Sherif Hetata

Before coming to this conference I kept wondering how to tackle the subject which I had chosen. This conference is being held mainly to discuss issues related to women’s rights. But to my mind in order to deal with this subject in a comprehensive way, to understand how women’s rights are being eroded and why, we should place them in the larger context of what is happening in the world today, we should link them with the economic and cultural transformations induced by capitalist globalization and their effect on the women’s movement, and on feminist thought.

Of course I do not believe that I can deal adequately with such a vast and complex subject in a paper like this. Nevertheless I will try to evoke a limited number of aspects which seem relevant to this conference. In so doing I will try to avert the complex linguistic acrobatics which have become so common in this era of post modern thought. Instead I will start from the concrete situation faced by women in the Arab region of the world and particularly in Egypt in the hope that this will help us to understand the challenges they face in society, and the difficulties which are in many ways common to women, not only in the so called South, but all over the world.

Globalization: The Economic and the Cultural:

Post modernism has been described by Fred Jamieson as “the cultural logic of late capitalism”. This cultural logic has many aspects but I will focus here on three main characteristics related to post-modernism namely “globalization”, “fragmentation” and “surrender” and their effect on women’s movements.

To expand and globalize the world market, the multi-national corporations resort to economic, political and military means. But their task is made easier if people can be convinced to think, feel and therefore act in ways which will promote the global market. Culture can help the global economy to expand and reach out to all corners of the world.

Cultural globalization:

It has become possible for the media to create a single North -South world market as a result of the technological means at their disposal. To expand the global market a “culture of consumerism” must be developed on a global scale, must propagate certain values, patterns of behavior, perceptions of happiness and success and attitudes towards sex and love. Culture must shape a “global consumer” with an overwhelming desire to buy. It must develop new needs, a cult of pleasure, and of material possession. It must address all ages, all members of the family. It must enhance the role of women as objects of sexual pleasure.

The media produce and reproduce the culture of violence and sex, the quest to satisfy immediate needs, fleeting pleasures, quick enjoyment, the excessive and the pornographic in order to keep the global economy rolling.

In this culture women are not to be regarded as producers. They should go back to the home, to the family but at the same time play their role as consumers with more and more zeal. They are allowed to work but preferably in less important or menial jobs and especially in services where the global economy needs their patience, their dexterity, their obedience, their lack of organization, their lower wages with no security or social insurance.

Dominant feminist theory in the postindustrial era has largely abandoned the problems of labour and exploitation, and ignored their relation to gender, sexuality, difference and desire. It has done so at a time when two thirds of labour in the world is done by women. In the free production zones in South East Asia, Africa (including Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt) and Latin America more than 70% of the labour force is female.

In place of the economic, in place of women as producers and reproducers of the working forces (Physical and mental) which carry the world economy on their shoulders, dominant feminist theory has posited desire and pleasure (read consumerism) as the dynamics of social change. It has followed the post structuralist theorists of global capitalism like Foucault, Derrida,, Lacan, Baudrillard, Fukuyama and others who maintain that the transformation of the social is no longer possible. There are no meta-narratives, no resistance, no emancipatory movements. There is an end to history, an end to organization, since organization means representation and representation is a form of tyranny (the replacement of one power by another). The struggles of women against patriarchal and class discrimination for their right as a part of human right are no longer relevant. We are at the end of history, where pleasure, desire, the discourse of texts intertexuality and culture are divorced from the economy, from labour, from patriarchal and class oppression, the struggle has become divorced from the economic and social reality in which women live to be transformed into mere words or into the search for pleasure, sex and an unbridled consumerism.

