American Literature, Arab Students and politics

In July 2008 Barack Obama toured the Middle East in a preemptive move to engage support for his presidential campaign. For voters, Obama’s tour of the Middle East signaled a candidate committed to change and who recognized America’s ongoing interests in that region. However Obama’s visit did not open a new dialogue with previous enemies but rather proclaimed the invincibility of America’s friendship with Israel, and confirmed support for Western-backed regimes such as those in Afghanistan. This tour was received somewhat differently in the Arab world. The Saudi Gazette noted that Obama did not visit an

‘Arab country that would demonstrate that Muslim opinion matters to him.  Not just …      Muslims who lost family members to American firepower, but Muslims who are eager for         normal relations with the United States.’

Rebarbative scepticism notwithstanding, Obama’s nomination seized Middle Eastern imaginations. Obama’s liability in the States, his seeming otherness –multicultural, multiracial background, religious background – made him an object of curiosity and even of cautious hope to some in the Middle East.

Political opinion in the Arab World is far from uniform. Governments may attest political alliance, but the populace often decry and demonize the actions of this world power. 2009’s Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey confirmed a persistent antipathy toward the United States, albeit one which has softened somewhat. 77 percent of respondents showed  a “very unfavorable” or “somewhat unfavorable” attitude toward the United States, down from 83 percent in 2008.  Yet the appetite for American culture in Arab nations is insatiable. The perceived power and prestige associated with America maps onto its literature, which comprises part of many undergraduate degrees.

I want to question the paradoxical status of American Literature in an Arab University through a discussion of teaching American Literature in Qatar University during the presidential campaign of Barrack Obama. As Marwan Obediet has noted, Arab students connect the values and power of America’s international power with its literature and thus make value judgments which are syntheses of both aesthetic and personal politics. I will briefly touch on the ways in which political, religious and gender ideologies effect the study of literature.  Teaching English Literature in colonial eras was arguably concerned with imperialist dominance through the elevation of a transcendental ‘literary’ canon. English education conferred status in, reproducing a body of knowledge found in the colonizing power and displacing the reading subject’s identity. Edward Said has reflected on the alienating process of this form of knowledge, and the distorted self-image created in students. Yet the study of literature in the contemporary ‘post-colonial’ Middle East is a radically different context from the twentieth-century of Said. American Literature carries an ideological freight in the Middle East which is marked by current politics in a fashion that English Literature no longer is.

Qatar’s Education System: Islam and American Values

American Literature is a compulsory course ar Qatar University. This  course raises questions about cross cultural communication,  belief, and a structural discrepancy between the university as an Islamic institution and the university as a locus for critical thinking in general.

Qatar exemplifies the Arab world’s complexity of relationship with America. An oil-rich Gulf state, in 2009 Qatar became the world’s wealthiest country per capita. Since independence from Britain Qatar has formed close political and economic relations with the United States. Its proximity to Iraq made it a key base during the Iraq war, and America continues to have a military presence. Qatar University is the state University, founded in 1973, and responsible for the education of the majority of the country’s small population. University classes are segregated by gender, and the student population is predominantly female.

The University’s educational policy is based around Islamic principles, with a core curriculum designed to emphasize ‘Qatari, Arabic and Islamic identity.’  Its remit thus is twofold –to educate and develop key skills in its students and to simultaneously inculcate Islamic values in the context of a pan-Arab community. This pan-Arab vision is reflected in the University’s students, with around 30 different nationalities represented in the undergraduate body. National diversity makes the classroom context much more varied given the cultural difference between students. Yet this is counterbalanced by a shared religion. That American Literature is a compulsory course in a University committed to Islamic values at once complicates the selection of Literature to be taught and raises questions as to the role of the university in habilitating cultural values in accordance with political outcomes.

