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Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re- presentations of Women in Non-Western SocietiesAihwa Ong
Who Is the Non-Feminist Other?
In a recent paper, Marilyn Strathern notes that feminists discover themselves by becoming conscious of oppression from the Other. In order to restore to subjectivity a self dominated by the Other, there can be no shared experience with persons who stand for the Other. Thus, necessary to the construction of the feminist self is a non-feminist Other … generally conceived of as “patriarchy” (Strathern 288). But Strathern also cautions that if women construct subjectivity for themselves, they do so strictly within the sociocultural constraints of their own society (291). This paper will suggest the problems feminists [1] experience in achieving the separation they desire when it comes to understanding women in the non-Western world. [2]
The irony of feminism is twofold: 1. As an oppositional subculture reproduced within the Western knowledge of the non-Western World, it is a field defined by historicism. This post-Enlightenment view holds that the world is a complex but unified unity culminating in the West. Liberal and socialist feminists alike apply the same incorporating world historical schemes to their understanding of women and men in the non-Western world. With common roots in the Enlightenment, masculinist and feminist perspectives share in the notion that enlightened reason has been a critical force in social emancipation. Western standards and goals–rationality and individualism–are thereby used to evaluate the cultures and histories of non- Western societies. Feminist voices in the social sciences unconsciously echo this masculinist will to power in its relation to non-Western societies. Thus, for feminists looking overseas, the non-feminist Other is not so much patriarchy as the non-Western woman. 2. Essential to the feminist task, Strathern argues, is the need to expose and destroy the authority of Others (i.e. male) to determine feminine experience. Yet, when feminists look overseas, they frequently seek to establish their authority on the backs of non-Western women, determining for them the meanings and goals of their lives. If, from the feminist perspective there can be no shared experience with persons who stand for the Other, the claim to a common kinship with non-Western women is at best, tenuous, at worst, non-existent.
My concern here is to talk about the intersections between colonial discourse and feminist representations of non-Western women in what may be called “women in development” studies. There are different self-styled approaches within this feminism, linked by a basic concern with problems of sexual inequality and difference in non-Western societies, problems perceived as the failure to achieve modernity. The terms “non-Western” and “Third World” are used as a shorthand, and not to imply a monolithic world outside European and American societies which have collectively maintained hegemony over much of the globe in recent history. [3] By “colonial discourse” I mean different strategies of description and understanding which were produced out of the historical emergence of this transnational network of power relations. Historically, distinct strands of colonial discourse circulating in particular colonial societies were linked to Western imperialist definitions of colonized populations. [4] Although there has been significant dismantling of this global political structure since the Second World War, neo-colonial preoccupations continue to haunt Western perceptions of ex- colonial societies. The following discussion suggests that well-known feminist studies on women in ex-colonial societies have not escaped this hegemonic world view.
Feminist Discursive Power and the Silenced Other
Albert Memmi characterizes the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized as one of “implacable dependence.” For the privilege of making cultural judgments which see their way into print, feminists often speak without reducing the silence of the cultural Other. George Marcus and Michael Fischer have recommended the repatriation of anthropology in order to defamiliarize the world view of middle-class Americans. Much recent feminist study of Asian women already has had this function, producing epistemological and political gaps between us feminists and them “oppressed” women. I will argue that although some kind of distance is necessary for arriving at a partial understanding of each other, this is not the kind of separation we should seek. We have to first divest ourselves of a cultural heritage whereby women in non-Western societies are fixed as various sexualities and natural capacities.
