Читать книгу Genders 22 - Ellen E. Berry - Страница 11

When Shogren speaks of Russian women “being less liberated, in a feminist sense,” when Kopkind records the absence of a feminist movement, or when I glibly introduce the term “gender studies,” we cannot presume a common ideology, but we seem to rely on a common heritage — one founded mainly on the experience of certain privileged groups of Western women and especially manifest in Western feminist movements of the late 1960s. This is not to claim that Shogren, Kopkind, and I represent the broad spectrum of extant Western feminisms or to argue that these feminisms can be reduced to a 1960s agenda. But if we are not to generalize our historical experience (especially when we are assaying comparisons with non-Western women), then it is imperative that we acknowledge the long-lasting formative influence (both positive and negative) of that earlier agenda and its regional context. The 1960s movements largely formed in protest against the situation of middle-class white women in advanced capitalist states — specifically, against their socially assigned and enforced roles as wife, mother, and homemaker; the legal and actual inequities in their professional, social, and economic status as compared with that of middle-class white men; and the general exploitation and commodification of women as objects of desire. Predictably enough, when feminist scholarship furthered this protest, it focused first on its own “first” conditions and articulators — on the models, experiences, and works of privileged first world women. This specialized focus prevailed for some time, as did the notion of gender as the unifying category of identity, subsuming other categories like race, class, or sexuality.

Over the last quarter of a century, this bias has provoked much protest, factionalism, and metamorphosis among Western women’s groups; internal debate has facilitated a dismantling of traditional presumptions about gender and sexual identity, a greater acknowledgment of class and race differences, the generation of a plurality of feminisms. But despite the attempts of Western feminists to theorize and accommodate difference, we face perhaps the greatest challenge in relating to non-Western women, for such relations require the negotiation of the most complex differences and antagonisms and suffer most acutely from tendencies to generalize the local and stereotype the other. To date, this challenge has been most vividly illustrated and amply studied in relations between first world and third world women. It seems particularly telling that, at least in the early stages of their inquiry, critics writing from third world perspectives asserted regional bias rather than plurality in their readings of Western women; they critiqued Western feminists in general for “shortsightedness in defining the meaning of gender in terms of middle-class white experiences, and in terms of internal racism, classism, and homophobia.”⁶ Elaborating this position in her pioneering essay, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Chandra Talpade Mohanty charges that Western feminists’ presumption of gender as the main source of identity, oppression, and therefore solidarity “implies a notion of gender or sexual difference or even patriarchy which can be applied universally and cross-culturally” and establishes middle-class white Western women as a “normative referent” against which women of other races, classes, and especially third world nations seem lacking or “underdeveloped.”⁷

However debatable her position, Mohanty’s protest and critique should alert us to the possibility of a similar “early” dynamic between first world and second world women.⁸ If relations between Western feminists and women in the postcolonial world sometimes recall (or are perceived to recall) the blind opposition of Western imperialism versus colonial resistance, Western approaches to Slavic women can be read as similarly myopic, if somewhat less condescending. Certainly conditions were ripe for miscommunication. By the late twentieth century, decades of cold war politics and Stalinist repression had curiously distorted relations between Soviet women and a wide array of Western feminist groups; in both “camps,” the propaganda deployed to demonize the “other” superpower often inadvertently fostered a kind of blinkered idealization. From the vantage point of Western women (even liberal feminists), the public gains of Soviet women under socialism seemed undeniable — the Soviet constitution’s guarantee of women’s equal professional and economic rights, the access of Soviet women to most areas of the work force, the state’s at least partial support for working women (paid maternity leave, public day care). In turn, Western focus on these coveted achievements at times obscured or dismissed the special problems of Soviet women (their unrelieved domestic labor, the lack of consumer goods and services that would ease their domestic burden, the political victimization they shared with men). In fact, in her introduction to Soviet Sisterhood in 1985, Barbara Holland readily admits Western feminists’ self-serving nostalgia for the “new Soviet woman” of the 1920s, that almost-realized socialist feminist:

Feminists in the West may feel nostalgic for the determined pioneers of the past who, their red kerchiefs firmly knotted round their heads, climbed into the driving seat of a tractor or picked up a shovel on a building site. We may be hurt by the ridicule now attached to these images by Soviet women, themselves anxious to buy our fashionable jeans and dresses, and leave their dirty overalls behind.⁹

It seems predictable, then, that this sort of nostalgia would elicit protest, debate, and correspondingly reductive readings from the Russian side. It is interesting to note that a Russian feminist (Anastasiia Posadskaia quoted by Kopkind) redirects Mohanty’s complaints about Western “shortsightedness,” in this instance generalizing and critiquing the model of Marxist feminists:

When we met with Western feminists we were struck by their social frame. They were Marxists. We argued with them so much I even cried. How could I say that the system that did all this to me was good? No one wants to hear about solidarity in this country anymore, because for years it was imposed: solidarity with South Africa, solidarity with Cuba. For Western women socialism was a question of values. They said, “At least the Communists put liberation down on paper.” (55)

At this point in our relations, if Western feminists are to see beyond their nostalgia and Russian women are to hear beyond an alienating political rhetoric, then we all must commit to more historically informed, contextually sensitive ways of seeing, hearing, and speaking. We may even need to devise a language of paraphrase to defuse those political buzzwords (the legacy of American and Soviet cold war rhetoric, the mar-ketspeak of Western developmental politics) that continue to polarize us.