Qatar’s educational system has undergone a series of reforms designed to improve its academic standards, and to introduce specifically Western structure into its schools and Universities. This includes the privatization of the school system and increased usage of English, rather than Arabic as the mode of instruction. .As Frantz Fanon noted, ‘to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.’ For many Qataris, and many Arabs resident in Qatar, this is a source of profound cultural anxiety. Qatar’s bilingualism is indicative of a cultural bifurcation that begins in school and is intensified at tertiary level where many instructors are American. The ‘special relationship’ between Qatar and the United States is encapsualted by the 2003 creation of  ‘Education City’ by minister Sheikha Mozha. This comprises a ‘state-of-the-art campus’  offering degrees from several U.S. universities including … Georgetown University’s …School of Foreign Service, Texas A&M University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Carnegie Mellon University.’ The development of tertiary education is synonymous with the import of  American university ‘brands’ into the Qatari market. The high status given to American institutions complicates Qatar’s educational market, appearing  a form of educational colonization at variance with Qatar’s Arab-nationalist aspirations. Courses such as ‘the Problem of God’ at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service explicitly challenge Qatar’s Islamic tradition. Qatar’s educational system is arguably not merely colonial but divisive.

The centrality of American-style education and the governmental tolerance for ‘anti-Islamic’ pedagogies coexists with the country’s rapid assumption of Western, specifically American, consumerist habits. The explosion of American shopping brands, fast food and entertainment culture instantiate the attraction of American exports. Yet despite the burgeoning of such lifestyles, Qatari society remains fundamentally resistant to Western democratic ideology. Joseph Nye’s concept of ‘soft power’ is helpful in unpacking the paradox of this Gulf state’s relationship with the United States. Economic affiliation is mutually beneficial to both Qatar and America, and the States finds in Qatar a ready market for much of goods. Though Qatar may ‘buy into’ American capitalism, the power relationship is neither simple nor unidirectional. American power is manifested in several forms which produce varying and paradoxical responses. America’s ‘soft power’ resources are its culture; political values; and foreign policies. The ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict distances Qatar from American foreign policy and its growing involvement in the Arab League demonstrates a degree of political autonomy missing from other Gulf  countries. It is popular cultural and commercial goods, which seem America’s strongest form of soft power, as Qataris partake of America’s commercial productions. However there is a discrepancy between the resources that might stimulate cultural attraction and actual changes in behavior: this is what Steven Lukes calls ‘the vehicle fallacy’  – or the confusion of products with power. The allure of consumerism might seem evidence of American power but it fails to penetrate or effectively alter the conditions – mental, social, religious and otherwise – of Qatari society. The study of literature at University is perceived as distinct from popular culture. The power of Literature, and its role in a compulsory curriculum produces a very different response to the pleasure of consumerism. With these preliminary remarks in mind I will briefly outline students’ one approach to teaching American Literature I have pursued.

Reading American Literature in Qatar

The American Literature course I designed for Qatar University replaced an outdated syllabus based around canonical male figures. American Literature had last been taught as an optional course in 2003, and was reintroduced as a compulsory component in 2008. As non-American faculty, I felt that my own distance from the American Imperialist worldview offered the students an hegemonic literature. I wished to emphasize the role of ‘American Literature’ in the difficult and complex creation  of the United States of America as a nation with its own cultural myths and ideologies. To this end, the first class brainstormed what students associated with ‘America’ as a concept. Unsurprisingly the students produced a welter of terms from popular culture, of brand names and TV shows. But they also associated it with key concepts, such as freedom and democracy. Further discussion opened up the disparities in the student body: for some students America was a symbol of meritocratic potential, a place where one could make one’s fortune and find oneself. For others, ‘the land of the free’ was, to quote one ‘completely ironic…to me, it is the greatest prison on earth.’

Being required to study American Literature provoked antipathy. It also emphasized the distance between my Western liberal presuppositions, and the belief systems of my students. If the study of Literature in English is tarnished by Orientalism, the political instability of the Middle East threatens to create conditions for Occidentalism – a perspective which occludes literary value and to refuse the understanding of a culture on its own terms. To mitigate the moral rejection of the literature the syllabus increased concentration on historical / political contexts, and the diversity of identities to be represented. The course opened with the conquest of the Americas and the rhetorical uses of literature in justifying colonialism. America’s historical status as colony was one which helped students grasp the notion of historical change, to reconceptualise America as land itself subject to occupation.

