December 1, 2014 - 19:47
In reading Nnaemeka's piece, I kept on going back to Persepolis and Americanah and thinking about the contradictions between the lives of the protaganists and Western expectations of feminism. Nnaemaka criticizes the treatment of "third-world" women as "case-study and country-specific sections" that pertain "to the specific countries from whence they come" but can't be used in theorizing, and it'd be easy to fall into the trap of placing these works in such a catagory (366). Even though they only represent the narratives of single individuals (although Americanah is fiction, I still think the narrative it represents is valid in this consideration because of its realism), we should read them not as case studies but as pieces of a larger narrative. Feeding into this, I've also been considering the memoir as a way to contribute to this same larger narrative. It certainly isn't the only way we should frame international feminism, as that once again reduces non-Western women to case studies. But coupled with the changing theory, I think it's an effective way to look at it because it provides a concrete way to contrast our understanding of feminism and to negotiate the values of nego-feminism. Take, for example, Satrapi's relationship with the veil: Nnaemeka explicitly critiques Western feminism for being "caught up in its ambivalence: fighting for inclusion, it installs exclusions; advocating change, it resists change; laying claims to movement, it resists moving" (363). Neglecting international feminism is neglecting the dynamics of other societies, instead imposing Western values (like freedom of expression and the female body) and claiming the oppression of structures like the veil. And although feminism might be trying to resist one form of oppression, this approach is enabling another by continuing to push imperialism. Furthermore, looking at personal stories enables us to build a theory from the ground up instead of, as Nnaemeka addressses, getting caught up in jargon and trying to apply theory to individual stories--at which point those stories become country-specific exceptions to a preexisting model. Approaching feminism from this persepctive ties into her assertion that "knowledge as a process is a crucial part of knowledge as a product" (365) by forcing us to consider how we got to the theory; in considering our process, we can then look for flaws that might exist in this theory by reexamining how we got there. For example, taking this route would lead us to see the issues present in how we currently look at feminism by realizing that it is built off of primarily Western ideology instead of experiences, subjectivities, and the realities of women outside of the Western sphere.
I also want to touch on her point about the homogeneity of women's studies in the US. Bryn Mawr does exactly what she critiques: "A homogeneous classroom that is anesthetized by the comfort of the familiar/"home" needs the "foreignness" that challenges and promotes self-examination; it needs the different, the out of the ordinary, that defamiliarizes as it promotes the multiple perspectives and challenges rooted in heterogeneity" (378). We live, interact, and learn in an environment that not only produces the "familiar/'home'" but actively tries to be home. It knows that it is homogeneous in terms of sex and prefers itself to be that way (obviously). In this, I see a conflict: do historically women's colleges still promote self-examination? Is it necessary for us to go coed to do so? On the one hand, I think that there's a great level of self-examination that happens because of our homogeneity (and, in fact, we are not especially homogenous because of the many backgrounds, stories, and identies--because we are the contact zone that we are). But I also know that her commentary on the shortcomings of having women's studies exist in a feminized classroom is equally important since it's so damaging to have feminism be gendered when it extends well beyond a classroom filled with women.