In the late 19th century, British traveler Isabella Bird passed through the Malay peninsula and made the following observation:
The people lead strange and uneventful lives. The men are not inclined to much effort except in fishing or hunting, and, where they possess rice land, in ploughing for rice… The women were lounging about the house, some cleaning fish, others pounding rice; but they do not care for work, and the little money which they need for buying clothes they can make by selling mats or jungle fruits…
Not a colonial official but an “indomitable” explorer of the Eastern world recntly brought under Western influence, Isabella Bird had already fixed her market lenses on the Malay (lack of) potential as a labor pool. [5] There are numerous other examples by less well known British observers in the “tropical dependencies” where natives were constantly evaluated in terms of their “natural” capacities and then dismissed as “indolent.” [6]
What has this got to do with contemporary feminist perspectives on Asian women? Since the early 1970s, when feminists turned their attention overseas, our understanding of women and men in the Third World has been framed in essentialist terms: how their statuses may be explained in terms of their labor and reproductive powers. Ester Boserup’s Women’s Role in Economic Development blazed a trail which has yet to spend itself. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, books on non-Western women emphasized their roles in capitalist development. Let me cite a few collections: “Women and National Development: The Complexities of Change,” a special issue of Signs; African Women in The Development Process editedby Nici Nelson; Of Marriage and the Market: Women’s Subordination in International Perspective edited by Kate Yong et al.; Women, Men and the International Division of Labor edited by June Nash and Maria Patricia Fernandez Kelly; and Women’s Work: Development and the Division of Labor by Gender edited by Eleanor Leacock and Helen Safa. Part of my own training as an anthropologist has been influenced by this kind of feminist literature largely shaped by a political economic perspective. By and large, non-Western women are taken as an unproblematic universal category; feminists mainly differ over whether modernization of the capitalist or socialist kind will emancipate or reinforce systems of gender inequality found in the Third World. The status of non- Western women is analyzed and gauged according to a set of legal, political and social benchmarks that Western feminists consider critical in achieving a power balance between men and women.
A. Modernization Discourse on Third World Women
Most of the literature in development studies falls within the framework of the so-called modernization school, as most clearly spelled out by William W. Rostow. Each generation of scholars has reworked this model which opposes Western modernity to Third World traditionalism. In the 1960s, Raphael Patai in Women in the Changing World accounted for gender inequalities in terms of the degree to which “age-old, custom-determining roles” were being broken down by “Westernization,” a process seen to favor women’s access to wage work and higher social status. This position was challenged by Laura Bossen who argued that Westernization has caused women to lose highly variable roles in the traditional economy. By placing structural limits on women’s access to new production activities, the modernization process has reduced women’s status relative to that of men in the Third World.
A recent revival of the modernization theory is expressed by Linda Lim in her paper on “the dilemma of Third World women workers in multinational factories.” She maintains that in societies “where capitalist relations are least developed … traditional patriarchy is sufficiently strong to maintain women in an inferior labor market position” (79). Following from this logic, she maintains that by providing these women with wage employment, transnational companies contribute to their emancipation. This is an example of linear thinking which ignores the multiple and fluid nature of power relations. As my 1987 study shows, factory women freed from some forms of family control come under new systems of domination such as industrial discipline, social surveillance and religious vigilance. Patriarchal power is reconstituted in the factory setting and in the fundamentalist Islamic movement which induce both rebellion and self control on the part of women workers. By using a traditional/modernity framework, these feminists view the destruction of “traditional customs” as either a decline of women’s status in a romanticized “natural” economy, or as their liberation by Western economic rationality. This either/or argument reveals a kind of magical thinking about modernity which has proliferated in Third World governments, while confusing and obscuring the social meanings of change for people caught up in it.
B. Discourse on Women in Capitalist and Social Transitions
For many socialist feminists, Asian societies are significant to the extent they possess or lack “patriarchal” traditions which may be reproduced in the transition to a capitalist or socialist “mode of production.” Women’s Work is based on papers on the sexual division of labor initially published in Signs (Vol. 7, No. 2, 1981). Women’s status worldwide is discussed within “an evolutionary perspective on the gender division of labor” (Leacock and Safa). In their critique of Boserup, Lourdes Beneria and Gita Sen offer a “capital accumulation” model to discuss “the specific ways in which women are affected by the hierarchical and exploitative structure of production associated with capitalism’s penetration in the Third World”(150). Capitalism is personified and differentiated in terms of its varied effects on “domestic work,” production and reproduction, population control and birth control. In contrast, “women” (in Africa, Latin America and Asia) are differentiated only in terms of their status as wives and workers in reproduction (i.e. the production of use values in the household), and production (of commodities). Beneria and Sen’s claim to “a richly textured understanding” may possibly describe their abstract formulation of “tensions between gender and class,” (156) but not their representation of “women in the Third World.”