I witnessed the production of unease due to certain subjects and the way in which aesthetic values were negated by moral judgments. The ‘liberating’ potential with which arts professors often credit their subject-matter is compromised by contexts of reception and study. Problems with American literature is partly due to alien attitudes celebrated, promoted, examined and decried in American Literature. There is a strong  antipathy to many core themes of American Literature; such as self-determination, sexual liberation and gender equality. Students interpreted the literature as being simply ‘against our culture’. The perceived permissiveness of American Literature is not confined to students; Layla Al-Maleh has noted that Arab or muslim teachers implement ‘a self-imposed censorship…[in which] highly controversial subjects are quickly excluded.’ As students united ‘by their Muslim faith’ this encounter was productive of sometimes intense discomfort and indeed conflict. The erotic content of Whitman’s Song of Myself was particularly difficult – to compromise on the content would lose the revolutionary aspect of Whitman’s verse and would distort literary history. Emphasizing American historical contexts assisted in justifying the inclusion of literature that might be sensitive to attack.

The politics of reading, interpretation and criticism is a loaded activity. As a Western Professor, I too have my values and beliefs. Like my students I believe in the validity of those beliefs. Like most academics of my generation I am aware of the negative and disempowering effects of colonial assumptions in teaching literature in once occupied countries. Professors should attempt to engage a type of non-coercive knowledge,  not proclaiming the superiority of American values, but enabling understanding, knowledge and critical thinking. The required nature of the course produced a certain resistance in the students’ approach, actively detracting from America’s strong ‘soft power’ appeal. I attempted to encourage students to think of the class as a triangulated encounter between themselves, myself, and literature. However, rather than neutralizing the political content of literature, I encouraged students to trace the defining myths of the American Dream from Emerson to Whitman and Fitzgerald. They were to assess the rhetorical success of literature in mobilizing desire, interest, admiration and literary skill through close analysis of the texts. Rather than conduct the cultural encounter as one of objectivity, we attempted to contextualize and to analyze the rhetoric and imagery of literary texts alongside our own acknowledged positions.

The semester’s coincidence with Obama’s campaign for the presidency was felicitous. The American Dream – that nexus of idealization, self-belief and energy located in the individual – was vividly mobilized by Obama’s rhetoric. Obama’s international profile and the discourse surrounding his ethnicity and beliefs made him of great interest to the students. He embodied the attraction as well as a renovation of American values. The proximity of much of the political rhetoric to the literary works and to the themes of the course meant that students were able to connect the traditions of literature to present identities and see how literature and language is used to reflect and provoke change in a country.

By having students analyze the literary aspects of Obama’s acceptance speech  in 2008 students were able to appreciate its literary and rhetorical strategies. Having already read Emerson students were able to re-evaluate the power of speech rhythms and oratory in the creation of America’s national literature. The evangelical quality of Obama’s speech focused attention on the way political language utilizes transcendence in a way similar to sermons. Obama’s designation of his nation as a ‘place where all things are possible’ marked the highest point of his aspirations. This vision of the nation returned the students to their discussion of Harold Bloom on Emerson as ‘the prophet of the American Religion’. Obama’s representation insisted on the transformative power of hope and aspiration – ideals which students responded very positively toward. In speaking toward the ‘enemies’ of America, the students recognized the way in which rhetoric drew up divisions to assert its boundaries. In drawing on the narrative of oppression and exclusion of African Americans from the power Obama’s assumption of the voices of the excluded, specifically that of the underprivileged women, touched on issues of gender and the role of self-representation that the course had taken as a key theme, through an early class on Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and the poetry of Phillis Wheatley.

This led to a revitalized conception of the role of literature in culture, but also to a realization of how historical conditions affect the literary or rhetorical representations of an age. Obama’s acceptance speech used for practical criticism which attempted a historically sensitive reading of American Literary Culture. Through the appeal of a figure of soft power, the students were able to more sympathetically read the national mythology in a speech which celebrated the nation through the vision and strength of its individual members.

This explicitly political approach was a new one for the students who were previously accustomed to a more traditional, and less critical or participatory pedagogic method. Students were initially cautious about expressing their opinions due to the contentious nature of political discussion in a country with limited citizenship. Being able to discuss American politics became a means of developing critical thinking,  partly due to the  University as a site of special dispensation, and because of the adversarial reflex American literature produced. Rather than passively consuming a cultural commodity, American Literature as field of study ironically created a transfer of power to the students.  Resistance became reflexivity as students understood complexity of factors and appreciated the aesthetic or formal qualities of American literature more.

