“Your Women Are Oppressed, But Ours Are Awesome”: How Nicholas Kristof And Half The Sky Use Women Against Each Other

Although Spivak was writing about British bans of widow burning and child marriage in India to make her point, we can see the reflections of this dynamic is the way that the US has justified wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as missions to “free Islamic women from the Veil.” (For a fantastic critique of this rationale, see Lila Abu-Lughod’s “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?“) According to Spivak, this trope of “white men rescuing brown women from brown men” becomes used to justify the imperialist project of “white man” over “brown man.”

And this formulation is consistent, pretty much across the board, with the film. White/Western dwelling men and women highlight the suffering, as well as local activism, of brown and black women. Brown and black men are portrayed consistently as violent, incompetent, uncaring or, in fact, invisible. And it’s only a small leap to realize that such formulations–of countries incapable of or unwilling to care for “their” women–only reinforce rather than undermine global patriarchy, while justifying paternalization, intervention–and even invasion of these “lesser” places–by the countries of the Global North.

Actress America Ferrera in “Half The Sky.” Via Zap2it.com

I’m certainly not making the case that gender-based violence is a good thing. Of course, we should work against it in our own personal location; of course, we should focus (as part of the film does) on, support, and follow the lead set by those fantastic global activists already organizing around these issues in their particular locations. The problem becomes when the process of international support takes on more importance than it should–when the shocked look on Meg Ryan’s face or the tears on Diane Lane’s or the colorful-exotic shots of Western-attired Olivia Wilde dancing with traditionally dressed and bead-wearing Kenyan village women becomes the primary focus.

And these actresses are not there to share, say, their own stories of gender violence, or because they are already involved in anti-gender violence work in the U.S. or even work already going on in these countries. Rather, they are there as tourists of violence, often visiting those countries for the first time with Kristof. They are wealthy celebrities whose lives, as Meg Ryan tells one sex trafficked Cambodian teen, are “far from” the experience they were witnessing. As well-known, even aspirational, figures to most Western viewers, they not only mediate the viewer’s relationship to the local women but mandate the viewer’s visual and emotional allegiance. Their mere presence interferes with the viewer’s ability to feel any true sense of affiliation with those local African or Asian women. Instead, they unwittingly reinforce the “your women are oppressed, but ours are awesome” dynamic.

I don’t mean to say that these actresses–or Kristof and WuDunn, for that matter–don’t mean well. They clearly do. The problem is that sometimes good intentions can do bad work; supposed “solutions” can effectively reinscribe the same dynamics between Global North and South that created the global economic and political inequities that facilitate gender based violence in the first place.

As feminist philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff argues in her essay “The Problem Of Speaking For Others,” that part of the problem of speaking for others is that none of us can transcend our social and cultural location: “The practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted (in many cases) in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for,” she writes.

To Kristof’s and WuDunn’s credit, Half the Sky is clearly trying to bring attention to issues of global gender violence, mobilizing the celebrity status of a group of actresses toward this goal. Also to his credit, Kristof highlights the work of a local, on-the-ground activist during each “celebration of oppression” segment, and there is somewhat of a focus on women’s empowerment, at least by the end of the film.

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