“What does he know about being a woman in Mauritius?” I wondered when watching our Prime Minister, a privileged man, gloat about gender parity in Mauritius. Between increasing reports of feminicide and studies revealing Mauritius’ measly structural efforts to providing safe spaces for women*, I find this statement rather preposterous. Yet, PKJ is not the only one that upholds a distorted version of the embodied female experience. Whether informed by a political economic agenda, or simply to gather clout online, many of our countrymen – and women – have taken up media spaces and instrumentalised images of women to gain attention, thereby indulging in acts of symbolic violence against them.
If the communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan contends that television has brought the brutality of war into people’s living rooms, the Internet and other memes, have brought violence against women out of it. Memes pop up on our social media feed with the same bull-headed determination with which politicians promise to change people’s lives during electoral campaigns. They are on everyone’s feed and, more often than not, we just scroll and chuckle seeing them as “harmless” casual jokes. However, in my recent gallivanting on social media platforms I have come across a number of disturbing memes that have gone viral and that threaten violence against ‘deviant’ women. ‘Deviance’ is often based on ideals of civilizational feminism and of “respectable feminity”. The notion of respectability has a colonial legacy and is traceable to Victorian era principles of respectable conduct for women, including “restraint”, “self-regulation” and “control”, along with “domesticity” as a central code of respectability. Women that do not match such criteria, by being ‘too loud’, ‘too sexual’, ‘too big’, and basically not ‘domesticated’ enough are often mocked or castigated on social media; with Black and coloured female bodies being at the worst receiving end of the vitriol and buffoonery spectrum. Within such framing, violence doesn’t have to be actual harm caused; but rather, the rhetoric alone constitutes a form of symbolic violence, that subjects women to heteropatriarchal and Eurocentric social orders that dehumanise them. Although met with some resistance by other social media users, such memes are often justified as part of “controversial humour” and freedom of speech, thus reflecting a male-centric, himpathetic, point of view of such social constructs.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions
Within a matrix constituted of digital hate speeches, cyber bullying and the sharing of pornographic material involving women and children, as well as the lack of content moderation on platforms located in niche markets that necessitate a complex set of literacy competences, the Mauritian government has started establishing safeguards. In 2021 only, we saw two legal proposals: first the changes the ICT Act that were promptly rejected for raising human rights concerns, and now, the Cybersecurity and Cybercrime Bill. The government posits that the whole purpose of the legislation is to shield the population against cybercriminals. With sections tackling issues of cyber bullying and of revenge pornography in their bill, the authorities adopt a paternalistic and protective tone. However, various commentators have argued that this move, in fact, reveals fascist fantasies, as every Mauritian’s digital move would be accessed and tracked. While much has been written about this bill from that angle, I then ask, what about instances of symbolic violence that are so subtle, almost like a misogynistic pathology; concealed under banter and freedom of speech? Will relevant authorities be trained, equipped and held accountable to deal with content moderation when gendered – and racial – abuse is reported? I doubt it. This bill approaches gendered hate speech as individual occurrences rather than the societal and cultural problems that require solid interventions that take into account our peculiar context.
Our Western-Patriarchal Genesis
Mauritius is a society that took birth into modernity through colonial violence and through a Western-patriarchal economic ideology that turned Black and coloured women into inferior beings marked by absence of reason, beauty, or a mind capable of technical and scientific discoveries. This is the historical legacy that still underpins our framing of the Mauritian woman today and the narrative of who she is, and, most importantly, of whom she ought to be. Feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick elaborates that “The place of black women is deemed unrecognisable because their ontological existence is both denied and deniable as a result of the regimes of colonialism, racism-sexism, transatlantic slavery, European intellectual systems, patriarchy, white feminity, and white feminism.” I’m not convinced that the civil servants and legal teams behind the Cybersecurity and Cybercrime Bill took into account the histories of gendered and racialised crime perpetuated against women when they drafted this bill. By failing to understand this context, the bill will end up belonging to Mauritius’ current collection of safety net programs that provide inadequate protection.
At the risk of being called a feminist killjoy (again), my vantage point troubles current political discourses that frame gender parity as being a success in Mauritius. Between the mundane saturation of symbolic violence on social media platforms and the state’s inability to address gendered violence, albeit proclaiming itself as the arbiter of protection, we still find ourselves within discursive spaces where gendered violence is normalized, while the sources of said-violence are not entirely addressed. In addition to being vulnerable to physical violence, women have a metaphorical safety net that is actually feeble. It has holes that other social actors will readily fill with narratives that inform their prerogatives regardless of the harm caused to women through presumably innocuous acts of symbolic violence.
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* In 2021, The World Economic Forum ranked Mauritius 110 out of 156 countries on the Global Gender Gap Index. In April 2021, the Minister of Gender Equality and Family Welfare (Gender Ministry) announced that there had been 293 reported cases of domestic violence in just 18 days. Further, Statistics Mauritius notes that out of the reported cases of domestic violence in Mauritius in 2020, 87.3% were women.