This question has been puzzling me since a late-night, noisy get together with friends where we got talking (some might say gossiping) about the alleged cross-party sexual politics taking place in our government. The men, it was said, were using sex as a strategy to silence the women from the opposite camps. The [...]]]> Kudzai Makombe

Queen Elizabeth I kept a reign on power by becoming "The Virgin Queen" Credit www.PDImages.com

This question has been puzzling me since a late-night, noisy get together with friends where we got talking (some might say gossiping) about the alleged cross-party sexual politics taking place in our government. The men, it was said, were using sex as a strategy to silence the women from the opposite camps. The woman targeted  loses her standing once she’s been seduced as it quickly becomes general knowledge among other politicians.

“Once you see that so and so who used to be so vocal has gone quite then you know they’ve been had,” said one friend. Much like the boarding school strategy employed by male students to remove the top performing girl student’s ranking as number one in class I’m told. But, never having been to boarding school, much less a co-educational school, I am not aware.

As much as this dirty trick is an age-old male strategy to silence female opponents, women throughout history have used their sexuality, that is — whom one has sex with (or not), in what ways, why, under what circumstances, and with what outcomes — as a strategy to gain power.

I’m thinking Anne Boleyn, Cleopatra and Eva Peron. Make no mistake about it. These were no dimwitted women bumbling their way to power. Neither were they the most attractive of women. No doubt their intelligence, wit, charm, humour and deep passion to succeed all combined to give them charisma, which played an important part in their sexual allure. And their sexual power lay in this desirability, not in handing out sexual favours.

More recently, we had general head shaking disapproval from many quarters over German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Christian Democratic Union Parliamentary candidate Vera Lengsfeld’s bosomy “We have more to offer” poster, which featured in last August’s election campaign. The posters were put up by Lengsfeld, who said she wanted to give the campaign a bit of humour. Reading up on Lengsfeld I found out she has a degree in Philosophy of Religion and is a civil rights activist which was my confirmation that she really thought this poster idea through. I wonder if there would have been less head shaking if the bosoms had not been middle-aged ones.

The example of all these women got me thinking that male politicians’ strategy of using sex against women could be turned on its head after the style of Anne Boleyn. It seems that sexual unavailability will get you ahead. Anne Boleyn’s “Queen or nothing” strategy worked well with Henry VIII. She refused to be his mistress and all the while his attentions and favours towards her flourished. Eventually he married her, annulling his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. But no sooner had she become Queen than Henry VIII began to lose interest and eventually got around to beheading her.

Elizabeth I (Anne Boleyn’s daughter) perfected her mother’s strategy. She came into power at age 25 despite being declared illegitimate and stayed in power for 44 years until her death. Sometimes called ‘The Virgin Queen’, she never married. Not only did Elizabeth avoid losing her power to a husband by marrying, she also avoided the problem of succession. Personally I’m not convinced Elizabeth was really a virgin, but either way, her strategy of sexual aloofness certainly kept her in the game of politics.

I can just picture many readers are tsk tsking, thinking this type of discussion is not going to help advance the feminist cause. Some will argue that in those days women may have had to use their ‘feminine wiles’ in addition to their intellectual skills to get ahead but now we have to employ ‘fair’ tactics and play strictly by the book. The problem for me is that men’s unfair tactics — violence, money and character assassination being the primary ones — are rarely questioned. In fact, they tend to be rewarded.

Surely denying women use of their sexuality in the game of politics and power is yet another reflection of the power imbalances between women and men where women’s sexual rights are limited while men’s sexual freedom grows. In the so-called “dirty game of politics”, are we stifling women’s progress to the top by refusing them the right to use their sexuality while we applaud men’s use of the same?

Fabrications is the theme of the  2010 calendar produced by the  Center for the Study of AIDS.  The gorgeous images are digitally manipulated African textiles.

The notion of “fabrications” was inspired by the many [...]]]> By Mary  Crewe and Pierre Brouard
Center for the Study of AIDS, University of Pretoria, South Africa

Fabrications is the theme of the  2010 calendar produced by the  Center for the Study of AIDS.  The gorgeous images are digitally manipulated African textiles.

The notion of “fabrications” was inspired by the many stories of the AIDS quilts –  designed to tell a story about someone who had died of AIDS, to honour them and to create a memorial to them that could be used as part of the fabric of people’s daily lives.

A fabrication is in this sense both a physical construction of fabrics, but also a psychological and social construction, the story of a life.

We need to tell people’s stories but we also need to acknowledge that we use stories to make sense of AIDS, to cope with it, to fashion it into something bearable, to give it meaning.