This substitution of understanding of women as cultural beings by an elaboration of feminist theory is also found in Women, Men and the International Division of Labor (Nash and Kelly). The papers taken as a whole tell us more about Marxist feminist thinking about the capitalist world system than about the experience of women and men in the industrializing situation. Eleven papers fall under sections entitled “global accumulation and the labor process,” “production, reproduction, and the household economy,” and “labor flow and capitalist expansion.” Seven essays (including my own) are “case studies in electronics and textiles.” This organization is clearly an attempt to discuss changing women’s positions in the encounter between global capitalist forces and the everyday life of paid and unpaid work. However, a consideration of the latter is subordinated to descriptions of the intersections of patriarchy and capitalism. Indeed, capitalism is delineated as a historically-conditioned, polymorphous system; it has more contradictions and personalities than the women and men who are ostensibly the subjects of the volume. In most of the papers, the implied message is that even when women constitute the majority of workers in transnational industries, their practical and theoretical significance as “a source of cheap labor” tends to take precedence over a more careful consideration of the social meanings these changes have for them. Except for essays by Bolles and Green, discourse on women’s position is theoretically derived from their being acted upon in an unproblematic fashion by patriarchal and capitalist relations of domination. Even in the case studies, quotations cited are from marxist scholars (e.g., Braverman, Wolpe), and feminists like Heidi Hartmann are considered more significant in uncovering the social meanings of work relations than the words of women on the shop floor. The general effect of these papers is the fetishization of capital accumulation and the valorization of women and men as commodities.
By portraying women in non-Western societies as identical and interchangable, and more exploited than women in the dominant capitalist societies, liberal and socialist feminists alike encode a belief in their own cultural superiority. On the one hand, we have a set of Western standards whereby feminists and other scholars evaluate the degree of patriarchal oppression inflicted on women as wives, mothers, and workers in the Third World. For instance, studies on women in post-1949 China inevitably discuss how they are doubly exploited by the peasant family and by socialist patriarchy, [7] reflecting the more immediate concerns of American socialist feminists than perhaps of Chinese women themselves. By using China as “a case study” of the socialist experiment with women’s liberation, these works are part of a whole network of Western academic and policy-making discourses on the backwardness of the non-Western, non-modern world. There is a scientific tendency to treat gender and sexuality as categories that are measurable, and to ignore indigenous meanings which may conceive of them as ideas inseparable from moral values.
On the other hand, feminist approaches which purport to understand indigenous traditions and meanings that have persisted over the course of modernization often betray a view of non-Western women as out of time with the West, [8] and therefore a vehicle for misplaced Western nostalgia. A recent ethnography, Geisha (Dalby 1983), discussed the sexual aesthetics of Japanese women and yet is coy about their specific intention and techniques. Despite the rich ethnographic details, this view “into a feminine community that has been the subject of rumor and fantasy for centuries in the West” (dustjacket) has managed to refreeze geishas as objects in Oriental erotica. Although their subculture is intended to create an illusion of an earlier time, one wishes the writer had situated her description of their images and working lives more firmly in late 20th-century Japanese society.
Another modernist mode for treating exotic women out of their time context is presented in Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (Shostak 1983). This book has become a popular text for introductory anthropology courses. Here is a feminist confrontation with a non-Western woman as an “individual,” i.e. someone seen as autonomous, in the moral sense of our modern (individualist) ideology. It seems inevitable that Nisa’s life is re-presented as a sexual discourse that “we” can appropriate for our post-modern consumption.