In our region the economic invasion by global capitalism has as elsewhere been accompanied by the global cultural invasion. The sections of society involved in this global transformation are mainly composed of the upper and middle class strata of society, the sector commonly described as westernized or modernized (post modernized). Here the different economic and cultural characteristics of capitalist globalization have crept in. Consumerism, the search for pleasure, for a sexual freedom bordering on licentiousness and on different forms of prostitution, drugs, etc are now a common aspect of life. These changes have of course affected women and led to attitudes and values in conformity with consumerist trends, coupled with an increasing individualism encouraged by the media which propagate the ideology of each one for himself, or herself, against social struggle, organization and therefore human rights. Women’s rights in these circles are seen as limited to sexual freedom, mobility and rights within the family (personal rights) which although important ignore the need for wider social and economic changes in society, and for effective women’s organizations capable of struggling for their rights. There are however small groups of women who have continued to battle for a wider conception of women’s rights.

Although consumerism tends to predominate in the more Westernized sectors of society, it has spread also to the more conservative strata of society and women, taking on patterns which are more, discrete, and hidden by a veneer of religion appearances (like veiling).

Cultural Fragmentation:

The post world war II years were a period of hope for the Arab peoples. Today most of these hopes have collapsed under the assault of global transnational capitalism. The setbacks faced by national democratic, progressive and women’s movements, the difficulties of the economic situation the brunt of which is born by ordinary men and women, the global attack on what people perceive as their interests, their history, their culture, their identity and their nation, all of these have bred movements of resistance of a varied nature.

In the absence of a general movement with wide perspectives women and men however tend to fall back on what they know, to cling to the familiar, to the heritage which makes them what they are, to the things of the past.

Rather than seeking a change forwards they tend to adopt ideas and attitudes and to join in movements which are reactionary and take them backwards to the closed patriarchal family and its values, to the closed community, the tribe, the race, or ethnic group, to tradition and religion. They adopt every thing which seems to distinguish them from others, which is part of their identity irrespective of whether this identity has both positive and negative characteristics.

These are the factors which lie behind the revival of ethnic, racial, and religious movements, which lie behind the spread of religious fundamentalism and identity politics.

Confronted by a global assault our people instead of uniting against a common danger, instead of cooperating to solve their problems and developing solidarity in their struggles tend to build up destructive barriers and fortifications against one another. Rather than being open to difference they close up like oysters, become divided, fight tooth and nail on issues that are not the most important to their lives.

But behind this situation, behind the increasing fragmentation lie concealed the economic and political forces of capitalist globalization which take advantage of division and fragmentation to. protect their interests, and expand their power. They divide in order to rule.

Thus in this post modern era we witness two seemingly contradictory processes which in fact complete one another. Increased concentration and unification of capital, of political military and mediatic control at the top, coupled with increased fragmentation and division of people at the bottom.

Fundamentalism, identity politics and women:

Women are the first victims of fundamentalism and identity politics in the Arab region and in other parts of the world.

Fundamentalism is overtly patriarchal and class oriented. Women are created to serve their husbands, and other males in the family and to be obedient to them. They are supposed to remain in the household, to have children and to care for them. The personal or family laws which govern their lives weigh heavily against the right to work, against control over their bodies and control over their lives. Hence all their human rights are either minimized or abolished. Fundamentalist tendencies in our region (and all over the world) are an integral part of capitalist globalization. They were nurtured and encouraged in our region first by British colonialism and then by American neo-colonialism. As an ideology and social movement they flow easily into identity, and reinforce identity polities. As a cultural manifestation they adopt an anti-western stance but are closely linked to world capitalism economically and politically despite the struggles in which they engage on certain issues or at certain moments of time.

Identity can be a factor of resistance and often is since it seeks to maintain memory, and history, to reinforce the culture and the interests of nations groups or individuals who are struggling to avoid being coopted and moulded into a global economic and cultural pattern imposed by multi nationals .

The problem with identity in the post-modern era which is witnessing a backlash against progressive, democratic and feminist popular movements and forces is that it tends to close in on itself instead of opening up to change to new ideas to the experience of others. This leads to a holding on to identity at all costs including the more negative, traditionalist, conservative and narrow minded aspects which characterize all racial and national identities to different degrees. It implies an uncritical acceptance of all the elements which constitute the concept of identity.

