Last Saturday, I had the honor to be surrounded by brilliant women of color in a discussion on race, gender and intersectionality. The event, organized by Rachel Y. DeGuzman, was called And, Ain’t I a Woman: A Long Table Conversation/Installation.
In the course of the conversation, Annette Ramos made an important point about not devaluing motherhood, about the skills that a woman brings to society by virtue of being a mother. I wanted to build on that and mentioned Helene Cixous who wrote that women possess the gift of alterability. On account of being mothers, women have a natural ability to nourish, nurture, erase separation, and rewrite codes.
Later this premise was questioned by a queer white sister who asked why nurturing should be a feminine trait? Why shouldn’t men be nurturers? I couldn’t agree more. Hopefully, all human beings can be nurturers. However, I wanted to think more about this.
Saying that women have a propensity for nourishing and nurturing, doesn’t mean that all nurturers are exclusively women. In a gender-equitable world, perhaps all traits and experiences can become unmoored from gender but even then it would be a violence to erase gender history.
In our present world, there are irrevocable gender hierarchies that become further intensified and distorted by race, class, age, sexual orientation, and disability. The work of women is not only devalued but unpaid. It’s not a coincidence that it’s not economically quantified or part of a country’s GDP.
Most women who make it in our androcentric world, have to subscribe to a masculine ethos, a macho modus operandi. This is particularly true of women in politics. Look at Hillary Clinton’s push for war in Libya, Thatcher’s bashing of coal miners and unions and her ban on milk exports to Vietnam (after the American invasion), Madeleine Albright’s famous comment that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were worth it as she continued to support harsh economic sanctions against Iraq, Condoleeza Rice’s role in an administration that launched a genocidal war and practiced torture, Indira Gandhi’s 1975 declaration of a state emergency and her forced-sterilization campaign. The list goes on.
In a world where masculinity is seen as universal and femininity considered a deviance, it makes sense to honor and name what women can bring to the table. After all, according to Cixous, language reflects masculine hegemony. Women are the colonized, men the imperialists. This apartheid is imbedded in language. One way to reclaim femininity from this subordinate assignation is to name what women have done beautifully since the beginning of time: given and nurtured life. It’s not the only thing women have done but isn’t it important to acknowledge it at a time when this role is regularly discounted, debased, and turned into an unwanted cost and liability?