Linking pedagogy to politics was risky, but in this context produced very positive results. The University’s role as a cultural institution made students more conscious of the saturation of their culture with American elements, but also to reassess the various forms of American culture . Edward Said’s work has called into question the very possibility of a non-political scholarship. Pedagogy also is implicated in the critical task of ‘drawing attention to realities of power and authority that make texts possible’. American Texts read by Arab students partake of and are affected by the political situation between America and the Muslim world. Obama makes another crucial speech today, June 3^rd,  in Cairo, which continues to affirm his commitment to the Middle East. Whatever the rhetoric, Obama’s presence in the Middle East confirms that America will continue to matter to Arab readers in the foreseeable future.

---

Elegiac mode

Two deaths this week which deplete intellectual resources.  The first being respected ‘Queer’ theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick from breast cancer, and then today so-called cult author J.G. Ballard.

Both writers were provocative in their subject matter and style. Sedgwick’s preoccupation with the homosocial and homosexual male behaviours was groundbreaking; effectively kickstarting queer studies in the university, and whilst the latterday manifestations of that field have often been methodologically slapdash and often crass parodies of academia, Sedgwick was a formidable and stimulating intellect. I read ‘Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire’ (1985) and ‘Epistemology of the Closet’ (1990) whilst studying the nineteenth-century novel. And whilst those novels didn’t entrance me, Sedgwick’s writing did. Her work traced the contours of hidden desire in seemingly anodyne canonical works that I was too bolshy to be interested in at the time.  Her overt cameraderie for  homosexual men was also a rare and sympathetic trait in scholarly work, extending study of sexuality into masculinity’s invisible forms. Her observations on homosociality were amongst the most important for subsequent theorists, dissolving notions of straight(hah!)forward heterosexuality with her ‘universalizing view’ of sexuality where  ‘apparently heterosexual persons…are strongly marked by same-sex influences.’ That is, we never know what we’ll do next and sometimes we aren’t clear about why we’re doing certain things. Our responses to people, society and culture are bound up with our sexual desires and trying to detangle these desires into one form does not allay the force of those imperatives.  Following her work on male desire she was diagnosed with breast cancer and wrote about the result her mastectomy had upon her own construction of gender. Sedgwick, like the best academics, was motivated by issues that impacted on her life and which she felt deserved critical attention that would illuminate difficulties, make subsequent encounters clearer, less painful.  I kept meaning to read one of her later works, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003) but never got round to it. I will now.

Ballard was another controversialist. I read his ‘Drowned World’ (1962) and ‘The Concrete Island’ (1974) while a teenager but failed to get het up about the more famous works. These two works failed to fit into my emergent grasp of genre, being part science-fiction but somehow more sordid, leaner and a lot nastier. In short, more interesting. (Even than Ray Bradbury, I must admit.) Ballard’s early work has proved horribly prescient, in its environmental, psychosexual and economic dystopias. His fixation on the horror of alienated, affectless individuals trapped in faceless structures has been called ‘disaster capitalism’ – a byproduct of what Edward Luttwark calls the unregulated  ‘turbo- capitalism’ of the 1980s.  Ballard’s extension of Kafka’s bureaucracy rightly identified the power of capital to penetrate and transform individuals, even as it dehumanized them. Ballard too used his illness (prostrate cancer) as subject matter for his final work. His publisher had recently announced that a work provisionally entitled Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life would be forthcoming in the near future.

Only fair: Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

Blog for fair pay

This is particularly ticklish subject for me having discovered that my co-workers are being paid a nice slice more than me. This is, I suspect, partly due to the fact that I’m an ol’ single woman who obviously needs nothing (other than a husband and a sprog, of course, though I would prefer a publication right now) and who will put up with cr*p. Hmm. We’ll see about that. Working in the Middle East doesn’t help, given endemic sexism and a total absence of equal opportunities legistlation.  The government’s policy of Qatarisation means that the pay scale for nationals is well above that for foreign workers. Add in the racial hierarchy and you have a heady mix of prejudice and inequality.

