Tag: Italy

A review of In the Name of Women′s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism, Sara R. Farris, Duke University Press, 2017.

What happens in the name of women’s right is, according to Italian scholar Sara Farris, the denial of the rights of certain women and men to live a life with dignity in Western European countries where they have migrated. More specifically, an anti-Islam and anti-migrant rhetoric is increasingly articulated in terms of gender equality and women’s emancipation. The misuse of liberal discourse for illiberal ends is not new: the invasion of Afghanistan that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11 was presented to the international community as a mission to liberate Afghan women from their oppression under Taliban rule just as much as an act of defense and retaliation against the perpetrators of the attacks. The French fixation with the “Islamic” veil finds its origins in the Algerian war and the effort to present the fight against the FLN as a crusade for modernity on behalf of “Arab” women against their male oppressors. Closer to us, Marine Le Pen is known for courting France’s female voters and for endorsing women’s rights within the framework of her anti-migrant platform. What is distinctive about Sara Farris’s book are three things. First, she anchors her discussion on what she calls “femonationalism” (read: feminism+nationalism) within the context of ideological debates taking place in France, Italy, and the Netherlands during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Second, she shows that the instrumentalization of women’s rights for anti-migrant and anti-Islam purposes is not limited to political parties from the far right: rather, it is the result of a convergence between right-wing nationalists, some feminists and femocrats (by which she means bureaucrats and social workers promoting gender equality policies in state agencies), and neoliberal economic policies targeting participation in the labor market. Third, Farris claims that only a political economy analysis inspired by the critique of neoliberalism can explain why, at this particular juncture, “Muslim” men are being targeted as surplus workers “stealing jobs” and “oppressing women”, while “Muslim” and non-European migrant women are construed as redeemable agents to be rescued by integrating them into low-skilled, low-paid activities of the “social reproduction sector.”

The femonationalist ideological formation

The first argument on the ideology of right-wing parties is well-known. Politicians such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France, or Matteo Salvini in Italy have expressed support for the cause of gender equality (with occasional mentions to gay rights) within a xenophobic and anti-migrant framework. As the book title reflects, they are advancing their anti-Islam agenda in the name of women’s rights. Their attacks on migrant men, especially Muslims, are more strident than their position on non-Western migrant women. They consider the first ones as a direct threat to Western Europe society due, above all, to their oppressive treatment of women at home and their unrestrained, violent sexuality toward women outside the home. The second ones are considered as redeemable: provided certain conditions are met, women can “assimilate” into the host society (through work and often through marriage) and raise their children the “right” way, but they are to be protected from the pervasive influence of “their” men. As the title “in the name of women’s rights” suggests, this appropriation of a feminist agenda is only an excuse, a deception or a fraud by nationalist parties who are otherwise described as misogynist in essence and masculinist in style. Hence the message to European feminists: the accession of the nationalist right to power, as is the case in several European countries, would constitute a regression for women’s rights and would end in a backlash against women. This assumption, however, should be put to empirical testing: it might be the case that illiberal policies would, in the end, benefit the situation of (certain) women at the national level, although migrant women would certainly be the first victims of a tightening of immigration policies. Likewise, as we mentioned, liberal means can serve illiberal ends. We have no reason to assume that the defense of (certain) women’s rights in nationalist platforms is not sincere and that there is only instrumentalization at play. It is true that nationalist parties have shown concern about gender inequality mostly in the case of Muslim and ethnic minority communities. But the history of political ideas provides us with many cases in which ideologies have shifted from the left to the right and sometimes to the far right. Behind the declarations of populist leaders in favor of women’s empowerment and gender equality, there may be a kind of “alt-feminism” in the making. The relation between this alternative feminism and more traditional forms of feminism will have to be defined. But these fine points are not discussed by Sara Farris, who obviously has no sympathy at all for nationalist points of view: for her, femonationalism is no feminism at all.

The second thesis on “femonationalism” as convergence between different agendas and positions is less familiar to the general public and itself needs to be unpacked. The most evident manifestation of this convergence between nationalism and feminism is the fact that some well-known and outspoken feminists such as Elisabeth Badinter in France have joined the ranks of those who see Islam as a threat to European societies. Accordingly, they have endorsed legal proposals such as veil bans while portraying “Muslim” women as passive victims who needed to be rescued and emancipated. They have also described men originating from non-western, economically underdeveloped countries are misogynist and prone to sexual violence, as in the cases of rape and sexual aggressions committed by North Africans and Middle East migrants in Germany. Again, Islam is singled out by these intellectuals as a religion associated with unequal gender relations and violence (with an emphasis on honor killings, domestic violence, forced veiling, and arranged marriages). They see the veil as a form of symbolic violence exerted by Muslim men forcing women to wear it and by Muslim women singling themselves out from the rest of society. Many have turned against multiculturalism as promoting a kind of value relativism and failing to defend “western” values of emancipation, individual rights, and secularism. These arguments define what Farris call the “femonationalist ideological formation,” bringing together public figures who otherwise disagree on many issues. Sara Farris claims that feminists can only lose by espousing the anti-Islam agenda. They are diverting attention away from the many forms of inequality that still affect Western European women. They transform women’s rights into a “civilizational”, ideological issue, as opposed to a social and economic one grounded on material interests. They also contribute to the diffusion of an ethnicized vision of society. Their endorsement of the agenda promoted by the nationalist right is a “divine surprise” for the latter: right-wing politicians can claim the support of high-visibility intellectuals, who have a strong legitimacy on issues of gender inequality and women’s rights. Some self-declared feminists, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands, have lend themselves to political collaboration with right-wing forces. Most feminists however, have insisted on their distance with the nationalist right, claiming instead that their new fight against Islam’s oppression of women stands in continuity with their progressive engagement.

