Hearing Hope

“Critical feminist perspectives must begin to analyze and account for the modalities by which suffering becomes a tool that upholds settler-colonial relations, to read the structures of power in the everydayness of maiming women’s psychosocial entities. It must attend to the voices, silences, and sufferings, the effects of the humiliation and endured pain. However, it must also look to the countervailing effects of survival. The Palestinian women interviewees demonstrate incredible steadfastness, or sumoud, in the face of suffering—indeed, managing not only to survive, but to infiltrate the nation that usurped the comfort of their lives and homes. Their agency, too, must be recognized, for their simple acts of surviving, giving birth, and going home may be seen as nothing less than undermining a settler-colonial regime.”

- Infiltrated Intimacies: The Case of Palestinian Returnees, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

Kevorkian ends her piece with a feminist call to arms. We have to be able to see the angles in which settler-colonialism seeks to uphold itself as a rightful presence, yet we must be able to see how these colonized communities resist their oppression. In this case, the survivance and resistance of Palestinian women under the Israeli regime. Palestinian women face violence on the axis of both Palestinian and woman, marking them as vulnerable to specific violences of biopolitics, “where the uses and abuses of women’s bodies become tools of oppression and serve to further Israel’s settler-colonial project (Shaloub-Kevorkian 169).”

The conversion of Palestinians from civilians to “intruders” represents an orphaned beginning. Palestinians are separated from their homeland and their family, many having to flee or change themselves in order to survive. The unmediatable damages inflicted onto women continue to haunt them, infiltrating the intimate interiors of their life as something unspeakable. The unspeakability of their pain is an Israeli victory, isolating them from the rest of the world, the past continues to haunt their very being.

This reconfiguration of identity was used to mobilize Israeli violence against the Palestinians, as violence was conducted under the name of security, instead of purely self-gain. Achille Membe’s concept of “necropolitics”  describes “the state’s ability to wield biopower in the subjugation of death over human bodies and populations, for the purpose of the preservation of the state’s sovereignty and the authority of its institutions (Shaloub Kevorkian 169).” Even in death, Palestinian bodies are constructed monstrous, signifying the successful protection of Israel from imminent contamination.

The mere existence of Palestinian women is a form of resistance against the Israeli colonial state, where she is proof that the Israeli settlement is one of attempting genocide. She is proof that the rightful owners of her land is that of colonizers. Shalhoub-Kevorkian upholds the importance of survivance and autonomy in her academic discourse. The act of living is weaponized.

“Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture—a flood, a war, a terrorist attack—can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.“

This was an extra heavy week. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots by Jasbir Puar discuss the exploitation of people of color after disastrous events, specifically the construction of the “monstrosity” that requires discipline. The Shock Doctrine contextualizes the “disaster capital complex,” that seeks to profit off of the disproportionate impact that disasters have off of poor people of color, such as Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. The “disaster capital complex” profits regardless of if the disaster was natural or not, reframing the War on Terror as one that seeks to destroy “terrorist” infrastructure and exploit the vulnerabilities that are presented. The construction of the “terrorist” requires serious interrogation. By marking someone as a terrorist, they are pinned under layers of sexual and racialized oppression, becoming a deviant that must be eradicated from society. This need for eradication or “discipline,” perpetuates narratives of U.S. saviortude, where the U.S. embodies a global liberator cleansing the world of its evils. “Terrorist” also becomes an obstacle of modernity, justifying Western imperialization in the name of modernizing third-world countries.

After 9/11 the U.S. became a “clean sheet of paper,” a now blank sheet that is released from any previous or ongoing injustices that it has inflicted (or is still inflicting) throughout its lifetime. The shock of the disaster to millions of Americans was exploited by the Bush administration, crafting the post-9/11 era that we all live in. The “terrorist” that has been introduced to the minds of many permits the increased surveillance and subjugation of people of color that are racialized as such. “Terrorist” and “Muslim” become conflated and biologized. Specific physical features become vessels for metaphor, making the body vulnerable to harmful ideologies that serve to other it. The “terrorist” figure allowed the U.S. to increase their military influence outside and within the country under the guise of global security.

