Continuing our series on #MeToo and humanitarianism in Africa, Dr Brenda Bartelink problematizes the colonial biases in European activism and considers if/how that hinders African women from being heard.
Guest post by: Brenda Bartelink, University of Groningen
Recent outcries over sexual harassment and assault suggest an renewed concern with ongoing gender inequality in public and private life, both in terms of its ideological structure and in terms of its violent results. November’s #MeToo movement, for example, became for many women an avenue to expose the inequality, sexual harassment and assault they experience on a near daily basis. It is part of a broader and growing movement to expose (once again) that gender inequality, which takes myriad forms around the globe, is yet to be overcome. However, noted earlier on this blog, coordinated, continental-level mobilisation around the #MeToo movement has been slow in the making. However, there have been on-ground, in-country movements to fight violence against women across Africa for many years and a younger generation of African feminists are being very vocal about this online, as Nora and Titilope wrote about in previous posts in this series. In this post, I want to consider the challenges of African women representation on these issues by exploring how gender inequality and gender-based violence are made public, normalized, problematized, and proposed to be ‘solved’ in European feminist humanitarian sectors.
On International Women’s Day this year, the Netherlands’ former Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, Lillianne Ploumen, received the Aletta Jacobs Prize for her work in launching the ‘She Decides’ initiative from my home university, the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. This Dutch-initiated international fund is aimed at filling the funding gap left by President Donald Trump’s decision to reinstate the Mexico City Policy, which not only prohibits US funds to go to abortion services, but has a significant impact on access to sexual and reproductive health services worldwide. The contribution of ‘She Decides’ to fill a funding gap and ensure access of women to sexual and reproductive health services is important and has invited support from all over the globe. It is however also an expression of white, western, humanitarian feminisms. European champions in the fight against gender inequality, such Lillianne Ploumen, and the forms of (political) action they use to fight it confront us with underlying paradoxes. These paradoxes demand attention, but they are not easy to solve.
For example, international development and humanitarian organisations have been quite successful in creating broad public concern (and at times outrage) over such practices as female circumcision and early and forced marriage in non-western societies. These gendered practices are framed as ‘harmful cultural practices’, suggesting that (parts) of culture should be changed or removed. These initiatives are difficult to approach dispassionately; female circumcision and early and forced marriage are often seen as the strongest expressions of gender inequality and gender-based violence. Yet, the anthropologist Fuambai Ahmadu points out, the framing of these practices as harmful can be harmful, too. The terminology used for female circumcision within the humanitarian and development sector is ‘female genital mutilation’. The emphasis on violence and mutilation is harmful, according to Ahmadu, because it frames circumcised women and girls as helpless victims who are ‘mutilated’ and unable to enjoy their sexuality.
Frames such as ‘harmful cultural practices’, which are used to problematize gender-based violence, bring with them implicit notions of how ‘religion’ and ‘traditional culture’ are violent, regressive, and detrimental to women’s empowerment. Recent research shows that where these biases are in play, even initiatives designed to empower women and counter gender-based violence can end up reinforcing structures of inequality. Academic literature supports Ahmadu’s critique, suggesting that colonialist biases play a role in shaping contemporary understandings and discourses on these so-called harmful practices (cf. Bartelink and Le Roux 2017).
In my own research, I have found humanitarian and development practitioners to be critical of the way practices related to gender and sexuality are framed in the sector. The term ‘harmful cultural practices’, for example, tends to be seen as counterproductive, because local communities feel criticized rather than encouraged to challenge violent procedures. Yet these development practitioners also acknowledge that it is difficult to change this terminology, which is deeply embedded in the international development lexicon. Furthermore, the recent exposure of sex scandals at Oxfam and other well-known agencies and charities suggest that the sector has its own challenges in relation to gender and sexuality.
