Recently at Feministing, Maya Dusenbery wrote about an ad from Germany’s International Human Rights campaign that, as she put it, is “a lesson in how not to advocate for women’s rights.”
The translation of the text is “Oppressed women are easily overlooked. Please support us in the fight for their rights.”
As Dusenbery writes,
It seems the folks who created this ad not only have a hard time seeing agency but actually went out of their way to erase it as thoroughly as possible and then stomp on it some more. And then equated women who wear the burqa with bags of trash. Literally.
I completely agree, and would like to add some broader context. This is not at all surprising, given the recent of attempts in the West to obscure the agency of Muslim women in juxtaposition to their white, Western saviors. One of the more blatant examples of this was the discourse of the United States government that it was going to war in Afghanistan in part to save Afghan women from the Taliban. Laura Shepherd argued in an excellent 2006 article in The International Feminist Journal of Politics (which I’vecited before) that the US discursively constructed Afghan women as the “Helpless Victim” that was submissive and lacking agency, under the oppressive control of the “Irrational Barbarian.” This discourse, was used, of course, to posit the United States (specifically, its military) as the saviors who could rectify the situation for these women. Much as the agency of the women in the German PSA was erased, this narrative denied the agency of Afghan women, who, as Shepherd writes, are afforded “only pity and a certain voyeuristic attraction” (p. 20).
Of course, this specific discourse hasn’t ended. As this TIME Magazine cover from last year shows, it continues to serve as a means of justifying the US occupation of Afghanistan.
(Cover to the August 9, 2010 edition of TIME)
This discourse assumes, obviously, that the US presence in Afghanistan is a clear benefit for women in the country, a position at least some women’s organizations in Afghanistan contest. Samhita Mukhopadhyay at Feministing had an excellent post on this issue last summer.
I should also mention France’s recently-instituted ban on the full-faced veil, which Dusenbery argues – citing Jos Truitt – is a similar erasure of agency. I agree with her, and again would add that this fits in with this general (Orientalist) discourse about Muslim women, their uncivilized oppressors, and their White saviors.
John McMahon is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he also participates in the Women’s Studies Certificate Program. He is interested in post-structuralism, issues relating to men and feminism, gendered practices in international relations, gender and political theory, and questions of American state identity. John blogs at Facile Gestures, where this post originally appeared.
See also our post in which we criticize a set of public service ads that compared women the genital cutting to blow up sex dolls.
Comments 36
Bannef — May 6, 2011
I agree. I feel terrible for women who feel they don't have a choice in wearing a burqa, but if they feel this way because of social pressure then we in the west shouldn't be pointing fingers - our daughters often feel very similarly about bikinis. Of course it isn't just social pressure, often there is the very real threat of violence, which is atrocious. But at the same time, I don't understand how measures such as France outlawing full face veils will change this. It seems to me that such controlling families will now simply not allow their female members to go outside - not exactly a solution. And I know too many women who choose to wear a burqa (despite the fact that in this country this is the decision that goes against social pressure and can lead to violence) to decide that they are victims who need our protection.
m — May 6, 2011
"white men save brown women from brown men" - was it Gyatri Spivak who said this? It says a lot about the screwed up thinking that surrounds these things.
Matt — May 6, 2011
The culture that requires a woman to provide 4 male witnesses to corroborate her rape (or else she can be executed for fornication), requires her to hide her body from view, and explicitly specifies in its holy book that her testimony is half as valid as a man's is the culture that does not erase a woman's agency, got it.
Village Idiot — May 6, 2011
It sure seems like a lot of women in Afghanistan accidentally set themselves on fire. It's probably a good market for clothing made of Nomex® fabric (unless these aren't accidents, that is).
Self-Immolation Tragically Frequent Among Afghan Women
But Drzalakha noted that over the past two years there is evidence that more women are burning themselves than ever before, underscoring "the power of men against women in Afghanistan."
Mohammad Ibrahim Mohammadi, the hospital's head of nursing, said that on average 7-10 women a month are treated for self-inflicted burns; a separate hospital exclusively for burn victims is near completion.
Because the burns cover most of the body -- 70 percent and above -- doctors are able to conclude that such cases are not accidental. (from 2007, http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/873/self-immolation-tragically-frequent-among-afghan-women)
Gee, I wonder what makes so many Afghan women so hot under the collar?
