Doha Diaries, no. 7: A Post on Power

I've been aware for some time now that the majority of my posts since moving abroad have related to the more mundane and practical aspects that surround international relocation. Daily snippets, frustrations with a new culture, occasional interesting observances, rather than extended discussions of a specific topic. This is not because I haven't been thinking about specific topics as they relate to living in the Middle East, but rather because I have been doing my best to think about them for a while before I come to any conclusions (if conclusions can even be reached).

For example, before coming here, the first question almost everyone asked me was: "Will you have to wear the veil?" For some reason, I was always amazed by this question. Maybe it was result of some graduate courses I took, in which I learned that clothing for men and women in the Muslim world is governed largely by tradition rather than law. With only a few exceptions, it is not a legal obligation that women cover themselves with the abaya or veil or that men wear the thobe.


Instead, it is a tradition sanctioned by the Qu'ran that both men and women dress modestly. Since it is a tradition for Muslims, and I'm not a Muslim, I'm not expected to wear an abaya (though I am, as per my contract, expected to respect and be sensitive to the culture, religion, and legal system here).

The assumption long held by many Westerners and Americans (feminists in particular) has been that this aspect of Muslim tradition is just one of the many oppressive practices that Muslim women face. Admittedly, I felt this way for most of my adult life until I met two young Muslim girls in graduate school who became good friends of mine. They had a tough job convincing me that the covering of ones body could be an act of empowerment, one that ensured (among other things) that attention was paid not to outward appearances but to more important qualities like what one had to say. I gradually came to see their point of view, even if they didn't come to see mine.

This is the attitude I brought with me when moving to the Middle East. For reasons I'm not yet sure of, I think I was invested in believing that wearing the abaya (with or without the veil) was a form of power in a specific cultural context. I quickly discovered that the abaya was not only a religious marker, but also a marker of class and nation. Some women have abayas that are distinguished by ornate beading and sequins at the end of the sleeve, and these can be quite expensive. Other women have something more like 'home-spun' abayas, perhaps indicating an inability to afford anything more elaborate. And then there are non-Muslim women who wear the abaya because it is the tradition they must follow as workers for a Muslim family. The latter, however, are usually dressed in little better than a head-covering and what often looks like pajamas. The look they have on their faces will never be lost from my memory. The vast majority of the time, I am convinced it is nothing short of the look of a slave.


This brings me to the idea of power...After conversations with quite a number of people, other expats who have lived here or in the Gulf region for several years and who have developed very close friendships with some very well-off citizens of this country, I have changed my mind about the idea of the abaya as a form of power. That is to say that the idea is much more complicated. I have heard stories of families whose sons gang rape their housemaid as a matter of occasional fun. I have heard of the bodies of housemaids that are found dumped and decomposing in the desert. I have heard of the women--mother and her daughters--who beat their maid with hairbrushes and sticks for no offense at all. I hate to say it, but the first of these doesn't surprise me. It has happened since time began, and it continues to happen everywhere in the world. The last example is certainly not limited to this country, but I can see how and why it goes unnoticed. As my friend explained to me: "They beat their maid because she's the only damn person they have any power over."


As part of a conversation about white people who speak Arabic and how white women in the Middle East are perceived by the women who wear the abaya, we stumbled into a discussion of power. I listened as he described their rage, something he's been privy to because he speaks Arabic. He's heard local women, disgusted at the sight of a Western woman in jeans and a t-shirt, calling her a whore under their breath. It made me at once feel angry at the idea that I might evoke such a reaction from the people around me, but I also felt confusion and pity at the idea that I could be complicit in the sense of rage and frustration building up in women who don't enjoy the same power that I have. This added to what has been a growing feeling of sadness and empathy for the 70% of people here who constitute the imported work force. The housemaids, drivers, construction workers, car washers, etc. It has become clear that, in many cases, these people are not seen as human beings. They are objects, usually identified only by their nationality: "Who cares? It's just a Phillipino." It. Not he or she. And to provide her family in her home country with whatever meager wages she can earn, she serves someone else's family, cleans someone else's home, and raises someone else's children (often falling victim to abuse from them as well). Rather than have compassion for this woman and treat her like a fellow human being, some women see her as the only person over whom they can exert power. All the pent-up rage and frustration is exorcised through violence against another woman's body. The woman who is not protected by the abaya, the culture, or the law.


I still think the abaya offers a sense of power...unfortunately, that's not always a good thing.

