Power, Identity and Boundaries in Cross-Cultural Dressing

Reina Lewis provides a startling analysis of Grace Ellison’s memoir on Ottoman harems. As a British feminist and Turkophile, Ellison gives various accounts of her delights on cross-dressing in Ottoman Turkey, including her wearing of the veil and her (successful) attempts at fooling some of her surroundings into thinking that she was an actual native Ottoman lady. Many writers are of the opinion that cross-cultural dressing is an activity which “blurs boundaries and creates new indeterminate categories” (p. 537). Lewis, however, challenges this position and argues that cross-cultural dressing “crosses boundaries, but does not dissolve them” (ibid). In other words, as dress acts as an element of ‘gender and ethnic performance’, cross-dressing therefore reasserts and reinforces boundaries and power relations between the West and the Orient.

To demonstrate her point, Lewis makes reference to Gail Low’s treatment of representation and colonialism. On the politics of clothes, Low argues that they are important in the ‘fantasy’ of cross-dressing as they are ‘superficial’ and “can always be removed when one needs to revert to type, to reassert one’s racial or cultural superiority” (p. 528). In the specific case of Ellison, the delight of cross-cultural dressing is “predicated on an implicit reinvestment in the very boundaries” that she crosses (p. 528). Clothes, therefore, “operate as visible gate-keepers of those divisions and, even when worn against the grain, serve always to re-emphasize the existence of the dividing line” (ibid).

But then how do power relations come into play? Aren’t power relations inversed in cross-dressing? If so, won’t that blur distinctions nevertheless by creating new or at least hybrid categories of identity? Lewis implies in her article that power relations are in fact exacerbated instead of reversed. She writes that cross-cultural dressing is associated with ‘fantasies’ of power and surveillance. In other words, the “undercover cross-culturally dressed agent embodies a mode of power based on a ‘fantasy of invisibility’ which imagines for an imperial gaze a state of omnipotence and omnipresence that is secret and voyeuristic  rather than visible, as in the [Foucaultian] panoptical model” (p. 530). As such, the racial privilege that “underpins” Ellison’s authority (p. 531) is always kept intact during this cultural transgression (along with the pleasures that it produces) and thus serves to merely expose boundary divisions and relations of power.

How then does the cross-dressing native (i.e. the Ottoman lady) in Ellison’s account fit into this paradigm? Here Lewis incorporates Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry where the cross-dressing native “risks becoming Bhabha’s mimic man – an uncanny imitation of the real thing, doomed to inauthenticity” (p. 535). More specifically, the cross-dressing ‘mimic man’, by the sheer fact of his or her reality of inauthenticity, pays homage (consciously or unconsciously) to colonial and even neo-colonial power relations.

Ultimately, all activities, even seemingly trivial ones such as cross-dressing, stand in power relations. I say ‘all activities’ as there is no space that exists outside these relations given that they exist as a web (as analogized by Foucault) that permeates the human condition and is the quintessence of modernity. Clothes, far from being trivial, have played an overarching role in the colonization of the Orient. Indeed, one of the markers of the colonial project was to transform natives into carbon-copies of those that stood at the hierarchy of power. As such, the colonial tenue vestimentaire stood as the prime symbol of the success of imperialist control. Strictly speaking, adopting the patron’s clothes became a testament and indeed verification of the transformational end-product of this process in the colonialist framework as well as within the context of (contemporary) neo-colonial power relations.

Reina Lewis. "On Veiling, Vision and Voyage: Cross-Cultural Dressing and Narratives of Identity" in Feminist Postcolonial Theory ed. Reina Lewis & Sara Mills, (Routledge: New York, 2003).

Nichiren on Women

Nichiren (d. 1282) was a Japanese Buddhist monk who lived during the Kamakura Period (1185-1333). He is important in that he is the founder of Nichiren Buddhism and is considered to be a Bodhisattva in his own right. What is remarkable about him is that he argued that women are able to attain Buddhahood, something which many Buddhists believed to be impossible as they needed to be reincarnated as men first before even trying!

Nevertheless,  he still had some interesting maxims on women:

1) "A woman is like water, which takes on the shape of its container...If [her husband] is good, she will become a Buddha". (Sajiki nyobo gohenji; STN 2: 997)

2) "Women follow others and thereby cause others to follow them". (Kyodai sho; STN 1:932)

Citations

STN --> Showa teihon Nichiren Shonin ibun vols 1 and 2, ed. Rissho Daigaku Nichiren Kyogaku Kenkyujo, Minobu: Minobu-san Kuon-ji, 1998. (cited from Mori Ichiu's Nichiren's View on Women)

Female Circumcision, Human Rights and the Myth of Unmediated Individual Choice in the West

For over three decades now, there has been quite the uproar over the largely African practice of female circumcision better known under its current epithet as ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ (FGM). Understood as a sinister and culturally backward practice in the West, a number of mainly immigrant African parents have been prosecuted for offending the bodily integrity and health of their children (a prominent example being the clash between the Malian practice of ‘FGM’ and French law). It is argued to be a crime that is not only inflicted on prepubescent girls, but also a ‘horror’ inflicted on the female perpetrators themselves (usually mothers) given that they have ‘no choice’ but to conform to the cultural norm of mutilating their daughters.

