Against White Feminism

by Against White Feminism (retail) (epub)

  But the legal consequence of applying the law indiscriminately was that it opened up a loophole to be exploited by the perpetrators of honor killings. When spousal homicide occurs, for example, other members of the family (since perpetrator and victim often belong to the same family) could step in and forgive the killer, hence erasing the crime itself. Anti–honor killing statutes in Pakistan have tried to undo the loophole but have had little or no success because murderers insist that the crime was not actually an honor killing (and hence an exception to the blood-money law) but simply a garden variety murder.

  Honor crimes are one of Western journalists’ favorite subjects when reporting on the Muslim world. The assumption is that telling these stories somehow works to end honor crimes in general, ensuring the safety of others who defy their families by raising the profile of the issue, putting it onto the international agenda. But the fact that honor killings are still occurring in Pakistan, drawing protests in Jordan and rising in India, suggests this premise is faulty at best, actively misleading at worst.25 On the other hand, it is easy to see how such storytelling benefits the white Western journalists who engage in it (leading to the same kind of financial and reputational gains discussed in Chapter 4), and how it reassures white Western readers and “saviors” of their own good fortune.

  Any honest analysis of honor crimes would need to consider the social and material circumstances that foster intimate violence against women—in hundreds of thousands of cases of male-partner violence in the United States and United Kingdom, as well as in foreign lands. To take the example of Afghanistan, we need to begin by acknowledging a society whose familial and institutional structures have been broken by five decades of Soviet and U.S. foreign intervention. Romantic marital “choice” is unavailable to nearly anyone, male or female, in Afghan society. Instead, marriage is generally seen as a means of cementing frayed communal relations in a war-torn land.

  In Jordan, the fight against honor killings has focused on a repeal of a law exempting from penalty men who discover wives or female relatives committing adultery, and who may have killed or injured one or both of them.26 Repealed in March 2017, the law that had been on the books was actually taken from the Syrian Penal Code, which in turn is based on the French Napoleonic Penal Code, which shaped development of laws throughout the Middle East and North Africa.27 It was the French, then, who instituted leniency in cases of honor killing, while also giving it the charming nickname of crime passionelle.

  The Jordanian reforms from March 2017 also did away with the “fit of fury” defense—comparable to the “heat of passion” defense permissible in voluntary manslaughter cases in many jurisdictions of the United States—which mitigates punishments in honor-killing cases. (Judges are still permitted to consider pleas by the victim’s family for reduced sentences for the perpetrators, who are often from the same family.) The irony of what was done in Jordan, a country that had been considered by Human Rights Watch to have a high rate of honor crimes, is that similar provisions continue to remain on the books in the United States. In many U.S. jurisdictions, murder defendants may invoke the “heat of passion” defense, whose validity is judged by similar criteria as the Jordanian law and, if accepted, means more lenient penalties.

  The heat-of-passion defense requires an inquiry into whether the defendant was “obscured” or “disturbed” such that a reasonable person, sufficiently provoked, could act from passion rather than judgment: the most common example being the sudden discovery of spousal adultery. Some jurisdictions apply the standard of “extreme emotional disturbance,” which downgrades the charge of murder to manslaughter if there has been extreme emotional disturbance for which there is reasonable explanation, again such as discovery of a woman’s infidelity.

  All of these defenses help to exonerate male perpetrators of violence against women. Legal scholars have noted that the substance of heat-of-passion defenses is similar to those offered up by domestic abusers who batter their wives.28

  Westerners read honor killing as endemic to “foreign” cultures and proof of their particular barbarity while continuing to permit heat-of-passion defenses for certain murderers at home. Violence against women in “other” countries is an indictment of religion, culture, and the particular depravity of the people, while the same violence in the United States is considered an aberration, particular to the individual who commits the crime, rather than to a nationally endemic pattern of misogyny and toxic masculinity. But acknowledging that “honor killing” is comparable to violent crimes perpetuated against women everywhere in the world would cast into doubt one of the main moral edifices of the imperial endeavor. It would necessitate the sort of scrutiny of the violence of white men in which white patriarchal powers have no interest. Instead, “honor killing” must be an incomprehensible, exotic phenomenon driven by mysterious cultural imperatives.

  Like the nineteenth-century preoccupation with Hindu sati, twenty-first-century Muslim honor killings must be seen as uniquely evil in the eyes of the West. Yet not only does this characterization demote feminists of color as passive, unable to curtail their uniquely violent men, it also does a tremendous disservice to white women, obscuring the true extent of the poison of gender-based violence and its tacit acceptance by legal systems rooted in English Common Law and the Napoleonic Code.

  Certain “cultural crimes” (honor killings, female genital cutting, child marriage, and so on) are now set apart from universal, “normal” crimes by the implication of a wider cultural complicity in non-white cultures, because indigenous feminists of color failed to eradicate them. White women, the superior feminists, we are expected to assume, have been able to transform their culture in a way that these other women have not. Yet given that the moral architecture of colonialism depends on the casting of the native as morally inferior, it is essential to question those assumptions. The very idea of cultural crimes specific to native peoples, and laden with a specifically heightened moral disgust, allowed colonists to paint local populations as inherently morally abject. Thus coercive and exploitative colonial intervention could be recast as a benevolent and necessary civilizing presence.

