HOUSEHOLD
Protection: Women bear the brunt
What a week: OBAMA! Dancing in the cold and rainy streets of DC in front of the White House well into Wednesday morning. Celebrations erupted from Kansas to Kenya to Katmandu. The morning after, The New York Times editorial anointed the new President-elect as both visionary and pragmatist. The young Obama saw what was wrong with the government and sees a way forward to a better place. What was it that Obama saw: “the utter failure of government to protect its citizens.” Protect its citizens? This protection clause touches on so many issues raised by feminist activists about the state, about citizenship, about the nation, about protection.
Let’s consider the week of non-nationals and non-citizens, from the protection perspective. For them, it was a busy week of routines of unremarkable, ordinary, toil, struggle, celebration, sharing. On Monday, “Shadow Workforce’s Battle for Dignity” reported that domestic workers in Chennai in India have it hard, and yet: “The rising expectations of India’s legions of working poor have sparked an unprecedented movement to organize household workers and push for their rights. The effort comes as the supply-demand ratio for domestic workers shifts in their favor: India’s economic rise has spurred more and more families to hire more and more servants. Increasingly, household help is seen as a necessity for India’s busy families, as well as a sign of status in this class-conscious country. There are at least 100 million domestic workers in India — 50 times the number of people working in the software industry. Domestic labor constitutes one of the country’s largest job categories, behind farming and construction. The growing confidence of this shadow workforce is reflected in the proliferation of domestic worker unions across the country. They are challenging deep-rooted prejudices about caste, class and labor and calling on India’s government to extend to domestic workers the rights, benefits and protections afforded to workers in other industries.” Protections matter but what the women are struggling for is respect, dignity, recognition, presence, autonomy, power. Rights and benefits, then protections. Citizenship and something more than citizenship.
On the same day, “Haiti: Sex for survival put women at risk” described the life of Marie Jessy, 16, who survives by ´befriending´ men, for food, for money, for safety, for comfort, for survival. Steeped in poverty, racked by hurricanes, devastated by HIV/AIDS, assaulted by the so-called food crisis, Haitian women have become particularly vulnerable and, not surprisingly, need protection. Women need condom protection, and they “depend on male sexual partners for financial support and protection from the sexual violence that is rife in the city’s slum”. Although the ngo’s see these women as sex workers, the women would be better described as women-in-poverty workers, as women-survivor workers. As women in the structures and conditions of immiseration that are provided for them, they enter into relationships that involve sex, that are lethal to the very extent that they are about survival, and are about patriarchy. Patriarchy offers protection. Marie Jessy yearns for something else: “I want someone who will help me.” Not a man to protect her but a someone to help her. She wants citizenship and something beyond, or before, citizenship.
In Zimbabwe, it’s been a busy week of men at the top doing nothing and killing the nation. Meanwhile, illegal foreign exchange hustlers are the new entrepreuneurial class; the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has yet to account for over 7 million U.S. dollars (oops!) for AIDS relief; people foraging in the rubbish for food are now selling cast off leather as meat (hunting for good garbage to eat, which at last bridges that troublesome gap between hunters and foragers). On Thursday, Magodonga Mahlangu and Jenni Williams, of Women of Zimabwe Arise, WOZA, were finally released from prison. They report horrible conditions inside, violation of women’s rights and persons, violations of everyone’s rights and persons. And there’s cholera! Harare has been without pipe water for days, burst sewer pipes are left unrepaired, and the shit literally flows in the streets and into the streams and rivers. The government has called on the Civil Protection Unit to assist, even though they suggest there is no disaster at hand, which is when the CPU is ordinarily called out. In Zimbabwe today, if the Civil Protection Unit shows up, that means you are maximally vulnerable, radically unprotected, and your condition most likely is about to worsen. Protection.
“What is life like for women in a country where inflation is 300 million percent and counting? What is life like for women in a country where their life expectancy is 34 years? What is life like for women in a country where three men hold a nation hostage?” Shereen Essof asks. In her compelling account, Essof rejects the protection option outright. The freedom that women, and people generally, seek to forge as well as the slender and fragile freedom they have already secured, the freedom of general and particular happiness for example and well being, is outside the discourse of protection: “freedom of all . . . is not something to be decreed and protected by laws or states, it is something that we shape for ourselves and share.”
Yes, it was a busy week in which the U.S. held elections, but the prize of Major Event had to be shared with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this week’s motherlode epicenter of humanitarians’ cries for protection. Jacques Depelchin describes the Congo as a zone of inconvenient extraction, of doing-away-with. This doing-away-with is a transitive, active process. If Lumumba gets in the way, do away with Lumumba. If cell phones and computers `lack’ coltan, do away with coltan from the Congo. Natural resource extraction, doing-away-with, consumes people, communities, minerals, time, everything. Doing away with consumes humanity, and that is what’s happening in the Congo, and everywhere, today.
