Against White Feminism Read online

  In her book Development Crises and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives, based on the DAWN collective’s work, Sen acidly writes, “Perhaps because the Western feminist movement (especially in the U.S.) gained strength in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, during which time employment, social services and income (at least of the white majority) were relatively insulated from the shocks of the world economy, gaining parity with white men often took center stage for the mainstream of the movement.”2 Thus enraptured with the ideal of equality between the sexes in the educational and professional spaces they saw opportunities to access, white and Western feminists largely ignored poorer women of color who were making the argument that “equality with men who themselves suffered employment, low wages, poor work conditions and racism within existing socio-economic structures did not seem an adequate or worthy goal.”3

  Sen was not arguing for doing away with equality as a feminist goal altogether as much as noting how the agenda of feminism, internationally and particularly within aid and development, was being set by what appealed to white and middle-class women in the United States and Europe. So she and the DAWN feminists conceived the “empowerment approach,” guided by the understanding that the existing white-led, top-down paradigms of development had not delivered any real change in the condition of women in the global south. Instead, they argued for a bottom-up approach, that grassroots organizations could be the actual “catalysts of women’s visions and perspectives” and spearhead the structural changes that were necessary within societies. At the center of DAWN’s vision of empowerment was “political mobilization” supported by education, and the promotion of development “free of all forms of oppression based on sex, class, race or nationality.”4

  Anti-racism and political mobilization were thus crucial to the emerging idea of empowerment from the global south. Sen’s and DAWN’s work invigorated other feminists from the region to speak out and refine the concept all through the 1980s. Indian researcher and activist Srilatha Batliwala, for instance, defined empowerment as “a process of transforming power relationships between individuals and social groups.” Batliwala argued that a feminist stance required skepticism toward all existing forms of power and an avid questioning of the ideologies that justified women’s subordination. Sen, Batliwala, and other feminists from the global south differentiated “empowerment” from “power”; the latter was simply a system of domination, the former “a collective political power used by grassroots organizations” to “accomplish things.” It was the latter that these feminists were after, a project very different from simply grabbing the wheel of the status quo from men and then steering it themselves.

  When DAWN and Sen came up with the idea of empowerment, few development agencies were interested in it. A good number of them, along with their donor organizations, thought “empowerment” was too radical a concept. Governments all ignored it, providing it with no support in their agendas. Also silent were powerful organizations like the American National Organization of Women. Western feminists at the time, including those in development or at the helm of other international organizations, were loath to support “political” projects.

  Eventually, however, the term began to gain some acceptance. In 1994, ten years after the formation of DAWN, at the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo, Sen’s definition of the concept was accepted and received international recognition on the UN conference circuit. An even greater victory came the following year, at the Fourth United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing, with the acceptance of a platform for action that described itself as “an agenda for the empowerment of women,” seeking “women’s empowerment and their full participation on the basis of equality in all spheres of society.”5

  The victory was a double-edged sword for the feminists who had originally pushed for the empowerment of the global south. Usage of the term climbed steadily, both in the world of development and in the discourse of mainstream Western feminism, but its definition became more and more vague—and more and more disconnected from the idea of collective political action.

  “Development,” as it existed in the imaginations of Western would-be saviors, had no room for political agitation, for that might reduce Western donors’ power over the recipients. Short-term aid enhances that power, while salving white consciences but developing alternative political structures might prove incompatible with or even challenge the ways the West has built its wealth. “Empowerment” in its original sense could never be integrated into the “foreign aid” idea of “development.” So, even though the feminists of DAWN had argued so fervently against top-down programs that sidelined the perspectives of the women themselves, aid disbursement continued to be donor-determined.

  If the clean-stove program avoided looking into culture, subsequent feminist development programs actively demonized culture as the source of the women’s backwardness and hardship, using this distraction to avoid any talk of politics altogether. So for example, a program against honor killings in Pakistan condemned the local beliefs that led to honor killings but without providing any capacity-building in education and political discussion in local contexts that would allow women to challenge and change the ideas of toxic masculinity that lay behind them. The result of the long-term funding in this program was that legislative measures against honor killing were successfully passed but subsequent years saw no reduction in the numbers of killings themselves.6 While the law existed on the books, the failure to bring about social and cultural transformation—of the kind that Sen had envisioned—meant that the crime continued to be perpetuated.

  Under the cover of technocratic policy mandates and elaborate monitoring procedures, many development programs actually encourage the depoliticization of issues.7 Interviews with female cadres demobilizing during peace talks in Colombia reveals how this plays out: “These NGO’s like IOM who were brought in by the Santos Government told us they were neutral. They offered us the opportunity to learn to style hair or makeup. They asked us if we wanted sewing machines.”8 The women had gone as far as to take up arms because they wanted to realize political change and gain political rights. Instead of capitalizing on their political identities, the NGO intervention tried to push them back into gendered and domesticated roles and depoliticize them. Even though the very reason for an NGO presence was political, they saw their role as technocratic, with politics as a nuisance that makes their job harder. In this way political resistance, in Colombia or elsewhere, is “NGO-ized.”

