JOE-ANN CHAVRY
Today is International Women’s Day (IWD). Like every year on this date, we face two extremes in the media: women’s hypervisibility versus the now-very-common: “What about International Men’s Day?”. While those will get a number of keyboard warriors excited, we will, again, be falling into debates that effectively conceal individual and institutional responsibilities for the discrimination against women and non-binary people.
By now, quite frankly, the rhetorical act of “whataboutism” has become exhausting and pointless. Yet, if we dare to dig a bit deeper, we would see how such comments – more often than not expressed by men – in fact reveal the ubiquity and hegemony of the binary logics which operate within our modern societies. It is indeed through the lens of simplistic oppositions, that the equation becomes simple: if women gain more public visibility, men must by default be losing importance. This is ridiculous.
Audre Lorde, black, lesbian, feminist socialist academic points out that much of our history is conditioned by Western European ethos that demand us to see human differences in simple binaries: white/black, superior/inferior, male/female. She adds that within such political economies, we are programmed to see human differences with fear and loathing, or, alternatively, in terms of profit and not as human needs.
Categorising the world in binary is neither natural nor novel. It lies under the belly of the most deeply rooted institutions of the modern world, even those that pretend to be “gender-blind” and progressive such as computer technologies, including social media. According to Meredith Broussard, a professor of data journalism at NYU, the digital is yet to be able to properly express gender as it rests upon the binary code. In the 1950s, when modern computer systems were first designed, gender was usually considered as “fixed”. One would fill a paper form and be offered two choices: male or female. And they would pick one. However, as Broussard explains, the experiences of gender have radically changed since then, leaving us with the need for a more inclusive code to accommodate non-conforming individuals.
Indeed algorithms and AI are far from being agnostic or objective. Instead, they operate in a world of two opposing symbols: zeros and ones. In other words, as our lives become increasingly mediated by the code and by its oversimplified logic where data is framed as a “natural” structure and sequence, our “natural” conceptualisation of the world, and by extension of gender issues, remain framed along dualistic principles.
Of course, such binary thinking goes beyond being categorised as ‘man’ or ‘woman’. In reality, it is something that is rather encoded in our colonial heritage, and in the extraction of labour through racialised and gendered capitalism. While some would like to believe that we have reached absolute gender parity and democracy in a modern, postcolonial, context, and that International Women’s day is somehow redundant, others ― especially businesses ― fall into another extreme: the politics of (hyper)visibility of women.
For many, today is the only time this year that their attention will be on women by representing one in a post, an advert or a promotional code. But not all representations are made equal. Like for algorithms and datasets, women’s media representations remain embedded in cultural, social, political settings which reflect the implicit values and agendas of their contexts. For example, we will see the images of women who have made strides and who are an example to others. While we should value their achievements, Audre Lorde reminds us, that those are a pretence to homogeneity of experience. Conflated with ideals of sisterhood, such representations will only result in illustrating white feminist values and neoliberal triumphs as main metrics of success, thereby excluding marginalised women from the discourse of “womanhood”.
Again, our limitation will lie in failing to recognise difference. Through media representations, it will be assumed that all Mauritian women, regardless of their ethnicity, class or sexual orientation experience femininity in the same way and have the same goals in life. From this perspective, the need for unity will again be misnamed for the need for homogeneity, while a demand for change will be perceived as a feminist kill-joy move.
While social media will yet again be flooded with posts defending IWD and posts criticising IWD, it is crucial to find places where more meaningful and reflexive conversations can be had in regards to the social categorisation bestowed upon us by gender norms.
Drawing on Paulo Freire and The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Lorde continues by arguing that the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape. Instead, and crucially, it is about that “piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us” that demands challenging.
Our future survival depends upon our ability to relate with one another while looking at the complexities of our different life experiences and subjectivities; and how those intersect with structural forces. Imbued in a world of binary thinking, we have built in us the old blueprints of expectations based on duality, condoning oppression through codes and normativity. It is up to us to dismantle, or at least question, such a predicament. It is in the spaces of in-betweeness that we can resist the ubiquitous and tyrannical zeroes and ones, to find alternatives where the “good” finally addresses diverse human needs and character.
Make International Women’s day about collective liberation and not another iteration of a dichotomous logic characterised by gender-blindness or overzealous neoliberal representations.