as some people have pointed out, it has moved so far left as to be isolationist. But there are vibrant and active feminism movements all over the world, that are homegrown, un-imposed and different, and given that we as transnationals stand as the bridge between those movements and the one we see here, can also find a space for ourselves between the feminism movements in both places…
Interesting read: Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World
Thanks for your response Kenyandesi,
I can’t add much to what you said, because I pretty much agree, although I don’t think its moved that far to the left.
Manju,
but then how do you know there was a comment 57?
I’m playing devil’s advocate…although I did see some pretty out there ideas among some feminists I know 😛
The great poet, Donald Rumsfeld, may help explain:
As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don’t know We don’t know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
WOW, that article about this Indian feminist really moved me, but now I am hungry so which one of you brawds is coming over here to make me a sandwich?
Just kidding.
You need two brawds to make a sandwich.
Hey, I’m Pakistani and I was also at the March for Women’s Lives!
this brownie was also at the march for women’s lives in 2004…go brown feminists! 🙂
Hi, we’re discussing the Aishwarya Rai film “Provoked” on our Sacred Media Cow blog and would love a desi feminist angle on things. Check out the discussion if you have a minute and we’d love to have your comments: http://sacredmediacow.com/?p=559
Who is the desi riot girl right now – i am confused here!
I support feminist issues but only when it relates significantly to desi women’s causes. I feel the wide term feminism often acts as a smokescreen for vested interests like reinforcing white ideals, Christianity, defusing/shadowing the real situation, generating sympathy for causes totally irrelevant to the movement. Often there are overlaps when a large group of women fights for a cause and the group is not represented sufficiently by a smaller subgroup, in this case the desi group. The benefits accrued hardly reach the subgroup and there is a reverse flowback to the dominant group (whites for example) that it was not originally designed for, due to racial coplanarity. This results in very less actual benefit to the subgroup. For substantial benefit to accrue, there must be either a critical mass(sufficient percentagewise representation) or a completely homogenous (ethnically) group. An alternative is to ensure that the rewards actually reach the subgroup, but there is no foolproof way to do that in practice. Living as a minority in a majority society, there are bound to be overlaps. However short-circuits must be avoided at all costs.