Gender Across Borders

Sarah Shourd

Sarah Shourd is a global feminist. Now thirty-one, she has been working for over a decade for the rights and welfare of women worldwide. Femicide, gentrification and military globalization are but a few of the injustices she has incessantly combated as an activist and community organizer.  She has worked with religious organizations, theater collectives and community-based organizations such as Causa Justa/Just Cause in Oakland. As her mother, Nora Shourd, told me in a phone interview on Thursday, “I think of her as being the kind of activist that wants to be a better activist all the time.” This work, at least in its most obvious forms, came to an abrupt halt ten and a half months ago but by no fault of Sarah. She had been living in Damascus, Syria for 13 months, working with the Iraqi Student Project, taking advanced classes in Arabic at the University of Damascus and teaching at the American Language School, when, on July 31st, 2009, during a hiking trip with two friends in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, she was taken prisoner by the Iranian government and accused of illegally crossing the Iraq/Iran border. She has yet to be granted access to her lawyer and has been detained in Evin Prison in Tehran without official charges for nearly eleven months now, a denial of habeas corpus, which is illegal both under Iranian law and according international humanitarian agreements.

When Sarah moved to Damascus in July 2008, there were approximately 1.5 million Iraqi refugees living in the Syrian city, and Sarah took it upon herself to organize a women’s group among the young refugees in the Iraqi Student Project and help prepare them for the women’s specific elements of culture shock that they were likely to experience when in the United States for their undergraduate education. She developed close friendships with young Iraqi, Syrian and Palestinian women and participated in a number of political discussion groups organized among these women living in Damascus. Due to these connections, in the summer of 2009, she was witness to what she has described as “an unusual show of organizational strength” as women’s rights groups joined together to halt a revision of the personal status law, which would have, if passed, reduced women’s rights even further, denying married women the right to work or travel without their husband’s permission and allowing men to divorce their wives but denying women the same option. In July 2009, when Sarah left on the hiking trip that would lead to her arrest and imprisonment, she was working with an editor at Women’s eNews to publish a story on the recent legal victory. Instead, the story, “Syrian Women Reflect on Rare Political Victory,” was just published earlier this week on June 7th, 2010. Read the rest of this entry →

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE9rUHDXRFI&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]

“Born Free” was released on April 23^rd to promote M.I.A.’s latest album, which will be released on June 29, 2010.  Recently, the L.A. Times reported that the video had been banned by YouTube.  Although this was untrue, the production did incite strong reactions-so strong, that YouTube ultimately obscured the video in order to appease angry YouTubers and the general public.  In response to the potential censorship, M.I.A. tweeted about it and added a direct link to the video on her official website.

The video begins with military sounds and imagery-sirens lazily blare as the sleepy-eyed Los Angeles S.W.A.A.T. team sits in anticipation of their next mission.  Bursting out of the van, they proceed to terrorize the unsuspecting tenants. Using their batons and pointing guns at bewildered tenants, they search rooms until they find their intended target-a young man wearing a tracksuit.

What follows is the disturbing part.  A bus full of redheaded young males are taken to a deserted area and ordered to run.  Upon refusing, a young boy is shot to instill fear, and they take off into the desert.  It doesn’t look good for them-there are landmines surrounding them and the S.W.A.A.T. team follows them in a black van.  With the music reaching a crescendo, a young man is blown apart as he inadvertently runs onto a landmine.  The rest of the redheads are beaten, and these are the images that the video ends with.  For most of us that have viewed the video by Romain Gavras, the violence is not anything new.  The most striking aspect of this is a genetically-determined feature-red hair. The mystifying cast of detainees has sparked the most reactions from viewers who just want to know, “Why?” “Born Free” is offensive and hard to watch. Fine. It’s meant to stir up feelings.

The discomfort can be understood as a culture shock of sorts, culled from the “antiracist and antisexist cultural tactics in ’70s activist art,” which A.S. Van Dorsten described as a “decentering.”  Atlantic writer Aylin Safar referred to it as “flipping the subject.” This is ultimately the success of M.I.A.’s video.

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At first I hesitated to write this review. I am a non-Muslim, Western woman writing a review of a book written by a (presumably) non-Muslim, Western woman about Muslim women in the Middle East. As I read the book, however, I became much more comfortable with the idea. Ms. Coleman’s book is a result of nearly ten years of research and personal interviews with women from Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. The book reads more like a report of women’s activities in these countries with only the occasional judgment from the author, (“Linking feminism with the ‘heresy’ of the West is good politics, and helps turn patriarchy into patriotism,”) instead of one woman’s opinion on an incredibly complex and historical struggle of which she is not technically a part. (Most of the judgments, save the previous quote, are of other Westerners who offer ignorant assessments of Muslim/Islamic feminism.)

Considering the subject matter, the book is an incredibly enjoyable read, which I hope will encourage more people to consider perusing this seemingly dense account. It passed the red-eye test; I read it on a red-eye flight to California after 3 hours of sleep and couldn’t put it down.