  Like sati and honor killing, the practice of female genital cutting fosters moral outrage in which the West stands on the right side and anyone trying to introduce the complexities of the issue into the debate is discredited as a secret supporter of the practice. Likewise, there can be no nuance in the discussion—for instance, questioning whether the practice of a small nick or cut for cultural or religious rituals not wildly distinct from the traditional practice of a bris for male Jewish infants is the moral equivalent of full clitoridectomies. Nor is the epidemic of privileged American teenage girls cutting themselves generally seen as a symptom of a barbaric culture in the same way. And even though the practice involves a tiny percentage of Arab and African women, President Trump and his allies used it to call out feminist opponents of the Muslim ban, like Elizabeth Warren, as hypocrites.

  In her essay “Who Defines ‘Mutilation’?” Courtney Smith challenges the “hegemony of Western feminist discourse” surrounding female genital cutting (FGC) by conducting an analysis of what a group of Senegalese women thought about breast implantation versus what a group of American women thought of FGC.29 The comparison is directed at pointing out how much cultural frames influence our judgment of various practices (and not toward creating equivalence between a harmful practice carried out on minors versus one that is usually chosen by adult women). As Smith describes it, both groups were a bit confounded by each other’s choices, American interviewees seeing FGC as a “castration of women” and an effort to “keep them down,” and Senegalese women saying about breast implantation that “no man would want his wife to do that.” But there were also women in both groups who could see the other’s perspective. One American interviewee observes, “When I think about it, plastic surgery is kind of similar to genital cutting. Sort of like, you are cutting your body to fit a mold, to define who you are through p
hysical attributes. A lot of women who are older get botox—they want to be attractive and beautiful and young again. Who told you that that is how to do it?”30 Similarly, a Mandinka woman interviewed in Douba in Senegal said, “In Senegal, excision is similar to breast implantation because something is changed or taken away from the woman in both of them.” Even more interesting was the statement of a development worker who was engaged in spreading information about the adverse health consequences of FGC who said, “If there are health consequences, there are health consequences. There aren’t Western consequences and African consequences and there aren’t American women and African women. There are just women whose bodies are being transformed.”

  Other scholars, like the anthropologist Saida Hodzic, have pointed out how the Western zeal for manufacturing “modern” African subjects often lies behind the discourse on FGC, promising/positing that the elimination of FGC would make African countries like Ghana (where Hodzic did her research) fully modern. One of Hodzic’s discussions with a representative of a reproductive-rights NGO in Ghana illustrates the misunderstandings that define Western vehemence on this score. This particular NGO had been in charge of providing “sensitization” training on FGC. Included in the training are questions like “Why Call it female genital mutilation?” and the answer “The World Health Organization has a definition and we all must use it.”31

  Pushing this kind of “sensitization” training, Hodzic says, requires NGOs to desensitize themselves to the actual needs and views of rural communities so that they can push a paradigm and moral binary that is not based in their reality. When she meets Olivia, an NGO worker, a member of the Ghana Women’s Welfare Association who works directly with rural populations, and asks her about the biggest problem facing women in poor and rural parts of Ghana, Olivia immediately responds with “economic problems.” Women like Olivia, however, have few options because donors prefer funding educational workshops rather than the redistribution of material resources. One NGO, “Rural Help Integrated,” chose to pursue a “holistic” approach and ordered a millet-grinding machine for use by the rural women—a decision questioned by a United Nations Population Fund, who asserted that there was no connection at all between reproductive health and the machine. According to Hodzic, “Had rural women been included in the conversation, they would have vigorously disagreed.” The machines greatly reduced the hours the women had to spend manually grinding millet, allowing them to rest and regain their strength, thus ensuring better health outcomes.32

  As Courtney Smith writes at the end of her parallel study of Senegalese and American women encountering each other’s views on FGC and breast augmentation, it is crucial to create dialogue between cultures. She advocates for “the possibility that we will learn from our encounters with other human societies to recognize things about ourselves that we had not seen before.”33 Dialogue occurs when both sides of a conversation feel that they are, at least to some extent, on equal ground. The enduring frame of white saviordom, and the belief that white Westerners are in charge of eliminating practices like FGC, makes it nearly impossible to inhabit this kind of conversation.

  One example of the ways in which this racist framework blocks meaningful communication and progress is seen in Sara Johnsdotter’s study of compulsory genital cutting cases of Swedish-African girls.34 Sweden was the first country in the world to criminalize FGC in 1982, and has been extraordinarily interested in cracking down on parents suspected of continuing the practice since then, even though the number of cases in Europe as a whole and Sweden (and also the home countries of most of the suspects) are very low.

