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Week 5  

La Guera by Cherrie Moraga (1998)

Mother:  By the standards in this country – considered largely illiterate

 Born in Santa Paula, Southern California – only daughter of six to marry Father who is an anglo

 Independent as a kid:  Pulled out of school at ages of 5, 7, 9 and 11 to work in fields along with brothers and sisters  Her father drinking away whatever small profit she was able to make for the family – going long way home to avoid meeting him on street  Main support of family at age 14  Doing piecework for electronics plant in neighborhood – sit in front of the T.V. set, wrapping copper wires into back of circuit boards, talking about “keeping up with younger girls”  By that time she was already in her mid-fifties  

Author: Well-educated daughter – wore it with a keen sense of pride and satisfaction – “my head propped up with the knowledge, from my mother, that my life would be easier than hers” – emphasizing the importance of education

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Go with mother to fill out job applications for her, or write checks for her at the supermarket

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Most important – “la guera” – fair skinned – born with features of Chicana mother but skin of Anglo father  Being light was something valued in my family – all Chicana, with the exception of father  Everything about my upbringing attempted to bleach me of what color I did have.

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Never taught much Spanish at home – picked up from school and over-heard snatches of conversations among relatives and mother

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My family had been poor and farmworkers – mother would like to forget as on a basic economic level to her, being Chicana meant bring “less”

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Became “anglocized” through mother’s desire to protect children from poverty and illiteracy – more effectively pass in white world, better guaranteed our future

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From all of this, I experience, daily, a huge disparity between what I was born into and what I was to grow up to become – crept under my “guera” skin – no choice but to enter into life of my mother

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Pretended to be the happy, upwardly mobile heterosexual Profound connection with my mother reawakened in me when finally lifted lid to my lesbianism – heartfelt identification with and empathy for my mother’s

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oppression (being poor, uneducated and Chicana) was realized 

My lesbianism is the avenue through which I have learned the most about silence and oppression, and it continues to be the most tactile reminder to me that we are not free human beings.

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The difference in the privileges attached to looking white instead of brown are merely a generation apart.

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Lesbianism is a poverty – as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor – the danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression and in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base – without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, nonhierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place.

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Gay friend – being a women meant being raped by men – in order for him to create an authentic alliance with me, he must deal with the primary source of his own sense of oppression – emotionally come to terms with what it feels like to be a victim

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To remember may mean giving up whatever privileges we have managed to squeeze out of this society by virtue of our gender, race, class or sexuality.

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Connections among women of different backgrounds and sexual orientations have been fragile – indicative of our failure to seriously address ourselves to some very frightening questions – we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry

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Frightening to acknowledge that I have internalized a racism and classism, where the object of oppression is not only someone outside of my skin, but someone inside my skin

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The major reason for my total alienation from and fear of my classmates was rooted in class and culture.

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All along I had felt the difference, but not until I had put the words “class” and “color” to the experience, did my feelings make any sense.

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They had enough privilege to be atheists – more guts to rebel against their parents and run around the country hitch-hiking, reading books and studying “art”

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For years I had disowned the language I knew best – ignored the words and rhythms that were the closest to me

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For a lesbian trying to survive in a heterosexist society, there is no easy way around these emotions.

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In a white-dominated world, there is little getting around racism and our own internalization of it.

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A woman with a foot in both worlds – refusing the split

Oppressor’s nightmare:  What the oppressor often succeeds in doing is simply externalizing his fears, projecting them into the bodies of women, Asians, gays, disabled folks, whoever seems most “other”  Fears to discover the same aches in himself, same longings as those of the people he has shitted on    

Fears immobilization threatened by his own incipient guilt Fears he will have to change his life once he has seen himself in the bodies of the people he has called different Fears the hatred, anger, and vengeance of those he has hurt. Women – afraid to look at how we have taken the values of our oppressor into our hearts and turned them against ourselves and one another – afraid to admit how deeply “the man’s” words have been ingrained in us

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Usual response among white women’s groups when the “racism issue” comes up is to deny the difference

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The only reason women of a privileged class will dare to look at how it is that they oppress, is when they’ve come to know the meaning of their own oppression.

