Growing Up Middle Eastern and African: Women

Yesterday, one of the male students from Afghanistan came to my office to pick up an immigration document for a woman in Afghanistan who is trying to come here to study English. He had been an interpreter for the U.S. military in Iraq and in Pakistan before he came here to improve his English and to begin a degree program. We talked of Benazir Bhutto's visit here sometime back and of the plight of women in Pakistan. We talked about what his friend from childhood, the woman wanting to study English here, is doing to better life for herself and for others in their village.

"It's much much worse for women in Afghanistan," he told me. "I tell other men there, 'The way you look at a woman walking down the street -- it's not how you want anyone looking at your mother or your daughter.' Women cannot vote in the upcoming election without men. Women are beaten and are raped. Girls are taken as brides. Their genitals are mutilated. It's very bad. We have a long way to go. I am here, and she is there, and we must do what we can. We must be patient while we do what we can."

Today, one of my blogger friends from the USA who lives in Africa muses about marriage. He's one of my favorite bloggers, and I have had the privilege of eating a meal with him here in Texas. David Ker (aka Lingamish) in a post today writes some things that are troubling but important for many of us here in the West to hear:

"I really hate labels like feminist and complementarian. But I use them a lot....

Here in Mozambique, race and gender roles are more clearly defined than those in modern America. I thank God that my daughter is not growing up an African. The exploitation and predation of young girls in Africa is a horror. And that carries through to adulthood where a woman’s options are very few. Interestingly, two of the most famous living Mozambicans are women: Luisa Dioga, the prime minister, and Olympic gold medalist, Maria Matola. Mozambique is in quite a few ways like the society found in Jane Austen’s romantic novels. A rich man is the quickest way for a woman to rise in society.

My hope for my sons and daughter is that they will grow up watching their parents struggle through life together trying to fulfill a vision that we can only realize together. May they be proud of our successes and learn from our mistakes."

(Ker begins that post of his today by quoting an English translation of a French proverb:

Marriage is like a fortress besieged: those who are outside want to get in, and those who are inside want to get out.


I'm making this parenthetical note, this aside, just to muse about how relationships between women and men, in marriage especially, and as mothers and fathers especially, may work for change.  And I think change comes mostly with intentionality to effect change.

The quotation Ker uses is appropriated by a Chinese couple whose literature in China has been quite influential; I'm thinking now of the novel Fortress Besieged by Qian Zhongshu whose work was inspired by his the work of his wife, Yang Jiang. And then that makes me think of the work of Lydia H. Liu, who studies Chinese appropriations of the West, and who makes this important comment in her book Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity: China, 1900-1937 [page 195]:

“The unmarking of the male gender as a gendered position… has the function of masking the true condition of gender politics in the universalizing discourse of modern literary criticism. This is the condition that concerns me most as I continue to ponder the meaning of national literature from a gendered point of view….

Her observation [Rey Chow’s observation] is timely and important, because it shows us that feminist gender criticism is not just about real women and sexuality – critics whose work is not theoretically informed by feminist gender criticism invariably express an interest in the so-called images of women or women writers – but rather, as Joan W. Scott, whom Chow quotes here, would put it, it is a way of reading and intervention into the dominant theoretical and critical practices.”

The ubiquity and universality of male dominance over females is something that can't go unmarked.  There is much work to do, and it is gendered work through ways of intervention that continue to be marked, if labelled and marked "feminist.")

You Are A Radical Relativist!

In this post, I'd like to expose you: You are a radical relativist! Before you deconstruct me, take a look at yourself. Listen to your own language. Okay, I'll help you out: listen to mine. These are "true" statements, of mine:

1. I am a linguist.
2. I am a native speaker of Vietnamese.
3. I am a native speaker of English.
4. My Vietnamese is Southern Vietnamese; my southern Vietnamese is Saigonese; my saigonese is 5-toned only.
5. My English is Southern American English; my southern american english is Texan probably only less drawled than my maternal grandfather's.
6. Blue is not green.
7. Xanh is the Vietnamese word for blue and for green.
8. Xanh is xanh; xanh is not not xanh.
9. I am a fan of Bob Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue."
10. I am someone who almost entitled this post "Tangled Up in Green."
11. Noam Chomsky is more clever than he thinks he is by creating his novel utterance: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
12. "Colorless green" is still a color.
13. "Colorless green" is an illustration of much much more than just abstract grammar categories or than unbounded nonsensicalness otherwise.
    
14. The river I step into is still the same river.
15. A pile of grain is a heap.
16. You and I are much much more forgiving and forgiven than we can even imagine.
    
17. Abortion is murder.
18. Abortion is a woman's legal choice in the United States of America.
19. I am a feminist.
20. You are a radical relativist!

With these 20 statements, I'm trying to show that we all (yes, you and I also) use language to chunk up our reality. I've been reading comments from some of you at this blog this past week. Posting on Anne Carson writing on adjectives was only the beginning of my response.

