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11/17/2004
"The global-local intersection of feminism in Muslim societies: the cases of Iran and Azerbaijan"
THE arguments made in this paper are based on empirical studies of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan, as well as on a review of studies of several other societies in the Muslim and non-Muslim global South.Through a brief review of Iran and a few references to post-Soviet Azerbaijan, the interplay between local and global factors in shaping the course of women's movements and feminism is demonstrated.
Attention is paid primarily to the positive impact of two specific aspects of globalization on women's movements and feminism in these two societies: the international human rights regime (comprised of the United Nations and international nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) and global feminism (comprised of feminist discourses, the international women's movement, and transnational feminist networks).
As in other countries, it is the history, internal developments, and dynamism of each society, particularly the social praxis of women, that have played the main role in shaping the course of women's movements in Iran and Azerbaijan. But external factors also, both during colonial times and in the present era of globalization, have influenced women's movements and feminism in Muslim and non-Muslim societies. In the past, the global and external factor for women in the Muslim world was predominantly of a colonial nature.
In colonial and postcolonial studies of Muslim societies, the gender- and class-based differential impacts of colonialism (in countries like Egypt, Syria, Iraq) or of Western hegemony (in countries that were never colonized, such as Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan) have been extensively studied. On women's rights movement and feminism also, colonialism or Western domination left contradictory impacts. (1)
The external/global factor, due to the much more deeply penetrating and transformative processes of globalization, is distinct from the colonial system of the past. Globalization, replete with contradictions, is more akin to the Industrial Revolution in its impact on societies, its intervention directly into daily life as well as economies, institutions of governance, and world order (Giddens, 1994; Held et al., 1999).
Because of increasing globalization, no gender regime and therefore no women's movement in any locality (country or community) can be studied and understood without taking global influences into account.
An obvious, recently illuminated case in point is the situation of women in Afghanistan. Women's status and rights in Afghanistan cannot be accounted for without understanding the interaction between the local (history, geography, geopolitics, political economy, culture, and Afghan women's own agency and struggles) and the global or international factors, including the intervention of the superpowers (the Soviet Union and the United States), the regional powers (including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran) and the subsequent interventions of international human/women's rights groups and feminist networks.
Before reviewing the case studies, some conceptual and theoretical clarification and definitions that make up the framework of this study are offered.
Globalization and "Global Feminism"
Globalization processes, especially since the 1970s, have affected feminist mobilization for change in many different societies. Feminist interventions, in turn, have aimed to affect the parameters and direction of globalization processes (Eschle, 2001: 192).
The increasing globalization and integration of the world through international trade, migration, faster and less expensive transportation, and new electronic communication and information technology, have led to a situation in which a growing number of women and men belong to more than one community. Communities and group identities are overlapping and de-territorializing, and an escalating number of individuals who become multicultural and multilingual are adopting more fluid and multiple identities (Jaggar, 1998; Appadurai, 1996).
Globalization is accompanied by intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole (Robertson, 1996: 8; Giddens, 1994: 5-7). This and other effects of globalization have important implications for gender relations and women's status in all societies.
Anthony Giddens, for example, points to the indirect impact of global processes on social pressure for democratization in the form of "the expansion of social reflexivity and detraditionalization" (Giddens, 1994: 111). As they become better informed about new and varied political alternatives in the world, populations become less likely to accept traditional models of political and gender regimes.
Globalization "allows for the subversive possibility of women seeing beyond the local to the global" (Eisenstein, 1997: 17).
Even those who never physically leave their communities of origin are more likely now to evaluate their own lives by placing their rights, options, and restrictions in a comparative and global perspective (Jaggar, 1998).
Exposure to geographically disparate influences and to issues framed in a global context can encourage the reflexive scrutiny of localized traditions and behavior patters and lead to the construction of new social relationships" (Eschle, 2001: 147).
Women, especially in the global South, are located at the center of contemporary globalization processes. Although local/national contexts are the primary sites for feminist struggles and intervention, global/international forums such as United Nations world conferences and transnational economic structures such as the IMF, World Bank, and transnational corporations have become more important in women's lives, hence requiring feminist intervention.
Throughout the world, the debt crisis; severe "structural adjustment" policies; unhealthy and unbalanced patters of consumption; plant relocations by multinational corporations from the global North to the global South; environmental degradation in both "worlds"; militarism; the trade in heroin and cocaine; and sex tourism and international traffic in women are among the main adverse effects of globalization that concern many feminists, especially in the global South, both in the areas formerly known as the "Third World" and the "Second World," now usually called post-Soviet, post-Communist or new transitional economies, including Azerbaijan. (2)
Culturally and politically, women are situated in the vortex of contending social forces: centripetal tendencies toward increasing globalization and integration and centrifugal tendencies toward nationalism and fragmentation (Jaggar, 1998: 7).
As in Iran, a main concern with respect to the cultural and political impacts of globalization is that women "are frequently taken as emblems of cultural integrity, so that defending beleaguered cultures becomes equated with preserving traditional forms of femininity, especially as these are manifest in traditional female dress and practices of marriage and sexuality" (Jaggar, 1998: 7).
In response to these global challenges and practical concerns (such as violence, democracy, universal human rights, morality, and ethics), a global discourse community is emerging among feminists (Jaggar, 1998; Eschle, 2001).
This emerging global feminism is an outgrowth of globalization and at the same time a critical response to it. The beginnings of global feminism are visible in official and semiofficial venues, such as the regional and world conferences on women sponsored by the UN since 1975, and especially their accompanying forums for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
The emergence of global feminism is also evident in a multitude of ongoing interactions among grassroots groups and transnational feminist networks addressing regional or global concerns, such as the Network of East/West Women, Encuentros Feministas, Women Living under Muslim Laws, and the Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights (Jaggar, 1998: 8).
The Interplay of the Local and the Global or the Particular and the Universal
Intensified globalization has made conventional demarcation between the "internal" and the "external," or the "local" and the "global" or the core-periphery model somewhat artificial as it is becoming more difficult to determine where the local stops and the global begins.
The "cultural flow" of globalization is not simply from the global to the local, but also the reverse (Abu-Lughod, 1991: 132) and forces from various metropolises that are brought into new societies tend to become indigenized in one way or another (Appadurai, 1996: 32).
Although many feminists feel compelled to "think globally and act locally," some actions have to be carried out globally if certain changes are to take place locally.
(3) Given the situation of Afghanistan, for example, no local improvement in women's status can take place without a global action to alter present devastation.
The concerns of women around the world have to be addressed, then, in the historicized particularity of their relationship to multiple systems of subordination and oppression: patriarchy and/or male supremacy at local levels (family, community, and nation) and international sexism and economic hegemony at the global level.
As Uma Narayan (1997) puts it, "we need to articulate the relationship of gender to scattered hegemonies such as global economic structures, patriarchal nationalisms, `authentic' forms of tradition, local structures of domination, and legal-juridical oppression on multiple levels."
While women's movements and feminism have become increasingly global, sisterhood is not global in its romantic sense, nor is it local.
Rather, women's solidarity has to be negotiated within each specific context (Mohanty, 1998; Sharoni, 2001; Bayes and Tohidi, 2001). Amrita Basu, for example, warns us against making sweeping generalizations about commonalities among women ....(TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE click here
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