  By 2000–2001, “empowerment” appeared alongside “opportunity” and “security” as the three pillars of the World Bank’s program for the fight against poverty—aligning the concept of empowerment with capitalist values of growth and wealth creation (opportunity) and with conservative, antirevolutionary politics (security). By 2006, the World Bank had veered even further away from empowerment’s original precepts, coupling it explicitly with economic power and progress: “The global community must renew its attention to women’s economic empowerment and increase investment in women. Women will benefit from their economic empowerment so too will men, children and society as a whole, in sum the business case for expanding women’s economic opportunities is becoming evident.” Not only did social and political transformation not get any mention, the sole reason for investing in women at all was that it made good business sense.9

  The World Bank was not alone; in other definitions from this time period of what could now be called empowerment-lite, such as those used by an alphabet soup of governmental and nongovernmental aid organizations, the political is dropped altogether, deemed too radical. Even for those who wanted to give money to the poor or to women’s programs, any overt linkages between poor women and political mobilization—any hint that the women might be poor at least in part because of politics that the donors supported or enforced—were too threatening to their self-conception as benevolent grantors.

  Development agencies frequently separated
political empowerment and economic empowerment into separate budget line items so that there would be little possibility of a holistic approach that would see the two as interconnected. The split also led to a privileging of a meaning of empowerment more commonly associated with formal institutions and individual autonomy. Even with the term “autonomy,” the emphasis was on the economic actor contributing to “growth,” in the sense of GDP and profit, and much less on the qualitative experience of the work or the unpaid-care economy, and even less on issues of bodily autonomy.

  The years following the UN conference in Beijing also saw an evolving definition of what constituted value. In the wake of capitalism’s presumed triumph in the Cold War, “value” has meant the possibility that any woman could go out and get a job and thus monetize her time. Everyone, from the development subject whose uplift was being strategized to the white feminists in Geneva or New York who were strategizing it, now had to maximize their value.

  Again, the clean-stove project is an example of how Western precepts about what constitutes “real” work seeped into development programs imposed on non-Western cultures. In the eyes of rural Indian women, they were already “working” and their labor was already essential without it becoming a part of the wage economy, where the labor available to them would be in menial, physically punishing jobs such as breaking up rocks at construction sites or in the agricultural fields as farmhands. The promised “empowerment” was not actually in the jobs that women would do but in economic, and hence decision-making, power presumably gained within the household. These women, however, saw that working a menial job outside the home might yield a bit more cash, but it would not compensate for the loss of dominion over the hearth of their home, which they deeply cherished.

  The conviction that human value and “empowerment” require participation in the cash economy coincided with the rise of neoliberalism—centering free markets while packaging international economic policy in the glib jargon of social justice. In actual terms it converted, as political theorist Wendy Brown puts it, “homo politicus into homo economicus.”

  On the aid end of the spectrum, neoliberalism required foreign assistance to gloss over the ugly reality of what free markets were doing in the global south. Rich Western countries funded microloans for women in Bangladesh while Bangladeshi textile manufacturers faced high tariffs if they tried to export their products to the West, and Western clothing companies exploited local female labor with impunity. Similarly, encouraging the inclusion of women in peace negotiations in Nigeria might distract the public from what large transnational oil corporations, with blessings from their allies in Western states, were doing to local populations.

  In 2007, Srilatha Batliwala, one of the women who had pushed the inclusion of political and social transformation in the original definition of empowerment, showed how its meaning had become “a technical magic bullet” that referred to things like micro-credit programs. “As a neoliberal tool,” Batliwala argues, “empowerment is now conceptualized to subvert the politics that the concept was meant to symbolize.”10 It was still overwhelmingly associated with women, but with a depoliticized, consumerist wave of feminism that had risen through the 1990s and 2000s.

  The evolution of “empowerment” into a “fuzzword” could be pinned to numerous motives. Rosalind Eyben and Rebecca Napier-Moore argue the ambiguity “created a normative resonance that makes everyone feel good” and without “revealing which meaning they personally favor.” The new “fuzzy” empowerment enabled everyone from the president of the World Bank selling a billion-dollar microcredit program to the feminist collective making beaded necklaces to claim they were furthering the cause of empowerment.

  One decade on from the UN’s official acceptance of the term, no one in the West, including its leading feminists, seemed to remember that empowerment had been introduced by feminists from the global south. And the idea that empowerment was primarily a Brown feminist political project had been erased from mainstream development work. Empowerment was now tied up with a more individualistic notion of power: synonymous with individual capacity, self-realization, and aspiration. Sen’s radical idea of a “liberating empowerment” had become something entirely different—“liberal empowerment,” or the maximization of individual economic interests.

