The Objectified Woman: Locating the Voice of the Colonized Woman

 

 

 

Object-n.

1. a tangible and visible thing

2. a person or thing seen as a focus or target for feelings, thought, etc: an object of affection

3. an aim, purpose, or objective

4. informal  a ridiculous or pitiable person, spectacle, etc

5. philosophy that towards which cognition is directed, as contrasted with the thinking subject; anything regarded as external to the mind, esp. in the external world

(Dictionary.com)

Woman. Woman is a simple word, and a tangible being that has excited controversy within the minds of many.  Depending on what creation story one believes in, it is always the body of the woman that has taken center stage.  Yes, men it is time we got off our egotistical high horses and give credit where it’s due.  Because let’s face it, without woman we just wouldn’t and couldn’t exist.  That still doesn’t account however that woman has been treated as an object, a spectacle, a target, something visible—notice the definition of object above because it’s crucial to understanding this post.    

 

I know I write from the position of gay man, and that I sympathize more with women then I do men, however, I understand what it’s like to be objectified because of my gender preference.  Keep that in mind when I give my spiel on the objectification and colonization of women.

 

With that said, it’s a wonder that we live in a world of patriarchal hegemony. (Italics added for emphasis which denotes disgust).    The current state of woman affairs in the world, as well as within our country, is one to be scoffed at, and should leave anyone wondering how we should situate ourselves within the context of these horrendous behaviors, beliefs, and acts.  It’s 2012 in the USA and we’re still arguing about the rights of woman to make changes within and outside their own bodies.  Not to mention we have politicians that can say politically offensive/incorrect phrases such as “Binders full of women” or that “Rape is a legitimate form of conception.”   And finally the thing that really gets me steamed, and I must admit extremely sad at the same time, is that a grown man can get onto a bus to put a bullet in the head of an unarmed girl who refused to be cowed into submission because she believed education should be a right entitled to all regardless of one’s sex or gender. 

All of these current arguments surround the issue of the woman body and  how it has been objectified and oppressed.

 

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN THE WORLD!!?!??? Sometimes I’d really like to give men a reality check.  Granted, there are still a few good guys out there. This website alone proves it…..http://goodmenproject.com/category/noseriouslywhatabouttehmenz/.  Take a look if you have a chance because I’m sure this will give you hope for the dominant masculine mentality that seems to be plaguing our existence as humans.

 

But why women?

These issues surrounding the woman body are nothing new, in fact they can go all the way back to creation.  However, the true time and place in which “Women” truly became glorified objects of subjugation is during……………………………..you guessed it, the time of colonization. 

Let’s take a look at Oyeronkey Oyemumi’s “Colonizing Bodies and Minds: Gender and

Colonialism.”  Oyemumi states that “the colonizer differentiated between male and female bodies and acted accordingly.  Men were the primary target of policy, and, as such, they were the natives and so were visible….The colonial process was sex differentiated insofar as the colonizers were male and used gender identity to determine policy…Native women occupied the residual and unspecified category of the Other” (Postcolonialisms 340).  Thus colonization was a process of objectification, making things visible, and or invisable.  Women were made inferior and objectified because of their supposed inferior gender.   Oyemumi also states that there were “two vital and intertwined processes inherent in European colonization of Africa. The first…[the] racializing and the attendant inferiorization of Africans as the colonized, the natives. The second process…the inferiorazation of females…the process of inferiorizing the native…was bound up with the process of enthroning male hegemony” (Postcolonialisms 355).    Women were both objectified, by first making them visible, and then second making them invisible.  A strict binary of Male/Female was constructed, even though Oyemumi states that Women were chiefs and acted as leaders within their own social spheres.  Women were the primary target of colonial rule because they were seen as a visible threat.

 

However Oyemumi’s view of colonization of women was specific to Nigerian women.  Leila Ahmed offers a second view of how colonization affected the women of the East.    Ahmed states that:

Even as Victorian male establishment devised theories to contest the claims of feminism, and derided and rejected the ideas of feminism and the notion of men’s oppressing women with respect to itself, it captured the language of feminism and redirected it in the service of colonialism, toward Other men and the cultures of Other men. It was here and in the combining of languages of colonialism and feminism that the fusion between the issues of woman and culture was created. More exactly, what was created was the fusion between the issues of women, their oppression and the cultures of Other men. The idea that Other men, men in colonized societies beyond the borders of the civilized West, oppressed women was to be used, in the rhetoric of colonialism, to render morally justifiable its project of undermining or eradicating the cultures of colonized peoples. (Postcolonialisms 321)

 

Here Ahmed presents another side of objectification, women were seen as needing to be saved, which in turn creates a second oppression.  Arab Islamists saw women as the reason for their so called colonization at the hands of Europeans, thus “issues of culture and women are connected” so that women become the objects of a second colonization. Woman was made a spectacle, an object, and a living testimonial for colonization.   Her looks, her garb, and body were all examined through a “fetishsized” lens.  At the center of these two accounts of colonized women is male domination of the gendered female body.  Both of these issues are at the heart of our current world problems when it comes to the woman body, something which we can blame history for. But what’s most important is the fact that what can be noted through both these theorists is that Women were categorized as inferior and subaltern. 

