[Reader-list] Tomrrow women: power and activism in South Africa

[arisen silently]

From: Zoe Wilson <wilsonz at ukzn.ac.za>
Date: Apr 10, 2005 3:32 PM
Subject: Tomrrow women: power and activism in South Africa

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?issue=198

Power and South Africa's social movements in the era of globalization
J. Zo* Wilson And Saranel Benjamin

Changes in the status of women are key features of globalization. Some
analysts have even concluded that globalization is, in part,
feminization. 'The feminization of what?' is the question. We are not
going to try to answer this question here. Rather, we want to open
discussion on how stories about women and globalization relate to the
world of activism. What functions do these stories perform for the
left? How do they constitute social movements and mask that civil
society is not an ideal space; that inequities are often reproduced
there?

The question of whether the changes associated with globalization have
been aggregately positive or negative for women tends to be one around
which activist and civil society politics is mobilized – and key
assertions about where our global society is going and how it wants to
get there are framed.

Digital divide notwithstanding, hours of web searching every possible
combination of key words for 'women and globalization' essentially
*revealed* that little to no progress of any meaningful kind has
occurred over the last 100 years, and that women as a whole remain
overwhelmingly powerless, voiceless and victims. The trade in colors,
with the image of black and brown women as the "face of poverty", is
particularly robust.

But, can we trust these stories completely? The way power is organized
tends to allow –even encourage - relatively well-resourced and
socially privileged spokespersons (men and women of various colours)
to use popular discourses about the affects of globalization on women.
Discourses do things; they have effects. Or, more strongly, people say
things in order to achieve things. They offer excuses, assign blame,
win support, seize the moment, cast themselves in a particular light,
and so on.

Women in the social movements in post-apartheid South Africa provide
testimony to the fact that whilst they may form the mass base of the
movement they most certainly are not well represented among the
leadership ranks. The movements have garnered the support of thousands
of poor black women and have through their political action challenged
the state's provision of basic services to the household and raised
consciousness around the plight of poor women. Yet within the
movements, a male, top heavy leadership speaks on behalf of thousands
of poor black women while the added burden of moving much needed
gender reform forward is one that falls primarily to women – often
finding an uneven, even cold reception from leaderships accustomed to
defining gender equality as secondary to class and race struggles.

That inequities are reproduced in civil society – from local to global
- raises questions about a left that trades on taking up the plight of
women, a left that looks to women's experiences to legitimize
movements, organizations – even activist careers. Commander Esther,
Zapatista Army of National Liberation, highlights the contradictions:

"[A]s women, the rich man tries to humiliate us, but also the man who
is not rich, who is poor like our husbands, our brothers, our fathers,
our sons, our companions in the struggle, and those who work with us
and are organized with us. So we say clearly that when women demand
respect, we demand it not only from the neoliberals, but also from
those who struggle against neoliberalism and say they are
revolutionaries but in the home are like Bush."

In South Africa, the social movements have traditionally been
perceived to be the place where poor, black women coagulate to regain
their self-respect, their dignity, their strength as a collective and
their identity as women. However, this safe space of the movement
continues to displace value and repeatedly uses the same oppressive
forms of structure and organising. Thus, when women gain it may be
merely as a component of other geometries of power, such as unions or
civil society organizations - whose decision-making processes and well
paid positions are overwhelmingly occupied by men. Some predict that
if this were to continue then women will be compelled to reconstitute
themselves as a group identity of women that will supplant class
interest as the chief medium of political mobilization.

Still, not much is done within social movements to empower women to
participate more effectively, so that they can be their own voices and
be their own faces and agents of their own experience. For example,
often the male leadership simultaneously co-opt women's powerfully
articulated demands for better municipal services while conceiving of
and scripting women's organizational roles as merely supportive. The
commitment from the male leadership to the transformation of gender
relations appears strategic and limited. As a result, women in the
movements are feeling a greater sense of isolation and that their
particular issues and their identities as women are being ignored. Ten
years on now from the end of apartheid and there is a growing sense
that women's development in the movement - other than what they are
able to achieve as individuals – has stalled.

If women consistently fail to escape the everyday indignities of
discrimination in social movements, that those movements might unravel
under the weight of their contradictions, is not surprising. Among the
members of the now frayed and fragmented Concerned Citizen's Forum
[CCF], for example, it was a commonly held perception that, while
women are at the forefront of the struggle and many occupy leadership
positions in their local branches, there was no development of women
in the CCF - other than what they are able to achieve as individuals -
and there existed few mechanisms in the social movements leadership
structure to encourage active participation of women. Similarly, to
date in trade unions, the democratic rights that have been achieved by
the unions for women members in the workplace are not paralleled by
democratic rights for women within the unions. More insidiously,
however, the values and beliefs encountered within the union
structures have been of women as inherently subservient, whose issues
carried less weight than those of the broader working class struggles.

Cutting into the question of women and the left where we have seems to
suggest that one route out of the impass might be to play closer
attention to what women can and have achieved (in terms of extracting
themselves from their particular experience with a tangle of
patriarchal norms and institutions) through acts of individual
creativity and innovation. For example, a breaking down and breaking
out – moving beyond what seems structurally or organizationally
possible within existing hierarchical parameters – has long been the
innovative strategy of black women – and a mode of power of the
so-called 'powerless' more generally. Since their demands have
perpetually been left out by feminist movements and movements for
racial liberation, it is often individual creativity that has brought
about the actual gains that translate into bargaining power and
leverage in movements.