Religion erases human agency, but I pray for the day humans collectively wise up erase religious agency.
debe White — May 6, 2011
For an Afghan woman's point of view see Malalai Joya's page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Malalai-Joya/109298299097265), book (A Woman Among Warlords), speeches. http://www.youtube.com/watandar2000#p/a/f/0/nRqZuv8GKVw
What is even more heinous than using the 'white saving the woman from the savage' discourse to their own ends is that the white guy in this case is the 'savage'. The US policy makers and other leaders internationally, facilitate and support financially the warlord criminals that are in positions of power in Afghanistan.
I agree that this ad is following this line of discourse as well. Where are the designers that can begin changing the paradigm?
Jason — May 6, 2011
Point of contention: conflation of "Afghanis" with "Muslim." There are over 1.5 billion Muslims on earth, and of the .75+ billion women who are Muslims, a very small percentage are legally/quasi-legally forced to wear burkas/niqabs, as the Muslims of China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and former Soviet Republics do not have to wear the veil. So, there is the conflation of under 2% of Muslim people as all Muslims.
Additionally, I do not think that this PSA is some horrific thing and is, frankly, rather truthful. A great deal of people living in developed nations are ignoring the plight of Afghani women in particular, and women in developing nations in general. This image is supposed to shock the viewer: "your current attitudes and actions are equating oppressed women with trash."
As for the agency of Afghani women: yes, they have it, but much as black slaves in the US and Slave Power territories, it did require an army dismantling the old power structure to eliminate the primary cause of oppression (unfortunately, while further progress could have been made in the cause of equality for black people in the US, Lincoln was shot and Johnson became president and he unmade Reconstruction, but I'm getting on a tangent). Thus, due to current US involvement having worsened the already failed-state of Afghanistan, there is a strong argument to be made that the US should create a sort of Marshal Plan for Afghanistan. Providing education for women to allow them employment opportunities would help to start the elimination of the oppressive apparatus of the Taliban in particular and other warlords who encourage such oppression in the more general. Unfortunately, there is not much will to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into Afghanistan to help boost it from failed state into functional, non-oppressive democracy.
kurukuruhsoujo — May 6, 2011
Agency as defined by Merriam-Webster (I only list the relevant definitions):
1. the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power: operation
2. a person or thing through which power is exerted or an end is achieved: instrumentality
Agency should not be the focal point in discussions such as these. Power should be the main concern. When looking at it from this perspective the design is an accurate reflection of Afghani women's position in their society. Absolutely not helpful for activism, point conceded, but still painfully true, especially in light of women having to beg on the streets or to prostitute when losing their provider.
Gayle — May 6, 2011
It seems to me people who throw around words like agency are going out of their way to not help oppressed women who are forced out onto the streets.
That picture isn't just an ad. It's an actual woman sitting in garbage. Most likely she's been reduced to begging or prostitution to survive. Your kind offer to respect her "agency" isn't helping.
Everything in its Right Place, 5-6 May « facilegestures — May 6, 2011
[...] previous post of John’s, “Muslim women and their white saviors” was cross-posted on the excellent Sociological Images blog. Go check it [...]
Alice — May 7, 2011
Since it hasn't been said yet, I think this campaign says volumes about the disconnect between Germany and its class of long-standing residents of the Muslim persuasion whom have not accessed citizenship and recent immigrants.
@modestgrrl — May 7, 2011
Here we go again. Just because a woman covers doesn't mean she's forced to cover. I'm not saying anything else. I'll let Dr. Lila Abu Lughod speak:
"There are several problems with these uniform and ubiquitous images of veiled women. First, they make it hard to think about the Muslim world without thinking about women, creating a seemingly huge divide between "us" and "them" based on the treatment or positions of women. This prevents us from thinking about the connections between our various parts of the world, helping setting up a civilizational divide. Second, they make it hard to appreciate the variety of women's lives across the Muslim or Middle Eastern worlds – differences of time and place and differences of class and region. Third, they even make it hard for us to appreciate that veiling itself is a complex practice.
Let me take a little time over this third point. It is common knowledge that the ultimate sign of the oppression of Afghani women under the Taliban-and-the-terrorists is that they were forced to wear the burqa. Liberals sometimes confess their surprise that even though Afghanistan has been liberated from the Taliban, women do not seem to be throwing off their burqas. Someone like me, who has worked in Muslim regions, asks why this is so surprising. Did we expect that once "free" from the Taliban they would go "back" to belly shirts and blue jeans, or dust off their Chanel suits?