Here I will treat some of the concerns raised by the French feminist scholar Francoise Lionnet who has interpreted the above discourse of bodily rights as being inherently sanctimonious, universalizing and perceptually hegemonic. Lionnet argues that the practice of female circumcision is a complex psychosexual phenomenon. Paraphrasing some of Michel Elrich’s concerns, the author writes that female circumcision is “embedded in a cultural context that encodes it as a beautifying and enriching phenomenon without which girls do not become women and will therefore never be able to marry, have some degree of economic security and lead ‘full’ female lives” (p. 371). In other words, female identity is not necessarily biological, but the result of a cultural process that women must go through (p. 375) in which clitoral circumcision is a fundamental part of.

The source of the conflict, according to Lionnet, is not really rooted in notions of ‘universal’ rights (which I will get to in a moment) but in an inherent conflict between the power of Malian culture (for instance) in investing “meaning in the individual body” that happens to be at odds “with the French State’s power to construct that body’s biological integrity according to modern notions of individual rights” (p. 376). This means that the conflict is rooted in the “conception of identity as subordinate to either the state (France) or the ruling patriarchy (in Mali) that governs the (il)legitimacy of parental behaviour” (p. 378) and not the opposition between a ‘cruel’ cultural value and a universal one, but between “two different communities, one of which would like to believe that its culture is a ‘universal’ one” (ibid).

Now what about the question of universal human rights? Lionnet implies that the discourse of universal human rights, at least in the case of female circumcision, is problematic and based on faulty perceptions and even moral duplicity. In other words, it assumes that female circumcision is the “only culturally sanctioned form of violence that deserves to be denounced, whereas we know that many other forms of violence are not repressed by law in the Western context, and that some of our own practices are objectionable and shocking to Africans” (p. 373). A recurrent example that the author presents is that of abortion since it is a good illustration of the “cultural conflict between the rights of the individual to bodily integrity on the one hand, and [the female’s] need to be satisfactorily integrated into a community on the other” (p. 372). It is important to note that the example of abortion is not framed within the view of whether or not a foetus is an individual, but in a view where pregnancy is seen as a ‘natural’ “consequence of female sexuality, just as we might see the clitoris as a ‘natural’ part of the female body”  where “abortion, like excision, simply imposes cultural constraints on physical reality, and both procedures can arguably be defended by their proponents as cultural steps taken to avoid biological determinism” (p. 374).[1]

What this implies is that the notion of “radical individualism” on which the notion of universal human rights to a large extent depends upon is meaningless. It is meaningless as it assumes that individual choice in the Western context is unmediated as opposed to the mediated choices (if they may even be called a choice) of African mothers who circumcise their daughters. How can one assume, for example, that socio-economic realities and socio-cultural discourses (e.g. the pursuing a successful career, education, consumerism, ‘autonomy’) do not shape the so-called ‘individual’ choices that both men and women make in regard to abortion or with any other matter? Is this not, on some level, an act of conforming to the traditions of a community where in this case it is Western instead of African?

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[1] Here, unlike Lionnet, I would also argue that the question of the foetus as an individual is also relevant to the debate. If the foetus is considered an individual, then how is the mutilation of a clitoris any more ‘barbaric’ than the killing of a baby in a womb, either by suctioning it out, or burning it with chemicals? Or how is a culture any less ‘cruel’ than one that induces its social members to mutilate their bodies (i.e. plastic surgery) for the purposes of beautification?   

Bibliography

Francoise Lionnet. Feminisms and Universalisms: "Universal Rights" and the Legal Debate Around the Practice of Female Excision in France. in Feminist Postcolonial Theory ed. Reina Lewis & Sara Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 368-380

Talal Asad on the idea of "Cultural Evolution"

Listened to an excellent lecture on the problematic theme and discourse of "human rights". The following is a quick type up of a key point the professor made:

"Evolutionary social theories offered a vision of a unity of mankind.  The evolutionary framework which humanity was placed in was further developed, esp by Herbert Spencer and produced the Victorian view that humans were produced by cultural evolution. It reformulated the essential unity of mankind"