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“Art is a powerful medium. It engages people. And I think that’s what we need…[I]t really doesn’t matter what medium you decide to use. I think the objective is to engage people. But now more than ever, artists have a lot more powerful tools to play with…[A]rt does not have to be confined to a physical space, the gallery or museums, but now we have the power of the internet, when we could enter people’s homes and offices and engage them in the dialogue. Art is not only there to educate. Art is there to agitate, as well.” –Wafaa Bilal on DemocracyNow! March 9th, 2010

Wafa Bilal, ...And Counting, photo by Brad Farwell, www.bradfarwell.com

From 8pm on March 8th, 2010 to 8pm on March 9th, 2010, Iraqi performance artist Wafaa Bilal sat in a chair on display in the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts on West 39th street in New York City as two tattoo artists took turns making marks on his exposed back. After twenty-four painful hours, the resulting tattoo was a borderless map of Iraq, its major cities’ names inscribed in Arabic, scattered between which lay two sets of dots—5,000 bright red dots and 100,000 green UV ink dots. The red dots were meant to represent the number of American soldiers who have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, while the green UV ink dots—invisible except when viewed under a black light—were meant to represent the excruciatingly high number of corresponding Iraqi casualties. One of these green dots stands for Bilal’s younger brother Haji, who died in 2004 in United States bombings of their hometown of Kufa. Wafaa, who has been studying and working as an artist in the United States since 1991 has experienced the recent war in an unique way, living a relatively safe life in comparison to his family back home and yet unable to relate to the nonchalant disinterest in its violence of the Americans around him. His tattoo makes the disparity in death tolls apparent while drawing attention to the invisibility of those killed by the overpowering bomb and drone attacks of the United States military. Read the rest of this entry →

Campaign billboard in Baghdad/ Ali al-Saadi for AFP

Tomorrow Iraq will hold its second parliamentary election since the 2003 US invasion of the country. Headlines in the mainstream US media have focused on how the election will predict Iraq’s political direction once US forces withdraw, and on the violent attacks that some have carried out to discourage voters from going to the polls. Just this morning, for example, a car bomb killed three Shiite pilgrims.

While following the news coverage this week I wondered about what was missing—information about the role of women in this election. Iran’s election and subsequent political uprising last summer made me cognizant of how women in the region are becoming increasingly crucial political trailblazers, but the US media is often slow to pick up this side of the story. So I went in search of information about women’s roles in the Iraq election, and sure enough there are plenty of stories that haven’t been covered on the evening news.

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Joachim Ladefoged: The Flight from Iraq

I’ve yet to succumb to the vampire craze. Given the growing number of conversations –- with friends over brunch, strangers on a bus, acquaintances at a dinner party – that this excludes me from, at some point I’m sure I’ll give in and read the Twilight series or watch True Blood.

In the meantime, when I recently saw a Huffington Post article comparing Iraqi refugees to the undead I was convinced that I was, yet again, not in the know.

This time it wasn’t simply vampire knowledge that I was lacking.

The “crepuscular parallel universe” Kathryn Shultz refers to in her article is that of individuals who have fled violence, persecution, and torture in Iraq to seek refuge in a Syria, Lebanon and the United States. Read the rest of this entry →

Caption: "Drone Porn. The article is kinda scary, but the photo is hella sexy." (Photo from Wired.com)

Drone porn. Have you heard of it? I hadn’t. And I certainly didn’t realize that it was the newest YouTube hit.

As soon as I saw it referenced in an article I was immediately inquisitive about what drones had to do with porn and why the phenomenon was so popular.

My curiosity led me to discover quite a few things… 1) that watching (never mind participating in) deadly warfare is intended to cause sexual arousal, 2) that the Department of Defense (DoD), or at least a private company that appears to be contracted by the DoD, has uploaded images of the aforementioned warfare onto YouTube, and 3) that the images are the catalyst for a maelstrom of online hatred. Read the rest of this entry →

If women are responsible for preventing rape…

then why is the advice given to us always to lock ourselves in our homes after dark unless escorted or to let people we trust guard our drinks and monitor whether we are too intoxicated to protect ourselves?

Why are we not, rather, told to keep company with other women: to watch them, their drinks, their bodies? Why are we told to depend on others instead of to look out for each other? If women are responsible for preventing rape…

then why is the emphasis so often on being wary of strangers and not of those men with whom we are most intimate? For women who do not live in war zones or other places where the social order has shattered, stranger rape is much less likely than rape by someone known and trusted.

Why are we not told to stop trusting men? If women are responsible for ending rape… Read the rest of this entry →

“Until every one comes home” is the motto of the United Service Organizations,  the partnership that organizes entertainment for U.S. troops domestically and overseas. The USO proclaims that its number one aim is to boost troops’ morale.

from http://www.uso.org/whatwedo/entertainment/dcc65thusotour/

In the traditional war scheme where men fight and women manage the home front, women take on hefty symbolic weight as the sacrosanct population. In this situation, women stand in for all that is missing in a war zone, and by extension, all that is being fought for. As symbols, they encase lofty or abstract ideals in sensual form. From the bare-chested, Amazonian “Liberty Leading the People” encouraging the rabble to depose a king (and promptly seat another, presumably better, one) in nineteenth-century France to the raunchy women gamely adorning the noses of WWII jets, representations of the female form multitask in combat environments.

It makes sense that the rich potential of women’s images to trigger strong feelings in the (presumably – don’t ask, don’t tell, of course) heterosexual and (historically, largely) male members of the military has been put to use for various purposes. Read the rest of this entry →

When I read this article about domestic violence shelters in Baghdad, I began thinking about domestic violence victims living in conflict zones. As an advocate for DV survivors, the question most people ask me is, “Why did she stay?” My favorite way to answer this question is to make a chart: reasons to stay and reasons to leave. Every time I do this, there are always more reasons to stay than to leave. (If this seems dubious, try it yourself. Imagine your spouse/partner/girl/boyfriend is abusive and you have to leave today. Make your own list.)

Of the many reasons to stay, safety is not usually one of them. In New York City, where I work, there are plenty of provisions to ensure a woman’s physical safety if she leaves her abusive partner. (I say woman because the majority of people with whom I work are women. I also work with men and would never deny that they can be victims as well.) No such promise can be made in a war zone, however, adding one more reason to stay and making the escape to freedom from violence even more elusive.

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