CITY

Women Bear the Brunt

In an article entitled “SOUTH AFRICA: Wealth gap becoming a chasm“, IRIN reported the following: “Despite the dismantling of apartheid in the early 1990s, and significant annual economic growth over the past 10 years, South African cities have the highest levels of inequality in the world, according to the UN Habitat’s latest State of the World’s Cities report. The flagship report, published every two years, says even though local governments in the continent’s richest country have adopted policies to fight poverty, efforts to bridge the gap between rich and poor have for the most part failed. ”

The UN-Habitat’s State of the World Cities 2006-2007 is actually worse, and more sobering, than IRIN lets on. Yes, the wealth gap in South Africa is growing incrementally, and that has to be read against a chapter on New Orleans, another on Mumbai, another on Paris, and the list continues. Slums worldwide are growing, the number of `hidden homeless’ is growing, the living conditions of urban slum dwellers is more often than not worse than those in the rural zones. The report notes, occasionally, ways in which urban poverty is a function of class, race/ethne, religion, age, and occasionally gender.

Women are written into this all over the place. When it comes to sanitation, for example, the report notes that “women bear the brunt of the consequences of inadequate sanitation, but this has not been a development priority on the UN agenda.” While this is a particularly un-noteworthy remark, in that “women (and children) bear the brunt” could be said to be the signature of the global economy, it does suggest something particular for further discussion. That this has not been a development priority on the UN agenda bears further elaboration. That the development agenda is the peace agenda is the security agenda, likewise bears further elaboration, and then there’s well being to discuss and pursue.

In the report’s chapter on education, the subsection on HIV/AIDS, it’s all women all the time. In the current phase of the AIDS pandemic, according to the report, “women have emerged as being particularly vulnerable.” “In poor urban communities worldwide women’s sexual rights are often disregarded within the context of non-consensual and unprotected sex.” This all sounds so discrete, so … indelicate, doesn’t it? But it’s a death sentence that’s being described. And, as we know, it’s a death sentence that emerges from normative heterosexual household arrangements. As described in the chapter, in reports from New York City, Guangzhou, and across India, the vast majority of women were infected by their regular partners. Indeed, women have emerged.

At the same time, in this report, women only emerge in the context of household or domestic functions. Nowhere in discussions concerning the commodification of housing or the allocation of durable residences, to take but two examples, is there any inkling that these might be women’s issues. As long as women are only invoked `in the women’s section’ of the work, as long as the various operations of security, peace, development, to name three, are isolated into disciplinarily hygienic compounds, there’s very little hope for structural or systemic change.

In today’s IPS News, a somewhat alternative approach is offered. “PHILIPPINES: Women Take the Brunt of Climate Change” describes women as being at all parts of the economy, society, situation, and thereby begins to take a more nuanced and networked approach. Women are described as farmers, food providers, fisherfolk, wage earners, and simply, and significantly, as women, and that’s not the entire list. Women are, in dramatic as well as unremarkable and ordinary ways, everywhere all the time.

Discussions of any gap — be it in research or income or access or anything – should also recognize that we need a taxonomy of gaps. It’s not just one gap that can somehow be bridged and then we move on. There are chasms, gaps, rifts, interstices, it’s a long list. Remember, one person’s autonomous space is another person’s gap. One woman’s pitfalls of national consciousness are another man’s national liberation anthem. Some gaps indicate inequality and inequity, and others indicate the necessary spaces between strands in a network, for example, or architectural or even architectonic supports. I suppose one way to go would be to analyze and theorize the discourse of `brunt.’ What is this brunt that women bear? Who are the women who bear the brunt?

Want peace and security? Try brunt and normal 

The United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, UN-INSTRAW, has been conducting a seminar entitled “Identifying Gaps in Gender, Peace and Security Research”. It went from 13 to 31 October 2008. Yes, it ended on Halloween, and so you know gender, peace and security must be a scary topic. In some ways, you’re right. Let’s talk about representations of peace and security.

Earlier this week, an article entitled “Real National Security Begins at Home, Say Women Leaders”, by Adele Stan, appeared in Alternet and Media Consortium. It’s a fine article, worth reading. I’m interested in the phrase “real national security”. Real national security participates in a race (to where?) against other forms security, unreal national security, real national insecurity, and so on. But what if real national security begins by focusing on something other than security (or sovereignty), something other than (and less destructive than and less inimical to women’s well being than) the national? The point is where it begins, and at home and between homes is fine as long as home is amply defined (patriarchal households? homeless? this could be another version of the secret of primitive accumulation, couldn’t it?), but somewhere it would be nice to know what the endpoints might be. Women are described as great at creating stakeholder constituencies and at keeping neighborhoods together. But what of those who fall outside, or under, the stakeholder rubric, what of those excluded from the neighborhood and, even more those criminalized within it?

