Local feminism for global change

I took an introduction to transgender studies my senior year of college.  About halfway through the semester, our class got into a heated discussion about genital cutting.  One white woman, who was part of a campus social justice group whose platform included advocating against female genital multilation (FGM...although the fact that we have termed it such implies our value judgment) in African countries, was deeply distressed by the comparison the instructor was making between FGM and gender assignment surgery for intersex babies and children in North America, especially the U.S.  She insisted that the two could not be compared - gender assignment surgery in the U.S., however wrong, was surely less harmful than FGM.

I am not sure if this woman had ever been to an African country, much less if she had ever spoken to groups that practice genital cutting.  Despite this, she was certain it was definitively different and definitively worse than genital cutting in the U.S.  She was so sure that nothing could convince her otherwise, not even testimonies by those who have suffered incredible emotional and physical damage as a result of these 'compassionate' gender assignment surgeries performed without their consent.

Let me start by saying that ranking oppressions is futile and unhelpful - ultimately, both practices involve surgical procedures on healthy, functioning genitals.  But this white woman was so sure that liberating darker-skinned girls from the throes of their culture's religious practices was preferable to - even a more worthwhile cause than - liberating U.S. babies from the throes of their culture's medical practices (which are informed by its religious practices, to be sure).

It seems far more appealing to be an advocate for monolithic Third World women rather than to understand and account for our own domestic hierarchies. This is the face of  "the fantasy of rescue" (Grewal and Kaplan 2001:673).  We decry "oppression" in non-Western countries as if these women would be more liberated with Western notions.  We demand that they exchange a hijab for thongs.  FGM for higher incidents of rape.  A burqua for Strippercise.  Ah, the "freedom" of "democratic choice!"  Grewal and Kaplan (2001: 669) write, "Thus the global feminist is one who has free choice over her body and a complete and intact rather than a fragmented or surgically altered body."  Should my lipstick be in rose petal or pink lemonade?

In the same way that white feminists have colonized the experiences of women of color through interpreting them in the eyes of white feminism, Western (usually white) feminists have colonized the experiences of non-Western, Global South women through interpreting them in the eyes of Western feminism.  Mohanty's well-published 1984 essay and 2003 reprisal document how, "people of and from the Third World live not only under Western eyes, but also within them."  We must remember who is documenting these accounts of 'Third World women's' experiences.  It is for that reason we must, as Mohanty argues, "look upward," and refocus our attention on how the legacy of colonialism is perpetuated by the colonizer. 

The cost of the rescue fantasy is not just to Global South women, but to U.S. women stratified on various axes of oppression.  Mohanty writes that "sisterhood cannot be presumed on the basis of gender," and this is as true locally as it is globally.  We must scrutinize the ways in which our brazen attempts to 'save' Global South women have cost us our abilities to save ourselves.  Her nod toward the prison industrial complex and religious fundamentalism of our own indicate how much domestic work remains.  Perhaps we should take the less glamourous path and account for local disarray. 

Perhaps our global work should start at home.