Story telling is a universal art form, but has a special significance for Africa. This calendar looks at different African fabrics, each telling a story about its creator and its country. The calendar offers ways to take these designs to tell new stories and produce new “fabrications”.                                                          

Many of the AIDS quilt stories had elements of “fabrication”, in that they were a blend of truth, memory and fantasy. It is the fantasy and fiction that is just as fascinating as “the truth”.

In the same way as people mythologized the dead, we as societies deal with HIV and AIDS by creating myths and fabrications of the epidemic, to cope with and make sense of it.

There are the myths of virgin protection, the myths of HIV in oranges, the myths of worms in condoms, of deliberate infection through syringes, and many other myths that are part of the fabric of dealing with HIV and AIDS.

But there are other fabrications and fantasies as well – that routine testing is a prevention strategy and can bring about universal treatment, that male circumcision is the new silver bullet, that communities can easily absorb orphans, that sexuality and identity are simply and easily understood and manipulated, that behaviour change is as simple as ABC.

In its work the CSA strives to challenge many of these fabrications, find ways to create new representations of the epidemic, to tell new stories, to deconstruct and reconstruct society.

At the end of this calendar are instructions on how to make a quilt, your own fabrication.

A. When it is shown in a pornographic magazine, film or website.
B. Never.
C. When it is emailed to government officials urging action to improve public health.

One could argue about A and B but this blog is [...]]]>

By Paula Modersohn Becker

When is a photo of a woman giving birth considered pornographic? Take your pick:

A. When it is shown in a pornographic magazine, film or website.
B. Never.
C. When it is emailed to government officials urging action to improve public health.

One could argue about A and B but this blog is about C.

Earlier this year, in Zambia, Chansa Kabwela, news editor at the feisty opposition newspaper The Post, was charged with circulating pornography with intent to corrupt public morals. What was her crime? During a nationwide strike by Zambia’s miserably paid doctors, a woman allegedly gave birth without medical assistance in a hospital car park. The baby was in a breech position and later died.

Her family sent Kabwela the photos but she found them too graphic for publication. Instead, she emailed them to the vice-president and other government officials and women’s groups, urging a negotiated end to the strike to avoid more deaths.

President Rupiyah Banda found the photos “morbid and peculiar” and Kabwela, a 29-year-old mother of two, was charged with the porn offence, which carries a five-year jail sentence. The state argued that giving birth is sacred in Zambia and the photos were disrespectful.

If giving birth is so sacred, why was the woman delivering in a car park?

Good sense prevailed and in November a judge acquitted Kabwela.

The Post has long been harassed by government for exposing corruption. This court case is one more instance, using birth, women and tradition as a cover to erode press freedom.

A very famous Christmas birth

This being the season of a famous birth, on the other side of the world, in New Zealand, a mischievous billboard about the immaculate conception has angered Catholics.               

It shows Joseph and Mary in bed. She looks blissful; he looks dejected. The kicker: “Poor Joseph. God is a hard act to follow.”

The twist is that the originator is an Anglican archdeacon who commissioned an ad agency to produce a Christmas poster. The archdeacon argues, somewhat confusedly, that the purpose was to highlight that Christmas is about love, not about Mary’s impregnation by God.

Within hours the billboard  was defaced with brown paint. Well, at least this is better than rioting over caricatures of the Prophet or charging an editor with pornography.

Giving birth is charged with cultural meaning: it can be sacred, pornographic, joyful, “eculiar” or offensive.  For half a million women, every year, it is deadly.

Yet these deaths do not spark the same outrage as a billboard or photographs.

My wish this Christmas is quite simple: safe delivery for women everywhere, not in a car park and not in a manger, neither holy nor unholy, whether through sex, artificial insemination or immaculate conception. Just safe.

***

Read about why maternal mortality remains so intractable here and about midwives in India.

Marie Mendene  is an extraordinary activist from Cameroon and one of the first African women to say publicly that she lives with HIV, in the 1990s, when AIDS was a disease of shame and blame.

This is one of my favourite photos about AIDS [...]]]> We share the wish of Marie Mendene Owono:  SEND AIDS AWAY.

By M. Sayagues

Marie Mendene  is an extraordinary activist from Cameroon and one of the first African women to say publicly that she lives with HIV, in the 1990s, when AIDS was a disease of shame and blame.

This is one of my favourite photos about AIDS in Africa. I took it at Sunshine, her NGO in Douala, in 2003, before antiretroviral treatment became widely available. Only a few Cameroonians in cities could get the life-saving pills.

The day I took the photo, Marie had queued for seven hours and  received only half of her monthly ARV pills. She was understandably upset about the poor logistics and delivery of medicines. AIDS magnified all the inadequacies of health systems.

That was then. Today, nearly three million people in Africa are on ARV treatment. This seemed like a dream then, but activists were campaigning hard to make it come true.

