US-based Japanese-Canadian feminist and scholar Setsu Shigematsu shares her critique of the dominance of multicultural liberal feminism, which she argues excludes and marginalises anti-imperialist feminist discourse.  She also talks about the influences that inform her own critique, the Subic rape case, and a women-of-color radical feminist movement called INCITE!

Setsu Shigematsu received her doctoral degree from Cornell University in 2003, with an interdisciplinary background that traverses the fields of Asian and Asian American Studies, and critical gender studies. Her intellectual and scholarly concerns include the historical relationship between US and Japanese imperialisms, transnational liberation movements, comparative feminist and critical theory, and media and cultural studies. She has published articles on Asian anti-imperialist women’s movements, the transnational circulation of Japanese popular cultural forms, women of color organising for prison abolition, and feminist philosophy.

Isis had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Shigematsu during her visit to the Philippines in December 2006.

Isis International-Manila [Isis]: We feel most fortunate to have caught your lecture at the University of the Philippines, sponsored by the University Center for Women's Studies (UCWS). Could you share your critique of mainstream US feminism with our readers?

Setsu Shigematsu [Shigematsu]: In the talk I gave at the University of the Philippines, I characterised mainstream US feminism today with the phrase “multicultural liberal feminism.” By that, I'm referring to the convergence of multiculturalism and liberal feminism, as the latter has become the most commonly understood, popularised, and institutionalised form of feminism since the second wave. Although there are many different schools of feminism including Marxist, socialist, and radical feminism, lesbian-feminism, and so forth, definitely liberal feminism, post-second wave, became dominant and mainstream. It has, in certain ways, merged with multiculturalism, by which I am referring to a policy of selective inclusion of racial and ethnic “minorities,” to promote an image of diversity, obscuring continuing forms of structural inequities and institutional racism.  Both liberal feminism and multiculturalism operate as reformist and additive models, by incorporating women and people of color into the existing framework of the imperialist nation-state, promoting a discourse of “individual rights” and “equality.”  Because they are both reformist, they are not fundamental threats to those in power.

Multicultural liberal feminism has become part of the state apparatus, such that white women and women of color are now agents on the front-lines of empire-building, as bombers, as stateswomen, and prison guards, as the world came to see through the infamous images of Abu Ghraib.

Isis: Who would you say personifies this “multicultural liberal feminism”?

Shigematsu: I'm not sure if you are hinting towards the kind of people that I spoke of in my talk, since I referred first to Condeleeza Rice, who is the most visible example of this paradigm, but I was more concerned with feminist scholars such as Catharine MacKinnon. I think we need to critique how academic feminists in the US promote a kind of American nationalism in their discourse, and without critical reflection, assume the legitimacy of the US nation-state.  Recently, I participated in a conference in Syracuse, New York, called Feminism and War, last October [2006].  Coming away from the conference, it seemed apparent that there is an assumption of a kind of feminist-duty to reform the nation, and in so doing, the nation is naturalised and not adequately problematised for its right to exist as such.  By assuming the naturalness and given-ness of the US as a nation, such feminist discourse, I think, in effect, naturalises its trajectory of imperialism.  The US nation has, from its outset, been a colonising nation founded on genocide of Native peoples and slavery. Since its conception, it [the US] has been a colonising imperialistic force.

Until feminists get to the roots and begin to question the basis of the United States and question the legitimacy of the United States as a nation, I think that the default position will continue to be a feminism that unwittingly re-produces a reformist nationalism.

Feminist discourse will use an anti-war discourse, which is not the same as an anti-imperialist discourse, and assume that the goal is to have the United States just scale back its imperialist violence, or be less rabidly militaristic in its imperialism.  It seems to me that especially in the post-9/11 juncture, a key reason that feminist critique hasn’t adequately denounced the superpower role of the United States has to do with an acceptance of the discourse of “terrorism” that undergirds the “war on terror.”  This problematic acceptance of the dominant discourse of “terrorism” is symptomatic of an identification with the national community that simultaneously downplays the much greater atrocities of US-sponsored state terrorism.

My talk reflects my response to a very disturbing time for me as a feminist scholar—for me to observe the effects of a first world empowerment model of feminism.  Since the emergence of feminism in the United States, anti-imperialism has not been an integral part of mainstream feminist discourse. It's always been a much more minority element.  My work specifically tries to question how, even first world anti-imperialist feminist movements, while they claim to be anti-imperialist due to their position, still reproduce imperialist forms of power relationships. My work looks at both the Japanese case and the US case; and tries to critically interrogate the ways in which global feminism and transnational feminism may still be carrying out certain kinds of imperialist feminist practices.

Isis: Your critique says that, generally, you have a feminist movement in the US that doesn't really address anti-imperialism. Who then perhaps would be some feminists in the US who you think have actually raised an anti-imperialist perspective or viewpoint in their feminism? And, who is at the forefront of this anti-imperialist feminism?

Shigematsu: Well, my own perspective on feminism has been influenced deeply by a new movement called INCITE!, a women-of-color radical feminist movement that seeks to stop violence against women.

This movement emerged as a critique of the mainstream feminist movement—in particular, a critique of the mainstream anti-violence movement. Initially, the mainstream feminist anti-violence movement was catalysed and formed by a radical feminist critique of patriarchal violence against women, which tended to focus on domestic violence and rape. However, since this anti-violence movement emerged, over the decades it has become institutionalised as part of state feminism. Hence, many rape crisis centres, rape crisis hotlines, and women’s shelters that are state-funded are tied in with the police system.  Then, as a result of becoming tied in with the police system, they're tied in with the prison system, which in turn is linked to the military industrial complex that exports its carceral technologies around the globe.