Migrant men and migrant women

Closely related to these Islam-bashing feminists, Farris also points to the role of “femocrats.” This term, slightly dismissive, refers to the (not necessarily female) bureaucrats who are institutionalizing feminism through state programs of gender equality and civic integration. Without giving any figures, Sara Farris claims that state funds are increasingly withdrawn from policies tackling gender inequality as a general problem and are redirected instead toward programs aimed at addressing gender inequality among “Muslim” and ethnic minority communities. These civic integration programs purport to teach migrant men what it means to respect women and gender diversity, and to instruct migrant women how to emancipate from their supposedly backward culture. Unwittingly, they are reproducing the prevalent image of migrant men as a sexual threat and migrant women as victims to be rescued. They are also positing the host country as a society where gender rights are respected and guaranteed by the state, as opposed to a domain of social gains and entitlements that need to be conquered and expanded. Of course, there is nothing wrong in telling people that men and women are equal and that women’s rights should be respected. But here again we may have the case of a liberal objective being pursued through illiberal and even repressive means. Civic integration policies have an obligatory character, and their nonobservance can be punished by either financial penalties or denial of a legal residence permit. Furthermore, the requirement that migrants possess the knowledge considered crucial to integration in the receiving country turns integration into an a priori condition rather than a process that occurs over time. From Sara Farris, the problem comes from the undiscussed assumption that these migrants need to be taught what gender equality is about as if they were ignorant of any notions about women’s rights. Besides, gender equality is mentioned mainly in reference to the private sphere, with an emphasis on traditional gender roles for women who need to develop good mothering skills. For Farris, emancipation cannot be taught, and certainly not in a condescending mode by Western feminists or state apparatuses. Nurturing freedom means first and foremost creating the material conditions for freedom and equality. That’s where the rubber hits the road: while social programs aimed at the integration of female migrants put forward values of emancipation and autonomy, they channel these women toward activities that are far from emancipating and that do not allow for their autonomization or empowerment. What they do is the opposite of what they preach.

Through civic integration programs and other policies, migrant women are directed toward what Sara Farris, in good Marxist fashion, calls the “social reproduction sector”: this refers to the care and domestic activities which are mostly located in the private sphere, such as babysitting, child rearing, housekeeping, apartment cleaning, and caregiving of the elderly. Farris sees a contradiction “when feminists and femocrats urge emancipation for Muslim and non-western migrant women while channeling them toward the very sphere (domestic, low-paying, and precarious jobs) from which the feminist movement had historically tried to liberate women.” While advocating women’s participation in the public sphere, they contribute to the confinement of migrant women in household services, the reinforcement of traditional gender roles and the perpetuation of the gender injustice they claim to be combating. Farris considers the jobs proposed to migrant women as lacking in dignity and not conducive to emancipation. Changing diapers, wiping floors, cleaning kitchens, attending sick bodies: these are occupations which are now overwhelmingly held by women of foreign origins and that European women do not want to take as a profession. Of course, one could argue that there is nothing demeaning in the work of care, in attending to children and the elderly, or in making hotel rooms and office space fit for productive use. These jobs can be held with dignity, the feeling that comes from working hard for a socially useful function. But this is not how society sees these jobs and occupations in western Europe. They are organized under conditions of precariousness, with minimal wages, job flexibility, part-time or casual contracts, and little access to welfare provisions. The inclusion of social reproduction into the market sphere of wage labor has not led to a rehabilitation of care and domestic work; on the contrary, it continues to be perceived as unskilled, low-status, isolated, servile, and dirty. And for Sara Farris, western feminists are largely to blame for this lack of consideration. They have deserted the issue of social reproduction as a matter for critical engagement, leaving the sector to the naturalizing forces of neoliberalism.