C. Modern Posturings with Nonmodern Images
Dumont defines modern ideology as that which is characterized by a valorization of the individual as an autonomous moral being, and neglects or subordinates the social whole (279-80). The feminist works cited above seek a modern form of individual freedom in their analyses of gender relations in the non-Western world. There is insufficient attention to nonmodern social values which do not conceptualize gender relations in those terms (of individualism). Furthermore, “the non-Western woman” as a trope of feminist discourse is either nonmodern or modern; she is seldom perceived as living in a situation where there is deeply felt tension between tradition and modernity. Two analytical strategies emerge in the feminist discourses discussed. First, even when, like Nisa, the non-Western woman speaks, she is wrenched out of the context of her society and inscribed within the concerns of Western feminist scholars. Secondly, however well-intended in their goal of exposing the oppression of Third World women, feminist scholars have a tendency to proceed by reversal: non-Western women are what we are not. These tendencies of projection and reversal situate non-Western women in a subordinate position within feminist theoretical and textual productions. These self-validating exercises affirm our feminist subjectivity while denying those of non-Western women.
What is peculiarly colonial in these feminist perspectives is the assumption that Western standards and feelings take precedence over those of their Third World subjects. In their naturalistic conceptualizations of non-Western women as labor power or sexuality, there is little interest (except in Dalby) about indigenous constructions of gender and sexuality. We miss the dense network of cultural politics that we demand of a study of women and men in Western societies. Thus, although a common past may be claimed by feminists, Third World women are often represented as mired in it, ever arriving at modernity when Western feminists are already adrift in postmodernism.
Modest Goals and Partial Understandings
Despite my critical remarks, I remain convinced that feminists, because of their privileged positions as members of hegemonic powers, should speak out against female oppression at home and overseas. Surely an element of the current backlash against social science research by Third World governments (Benard 275-84) is their protests against our cultural assumptions and conceptual language. [9] Political elites in the Third World have their own representations and discourses which do not necessarily reflect a concern with women’s or lower-class interests. However, this does not mean that the prescriptions of sympathetic Western feminists are inevitably more aligned with the ideas and values of Third World women. I mentioned earlier our need to maintain a respectful distance, not in order to see ourselves more clearly (the only possible goal, as Marcus and Fischer seem to think), but to leave open the possibilities for an understanding not overly constructed by our own preoccupations. This “privilege of distantiation”(Dumont) also helps us accept that cultural struggles in the Third World may be for social and sexual destinies different from Western (male-dominated or feminist) visions.
I can suggest a few tentative leads for recognizing a mutuality of discourse in our encounter with women in non-Western societies. We can resist the tendency to write our subjectively-defined world onto an Other that lies outside it. As the above review shows, feminist scholarship tends to be riddled with natural, sexual, political, and social categories when it comes to re-presenting the Other. When we jettison our conceptual baggage, we open up the possibilities for mutual but partial, and ambiguous, exchange. With James Clifford, I am doubtful that we can achieve more than partial understandings. However, the multivocal ethnographic texts he would have anthropologists produce must also disclose a riot of social meanings embedded in the confrontation between tradition and modernity in Third World societies. Below, I attempt to show how cultural analysis in anthropology can produce an understanding of gender as constructed by, and contingent upon, the play of power relations in a cultural context.