Marie had a clear vision of activism. “We should go beyond the begging bowl and the appeal to compassion, beyond the stage of being used to do prevention and awareness, and become part of real-decision making around AIDS,” she told me.

Marie is to the right in the pic, with a fellow activist.

I will call her Gabra (gift, in Amharic), for our conversation was private. I met her at a monastery near Lalibela, the mystical city of [...]]]>

Patriarchal in all senses. By M. Sayagues

What drives a 17-year-old girl to enter a monastery? Today she is 30, and still happy about her choice. Her eyes sparkle and her laughter comes easy. She exudes peace.

I will call her Gabra (gift, in Amharic), for our conversation was private. I met her at a monastery near Lalibela, the mystical city of rock-hewn churches in northern Ethiopia.

Monastic life has a long tradition and prestige in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The oldest monastery dates from the 6th century. A monastic renaissance between the 13th and 16th century brought great moral and political authority to clergy.

Custodians of tradition

Gabra’s rock-hewn monastery dates from the 12th century. Her room is excavated in the pink tufa rock. Two built-in-the-rock platforms, covered with a thin mattress, do as couch and bed. An old cupboard holds a few plates and cooking utensils, three of the long green robes worn by Ethiopian peasants, the white headscarves that nuns wear, and two pairs of sandals.

For income, she and her fellow nuns weave cotton and silk into diaphanous shawls, sold at the monastery. She rises before dawn to pray – the first of daily seven prayers. Her ambition is to study theology in Addis Ababa or in Lalibela.

Gabra is not completely cut off from the world. She has a cellphone and a radio. On Sundays, relatives and friends visit.
Choices

I ask her if marriage and children ever interested her.

“It is a privilege to be single and not to have children,” she says softly, smiling but firmly. She sounds relieved.

Unmarried myself, I agree that motherhood and marriage are just one option. I understand the spiritual call, the peace of contemplation and withdrawal, of a simple lifestyle unencumbered by material things.

Yet I wonder if female genital mutilation had to do with her decision.

In Ethiopia’s eastern region, a girl might suffer genital cutting between the age of 15-17, before marriage. Her clitoris would be cut, sometimes the labia.

She has a right to her bodily integrity.

In Somali region, she would have infibulation at a younger age: the complete removal of her genitalia and, to preserve virginity, being stitched shut with an acacia thorn, leaving only a hole to urinate.

About three-quarters of women in Ethiopia between 15-49 have suffered some form of genital mutilation, said a government survey of 2005. The practice is fading – but too slowly, say activists.

It is not called mutilation for nothing. Sex and childbirth will be extremely painful and dangerous.

If finding a husband means suffering genital cutting, a hard mattress in a rock-hewn room is a much better place than a king-size wedding bed.

Gabra did not speak English, my male guide spoke little, and sex topics are taboo in Ethiopia, so the conversation went in another direction. Gabra was curious about my life, my work, and my daughter.                                         

“Would you want to live like me?” she asked. “I don’t think I could,” I said. “But I feel the beauty of this simplicity.” She smiled.

Ethiopia looks and feels ancient and spiritual.  Social cohesion is remarkable. But the same lifestyle that makes ferenji (foreigner, in Amharic) wax lyrical about the “biblical landscape and people” binds women to painful and dangerous traditions.

Some traditions are simply annoying. Women cannot join the rites if they are menstruating, ergo unclean. At no time of the month can women, local or foreign, enter the most sacred chapel of the Lalibela complex, Bete Mikael, where King Lalibela is buried. We are only allowed a glimpse from the door. In some monasteries, no females, including of the animal kingdom, are allowed.

Monastery visitors take leave at 5 PM (international time; in Ethiopian time, 11 in the night). I make my way down the stony path, the tufa rock glowing pink and gold in the sunset.

I am thinking that the monastery – the spiritual world – may be a blessed refuge from the hardship of being born female in a deeply patriarchal world.

Read  recent IPS stories about genital cutting in Uganda, Sierra Leone and cross-border in West Africa.

It is about beauty. The beauty of nature: the splendid jacarandas blooming just now that turn Pretoria into a lilac-purple dreamscape.

It s said that  50,000 jacarandas line the streets.   When the blossoms drift to the [...]]]>

By F. Beaumont

I just have to do it. This posting is not about gender, politics, foreign aid or photoshopped  models.

It is about beauty. The beauty of nature: the splendid jacarandas blooming just now that turn Pretoria into a lilac-purple dreamscape.

It s said that  50,000 jacarandas line the streets.   When the blossoms drift to the ground, carpetting sidewalks, it’s like  a magical  purple rain. Awesome.

By F. Beaumont

http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.ca/bblank.asp?id=6895

Digital cosmetic surgery – nip-and-tuck, botox and liposuction, on the screen, with a click – render these models picture-perfect (excuse the pun) and thoroughly unreal.

