Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism & Social Change (16-19 September 2013, Istanbul)

[Image via the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University.] [Image via the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University.]

Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism & Social Change (16-19 September 2013, Istanbul)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism & Social Change

Women Creating Change

Istanbul Workshop, 16-19 September 2013     
Co-directors: Judith Butler and Zeynep Gambetti

[More information is available on the website of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University.]

There is always something both risky and true in claiming that women are especially vulnerable. The claim can be taken to mean that women have an unchanging and defining vulnerability, and that kind of argument makes the case for paternalistic protection. If women are especially vulnerable, then they seek protection, and it becomes the responsibility of the state or other paternal powers to provide that protection. On the model, feminist activism not only petitions paternal authority for special dispensations and protections, but affirms that inequality of power situates women in a powerless position and, by implication, men in a more powerful one, or it invests state structures with the responsibility for facilitating the achievement of feminist goals. In yet other instances, women struggle to establish practices (self-defense) and institutions (battered women’s shelters) that seek to provide protection without enlarging paternalistic powers.

And yet, there are good reasons to argue for the differential vulnerability of women; they suffer disproportionately from poverty and illiteracy, two very important dimensions of any global analysis of women’s condition. So the question that emerges, and forms the focus of this project, is how to think about the vulnerability of women in conjunction with feminist modes of agency, and how to think both in light of global conditions and emerging possibilities of global alliance? This task is made all the more difficult as state structures and institutions of social welfare lose their own resources, thus exposing more populations to homelessness, unemployment, illiteracy, and inadequate health care. Hence, the question is how to make the feminist claim effectively that such institutions are crucial to sustaining lives at the same time that feminists resist modes of paternalism that re-instate relations of inequality?

In some ways, vulnerability has been regarded as a value in feminist theory and politics. This means neither that women are more vulnerable than men nor that women value vulnerability more than men do. Rather, certain kinds of gender-defining attributes, like vulnerability and invulnerability, are distributed unequally, and for purposes of shoring up certain regimes of power that disenfranchise women. We think about goods as distributed unequally under capitalism as well as natural resources, especially water, as distributed unequally, but we should also surely consider that one way of managing populations is to distribute vulnerability unequally in such a way that “vulnerable populations” are established within discourse and policy. More recently, we note that social movements and policy analysts refer to precarious populations, and that political strategies are accordingly devised to think about ameliorating conditions of precarity. As we extend the economic notion of “unequal distribution” to broader social and cultural spheres, we also are confronted, especially during times of war, with the uneven grievability of populations, that is, the idea that certain lives, if lost, are more worthy of memorialization and public grieving, than others. Populations targeted for injury and destruction in war are considered ungrievable from the start, but so too are populations whose labor is episodic and precarious, or who are considered “abandoned” through systematic forms of negligence. In Turkey, the attempt to establish lives as ungrievable becomes highly relevant for Kurdish women, and women from rural areas, especially informal laborers. The deaths of Kurdish guerillas (and the grief of their mothers) is actively discredited while fallen Turkish soldiers are elevated to the status of martyrs.

When vulnerability is distributed unequally, then certain populations are effectively targeted as injurable (with impunity) or disposable (without reparation). This kind of explicit or implicit marking can work to justify the infliction of injury upon them (as we see in times of war, or in state violence against undocumented citizens), or we can see such populations as responsible for their position or, conversely, in need of protection from the state or other institutions of civil society. The sequence does not always work in one way; for instance, precisely on those occasions when injury goes unpunished are certain populations rendered effectively vulnerable (Turkey is a case in point). It is important to note that when such redistributive strategies abound, then other populations, usually the ones orchestrating or effecting the processes of re-distribution, posit themselves as invulnerable, if not impermeable, and without any such needs of protection. Or, in the case of honor killing, it is for the most part men’s “honor” that is figured as hyper-vulnerable and women’s sexual behavior that is figured as waging a lethal force. In each of these cases, vulnerability and invulnerability are taken as political effects, unequally distributed effects of a field of power that acts on and through bodies. If vulnerability has been culturally coded feminine, then how are certain populations effectively feminized when designated as vulnerable, and others construed as masculine when laying claim to impermeability? And conversely, when it is men and their honor that is figured as vulnerable, to what extent are women expected to function as protection and, when they fail, become cast as threats to be contained? As we can see from some of these swift inversions, vulnerability and invulnerability are not essential features of men or women, but processes of gender formation, the effects of modes of power that have as one of their aims the production of gender differences along lines of inequality. This has led psychoanalytic feminists to remark that the masculine position, construed in such a way, is effectively built through a denial of its own constitutive vulnerability. This denial or disavowal requires the political institution of oblivion, or forgetfulness, more specifically, the forgetting of one’s own vulnerability and its projection and displacement elsewhere. At the same time, the production of a hyper-vulnerability (of the nation, of masculinity) establishes a rationale for the containment of both women and minorities.

