A Smile to Critique the Future
This photo was taken on March 10, 2017 at White Rock Beach, Vancouver. We had heavily discussed the “The Girl Effect” video created by international actors to address the idea of saving the third world. In this photo, my friend, a woman of colour, would be declared by many Western feminists to be from “the third world” and would want to share their guidance in order to “save” the third world within her. The photograph is here to represent the smile on her face and the future of what global feminism means. To surpass those who are holding the voices of “third world feminists” and to critique the ideas of oppression and saviour is needed.
We must critique this idea of the “Western saviour” if we ever want to interrupt and change the ideas surrounding the need to help and locking the voices of those who represent the “third world society.” By interrupting the ideas of western feminism, society can move one step closer towards the ideology of transnational feminism, which entails reconciliation instead of apology. Katie Macdonald uses the example of the novel, Three Cups of Tea, to further illustrate the point in which “The book is a part of a larger organization called the Central Asian Institute and was published after 9/11 as concerns about women’s rights in the ‘Middle East’ were of particular concern in Western public discourse” (Macdonald 2013). In the mind of the author, the women of the Middle East can no longer receive the voice or help they need because the Middle East has deemed to be of the orient. The perceived idea is that the Middle East is both politically and intellectually “backwards” and uncivilized (Said, 2003). Due to the accusation and the uproar of 9/11 Islamophobia, the idea of women’s oppression in the east has grown exponentially. With locked voices and being “forced” into the cage of the hijab, many Western groups feel the need to be the voice for “third world” women, including those who have colonized and lived within a colonial country. The photo of this woman of colour smiling brings hope that her voice is a voice and that the white saviour is not needed. Macdonald expresses the idea that, “these calls present girls as ‘emblems of futurity’. Girls, through these investments, eventually become women who ‘know better’” (Macdonald, 2013). Many people see them as charity and as a way to better Western empowerment by helping those who we feel do not have the ability themselves. By focusing on the lack of transnational analysis, people around the world can begin to understand the “empowerment” of the West is only creating more of a hierarchy and inequality between others. By opening up the problem that the First World only looks at the poverty and the placement of the women, they disregard the political ideologies on what the “ideal” world is. Creating a barrier and making the assumptions that a woman of colour from the East is oppressed and in need of empowerment is what further creates gender oppression and not the false “sisterhood” they try to reclaim.
In order to seek change for our future, the West must take a step back and redefine the word empowerment and to what extent it goes. With the capitalist mind, empowerment strikes out to seek aid for not only the ones “in need of it” but also to themselves as self-satisfaction of white saviour. The woman in this photo defines the “norms” of the orient and shows what it looks like to reject the saviour. This is a woman with a voice. The smile on her face is not being caged by the “backwards” upbringing of the orient. In order to see our future in feminism, we must change our Westernized preconception that the East pertains no voice.
Citations:
Macdonald, K. (2013). Calls for educating girls in the Third World: futurity,
girls and the ‘Third World Woman’. Gender, Place & Culture, 23(1).
Said, E. (2003). Imaginative geography and its representations: Orientalizing the Oriental. b, 49-73.