For Depelchin, feminicide is the latest chapter of this process of doing away with: “To this day, the unfolding of feminicide (destroying women at their most vulnerable and intimate) in the eastern DRC, the collateral maiming and killing of children, are the direct continuation of a refusal to attend to what happened, at all levels, inside and outside Africa. And, of course, this refusal is, in turn, connected to the wider and deeper refusal to face crimes against humanity where and when they happen. The result can be observed today, almost like a spectacle. The inventory of atrocities committed seems endless both in terms of numbers and intensity”. The society of the spectacle has become a landscape of atrocity; the landscape of atrocity is composed of commissions of evil married to denials and silencings. As Depelchin notes, “In the conference that is being called in Nairobi, there will be nobody representing the women who were raped beyond description, and no one will represent the children.” In the same issue of Pambazuka, Stephen Lewis beats the drum of protection: “UNAIDS utterly and tragically failed to protect the women of Africa. . . . It is noteworthy that the Secretary-General’s representative has just called for additional peacekeeping troops to halt the current rebel military advance, but you’ve never heard a similar call for additional troops to protect the women from the contagion of rape and sexual violence. . . . It is noteworthy that MONUC, the DRC’s peacekeeping mission and at seventeen thousand strong, the largest in the world, has failed to protect the women of the Congo despite explicit provisions in its mandate requiring it to do so. . . . It is noteworthy that the principle of ‘Responsibility to Protect’, embraced unanimously by all Member States of the United Nations in 2005, has never been invoked on behalf of the women of the Congo.”
The absence of protection is noteworthy, as are the failure to protect and the failure to invoke protection clauses. But protection, or its lack, forms only a small part of femicide.
Melissa W. Wright has tried to understand the structures of femicide as they operate in Ciudad Juárez, on the U.S. – Mexico border. In the 1990s, during a five year period, `almost 200 females corpses surfaced in the desert’ (A Manifesto Against Femicide, Antipode 33.3, 2001). By surfaced is meant were dumped. This irruption of violence against Mexican women, and in particular Mexican women maquiladora workers, not only made Ciudad Juárez famous, or infamous, but also produced “perhaps Mexico’s currently most renowned feminist activist”, Esther Chávez Cano. Wright’s version of Cano’s actions are instructive: “With an activist coalition she helped establish, Chávez is fighting against the famous spectre that now haunts Ciudad Juárez—the spectre of the worthless woman. This spectre is of the woman not worth protecting as she goes to work in the maquilas and then dances afterwards, the one who is not worth the cost of her own social reproduction, the one whose death is insignificant—the one, in short, who does not have value. Chávez has called the object of her struggle “femenicidio,” or “femicide.” “When we say women are worthless,” she explained, “this is femenicidio.” Femicide recreates the mythic worthless women who inhabit Ciudad Juárez. With the help of local and international activists, Chávez has launched a public war against femicide. “It is everywhere. In our homes, in our schools, in the maquila,” she has said. “It is a crisis. When we look at women as if they were trash, then something is wrong” (author interview).
The specter of the worthless woman has hunted Mexican maquila workers on the border. In Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (Routledge 2006). Wright describes the ways in which Mexican women in the maquila zones are suspended between value (the value they produce) and waste (the waste they become). They are `waste-in-the-making’, `untrainable, unskillable, and always a temporary worker’. (73) They die because they are disposable, they die because they are considered already dead. `Society’ need not protect its trash. When the industry was approached to consider its responsibility in the deaths, they argued “that no degree of funding for security personnel, or outlays for improved streetlighting, or in-house self-defense workshops, or changes to production schedule will help” (76 – 77). The women were murdered because they were not worth protecting. Protection is a private affair. The women should have known better, the women should have stayed home.
When the women protested their disposability, they entered into `the paradox …:in taking their protests to the public sphere and exercising their democratic rights as Mexican citizens, the Mujeres de Negro are publicly declaring the right of women to exist in the public sphere both as citizens and as people who deserve to be free from violence and fear. Yet, as they take to the streets, they are vulnerable to attacks that they are `public women’ in a discursive context where that label continues to be used effectively to dismiss and devalue women for `prostituting themselves by venturing beyond the domestic sphere….This gendering of space and of the democratic process, a process which by definition requires the active public participation of the citizenry, and the dismissal of women’s democratic voices based on their exercise of democratic rights creates a conundrum” (153 – 154).
The feminicide of the Congo is directly related to the femicide of Ciudad Juárez, waste-in-the-making is doing-away-with, and the layered situations of alibi, evasion and denial are identical. Call it the gendering of space within “the democratic processes”.
Mae West said somewhere, “Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from.” Wendy Brown opened “Finding the Man in the State” (States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, 1995)) with that line, and Iris Marion Young started her essay, “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State” (Signs 29, 1, 2003, 1 – 15) with the same words.
