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Anthropologist Clifford Geertz thought that to understand the world, you had to understand an onion<\/a>.<\/p>\n It is the concept of social embeddedness.\u00a0 The only way to understand an onion is as a whole; peeling back layers will never lead to a core \u2013 only more layers, and watering eyes.\u00a0 Geertz was writing about culture, but feminist scholars Ellen Ross and Rayna Rapp made the same point about sexuality<\/a>: it cannot be removed from social layers of family, politics, media, economics, religion, world systems.<\/p>\n Since reading Kristof and WuDunn\u2019s Half the Sky<\/em>, I have been thinking about the poverty onion.\u00a0 The global women\u2019s oppression onion.\u00a0\u00a0 The violence against women onion.<\/p>\n In their book, Kristof and WuDunn tell urgent, compelling, personal stories about individual women \u2013 primarily in poor countries \u2013 struggling to overcome poverty and violence.\u00a0 They are inspiring writers that make readers want to act.\u00a0 As a former nonprofit fundraiser, I know the power of these stories.\u00a0 (I also know the danger of turning lives into stories.)<\/p>\n Yet with this kind of writing, we always have the responsibility of asking questions like who is speaking for whom?\u00a0 What kind of picture are they painting?\u00a0\u00a0 Do they show the problems women are facing as rooted only in individuals (i.e. sex traffickers) or do they show larger systems that act to constrain agency?\u00a0 Is there an examination of structural causes?\u00a0 Can one woman\u2019s struggles be separated from economic influences, cultural influences, global trade agreements being negotiated an ocean away?\u00a0 Can one woman\u2019s struggles be separated from the world?<\/p>\n In other words, are they writing about the onion, or an imaginary onion core?<\/p>\n In a chapter about sex work and sex trafficking, WuDunn and Kristof write: \u201cWe\u2019re not arguing that Westerners should take up this cause because it\u2019s the fault of the West\u2026 This is not a case where we in the West have a responsibility to lead because we\u2019re the source of the problem.\u00a0 Rather, we single out the West because, even though we\u2019re peripheral to the slavery, our action is necessary to overcome a horrific evil\u201d (24-25).<\/p>\n Is the West not at all implicated or connected to sex work in poor countries?\u00a0 This view ignores unjust global economic systems \u2013 and how the poverty that is influenced by these systems affects decisions individual women make about sex work.\u00a0 Kristof and WuDunn\u2019s argument that it is not our fault in the West that women are in these situations \u2013 but that we should do the right thing and help them \u2013 is a framework that leaves people in rich countries as the central and powerful figures and women in poor countries as objects.\u00a0 Truly feminist work should disrupt, rather than reproduce, terms of domination.<\/p>\n