Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance/Edited by Marguerite R
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FRONTLINE FEMINISMS GENDER, CULTURE, AND GLOBAL POLITICS CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY, Series Editor INTERVENTIONS Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film Edited by Bishnupriya Ghosh and Brinda Bose WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS AND PUBLIC POLICY IN EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA, AND THE CARIBBEAN Edited by Geertje Lycklama à Nijeholt, Virginia Vargas, and Saskia Wieringa CHINESE WOMEN TRAVERSING DIASPORA Memoirs, Essays, and Poetry Edited by Sharon K.Holm GENDER, RELIGION, AND “HEATHEN LANDS” American Missionary Women in South Asia, 1860s–1940s Maina Chawla Singh FRONTLINE FEMINISMS Women, War, and Resistance Edited by Marguerite R.Waller and Jennifer Rycenga FRONTLINE FEMINISMS WOMEN, WAR, AND RESISTANCE EDITED BY MARGUERITE R.WALLER JENNIFER RYCENGA Routledge NEW YORK/LONDON To activist women…everywhere Published in 2001 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” First hardback edition published in 2000 by Garland Publishing, Inc. First paperback edition published by Routledge, 2001. Copyright © 2000 by Marguerite R.Waller and Jennifer Rycenga All rights reserved. No part of this book may be printed or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The Library of Congress has cataloged the Garland edition as follows: Frontline feminisms: women, war, and resistance/edited by Marguerite R. Waller, Jennifer Rycenga. p. cm.—(Gender, culture, and global politics; v. 5) (Garland reference library of social science; v. 1436) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8153-3442-7 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-415-93239-4 (pbk.) 1. Women and war. 2. Women and the military. I. Waller, Marguerite R., 1948– . II. Rycenga, Jennifer, 1958– . III. Series. IV. Series; Garland reference library of social science; v. 1436. HQ1236.F78 2000 305.42–dc21 99–38045 CIP ISBN 0-203-00956-8 Master e-book ISBN vi Contents Series Editor’s Foreword xi Chandra Talpade Mohanty Introduction xiv Acknowledgments xxx Illustrations xxxiii PART I Domestic and Public Violence 1 CHAPTER 1 Public Imprisonment and Private 2 Violence: Reflections on the Hidden Punishment of Women Angela Y.Davis CHAPTER 2 Screaming in Silence 18 Shadia el Sarraj CHAPTER 3 From Reverence to Rape: An 25 Anthropology of Ethnic and Genderized Violence Vesna Kesic CHAPTER 4 Laughter, Tears, and Politics— 40 Dialogue: How Women Do It Vesna Kesic and Lepa Mladjenovic CHAPTER 5 The Opposite of War Is Not Peace—It 43 Is Creativity Zorica Mrsevic CHAPTER 6 Is Violence Male? The Law, Gender, 58 and Violence Lucinda Joy Peach viii CHAPTER 7 Art as a Healing Tool from “A 73 Window Between Worlds” Cathy Salser PART II Gender, Militarism, and Sexuality 82 CHAPTER 8 Translating/Transgressing/Torture… 83 Irene Matthews CHAPTER 9 Women and Militarization in Israel: 113 Forgotten Letters in the Midst of Conflict Isis Nusair CHAPTER 10 Sudanese Women under Repression, 128 and the Shortest Way to Equality Fatima Ahmed Ibrahim CHAPTER 11 Who Benefits? U.S. Military, 140 Prostitution, and Base Conversion Saundra Sturdevant CHAPTER 12 Demilitarizing Security: Women 157 Oppose U.S. Militarism in East Asia Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey CHAPTER 13 Women’s Politics and Organizing in 171 Vietnam and Cambodia Kathryn McMahon CHAPTER 14 Women in Command: A Successful 183 Experience in the National Liberation Army of Iran Sorayya Shahri CHAPTER 15 Conversion 191 Habiba Metikos CHAPTER 16 The Passage 194 Vinka Ljubimir PART III Nonviolent, and Not-Nonviolent, Action 202 against Patriarchy CHAPTER 17 The Kitchen Cabinet 203 Julie Mertus ix CHAPTER 18 Ritual as Resistance: Tibetan Women 206 and Nonviolence Benina Berger Gould CHAPTER 19 The Impact of Women in Black in 229 Israel Gila Svirsky CHAPTER 20 Feminist Resistance to War and 241 Violence in Serbia Lepa Mladjenovic and Donna M.Hughes CHAPTER 21 Gender, Nationalism, and the 271 Ambiguity of Female Agency in Aceh, Indonesia, and East Timor Jacqueline Siapno CHAPTER 22 Maria Stewart, Black Abolitionist, and 293 the Idea of Freedom Jennifer Rycenga CHAPTER 23 January 16, 1997: Message from 323 Maryam Rajavi, President-Elect of the Iranian Resistance Maryam Rajavi CHAPTER 24 “You Have a Voice Now, Resistance 330 Is Futile!” Shashwati Talukdar PART IV Where Are the Frontlines? 