 

This leads me to the most important part of this post—Gaytri Spivak’s assertion that the subaltern woman cannot speak within her article “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.  I would first like to say that, as much as I understand Spivak’s grandiose and somewhat elitist vision, I must beg to differ.  The subaltern woman can speak, just like the subaltern homosexual, the subaltern peasant, and so on….  Each has a voice, but before I get to my own opinion let’s consider what Spivak has to say.

Spivak states that “between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization….There is no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak….The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read” (307-308).  Let us remember that Spivak writes from an elitist position, a position that enables her to assume and postulate, so it would come as no surprise that she would propose and assert the thesis that the subaltern cannot speak.   She’s warranted in saying that capitalization and colonization create a thing-i-fication, a modernization of people into objects and machines, forced into spaces of in-betweens.   One can understand the influences of Marxism within her argument.  

However, Spivak falls into the trap of universalism.  She focuses on religion, capitalism, and colonization as universal forms of oppression, exacting the same story for all women and the subaltern.  She objectifies them; just as much as the anthropological discourses she tries to understand objectify the women she seems not to give a name or any specification other then then those who suffer from Widow burning.  Chandra Talpade Mohanty warns against this type of thought—the idea of universalism. Mohanty says that feminist theorist tend to group women into one universal group who all occupy an inherent space of stasis that is defined by a universal group oppression (Under Western Eyes 347).  WHAT A MOUTH FULL, but one that provides extremely useful proof as to how we can challenge such an assumption that the subaltern woman cannot speak.  Because I think this thesis begs to be challenged and that it is just as hegemonic and powerful as the forces that colonized and objectified women in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong I truly understand where Spivak is coming from, and I commend her for a wonderful piece on the objectification of women.  But she is in danger of coming way to close to the acceptance of the single story, the essentialist view of universalism.  Maybe I am a little biased being a homosexual male. But I can tell you that genderization objectifies my very existence.  In all truth, I am subaltern the lowest part of society, inferiorized by capitalism, and cultural imperialism.   Women have rights, they may be few, but I can certainly attest that gays are at the bottom of the heap.  However, I sure as hell have a voice, a voice that I refuse to silence. And if anyone wants to assert that I can’t speak, I dare you.  Maybe it’s time I used my voice and speak up against injustices like Malala.

 

I would like to finish this post with a look at a passage from Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi in hopes that this can prove the subaltern woman can speak, and that to do so can cause great harm and even death to those have understood the implications of objectification.   

 

This passage that I would like to focus on is Firdaus final words to the narrator who has gotten Firdaus to tell her story.  AHA we already have a basis for the concept that the subaltern woman can speak! Firdaus tells of her final act of sexual prostitution with an Arab prince, and in doing so tells of how she discovered the truth behind the male sex, and their masculinized male domination. Firdaus admits of her murder, and an interrogation takes place, but one in which the subaltern woman speaks the truth of defiance and literally tears down the mask of objectification and domination.

 The passage goes like this:

 

‘I am a killer, but I’ve committed no crime. Like you, I kill only criminals’

‘But he is a prince, and a hero. He’s not a criminal’

‘For me feats of kings and princes are no more than crimes, for I do not see things the way you do’

 ‘You are a criminal.’ They said, ‘and your mother is a criminal’

‘My mother was not a criminal. No woman can be a criminal. To be a criminal one must be a man.’

 ‘Now look here, what is this that you are saying?’

 ‘I am saying that you are criminals, all of you: the fathers, the uncles, the husbands, the pimps, the lawyers, the doctors, the journalists, and all men of all professions’

They said, ‘You are a savage and dangerous woman’

‘I am speaking the Truth. And truth is savage and dangerous’. (Saadawi 109-110)

 

If we, as poco theorist, accept Spivak’s assertion that the subaltern woman cannot speak, then we lose the empowerment of Firdaus speech.  We should then ignore this speech altogether. But we won’t and we must and can reject this notion of an “unspeakable” other.  It is only when we listen, that we can truly understand the voice of the invisible woman because Firdaus is making herself visible with this defiant speech.  Firdaus flips patriarchy on its head and exclaims that it is not women who are inferior but men because they are materialistic and objectify women through masculine domination.    Firdaus exclaims right after that “I was the only woman who had torn the mask away, and exposed the face of their ugly reality” (Saadawi 110)   Perhaps the true veil is not one worn by the women, but the veil of invisibility cast on women that prevents them from understanding the truth—the truth behind the savage subjugation of women by the hands of men.  The veil is inverted, torn away, so that it does not conceal but reveal.   

Woman can speak, and she has a voice that is every bit as powerful as the discourses that objectify and universalize her body.  Instead of writing theory on the basis of her non-existent voice, maybe we should focus on promoting theory that aims at trying to understand the every present voice that is uniquely woman, and promoting theory that aims at supporting voices that have all ready sounded throughout the world.

 

Here's to you Malala, the greatest voice the world has ever heard.