We need to recall some basics of veiling. First, the Taliban did not invent the burqa in Afghanistan. It was the local form of covering that Pashtun women in one region wore when they went out. The Pashtun are one of several ethnic groups in Afghanistan and the burqa was one of many forms of covering in the subcontinent and Southwest Asia that has developed as a convention for symbolizing women's modesty or respectability. The burqa, like some other forms of "cover" has, in many settings, marked the symbolic separation of men's and women's spheres, as part of the general association of women with family and home, not with public space where strangers mingled."
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-09-01-abulughod-en.html
Fanny Goldstein — May 8, 2011
The IGFM was founded in the early seventies by right-wing and conservative circles as a kind of "counter-organisation" against Amnesty International which was seen as too left-leaning. The right wing journalist Gerhard Löwenthal, who later left the CDU because it was too "left-leaning", was one of their founders.
IGFM always ignored human rights violations in the Western Hemisphere and before 1989 were 100 % focused on the communist countries and their satellites in the Third World. It was an instrument of the Cold War. No wonder that, after their red enemy disappeared after the collapse of the wall in 1989, they had to find new targets and found it in the popular topic of human rights violations in Islamic countries. In Germany there are dozens of books about suppressed muslim women in the style of Betty Mahmoody, which are extremely popular and very successful.
What is striking is the similarity of the popular anti-islamic propaganda in contemporary Germeny with the German anti-semitism of the 1920s and 1930s.
Vee — May 8, 2011
Curiously missing from all these discussions- the perspectives of Muslim women who veil. As for those of us who don't fit this description, sure, we can agree that it's not right to force someone to wear something if they don't want to. The buck stops there. It's not our job to decide what constitutes 'oppressive' outerwear for other people. If you want to help women then help them get access to basic necessities and education. You may be amazed to discover that these women have as much fortitude, intelligence, and ability to think for themselves as anybody else. They are capable of making decisions for themselves much better than you, me, the government, or any overseas liberal.
Links That Will Change Your World! | Ted Paulson -- Sociology blog — May 13, 2011
[...] That Will Change Your World! May 13, 2011By Ted PaulsonMuslim women and their white saviors. One of the best articles explaining why ethnocentrism really messes with people’s ability to help [...]
skeptifem — May 21, 2011
Who cares about women being forced into marriages and raped by their husbands? The real problem is taking away their agency! Wait, what?
Do you even hear yourself? The US in Afghanistan doesn't help this kind of shit at all, but to pretend that even a majority of women in fundamentalist islam are not being totally abused, that they are exercising agency is intellectually dishonest. I don't understand how anyone can read what escaped women have been through and still think that anyone is capable of "choosing" this, a whole lot of the abuse that women in islamic patriarchy suffer is force by definition- forced marriage, forced sex, forced child rearing, domestic violence, etc. Sometimes communities will brutalize women who depart from their norms, which include not talking to/selling things to women who go out without a husband. This makes it problematic to live without moving to a different home. Part of it is that sexual consent doesn't exist- women who are raped and beaten by their husbands are told this is a totally correct state of affairs by all available religious authority. What other options exist? Its just like when people tell me to respect the "agency" of street prostitutes even though the majority of them are introduced young, have pimps, and few other options. Its total BS. I happen to think all the rape and abuse that women suffer (within systems like fundamentalist islam and prostitution) are the real problem.
Round Up of items from the Web: Wanrow, Clothes, and a dean search… — May 22, 2011
[...] for public projects without using sexist/racist tropes appreciated this discussion over at sociological images of this poster from a German human rights [...]
ds — June 6, 2011
The view that the ad "equated women who wear the burqa with bags of trash. Literally" is perhaps one of the most impressive displays of inability to understand a concept I've ever seen.
Does it really needs explaining that the human rights campaign isn't about "we need to save all that thrash that needs recycling", but uses such perspective to show how women are often treated in some cultures? (And talk about a real "rape culture" for a change)
What one would want? How we portray the suffering of people without being somehow offending? I'm always left wondering how would the "ideal version" of the misoginist/racist/LGBTophobe thing should be in order not to be offensive.
Are there "this was done right, they've nailed it; this is not offensive to anyone and goes straight to the point" posts on this blog at least? Or is it just bashing about how everything is offensive without ever suggesting how a non-offensive alternative would be?
Kat — September 13, 2011
Bla. You need to get in mind what the ad wants: Funding and awareness raising. Do you really think anyone in the Western hemisphere will donate if we represent "agency"?! WTF? Agency has something to do with choice and possibility. To not understand that this is severely reduced in Afghanistan for women needs to get their privileged ass up.