Narratives of Resistance: Threading Women's Struggles for Liberation

Jerrie Abella

The narrative of women’s age-old oppression is a long and nuanced history of cruelty and subjugation, of Middle East women raped and their families butchered, of American women forced into the forefront of wars of aggression, of women and children from Third World countries coerced into working under inhumane conditions, or peddled like commodities in sex trades.

It is amid this background of seemingly disparate plight of women across the globe that the 10th Women’s International Solidarity Affair in the Philippines (WISAP) sought to formulate a unifying and coherent account of women’s oppression. Aptly themed “ The Women’s Vision: Strategies and Tactics of Women’s Resistance,” the conference aimed to pave the way towards a collective struggle for women’s liberation and the dismantling of malevolent structures extant in the capitalist and patriarchal social order.

In 1986, the first WISAP was held in the wake of the demise of the Marcos dictatorship and was since then convened every two years. The 10th WISAP was supposed to be held last year, but President Gloria Arroyo’s declaration of a state of national emergency compelled host Gabriela, an alliance of women’s organizations in the Philippines which also has chapters in other countries, to stall it for this year.

Unifying the struggle

This year’s week-long conference, which consisted of regional trips, workshops and forums, drew over 200 delegates from 14 nations, including Palestine, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, the US, Malaysia, Canada, and Indonesia. While issues hounding women across the globe may be intricate and multifaceted, what binds their struggle is the collective effort to subvert and preclude the ill-effects of imperialism and globalization, which have spawned new, more vicious forms of oppression.

Foremost of these are the negative effects of war, migration, poverty, and violence on women. Palestinian Sarwat Viqar, for example, bewails how the decades-old Palestine-Israel conflict has been afflicting Palestinian women, particularly in communities. She cites the case of a Palestinian woman raped by Israeli soldiers and then made to choose from among her family who should be killed first.

Judith Mirkinson of Gabriela Network-USA also declares rape as “essential to war” and an “act of terror,” citing as an example the mass rape of women in conflict-stricken Darfur in Africa. She adds that wars necessitate the creation of a “masculinist culture” and a fascist authority, like the US’ Patriot Act and its local counterpart, the Human Security Act, that devalue women.

Prominent Filipino novelist Ninotchka Rosca of the Women’s Anti-Imperialist League-USA, in her discussion of international women’s situation, also reveals that 88 million migrant workers are women conscripted to the international labor market due to economic pressures, most of whom end up working as helpers in private households. The Filipino women’s case remains peculiar, as they are the only ones known to be present in all countries of the world as opposed to migrant workers of other nationalities.

Bridging the gaps

Rosca under scores this growing disparity in the women’s movement in the global scale, with issues ranging from advocacy for reproductive health and fighting for decent wages and working conditions, to condemning political persecution and opposing imperialist wars of aggression and occupation.

These multifarious women’s issues, Rosca says, brings to the fore the need for “a comprehensive philosophical and political framework” for the waging of a unified women’s resistance. Ultimately, she adds, women of all nations must come together in a concerted effort to fight imperialism and globalization.

Imperialism is able to mobilize women for its own benefit, as illustrated by American women integrated into the US wars of aggression and the intensification of its efforts to occupy undeveloped countries. She explains, “Imperialism has launched new methods of exploitation, even as it intensifies the old ones; it has created a climate of anarchy and violence on which anti- woman policies and attitudes breed and thrive.”

As imperialism’s contemporary tool of subjugation, globalization further intensifies women’s poverty by consigning them to wage slavery, under which they are compelled to work by their “feudal and patriarchal obligations” – feeding their family and providing for the education and needs of their relatives.

Retracing women’s oppression

Rosca identifies two main issues that currently afflict women in general: commoditization in the sex trade, and conscription and alienation of women from the value of their “necessary labor.”

The historical conscription of women and children in the sex trade remains veritable; 90% of the 20 million people recruited in prostitution are women, 25% of whom are still children. Rosca said, “The reification [commoditization] of women’s reproductive capacity and sexuality was the origin of the very concept of marginalization, control and alienation of large segments of the human population.” She notes that majority of trafficked women come from the Third World.

“Necessary labor,” meanwhile, refers to labor done in the household to sustain workers and the bearing of children who will eventually become another generation of workers. Alienation from the fruits of this “necessary labor,” which, according to Rosca, amounts to trillions of dollars every year, forms a large part of women’s oppression and alienation from the value of their labor, but remains the most hidden of all forms of class-based exploitation.

Narrativizing resistance

Rosca asserts that the creation of narratives is originally a woman’s territory, aimed at enabling the community to integrate their seemingly incongruent endeavors and formulate a coherent system with which to arrest the nuances of their conditions.

Holding conferences like WISAP, therefore, is one potent attempt at reclaiming this territory by creating a narrative that ultimately defines what women’s emancipation is, and how such could be achieved in the framework of liberating all oppressed peoples from their afflictions.

“We would like to see our societies transformed into societies that are not profit-motivated but rather societies organized for the purpose of advancing humanity – the return of the complementarity of male and female roles in society,” Rosca concludes.

In the final analysis, it is in spite and precisely because of these varied forms of oppression and exploitation that both women and men are called upon to craft narratives of resistance that expose structures perpetuating and perpetrating such, and then work in concert for their dismantling.

Women’s oppression by the numbers

· 350,000 women in the US military

· 155,000 women have had tours of duty in Iraq & Afghanistan

· 16,000 single mothers serving in Iraq

· 64 women military personnel killed in Iraq; 4 in Afghanistan

· one in seven US soldiers in the war is a woman

· women comprise 45% of the world’s work force

· 80% of 50 million workers in export processing zones are women

· 65% of globalization’s profits come from the sale/use of female labor and female bodies

· women earn less than 10% of the world’s income

· women own less than 1% of the world’s assets

· women comprise 70% of those living on less than $1 per day

· women comprise 2/3 of the world’s illiterates

· women comprise 51% of all those afflicted with HIV (20 million)

· women comprise more than half of 12.7 million refugees and half of 773,500 individuals seeking asylum

· one woman dies from childbirth every minute

· 1/3 of womankind in whatever class experience domestic violence

· 90% of all trafficked persons are female, 25% minors

· 90% of women in the sex trade are women of color, 25% minors

· 80% of tourists to Southeast Asia are male

· 25% is the highest female representation in government

Source: Gabriela Network USA ■