We construct and we deconstruct our realities by language. Benjamin Whorf began talking about that. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay chatted about everyone else chatting about colors. Ed Sapir took it all further. Kenneth Pike even further. These guys are feminists. Now, I hear you all saying to me: No way. So I'm asking you, No way What? And most of you say, No way these fellows were women activists. They are linguists. And some of you linguists say, Yeah, and they are structuralists. And I ask, Did I say that?

You see what we're doing, don't you? We're not listening to each other! We're talking past one another. We're assuming linguistic categories differently. "Women, fire, and dangerous things," are not all the same thing in English we all agree until we start reading that huge book of George Lakoff. He is not a feminist but a feminist taunter, I say. And while you're choosing words with which to protest, I add: "And Ernst-August Gutt, whom bible translators are looking to today to appropriate so-called 'Relevance' Theory for their work, is not a feminist either." What? most of you reply while still thinking of how women like Claudia Camp and Frances Young can so easily not be the feminists that Phyllis Trible is.

You are thinking their positions, and your very own, are not radically relative. Right? You love your own language and how it chunks your own reality for you. You love to see how awfully my language chunks your own reality. Which is Reality. And so you say so really in the space of a blog comment box.

But, my friend, think again please. You are a radical relativist!

Take your letter A, and it's shape. Write it by hand. Type it by finger. Did you write it the same way each time? Now teach it to a NON-native speaker of English, your English. Teach the fundamental absolute shape of the letter A in your alphabet to a native speaker and writer of Chinese. What is it? Do you see how many many different shapes you allow? Just for lower case? What if you chose the other shape of upper case? What if you've worn out the letter A on your keyboard. Wh^t if you h^d to use a different ch^r^cter for the letter ^? Do you see how toler^nt you h^ve been? How rel^tive! You r^dic^l! You w^nt your Chinese friend to underst^nd, don't you? Who t^ught you? Your mother? Your schoolte^cher? Remember how forgiving she was of you? Remember how forgiving you were of yourself?

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My linguistics prof, Kenneth L. Pike, never called himself a feminist. Then again, he didn't call "emics" and "etics" what anthropologist Marvin Harris called these Pikean terms for "insider" and "outsider" perspectives. Pike was fascinated that scientists (the most rigid observers of all) could use variable language for "light." It's a "particle," it's a "wave," it's a "field." It depends on what's most useful. But Pike went beyond pragmatics. He'd always say, "person above logic." "Logic is formalism." "Persons and persons choosing radically relative perspectives are always above and prior to the formal rules they choose." "Okay, language may have some of the formal properties Noam Chomsky perceives it has, but language is also N-dimensional. N is infinite. We people are infinite in our choosings." Pike also told us his students of a moment when he was a student: One of his teachers one day was trying to overcome Plato's problem when he declared to the class, "What we really need in language is for one word to have one and only one meaning." (The teacher, I think, had been reading too much of Aristotle - but that is my aside to this little story.) Pike tells us his students how he responded to this teacher of his: "But sir," he protested, "how then would we learn language." Do you see how radical a question (how rhetorical!) it is?! Pike knows that learning language depends on it's N-dimensionality. If language for everyone is always and only chunked exactly the same way, then how will our mothers teach us? We need adjectives to modify our nouns. We need metaphors to give nuance to construct differently our worlds. Pike loved to quote Nelson Goodman saying, What we need is "radical relativism within rigid restraints." What most of us want to imagine most of the time (and it is absolutely pure imagination) is that there must only be rigid restraints. Thank God you are a radical relativist!

feministing the bible, or, Bibling feminisms

When we read the phrase "feministing," we may immediately think of the blog (and the feminist bloggers of) feministing.com. So when you hear the phrase "Bible-ing," what (and whom) do you think of?

(I thought I'd throw that question in here - even though I'm mostly intending to write this post about feministing. Lately one of my blogger friends has been wondering about my being a feminist and about my being a bible blogger and about my ostensibly drawing a sharp binary distinction between the two. The labels are considerably difficult, and this certain accusation of his is as essentially just as troubling. If you've stayed with me this far, let me announce here and now that my title for this post is likely going to seem misleading. In reality, I'm probably going to say more about my boss and about her feministing than I am about the bible or anyone's Bibling. Nonetheless, we can always talk more later about those other things, or any of us can make the applications back to them in our thinking, in our feelings, in our relating with others, in our living of life. Do know that I'm writing with an intended degree of anonymity. But I want us to be as personal as possible, lest we find ourselves powering up on the high-horse of abstractions and pontifications.)

My boss does not call herself a feminist. She is a scientist, a professor, and now a high-level administrator in the university. However, when I've asked her about books on her shelves by feminist authors, she's said to me how concerned she is that women do not get the salaries that men do. I know she has daughters, but I've heard that she also mentors other women to negotiate more when offered less. Some of us figured that's what she herself was doing when it took an extra long time for her finally to accept the position she now holds. It's no accident, I think, that the director of the Women's Studies Program and the director of the Institute on Women and Gender Research both report to my boss. And now you know I direct another unit on campus, not those, and also report to her. When we have director's meetings, she gets us talking about our respective concerns, and she keeps us talking about issues of fairness, diversity, and even gender. Let me say one more thing about my boss in her private life off campus, and then I'll come back to her feministing. Do remember, please, that I'm trying to maintain a sure degree of anonymity.