In my study of Malay factory women, gender is revealed as a symbolic system not separable from domains such as the family, the economy, and politics, but as embedded in discourses and images marking social boundaries and self- reflective identities. Foucault (1977) has noted that modern power is productive, rather than repressive. In sexual discourses, for instance, new techniques and regulations are generated for controlling social activity and perceptions. These in turn induce another scheme of power relations, i.e., techniques of self-management by people subjected to control (Foucault 1978). The fluid and multiple nature of power relations becomes a part of the everyday life of young peasant women working in transnational factories. This making of a female labor force has been accompanied by an inflationary increase in the social meanings of gender and sexuality: these are negotiated and contested in relation to other discourses about social difference and domination in Malaysian society. I identify at least four overlapping sets of discourses about factory women: corporate, political, Islamic, and personal. Corporate discourse elaborated on the “natural” accommodation of “oriental female” fingers, eyes, and passivity to low-skilled assembly work. This instrumental-biological representation of women is part of the neo-colonial attitude towards development in Third World societies perceived as an international reservoir of cheap labor. Secondly, the emergence of a Malay female industrial labor force has produced a public debate over their sexuality, as expressed in individualistic ideas, behavior, and modern forms of consumption. The “electronics woman” becomes a symbol of sexual threat to Malay culture and of working class defiance. Islamic pronouncements about factory women’s morality betrays an anxiety over their crossing of social boundaries, and their flirtation with secularism and individualistic self- identity. They demand a greater religious vigilance to bring Malay working women back into the fold of Islamic womanhood. In this explosion of sexual discourses, many factory women internalize the cautionary tales and are induced to discipline themselves as Muslims and as workers. Others see themselves as modern women, and throwing caution to the winds, embrace Western images of sexual liberation. By looking at the politics of sexuality, I discovered conflicting sets of genders, and their embeddedness in political struggles over cultural identity and the transition to industrial modernization. In their own words and actions, which I cannot reproduce here, we see how meanings attached to gender can generate deep divisions, confusion, and unresolved tensions between tradition and modernity.
Like Malay factory women, government bureaucrats, and religious zealots, we may wish to deconstruct colonial categories and problematize modernization. By giving up our accustomed ways of looking at non-Western women, we may begin to understand better. We may come to accept their living according to their own cultural interpretations of a changing world, and not simply acted upon by inherited traditions and modernization projects. They may not seek our secular goal of individual autonomy nor renounce the bonds of family and community. Albert Memmi observes that in passionately repossessing themselves, the colonized will be nationalistic, not internationalistic (i.e., under Western hegemony). Many in the Third World, including Malaysians, seek a separate destiny in Islamic fundamentalism, itself a historical force against the global domination by Western imperialism. Edward Said has suggested that a new way of transnational solidarity is not through assimilating the Rest into a common unity, but by renouncing our utopian, libertarian vision. It seems to me that as feminists, we need to take into account the changing world community, and recognize the limits of our own traditions and explanations. We begin a dialogue when we recognize other forms of gender- and culture-based subjectivities, and accept that others often choose to conduct their lives separate from our particular vision of the future.
Notes
1. By “feminists” I do not merely mean white women but also persons of different nationalities (myself included) engaged in the field of Anglophone feminism, an area overly determined by Western interests. Back to main text
2. I will confine my discussion to studies dealing with women in Asian societies, although my remarks may apply to feminist endeavors in other parts of the non-Western world. Back to main text
3. By the same token, “Western” is taken as a problematic construct, and is by no means used to suggest an undifferentiated and congealed form of global dominance. Since we are discussing texts in the English language, “Western” is here taken to include European societies under prewar British and postwar American hegemonic leadership. Back to main text
4. This definition of colonial discourse is thus broader than that used by Lata Mani in “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 119-156. Back to main text
5. Isabella Bird’s writings on her travels to the corners of the British empire and beyond have recently been printed in the United States because of the American market for “travel literature.” See her The Yangze Valley and Beyond (New York: Beacon Press, 1987) and Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (New York: Beacon Press, 1987). Back to main text
6. For a discussion of colonial discourse in the Malay world, see S. Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native (London: Frank Cass, 1977). Back to main text
7. See Molyneux, 1981; Kay A. Johnson, Women, Family and the Peasant Revolution in China (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982); Judith Stacey, Socialism and Patriarchy in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Margery Wolf, Revolution Postponed: Women and Socialism in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). Back to main text
8. On circumventing “coevalness” in ethnographies, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Males its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).Back to main text
9. Some feminists have criticized feminist categories projected onto non- Western women and men in the representation of indigenous meaning and experience (see Marilyn Strathern, “Culture in a Netbag,” Man (n.s.) 16 (1981): 168-88; and Deborah Gordon, “Feminist Anthropology and the Invention of American Female Identities,” a paper presented at the 86th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, November 1987). Back to main text
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