Down with the hubble-bubble

 politics  No Responses »
Jul 202010
 

I seem to be banging on about women’s rights lately, especially with “us” in our post-feminist age and all, but the ironies do pile up. Hamas which is of course duly elected, sort of, has now banned women from smoking the narghileh in public. (It’s that hubble-bubble thing.) On public health grounds.

Similarly their ban on women driving (a year ago) and their policing of couples in the streets (duly married, or else). Has to be public health.

Gaza women are forbidden from riding motorcycles with their husbands; women are forbidden from getting haircuts at male hair salons; women are forbidden from walking on the beach without a male family member’s accompaniment; and they must wear the hijab and full-length dresses to courthouses, schools, universities.

France looks like a pretty good option.

 Posted by bruce at 4:11 pm  Tagged with:

Beyond the veil

 politics  No Responses »
Jul 162010
 

Those silly French, according to a commentator in The Independent.  They are trying to impose a centrist set of values. It won’t work, and worse, will bring on the martyrs.

No doubt they are, and no doubt it will. But the same arguments, precisely, have been used to oppose every re-negotiation of the state-individual boundary – seat-belts, voting-age, you name it.

Adrian Hamilton even finds the near-unanimous vote objectionable: the politicians, he says are doing it for their own interests. Gosh.

Equality for women is a central state value nowadays, and the law is, amongst other things, an expression of state values. Women of course differ among themselves about the burqa. But those who approve of it always concentrate on women who have chosen to wear it, conveniently overlooking all the other women for whom it is the outward and visible sign of female subjection. This difference reproduces the old argument between feminists and women who want to be ‘women’. The feminists won that one, and let’s hope they continue to  prevail here.

 Posted by bruce at 11:57 am  Tagged with:

Vive la France!

 politics  No Responses »
Jul 142010
 

France has banned the burqa. The Minister for Justice justified the action by appealing to two principles: ‘democracy’, which I guess here means either equal treatment or equal rights – or both – and the ‘values of the Republic’, that accommodating idea.

Nicolas Sarkozy a year ago, in a speech:

In this country we cannot accept women imprisoned behind a grill, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity.  This is not the idea of the dignity of women endorsed by the French Republic.

Unless we believe that the values of the Republic were engraved on a stone by the Spirit of 1789, we must conceive of them as a developing set, largely implicit, and of course created, to some extent, by such an edict from the President.  France is right about this matter, and despite bully-supporters like Cory Bernardi, we would do well to emulate the French.

We won’t. The arguments from ‘human rights’ will prevail. That is, we will defend the tribal – not the religious – practice of hiding women from men’s eyes because, allegedly, the sight of any portion of their bodies will incite sexual desire. The argument that women are cut off from social life is just fine with tribal men: that’s what they want. The argument from equality doesn’t cut it either.

By the way, when someone is stoned to death in Iran and elsewhere, a man is buried up to the waist, but a woman up to the neck. This is so the men killing her will not see her breasts.

By taking their stand on the equality and dignity of women, the French have avoided the more controversial issue of religious freedom. If we accept the idea that total coverage is a religious practice, it could still be outlawed, but the arguments are  much more difficult and divisive.

They are put with thoroughness and care in the NYT by Martha Nussbaum. Greatly though I respect her, I believe her to be mistaken. Her main mistake is to see the burqa as a religious practice.  There is any amount of publicly-available material in which Muslims themselves  deny this and condemn the garment. Nussbaum also seems to think that the meaning of the practice is somehow hidden, available only to experts. Well, consider Iran, where after 1989 the regime forced women into the garment by arrest, imprisonment and flogging. Nothing very mysterious about that.

In respect to aboriginal people, Australian decisions have consistently re-affirmed that where tribal law conflicts with the law of the land, tribal law must give way. We are dealing here with a tribal practice and we should apply the same reasoning – or else give up canting about equal opportunity.

 Posted by bruce at 1:04 pm  Tagged with:

A green thought

 oddments  No Responses »
Jun 292010
 

Jessie Gugig, 15, said she could not believe the charges, especially against Mrs. Murphy, who was an accomplished gardener.

“They couldn’t have been spies,” she said. “Look what she did with the hydrangeas.”

 Posted by bruce at 2:16 pm  Tagged with:

The “Gettysburg” “address”

 language and ethics, literature, politics  No Responses »
Jun 232010
 

“Fourscore and seven years ago, our “fathers”—with half the population excluded from the start—“brought forth”—with the dubious, always questionable assumption of “progress”—itself a value judgment about the meaning of history, which opens up the inherently dubious notion of “history” itself—“a “new” “nation”—a double double scare quote, with the claim of “new” at once instantly erasing the presence of all indigenous peoples and affirming the utterly questionable notion that anything can be qualitatively or authentically “new,” which again calls the very notion of “history” into question—and the word “nation” presupposing a commonality that may be nothing more than a kind of conspiracy of consent, a conglomeration of power meant to enrich the few and marginalize almost everyone else—“conceived”—privileging the idea that anything so questionable as a “nation” could be made up, as if out of nothing—“in “Liberty”—

Well, that’s just too much. We’re going to have to stop right here. We can’t even begin to get into “dedicated to the proposition”—we’ll let that pass—that “all”—“all”? Really? “men”—again—“are “created”—by whom? By what? For what purpose? To what end?—“equal.” Yes. Stop right here.

After the seminar

Greil Marcus, an editor of the New Literary History of America, in a piece called “Scare Quotes are the Enemy”

What Marcus’s parody captures about bien-pensant readings  is their dainty horror at the discovery that people in the past did not think like Us. Which is odd in a generation that rabbits on about the Other.  Texts are produced only to be decontaminated. It wasn’t us, cry the critics, we didn’t silence the Other. It was Them.

 Posted by bruce at 12:12 pm  Tagged with: , ,

With friends like these . . .

 politics  No Responses »
Jun 202010
 

Tariq Ali’ s nostrum for Afghanistan: talks to include the “Chinese because they have investments there . . .  the Pakistanis, Iranians, and the Russians.” Not, we note, the Japanese, to whom Hamad Karzai has just promised first crack at the minerals – which were discovered by the Americans.

Remind me again: why are Australians dying there?

 Posted by bruce at 11:28 pm  Tagged with: , ,
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