Hamas and Feminist Dissonance

2025/03/12 Leave a comment

Sigh…:

It was predictable that Hamas officials and their radicalised international supporters would deny that sexual violence against Israeli women and men was committed on 7 October 2023. But denials from the academic field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies are more surprising because they appear to violate two of the field’s salient principles: support for women’s sexual autonomy and insistence that women who lodge charges of sexual violence should be believed. Instead, a number of academic feminists have not only rejected Israeli claims, they have also embraced Hamas, along with all the reactionary patriarchal baggage of radical Islam, thereby abandoning their own stated values.

This subversion of academic feminism has been unambiguously apparent in multiple events organised by women’s and gender studies programs across the US since the 7 October attacks. The most recent of these was held on 11 February, when the Gender and Women’s Studies department at the University of California at Berkeley sponsored a webinar panel discussion titled “Feminist and Queer Solidarities with Palestine.” The original abstract for the event read:

“Some of the more important accomplishments of feminism include the insistence on “believing women” who come forward with accusations of sexual assault, and the awareness of increased sexual violence during militarized conflicts. Yet these achievements are currently being turned against real feminist concerns in Palestine. This talk will look at how Zionism has weaponized feminism, so as to serve Israel’s genocidal intent, by upholding debunked accusations of systematic Hamas mass assault, while ignoring documented reports of Israeli abuses.”

The abstract was taken down after UCB law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon published a critical op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on 3 February. Solomon anticipated that the panelists’ talks would likely “celebrate antisemitic violence” and create “a hostile environment for women” on campus, thereby violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Two days later, UC Berkeley’s chancellor Rich Lyons responded to Solomon in a letter to the Journal:…

Source: Hamas and Feminist Dissonance

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Today’s feminist problem? Black women are still invisible: Anderson

2016/03/10 Leave a comment

More than an element of truth in this critique by Septembre Anderson:

A few weeks ago, I got a press release about the 100th anniversary of women getting the vote in Canada. The e-mail goes on about women’s suffrage and the commemoration of that fight for a few hundred words and then begins to catalogue when women got the right to vote throughout the country – women in Manitoba in 1916, those in Newfoundland in 1925 and so on and so on – and then, in brackets, near the end, “Unfortunately, the right to vote was withheld from indigenous women, as well as those of Asian and African descent, for years longer.”

Nowhere in the press release was there any mention of how anti-black many suffragettes were; how much of these women’s activism was about gaining the vote for white women only; and how championing eugenics for racialized women was also part of their politics. Heck, there wasn’t even a mention of when indigenous, Asian and African women got the vote in Canada.

And this is the problem with feminism as it exists today. Black women and other women of colour are continuously rendered invisible beneath the “women” banner. The default definition for women is white women – those with the most systemic power – and the issues of the most privileged of us take precedence over the trials and tribulations of the least privileged of us.

We saw this clearly during the Academy Awards. While white women used the hashtag #AskHerMore to bring awareness to and combat sexist reporting on the red carpet, women of colour were bringing attention to #OscarsSoWhite, created by movie critic April Reign, to protest the lack of racial diversity in Oscar nominees.

We saw this with the celebration of Justin Trudeau’s recent cabinet – that boasted gender parity “because it’s 2015” but not racial parity. We see this with continuing discussions about the gender pay gap – but there’s a greater disparity between race than gender.

While white women experience the repercussions of sexism, racism isn’t one of the barriers that they have to come up against. It’s actually one that benefits them. The unique issues that black women have to deal with are far too often overshadowed by the issues that white women deal with, leaving those of us with less institutional power to wait and hope for a trickle-down equity that history has shown us will never come.

Black women exist at the intersection of blackness and womanhood and, therefore, our feminism isn’t a single issue struggle. Our battle for equity and inclusion is with both misogyny and systemic anti-blackness, from within and without feminist circles. Feminism, as it is popularly practised, whitewashes the experience of racialized women and does not acknowledge the intersectionalities within womanhood. It does not acknowledge the distinctive ways different women experience sexism.

Through this myopic definition of womanhood, mainstream feminism is embroiled in elevating the women closest to the top rather than those struggling and suffering on the margins.

In Canada, black women and other women of colour find themselves missing not only from movements for gender diversity, but also from seats of power. Bank boards, newsrooms, hospital boards and executive positions are all spaces where white women see themselves better represented.

Source: Today’s feminist problem? Black women are still invisible – The Globe and Mail

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UK: Bid to boost feminism among Muslim women

2014/03/18 Leave a comment

Part of an emerging and ongoing debate within Muslim communities, this time from the UK:

A new project to connect Islam to feminism has been launched to tackle long-standing concerns that religious Muslim women are excluded from the women’s rights debate.

In what is a deeply controversial area for many in Islamic communities and for many mainstream feminists, the linkup between a Muslim charity and the project is seen as a pioneering step to bring women from different cultural backgrounds together in the battle for sexual equality.

The social enterprise Maslaha, established by the Young Foundation to work on improving social conditions in Muslim and minority communities, said the programme had attracted a huge response in the past few days.

“An awful lot of Muslim women have felt excluded from the debate about women’s rights and this project really focuses on bringing ordinary women into a debate about Islamic feminism that has so far only really been heard in academic circles,” said Latifa Akay of Maslaha.

Bid to boost feminism among Muslim women | World news | The Observer.

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