The article focuses on Iraq and Afghanistan, but what if any African nation, and what if  Africom, were brought into the picture? Then we would have to take on the treatment of African and African descendent women, of Black women, in the world of security that is the so-called global war against terror. In “Domestic Enemies and Carceral Circles: African Women and Criminalization in Italy”, in Julia Sudbury’s Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex (Routledge, 2005), the author Asale Angel-Ajani notes: “…it is not uncommon to hear `Nigerian’ substitute for `prostitute,’ and popular representations of prostitution are exhibited through (black) African female bodies. . . .All immigrant women are subjected to negative representations, but it is striking to note that in most representations, the sex worker is depicted as specifically Nigerian or at least African in the media and in popular discourse”. (8)

What does the coding and inscription of African women’s bodies, of Black women’s bodies, in Italy, in the United States, in Spain, and elsewhere, mean for security and peace? First, it occurs in the everyday, not in the event of Badiou nor in the evental of Foucault. Rather, every day, around the world, elisions of race and gender produce the ordinary and provide alibis for structural and physical violence, first against Black women. The criminalization of the Black woman’s body in Europe, in the United States, in the world, is then resolved by the multinational militarization, the peace keeping operational forces, of Africom.

The everyday and the ordinary would change the processes of peace-and-security gender analysis and action. First, it would change the real and symbolic gift political economies of the rescue industry (cf Laura Agustín’s Sex at the Margins for a trenchant critique). Those engaged in peace and security would finally have to answer the critical question, “What’s in it for you? What are you getting out of this?” Terms of accountability would change; subject positions, too. Local community based organizations would sit with social movements and with even more informal groups, many of which don’t have names, and yet deserve to be heard and engaged with. The justification of urgency, which is often the calculus of acceptable collateral damage, would be dispensed with. Every moment is an urgent moment, or not.

I imagine this sounds like high romance, and perhaps it is. But it’s also about popular education, where the understanding has been that the program must emerge from at least an invitation from a sufficient number of people within the given zone or community. It emerges as well from readings of sovereignty, such as Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, that argue for a thorough and open reading of the metaphysical assumptions built into mutual and negotiated settlements between sovereign nation-states and the real violence that emerges `naturally’ from those. Likewise, it speaks to writings on democracy, such as Ranciére’s Dis-agreement, that argue that a democracy of peace would be one in which foundational, radical, disagreement would not be seen as a potential security threat, as an invitation to disappearance and silence. Lastly, it emerges from people who have looked at and lived with the continual reiterations of the borderlands (Kathleen Staudt, Melissa Wright, and of course Gloria Anzaldua come to mind).

From a gendered perspective, peace and security must address, emerge from, and participate in the “normal”. In this week’s Pambazuka, Astrid von Kotze opens a piece, “The world food crisis: a ’silent tsunami’?” as follows  “World Food Day (16 October) has come and gone, completely overshadowed by the global financial crisis. Banks crashing are a priority over escalating food prices and hunger. Only the banks got the 700 billion cash injection to get bailed out; the World Food Programme is still appealing for an extra 700 million to feed the poor and starving. This does not include all those ‘normally’ underweight children and malnourished anaemic young women. Both cash and food crises are blamed on the poor: there are too many of them, and they can’t pay their debts.” When do the normal, the normally underweight children and malnourished anaemic young women, enter into the conversation?

Women’s peace and security begins and ends with the phrase, “bearing the brunt”. In a recent essay, “The Demand for the Export of Agrofuels Threatens Livelihoods in Southern Africa”, Michelle Pressend writes: “More than 80 percent of the population is still dependent on biomass for energy in the Southern African region, particularly, wood, cow dung and coal. It is mainly women and children in rural areas that bear the brunt of lack of access to modern, safe and affordable energy. They are the ones that collect wood and search for coal in and around operating and abandoned mines.”

It’s not in crisis and conflict that women and children bear the brunt. It’s in the everyday and the everywhere, and women and children who bear the brunt do not live in lack. They inhabit the normal, they are the normal. 

These pieces were written by Dan Moshenberg. If you have any questions or comments, please contact Dan at dmoshenberg@gmail.com.