In the Arab region the position and the treatment of women is considered a crucial aspect of Arab identity. Thus matters like freedom of women to work, to travel, to control their own bodies and lives (abortion, circumcision, virginity, sexual freedom, honour killing, obedience to men) are inextricably linked with what is considered Arab identity and severely control the rights of women.

In addition “cultural identity” and culture in general has been divorced from the economic. This has led to the extolling of so called multiculturalism, under the guise of respect for other cultures. But this respect for “cultural freedom” can often be profoundly misleading and dangerous.

Firstly cultural freedom and development are closely linked to the material possibilities of a nation, ethnic group, community or society. You cannot preserve what is good in your culture or develop it if you are poor starving, ignorant, and sick. Material development in your own way, and in conformity with your needs, is a necessary condition for the preservation, development and enriching of culture and identity . In our scientific and technological age this is even more obvious than it was before.

Secondly multi-culturalism is often used especially in the west as an excuse to maintain cultural backwardness. For example about a year ago “Germaine Greer” the well-known Australian feminist in an interview published in the “Guardian” maintained that we should accept female circumcision as a cultural characteristic of certain communities and peoples, should respect other cultures and not try to interfere in them.

Multi - culturalism is thus often being used to buttress ideas and practices antagonistic to the rights of women. This has nothing to do with the democratic right of peoples and communities to tackle their problems in their own way and to decide what they should do without foreign interference. But there should be an unequivocal stand against all practices that affect the rights of women. Human rights are universal, an ideal to which all peoples must aspire, and women’s rights are an integral part of human rights.

Post-modern thought and cultural helplessness:

Post-modern thought therefore serves to maintain the global hegemony of multinational capitalism through two seemingly opposed cultural tendencies: the unifying global consumer culture, and the fragmenting effect of cultural identity or multi-culturalism directed to the peoples of the world especially in the South. This is very clear in the Arab region.

Both these tendencies serve a single aim. To maintain and develop global capitalism the cultural must be divorced from the economic, the political and the military in order to confuse people and conceal what is happening to them. We respect and admire your culture the ideologies of global capitalism say but they close their eyes to the marginalisation and poverty affecting milliards of people especially women.

Post modern thinking as it has been developed mainly in the United States, the United Kingdom and France is also an ideology of apathy and helplessness, of non-resistance, of non-struggle for economic, political, social, and cultural human rights, including those of women, and this despite the extensive use of human rights issues to bully other countries especially in the South into obedience.

It devitalizes and paralyzes resistance by destroying interconnectedness in the name of diversity and cultural richness. It fragments knowledge in its attempt to study only what is local and specific. It transforms the world into a rich but disconnected kaleidoscope.

These strategies are not necessarily without merit. Chaos can sometimes be positive and unpredictability is one of the doors to knowledge, but post medernism mainly propagates conceptions which deprive people of their capacity to struggle against global capitalism and to change the world in which we live today by, to replace globalization by the few and for the few by globalization by, and for the peoples of the globe. It does so by an insistence on fragmentation, by instilling a rabid individualism, encouraged daily by the media, by paralyzing the struggle of all peoples for human rights.

For if we are living the end of history as Francis Fukuyama maintains, how can we think of the future, or learn from the past? Is he not saying that our world - the world ruled by multinationals, by an enormous concentration of money, power and knowledge in the hands of a tiny minority will remain as it is? If we are witnessing the end of meta-narratives, of theory and ideology as Foucault, Jaques Derrida and other post modern thinkers suggest how can we gather facts and knowledge into some form of coherence, even if this whole is dynamic and changes all the time. If with Foucault we are witnessing the end of representation how can people organize associations, parties, unions to struggle for their human rights? If we are living the death of the author as Roland Barthes says are we not left with words divorced from human endeavour.

All these ends and deaths deprive people of their urge to struggle, of their capacity to resist. They mean the surrender of history, theory, ideology, authorship and representation to global capitalism, handing them over as weapons with which it can defend itself and expand unopposed, propagate its own ideology, its history, its theories, its forms of representation and its authorship at will. They mean the end of a consistent and effective struggle for women’s human rights.