Orientalism Edward Said
• Definition: “the acceptance in the West of the basic distinction between East and West as the starting
point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the
Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind’, destiny and so on.”
• Basic description:
o The intellectual authority over the orient
o Way of coming to terms with orient
o Clear distinction between orient and occident
o Managing the orient
o Fixing the orient in timelessness
o Relation of power, domination, and hegemony
o Significance of cultural hegemony
• Three dimensions to orientalism:
o Mode of representation us (civilized, rational) vs. them (barbaric and emotional)
o Style of thought
o Corporate network of vested interests
• The orient and the western selfconception
o Contrast conception creating identity of self by comparison
o Superiority/inferiority
o Subject/object relationship subject is an agent and object is passive
o Overgeneralization removing specifities
Power
• Not the property of individuals
• Property of group life, of social life
• Power “is” has an ontological status
• Deeply woven in our lives
• Foundation of our current institutions
• Invisible to those who are most empowered
• Invisible knapsack carry (dis)power with us without knowing
o People come with different forms of power which is carried out vis a vis the position we
occupy at the time – i.e. woman has power over her children but not in relation to her husband
o Power is thus fluid and changes with the context
Transnationalism
• Transnational: “the movement of goods, bodies and ideas across national boundaries such that the
strict distinctions among nations become altered or more flexible”
• The hegemony of neoliberal economic agenda:
o Neoliberalism: “the privatization policies created by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s in the US.
And Margaret Thatcher in the UK, that dismantled public programs and the state focus on
bettering the welfare of citizens. They claimed that privatizing such work was more efficient,
more economical and better.”
• Transnational Corporations
o Everything up for sale i.e. Italian soccer team owned by someone in Kazakhstan
o They are the institution through which globalization happens
o An outcome of neoliberalism
o Exert powerful force on current global order o One and only one goal making a profit
o In 2013, of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations while only 49 are
countries more powerful than nation states
o They influence what we eat/drink, where we live, what we wear, how we think, what
information we receive, how we get most of our essential services like health care and what
we are taught in school
o Create and control our sources of information
o Influence our gender selves, gender identities and gender relations
o Transnational feminism is a response
o 13 main tenets of transnational feminism:
1. Gives voice to southern feminist agendas and perspectives (as of now, white feminism
was dominant)
2. Response to “global” and “international” feminisms not only white agenda
3. Looks at interrelationships
4. Articulates issues as they take place through multiple related contexts not just gender
equality but racism, poverty, etc.
5. Focuses on relationships and movements – i.e. trafficking of women and how different
countries profit from it
6. Problematizes a purely locational gender politics – makes connections where links
are/made invisible
7. Freedom is interconnected
8. Focuses on world’s division of nations into “first” and “third” world nations
9. Roots in postcolonial studies, feminist and antiracist theorizing and activism
10. Postcolonial discourse
11. Highlights differences among women no illusion of sisterhood not “generalized”
issues
12. No one single set of ‘women’s issues’
13. Intersectional
o Historical context of transnational feminism:
Response to women’s participation in the UN’s International Decade for Women
(19751985)
Four world conferences on women: 1975 Mexico City, 1980 Copenhagen, 1985
Nairobi and 1995 Beijing
• Significance of Beijing conference: Hilary Clinton
o Shift in construction of gender
o Beijing: differences among women emerged
o Objection by women from the “south”
o “Solidarities across differences”; “transnational feminists’ efforts to
employ collective action frames as tools in their attempt to
acknowledge gender differences and build solidarities”
“Women’s rights are human rights”
Genderbased abuses as human rights abuses
o CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women)
Treaty for rights of women
Most comprehensive international agreement on basis human rights of women so far
“Bill of rights” for women
Addresses women’s rights within political, civil, cultural, economic, legal and social
life
CEDAW enters into force through national ratification
Who signed CEDAW? Who hasn’t? o Important articles of CEDAW:
1. Country duties
2. Equality
5. Prejudice
6. Trafficking
7. Political and public life
8. International work
9. Nationality
10. Education
11. Employment
12. Health
13. Economic and social life
14. Rural women
15. Equality before the law
16. Marriage and family, including reproductive rights
o State’s obligations:
1. To incorporate women’s equality in their legal system
2. To protect women in all areas of life
3. To eliminate discriminatory laws and practices
4. To put CEDAW in practice
o One missing piece: violence against women not mentioned in 1979 CEDAW convention
o 1992: General Recommendation 19 recognizes violence against women as
discrimination and recognizes genderbased violence impairs or nullifies the basic
rights of women
GR19 only international treaty that talks about violence against women as
discrimination
• Why did Women’s Human Rights arrive so late?
o Three reasons: historical exclusion of gender, public/private split (women’s issues seen as
private, not public concerns), the powerful have the power to write the law and there were
simply not enough women in positions of power
• Important achievement
o Gender mainstreaming since 1997; strategy for promoting gender equality but not an end in
itself
Definition of gender mainstreaming: “concerns and experiences of women to be an
integral part of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation in all activities,
including policy development, research, advocacy, dialogue, legislation, resource
allocation, and planning, implementing and monitoring programs and projects in all
political, economic and societal spheres”
• Problems and shortcomings:
o Three overarching problems:
Founded upon western ethical, political, philosophical norms and values
Universalist and essentialist essentializes gender
Assumes to have crosscultural applicability; looking at one issue while ignoring
others and assuming that issues are not related
Women’s Human Rights and its Discontent
• Article 1: Definite discrimination against women as:
“For the purposes of the present convention, the term “discrimination against women” shall mean any
distinction, exclusion, or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing
or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political,
economic, social, cultural, civil, or any other field”
Precarity
• Judith Butler “precarity” designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations
suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to
injury, violence and death
• Definition: condition under which certain bodies and lives are not deemed valuable, grievable, and
subjects of state protection
• Those who are marginalized systematically exclude them
• Examples: aboriginal women, sex workers, transwomen, disabled
• Robert Pickton’s case in BC from 1991 to 2002 sex trade workers disappearing from Vancouver;
one third of them native; took police almost 15 years to track this down. Why?
Sarah Horowitz Sexual violence against women in a university context
• Emotional and psychological impacts depression, anxiety, posttrauma
• Rape myths: “culturally situated and socially learned ideologies that excuse sexual violence…and
advocate that (survivors) should accept responsibility for their sexual victimization” i.e. women lie
and say they were raped so they are not seen as sluts
o Male university students rated the identical behaviour of rapists as being more excusable when
they were portrayed as dating the victim steadily than when they were portrayed as just friends
with the victim
o Of a group of women raped by physical force,
22.7% said they only blamed themselves
27.3% said they blame themselves and the perpetrator
• Rape scripts: narratives about what characteristics are involved in a typical rape or other instance of
sexual violence i.e. young, attractive, sexually inexperienced white women at night being attacked by
a male
• Research on university rape culture
o Although university women research participants relied heavily on supporting each other to
try to ‘avoid’ sexual assault, when a sexual assault occurred, female friend groups tended to
fall apart
o University women saw reporting sexual assault as pointless because of men’s superior r social
status
o University women who had been raped did not label their experience as rape when confidant
blamed them for the rape, or encouraged selfblame
o Findings: from emotional to political
Direct impacts on daily school experience low concentration, avoidance of
perpetrator, difficulty sleeping
Victimblaming by survivors and their peers, leading to selfsilencing and isolation;
demonstrate buyin to rape myths, strict rape sc
More
Less
