This week’s readings complicated even further the discussion we were having last week in regards to subjectivity, privilege, and conscious feminists methodologies (why did I not see this coming!). I enjoyed McDowell’s piece, couldn’t sift through the theoretically-heavy Scott piece, and thought Miraftab pointed out something we may miss when discussing privilege and vantage-point: regardless of all your reflexivity and positionality, where you stand in research isn’t always discernible before-hand.
“Intersubjectivity rather than ‘objectivity’ characterizes the ideal relationship between a feminist researcher and her subjects'” (McDowell, 406). There’s that precursor we’re so used to: inter-. Interdisciplinary, intersectionality, and now adding to the heap, intersubjectivity. Not only do we need to work across methodologies and silos of knowledge formation, take into account all the layers and identities that make up social location and experience, but we also need to see ourselves and the work we do with others as an interconnected, interchanging power relationship, not just top down from our privileged, assumedly Western guise.
What I found most valuable across all three pieces was McDowell’s conclusion that while the work we do aims to empower the seemingly marginalized, we need to be humble and realize the only person we should and could empower is ourselves. “Is it a realistic aim to endeavor to empower the subjects of our research or does this in itself reveal contestable notions of domination? A more appropriate aim may be to provide the means towards empowerment” (McDowell, 408). She goes on to write, “[W]e as scholars, cannot, nor should we aim to, empower our participants. That is a political task for them, or better, one that we might share together” (McDowell, 413).
This reminded me of an alternative vantage point to the colonizing view that the veil oppresses all its wearers and in hand, Islamic women are all oppressed. In Three Cups of Tea (2006), one of the Central Asia Institute’s (CAI) Board Members asks a Pakistani woman how she feels about the oppressive nature of the veil, in which case the taken aback woman replies, something along the lines of, “You Western women think we’re the ones who are oppressed by the veil to please our men, but women in the West have to cut and change your bodies to keep your men happy.” To which point I thought, touche.
This speaks to the Miraftab piece quite nicely. By assuming we know how we’re viewed as Western (white) women and men, and the privilege that others will counter assume in us, by us, “it risks researchers’ ‘new methodological self-absorption’ and egocentrism emerging from constant self-appraisal and self-reflexivity” (Miraftab, 597). Perceived privilege is one side of the double edged sword that is reflexivity (Miraftab, 602).
McDowell quotes Daniels “‘It is in the nature of ethical problems that they are not generally clear-but, readily or finally resolvable. It is in the nature of fieldwork that you are likely to find yourself up to the waist in a morass of personal ties, intimate experiences and lofty and base sentiments as your own sense of decency, vanity or outrage is tried'” (McDowell, 408). There are no easy answers, no lines in the sand to put up a DO NOT ENTER sign. We walk in quicksand and here I think of Elise’s words, and “need others to check us” in order to stay relevant, respectful, and righteous.
Confessions of a Bleeding Heart 
Incorrect Citation
After thinking about my post last night, I realized the source I cited, Three Cups, is not in fact where my example of how an Islamic woman would view Western women as the oppressed came from. This came from Inga Muscio’s, Cunt (2002). The entire chapter, Acrimony of Cunts (122-139), reiterates what we’ve been discussing regarding empowering yourself and seeing your own oppressions before you assume others’.
Muscio quotes her interview with Soraya Mire, a Somali filmmaker who created Fire Eyes, about genital mutilation:
I’ve learned that American women look at women like me to hide from their own pain. They can’t face their pain, and mine is so obvious, they think they can help me without looking at themselves. . . . In America, women pay the money that is theirs and no one else’s to go to a doctor who cuts them up so they can create or sustain an image men want. Men are the mirror. Western women cut themselves up voluntarily. In my country, a child is woken up at three in the morning, held down and cut with a razor blade. She has no choice. Western women pay to get their bodies mutilated (125-126).
Muscio is a powerful writer and I found her book liberating in multifaceted ways. Her language is colloquial and welcomed when talking about difficult issues. She writes,
If you want to find out how your oppression infringes on your freedom, walk into the bathroom, stare deeply into your eyes, and face your pain without blame. Don’t go feeling sorry for them ladies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan until you do this first. Don’t be dissin’ on unbermodel-types with silicone titties until you do this first. Don’t sneer are women from a class or ethnicity different from your own, at lesbians, bi-women, straight women, fat women, skinny women, old women or young women until you do this first. There will remain much sadness in the world until people are willing to rise to the task of facing the world’s pain in the bathroom mirror (138-139).
I have this book if anyone would like to borrow it. It’s not heavily theoretical at all and is more of an action guide for third wave feminists. I highly suggest you purchase and pen-up your own though.