Thinking Outside the Box
AR: As Jennifer was saying earlier, there are more similarities here than differences. I think one of the most important similarities is that each of you really thought about the choices that you made. That differentiates you, sadly, from a lot of other people, or from the perceived majority. Because I think the perceived majority falls into the habit of what society expects of us. And maybe that’s always been feminism’s role: to challenge those expectations. As we can see from this panel, one person’s choices don’t cancel out another’s.
Now we want to turn the conversation over to the audience. If you have questions or comments, please feel free.
Audience Member: I was interested in the systemologies of the categories that we think in, and the limitations of language: we struggle with these boxes that we don’t quite fit into. Noelle, in your book, which I really enjoyed, it’s really funny –
NH: Thank you.
Audience Member: You start using the word Da, to describe your father, after he has the sex change. Amy and I were talking before the panel started about the word “Single” and how there are only a couple of categories you can check off on forms: single or married. What do we do with the rest of us? I’m wondering how you would suggest we go about changing these categories and changing the language in which we think? Obviously, that’s not the only barrier to changing social policy. But in a lot of ways, the way we live in the world starts with how we think of ourselves and the language that we use.
NH: It’s strange because I actually don’t use Da anymore. It fell by the wayside. But during the transitional time, because it had sort of a softer sound and every time I thought of the word dad, I’d think of a guy wearing a barbecue apron in the backyard of a suburban house, I needed a word that was vaguely fatherish, but that had a softer tone to it, or that just didn’t have as immediate a visual image attached to it.
Now I call her Dad, Da, Christine, hey you. In restaurants a lot of times, I say Aunt Tillie, because otherwise the waiter will look and we’ll get into a whole big discussion with the waiter for two hours. So language is a real pain, because you do struggle with these categories and they’re so limiting. And at the same time, you can’t just abandon them and pretend they don’t exist – “Well, I’m going to have nothing to do with this category” – because it’s there and, as a writer especially, you can’t get around the language you’re working with. It’s a matter of trying to adapt it to your situation, which is a challenge, but that’s what feminism is about, right? Finding ways to exist within these institutions.
AR: Yes.
LT: This isn’t an answer to your question, but it’s interesting. My three-year-old doesn’t distinguish between males and females. He has girls in his class and he has boys in his class, but he doesn’t think of them as boys or girls. In fact, he will make very cute mistakes, where he will refer to a girl as a boy, or whatever.
AR: Maybe he’s slow.
(laughter)
LT: I don’t interfere and try to teach or try to direct him to know Gabrielle is a girl and Mark is a boy. It’s irrelevant, as far as I’m concerned. It makes me sad to think about when this innocent time will be lost. I’m very curious to know at what point in his development that’s going to happen, but I’m enjoying it very much right now.
AR: Irshad or Cathy, do you say anything subversive when you’re asked the question about “Married” or “Single”? I often think can it at least be “Married” and “Unmarried”? Is there another choice? Do you get mad about that?
CM: The language-thing is difficult in a lot of ways. I have friends who still call my adoptive parents my foster parents, because they just don’t know the language of adoption. I always felt uncomfortably in the middle of all of it. The thing that I’m working on now focuses on sexual identity. One thing I like a lot about Ghana is that lesbians are called Supi. And Supi means the place where your spirit resides. Literally, it refers to a stool. Everybody, when born, is given a stool and that’s the place where your spirit sits. Your stool is your Supi; it’s the thing you’re closest to. I don’t know how it became, in the language, the word for women lovers.
AR: Irshad, did you have anything on that?
IM: Only very marginally, to say that I am more interested to know from you guys, maybe after the panel is over, whether the Bush Administration’s boxes for certain families, or perhaps one model of a family, has an effect on your life, on your daily life? Or are we all simply living our lives as if they didn’t matter, doing what we need to do and talking about what we need to talk about as if Washington didn’t matter?
