Four women-centric events have made headlines in the past month: Giorgio Meloni's election victory in Italy, the death and funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, the premiere of The Woman King, and protests across Iran after Mahsa Amini was killed by morality police. Together, these four stories highlight essential features of the political circumstances at this time.
Since the left has failed to offer an adequate response to the crisis of liberal democracy, the rise of new right-wing governments in Europe is not particularly surprising. But the central role of women in this has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Right-wing female leaders like Meloni and Marine Le Pen in France present themselves as stronger alternatives to traditional mainstream male technocrats. They are both the embodiment of the stubbornness of the right and the qualities usually associated with femininity, such as care and family: fascism with a human face.
Let's move on to the televised spectacle of Elizabeth II's funeral, which highlighted an interesting paradox: as the British state increasingly loses its superpower status, the British royal family's ability to inspire imperial fantasies only grows. It should not be dismissed as an ideology that masks real power relations. On the contrary, monarchical phantasies are themselves part of the process that reproduces them.
The death of Elizabeth II reminded us of the modern distinction between lordship and rule, the former being today limited to ceremonial duties. The monarch is expected to radiate compassion, gentleness and patriotism and to stay away from political conflicts. As such, monarchs do not represent the transcendence of ideology, but rather ideology in its purest form. For seven decades, Elizabeth II's role was to be the face of state power. The coincidence of her death with the rise to power of Prime Minister Liz Truss may have been extremely coincidental, but it nevertheless symbolized the transition from queen to king's wife. In her new role, Truss partially preempted the left by tying energy subsidies to tax cuts for the wealthy.
Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Woman King also deals with the political logic of monarchy. In the historical epic about the Agogia, an all-female warrior squad that served to defend the West African kingdom of Dahomey from the 17th to the 19th centuries, Viola Davis stars as the fictional general Nanisca. It was subject only to King Gez, the real person at the head of the kingdom from 1818, who participated in the Atlantic slave trade until the end of his reign in 1859.
In the film, Agogia's enemies include slave traders led by Santo Ferreira, a fictional character based on the historical figure of Francisco Félix de Souza. However, de Souza was a Brazilian slave trader who helped Gezo take over, and Dahomey was a kingdom that conquered other African countries and sold their peoples into slavery. While Naniska is shown protesting against the slave trade to the king, the real Agođije served him.
The Woman King thus promotes the form of feminism favored by the Western liberal middle class. Like today's #MeToo feminists, the Amazons of Dahomey will mercilessly denounce all forms of binary logic, patriarchy, and traces of racism in everyday language; but they will be very careful not to disrupt the deeper forms of exploitation that underpin contemporary global capitalism and the persistence of racism.
This approach implies the relativization of two basic facts about slavery. First, white slave traders hardly had to set foot on African soil, as privileged Africans (like the kingdom of Dahomey) supplied them with an abundance of fresh slaves. Second, the slave trade was widespread not only in West Africa but also in its eastern parts, where the Arabs enslaved millions and where the institution lasted longer than in the West (Saudi Arabia formally abolished slavery only in 1962).
Muhammad Qutb, brother of the Egyptian Muslim intellectual Sajid Qutb, vigorously defended Islamic slavery against Western criticism. Claiming that "Islam gave spiritual rights to slaves," he contrasted adultery, prostitution, and promiscuous sex ("that most abominable form of animalism") in the West with "the pure and spiritual bond which binds the servant [slave] to her master in Islam." Some conservative Salafi scholars still tell that story: for example, Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan, a member of Saudi Arabia's highest religious body. But you can't find that out from middle-class liberals from the West.
Fortunately, Islam's historical ties to slavery need not hinder the emancipatory potential of predominantly Muslim societies. Mass protests in Iran have historical significance globally, as they combine different struggles (against women's oppression, religious oppression and state terror) into an organic unity. Iran is not part of the developed West, and the protesters' slogan Zan, Zendegi, Azadi ("woman, life, freedom") is not a mere replica of the #MeToo movement or Western feminism. Although it mobilized millions of women, the slogan speaks to a much broader struggle and avoids the anti-male tendency often encountered in Western feminism.
Iranian men who chant Zan, Zendegi, Azadi know that the fight for women's rights is also a fight for their freedom - that the oppression of women is only the most visible manifestation of a wider system of state terror. Moreover, what is happening in Iran is still waiting for us in the developed Western world, where the trends towards political violence, religious fundamentalism and the oppression of women are strengthening.
We in the west have no right to treat Iran as a country that is desperately trying to catch up with us. On the contrary, we are the ones who must learn from the Iranian people if we want any chance in the face of right-wing violence and oppression in the United States, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and many other countries. Regardless of the immediate outcome of the protest, it is crucial to keep the movement alive, by organizing networks within society, which can continue working underground in case the forces of state oppression win a temporary victory.
It is not enough to simply express sympathy or solidarity with the Iranian protesters, as if they belong to some distant exotic culture. Now any relativistic speculation about cultural specificities and sensibilities is meaningless. We can and should see Iran's struggle as synonymous with ours. We don't need nominal leaders or female kings; we need women who will mobilize us all for "woman, life, freedom" - and against hatred, violence and fundamentalism.
(Project Syndicate; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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