It’s not like the West is the glittering palace of equity anyhow.  In the UK working women earn around 17% less per hour than their male counterparts.  Stateside, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay act is heinously overdue.  Even more depressing is that women’s lower pay is often ‘naturalised’ by commentators and employers who claim it is a product of women’s reproductive role, their desire for part-time or job-share, and lesser participation in the world of work. Or, that we’re just plain unambitious – but if we are we’re unnatural ‘b*tches’ who need to be taken down a peg or two. Grrr.

In education,  the Shouty Boys of academe get better pay packages while their female colleagues earn less (around 11% less) and still fail to make it to the highest ranks of their profession despite the supposed ‘feminization’ of university learning.  The ‘rewards’ of the Ivory tower never were gold suits and Crystal, but a decent standard of living should be every citizens’ right. Cherie Blair recently remarked that the global economic crisis  might prove a opportunity for women in business: apparently when the world markets are collapsing “people are more prepared to take a chance and give a woman a chance” . Blair’s peculiar perspective casts women into the overlooked saviours of consumerism, intervening to save the suits from themselves and turning the boardroom into a softer, “more diverse” environment. No grubby questions about cash, though: the lovely ladies of Cherie’s economic fantasy simply bestow their fragrant knowledge out of sheer christian love – not ruthless economic appetite. Sigh.  Given the elusiveness of basic pay equity throughout the boom years of capitalism, Blair’s prediction seems remarkably maldroit. I suspect that the recession simply offers another opportunity to exploit women’s labour,  and to make sure they’re bloody grateful for being let into the world of work.  We can’t have them getting too uppity, after all…

AND FURTHER: – This from the New York Times. The economic downturn camouflages sexual discrimination.

Back to the future, please

I don’t think Northern Ireland could be clearer about how it feels about dissident violence. 

Knickers

Underwear is big business in the Middle East and Gulf. Underneath the abaya are women who wear not not merely exceedingly fashionable clothes, but garments that accentuate, display, eroticise the female body. Garments that are, frankly, sexy. The dynamic of invitation and prohibition that the abaya creates is intensely sexual. The few parts of the female body that protude or are visible through the material of the abaya  -  shoes,  hands, sometimes a face, perhaps a lock of hair, eyes -  garner an incredible charge. As a result these physically dislocated items are often presented seductively: heavy make-up framing the eyes, the most improbably fetishistic (and deeply impractical) footwear, gold jewellery and most ubiquitous of all, the use of perfume to mark the place where a body might be.

All this is weird enough, especially explaining the meaning of  ‘painted women’ to a group of virgins with slap just short of Julian Clary, but when I moved here I was amazed at the number of lingerie shops in the Gulf. Every mall has at least two, if not more, selling saucy knickers and underwear. Not the puritanical kind favoured by the English (the joys of M&S) or even the good ol’ Catholic kind (what my Mammy calls ‘kidney warmers’ which generally cover not merely a generous Irish buttock, but extend up over your hips, finishing in an elasticated twang just below your belly button), but raunchy, sexy, good-god-what-is-that-hole-for kind of lingerie.

And Qatari women seem to be rather happy buying this stuff. Generally with mildly peturbed husbands in tow, blushing gamely at whatever micromesh peepo brassiere Mrs Qatari is holding up for approval and looking like they’d rather be out with the boys and a few Falcons. Doha even has its own Agent Provacateur store in Al fardan towers. Given the soft-porn, oh sorry, ‘erotic’ content of AP’s designs and brand this is fairly surprising.

This is the case across the Arab world: Syria, too,has a strong, but somewhat ludicrous, lingerie tradition. To my mind, at least, knickers with fluffy birds on them are about as sexy as queefing. I have that residual religious idea that sex should be a bit more serious and intense – in order to make up for the fact you’re going to burn for all eternity for doing it.