I will say this, it is fairly frightening to me to see how the mores of cultural minorities to North America influence public policy. We, at least in Canada, we are so caught up in the issue of multiculturalism, and much like the way Muslims take the Koran so literally, we, sadly, take multiculturalism very literally. Often what that means is that we fail to ask the questions that we need to ask of our cultural minorities, publicly, never mind privately, in order to formulate good public policy. For example, why is female genital mutilation still considered a cultural issue? Why is it conflated or confused with culture, as opposed to absolutely calling it what it is: torture?
I don’t necessarily mean it’s a problem for cultural minorities to have influence. Obviously, I’m not suggesting that at all. The problem is that I don’t think we’re being honest about it. One group of people is using culture as a shield. Another group of people is using culture as a sword. And there’s a whole whack of people in the middle, who frankly, want a more honest public debate about these things.
Families and Competing Cultures
Audience Member: I’ve been spending a lot of time with immigrant women, some from the former Soviet Union, who have come to the U.S. and feel a bit alienated by American feminism because they feel that their traditions are not being respected, and that the way they’ve lived their lives for 30, 40 or 50 years is now considered anachronistic. They’re trying to find a way to fit into western culture, without losing part of what has given them their identity through the years. Can any of you talk about the fact that in other cultures some women are more comfortable playing the traditional wife role, where they cook the dinner and take charge of the babies?
IM: Can I ask a question, in order to flesh this out a little bit more? Is there a particular example that you can give about what these women are saying to you about what doesn’t quite fit with American mores?
Audience Member: Sure. I live in Brighton Beach and I met with Russian women about two months ago. And they see things on TV, images of American women, so one woman turned to me and said, “Am I that out of date?” Which was her way of saying that she doesn’t fit. She told me she felt like she needed to isolate herself in a small community because when she ventured outside of Brighton Beach, when she came into the city, she felt like she was being looked down upon. I think it’s more of an internal feeling than anything that is manifested outwardly, but when they see things on television or come to panels such as this, they feel. . ..
AR: Leora, do you want to address that?
LT: I do think that over the last 35 years of the feminist movement, going back to the beginning of second wave activity, there has been a disparagement among feminists of women who choose or have taken on the traditional role, whether or not that was an active choice on their part. There has been a sort of valorization of paid work outside the home. I think the tide is turning now. I think most people in the U.S. are very quick to now admit that most paid work is not very liberating at all, no matter who you are. Certainly, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed showed that. So that, coupled with the fact that there is more respect, in recent years, for women who make an active choice to stay at home or in some way to take on traditional aspects of the female role.
I do, however, think that it’s is generational. I’m 33 and I think that this is something new for my generation and my peer group. It sounds like you were talking about women who are of my parents’ generation. I’d be curious to hear from others, if the tide is turning for that generation.
AR: Do you have a comment on that?
Audience Member: You said that making a conscious choice to take on a more traditional role, for example, is becoming more accepted. And yet earlier you were talking about people who lived that lifestyle but hadn’t actually ever made that choice. Does anyone actually make that choice or is it this new myth that we’ve set up?
LT: Yes, you’re absolutely right. I’m not saying that you necessarily are taking on wholesale every single aspect of the traditional female role. I mean, you can be a mother who is away at a paid job from nine to six, and then comes home to do the laundry. You may choose to do this or you may choose not to do that. Absolutely, as I said before, many of the choices aren’t really choices because they’re imposed upon us. But sometimes we kind of wiggle around within that framework and there are choices we make.
My husband does all the cleaning in our apartment because he’s better at it and he hates the cleaning I do. That’s his choice.
(laughter)
Amy Richards: Your hand went up. Did you have a comment on this?
Audience Member: I have two comments. The first is about the issue of female genital mutilation. At a previous job that I had, I invited Nahid Toubia to come and speak about FGM. For those of you who don’t know her, she was the first female surgeon in Sudan, and she’s published a fair amount on female genital mutilation. She came to speak about the topic, and it was actually one of the most well-attended –
AR: And very critical of the U.S. or American women.
Audience Member: And she said that it fascinated her that western people were so interested in FGM and so quick to condemn it given that they were so unwilling to look at their own practices around sexuality and self-mutilation. How many women would make the choice to have breast implants if society didn’t tell them that it makes them sexy and marriageable, the same way that women practicing FGM in other cultures believe that it makes them more desirable for marriage. And granted, there is an age difference, but it’s a decision you’re making based on what society expects. I just wanted to put that comment out there.