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Women of color and working-class women often shrink from challenging white middle-class women

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Easier to rank oppressions and set up a hierarchy, rather than take responsibility for changing our own lives

On The Beach: Sexism and Tourism by Cynthia Enloe 

No matter how good feminist tourist’s intention, relationship between British woman on holiday and working women of Portugal – fall short of international sisterhood

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Women in many countries are being drawn into unequal relationships with each other as a result of governments’ sponsorship of the international tourist industry – because they have no choice / making their own decisions about how to improve their lives

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Many women are playing active roles in expanding and shaping the tourist industry – as travel agents, travel writers, flight attendants, craftswomen, chambermaids – even if they don’t control it

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Women who travel are not merely creatures of privilege – not only from Western societies

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Often had to fight against confining presumptions of feminine respectability to travel away from home on their own

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British women’s dilemma in trying to find a postcard expressing sisterhood rather than exploitation suggests that the galloping tourist industry is not necessarily making the world a more equal or harmonious place

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Being feminine has been defined as sticking close to home

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Masculinity – the passport for travel Feminist geographers and ethnographers have been accumulating evidence revealing principal different between women and men in countless societies – the licence to travel away from a place thought of as ‘home’

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A women who travels away from the ideological protection of ‘home’ and without the protection of an acceptable male escort is likely to be tarred with the brush of ‘unrespectability’ – risks losing her honor/being blamed for any harm that befalls her on her travels

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A man is deemed > manly until he breaks away from home and strikes out on his own

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While some women ran away to sea/enlisted as drummer boys to escape suffocating village life, others claimed they were simply acting as a loyal wife/sweetheart, following their man.

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If a woman was exposed – while being treated for a battle wound or giving birth – the punishment she received frequently depended on which of these two interpretations was believed by the men who pulled away her disguise.

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Women have been lured into joining the military – without a disguise – by thoughts of leaving home

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‘Pat and I had become nurses with the expectation that we could go anywhere and work. We wanted to go somewhere, and we wanted to do something really different.’ – didn’t want to surrender as a respectable young woman

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Victorian lady travellers – most famous of women who set out to travel further than convention allowed without disguise

 Most came from white middle classes of North America and Europe  Set out upon travels that were supposed to be preserve of men  Defied strictures of femininity by choosing parts of the world which whites in late nineteenth and early twentieth century considered ‘uncharted’, ‘uncivilized’  Wanted adventure – going to lands just being opened up by imperial armies and capitalist traders  Viewed with suspicion because they dared to travel such long distances with so little proper male protection  Insist upon separateness of their own experiences  Most were white – chose to travel in continents whose populations were not, added to the ‘exotic’ aura surrounding their journeys 

The world’s fairs of this era preached that white men’s manliness fueled the civilizing imperial mission and that pursuing the imperial mission revitalized the nation’s masculinity – designed to show that women’s domestication was proof of the manly mission’s worthiness

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White women were meant to come away from the fair feeling grateful for the benefits of civilization they enjoyed – not expected to measure progress from savagery to civilization in terms of voting rights/economic independence – adopt a scale that had domesticated respectability at one end and hard manual labour at the other

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White men were to look at ‘savage’ men’s treatment of their over-worked women and congratulate themselves on their own civilized roles as protectors and breadwinners

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Some American women saw the world’s fair as a perfect venue for showing women’s special contributions to the nations progress

Tourism – Flight attendants and chambermaids:  A package of ideas about industrial, bureaucratic life  A set of presumptions about manhood, education and pleasure  Doesn’t fit neatly into public preoccupations with military conflict and high finance 

Depended on presumptions about masculinity and femininity  If women are of a different culture, male tourist feels he has entered a region where he can shed civilization’s constraints, where he is freed from standards of behavior imposed by respectable women back home.

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A powerful motor for global integration Entails a more politically potent kind of intimacy  Making sense of the strange local currency is about all that is demanded

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Promoted today as an industry that can turn poor countries’ very poverty into a magnet for sorely needed foreign currency

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Being touted as an alternative to the one-commodity dependency inherited from colonial rule

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May be creating a new kind of dependency for poor nations Indebted governments that have begun to rely on tourism include those which previously were most dubious about this as a route to genuine development, especially if ‘development’ is to include preservation of national sovereignty  Place reduction of international debt and earning of foreign currency on top of their political agenda  Many ads luring travelers to sunny beaches and romantic ruins are designed and paid for by government tourist offices  Local men are militarized in their manliness / local women are welcoming and available in their femininity

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International business travelers are men / service workers are women

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Most women working as flight attendants do not yet have backing of strong trade unions – subject to their employers’ desire for flight attendants to represent not only airline company that employs them but feminine essence of their nation – distinctive femininity is a major attraction in the eyes of the flight attendant’s employer and her government

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Airlines – first used a racial and gendered division of labor to maximize profits while constructing a notion of leisure

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Ocean-liner crews were male, ranked by class and race White officers were to exclude both competence and romance for passengers

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Indonesian, Filipino and other men of color serving in dining rooms and below deck reflected a comforting global hierarchy while permitting company to pay lower wages

