This
special issue contains four articles that deal with women's movement
activism in Australia, Africa and Indonesia. This international
perspective sheds light on the claim by many feminist academics in the
west claim that feminism 'has become little more than a blip in the
march of economic neo-liberalism', to use Lyn Segal's (1991:1) phrase.
Similar claims have been made by Barbara Epstein (2001:2) for the
United States and Belinda Probert (2002:7) for Australia.
Sarah
Maddison's contribution to this issue is a timely rejoinder to these
doom-sayers. She argues that young women, many of whom do not call
themselves feminists, are in fact holding the space open for the
resurgence of a strong women's movement some time in the future.
Maddison continues the discussion of feminism and generation raised in
Outskirts number 8, by exploring potential fruitful connections between
generations of feminists. She offers the example of a group of young
mothers trained in politically aware activism by older feminists:
The Young Women Who Are Parents Network are part of a unique program in
which the staff who work with the network recognise that if these
extremely disadvantaged young women tried to take on the world as
activists without any training or support they would be setting them up
to fail. Therefore the work of the Network takes place within the
context of a training program and ongoing, structured support.
By
contrast, the
Cross-Campus Women's Network, who one would assume, have
feminist scholars at their fingertips, struggle to make political and
moral sense of their issues, which range from improving safety on
campus to supporting women outworkers in developing countries. Working
without any interaction with an older generation of feminists who have
also grappled with these issues, these young feminists may well be
burned out by their attempts to grapple with 'the "postsocialist"
struggle to avoid an either/or choice between a social politics of
class or equality and a cultural politics of identity or difference'.
Maddison concludes that 'There is a clear challenge here for older,
more experienced activists to find ways of supporting the activism
being practised by contemporary young women'.
Elaine Dowd
provides a third case study of gender politics in Australia with her
discussion of the impact of Western Australian legislation on the
rights of sex workers in Perth. Indeed, Dowd argues that the
Prostitution Act 2000 (WA) infringes the rights of all women in the
community. For example,
any woman who is suspected of an
intention to engage in an act of prostitution can, quite legally, be
held down by one or more male police officers while her vagina and anus
are searched by a male doctor. This ä could legitimately happen to any
woman who happened to be standing on a street corner waiting for a
friend or a taxi.
The move-on provisions of the legislation
debar sex workers from geographical access to outreach projects, a
needle and syringe exchange centre,
Women's Health Care House, and the
WA Sex Workers Agency. Dowd provides a trenchant analysis of feminist
scholars' obligations to accord sex workers the same support and human
rights as they would accord women suffering heterosexual relationship
violence or sexual harassment at work. Dowd claims that feminist
scholars must work closely with sex workers to establish how their
human rights can best be protected:
The criteria which is
applied by some feminists in the struggle to improve the lives of
prostitute women compared with non-prostitute women is often not
consistent. Those women who 'choose' to marry rarely have to undergo
the same level of scrutiny that women who work as prostitutes must
endure despite the often financially motivated decision in either case.
My point is that sex work and marriage are intimately related and that
discussion of prostitution as sexual abuse must always recognise the
similarities with the institution of marriage.
Maddison
describes how the
Cross-Campus Women's Network in New South Wales is
silenced in their attempt to grapple with difference. Edith Miguda
suggests that, when western feminists discuss difference, it is not
themselves that they silence, but the 'othered' women. Miguda addresses
the marginalisation from western feminist writings of the millions of
African women who are involved in African women's/feminist movements.
African women were first distorted in European anthropological and
missionary writings, then in Africanist writings reacting to and
attempting to correct these colonialist distortions, and finally in
feminist writing, which 'largely employs lenses coloured by its western
orientation, leading to misrepresentation of African women and their
experiences'. Ironically, just as rush 'to "give voice" to women of the
Third world', western feminists silence these women in this very
action. Miguda offers some new questions and approaches for western
feminism if African women are put at the centre of analysis.
While
western commentators claim that feminism is in decline, the women's
movements in many Asian countries appear to be expanding in scope and
effect. On International Women's Day
this year, equal opportunity
legislation came into force in Taiwan (pers. comm. Chen-Yen Ku). There
has been a ferment of legislative change in the Republic of Korea,
including outlawing violence against women and promoting equal
opportunities (Chai 1997:176; Kuninobu 2000:2091). In Hong Kong in
1996, a statutory Equal Opportunities Commission was established; a
Women's Commission was established in January 2001 (Ng and Ng 2002:7).
Women leaders and women's groups have been prominent in protesting the
Indonesian government's response to the economic crisis (Sen
1999:14-15; Suryochondro 2000:232,236).
Rachel Rinaldo explores
Indonesian women's movements, puzzling over the question concerning how
this apparently independent and 'feminist' movement could rise so
quickly out of the highly government regulated women's movement under
Suharto's New Order. Rinaldo suggests that the middle class woman was
invoked and created as a political actor under the previous regime, and
she was thus given a legitimate public role and space:
The
New Order promulgated particular notions of gender and family, reliant
on a construction of male and female as binary opposites, belonging to
separate spheres. Nevertheless, by establishing the social category of
middle-class women, the state's mobilization of women may have laid the
groundwork for renewed women's movements in the 1990s and beyond.
Furthermore,
whatever the intentions of the state, women were not merely passive
absorbers of messages to be loyal wives, but adapted and resisted these
prescriptions in various ways. However, as Rinaldo goes on to explore,
contemporary Indonesian women's movements are now dealing with the
legacy of a focus on Java and on middle-class women, seeking ways to
incorporate women and their specific needs elsewhere in Indonesia.
Issues of difference are preoccupying the activist women of Indonesia,
just as issues of difference provoke African feminists and young
Australian feminists.
Together these articles suggest that the
death of feminism has been exaggerated. They also describe synergies
between theory and practice. Feminist scholarship continues to grapple
with the problems of feminist politics, just as women's activism
continues to search for ways to improve the position of women around
the world. This is not to deny that the space for feminism is
increasingly threatened by the reversal of gains made by women's
liberation and its successors in the west, and by growing global income
inequality and strains towards economic rationalism and individualism
in almost every nation in the world. But these articles support the
claim that feminist politics and theory is still being practised across
the globe in efforts to understand and change the world for women.
