Two weekends ago, I drove back home to Wichita for my brother’s birthday, and for Vietnamese New Year (although, technically, the New Year began last Wednesday). That Saturday, we also had a memorial for my oldest uncle, (Co Hai, literally meaning “Uncle Two”) who died in the war. The neat but sad story about that is that Uncle Two had just completed his term of service; he was able to retire and return home. Meanwhile my youngest uncle, Uncle Seven (no, my grandmother’s not number-crazy. They’re terms of affection, and are commonly used in Vietnamese families), had recently turned eighteen, old enough to be drafted into the military. Since Uncle Seven was the only other boy in the family, he had been permitted to stay home and take care of the girls - but if Uncle Two retired, then Uncle Seven would have to go fight. Uncle Two decided to protect his battle-inexperienced brother by staying in the military, and not too long after that, Uncle Two was killed. I’ve always thought that was a neat story, and I kind of wonder how Uncle Seven feels about it. That’s not really something I feel comfortable with approaching him about, though. “Hey, Uncle Seven, do you feel guilty about Uncle Two’s death? Cause I sure would! Heh, heh, heh” - why yes, what a pleasant family gettogether that would make.
Anyhow, this post is not about my uncles Two or Seven, but, of all things, “Mulan 2.” My mother, little brother and I went to my aunt’s house to celebrate uncle Two’s death” - celebrate? That doesn’t sound right. Commemorate, maybe, but a little less formal. I walked into my aunt’s little house to find my family divided into two groups: the young’uns, stationed in front of the TV; and the adult women in the kitchen, cleaning the food. I sat with the adults (yeah, I’m twenty-one now, and I still only think of people over thirty as “adults”) and ate Vietnamese food, while the kids in the living room were dining on Happy Meals. It’s kind of funny how strictly we were all conforming to stereotypical Asian generational divides, but there we were. I’ve found I fall somewhere in between the two groups - after I finished eating traditional food, I left to join the kids because I can’t speak Vietnamese and even if I could, I wasn’t really up to hearing about the latest old-person gossip anyway.
The kids were watching “Mulan 2,” which just recently came out. “Mulan,” in case you don’t hang out around six-year-olds on a regular basis or just aren’t into Disney movies, is based on the legendary Chinese heroine that dressed up as a man to join the military and fight. Through Disneyfication, of course, the story was slightly changed. In the sequel, Mulan is escorting three princesses to a royal match-maker. The princesses, as it turns out, hate the idea of arranged marriages and hate being princesses in general, because they lack the freedom to marry the peasant louts that they’re really in love with. One princess - representative of the traditional Chinese mores - argues that it’s part of their duty to their country to go through with the arranged marriages, but the other princesses argue her down and claim that their superior duty is to themselves. This being Disney, they sing about it and have a big musical number about freedom, which apparently consists of eating cake and not having to wear tight shoes (I guess the Disney writers didn’t want to get into the whole mess of explaining foot-binding to little American tots).
For some reason, I felt rather indignant about the whole scene. If this were two years ago, I don’t think I would have even questioned it - I would probably have thought, ‘well good for Disney, promoting feminism!’ and just left it at that. But now the scene stunk to me of a very Western imperialist attitude, an attitude about ‘those poor unliberated Chinese women, bound by barbaric acts like arranged marriage.’ Regardless of whether or not Chinese society is patriarchal (oh, and it definitely is, I’m certainly not arguing with that), there is an underlying assumption of cultural superiority in that sort of claim, that Western feminists need to go out and rescue foreign women from their oppressors. That feminism doesn’t exist in other societies besides our own.
Certainly American feminism takes on a much different form than feminism in Morocco or Argentina. One measure that we have of a woman’s liberation in America is her ability to take her clothes off and not be harrassed. We can see this in our attitudes towards Muslim women who veil, for instance. Surely they are being oppressed because they have to cover their hair/faces/breasts/etc. around men, right? There are Muslim feminists who would argue that veiling is actually empowering for a woman, because a man talking to her will be forced to respect her intellect, rather than viewing her as an object for lust.
One who communicates this idea a lot better than I is Lila Abu-Lughod, a professor at Columbia and a Muslim feminist. The following is quoted from an interview with her from 2002, which can be found here:
“…I ask myself about the very strong appeal of this notion of “saving” Afghan women, a notion that justifies American intervention (according to First Lady Laura Bush’s November radio address) and that dampens criticism of intervention by American and European feminists. It is easy to see through the hypocritical “feminism” of a Republican administration. More troubling for me are the attitudes of those who do genuinely care about women’s status. The problem, of course, with ideas of “saving” other women is that they depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by westerners.
When you save someone, you are saving them from something. You are also saving them to something. What violences are entailed in this transformation? And what presumptions are being made about the superiority of what you are saving them to? This is the arrogance that feminists need to question. The reason I brought up African American women, or working class women in the U.S., was that the smug and patronizing assumptions of this missionary rhetoric would be obvious if used at home, because we’ve become more politicized about problems of race and class. What would happen if white middle class women today said they needed to save those poor African-American women from the oppression of their men?”
The only criticism that I have about Abu-Lughod’s statement is that I think that these patronizing sentiments do exist here, between white feminists and women of color. Perhaps they are not as blatantly patronizing as in discourse concerning foreign women. But one need only observe the segregation within the feminist movement throughout its history in order to see that assumptions of racial/ethnic/class superiority operate quite powerfully in mainstream American feminist thought.
I don’t want to say that American feminists shouldn’t decry abuses abroad - far from it. I just think that we need to be aware of these assumptions and incorporate cultural knowledge into discourse. I’ll close this insanely long post with an example from the boy - a story he heard at a student leadership camp (he doesn’t remember which country this example comes from):
There’s a traditional code of behavior for eating in which, if women and men eat together, the woman sits on the floor and the man in a chair. The man eats first, and after finishing, he nods his head, at which point the woman can begin to eat. Sounds misogynistic, right? Actually - as it was explained to my boss - the woman sits on the floor traditionally, because women are more greatly in touch with nature than men; they have the privilege of sitting on the ground and therefore being closer to the gods of the earth. The man eats first to make sure the food isn’t poisoned - the woman is treated like a queen. Totally different context, totally different assumptions - we need to be aware of these before we make our own judgments.