337 CHAPTER 25 Women’s Activism in Rural Kosova 338 Eli CHAPTER 26 The Soldier and the State: Post- 343 Liberation Women: The Case of Eritrea Sondra Hale CHAPTER 27 Beyond the Baton: How Women’s 367 Responses Are Changing Definitions of Police Violence Nancy Keefe Rhodes x CHAPTER 28 Black Women and Labor Unions in 381 the South: From the 1970s to the 1990s Ida Leachman CHAPTER 29 From the Mississippi Delta to South 391 Central Los Angeles Georgiana Williams CHAPTER 30 “A Struggle of the Mind”: Black 395 Working-Class Women’s Organizing in Memphis and the Mississippi Delta, 1960s to 1990s Laurie Beth Green CHAPTER 31 A State of Work: Women, Politics, and 417 Protest on an Indian Tea Plantation Piya Chatterjee Contributors 436 Index 444 Series Editor’s Foreword Five years after the United Nations Fourth International Conference on Women in Beijing (September 1995), I reflect on what feminists have achieved after more than four decades of organizing around issues of social and economic justice for women. I realize that civil rights are not the same as economic justice. While issues such as health, nutrition, reproductive rights, violence, misogyny, and women’s poverty and labor struggles have achieved widespread global recognition, women still constitute the world’s poor and the majority of the world’s refugees. The so- called structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank continue to have a devastating impact on Third World women. Militarization, environmental degradation, the WTO, heterosexist state practices, religious fundamentalism, and the exploitation of poor women’s labor by multinationals all pose profound challenges for feminists as we embark upon the twenty-first century. While feminists across the globe have been variously successful, we inherit a number of challenges our mothers and grandmothers faced. But there are also new challenges as we attempt to make sense of a world indelibly marked by the failure of postcolonial capitalist and communist nation-states to provide for the social, economic, spiritual, and psychic needs of the majority of the world’s population. At the beginning of the Christian millennium (year 2000, also 5760 according to the Hebrew, 4697 according to the Chinese, and 1420 according to the Arabic calendar—“just another day” according to Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Onandaga Nation), globalization has come to represent the interests of corporations and the free market rather than self- determination and freedom from political, cultural, and economic domination for all the world’s peoples. xii These are some of the challenges addressed by the series Gender, Culture, and Global Politics. It takes as its fundamental premises (1) the need for feminist engagement with global as well as local ideological, economic, and political processes, and (2) the urgency of transnational dialogue in building an ethical culture capable of withstanding and transforming the commodified and exploitative practices of global culture and economics. The series foregrounds the need for comparative feminist analysis and scholarship and seeks to forge direct links between analysis, (self)- reflection, and organizing. Individual volumes in the series provide systematic and challenging interventions into the (still) largely Eurocentric and Western Women’s Studies knowledge base, while simultaneously highlighting the work that can and needs to be done to envision and enact cross-cultural multiracial feminist solidarity. Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance, the fifth volume in the series, is an important embodiment of the links between analysis, (self)-reflection, and organizing and the enactment of feminist solidarity encouraged by this series. Drawing on work presented at the historic 1997 “Frontline Feminisms” Conference in Riverside, California, Waller and Rycenga have assembled a wide-ranging, eloquent, original critique of global masculinist militarism, foregrounding women’s resistance to it. This volume is also a testament to the creativity, resilience, and deeply thoughtful feminist activism engendered by women on the various “frontlines” created by wars around the world. Palestinian Laila al-Saith says in “Intimations of Anxiety”: You do not know how hard it is transfiguring blood into ink— emerging from one’s secret dream to voicing that dream…. These are the things we must share, and how the word takes shape within me. Pulled between a world that created me and a vaporous world I wish to create, I begin again…. (“Roots that Do Not Depart,” 1984) In these pages, women transfigure blood into ink, and pain and despair into the courage, creativity, and joy of struggle. In the xiii midst of war, “the frontline”—as a concept, as a span of time, as a place to grow, change, and transform—is known as a gritty, multifaceted reality” (Introduction). In the context of this very multifaceted reality, women voice the dream and enact the vision of resistance, agency, and justice. The writings in this collection cover a range of genres from memoir, historical accounts, and critical essays, to an exercise on “art as a healing tool” for adult survivors of domestic violence. What holds the writings together is an urgency to reflect on and analyze women’s activism on the frontlines—from Palestine, Sudan, Iran, Kosova, and rural India to Serbia, Croatia, Okinawa, Israel, U.S.