My boss has never mentioned to me reading the Bible. To be fair, I've never asked her about all the books on her shelves. However, one of my employees has mentioned how active she is in the mainstream denominational local church of which he also is a member. What I know of my boss' politics, in as much as she's made them public, they are part and parcel of her feministing, which is decidedly biblical. Indeed, her bibling is feminist. She is as at home reading the Bible, I imagine, as she is if reading The Women's Bible, or Ms. magazine issues from any of the past four decades, or Manifesta.

In the most recent director's meeting that she called, my boss did not mention feministing or Bibling. Rather, she got us talking about being bosses. She had us reconsider the binary "management or leadership." She took us through a bit by Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal (in their Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership, 2003) in which they review the literature. "Bennis and Nanus (1985)," they note, for example, "offer the distinction that 'managers do things right, and leaders do the right thing' (p. 21)." She discussed with us perceived differences between "Transactional leadership" and "Transformational leadership" - in which the former has the focus on "give and take within structures" and the latter the focus on "vision and motivation."

Then my boss started feministing. That is, she started asking us whether we thought we had to force such a choice.

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It immediately took me back. We will come back to my boss' feministing. But it immediately took me back to Jesus - as Mark translates him, renders his Greek parables. And it took me back to Helen the whore - as Gorgias feels he has to praise her, to defend her. And to George Steiner the Jew, the literary critic. And to Robert E. Quinn, the white male non-feminist corporation guru, the deep-change and change-the-world professor. And to Patricia Bizzell, feminist (but "not a Catholic, not even a Christian" though working and teaching at Holy Cross while engaged as a student herself in the links between religion and rhetoric, especially Jewish rhetoric, at Hebrew College.)

What? you're asking. And I'm talking about real people, some somebodies. All of them are outlining choices, and not just a binary set of two from which each of us must choose the one. They may, in fact, be personal positions.

For example, Mark's Joshua (aka Jesus) tells a parable that seems to be the key (position) for all the parables: a sower sows seed which falls on different places and yields crops differently because of it. Likewise, Gorgias' Helen decides to leave the men of Greece: for various possible reasons some of which are more praiseworthy. Steiner comes across difficulties in poetry reading, some which are more profound than others. Quinn reviews the business management literature to discover that bosses typically choose one of several strategies for change. (Quinn also writes to disparage the views of a [not named] "woman at a professional conference who was on the cutting edge of feminist theory." But that's for another conversation.) And Bizzell reviews methods of writing the history rhetoric, suggesting that "masculinism" for feminist rhetoric purposes is not the only one. (Lots of rhetoricians, come to think of it, do what Bizzell does whether "feminists" or labeled otherwise, and I'm thinking here of Cheryl Glenn, Wayne Boothe, and Krista Ratcliffe in particular. Bizzell herself really likes Jacqueline Jones Royster, and come to think of it, so do I.)

The point of my reviewing all of this so quickly and so sloppily is this: these real human beings have reviewed choices in sets of 4. And the four line up remarkably. For example, Quinn even looks to Jesus (and to Martin Luther King, Jr. and to Ghandi) as the exemplar(s) of what he considers the best "change strategy." But to line this up further, we may just take the men mentioned above to see the parallels in "choices":

Steiner / Quinn / Jesus / Gorgias
poetry difficulty / change strategy / regula fidei / Helen's motivation:

1. epiphenomenal difficulty / telling strategy / the wayside / she was convinced by a man's speech;

2. tactical difficulty / forcing strategy / rocky soil hot sun / she was seized, raped, by men;

3. modal difficulty / negotiating strategy / weedy soil / she was commanded by the gods;

4. ontological difficulty / transformative strategy / good soil / she chose her love.

I think there's an argument to be made for viewing these choices epistemologically too: 1. Aristotle's logic; 2. Alexander the Great's conquest; 3. Plato's idealism; 4. Socrates' dialectic (which he learned from Aspasia, a prostitute, a non-Greek). I'm only mentioning this argument because so much of the Bible is in Greek. And when people are bibling these days, all too often they resort to one and only one epistemology. It's often either Aristotle's logic or something else. If it's Aristotle's logic, then, of course, everything else must be not logic, must be illogical. You can use a fancy Latin phrase like "regula fidei" to bound what must be meant and what canNot go into that Roman category either. (Romans always tended to take the Greek stuff to the Nth degree, didn't they?) The huge issues with aristotelianism, whoever is appropriating it, is that it tends to ignore what's really going on in a person (i.e., motivations of resentments, fear, shame, or guilt); more than that, Aristotle's method of "knowing" tends first to categorize in real artificial ways but it also then tends to put down "the other" in the automatic hierarchy. Anyone and anything Not close to one's own uppity categories is lower than one's own categories. I could go on. But I may be digressing a bit.

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When my boss is feministing, she's not being bossy at all. She's not limiting herself or any of the rest of us to any one choice or to one pair of choices either. She's saying, "Consider which choices give you the best results in working with people. Transformation of yourself and with them is probably the best if you can do that some of the time. But work well and personally otherwise."