Perspectives

In 1970 just as I felt somewhat settled in to first grade and was feeling more comfortable speaking Dutch, my father signed a contract with the Stadttheater Klagenfurt. It was a fantastic opportunity for him to sing Othello, one of the biggest parts written for a dramatic tenor, and so within a few weeks our suitcases were packed again and we were on a long black overnight train to Austria.
    My parents rented a small apartment in one of the pastoral rural villages surrounding Klagenfurt, which besides being the home of a big theater was also the seat of the Roman Catholic diocese  Bishop.  My mother, always keen that I get out of her hair, and meet other children, immediately sent me to the local village school. I was welcomed by the first grade teacher, a short plump lady with dark hair and a rosy complexion, sort of an elderly snow white, who then promptly commanded me to stand outside the door. She refused to have me in her classroom. I was, in the particular, Jewish.   
    A few years later, sometime in the already very hot Israeli June, I was sitting in class, once again grappling to understand what the teacher talking in Hebrew was going on about, and longing for my last, very cozy, very orderly, and small Dutch Protestant school, which was the exact opposite of this very big loud middle school in Jerusalem, when I realized that the teacher’s elegant hand, laced with a shiny gold bracelet, was inviting me to come to the front of the class.
    Confused and feeling a little stupid I walked up and stood in front of my class mates, whom I hardly knew, and smiled politely. Looking at me with pride the teacher spoke at length about something, the speck of pink lipstick bouncing on her front tooth and her French accent making it even more difficult to understand, shook my hand, and gave me a little green book. Jittery, cold, but still smiling, I accepted it and said Toda Raba (Thank you very much), two words I was confident about, and made my way back to my seat.
     Arriving safely back on my chair the American girl with whom I shared a rickety table, and who had been positioned as my translator, and who vacillated between being mean and friendly, and who had introduced me to John Denver, Hershey Chocolates and robust American style sleepovers, muttered that I had received the book for being the best student of the year.
    Really? Ridiculous. I was in the class only one day a week. The rest of my time I spent in Ulpan (an intensive study course in Hebrew provided for all immigrants). They were just being nice or something. Luckily, it was the end of the day and I got up to leave. Just as I was slipping the little green book in to my bag, thinking how strange the world really was, three girls with wavy dark brown hair and dark brown eyes and gnarling faces suddenly bunched up around me spouted something out and then walked off. I looked at my translator who still sitting dispassionately on her chair explained, “They said that you only received the prize because you’re an Ashkenazi snob.”
    At home my mother explained that an Ashkenazi is a German Jew, which has come to refer to any Jew who is white and a descendant of Europe, except for Spain. American, Australian, South African Jews are also Ashkenazi. Later I learned that the girls were of Moroccan descent. Moroccan Jewish immigrants along with immigrants who had been expelled from other Arab countries including, Yemen, Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, had been systematically excluded from the white European, mainly Polish/Russian/German/ ‘elite’in Israel. They had received less land (often apartments rather than acreage), in more distant locations and in less fertile areas. During the 70s they were still largely excluded from government positions and had a much harder time getting accepted to universities or to elite units in the Israeli army, which was not only an issue of prestige, but one of the main trajectories leading to high paying non-military jobs and, more importantly, to such positions as Prime Minister (It was only recently that a Prime Minister who was not a chief of staff of the IDF was elected in Israel).
    So, I came to understand that for my twelve year old Israeli Sephardi school mates I was, an ‘elite, white, western, oppressor’ while for my Austrian teacher and classmates I was nothing less than the devil. I thought I was just a girl.

    Delving ever deeper in to the particular is one of the functions of scholarly work both in and outside of academia. Paying attention to nuances and complexities, finding out infinite amounts of details and information, defining and naming these new discoveries and trying to understand them, coding, decoding and recoding, narrowing subjects down to minute sometimes invisible particulars and specializing in them have brought tremendous advances in all fields of study and have influenced the way we think, produce, and govern.
     Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s cry, in her 1986 article, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”, that white, mainly privileged feminist scholars stop generalizing about women in the so called Third World and instead pay closer attention and become more sensitive to specific differences and particulars between women of other locations, cultures and economic structures was,  no doubt, an important step in the scholarly aspect of the  feminist movement. Her demand that white feminist scholars note that by using First World definitions they place themselves as superior to other women around the world and her call for a more refined globally inclusive humanism must have been an eye opener as well.
    But by her second article, “Under Western Eyes” Revisited:Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Solidarity,” Mohanty, admitting that political activism is important, and that the radical women’s movement that was active in the 1980s “no longer exists”(p516), wants to “reemphasize the connection between the local and universal” and to use these “common differences” to “forge international links between political struggles”(Mohanty 1986, p336). She suggests that the unifying link for women should be antiglobalization.  Mohanty seems to think that to overcome the fragmentation that has occurred, due to the successful separation of women’s varied and rich ‘particulars’, women should now unite, become a ‘whole’, by coming together to fight Globalization.
    But what is this Globalization? What is this whole, this generality, that women from around the world are supposed to come together for to fight? Mohanty speaks of the almost exclusive importance of seeing the very negative consequences of Globalization suffered by indigenous women and proposes that Women’s Studies scholars use the indigenous women’s experience as a baseline for change. Mohanty seems not to notice, and with apparent ease to devalue, the effect Globalization has had on white privileged American women, many of whom spent years studying and climbing a career path only to see themselves excluded from “Globalization”when they lost their jobs once they realized that spending time with their children was not possible while plane hopping in distant countries. And, what about the indigenous American women, who used to be expert seamstresses working in the textile industry, or had farms, or made herbal tinctures. Shouldn’t all global particulars deserve equal recognition?
    Globalization has had an impacted on everyone, poor, middle class, wealthy, old, middle aged or young. Both women and men. For bad, but most importantly also for good. It is true that the indigenous women Mohanty speaks of were inexcusably robbed of their ancient knowledge (in the similar way that large Pharmaceutical companies disguised behind the FDA are currently making tremendous attempts to ‘regulate’,with high fees, the field of herbs and tinctures made by many farming women  here in the States), but ‘Globalization’ has enabled  many other populations around the world, who otherwise would not have known about these medicines, to benefit from them
     Does Mohanty want to return to a place where all our particulars are not integrated? A world where one can only eat Chinese food in China? Pita bread in the middles East? Tikki Massala only in India? Which fragment of this Globalization should we women come together for to fight? And, how are we, each in our respected ‘particulars’, going to be able to agree on one?
     I’d like to think that women from different locations and culture could unite for something rather than against something. Prof. Ng somewhat jestingly asked (or possibly it was a serious suggestion) if, maybe, feminist should construct a code of Feminist Ethics. Perhaps, now, a hundred and sixty two years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented the Declaration of Sentiments, that would be a very good idea. Maybe, feminists, like many men before them, could formulate a Code of Feminist Ethics that would provide a new a scripture, a new feminine vision of the world. A Code of Feminist Ethics that would function as a guide and support for all women. A set of codes which women could use to confront both those negative aspects of Globalization affecting them, and the regular idiot attempting to control women’s rights over  their bodies.
     I’d like to think that in this feminist world my Austrian first grade teacher would not leave me standing outside the classroom door alone.