Feminism: Could It Be Any More Difficult?

After reading ld's great post on her female students' response to identifying themselves as feminists; this post at Tenured Radical, which discusses the teaching of second-wave feminism; and the comment that follows the post, which quotes Gloria Steinem, I'm left frustrated at the explicit notion that graduate school somehow "brainwashes" female graduate students, who then go on to face undergraduates that have no ability (possibly no need) to be familiar with a very basic history of feminism (i.e. that feminism doesn't equal man-hating lesbians).

The quote offered by lesboprof (keep in mind it's not direct) was that she believed someone told her in grad school that "[Gloria] Steinem said it took women 3-5 years to recover from every year they spent in grad school."

My problems with this idea begin with the premises on which it appears to be based. The idea implies:

1) that women are "brainwashed" by feminist ideology throughout graduate school. As if we get to graduate school only to have our professors reveal that we've been oppressed all our lives and we must immediately join The Fight Against the Patriarchy;

2) that female graduate students then believe everything they are taught about feminism in graduate school. Yep, we eat it all up...hook, line, and sinker, cause you know, we can't think for ourselves yet, right?

3) that we then graduate, only to spend the next 15-25 years "recovering" from this brainwashing, implicitly discovering some other sort of reality or truth...I'm still not sure how this works.

Did I miss something here? First, yes, I knew very little about the history of feminism before starting graduate school, but I also knew very little about the history of ANY school of ideology or literary criticism. Learning more about the history of important schools of literary and linguistic thought is, as I understand it, one of the benefits/expectations of graduate school, as it prepares one for a career as a academic in literary studies.

Second, if I'm smart enough to understand Derrida, Lacan, Butler, and all the other theorists that I had to read throughout coursework, then it's pretty likely I've got the intellectual hardware to be critical of those writers and thinkers, as well as critical of the choices of specific texts in any given course. Never did I have a professor claim that one theory, ideology, literary school of thought, etc. was The One True Way that I must follow. No professor told me I'd been oppressed, limited, screwed over, sheltered (although that was actually the case), or unenlightened. What my professors did was expose me to texts that made me think critically about the values, beliefs, and systems of thought I'd previously understood as natural, right, common, true, etc. I asked questions I'd never asked. Good questions! Really fucking hard questions. Painful questions. Questions that definitely changed the way I see the world around me on a daily basis. I also had the freedom and encouragement to challenge the texts I read, the professors who assigned them, and those scholars and students who've responded to both. To imply that I suffered in a way that requires "recovery" is, to me, ridiculous, especially framed in terms of what academics "do" with feminism.

Finally, using the term "recover" implies some sort of healing, as if I've suffered a wound or an illness. Yes, many times graduate school makes me sick, but not in that way. When I finish next year, am I going to "see the light" or unlearn everything that my feminist professors have taught me (or more accurately, what they've let me learn)? What does this "recovery" mean?

I'm hoping people will visit and read this posts and join this query, because I'm really a bit befuddled. Feminism in the academy doesn't inherently equal evil, tragedy, brainwashing, or political manhandling, as many would like to argue. Learning is often about what each student makes of it, so the range of experiences is infinite. What, then, are we (by we I mean those who identify themselves as feminists or make use of feminist literary theory and practice) to make of these various posts?

Tampon Art: Or, Everything You Didn't Know About Menstrual Aesthetics

This just *HAD* to be circulated immediately! I found this online museum of Menstrual Art via the Feministe blog. Kate Goldwater's pieces are actually quite moving, despite the fact that I'm very scared to look in a film container ever again. I mean, in the movie Quills, the Marquis de Sade is represented as using his own feces to create text: shit writing on the walls of his cell. If this representation is accurate (which it may very well not be, but who knows?), then the idea of using one's bodily fluids to create art has been around for a long time. And I personally know of a girl I went to school with in my M.A. program who, believing in the power of pheromones, sent her own body odor out into the world with the hopes of it attracting her biological mother. She used other women as satellites, and they were not to use deoderant, perfume, or lotion of any kind. Nothing that would deter from the adopted girl's pheromone-soaked swatches of clothing or fabric they would wear strapped underneath their armpits and in other pulse point areas. But I digress... Anyway, the point is that FGM (female genital mutilation) is a horrific violence to young girls, and any attention that can be drawn to it is energy well spent.

Be sure to check out the other artist listed on the left side of the online museum site...interesting stuff.