Whose feminism is it, anyway?
By Kirthi Jayakumar
Photo (detail): Jordi Boixareu © ZUMAPRESS.com
The history of International Women’s Day (IWD) tells an important story of how the system will co-opt anything to further itself. What began with socialist roots has now become the global mascot for tokenism. Gimmicky discount sales and marketing for #GirlBossFeminism brings capitalism front and centre, marking a deep divorce from the socialist roots of International Women’s Day. But of course, no one wants to explore the systemic barriers and structural harm underlying contemporary socio, economic, and political realities, such as the patriarchy, militarized masculinities, and heteronormativity. Never mind that questioning these things were key to the celebration of IWD in the beginning.
Today, these patterns are repeating in the way feminist foreign policies are shaped, formed, and implemented. In these policies – deeply reminiscent of the Women Peace Security Agenda – gendered impacts of armed conflict, climate change, and human rights violations (among other things) are named as a basis for the inclusion of women in addressing these issues – with the implicit (or explicit) suggestion that their identity as women carries the solutions. Within this limited framing, we see the conflation of sex and gender, the reduction of gender into a binary, and the homogenization of the idea of “women” with no room for intersectionality. Here, there is space to bring women into the mix as long as they speak about “women’s issues.” Here, there is a way to be feminist: Keep the patriarchy alive, add women and stir, don’t question any institutions please and thank you, and just put women on the promotional posters.
Feminism has been tied to the idea of gender equality, but in reality, it goes much deeper than the zero sum game that “equality” has come to be associated with. Feminism interrogates why we need structural and systemic violence at all. It dares to hold power accountable. It calls for the dismantling of violent institutions like war, colonialism, and extractivism. And yet, no foreign policy – an arena where such institutions exist and operate – that has been self-named feminist has done any of this.
Instead, in these 10 years, we’ve seen several states call their foreign policies feminist, but also somehow participate actively in arms trade, support war, not call out genocides or hold their perpetrators accountable, target indigenous communities within their own territories, reallocate resources dedicated to the policy’s implementation without accountability, continue to exacerbate climate change, and refuse to be held accountable to truly feminist standards. In these 10 years, we saw how wars can be waged in the name of emancipating women (femonationalism) and LGBTQIA+ folks (homonationalism). We also saw how some states can be targeted for “gender apartheid” by states that also completely normalize gender apartheid within their territories.
What then, makes a state adopt a feminist foreign policy when it has no intention to be, well, feminist?
It’s hard to say, really, but a powerful explanation for the systemic factors that may have likely motivated this, comes from Francoise Verges (2021), in her recent book, A Decolonial Feminism. Verges presents a significant historical development to show how the system steps up to commandeer the rhetoric and practice around feminist endeavours to serve its own goal of furthering the patriarchy. She explains how, in the early 1970s, the USSR and a few developing nations proposed to the UN that it declare a decade for women. Initially suspicious, in response, Verges explains that the US and its allies responded with attempts to institutionalize feminism. However, as Verges reminds us, things did not go as planned.
Following this, at the World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women in Copenhagen in 1980, North African and Sub-Saharan feminists challenged the use of the terms “save customs” and “backward cultures.” These terms were used by White feminists to denounce female genital mutilation. Following this, in the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women held in Nairobi in 1985, women who opposed the occupation of Palestine denounced the systemic oppression. In doing so, these women highlighted the difference between decolonial feminism and “a feminism that didn’t want to confront coloniality,” in Verges’ words.
Liberation took a backseat and discrimination took centre-stage. In the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, Verges says that there was a “return to order.” This meeting is otherwise (in)famous for the statement Hillary Clinton made – “women’s rights are human rights once and for all” – a difficult moment that brazenly erased women from the majority world in all their rich diversity. What followed were a series of international actors co-opting the White frame of women’s rights. Verges names how the NATO wove it into their national values and interests, and the World Bank embedded the rhetoric into their policies for “development” and reduction of birthrates.
Jules Falquet (2011) explains this further, calling this rhetoric of “women’s empowerment” a response to the feminization of poverty. This was a ruse to keep up policies of pacification, control, and regulation. Before too long, aid and development institutions emerged on the scene. The Woman had become the key solution to problems in the majority world, and became the “pillar of development in the Global South,” in Verges’ words.
Here, the case began to be made for the inclusion of women in peace processes because their gender somehow predisposed their propensity for peace. No interrogation of why we need war at all. Here, women were to be the vanguards for the “development” of their communities because “educating a woman” and “ensuring her health” paved the way for educated and healthy families. No exploration of the need to shift away from these stereotypical roles that baked women’s participation into limited frames and excluded people identifying across the SOGIESC spectrum altogether. Here, indigenous women were expected to bear the emotional labour of fixing climate change. Not a whisper about addressing the extractive and polluting industries that exacerbate climate change. Here, women could be hailed for multitasking. But no one would think twice about the unfair burdens of care and labour that fall on a woman’s shoulders just because.
Verges calls this Civilizational Feminism. As she explains, racialized women are welcomed into the fold of civilizational feminists on the condition that they align with the White feminist agenda and interpretation of women’s rights. Women from the majority world demonstrate clearly that the contradictions produced by imperialism and capitalism cannot be resolved through “integration, parity, and diversity.”
Feminist foreign policy in its current form, has emerged from this platform of civilizational feminism. Pinkwashing’s cousin has officially arrived on the scene: Purplewashing. Here, we’re adding the word “feminist” where we once added “women.” No effort was made to BE feminist. Here, “feminist foreign policies” are considered the pioneering efforts of Global North-led White feminist leadership. Not a word is mentioned about the number of women’s movements across the majority world that have been practicing feminist foreign policy for generations now.
With 16 countries either having adopted or committing to adopt a feminist foreign policy at various points since in time since 2014, there is a real danger that this limited framing – reminiscent of Helga Hernes’ (1987) concept of state feminism – is well on its way to become a “new standard of civilization,” in the powerful words of Maria Paulina Rivera Chavez. What we see called feminist foreign policies have come to be without any attempt to interrogate power or even the idea of what it might mean for a state - whose origins are rooted in Eurocentric developments - to claim to be feminist. The foremost question that remains unanswered is: Whose feminism gets to be centered in an imbalanced foreign policy dynamic where a more powerful state enacts its power on a less powerful one? Without exploring this question and its implications, universalisms are created. How does perpetrating this universalism differ from colonialism?
We owe it to ourselves to commit to decolonization. Calling a foreign policy feminist and doing nothing feminist in implementing it is only a one-way ticket into keeping systemic and structural violence alive. As Chela Sandoval says in the Methodology of the Oppressed, "Indeed, without making this kind of metamove, any 'liberation' or social movement eventually becomes destined to repeat the oppressive authoritarianism from which it is attempting to free itself, and become trapped inside a drive for truth that ends only in producing its own brand of dominations."
References:
Falquet, J. (2011). Analyzing globalization from a feminist perspective. Travail, genre et societes, 25(1), 81-98.
Helga Hernes (1987). Welfare State and Woman Power: Essays in state feminism, Norwegian University Press.
Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the Oppressed. University of Minnesota Press.
Vergès, F., (2021). A decolonial feminism. London: Pluto Press.
