Feminists must check the conservatives within


Date: January 1, 1970
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The African Women’s Movement must look within for the elements that have thrown a spanner into the wheels of progress.

In the face of the rightwing-swing of the social and political pendulum, and the fear that the HIV and AIDS pandemic has unleashed within heterosexual relationships, African women are once again learning how to be “seen and not heard”.

The tyranny of conformity is baring its fangs with impunity in the lives of women globally, and the manipulation of women’s fears and hesitancies is beginning to have the desired impact on the pace and content of the African women’s Movement.

The appeal to women’s “reasonableness” is actually very seductive. Women have been well-schooled to feel that their interests should come last, that they exist only to serve others, and struggling for personal freedoms in a situation where everything is already so dire, is both personally and intellectually taxing.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that many among us, many who once proclaimed themselves “feminists” and “radicals”, are quietly slipping away to focus on lucrative careers as “gender consultants”, instead of taking up positions at the front-line of the battle against patriarchy.

Some of the most strident and sinister attacks on “rash feminist behavior” comes from the “consultancy divas”, who also are often quick to warn against the threats that radical feminism poses to the so-called gains made by women.

Among many doyens of the African women’s Movement we find deep-seated and pervasive conservatism: women who have used the Movement as a stepping stone to fancy jobs in the UN system or to other sites in the international capitalist system.

These women are now the gatekeepers of deeply reactionary politics, and it is within their ranks that the new challenges facing the African women’s Movement must be identified.

One of the greatest challenges to the Movement is “gender mainstreaming”. The rightwing patriarchal project’s coercion of silence encompasses “gender mainstreaming” which has two ideological aims: to make gender equality manageable through small concessions to women and girls by tinkering with key patriarchal institutions; and, by taking the anger and fire out of feminist politics by representing feminists as extremist, unreasonable and frustrated individuals who will never be satisfied until the society is “destroyed”.

The continent’s “experts” on gender training and mainstreaming serve as the link between the women’s Movement and the state in almost every African country. They control the flow of resources between the state and donor communities.

The donors are, of course, only to relieve to hand funds over to a politically compliant female middle class that supports the impression that donor funds are “empowering” African women.

Our staid matrons also carefully tread the thin lines drawn by Northern donors on issues of reproductive health and sexuality; cautiously referring to difficult issues like abortion and sexual orientation only in moderate tones, and rarely, if ever, rocking the national or international boat.

Ultimately these women are no different from the male nationalists who occupy the neo-colonial state, tip-toeing around critical issues, always looking behind their shoulders, and never, never breaking free of the “ideological reservation” which the conservatives in the donor community and the international agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have constructed in their minds and ideas.

Occasionally, these ideological askaris are joined by newly arrived divas who proclaim their “feminism” with great fanfare – even as they frantically scramble up the ladder of social mobility, trampling with total disregard any feminist attempts to create truly innovative and radical feminist spaces.

Selectively using the rhetoric of feminist activism, they are driven mainly by unscrupulous greed for public recognition and acceptance by males in the state, as well as by the need to reassure the males with whom they live that they are acceptably “feminine”, and not the “dangerous” women that feminists have been constructed to be.

The new crowd silence any emerging voices that might cast them in disfavor with the state and donor agencies, while insisting that they understand issues of feminism and “gender activism” best.

Reactionary behavior is not new within the African women’s Movement. In fact, it is as old as the nationalism that informs its backward, reactionary politics. These women have gone about their opportunistic business without any real critique from feminists in the women’s Movement.

We have allowed a group of petty bourgeois women to define our politics in relation to the neo-colonial state; to decide what intellectual tools we use in understanding inequality and injustice. We even allow them to re-define the language we gave struggled so hard and long to find that speaks most deeply to the social and bodily violations that confront us.

Everywhere these days we see evidence of the toned down language of “gender awareness” that reduces radical feminist politics to neat, manageable and unthreatening “issues” on the “development agenda”.

Herstorically the African women’s Movement is largely an outcome of the feminist energies and courage in which we have invested these past decades. We have sought to set ourselves apart from the status quo, and formed what aspired to be an autonomous movement – a movement that refused to act on behalf of the state in undertaking surveillance over women’s sexuality and other life choices.

How we lost the ownership of our Movement to a clique of rightwing divas, whose collusion with the neocolonial state has pushed our Movement into a cul-de-sac, is the fundamental reason why we have to revisit the notion of Autonomy – and reclaim a political space and process that rightfully belongs to us as feminists across the continent and the world.

Dr. Patricia McFadden is a feminist activist and writer.

This article is part of the GEM Opinion and Commentary Service that provides views and perspectives on current events.

janine@genderlinks.org.za for more information.


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