bell hooks: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Doing some reading of bell hooks, because it’s been a long time since I read Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and because I have a few other books by her on hand that I’ve not yet read.

Hooks’ critique of second wave, white feminism, remains as trenchant today as it was when she first wrote about it in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Her analysis of the deadly flaws of liberal feminism - its focus on individual rights and achieving equality within the existing social and economic structure - has been borne out by the stalling of real progress on eliminating sexist and other forms of oppression over the last 30 years. As she notes in this foundational work, “The lack of any emphasis on domination is consistent with the liberal feminist belief that women can achieve equality with men of their class without challenging and changing the cultural basis of group oppression. It is this belief that negates the likelihood that the potential radicalism of liberal feminism will ever be realized.”

While some of her analysis is specific to the time, so much of what she writes here is still relevant, particularly when she looks at white liberal/bourgeois feminism and its failures to embrace a struggle against all forms of domination and oppression, settling for an increased degree of social and economic equality between white women and white men.

“Many feminist radicals now know that neither a feminism that focuses on woman as an autonomous human being worthy of personal freedom nor one that focuses on the attainment of equality of opportunity with men can rid society of sexism and male domination. Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.”

Hooks unabashedly connects oppression to capitalism, demanding that feminism address the structural inequalities that come from an exploitative economic system as well as the oppressions based in gender and race. She calls for a change in values, a new conception of power that does not include domination over others, and predicts - sadly, with pinpoint accuracy - that a feminism that seeks equality for women within the existing social and economic structure is a feminism that will fail.

“Before women can work to reconstruct society we must reject the notion that obtaining power in the existing social structure will necessarily advance feminist struggle to end sexist oppression. It may allow numbers of women to gain greater material privilege, control over their destiny, and the destiny of others, all of which are important goals. It will not end male domination as a system. The suggestion that women must obtain power before they can effectively resist sexism is rooted in the false assumption that women have no power. Women, even the most oppressed among us, do exercise some power. These powers can be used to advance feminist struggle. Forms of power held by exploited and oppressed groups are described in Elizabeth Janeway's important work Powers of the Weak. One of the most significant forms of power held by the weak is ‘the refusal to accept the definition of oneself that is put forward by the powerful.’ Janeway calls this the ‘ordered use of the power to disbelieve.’ “

Hooks also looks at the relationship between domination and violence, in the context of the home and family, in social interactions, and in imperialism and war. She reminds us that violence is not inherently male, rather, that a society in which men are assumed to be dominant over women leads to male violence against women, just as other firms of domination and oppression lead to white violence against people of colour, and imperialist violence against the nations of the global south.

In the end, hooks is reaching toward the future of the feminist movement in this treatise, examining the ways in which feminist movements had taken wrong turns, and looking at what would be needed to keep feminism vital and forward-moving as an ideology and as a movement.

“To move beyond the stage of feminist rebellion, to move past the impasse that characterizes contemporary feminist movement, women must recognize the need for reorganization. Without dismissing the positive dimensions of feminist movement up to this point, we need to accept that there was never a strategy on the part of feminist organizers and participants to build mass awareness of the need for feminist movement through political education. Such a strategy is needed if feminism is to be a political movement impacting on society as a whole in a revolutionary and transformative way. We also need to face the fact that many of the dilemmas facing feminist movement today were created by bourgeois women who shaped the movement in ways that served their opportunistic class interests. We must now work to change its direction so that women of all classes can see that their interest in ending sexist oppression is served by feminist movement.”

She continues: “To build a mass-based feminist movement, we need to have a liberatory ideology that can be shared with everyone. That revolutionary ideology can be created only if the experiences of people on the margin who suffer sexist oppression and other forms of group oppression are understood, addressed, and incorporated. They must participate in feminist movement as makers of theory and as leaders of action. In past feminist practice, we have been satisfied with relying on self-appointed individuals, some of whom are more concerned about exercising authority and power than with communicating with people from various backgrounds and political perspectives. Such individuals do not choose to learn about collective female experience, but impose their own ideas and values. Leaders are needed, and should be individuals who acknowledge their relationship to the group and who are accountable to it. They should have the ability to show love and compassion, show this love through their actions, and be able to engage in successful dialogue.”