The regular army of domestic labor

Right-wing nationalists, intellectuals who identify themselves as feminists, state experts working on migrant women issues, and neoliberals favoring workfare programs: how can these very different and sometimes opposing parties come up with similar ideas when the migrant question is at stake? As Sara Farris insists, these opponents to Islam in the name of women’s rights should not be seen as partners in crime or ideological bedfellows. The fact that they sometimes converge on an anti-Islam platform doesn’t mean they are colluding, cooperating, or associating with each other in any way. Each party has specific reasons to frame Islam as posing a threat to gender equality in the west. Talking about instrumentalization to describe their relations would be patronizing, especially for the feminists who are very conscious of the political difference that separate them from the nationalist right. In true Marxist fashion, Sara Farris believes convergence at the ideological level comes from similar interests dictated by the material conditions of late capitalism. Neoliberalism isn’t simply the contextual ground on which the femonationalist convergence takes place: it is the constitutive plane of such a convergence. Neoliberal globalization is grounded on a sexual division of labor in which, to use Karl Marx’s categories, migrant women provide the “regular army of labor” and migrant men the “reserve army of labor” or relative surplus population. Unlike migrant men who work in the productive sector, migrant women who work in the domestic sector allow the social reproduction of labor to take place. They are spared from accusations of “stealing jobs” or “posing a threat to society” because they allow western families to form double income couples and to balance work with domestic life. Their employers maintain ownership and control over the social means of production and reproduction. Their labor cannot be substituted by machines and capital, as care and domestic work imply certain qualities that can only be provided by “live labor” and that are often associated with traditional feminine roles. The difference between the industrial sector afflicted with an oversupply of labor in western European countries and the social reproductive sector (cleaning, care domestic, and health care work) explains the double standard applied to male and female migrant workers, especially when religious values come into play.

Commenting the division of the working class in England between English proletarians and Irish proletarians, Karl Marx claimed he had found the secret of the maintenance of power by the capitalist class, as well as the secret of the English working class’s lack of revolutionary spirit. Similarly, Sara Farris believes she has solved the mystery of the unholy convergence between nationalists and feminist promoters of women’s rights: the femonationalist ideological formation takes places under the aegis of neoliberal exploitation of the Global South. “Just as the exploitation of non-western countries’ natural resources permits the West to keep its pattern of production and consumption, it is also migrant women’s socially reproductive work that permits western European women and men not only to have the ‘cheap’ care that enables them to be active in the labor market, but also to retain the illusion that gender inequality has been achieved—at least for ‘them’.” Migrant women are “needed” as workers, “tolerated” as migrants, and “encouraged” as women to conform to western values. Meanwhile, migrant men are needed only insofar as they form a “reserve army of labor,” pushing industrial wages down and antagonizing western workers who then tend to align with the nationalist agenda of the ruling class. Feminists who claim to act in the name of women’s rights are only idiot savants, contributing to the social reproduction of capital while protecting the interests of some women against others’. It is in this sense that they converge with the agenda of the nationalist right: both are complementary ways by which neoliberal globalization extends its conditions of uneven development and exploitation. This process is fraught with contradictions: historically, migrant women came to Western Europe only as the wives and relatives of male guest laborers who formed a first wave of labor migration. It is only when male workers became redundant that the demand for female migrant labor in social reproductive activities began to rise, leading to a mechanism of exclusion of male migrants and inclusion of female migrants. It is this dual process of inclusion and exclusion that femonationalism performs at the level of ideology.

Importing identity politics into Europe

In the Name of Women’s Rights offers a curious mix of European social critique and American multicultural advocacy. It was written while the author was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, with feminist author Joan W. Scott providing advice on how to frame intellectual debates about Islam and feminism in Western Europe. Through scholarly networks and academic contacts, the United States smuggles into Europe a vision of identity politics and multiculturalism that was developed in the context of the culture wars on university campuses and that reflects a very specific conception of social groups and ethnicities. Each individual is automatically affiliated to an ethnic or religious community, an exclusive group that is conceived as separated from mainstream culture and that is defined in opposition to other collectives: migrant vs. natives, foreigners vs. citizens, men vs. women, Muslims vs. secular individuals. Like the right-wing promoters of the fantasy notion of Eurabia, these leftist intellectuals see Islam and the integration of non-western Muslim communities as the main challenge facing European societies, overcoming all other forms of division and solidarity. Debates on citizenship, on gender parity, on secularism and on inequality are all overdetermined by this ethnic and religious context. As a European, Sara Farris should know better than to apply such simplistic notion to a situation that requires other tools of analysis and interpretation. But she finds it convenient to sugarcoat her hardcore Marxism with a layer of identity politics that provides catchy titles and attractive soundbites. Like the convergence between European nationalists and universalist feminists—a fringe phenomenon, that doesn’t reflect the history of both the nationalist right and of the feminist movement in Europe—, this alliance between radical economics and cultural warfare mixes elements that don’t fit together and that provide little explanatory power. This is a shallow and off-the-shelf book that attempts to ride the wave of sexual nationalisms by providing its own entry in the form of a catchy word—femonationalism is designed after the notion of homonationalism advanced by Jasbir Puar. But its cultural lenses are heavily biased, and its political economy antiquated. As a piece of transnational scholarship designed between Europe and the United States, it provides the worst of both worlds.