Although psychoanalytic perspectives such as these are important as a way of gaining insight into this particular way that vulnerability is distributed along gender lines, it only goes part of the way toward the kind of analysis needed here. Since if we say that some person or some group denies vulnerability, then we presume not only that the vulnerability was already there, but also that it is in some sense undeniable. Of course, one cannot make an easy analogy between individual and groups formations, and yet modes of denial or disavowal can be seen to traverse them both. For instance, to certain defenders of the military rationale for the destruction of targeted groups or populations, we might say, ”you act as if you yourself were not vulnerable to the kind of destruction you cause.” Or to defenders of certain forms of neo-liberal economics—you act as if you yourself could never belong to a population whose work and life is precarious, who can suddenly be deprived of basic rights or access to housing or health care, or who lives with anxiety about how and whether work will ever arrive. In this way, then, we assume that those who seek to expose others to a vulnerable position, or those who seek to posit and maintain a position of invulnerability for themselves seek to deny a vulnerability by which they are bound to the ones they seek to subjugate. This strategy becomes all the more complicated, and paradoxical, when it is precisely masculinist norms that are considered “under attack” by LGBTQ communities, and when feminism is cast as a “threat” to a vulnerable masculinity. How do we distinguish, if we can, between this tactical deployment of vulnerability and the important view of vulnerability that implies that bodies invariably depend on enduring social relations and institutions or their survival and flourishing, and that this cannot happen outside of relations of equality and justice? If the concept of vulnerability always operates within a tactical field, how do theoretical affirmations of vulnerability enter into that field? At stake is whether the assertions of hyper-vulnerability or invulnerability for women or for men can give way to a notion of bodily vulnerability linked with practices of resistance in the service of social and political justice.

In the context of meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, these questions will be importantly revised and reconceptualized in light of feminist political actions and perceived, inverted, and deflected forms of vulnerability. For instance, in the 1980s, a group of feminists launched an “occupy coffee houses” movement. Coffee houses are strictly masculine spaces where men spend the whole day. Feminists would go in groups to swarm the men who would otherwise deride them for entering into a masculine space. Recently, feminists have initiated the practice of carrying the coffins of victimized women during funerals. This is a breach of the religious rule that allows only men to carry coffins. Thus, certain women’s victimhood (in this case death) became the occasion for other women to breach the rule without public objection. Similarly, the feminist initiatives that founded women’s shelters without the permission of the state were important accomplishments that, in turn, compelled the state to respond by building its own shelters. We will also have a chance to understand how secular and religious power are conceptualized, and how feminist and LGBTQ struggles are formulated in relation to that form of juridical power.

This project seeks to bring together a wide range of feminist scholars who work on the problem of women, vulnerability, and social change with an eye to understanding both the risks of establishing women as a vulnerable population (especially when, according to nationalist norms, some women are regarded as vulnerable, and minority women are not), the tactical deployment of the status of vulnerability, and the promise of developing new modes of collective agency that do not deny vulnerability as a resource. We propose to consider both the power differential and modes of agency among women that mobilize vulnerability within tactics of resistance. In other words, we hope to understand global practices of social change that emerge from conditions of social and economic vulnerability, and that demonstrate the relation between vulnerability and political agency. Our topics will include a gendered analysis of war, literacy and education, economic precarity and inequality, and we hope both to identify sites of social vulnerability and modes of social change. We hope as well to bring together artists, critics, and philosophers who offer theoretical perspectives on the sources of social change, focusing on modes of alliance that are characterized by interdependency and public action. Moreover, we will ask about the gendering of perceived or marked vulnerabilities and how they function to expand or justify those structures of power that seek to achieve ethnic, economic or cultural-religious dominance in specific social contexts.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412