#264 | Feminist Sunday

Tavi's sweater!

***

Just because.

***

And so I faced the task of explaining an American legal reality of freedom and consent to a woman who had been married under circumstances that could not have been more different. Zainab expected spousal support and her argument for it was simple: she had given up everything to be married and feared the pain of an ineradicable stigma if sent back to Jordan. Again and again, she would ask me about her rights under the Islamic marriage contract, and repeatedly I would tell her that an Indiana court would not enforce a marriage contract based on Sharia law. Then she would exclaim, aghast, that if she could not get any rights or restitution under Islamic law, what indeed were her options under American law? My response, that all she would receive from an American court was a legally recognized divorce, no property, no spousal support, and no amount awarded for repudiating the marriage contract, was impossible for Zainab to digest. “How can this be?” she would ask. “This is America. Women are supposed to have rights here. How can a judge tell me that I deserve nothing after having been abused and abandoned?”

Muslim Grrrls by Rafia Zakaria on Guernica Mag.

***

Gentle, public activism: Magnusson's I-75 project.

***

From the time of the king lists of ancient Sumer on, historians [...] have selected the events to be recorded and have interpreted them so as to give them meaning and significance. Until the most recent past, these historians have been men, and what they have recorded is what men have done and experienced and found significant. [...]
I began by asking the question: what are the definitions and concepts we need in order to explain the unique and segregate relationship of women to historical process, to the making of history and ot the interpretation of their own past?
Another question which I hoped my study would address concerned the long delay (over 3500 years) in women's coming to consciousness of their own subordinate position in society. What could explain it? What could explain women's historical "complicity" in upholding the patriarchical system that subordinated them and in transmitting that system, generation after generation, to their children of both sexes? [...]
After a while I began to see that I needed to focus more on the control of women's sexuality and procreativity than on the usual economic questions [...]. When I began to ask how class definiton was different for women than for men at the very inception of class society, the evidence before me made sense. [...]
# The appropriation by men of women's sexual and reproductive capacity occured prior to the formation of private property and class society. Its commodification lies, in fact, at the foundation of private property. [...]
# Women's sexual subordination was institutionalized in the earliest law codes and enforced by the full power of the state. Women's cooperation in the system was secured by various means: force, economic dependency on the male head of the family, class privileges bestowed upon conforming and dependent women of the upper classes, and the artificially created division of women into respectable and not-respectable women. [...]
# In the establishment of the covenant community the basic symbolism and the actual contract between God and humanity assumes as a given the subordinate position of women and their exclusion from the metaphysical covenant and the earthly covenant community. Their only access to God and to the holy community is in their fuction as mothers.
# This symbolic devaluing of women in relation to the divine becomes one of the founding metaphors of Western civilization. The other founding metaphor is supplied by Aristotelian philosophy, which assumes as a given that women are incomplete and damaged human beings of an entirely different order than men. It is with the creation of these two metaphorical constructs, which are built into the very foundations of the symbol systems of Western civilization, that the subordination of women comes to be seen as "natural," hence it becomes invisible. [...]
Looking at the recorded History as though it were a play, we realize that the story of performances over thousands of years has been recorded only by men and told in their words. Their attention has been mostly on men. Not surprisingly, they have not noticed all the actions women have taken. Finally, in the past fifty years, some women have acquired the training necessary for writing the company's scripts. As they wrote, they began to pay more attention to what women were doing. Still, they had been trained by their male mentors. So they too found what mene were doing on the whole more significant and, in their desires to upgrade the part of women in the past, they looked hard for women who have done what men did. Thus, compensatory history was born.
What women must do, what feminists are now doing is to point to that stage, its sets, its props, its director, and its scriptwriter, as did the child in the fairy tale who discovered that the emperor was naked, and say, the basic inequality between us lies within the framework. And they must tear it down.

Gerda Lerner · introduction to The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)

***

The exhibition included skateboards that generally mocked sexist language and re-claimed the blood of menstruation: this blood, the message is, makes me hardcore.

Re-Framing Menstruation on Sociological Images.