In this light, while there is little point to romanticizing the
ruptures and border zones of the globalizing world, some analysts
point to not yet well understood informal temporary zones and
multi-centric functional networks nested within sprawling "scapes"
where important social resistance and renewal takes place. That is,
beyond totalizing rhetorics and hardened organizational hierarchies of
the left there is an array of women's insurgencies taking place. The
widest array of which may be, to borrow Castell's language, "practical
feminists" (2000b: 200).

"Aren't the struggles and organizations of women throughout the world,
for their families (meaning mainly their children), their lives, their
work, their shelter, their health, their dignity, feminism in
practice…Under different forms, and through different paths, feminism
dilutes the patriarchal dichotomy of man/woman as it manifests itself
in social institutions and in social practice. So doing, feminism
constructs not one but many identities, each one of which, by their
autonomous existence, seizes micropowers in the world wide web of life
experiences."

Authors like Saskia Sassen have noted that in the global cities
"[t]here is a large literature showing that immigrant women's regular
wage work and improved access to other public realms has an impact on
their gender relations: Women gain greater personal autonomy and
independence while men lose ground." It may be that we like our
stories of women having new freedoms, of gaining ground, to be less
messy. We have been trained to see as primary her exploitation in the
capitalist labour market. But what if we change the lens from
capitalism to patriarchy? And what if we set that picture afloat
within a global left that doesn't value women any more than capitalism
does?

The organized left's skepticism about women's agency and what can be
achieved without being organized tends to operate to script the work
of 'the struggle' in service of 'the revolution' as nobler, more
important, more immediately pressing. But the promise that women's
everyday lived indignities will simply evaporate once race and class
issues are addressed relies on futurology as vague and discredited as
Adam Smith's invisible hand. Capitalism seems to trade on patriarchy,
but so can the left.

We are skeptical about global discourses and politicized terrains that
remain dominated by debates that frame women's autonomy as something
won on behalf of women. It renders invisible much of the day-to-day
innovation and activity that individual women leverage to
incrementally reinvent daily life. More insidiously it co-opts and
confiscates the gains made by women in the everyday, attributing it to
activists, organized civil society organizations and international
development agencies, many of which primarily serve the interests of a
narrow band of elite often organized along principles where men are
able to move through the ranks leaving the bulk of women behind as
shadow workers.

Many of the women who belong to social movements in South Africa often
don't restrict themselves to the work of the organization. Women in
the Anti-Eviction Campaign in the Western Cape pointed out that it is
not only evictions that they are concerned with. They work in their
communities around issues of HIV, poverty, rape, drug-abuse, accessing
social grants, teenage pregnancies and access to education for their
children. Yet this work is not considered as a form of activism that
is altering the political landscape. Rather "strategic" interests of
the left are perceived as a more evolved and informed type of activism
(where most of the men congregate around) and set in opposition to
"practical" issues like daily survival.

With the specter of revolution denied looming intimidating, women are
called to justify and rationalize the authenticity of their interests
- to stop pursuing those interests and be drawn into the diversionary
web of defending them. In her seminal 1985 article Spivak asked the
question "Can the Subaltern Speak?" The point was not that movements
for social change can somehow 'get it right next time' when they speak
on behalf of those who have little voice in existing architectures of
power. Rather, she wanted to know when and under what conditions will
the subaltern speak for themselves?
As Poet Sujata Bhatt has said:

I am Indian, very brown, born in
Malabar, I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one. Don't write in English, they said,
English is not your mother tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in any language I like?...

* Saranel Benjamin and J. Zo* Wilson are with the Centre for Civil
Society, University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, and Institute for
Research and Innovation in Sustainability, York University, Canada.
The authors would like to thank Amanda Alexander, Raj Patel and
Richard Pithouse for their valuable comments. All errors remain the
responsibility of the authors exclusively.

**NOTE TO READERS: the authors would like to invite people everywhere
to send their experiences with gender equity in social movements to:
benjamins at ukzn.ac.za and wilsonz at ukzn.ac.za. Accounts will be
compiled, verified and made available to all respondents. Please note
if you wish to remain anonymous.

* Please send comments to editor at pambazuka.org.

References

Benjamin, S ' "We are not Indians! We are the Poors!" : Investigating
Race Class and Gender in Social Movements' Development Update, Vol 5
No. 2, 2004.

Castells, M. . The Power of Identity. Great Britain: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Spivak. G. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In Colonial Discourse and
Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, pp. 66-111, Patrick Williams and Laura
Chrisman, eds. Hemel Hempstead & New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.
(First printing 1988)

J. Zoe Wilson, Ph.D.
Post Doctoral Fellow
Centre for Civil Society, UKZN
27 31 260 2917
072 966 3603
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Please find our disclaimer at http://www.ukzn.ac.za/disclaimer
--------------------------------------------------------------------
<<<<gwavasig>>>>
----
Message sent by the Situationist list.
To unsubscribe, send blank email to situationist-off at lists.nothingness.org