conundrumumumumumum

today we had yet another interesting lecture about the feminist movement in jordan (or lack thereof) from a jordanian scholar working at the university of jordan. she teaches american lit, which i think is an important point to remember, and started the women’s center at uj. she was an excellent public speaker, almost dangerously so, and i found myself completely enraptured in what she had to say. it wasn’t until after i had thought for a few minutes, checked back over the notes i had taken, and processed her rhetoric that i started to feel a wrench in my stomach.

mostly, i felt her lecture to be extremely disorganized and she jumped from place to place. she went off on completely unrelated tangents, then at the end of the lecture started wrapping up with the history of the women’s movement (which she really spent no time talking about), and then read a letter written by an egyptian woman in 1909 that i think she expected us to cry over.

i guess i’ll start with what i liked/thought interesting about her lecture and then move into what i found problematic.

she raised some points about cultural views of women and the impact on their health that i had never realized before. for instance, here it’s crucial that a woman be a virgin when she marries, and the way to prove her chastity is the blood from her broken hymen. this is so important, in fact, that some parents don’t even let their girls ride bicycles or participate in sports because they are afraid that their hymens might break prematurely. this compounds a lot of what i’ve noticed regarding health in this country. there doesn’t seem to be a lot of knowledge about healthy eating or proper exercise. for example, my host sister in the badia asked me why she was so fat when she walks a full two km per day. well, that’s only about one mile and she doesn’t walk it very quickly. also she eats sweets galore (jordanians love their sugar). similarly, a girl on the program here stayed with a very traditional family in the badia whose women essentially never left the house. they were all pretty overweight. it worries me that these cultural views are keeping people from healthy and active lives.

the lecturer also said that it sometimes takes her hours to convince a woman to get a mammogram, especially in rural areas. she couldn’t figure out why this was until she realized that the only physician in town was a man, and the women of the village felt that it was improper for him to touch them in such a way. highly educated female physicians didn’t want to live in those villages where they felt their lifestyles were restrictive. she also said that religion can influence women to make unhealthy choices. here there is a sort of fatalism: whatever happens, god has willed it. the lecturer spoke of a woman she met who knew she had a lump on her breast but wouldn’t go get it checked out because she had faith that whatever happened was the will of god and she didn’t want to betray his will.

also, she and our last lecturer brought up a point of “distribution of resources” point. they said that jordan, as a developing country, and its government have a hard time focusing on feminist demands when they are so strained and stressed in other areas (a consequence of this is that the feminist movement is necessarily limited to upper-class participants, making it, like second-wave feminism in the US, a bourgeois/intellectual movement). going hand-in-hand with this point is that jordan, the middle east in general, and palestine in particular face huge political obstacles, particularly in relation to israel but also to the global political stage in general, in making their voices heard, understood, and respected. our lecturer said, and i’ve noticed this as well, that men here definitely have a macho attitude going on, which i see as being a product of feeling emasculation in other parts of their lives (note to self: look up statistics of domestic violence in the US before and after the recession).

now to the stuff i didn’t like:
while i appreciated the information the professor gave us, and i found much of it enlightening, she was definitely coming from a western perspective on feminism which makes me question the potential success of her point of view becoming the mainstream in jordan. she noted, but then seemed to dismiss, the impact of colonialism on reactions to feminist movements. she said that here feminism still has a huge stigma attached to it because it is seen as a betrayal of islamic values, that it is part of the “westoxification” of the arab world. then, she went on to say that feminism is a secular movement. this raised a big old red flag in my head. we have been talking this whole semester about how the religion of islam cannot be separated from other realms of society. it is not just a system of thought and beliefs but a way of life; islam is orthopraxic not orthodox. how then, can feminism (or at least the secular feminism that our lecturer prescribed) succeed in jordan? when she was talking to us, it was almost as if she was commenting on a people and culture other than her own. probably had something to do with her western education and the fact that she in an english lit professor.

she did say though that these “westoxification” accusations come readily partly because there is just a lack of middle east-produced feminist discourse (egypt is the exception). to a certain extent, there is nothing to do but borrow from the west.
herein lies the conundrum that i’ve been struggling with for so long re: feminism in the islamic world. i really don’t think that western feminism can survive/thrive in the middle east. firstly, there is too much outright rejection of anything western-produced in all realms of life, something that i don’t think will change until the US stops supporting israel (it’s amazing how i can trace almost every problem in jordan back to israeli-palestinian conflict; but this isn’t me extrapolating. it legitimately permeates every facet of life here). secondly, it doesn’t account for how deeply islam is incorporated into people’s life. thirdly, there is such a huge divide between intellectualism in amman and tribal traditionalism in the rural parts of jordan. i don’t think that the strength and influence of tribes in jordan can be underestimated, especially when the king right now relies heavily on these tribes’ support. i don’t know how connected these feminist intellectuals are with the needs/desires/challenges of women in rural jordan. the feminist movement here is definitely very bourgeois.

we were talking about top-down vs. bottom-up social reform. is change only going to come if the king/government (likely the king because parliament is very patriarchal and there are only female ministers because of a quota system) declares it, or is there a way for more grassroots change to occur? and even if it could, would it really be bottom-up reform? the point that i brought up is that because feminism here is so bourgeois still the bottom doesn’t really seem like the bottom. the analogy i brought up is freedom summer, in which white college students from the north went down to mississippi to help the black community exercise their voting rights and participate in the civil rights movement. it seems like this is almost what would happen be happening between women in the city and in rural areas. i can’t figure out how i feel about this. obviously i’m glad that mississppians voted, but freedom summer had some lasting negative effects. as david on my program brought up, sometimes the perfect gets in the way of the good. but i don’t know if i agree with this either!! i’ve never been a fan of band-aids. i think there needs to be patience, for people to realize that women have only been able to vote here since 1974 (which, humorously, i think is the same year women gained the right to vote in switzerland) and that there have been huge changes in that short period of time. there’s no easy answer other than it definitely isn’t the west’s responsibility to “save” islamic women. and if people in the west had any real interaction with women over here they would realize that they are much more capable than most give them credit for.

buzzword in my life for the past few weeks: CONUNDRUM. aaaaaaaah.