There [...]]]> Fashion models in ads are optical illusions and the award-winning  video Evolution of Beauty, from the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty proves the point eloquently. Watch it at:

http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.ca/bblank.asp?id=6895

Digital cosmetic surgery – nip-and-tuck, botox and liposuction, on the screen, with a click – render these models picture-perfect (excuse the pun) and thoroughly unreal.

There is no way a non-photoshopped  woman can attain that perfection. Hey, we are human. We have flaws.

In France and the UK, women lawmakers recently proposed that ads should disclose when their photos have been digitally manipulated to a great extent. They argue that bodily digital perfection in ads undermines the body  image and self-esteem of girls and women.

Anorexia, bulimia, eating disorders, obsession with thinness  and unnecessary cosmetic surgery follow. Meanwhile, sales of weight-loss products and push-up bras soar.

The tricky problem for lawmakers and advertisers alike is where to draw the line between (acceptable) touching up a pimple or a wrinkle and engaging in full (unacceptable) deception.

Among the most egregious offenders: the French magazine Paris Match nipped the bulging love handles of President Nicholas Sarkozy, in evidence while he canoed bare-chested in the USA.

Oprah Winfrey always has a waist in the cover of O magazine, while flat-chested Keira Knightley miraculously acquired big boobs for her recent Chanel Mademoiselle perfume ad.

The alcoholic drink Campari must have some magical effects on bones because actress Jessica Alba got sharper collarbone and knee definition, longer arms and a tinier waist in its recent ad.

Eating disorders once afflicted mostly affluent white teen girls in the West.  Now they have spread across the world, among all ages and ethnic groups and, increasingly, among young men.

It is  harder to quantify how the unreal perfect bodies in ads distort the self-image of girls and boys worldwide.

Watch the video and share your thoughts about the proposed disclosure measures.

What happens when the relatives of the murdered confront their murderers? What happens if they have to live with the murderers?

This is the theme of “My neighbour, my killer”, a film about Rwanda’s extraordinary attempt at reconciliation. This documentary by Anne Aghion, which premiered in New York two weeks ago at the [...]]]>

Remembering in Rwanda. Courtesy Anne Aghion

What happens when the relatives of the murdered confront their murderers? What happens if they have to live with the murderers?

This is the theme of “My neighbour, my killer”, a film about Rwanda’s extraordinary attempt at reconciliation. This documentary by Anne Aghion, which premiered in New York two weeks ago at the Human Rights Watch film festival, follows a gacaca or community court during five years.

Rwanda has set up some 12, 000 gacaca where killers face the relatives of those they killed during the genocide in 1994. (Read an interview with Aghion here).

A world and an age away, the same questions emerge in “Katyn”, the magnificent, sombre and sober epic movie made in 2008 by Polish director Andrzej Wajda about the Soviet massacre of 20,000 Poles during World War 2.  During the ensuing five decades of occupation of Poland, the Soviets falsified history in a web of institutional lies and blamed the Nazis for the mass murders.

Both films are meditations on memory and history and their distortions, on loss, cruelty and forgiving, on imperfect justice, atonement and healing.

Women are central to both films – they are witness to horror and keepers of memory.

Think of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo haunting the Argentine junta with the photographs of their disappeared sons and daughters in the 1980s.

Gendering truth, gendering abuse

At truth and reconciliation commissions across the world, the bulk of testimonies by women dwell more on their loved ones and less on their own sufferings.

This is changing, as truth commissions become more gender-aware and seek gendered narratives. Earlier commissions, such as Argentina and Chile, were gender-neutral (some say gender-blind). South Africa was gender-neutral in its mandate but had special hearings for women. Peru’ commission had a gender unit. Later ones, like Haiti, Sierra Leone and Timor Leste, have looked specifically at sexual violence.

And more: the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia have ruled that mass rape, sexual assault, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced abortion and forced pregnancy may be crimes against humanity, torture and genocide.

A third film that I saw recently is “Persepolis”, Marjane Satrapi’s wildly popular graphic novel turned animated movie, about her life growing up as a girl who likes Michael Jackson and punk music under the ayatollahs in Iran in the 1980s.

Protesting in Tehran. Photo: M. Avazbeigi

Its charming animation overlays a dreadful national and family history of imprisonment, torture, disappearances, failed revolutions, dashed political hopes, war and Shariah.

The movie conveys a poignant description of another form of gender abuse: the repression of women’s freedom to dress, move about, work, study, divorce, inherit, love and have fun.

Repressed, but not cowed into submission: as I write, on the streets across Iran, women are protesting, being beaten up, arrested and killed, challenging theocracy, demanding their rights.

(Read about women protesters in Iran and about dismantling a culture of impunity in Guatemala, Peru and Democratic Republic of Congo)