swirlspice

To the surprise of few, a new Vikings stadium won the billion-dollar showdown with a proposed light rail transit line that I previewed a few weeks back. Legislators facing loud, purple-clad lobbyists in an election year opted to raise $348 million from expanded gambling to match $477 million from the Wilf family and $150 million from Minneapolis taxpayers for a new pigskin palace on the site of the Metrodome. Meanwhile, many of the same legislators turned a deaf ear to a request for $25 million in state borrowing to secure a whopping $625 million from the federal government for the Southwest LRT. That project remains in limbo now, although its business community backers are pushing another way to show a state commitment to pay one-tenth of the total cost.

Whether Asian, Arab or African, the discussion over Muslim women’s agency (particularly of women of color) has been a one-dimensional, narrowed act of discourse where the agency of Muslim women is rarely discussed by her own terms. She, therefore, becomes the inferior Other. Less than a human being, she is rendered invisible yet visible. She is there but she is not in the sense that her voice does not matter as long as her image is presented before the ‘liberated, progressive’ Western feminists as they choose to interpret it. Her concerns are relegated to the issues of the veil, clitoridectomy, beatings from male members of the family and/or society. As Azizah Al-Hibri says, “The white middle-class women’s movement has bestowed upon itself the right to tell us […] what are the most serious issues for us—over our own objections.” As an Asian Muslim female participant in this oft-occurring discourse, it becomes very obvious to me to see that these issues are over-simplified and ignored by Western feminists with their ‘preference’ for issues that have been used as symbols to demonize the culture and religion in these regions. Most importantly, issues rooted in political and historical contexts are nearly never discussed because, in simple words, the finger is then pointed at the West. e.g. U.S. backed dictatorships in the Middle East and Asia, economic disparity, former Empire’s (Britain) exploitation of religion in the Asian diaspora, U.S. invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more. The equality debate strictly revolves around the veil (be that the Hijab, Niqab, Burka, Chador) and are consequently decontextualized and overtly politicized in hegemonic discourse(s) to demonize Islam and Muslims. As a result, Muslim women are viewed with the Orientalist Gaze. It is the lens with which the veil is seen as an exotic and erotic object to fuel fantasy and Islamophobic assertions that “it must be removed” in order to “liberate Muslim women.” The realistic occurrence and posibility that the veil is donned by many as a choice, and that it enables them mobility and agency is rarely considered. It is simply seen as an emblem of Islamic oppression, violence and “rejection of modernization.” The West (colonizer) therefore defines the parameters for which emancipation is achieved for the Muslim women of those regions (the colonized). Western culture is shown as the “right culture” while the East is treated with xenophobic bigotry. It is, basically, a war shown in a dichotomy of Us VS Them. In this war of ideological differences, Muslim women become the battleground over which oppressors from the West and oppressors in the East fight each other to maintain claim over. Naturally she becomes Invisible.

To be poor in the United States today is to be always at risk, the object of scorn and shame. Without mass-based empathy for the poor, it is possible for ruling class groups to mask class terrorism and genocidal acts. Creating and maintaining social conditions where individuals of all ages daily suffer malnutrition and starvation is a form of class warfare that increasingly goes unnoticed in this society. When huge housing projects in urban cities are torn down and the folks who dwell therein are not relocated, no one raises questions or protests.

What is the personal misconduct here? That they besmirched the reputation of the United States and endangered the President by dallying with sex workers? That they used US tax dollars to stay in a five star hotel and live the high life with a party so loud that it apparently disrupted other guests? That they failed to set a good example for the residents of Colombia, that ‘lesser’ and ‘inferior’ nation?

Or that they carelessly flexed their muscles as the colonisers, as the abusers, as the takers?

We know nothing about the women involved in this scandal; they are the faceless ‘prostitutes’ and we need know nothing more about them. They don’t matter; they aren’t human beings, women with lives and careers of their own. In every story they are simply the vehicle for the shame and embarrassment. How awkward for the US Secret Service, to be caught with whores.

Disposable women. Chiquitas!

We are all in danger here.

Flavia talks about the desecration and violation of nameless brown bodies, the treatment of these bodies as things, the objectification of women who are inhuman by virtue of who they are: This is what she means when she talks about this.

That we, the coloniser, should enter the colonial subject and take what we will.

Except you can’t show a topless woman on TV - and you can’t defibrillate a woman in a bra. So victims of heart attacks on TV are *always* male. Did you know that a woman having a heart attack is more likely to have back or jaw pain than chest or left arm pain? I didn’t - because I’ve never seen a woman having a heart attack. I’ve been trained in CPR and Advanced First Aid by the Red Cross over 15 times in my life, the videos and booklets always have a guy and say the same thing about clutching his chest and/or bicep.

And people laugh when I tell them women are still invisible in this world.