But here, raunch is alright, because the women who are indulging in the delights of lingerie are all married, and will not be fornicating.  It’s married women buying the knickers, presumably for the delights of Mr Qatari. For fornication is indeed illegal in Doha. (Not to say unappealing when you regard the male population. Shudder.)  And lingerie makes perfect cultural sense here, as  it invites contemplation of female sexuality whilst simultaneously covering – or even substituting for - its nakedness, or primal appeal. These ornate knickers, saucy and fun though they are, continue to enforce the idea that women’s bodies at the most fundamental level are obscene, in the very literal sense of not to be shown, the very thing that cannot be looked at directly. Knickers are fun, but only when there’s someone in them.

(footnote: A Saudi Law Professor is campaigning for an end to prohibition on male shop assistants in lingerie shops so that women can actually buy underwear they want without being sleazed on by men in this incredibly patriarchal society. Interesting stuff and a fair point.)

Out of body experience

Does my head look big in this?

 

Years ago, when I started my PhD, I never expected that I would end up perspiring in a room in a Gulf State University explaining that I didn’t believe the above picture was necessarily a homosexual, though certainly effete, that his Italian name and dress could certainly be related to the indeterminate gender of the castrato. And then explain what a castrato was. Urk.

Yes! Faculty presentations a-go-go. I bit the bullet and presented on my current research on masculinity in the eighteenth-century, which was fun, if mildly disconcerting. Suggesting that gender is a construct is sometimes pushing the boundaries of knowledge here, but at least that suggestion is generally confined to feminist scholars whose focus is often on the gendering of women’s subjectivties. Suggesting that men, and being a man, might similarly be subject to the same ideological procedures and structures of identification and what Nancy Armstrong calls ’strategies of self-discipline’ in conduct was fairly novel at least. In literature and history, Robert Shoemaker has observed that ‘Men remained the unanalysed norm, women the exception which merited specific mention’ (Gender in English Society, 1650-1850, 3). Refocussing criticism on the ‘invisible’ gender of masculinity is absolutely necessary to what we might think of the humanising project of feminism; the way in which feminism tries to understand both sexes caught up in the project of patriarchy, rather than claiming victimhood or a special status for either. The more we come to understand our selves and our societies as bound up in constructing, reconstructing and subjecting gender identities the more we should understand our similarities, and the causes of our differences.

Religion, women and violence

 

I mentioned in my last post the murder of Aasiya Zubair by her husband, Muzzamil Hassan. Initially the media downplayed the crime, whether for reasons of sensitivity or because Hassan, as an influential TV director,  was in many senses one of their own, it isn’t clear. But now, a few days later, the story has become prominent in many papers stateside and online news pages, with a fair amount of blogging also. The debate around the murder has been more complex and varied than the (sadly) usual domestic violence cases, due to the fact that Hassan is Muslim, as was Aasiya Zubair. The manner of Zubair’s death, by decapitation, has generally been contextualised by the papers who rightly focus on the fact that domestic abuse is not confined to religious communities, and is not endorsed by most interpretations of religious texts. Yet there is an underlying frisson to the reportage, as reports place facts in proximity whilst refraining from making overt connections – the Bridges network’s  attempt at Muslim integration in the US, the faith of the couple, the history of domestic ‘incidents’, her request for a divorce, the beheading – all leave the lingering impression of a crime distinguished by the faith of the victim and perpetrator. The sad fact is, that if Zubair had been a white, lower-class woman killed by her partner, the coverage would have been in all likelihood less sympathetic, less sensitive and just less of it. But as successful, wealthy, American-Muslims Zubair and Hassan represented the dream of integation in a country that has become profoundly antipathetic to Islam following the ‘War Against terror’.

The media’s interest in Zubair’s death implies, even as it does not state, that this is different from the quotidian brutalities that we associate with domestic violence. This seems like a different category of abuse. Even in a Western culture which has accelerated or at least made explicit its own brutality in the wake of September 11th, there is still a taxonomy of violence which separates, say, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo from the murder of Margaret Hassan, or Kenneth Bigley; that thinks punching your wife in a fit of temper is different to cutting her throat. All forms of violence are unacceptable. But cultural categorization allows a degree of comfort in Western readers by estranging violence through reference to religious difference and symbolism. Under the rubric of ‘honour’ killings, or an Islamist culture which devalues a woman’s life, these actions become readable as expressions of essential difference rather than an anxiety-inducing similarity. 

