Re male circumcision, i am in general against it, but many studies have shown that it drops the chance of getting HIV as much as half. It's one of the reasons that southern Africa has a higher infection rate than East and West Africa, which are more Muslim.
Re female circumcision, i see no excuse for it. No cultural excuse is acceptable. It is a human rights violation and ought to be pursued by international agencies as such.
i appreciate Nat's making the thread, in part not to derail another. And i totally agree with increasing awareness and getting support for agencies that help women, like the fistula clinics that Heart linked to.
But i am bothered by the fact that we seem to be aware of women from developing countries only through issues of gender violence. These issues are real. They are not rare. But they are not the whole lives of women from these nations.
One can live in a patriarchal culture and negotiate power for oneself. That has led to some women demanding power for their gender. i appreciate the work of people like Nicholas Kristof. i love his story. i have always followed him in the Times. It's huge what they are doing, and more needs to be done.
But we also need to hear the voices of women whose first concerns are not gender violence. Most women in developing countries live lives where they have a certain amount of self-determination. They have families who support them. They have jobs. They have children about whose education they make choices. Are they living in more sexist cultures? Yes. Do they perhaps have some pleasures and freedoms that we do not? Yes.
i am thinking of the women i saw depicted in the PBS Africa series this year that my students watched much of. There was a Nairobi single mom who owned her own hair salon. A woman living in remote Tanzania among another tribe because she fell in love. She visited her mom again in the city and made the decision for herself whether to keep living in rural poverty or return to the city and take advantage of her education. There was a family where the wife ran the farm/ranch back home while the husband lived near the lake and ran a fishing concern. They came together and coordinated their business concerns and made business decisions together. We saw a woman become the first female supervisor in a mine.
Global feminism is of course concerned with gender violence, but also with the struggle against corporations and governments who want to exploit third world laborers and despoil their environments. China's investment in Africa, in some of the poorest and most ecologically fragile places in the world, is a concern to feminists and other activists in the region.
Anyway, we ought to take the time to look into how women empower themselves as well as how they are disempowered. i think Kristof does that. i think reporting on international development efforts that focus on women does that. But somehow we still come away with this image of women of the developing world as victims.
We have this definition of personal autonomy that is western. We are totally bought into it. And we seem to believe that anybody who does not have the miriad of choices we do is oppressed. Well maybe. But some of them have a few things we do not have. Like the support of an extended family and a sense of community that stretches back generations. That is certainly less common everywhere these days. And it certainly is not the case in postcolonial subSaharan Africa where the most disruptive thing in most people's lives has been the fact that men have to be away from home for months at a time to work. Anyway, the concerns of women from developing nations are not always our concerns. Nor are they the concerns we might think they should have.
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