The other comment I wanted to bring up was about the Russian women who were watching television and felt alienated. Even though we’re talking about how many choices we have, I do see feminism as striving to create more choices. And so, it’s unfortunate that those women –
Confronting Traditions
Audience Member: There are younger women in Russia right now who are basically using this idea, this traditional wife and mother role, as a commodity to sell themselves to American men. They have an Internet site burgeoning with business right now because there are certain kinds of American men who crave these young, very naive, very beautiful young women who knows that if she says she’ll be a very good wife, people will give her a green card. There’s a whole business around that.
I’m wondering what the panel’s thoughts are about why American men would want these kinds of women?.
AR: Well, I think that’s a myth that American women struggle with too. I don’t think that’s something unique to being an immigrant woman in this country. Women across the country, women across the world struggle to live up to a certain standard, with a similar sense of conformity.
NH: I gathered from what you were saying earlier that women were seeing images of high-powered career women on television, and then saying, “Well, I feel that American feminism doesn’t include me.” As though we were controlling the media!
(laughter)
I don’t really feel like high-powered women shown on TV are really indicative of most of the feminist women I know either.
AR: Cathy, you wanted to comment?
CM: I wanted to say, first of all, in Ghana, I lived in a compound with women from Nigeria. It took me a while to realize that FGM was a big part of that community. It was going on all the time. And it made me revise so many things because it was so profoundly normal within that community. There were huge issues around health care and health access for everybody: the amount of death, stupid death around the food that we export; the number of deaths from food poisoning or bad pharmaceuticals. FGM fell under this whole huge umbrella of health concerns, and there was a way that was it so profoundly normal, I had to revise a lot of the way it was presented to me through American feminism. I see a lot of problems with the arguments now, which is not a defense of the practice, but it wasn’t this huge social horror that was going on. There were many more pressing issues.
But I do hear a lot of Ghanaian men say all the time that Ghanaian women spoil when they get here. They want to go back to the village and get, not even a city girl from Ghana, but a village girl and bring her back. In some ways, it says profound things about their social alienation, the feeling that their family structure is falling apart. I don’t think we want to read it in simple, macho terms, as if they simply want this idealized woman. It’s more about their levels of alienation, of loneliness, of wanting to recreate the kind of family that they grew up in. I don’t know if this has something to do with American men or American women, who have longings around the things that we may have lost in society.
NH: I remembered what I wanted to say, which was also about American men. Why do men want these traditions? To a certain extent, I think both my husband and my father, neither one who are traditional men, are in some ways an indication that there is an enormous struggle to be a certain kind of man in this society. By “certain kind of man,” I don’t mean an oppressive one. My husband, who is the gentlest, kindest, most unathletic man in the world, is constantly at family occasions asked, “What do you think about football, blah, blah, blah?”
These are small little things, but he was beaten up his entire youth. This was his constant, being forced into negative situations where he is supposed to assert his testosterone. My dad responded to those same cultural pressures in just the opposite way, by appropriating them and saying, “I’m going to be Superguy.” He was macho; he was abusive – not physically, but verbally – to my mother. He berated her. He played on her self-esteem and her body image issues. All of which was textbook abusive husband behavior that we were able to look at in a very different light afterwards: this was my dad trying to pass as a man.
Even though we think there are a million ways to be a man in America, my father felt that the only way that he wouldn’t get read immediately as some sort of swishy, effeminate guy who was not going to get jobs, not be able to support the family, was to become a hysterically-extreme version of masculinity. And while my dad may be an extreme version, I still think that men have to confront these sorts of pressures all the time. So, why do they seek out women who are compliant? They’re taught to, in a way. Seeing what my father went through has given me some sympathy for that experience.
AR: It’s past 8:30. Time to wrap up, so I want to let everybody leave who wants to leave. But I think the panelists will stay around, so if you have a question that was not asked, I want to encourage you to come up and ask it. Thank you very much.