And yet, I’m sorry, I disagree with Hussien Rashid’s assertion that ‘domestic violence has nothing to do with religion’. Whether we like it or not, religion (amongst other things) is used to justify, to cover up and to contextualise (as if such a thing were possible) the oppression and denigration of women throughout the world.  An article I linked below shows just how complicit male religious leaders are in utilizing religion to perpetuate a culture of ‘put up and shut up’ as regards violence against women.

A woman in the studio audience stands up and, with the spotlight highlighting her covered head, announces to the crowd that her husband abuses her but that she doesn’t know how to react and still be a good Muslim.

The host of this popular Turkish TV show, “Islam in Our Life,” Professor Faruk Beser, is — from his trimmed mustache to his tailored suit — the image of a modern, successful Turkish man. But as he approaches the woman, his answer is far from progressive.

Looking her in the eye, Beser urges the woman to “carry this pain within you and keep living with your husband,” prescribing constant prayer over divorce, and reminding the woman of the rewards she will receive in heaven for her suffering.

Consider the flow of expletives that produced. Islam in its most politically extreme forms, in Iran or Saudi Arabia, effectively dispossesses and displaces the body of the woman from the public sphere, making it both the repository of virtue and visual symbol for the most brutal forms of discipline. Religion does play a part in this, even as it does not explain away its horror. I think the spokeswoman for NOW is closer to the truth, so that while Hassan’s attornet dismissed:

suggestions that religion or culture played a role in the crime…Marcia Pappas, New York State president of the National Organization for Women, said  that “this was apparently a terroristic version of honor killing, a murder rooted in cultural notions about women’s subordination to men.”

This murder derives from a perception of women’s ‘natural’ and ‘divinely ordered’ subjuation by men. Religion and culture have played a part in that.  But not only Islam has been used as a means of ideologically trapping women in relationships which actively endanger their lives. Christianity has a strong line in misogyny too,  with a long history of punitive marital relationships. It’s just that we like to think of the West as having shaken off the uglier facets of misogyny, having sublimated its violence into capitalism and pornography.

Hostile Sexists R Us

Not a human, according to some men

Sometimes my optimism is seriously compromised.

Jessica on Feministing posted this after a week in which a respected member of the Muslim community in the States decapitated his estranged wife, in which popstar Chris Brown alledgedly battered his friend Rhianna in a parking lot in Los Angeles, that a report on domestic abuse in Turkey indicated that 4 out of 10 married women are abused by their husbands (lets not forget parental abuse here people!), the National Commission for Women in India has registered an unbelievable 1, 207 reports of violence against women in the last three months alone.

These statistics about violence against women might seem to be tangential, rather than related, to an article that asserts that bikini-wearing triggers sexualised thoughts and stimulates the area of the brain associated with, ahem, ‘tool-use’. The article in the National Geographic is based around the findings of Prof. Susan Fiske into male behaviour. It’s a depressing read, because Fiske’s findings seem to corroborate what second generation feminists argued, that objectification of women is a distinct tendency in men who are hostile or aggressive toward women, i.e. who see them as a ‘threat’.

Men who scored higher as “hostile sexists”–those who view women as controlling and invaders of male space–didn’t show brain activity that indicates they saw the women in bikinis as humans with thoughts and intentions.

So men who think of women as The Enemy cognitively misrecognise female bodies as non-human. Fucking hell.  Fiske says this means a initial identification occurs, they regard the women

 ”as sexually inviting, but they are not thinking about their minds,” Fiske said. “The lack of activation in this social cognition area is really odd, because it hardly ever happens.”

