Power, privilege and discrimination

There is always some discussion going on in smaller and wider circles that I am privy to about power, privilege and discrimination.  And recently we have the #MeToo campaign on violence against women which exposes how many women have encountered sexual harassment and violence in their lives.   Even if this exposé is limited to  women on facebook and twitter, the number is quite (unsurprisingly) staggering.   More than a little disconcerted however,  that young feminists are questioning the right of men, even queer men, to post the #MeToo  hashtag. 

Violence is an expression of the abuse of power whatever form it takes, and we should be against violence in all its manifestations, irrespective of who is the perpetrator or who is the victim.  The wonderful Tanaka Mhishi, sole representative of the next generation in our rather unproductive family tree, survived a date rape, and turned his experience into a writing/performing theatre project exploring the experiences of male survivors of sexual violence.  Both the rape and witnessing the initial reading of the script of This is How it Happens was traumatic for me, as Tanaka’s Loku, as an anthropologist,  as a feminist, as a woman who subscribes to the #MeToo hashtag.   I was forced to recognize how much I have ignored an aspect of systemic violence taking place around me; ignored it because of my own stereotyping of gender based violence in the binary of man/women, and ignoring the potential of intersectional power relationships.  This is How it Happens is, in Tanaka’s words about “four men talking across history and geography, helping each other to recover. From a black man in a 1930s Alabama prison to a club-kid in the present day, [the script] tackles the facets of survivorhood -some universal, others peculiar to men- that we never really talk about.” 

The learning from this thinking about violence spills over into another conversation about power, privilege and discrimination, and the other binary framework of global north vs global south.   Those of us who have suffered, and continue to suffer, the impacts of (predominantly Western) colonialism and who call for a grounding of our struggles in the lived experience of women in the global south,  find it difficult to  recognize that power, privilege and discrimination are not limited to geography.  The nationalisms and populisms of the far right are as present in Modi’s India or Duterte’s Philippines as they are in Trump’s America.  The Rohingya genocide is as racist as apartheid.  #BlackLivesMatter defies the structural inequalities inherited from our colonial past,  as  much as the Dalit movement challenges the structural inequalities of India's traditional caste system.  The world is no longer so clearly divided (if it ever was). Even the attribution of igniting the #MeToo campaign to Alyssa Milano invisibilises the work of Tarana Burke, a Black Woman activist from Harlem who started the Me Too movement 10 years ago.   There is a global south in the global north, as much as there is a global north in the global south. 

Personally, I feel the need to be constantly self-reflexive, and continuously interrogate where  power, privilege and discrimination intersect into my own activism and our collective feminism. I need to revisit the readings of the likes of Frantz Fannon, so I can better articulate a radical non-binary feminism that can challenge power, privilege and discrimination and does not succumb to the patriarchal, post-colonial,  discourse of the ‘global north’ nor the oppositional, and potentially exclusionary philosophies of  the ‘global south’.  In a 21^st century world where capitalism seems to be the only game in town, where neo-liberalism and patriarchy are seen as the only basis for economic and social development, I feel we need an imagination that seeks to build alliances across different sites of oppression. Only then will we be able to see that other  world that Arundathy Roy tells us “is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing...'