Slutwalk – To March or Not to March

By Guest Contributor Harsha Walia, cross-posted from Rabble.ca

“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”

— Audre Lorde

Since April, when thousands marched in a Slutwalk in Toronto in response to a police officer telling students that the best way to avoid getting raped was to avoid dressing like a ‘slut’, Slutwalks have spread across cities in Canada and the US to the UK and Australia. Accompanying this global surge has been a myriad of controversies about the term ‘slut’ as well as questions about who was being left out from this new movement.

I share many of these concerns.

Slutwalk – in its slick branding – runs the risk of facilitating the dominant discourse of ‘liberated’ women as only those women wearing mini-skirts and high heels in/on their way to professional jobs. In reality, capitalism mediates the feminist façade of choice by creating an entire industry that commodifies women’s sexuality and links a woman’s self-esteem and self-worth to fashion and beauty. Slutwalk itself consistently refuses any connection to feminism and fixates solely around liberal questions of individual choice – the palatable “I can wear what I want” feminism that is intentionally devoid of an analysis of power dynamics.

Historically, this has come at a great cost to low-income women and women of colour who bear the brunt of institutionalized sexism – from lack of access to childcare and denial of reproductive justice to stratification in precarious low-wage work and disproportionate criminalization. In the post 9/11 climate, the focus on a particular version of sex(y)-positive feminism runs the risk of further marginalizing Muslim women’s movements who are hugely impacted by the racist ‘reasonable accommodation’ debate and state policies against the niqab. This marginalization has, at least in part, been legitimized through an imperialist feminist discourse that imposes certain ideas of gender liberation and perpetuates the myth that certain cultural/religious identities are inherently antithetical to women’s rights.

According to Nassim Elbardouh, a community organizer and Muslim woman who grew up in Saskatoon, “Though I support the tremendous effort, I didn’t go to Slutwalk because rather than focusing on lack of consent in sexual assault, there seemed to be a message that I have heard since I was a young girl – that I am only a feminist under the White gaze if I dressed and behaved in certain exposing and forward ways. People need to realize that being ‘scantily clad’ is not the only patriarchal excuse that victimizes women. Sexual assaults against Muslim women are often minimized in our society because Muslim women are perceived as repressed, and therefore in need of sexual emancipation. I would much rather have attended a ‘Do Not Rape’ Walk.”

On the use of the term ‘slut’ itself, while I appreciate that others feel differently and there is an argument to be made about transgressing the social boundaries defined by the term ‘slut’, I personally don’t feel the whole ‘reclaim slut’ thing. I find that the term disproportionately impacts women of colour and poor women in order to reinforce their status as inherently dirty and second-class, and hence more rape-able. The history of genocide against Indigenous women, the enslavement of Black women, and the forced sterilization of poor women goes beyond their attire. It is a means of gender control that is embedded within the intersecting processes of racism and colonialism. As long-term activists with Incite Women of Color have pointed out, the experience of women of colour with violence and victim-blaming is not only quantitatively different (i.e. increased) but is also qualitatively different.

Racist and sexist terminology like ‘squaw’ continues to particularly demean Indigenous women living in poverty. The systemic ideology that upholds the colonial disposability of Indigenous women’s bodies and lives has normalized the tragedy of thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women across this country. As a Manitoba Judge stated during the inquiry into the death of 19-year old Helen Betty Osborne “the men who abducted Osborne believed that young Aboriginal women were objects with no human value beyond sexual gratification.”

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