So this is abberant mental behaviour, or at least unusual, which is vaguely comforting. But the overall conclusion, that men look at sexualised female bodies and dehumanise them – and arguably feel more comfortable in using violence against them – confirms the rhetoric of second-wave feminism almost two generations after. These feminists, Dworkin, McKinnon, Friedan et al, were adamant that there was a correlation between women’s objectfication based on her sexualised appearance and the subjugation and oppression of women. To renounce social demands to prettify and perform disempowering, vulnerable, and primarily sexually available roles, was key in the Women’s Liberation movement. Indeed Katherine Mackinnon’s recent work has comprehensively attacked the complacent notion that women have equal rights, let alone are perceived as human and that the key to global oppression of women is this fundamental denial of their humanity, based around a sexual objectification of their bodies. The ideological connections between objectification, sexuality and oppression were queried by third wave feminists who sought rehabiliation and assimilation in the patriarchal economic world of the 1980s and 1990s, arguing that sexuality was a instrument of empowerment and pleasure in the feminine self. This was further exemplified by post-modernity’s emphasis on the perfomativity of sexual desire and indeed of gender relations: i.e. by stimulating male desire one is actually turning patriarchy on its head, and annexing power to the female self - what you do with your body does not fix you in any particular role and can be played with, subverted, refused.

Yet the type of desire one produces – consciously or otherwise – seems crucial. If, as this report suggests, overtly ’sexy’ displays of flesh produces dehumanising responses in male subjects in 2009 (for godsake!) we have a problem with the legacy of third wave feminism. This report adds to the growing evidence that we were wrong in assuming we had made significant developments in gender equality, both legal, civic and interpersonal. We were hasty to presume that the construction, performance and display of our sexualities was understood and respected by men. While I don’t think that we should burn our hot pants by any means, it seems to be imperative that we revisit the understanding of our physicality in a changed society in order to understand why so many women, young and old, participate in objectifying their own bodies, in dehumanising themselves as objects in order to procure a pleasure that might not be based in respect, or understanding, or even a comprehension of a shared humanity. And more urgently, what it will take for men to recognise women as fellow humans.

‘No Hierarchy of victims’?

The Consultative Group on the Past have defended their “challenging and complex report” as “too important an issue for instant responses”.

I would be very interested in hearing Eames’s definition of victimhood. Nice idea, but almost impossible to apply practically.

More equal than others

Ah, Norn Iron. Land of perpetual rain, Tayto, Mammies, potato bread and never-ending cups of tea.

Oh, and ridiculous post-Troubles initiatives.

Having proved through the daily activity of the Assembly that we are as capable as Westminster of bureaucratic, self-serving and corrupt government, an independent committee has now shown that we are similarly free of common reasoning and morality by recommending that all victims of the Troubles are equally deserving of a nice fat cheque of £12,000.

The wonderfully Orwellian-monikered ‘Consultative Group on the Past’, whose committee includes fairly respectable members of NI society, including Eames, proposes ignoring the respective identities of those involved – willing or otherwise – in the violence of the Troubles. This means that the wife of a bomber is entitled to the same compensation as the families of those killed in his attack. This equivalence is presumably designed to promote a kind of post-Good Friday tabula rasa, as cash erases the pain and memories of those involved. The language used by the BBC report suggests a newspeak-solution to the complex inheritance of the past thirty years.

‘The Consultative Group on the Past is also expected to recommend the creation of a five year legacy commission, appointed by the British and Irish governments, to deal with the past.’

I don’t know, but that term –  ’to deal with the past’  – suggests a strange hybrid between therapeutic and Stalinist approaches to sectarian politics. This wrong-headedness imposes a uniformity that simply is not afforded by the past, nor is it helpful in creating a position from which to forge a united and peacful society. This is confirmed by the fact that,

‘Big goals in the recommended process will include combating sectarianism and creating a story-telling process on the conflict. Eames-Bradley will set out aims and criteria for this.‘

I can almost see where they are going here, in a kind of Truth-and-Reconciliation fashion, but at the same time these ideas seem flimsy and half-hearted. Have they not noticed that much of the literature of the past thirty years has been concerned with the pre-history, cultural context and repercussions of the Troubles? (There’s another discussion latent here, which would think about how why contemporary northern irish writers seem so keen to supress and displace any mention of the troubles in their writing as if to distance themselves from that legacy, but in so doing create a freakishly unrecognizable Northern Ireland. But that’s for another time.)

It’s a shame, because some of the Eames-Bradley proposals are quite sensible. They aren’t proposing an amnesty, and their call for a Heritage commission shows that they are concerned with the concepts of justice and closure. But these ideas do not cohere as an overall plan, and have had the contrary effect of reopening debate on culpability. Sigh. Cup of tea?