Take That, Patriarchy!

When Ted Cruz jumps to stand with you, you may be in trouble:

I saw this item Wednesday morning just before I went to work, and it intrigued me.  On the one hand, right-wing Republicans have thrown tantrums before when they imagined that the Obamas were violating royal protocol; surely they would be upset that Mrs. Obama should do it now, and to one of America's most important allies in the Middle East.  On the other hand, she was defying "sharia law," which is good, but she's a Democrat and married to a black man, which is bad. especially since her husband is widely believed by Republicans to be a Muslim bent on imposing sharia law on Christian America.  What to do?

But consider the dilemma for the Democrats.  On the one hand, Mrs. Obama defied patriarchal Muslim norms and totally destroyed the Saudi oppression of women! -- at the same time that her husband was defending US intimacy with one of the nastier dictatorships in the world, and his administration (along with the corporate media and other minor elements) was fawning on the late King Abdullah as a "man of wisdom and vision," even a "man of peace" who "nudged Saudi Arabia forward."  On the other hand, she disrespected another culture, which objectively put her on the side of the Islamophobes.  As far as I can tell, except for Cruz, most people chose to solve the problem by falling back on knee-jerk cheerleading.  Since the Right mostly did not mount an offensive, liberals didn't have to get defensive.  So when I looked around after work that day, I didn't find the slapfight I'd half-hoped to find.

What I did find was that Mrs. Obama's behavior was not unprecedented.  In fact, it was routine and bipartisan.  Neither Laura Bush nor Condoleezza Rice (who later referred to the headscarf as a "sign of oppression") wore a headscarf when they traveled to Saudi Arabia and met King Adbullah, and according to this Washington Post article, other foreign women have done likewise.  As foreigners and non-Muslims, they aren't even expected to cover their heads.  So why did Mrs. Obama's attire get all this attention (via)?  There was a fuss on Twitter by some Saudis, that's why: about 1500 tweets, some of which were critical, while others defended her.  A tempest in a teapot.

So, good for Michelle Obama, though it doesn't seem she was making a bold political statement.  Like her predecessors, she went with the flow, followed precedent, didn't make waves.

This item interested me, though, because lately I've been seeing a number of feel-good multiculti memes which declare that wearing a headscarf is a personal choice or an individual choice.

 
Which is, of course, nonsense.  Using a Hello Kitty lunchbox as a briefcase is a personal decision.  Dyeing your hair green is a personal decision.  Wearing a hijab, or other form of female head covering, is a custom tied to the status of women in a particular culture or religious sect (as shown by the fact that men aren't required to wear one), it's a declaration of one's religious affiliation and makes a statement about the status of women in that affiliation.  (If people were required to use a Hello Kitty lunchbox as a briefcase for religious or cultural reasons, it would cease to be a personal choice.)  It's not a universal Muslim custom, nor is the covering of women's heads as a cultural requirement limited to Islam; and outside of certain Islamist environments a woman can usually go bare-headed without being penalized for it, though even in Europe or the US she could come into conflict with her family or her mosque if she makes the personal choice not to wear the scarf.  It could be a personal decision if a non-Muslim chose to wear one in a non-Muslim society because they thought it looked cool, but how often does that happen?

This iteration of the meme is particularly dishonest, not just because it ignores the cultural context in which many women must cover themselves, but because of that bit about its being "oppressive to strip you of your freedom of choice" by calling the head covering a sign of oppression.  Discussing a cultural sign, criticizing it for what it signifies, does not strip a person of their freedom of choice.  Assaulting a woman and tearing off her headscarf would strip her of her freedom of choice -- but so would assaulting a woman who chooses not to cover her head.  So would laws or regulations forbidding (or requiring) women to wear the hijab.  By this logic, criticizing, say, antigay or antichoice Christians would strip them of their freedom of choice.  Such Christians and their apologists might very well try to claim that it does.  (As do ultraorthodox Jewish males who assault little orthodox Jewish girls for not meeting their standards of female attire.)  People of the mindset represented by this meme mostly reply that their faith is not legitimate, it's a religion of hate, and therefore their faith doesn't deserve respect.  As I've noted before, such people are highly selective in their implementation of freedom.  I suspect that they are so tolerant of the hijab because it has no hegemonic cultural significance in the US yet: it seems exotic, and they can fantasize about the inner lives of the women who wear it.  To some extent the hijab is a personal choice here, though young girls whose parents require them to wear it, or grown women pressured by their communities to wear it, could plausibly argue otherwise.

While it would be obnoxious to hector women who cover their heads, or accuse them of collaboration with the patriarchy, etc., such criticism does not strip them of their freedom of choice, any more than this meme strips me of my freedom of choice by trying to tell me how to think about the hijab.  We live in a pluralistic society, however much many people find that uncomfortable, and in a pluralistic society people are free not just to behave and believe differently, they are free to talk and disagree and argue about their differences.  Unfortunately the level of debate is generally very low on all sides, but the remedy for that is to raise the level, not to throw out debate altogether.