In order to understand how the international humanitarian and development sector itself fails to be inclusive in its terminology and practices, it is important to consider those voices that tend to be the strongest within the industry. When it comes to promoting women’s rights, secular, liberal, European voices are prominent in the field. The ‘She Decides’ initiative is a case in point. The question is how to understand these voices in the contexts in which they are shaped. Tamsin Bradley and Chia Longman – editors of a volume on ‘harmful cultural practices’ – argue that in Western Europe these practices have become associated with non-Western women, and Muslim women in particular [i]. In contrast to their European sisters, these women are not seen as emancipated or free. As Joan Scott argues in her seminal book Sex and Secularism, the language of unfreedom can be used to exclude people from full citizenship and participation in European societies. In the dominant understanding of secularism that prevails in Western European societies, gender equality and emancipation are ‘traits presumed to inhere in individuals’ [ii]. Because those who are ‘religious’ are not seen as either emancipated or egalitarian, they can never be fully accepted as belonging to or in European society. In Western European discourses, and by extension in the international development sector, an understanding of women as the voiceless victims of culture, tradition and religion prevails.
However, as #MeToo demonstrates, harmful gender practices occur across the globe, including in ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ contexts, such as the U.S. film industry or the development sector. Further, practices that might well be seen as ‘harmful’ to women in western societies are not always framed as such. Janice Boddy, for example, who has previously worked with those who practice female circumcision, has noted similarities between labiaplasty – a form of plastic surgery that is increasingly popular in the west – and pharaonic circumcision. Another example is the pervasiveness of gender inequality and sexual harassment in European student culture(s). For example, when a student fraternity in the university city of Groningen published online the names and phone numbers of female students who were presumed to be willing to have sex with fraternity males, this initially did not lead to a broad concern with gender-based violence. Only when other incidents occurred and it was seen as damaging to the image of the University was action taken. In the media, the incident was normalized by pointing out that it took place in a rather innocent phase of life, characterized by playful experiments. There was limited attention paid to the underlying structures and unequal power relations between male and female students. And there were no calls to blame Dutch culture, tradition or religion, as we so often see when ‘harmful cultural practices’ are discussed in the development sector.
From these reflections some questions emerge. How can we understand the processes by which some practices are problematized while others are normalized? Why are some violent gender practices exposed while others are silenced or deemed innocent? Which power structures undergird these processes? How do gender, race and religion structure the ways in which we see some people as champions in the fight against gender-based violence while we see others as victims? No matter how important the ‘She Decides’ fund may be to sexual and reproductive health organisations as they continue their work, we cannot ignore that it was a Dutch, white and (yes) female minister who made international news with her initiative against Trump during election time in The Netherlands. We also should not ignore that Ploumen is receiving her award from a University that still struggles with the idea of inclusivity, and which has a patchy track record on promoting gender equality within its own walls.
The question for #MeToo, then, is how best to break the real and symbolic boundaries between the Global North and Global South/ West and Non-West. For European actors in the #MeToo movement it is time to consider exclusionary and unjust patriarchal structures that have been entrenched at home. This also means taking seriously the strategies women have already been taking to increase their well-being and create a better future both on and in their own terms. How can #MeToo in Africa become a pivotal and critical voice to call for feminist, intersectional and decolonializing approaches to inequality and violence?
[i] Longman, Chia, and Tamsin Bradley.2015. Interrogating Harmful Cultural Practices: Gender, Culture and Coercion. Farnham: Routledge. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed March 27, 2017).
[ii] Scott, Joan Wallach. 2018. Sex and Secularism. Princeton University Press, p. 169.
Featured image caption: picture of #Me Too in the Netherlands. Demonstration boards are featuring the previous Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade and International Development Lillianne Ploumen as Super Women after she initiated the She Decides decides initiative to counter the impact of the Global Gag Rule. Photo source: author
About the Author
Brenda Bartelink convenes the clusters on Gender, Sexuality and Multiple Modernities and Religion, conflict transformation and Development at the Centre for Religion, Conflict and Globalization. This blog post is a slightly adapted version of the post on Religion Factor.