  According to a law passed in Sweden in 1997, a girl or young child can be subjected to a genital exam without the knowledge and permission of the child’s legal guardian if they are suspected of having undergone FGC. Looking through police files of 122 FGC cases, Johnsdotter found numerous examples of incorrect reporting. In one case, a teacher noticed that a six-year-old child in her class was taciturn and secretive after a visit to Somalia. She immediately reported this as a suspected FGC to the authorities. The parents, afraid of being prosecuted, agreed to an examination. Two gynecologists who examined the girl found that her labia minora were missing. The prosecutor was willing to press charges, but when the girl was examined again by a pediatrician, that doctor pointed out that the child’s labia were completely intact. The prosecutor was so incensed that he accused the parents of having taken a different girl to the exam.

  In another case, Johnsdotter reported, a father was nearly sent to jail because his daughter had had a car accident in which the genitalia was outwardly damaged, and subsequent surgeries made one of the nurses suspect that FGC had taken place. The racism and xenophobia in these compulsory exams and the racist inability of Swedish doctors to tell the difference between one or another Somali child is simply accepted.

  A 2018 study of FGC in Africa shows that the numbers of girls/young women who underwent the procedure have fallen from 71 percent to 8 percent in the past twenty years, owing largely to the work done by indigenous African women.35 Countries like Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom, however, continue to use the practice as a means of typecasting migrants traveling to and from Africa.

  In 2016, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in collaboration with the U.K. government, initiated “Operation Limelight,” an effort to crack down on FGC at British and American airports. Designed by the Homeland Security Investigation’s “Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center,” Operation Limelight seeks to “bring awareness to FGM and deter its practice by educating the public about the risks and penalties associated with it.”36 Conveniently, the data used by ICE relies on old studies and shoddy methodological procedures.37 The statistics, which were referenced in the press statements about the initiation of Operation Limelight, all originate in a paper titled “Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting in the United States: Updated Estimates of Women and Girls at Risk, 2012.”38 The paper takes the number of female immigrants from various African and Middle Eastern countries and multiplies it with the rates of FGC prevalent in those countries to conclude that the risk of FGC in the United States had increased threefold since 1990, with more than half a million women and girls at risk.

  Operation Limelight sets out a false imperative for intrusive examinations of African immigrants. According to an ICE press release, agents who have received FGC-related training are stationed at large airports, where they select individuals from “high risk” countries to provide with “informational brochures” about FGC, with the intention of deterring them from carrying out “vacation cutting” (taking girls to receive the procedure in countries where it is legal). In another press release, the modus operandi seemed a bit clearer: “Agents engaged approximately 700 individuals in the international terminal destined for Dubai, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Cairo, and San Salvador. Approximately 40% of passengers were traveling with children. Flight crew and airline employees in the international areas were also provided materials for additional outreach.”39

  These interactions may seem innocuous to non-immigrants, but they can be fraught experiences of powerlessness for immigrants who likely have no option but to answer the questions posed by ICE officials, do not know if a physical examination is forthcoming, and also do not know whether the exchange will have immigration consequences for them.40 Understanding the terror of these interactions requires that white women get past their own privilege and learn to empathize with women who do not have the power to say no to such intrusions.

  Few details exist of what sort of questions are asked of these people or the fear among girls and women that they will have their genitalia examined by ICE agents. ICE is, however, quite proud of having won the “World Class Policing Award”; a photo from the event, held in London, shows four white people beaming as they hold the award they have won for their alleged concern for the health of African women and girls.41 Meanwhile, needless to say, the affected communities were not consulted or invol
ved in determining what programs would be most effective in bringing about desired change.

  The fact that these programs are not community-generated or -directed means that the level of intrusion that is considered acceptable in policing against FGC is never passed through any sort of community consensus, let alone consent. Anyone who is Muslim or Black or Brown or Somali, who may critique this sort of airport thuggery by ICE officials allegedly “protecting” the genitalia of Brown and Black girls, is automatically tossed into the pile of secret supporters of the practice. Since the culture that permits FGC is itself considered bad and community members automatically complicit unless they insist otherwise, it is only ICE agents of an increasingly white-nationalist state who can do the job. It is important to note that there is no public-health dimension to this intervention. If it were truly a concern about minor girls being forced into this practice, an appropriate agency to be tasked with the matter would Health and Human Services, not Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The possibility of the practice thus becomes the basis of racial profiling and demonization of immigrants from certain countries over others.

  There is no clear evidence of what exactly ICE was doing with FGC suspects, but there are cases of alleged forced hysterectomies performed on migrant women in detention. Exerting dominion over Black and Brown bodies to instigate fear in female migrants and asylum-seekers, the Trump administration weaponized a contemporary version of the forced genital examinations carried out by British administrators in the Indian colonies. Officially, ICE is authorized to test for STDs among detainees. In late summer of 2020, a whistleblower at the Irwin Correctional Facility in Ocilla, Georgia, filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and the warden of the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC), about an unusual number of hysterectomies being carried out on the center’s detainees. The procedures were allegedly performed outside the facility, at the nearby Irwin County Hospital, on immigrant women, many of them unable to speak any English, who did not authorize their surgeries with proper informed consent; rather, they were treated as if communication was unnecessary. When they awoke, many were confused about what had been done to them. Neither was it easy to figure it out.