According to the meme, "Susan wears a hijab out of choice".  This is laziness, or as Bertrand Russell said about postulating, it has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.  Susan is a fictional character, created to grind the meme-maker's axe.  Real women's reasons for wearing headscarves will likely be more complex than that.  People have often chosen to go along with systems that oppress them.  The women in the anti-choice movement, for example, are as eager to police other women's bodies as any patriarch.  Or take as simple an example of female gender-cop behavior as women calling other women sluts.  I'm reminded of Richard Trexler, who wrote in Sex and Conquest (Polity Press, 1995) of claims that children chose to become 'two-spirit': "Compare these protestations that a child exercised 'free will’ to those in any traditional Catholic society that young girls married of their own free will, when of course they did not" (225 n14).  In the American culture of therapy, moreover, choice is highly suspect: it's only okay to be gay, for example, if it was forced on you by your genes; as this meme shows, choice is okay when it's an exotic multicultural manifestation, forced on you only by your parents and your imam.

I think it's time to reread Susan Miller Okun's Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, in which she and several other writer / scholars grapple with questions like this one.

Some Choices Are More Equal Than Others

While I was looking for some discourse about black women's hair the other day, I found this item at Angry Black Woman.  And this comment:

I don’t think that removing the hijab so that people won’t harass you makes you ‘free’. This documentary seems a bit misguided or problematic. Muslim women should be able to wear what they want, hijab or no hijab, but the hijab is not a sign of oppression, PEOPLE are the oppressors. Instead of fixing racism (which it won’t) by removing your Muslim head cover, maybe we should fight a xenophobic nation.

This set my brain to teeming.  I agree that "removing the hijab so that people wont harass you" doesn't equal freedom, and I don't believe that women who wear the hijab should be harassed in countries where Islam isn't the dominant religion.  But the commenter gets sloppy in her third sentence: "The hijab is not a sign of oppression, PEOPLE are the oppressors."  There's a crucial difference between "a sign of oppression" and the identity of the oppressors.  To give an extreme example, there's no contradiction in saying that the pink triangle is a sign of oppression, and that it was imposed by Nazi oppressors.  Of course, now the pink triangle is too often a fashion statement, and the hijab is an ambiguous sign.

But then, women who don't wear the hijab shouldn't be harassed either, whether they're living in a non-Muslim country or a predominantly Muslim one.  And there's the rub, because they too often are.  (There are also "signs of oppression" for men in some Muslim countries: under the Taliban men in Afghanistan were "harassed" for not wearing a beard, for example.  In the sixties, American men who wore their hair too long were subject to attack and forcible haircuts by police in many areas.  Similar abuse occurred in other parts of the Free World.)  Does wearing a headscarf so that people won't harass  you make you 'free'?  Apologists for Islamism have said so.

A couple of days after I saw the comment I quoted, I read about American women travelling to Muslim countries being advised to be more "modest" in dress and demeanor, both as a good-will gesture and to avoid harassment.  (It was probably in Gay Travels in the Muslim World, come to think of it, referring to female Peace Corps volunteers.)  That's fair enough, I suppose, but shouldn't it work both ways?  Shouldn't Muslim women who live in America modify their dress and demeanor to be less "modest," so as not to give offense?  True, the US is supposed to be a pluralist society, but we do have our own quaint customs and gender expectations.  Why shouldn't visitors or immigrants (or American converts to Islam) show courtesy to us and our folkways?  This seems to me very similar to what some Americans have said in my presence (and many more seem to assume): that foreigners coming to America should learn English, because we speak English here; but foreigners in their own countries should learn English to talk to us when we travel there, because English is the dominant world language, especially for business.  The double bind is the same.

Thinking about this sent me back to a review, by the American feminist Christine Stansell, of a book about the resurgence of the veil among Muslim women.  She wrote:

Around the world past and present, women cover their heads before God and man. That is, they veil. A dispassionate list of veils would include nuns' cowls, saris, lace mantillas for Mass, peasant babushkas, brides' veils, church ladies' Sunday hats, the wigs and headscarves of Orthodox Jews, and the headscarf my mother (middle class, Midwestern, Protestant) threw on in the 1950s when she ran across the street to the corner store. All these forms of veiling refer, religiously or secularly, to the old idea that women have something that should be hidden. Call it modesty, or propriety; but at heart it is about the sexual shame that women incur if they reveal themselves in public. In this regard, culture and tradition may be more decisive than religious belief: my mother wore a scarf because "ladies" didn't go bareheaded in public, not because the Apostle Paul told women in the early Church to cover.

But despite all that these many veils share, there is only one kind of veil that is widely seen as a barbaric imposition, and that is the Muslim veil.