Ukmina Manoori: I Am a Bacha Posh

In traditional homes in Afghanistan, it is a misfortune to have no son. So in many such homes, a daughter is chosen, to be a bacha posh, a “girl dressed as a boy,” a surrogate to be the family’s son until, the family hopes, a true son is born. These girls dress as boys, have the freedom of boys, and the privileges - school, involvement in public social life, having jobs, as many young children do in underdeveloped nations. Usually, when a boy is born, or when the bacha posh reaches puberty, she is forcibly pushed back into the restricted sphere of female life, no more freedom of dress and action, no more school. Some resist, refuse to be forced into a female role, despite the disapproval of family and mullahs and society.

Ukmina Manoori, author of I Am a Bacha Posh, is one such person. They write: “This is how I am. This is why I wrote this book. So I could tell the truth about Afghani women.

Because I lived as a man for most of my life, I could do this today. What a paradox! But I was seizing the opportunity. I learned not very long ago that I was the only Afghan to know of such a special fate. In our country, we, the bacha posh, the “women dressed as men,” made ourselves discreet. No one could say how many of us there were. We made the choice in a single moment of our lives not to renounce the freedom that our simple masculine clothes give but to risk our lives every single day. I wanted to write this book before I became an old woman or ill, before I was no longer able to remember my life, my special fate. Everyone wanted to know why some Afghan women made this choice. I think that from reading what I am going to recount of my life, they will understand. I want them to talk about us, the Afghans who fight to no longer be ghosts, to come back to the visible world. To no longer hide ourselves under burqas or men’s clothing.”

In telling their story, Manoori also tells the story of what it is like to be a woman in Afghanistan, for every freedom they speak of gaining because they wear men’s clothing is a freedom denied to women. The freedom to go to school, to read, to be literate is one of the key freedoms: “I liked school; I really wanted to know how to read and write. There, I came close to that which separated the men from the women in our country: education. Men have the right to learn. I did not understand why this right was refused to girls, why there were so few schools for them. Later, these boys would become men, and they would make it their duty to prevent women from accessing this knowledge. Why should women learn to read, when it would only pervert their minds? Why would they need to write, if only to tell nonsense? And the Pashtun men argued that they must protect the women, to make them respectable. They prohibited them from showing themselves, especially in public places, like schools.”

By the time that Manoori, now late in their teens, had won their struggle with their family and community, to continue living as a man, the Russian invasion ended any hopes they had entertained for getting a good education and winning respect as a literate, well-employed man. After helping their mother and younger siblings escape into the mountains, Manoori joined the Mujahideen, the guerrilla fighters resisting the Russian forces, despite their qualms over the violence that the Mujahideen often brought against Afghan villagers trying to survive.

By the time the Russians left Afghanistan, Manoori’s father was ill from the privations of living as a refugee, and woukd soon die. Manoori was now the man of the family, respected as one who fought the jihad against the Russians. The family returned to their native village to find their home and farm destroyed. Hard work slowly brought things back, though nowhere near the level of security the family had known before the Russian invasion. But just as the hopes of the family began to grow, the Taliban began its drive to power in Afghanistan. Once more, Manoori was in jeopardy for their choice to live as a man. Under the Taliban, they became a prisoner in their home, unable to go out in case they were seen as a woman, waiting for the knock on the door that meant some neighbour had betrayed their secret. But the knick never came. Only the American bombs, in 2001.

With the restoration of democratic rule, Manoori became valuable to the new government. Because they lived as a man, and had been a Mujahideen, they could travel, attend meetings, talk to her fellow Pashtun with some authority - but because they were a woman, they could speak to women directly, work to engage them in the new government, begin the process of bringing the women of rural Afghanistan into public life as citizens. They would later serve their district as an elected representative on the Provincial Council.

In 2006, Manoori fulfilled a promise to their dying father, and made the Hadj, to present themselves before Allah as they were, a woman living as a man, and receive judgement from Him. And their sense was that Allah accepted them as they were.

Manoori writes in a very simple and straight-forward fashion of their experiences, their life as a woman dressed as, acting as, a man in such a male-dominated society. They have suffered much, as have the Afghan people, but express no regret for their choice to live as a man, even though that has meant, in their culture, that they have had no opportunity to take a partner or lover, to have a family. They say they have never felt a need for love, that respect and freedom have been more than enough in their life.

I am reluctant to frame the experiences of a person like Manoori in the terms we use for gender and sexuality in the West. Are they transgender? Non-binary? Asexual? I’m not sure what those concepts might mean to them. But the story of their life, of who they are on their own terms, is a fascinating one, and in their terms Manoori says clearly, “I am a bacha posh.”