  Rather than “empowering” those on the receiving end of aid programs, the development community tends to envision them as helpless, backward, pre-Enlightenment versions of white Western women, whose social and cultural differences from the West are problems to be solved and whose actual problems can be swiftly dispatched using methods that have been tailored to the needs of white people. If the architects of the clean-stove initiative had consulted the rural Indian women properly, the flaws in its premises would have been immediately apparent. Indians were instrumental to the initiative and implementation of the programs, but these Indians belonged to the urban middle class; women in the cities, seeing themselves as more feminist and modern, were eager to collaborate with international feminist efforts. They, too, were enthusiastic about delivering rural Indian women from what appeared to them to be pure drudgery. Often the assent of this cadre of development workers, already eager to identify with the West and its agenda, permits agencies like the UN and their program directors to tick the box for local consultation.

  Meanwhile, the underlying premise was not only that rural Indian women have to be taught empowerment through white programmatic interventions but that they were ignorant and apolitical and had no existing ideas or beliefs of their own regarding their own welfare. There is no centering of the woman to be “empowered” here, just the assumption that help will be given in the form deemed most useful by the white donor, and the poor Brown woman will gratefully accept it.

  According to researchers, the commercial forestry industry, the clearing of land for agricultural use, urbanization, and broad changes in ground cover all have a much more significant impact on deforestation than the collection of fuelwood.11 Neither was there much attention paid to the fact that the new stoves were incompatible with certain recipes that required traditional cooking methods and that had been part of the culture for centuries.

  Traditional stoves do pollute, they do create smoky interiors, they do require a lot of labor on the part of the women who use them—who can be subject to breathing issues because of them and who surely have ideas about improving them. Meanwhile, the clean stoves broke down and could not be repaired easily in the village, while the old stoves were made of clay.12 A solution was needed, but it ought not to have been a white-centric solution that made sense only to white and Western program leaders; it had to be a solution that worked for rural Indian women.

  Trickle-down feminism, where a solution developed at the top (meaning, generally, by members of the upper or upper-middle class, usually white) is not intersectional feminism; it is dictatorial feminism. This trickle-down framework fosters initiatives like the Gates Foundation Chicken Program, which aims to provide individual women with a degree of economic autonomy via their chickens, which then, it is assumed, may allow them (somehow) to become politically and socially more autonomous as well. Like the clean-stoves program, such endeavors not only overlook women’s complex political and social identities but bring a tunnel-visioned focus on the individual as “entrepreneur” rather than on the capacity of women as a collective to bring about social and political change.

  In 2015, the Gates Foundation collaborated with Heifer International to donate 100,000 chickens to individual women in some of the world’s poorest countries, estimating that a woman with five chickens could make $1,000 a year from selling the eggs, use the profits to buy more chickens, and hence grow her own business.13 In a long post about the program on Medium, Melinda Gates opined that “a chicken can mean the difference between a family that survives and a family that thrives.” Chickens were also deemed exceptional as a tool for women’s empowerment because “men don’t think chickens are worth their time,” leaving the women t
o tend them and (with the help of the Gates Foundation) so become empowered. The burgeoning numbers of women chicken entrepreneurs would enable the Gates Foundation to claim that they had directly delivered empowerment to tens of thousands of women.

  Yet even while Bill Gates was touting the program’s benefits, researchers had already pointed out that there was no evidence that chickens provided long-term economic advancement, let alone the empowerment of half of the population. In Mozambique, where the idea had already been tried out, researchers found that while women could make some money in the short term, they were unable to make the chickens a successful commercial venture because large chicken producers with their economies of scale were able to produce cheaper eggs. This meant the women could make at best $100 a year.14

  One country, Bolivia, earmarked to receive the chickens, called the Gates initiative “offensive” and declined the offer. Cesar Cocanco, Bolivia’s minister for land and rural development, said: “[Gates] does not know Bolivia’s reality to think we are living 500 years ago, in the middle of the jungle not knowing how to produce,” adding “respectfully he should stop talking about Bolivia and once he knows more, apologize to us.”15 No apology, of course, was forthcoming. Bolivia is a major chicken producer, where commercial chicken growers produce 197 million chickens annually.

  Imagine: what if, in the poorest rural and urban parts of the United States, where surely “development” assistance is needed, white feminists created a blanket plan to foster gender equality and empowerment by giving every woman a chicken or a sewing machine or a microloan? It is amazing what you can get away with, in defiance of basic logic about how the modern world works, if you’re “helping Africa,” or other parts of the global south. White and Western women are seen as participants in complex modern societies; their problems cannot be solved with a single neat gift. Women of color are imagined as existing in a much simpler world, held back from success by very basic issues that have very basic solutions.