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Women crew members multiplied when company executives began to realize that their women passengers preferred to be waited by women

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Hundreds of women today are hired to work as service personnel in burgeoning cruise-ship industry – ‘Love Boat’ kept afloat by a sexual division of labor

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When people go on holiday, they expect to be freed from humdrum domestic tasks - To be a tourist means to have someone else make your bed – chambermaids, waitresses and cooks are as crucial to the international tourism industry

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Even a low-paid, over-worked male employee on a banana or sugar plantation has a machete, a sense of strength, a perception of his work as manly

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Many nationalist movements have rallied around the image of exploited male plantation worker; represented denial of national sovereignty

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Nationalist leaders who have become alarmed at tourism-dependent policies imposed by foreign bankers and their own governments have been reluctant to rally around symbol of oppressed chambermaid

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Men in nationalist movements may find it easier to be roused to anger by vision of a machete-swinging man transformed into a tray-carrying waiter in a white resort – a man who had his masculine pride stolen from him

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‘Nation of chambermaids’ doesn’t seem to have same mobilizing ring in their ears – a women who has traded work as an unpaid agricultural worker for work as a hotel cleaner hasn’t lost any of her femininity

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‘Labor-intensive’ industry – requires construction crews, airplanes, gallons of frozen orange juice, and a high ratio of employees to paying customers – tourists need and expect a lot of service

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Women in most societies are presumed to be naturally capable at cleaning, washing, cooking, serving

Sex Tourism in International Politics  Not an anomaly – one strand of gendered tourism industry  A network of local and foreign companies encourages men to travel to Third World countries specifically to purchase sexual services of local women 

To succeed, sex tourism requires Third World women to be economically desperate enough to enter prostitution – also requires men from affluent societies to imagine certain women, usually of color, to be more available and submissive than women in their own countries

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Industry depends on an alliance between local governments in search of foreign currency and local and foreign businessmen willing to invest in sexualized travel

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Part of domestic and international political system

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Changes occurring both within and between countries that could radically alter sex tourism industry – AIDS – official nationalism – Asian and African feminist movements – international alliances between feminist organizations

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Public admission of AIDS – seen as damaging to economy and national pride Migration as entertainers and brides to foreign men has been latest step in making world travel different for men than for women Tourism is not just about escaping work and drizzle – but about power increasingly internationalized power

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Government and corporate officials have come to depend on international travel for pleasure in several ways (1) seeing tourism as an industry that can help diversify local economies suffering from reliance on one/two products for export  embedded in inequalities of international trade – often tied to politics of particular products (2) providing them with foreign currency, a necessity in the ever more globalized economies of both poor and rich countries (3) a spur to more general social development – ‘trickle down’ of modern skills, new technology and improved public services is imagined to follow in the wake of foreign tourists (4) to secure political loyalty of local elites  certain hotel licences may win a politician more strategic allies today than mere civil-service appointment (5) raise their nations’ international visibility and even prestige

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continues to be promoted by bankers and development planners as a means of making international system less unequal, more financially sound and more politically stable

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without ideas about masculinity and femininity – impossible to sustain tourism industry and its political agenda in their current form

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the very structure of international tourism needs patriarchy to survive

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men’s capacity to control women’s sense of their security and self-worth has been central to evolution of tourism politics

    

Report from the Bahamas by June Jordan (1992) June Jordan: Black American Political activist

Ito Noe  Born Kyushu (margins and site of strong masculine dominance) in 1895  Six years of school  Family was well off but father was bankrupt  Worked in post-office  Jealous of other girls in family who received higher schooling  Her determination evident by fact that she convinced relatives to fund her education at Ueno Higher Girls School – so she went “up” to Tokyo  Marriage arranged  Fled arranged marriage to live with her anarchist Dadaist, shakuhachi player English teacher (Tsuji Jun)  Sought advice from famous feminist Hiratsuka Raicho re divorce  Mother of 7 children – 2 sons then 4 daughters and 1 son  Famously took up with Japan’s most famous (and dashing) anarchist  Wrote as activist with her partner until their murders by the Higher Police in the crack down on dissidents that followed the 1 September, 1923, Great Tokyo Earthquake

The Blue Stockings by Sharon L. Sievers (1983) Bluestocking:  An educated and intellectual women Bluestockings magazine:  Designed to encourage and advertise women’s creative talents – relatively unknown in Japanese literary circles

 With All Our Strength by Anne E. Brodsky (2004)  The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan   Salima – a RAWA member based in Afghanistan  Role in the covert filming of the infamous execution of Zarmeena  Zarmeena - Mother of seven, accused of killing her husband, publicly executed      

by the Talib...