Some thoughts on the status of the women’s movement in the Caribbean

I take as my starting point the notion that the women’s movement in the Caribbean has been destabilised. But whether that has actually only weakened the movement is a matter for debate. Also up for debate is the question of estabilisation itself. I believe that to think that there was ever a moment when the women’s movement was stable, meaning well and indisputably positioned to achieve the goals it set itself, is to be mistaken. Given what we proposed to do:

• identify oppressions against women and the mechanisms of their maintenance,
• and work to eradicate them, in the context that oppressors benefit from keeping others down- we would have always been on shaky ground. Nevertheless, because I too feel that the ground has become even more shaky than usual, I take the notion of destabilisation as true for the moment.

But by what are we being destabilised? To my mind there are four factors:

1. The notion of difference;
2. Notions of the total or absolute power of patriarchy, colonialism/neo-colonialism, capitalism and statism; in other words, the belief in the near impossibility of penetrating these amalgams of power;
3. The male backlash;
4. Late 20th century instabilities of the concept of the nation state.

The issue of lost funding is a given.

In this issue of CAFRA NEWS, the notion of difference is explored.

Difference

The idea that "women" is a category riveted by difference has complicated what was thought to be an unproblematic space for solidarity. In other words, these differences- of class, race, location, ability, to name but a small few- mean that universal sisterhood, which was once assumed, can no longer be an automatic assumption. Persons theorising difference have demonstrated that oppressions, and solutions to these, rightly have something to do with/are mediated by different cultures or sub-cultures. To give an example, the wearing of the veil by women could be a choice for one culture while for another it could be an ppression. The identification of this practice as a problem, and by extension, the solution to this "problem" as the removal of the veil, is all bound up in where you are located.

The appeal to the category "women" as the ground for action takes for granted the constituency that has first to be proved. As academics would put it, "Women" is not a category stabilised by nature, but is historically, culturally and politically produced. Since not nature but culture, or politics, or history determines one’s experiences and problems as a woman, no group of women can speak for all women. No experience of one can stand in for that of all. Not that there can be now no shared basic principles or rights. Rather, what these principles should be is now not as settled as once thought.

But arguments against difference theorising have also arisen. One such important argument says that difference itself is a production of the amalgams of power we oppose. In other words, culture/difference is that thing that is already produced by power. So that the woman for whom the veil is a cultural right had little to do with the choosing of the veil as the expression of her particular identity. In fact, her wearing of the veil as an expression of culture pre-dates her. Amalgams of (patriarchal) power over which she had no control chose the veil for her and she then validates it as though it is her original choice. Also important is the fact that these differences mean that the solidarity necessary for social action for change could not be now automatically depended on, it had to be negotiated.

However, the recognition of difference was a good thing in many respects. Among other things, it asked feminist women of the "North" to examine the degree of their own (unknowing) collusion, their complicity with imperialist projects of domination and control- particularly since these projects express themselves in the consequent oppression of us women of the "South"; it enlightened us to the fact that a project involving mainly black women (but seen by them not as a black women’s project but as a women’s project) could be exclusionary- Indian women in the Caribbean have argued this in relation to the women’s movement in the region in the 1980s in particular. Difference theorising exposed that one of the mechanisms of oppression was a universalising, homogenising reductionism.

Since difference theorising has highlighted the real need for negotiating within the women’s movement, does that finding not also express an enablement of the movement? It validates the vitality and correctness of negotiating difference, and implies consequent improvements in understanding and respect that presumably arise in negotiating. It also gives greater sensibility to our investigations and our actions, especially in a world where historical categories are proving more and more inadequate in describing the realities of people.