For Brown, protection in the late modern state creates another conundrum for women: “While minimal levels of protection may be an essential prerequisite to freedom, freedom in the barest sense of participating in the conditions and choices shaping a life, let alone in a richer sense of shaping a common world with others, is also in profound tension with externally provided protection. . . . Historically, the argument that women require protection by and from men has been critical in legitimating women’s exclusion from some spheres of human endeavor and confinement within others. . . . To be `protected’ by the same power whose violation one fears perpetuates the very modality of dependence and powerlessness marking much of women’s experience across widely diverse cultures and epochs” (169 – 170).
Young updates this into the security state: “an exposition of the gendered logic of the masculine role of protector in relation to women and children illuminates the meaning and effective appeal of a security state that wages war abroad and expects obedience and loyalty at home. In this patriarchal logic, the role of the masculine protector puts those protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience. To the extent that citizens of a democratic state allow their leaders to adopt a stance of protectors toward them, these citizens come to occupy a subordinate status like that of women in the patriarchal household.” (2).
The divisions of public sphere and private space are nationalized, globalized and localized. They are not fixed divisions; they are being forever mobilized and repositioned. The women of east Congo suffer rebels today, will suffer the Congolese army tomorrow, and the day after will suffer the U.N. and the A.U. peacekeepers. The crisis of home and household is a crisis of nation and world. Meanwhile, the Congo continues, in every cell phone and every computer, and the women of Ciudad Juárez are located in their homes and factories, their city and in the borderlands, and in the networked circuits of production and distribution that articulate China with Mexico with the United States, and beyond. National authoritarianism is the other face of global `just war’. In that world, citizenship is global or not at all, and protection is both intimate and corporate violence.
Young ends her essay with a plea for democratic citizenship: “Democratic citizenship should first involve admitting that no state can make any of us completely safe and that leaders who promise that are themselves suspect. The world is full of risks. . . . Democratic citizenship thus means ultimately rejecting the hierarchy of protector and protected” (20 – 22). In Haiti and Zimbabwe, women are not looking for help-as-protection. They are looking for help without debt and without hierarchy. The problem in the security state is not lack of but rather too much protection. In “Preemptive Fridge Magnets and Other Weapons of Masculinist Destruction: The Rhetoric and Reality of `Safeguarding Australia’” (Signs 33.1, 2007, 25 – 51), Bronwyn Winter concluded the same for Australia: “If the war on terror is largely a fiction endorsed and embellished by the masculinist Australian state to keep the population fearful and submissive, then the protection of women—a class kept insecure, docile, malleable, and both subservient to and grateful to its demon lover, in short, a class kept firmly bound within femininity—is integral to the maintenance of that fiction.”
You will be protected, and you will like it! You will be protected in the name of humanity, which is fraternity. In The Politics of Friendship (Verso 1997), Jacques Derrida describes the double exclusion of women and the feminine. First, humanity is defined as brotherhood, politics is the friendship of brothers, and citizenship is a condition brothers share. Humanity is phallogocentric and phratrocentric, man speech and brother bondage. (278) The second exclusion “is at work in all the discourses that reserve politics and public space to man, domestic and private space to woman” (281). The dream is democracy to come: “For democracy remains to come: this is its essence in so far as it remains: not only will it remain indefinitely perfectible, hence always insufficient and future, but, belonging to the time of the promise, it will always remain, in each of its future times, to come: even when there is democracy, it is never present, it remains the theme of a non-presentable concept. Is it possible to open up to the `come’ of a certain democracy which is no longer an insult to the friendship we have striven to think beyond the homo-fraternal and phallogocentric schema? When will we be ready for an experience of freedom and equality that is capable of respectfully experiencing that friendship, which would at last be just, just beyond the law, and measured up against its measurelessness? O my democratic friends . . . “. (306)
O my democratic friends. . . . Women of Zimbabwe do not call for protection. They struggle to dream. As Essof notes: “Women continue to envisage a ‘new’ Zimbabwe and are clear about what they want. In small and sometimes big ways women work to make the dream of feminist futures possible, even in the harshest of environments.” Not protection, but Zimbabwe to come, where women speak clearly and openly, in all spaces, of happiness, justice and freedom, in which happiness, justice, freedom, incomplete, glimmer and hover in the to-come. Where the future is not a prescription for women of to-do-away-with nor of waste-in-the-making. Where the state does not protect but engages. What happened in the United States on November 4th, 2008, was not a vision of an utter failure of government to protect its citizens. It was a vision of the end of protectionism and the beginning of democratic friendship, just beyond the law and measured up against its measurelessness.
This piece was written by Dan Moshenberg. If you have any questions or comments, please contact Dan at dmoshenberg@gmail.com.