Fair enough -- to the point where Stansell deploys the blind passive, "is widely seen as a barbaric imposition."  Widely seen by whom?  A good many feminist writers have mocked the hypocrisy of European and American imperialists who saw "barbarism" only in the way brown-skinned women were treated by their men.  "Western" feminists generally criticized the sexism of their own society first.  They've been attacked by conservatives, as expedient, for either ignoring the oppression of women in other countries, or for trying to make those women over in their own lesbian, baby-killing, sluttish image.  Similarly, "Third World" feminists have routinely been attacked by their countrymen for supposedly borrowing the values of the decadent, man-hating, immodest harridans of the West.  And then there have been incidents like this, in Israel, where ultra-Orthodox men attacked and harassed women who didn't fit their standards of modesty.  (And then, when they drew criticism, whined that their [Jewish] critics were Nazi oppressors.)  If it will make Stansell feel any better, I'll be happy to say that spitting on an eight-year-old girl and calling her a whore, no matter how she's dressed, is barbaric.  So is the misogyny of American men.  (The question I raised about Muslim women also applies to the ultra-Orthodox: If majority values rule, shouldn't ultra-Orthodox women be required to "dress like prostitutes"?)

On the other hand, "barbaric" is a red herring.  Originally it simply meant "foreign," with the added assumption that foreigners are less civilized than one's own country.  I just did a quick search of this blog, and it doesn't appear I've ever used "barbaric" as an epithet; it turns up only where I'm quoting someone else or referring to ethnocentric attitudes about foreigners.  I don't need that word or that concept to oppose unjust social structures and practices.

Stansell also wrote in that review that "American feminists have no problem seeing fundamentalist Christianity as a broad-based movement that harbors lethal views at the edges, but they will bend over backwards to avoid criticisms of radical Islam, even at its most hateful and murderous."  I think this is, at best, an oversimplification of American feminists' views of fundamentalist Christianity, and of their views of fundamentalist Islam.  As I indicated before, American feminists were working with their counterparts in Islamic countries before the September 11 attacks, but they were widely accused of ethnocentrism by conservative men until George W. Bush declared a fatwa against the Taliban, and poor oppressed Muslim women became worthy victims again.  This standard is still being waved under the Obama regime, defending our ongoing war in Afghanistan as a defense of women against the brutal Taliban; that our allies the Northern Alliance are also radical Islamists who commit violence against women is less likely to be admitted.

In 2009, Katha Pollitt wrote of President Obama's speech in Cairo:

You would think the biggest issue for Muslim women is that someone is preventing them from wearing a headscarf: "The US government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it," he said. "I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal." Fair enough, but that woman is choosing. What about Saudi or Iranian women, who are forced by law to cover? Obama noted that countries where women are well educated tend to be more prosperous and promised American aid for women's literacy and microloans. These are both good things, especially in desperately poor and underdeveloped countries like Afghanistan; but face it, to become full participants in modern societies women need more than a grade school education and a sewing machine. They need their rights.

What I'm trying to do here is not to declare one side or another the bad guys, but to stress the complications and contradictions of these issues.  Following Noam Chomsky and Martin Luther King Jr., I hold that the faults and crimes of my own country should get my first attention; but that doesn't mean I shouldn't also notice the faults and crimes of other countries too.  And what if the crimes of other cultures come here?  When the Tonton Macoute visited American shores and assaulted Haitian refugees, should I have withheld judgment on the ground that it's their culture and I can't judge because American crimes are as bad or worse?  I don't equate the hijab with death squads, but I don't think I'm obliged to respect Islam any more than I respect Christianity or Judaism.

As for moves to ban the headscarf in various places, I have mixed feelings about them.  On the one hand, they are a restriction on religious freedom, and I object to that on principle.  But then I read about a television debate where a French Muslim teenager said she supported the headscarf ban, because without it her family would force her to wear one. Of course apologists for the headscarf might argue that she doesn't want to wear it because she's been influenced by her peers, and that might be true, but it's irrelevant. (Such an apologist should tread carefully though, because the usual next step is to vilify the peers and the host culture for immodest and decadent values.) When she grows up, she might decide she likes her parents' values after all and put on a scarf. Till then, however, it should be her choice.

Which is why it's a mistake to invoke individual choice in controversies like these.  It isn't always the women themselves who want to wear a scarf, but their families and their communities who want to make them do it. This is ironic for families that have come to the West to escape certain values in their home countries that they consider oppressive, but more important is that individual choice isn't really the issue: it's the right of certain members of a group -- usually but not always older males -- to make choices for the others.  The recent ruckus over a Federal requirement that employers include contraception in their health care coverage is an example of this: the objections overwhelmingly came not from lay Christians but from senior clergy, who demanded the authority to deny access to contraception to Catholic and non-Catholic employees alike.  Another example would be the exemptions from educational requirements that Amish communities in the US enjoy: it's not a protection of the rights of the kids, but of their parents and their religious superiors.  Such community leaders may pay lip service to the American value of individual choice, but they're really hiding behind it.  Individual choice, for women or men, is the last thing they want.

There is no need for a pluralistic society to respect the wish of religious or ethnic leaders to impose their will on those they want to control,  no contradiction of the general commitment to diversity.  The limits on parental rights are controversial, but they aren't written in stone either.  Parents don't have unlimited power over their children, nor should they.  And it's disingenuous to present the controversy over the hijab as a dispute over individual rights and choices, either in the West or in Muslim societies.