"But Mankind was not one because it was everywhere the same, but because the differences represented different stages in the same process, by agreeing to call the process “progress”, one could convert the theory into a moral and political one. What had once been a narrow Christian civilization, was now in its secular form become the epitome of an all-inclusive humanity"

Islah, Genealogy and the Feminist Discourse of History

One of the distinctive features of Foucault’s thought has been the refusal to separate power from knowledge. The mixing of the social sciences and social practices is seen as one of the greatest dangers that we are facing today (Introduction, p. 7). What Foucault calls the “genealogy of the modern subject” as Rabinow explains, is the attempt to “historically localize and analyze the discourses and practices to the subject, knowledge, and power” (ibid). In Foucault’s own words, genealogy is “a form of history which can account for the constitution of ‘knowledges’, discourses, domains, subjects etc. without making reference to a subject that is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history” (Truth and Method, p. 59). It is situated “within the articulation of the body and history” where its task “is to expose a body totally imprinted by history” (Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, p. 83).

But genealogy is not simple and easy. It is “gray, meticulous and patiently documentary” (p. 76). It is opposed to grand narratives, universals and black & white readings of history. It is opposed to metahistorical understandings of the world that seek singular origins and teleologies. As such, history is chaotic. Its stories are multiple along its “numberless beginnings” (Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, p. 81).

With this in mind, it is reasonable to state that any historical reading (in its conventional sense) is potentially dangerous. This is because history per se is not a story of what ‘truly happened’, but as Bernardo Attias explains, its “goal is to produce an effect -- a change, a mutation in present ways of conceiving things by explaining the past in new ways”.[1] We do not need to look too deeply in order to come up with countless examples of how modern states have used history – through its disciplinary technologies such as school – in order to objectify its subjects (i.e. the Foucaultian term for population control). Such uses of history have included readings of the Enlightenment (an example which Foucault analyzes when it comes to Kant’s understanding of this event as an “exit from immaturity”). Or more problematically, historical readings (or narratives) of the “Third World” (e.g. the Middle East). Historical readings of the Middle East (backward, feudal, promiscuous, undemocratic, patriarchal, superstitious, oppressive to women, unscientific, magical etc.) in the institutions of the social sciences have directly worked with political powers in enabling colonialism in one instance, and influencing other contemporary (domestic) social practices (e.g. wars, elections, job allocations) in another.

 Metahistory has also been problematic in Feminist Studies. Certain segments of Feminist Studies have been plagued by histories of morality that frame these discourses (of morality) within a “linear development”. Words like liberty, freedom, democracy, equality are understood, in Foucaultian terms, as having kept a consistent “meaning” and that “desires” still point “in a single direction”, and that ideas have always retained their “logic” (p. 76). They have forgotten, or chosen to forget, that the “world of speech and desires has known invasions, struggles, plundering, disguises, ploys” (ibid). This is most subtly manifested in some of the discourses of native anthropologists of Islam. The desire for freedom (i.e. positive freedom), as understood in secular liberal discourse is essentialized and taken uncritically. There is no admission that such terms have undergone invasions and mutations

Consider the Arabic term “Islah” which has been translated as “reform” in the context of Islam. “Islah” is seen as an organic term for reforming “Islam”. In its traditional and Qur’anic context, islah refers to ‘going back’ in order to fix later corruptions that have tainted the religion (this is what I would call regressive). Yet the modern usage of the term (by natives and outsiders of the tradition alike) have meshed it with the modern liberal understanding of the word which denotes a fixing or repair (usually artificial) of an essential corruption. In other words, the modern discourse of islah is progressive in that it implicitly assumes that there is an aspect of the tradition that is inherently been flawed in the tradition (right from its inception) which needs modern, inorganic rectification. This includes, for example, the incorporation of protestant theories of reform (Shabestari) or a totalizing, positive-historical approach to Islam (Soroush, this method is similar to Mordachai Kaplan’s Reconstructionist Judaism).

All of the above modern discourses of islah are inherently metahistorical. The discourse of regressive islah has been framed within a context of resistance against liberal metanarratives of Islam. The latter, i.e. progressive islah, has been framed in a relation of power/domination and objectification of Islam. Both of course are potentially and at times dangerous. The former runs the risk of transcendentalizing and polarizing the discourse, an approach which has often been militarized. The latter exacerbates and continues colonial discourse into its contemporary realm of neo-colonialism. This discourse colonizes perceptions of reality and shapes the ‘objects’ in accordance with the dominant ways of knowing. This group is generally not militarized at the local level, but it reproduces relations of domination from sources that have historically been so. In this sense, it is acutely more dangerous.

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[1] http://www.csun.edu/~hfspc002/fouc.B1.html

Bibliography

Paul Rabinow (Editor), The Foucault Reader. New York: Vintage Books (2010).

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