Many women of color, in particular those who lack socioeconomic power, are going to be much more reluctant to call on the police or call even a crisis line if it is going to pressure them to turn in their partner, husband, or girlfriends for that matter, given the homophobia they will likely encounter. INCITE! has raised a critique on the intersection of state violence and interpersonal violence, pointing to how the state reproduces many forms of gendered violence, whether it is police and prison guards assaulting women and youths, or through the destruction and dis-memberment of families through detention, deportation, and indefinite prison sentences.  Here we see how what began as radical feminism becomes linked to imperialist outcomes.

I think the critique of state violence is an essential area that mainstream feminism has failed to address adequately throughout its history, in both the first and second wave.  Critique of state violence—including policing, the prisons, and the military complex—is necessary to really understand the scope and interconnectedness of gendered and racialised violence that is not only the inevitable side-effect, but an integral aim of US aggression, as it manifests in both domestic and international fronts.  So I think, this movement is offering an important feminist model that links violence against women to the US state.

Isis: Can you share with us some of the projects of INCITE!?

Shigematsu:  First, I might mention INCITE’s anthology, “The Color of Violence,” that was recently published in 2006 by South End Press.  “The Color of Violence” was the name of the first of three major conferences.  It took place in 2000 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, while the second took place in Chicago in 2002, and the third in New Orleans in 2005, before it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.  The fourth major conference, in Santa Barbara, California was called “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” and focused on a critique of the non-profit industrial complex.  Each local chapter of INCITE! engages in its own on-the-ground organising depending on the needs and goals of its members.

One of the projects that INCITE! has become well-known for is its collaboration with Critical Resistance, a nationwide movement against the prison industrial complex.  Members of INCITE! and Critical Resistance have produced a manifesto that offers a critique of the mainstream anti-violence movement. It's taught in university classes now around the nation as a new position on the intersections of state violence and interpersonal violence. I think that this document has been and will continue to be highly influential. The key is the collaboration of the two movements.
 
INCITE! has also produced a lot of anti-war visibility with its Campaign Against War, Occupation, and Colonization (see <www.incite-national.org>). As part of this campaign, since the invasion of Afghanistan, INCITE! has created and distributed anti-war posters that specifically raise awareness and visibility about violence against Muslim and Arab women and their communities. These posters feature a portrait of a Muslim woman that expresses a critique of how Muslim women are being erased in this so-called war against terror. The figure of the terrorist, as we know, is overwhelmingly projected as an Arab or brown Muslim male. In displaying this image, this was one of the ways to raise visibility about the violence being done against Arab and Muslim women, and their communities, through the bogus war on terror.

Isis: Then again, some feminists argue that the constant portrayal of women as the victim is equally problematic and disempowering.

Shigematsu: Perhaps we need to think about the different ways of using language to describe the condition of women in war, as we have done in our re-naming of “rape-survivors,” for example.  The Bush regime has been able to appropriate the language of women's liberation in the name of imperialism, saying that it is “liberating Afghani and Iraqi women,” when it is in fact, destroying their autonomy and way of life.

This perpetrator/victim binary was something that I was trying to critique in my talk. I think that you can project an image of a woman that does not necessarily signify a woman being used as a victim. The image that I am referring to clearly does not portray or give the connotation of woman as victim but it does have a humanising effect because it's a portrait of a face.  It is too reductive to assume that every time you deploy a woman’s image, that it automatically conjures a discourse of victimisation, or can only be read through this binary of victim/perpetrator.  Practices of interpretation enable more complex understandings.  Being a victim doesn’t merely imply passivity, it can also become the basis for authorising discourse as a result of personal experience. After all, “victims” speak out and fight back.   

Isis: Given this whole critique of portraying women as “victims,” what would be some alternatives to that? Let's say in the case of the Subic rape incident in the Philippines involving US servicemen (previously covered by we!, first issue in January 2007),  what alternative discourses or storylines could we be looking at?

Shigematsu: I think that this is in some sense very significantly different. The Subic rape case is a case of militarised sexual violence, if not state-sanctioned militarised sexual violence because it [imperialist sexualised violence] has been ongoing—the only difference this time was that a US Marine was finally convicted by the Philippine court.

Here we have a territory that has been colonised for hundreds of years, and then overridden with militarised culture—the accused men probably assume that they're just going to walk away, and most of them did and perhaps even the last one who was convicted will as well.  Likely, they take for granted that they have a right of access to third world and formerly-colonised women because of their superpower status. This would be my reading from what I understand from having interviewed former military personnel in terms of their attitude towards sexual access to women and to their right to go anywhere in the world for that matter—even the idea that they have rights and impunity, because the military, I think, trains its personnel with this mentality—that they have impunity throughout the world to act as God—killing as they will, raping as they will, with no consequence.  It’s the pure expression of unilateralism, or imperialism.
 
Isis: And your parting words to our readers, Dr. Shigematsu?

Shigematsu: It's necessary for feminists of the first world to engage in a serious self-critique of our relative power and imperialist positionality, and to try strategically to use that power in ways that would forge true solidarity, rather than re-inscribe, under the name of solidarity, the same old power relationships. So, I think that, we have to be more creative about ways to disrupt and destabilise, and reroute these [sources of power].