Klein calls the Shock Doctrine a doctrine of torture, where entire societies are “softened up” to give up things that they would normally protect. The War on Terror seeks to “soften up” specific SWANA countries, forcing them to give up their oil reserves for U.S. benefit, just like how Hurricane Katrina softened up Southern states and made them give up several public institutions that were implemented to support poor Black people, resulting in the vast production of charter schools in the area. Klein’s work illuminates the vile intentions of U.S. capitalist entities, but I believe she slightly misses the mark with this analogy of torture and exploitation.

I think the “soften up” metaphor gives too much credit to certain institutions that are meant to protect these “treasured objects.” Though not applicable to all situations, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, the disaster did the dirty work that capitalist entities have been doing since the birth of the U.S. nation. Poor Black people were never treasured by societies, they have always been portrayed as an obstacle in a society’s progression towards a utopian (White) existence. Their slow death can be seen in countless aspects of life, including the overwhelming disparities in police violence, wealth, and mental and physical health that are all too familiar within Western discourse. These disparities consequently weaponize natural and unnatural disasters as ethnic cleansers, clearing the path for communities to climb into higher brackets of White wealth. The Civil Rights Act becomes a knee-jerk reaction to Black resistance, where the laws that have been put in place only serve to quell angry Black people, cloaking their slow death under the guise of a newly color-blind society.

"I argue that concepts and theoretical formulations are culture-bound and that scholars themselves are not merely recorders or observers in the research process; they are also participants (Oyewumi xv)."

This week’s readings focused on the decentering of African epistemologies in the discussions about the aspects of African cultures, specifically Yoruba and the customs of the Gikuyu people. The use of Western epistemologies creates an inherent disconnect between subject and researcher, where African deviance from Western heterornormative standards of gender are overgeneralized as immorality and prehistoric customs. This decentering occurs within African studies as well, where the complexity of culture is reduced to conform to a lens that cannot fully encompass it. Even though these scholars may be Africans themselves, the use of Western frameworks serves to Other these cultures, positioning them as deviant. These authors assert that the positionality of the researcher and cultural context must be discussed before engaging critiques of non-Western societies.

The notion of gender in Yoruba culture is what Oyerunke Oyewumi describes as “an imported one,” one that did not come about in Yoruba society until it had undergone the violences of colonization. Oyewumi positions the scholar as not just a recorder or observer, but a participant of gender-formation. Concepts and theoretical formulations are culture-bound, thus we have to be considerate of the implications of conducting a Western analysis on non-Western topics. This disconnect leads to harmful over-generalizations and misunderstandings of African cultures, such as FGM being portrayed as the domination of African women and girls living in backwards society.

Specificity is very important, as the generalization of Africa as the epitome of a pre-modern society permits the exploitation of it and its people. Oyewumi’s discussion of the importation of gender is applicable to other African cultures, though she is wary of not falling “into the common trap of erasing a multitude of African cultures by making facile generalizations, a process that results in unwarranted homogenization. (Oyewumi xiv).” The assertion of an African third-world serves to simultaneously disadvantage African customs and peoples while idealizing the West. Africa is not something to be.

Wairimu Njambi contextualizes FGM within Gikuyu customs and reframes it as a site of resistance for Gikuyu men and women. “Female genital mutiliation” is a problematic term that is used overgeneralize African life as “Black women being dominated by Black men,” where women “once African women who perform FGM can be taught to see beyond the cultural blinders imposed by their traditions, the story goes, they surely would oppose such barbarity.” Njambi discusses irua ria atumia na anake, the initiation ritual of becoming men and women, and its roots in anti-colonial resistance. Njambi remarks on the harmful use of specific words used to other African cultures, specifically “castration,” which said in a Western context, remove the cultural value of ritual and construct it as “barbaric.”