Where were all of the feminists? Oh, right, busy planning a “Boobquake”

Cross-posted at Switchintoglide

So I went to a protest a little while ago — more specifically, a demonstration against the Islamophobic , sexist , ableist , and racist Bill 94 here in Quebec — and I was struck by both the low attendance (between 60 and 120 according to news outlets), and the demographic composition of the attendees. Based on my conversations and observations, the main groups of people that I observed were:

• Muslim women who wear the niqab, hijab, or no covering at all, and their male friends, husbands, partners, relatives, counterparts, children, etc.
• Representatives of other faiths showing solidarity (Jewish organizations and Montreal’s Anglican diocese)
• Representatives from groups such as the South Asian Women’s Association
• A small group of language teachers, who were responding to the incident that provoked all of this hubbub (wherein a woman was expelled from her language class for refusing to take off her niqab) by asserting that they can teach a student with a covered face just fine, and it is insulting to their profession that the government should think otherwise
• Libertarians, who oppose any government intervention of this type
• GLB, Queer, and gender-variant folks, who felt compelled to show solidarity because this bill is a human rights violation, and also because government prohibitions on certain types of clothing (hoodies , for a facetious example) could just as easily adversely affect them in the future (“THEY CAME FIRST for the women wearing the niqab, and I didn’t speak up because I didn’t wear a niqab…)
• Social-justice activists and academics, including the 2110 Centre for Gender Advocacy , and the representatives from the Simone de Beauvoir Institute (who also released and handed out a statement on the matter); these protesters rightly asserted that “tearing the clothing off of women’s bodies is violence against women.”

  
  

Maybe I just don’t go to enough protests, but it seems like such a blatant human rights violation would attract more attention, I mean, more than 120 protesters. Unfortunately, Bill 94 is supported by over 95% of Quebecers, and 4/5 Canadians , so I understand that it is not popular to oppose it. However, I’ll be damned if I have not personally met well over 120 feminists in Montreal — where the hell were they?

I wasn’t as angered about this dearth of feminist interest in an OBVIOUS feminist issue until the recent furor over the Facebook “Boobquake ” (67,003 attendees) and “Brainquake ” (1484 attendees), and more recently the “Femquake ” (331 attendees) taking place today, all of which have collectively garnered roughly 574x the support of the protest I attended. The three events were started in response to an Iranian cleric’s proclamations about women’s immodesty and promiscuity causing earthquakes, and have subsequently been supported by such feminist sites as Feministing.com, Jezebel.com , and Feministe.com. I was initially intrigued by the idea as a sort of campy and playful way to collectively disprove an idea, but after about 5 minutes of perusal, it became glaringly apparent that this North American response to an Iranian cleric was more about Islamophobia and ethnocentrism than the rights of Muslim women. The events are a vector for the co-option of feminist rhetoric to further objectify women, and a demonstration of the smug North American sense of moral and developmental superiority over those “other” brown folks in the Middle East. The people who should REALLY be leading the response to the statements made by the cleric are IRANIAN and  MUSLIM WOMEN, who have, you know, the LIVED EXPERIENCE of dealing with these statements every day, but their voices are silenced by us obnoxious and entitled white-educated-secular types who feel the need to make a BOOBQUAKE instead of really listening and standing in solidarity. Our form of protest also prevents women who choose to dress modestly for religious reasons from participating in fighting their own oppression.

Therefore I ask: why is it so easy for feminists to organise around a chance to show off some cleavage in order to belittle one man overseas who would police the lives of Muslim women, whereas it is so difficult to get feminists to organise around a chance to protest a powerful provincial government who would police the lives of Muslim women?

To quote the above statement from the Simone de Beauvoir Institute about Bill 94:

“As feminists, we are committed to supporting bodily and personal autonomy for all women, as well as all women’s capacity to understand and articulate their experiences of oppression on their own terms.”

Or at least we SHOULD BE committed to doing so, but we are really just paying intersectionality lip service when we pull stunts like these Boob-, Brain-, and Fem- quakes. I am sure there is a good idea there, but the cause around which we’ve rallied — the “othering” and demeaning of Islam as backward and oppressive — fuels wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, racist immigration laws, and legislation like Bill 94. My feminism won’t be complicit in that.

It is time for this to change. Feminism should not avoid its domestic problems while subjecting others to a scrutinizing neo-colonial gaze: it’s time for Western feminists to stop talking about Female Genital Cutting abroad with such moral authority , and to start talking about the unnecessary surgical procedures performed on Intersex children in North America ; it’s time for non-Muslim women to stop talking about the hijab, and start talking about the high heel ; it’s time for white feminists to stop telling womanists who they are , and to start interrogating the racial problems of the feminist movement ; it’s time for hipster feminists to stop accusing indigenous feminists of being “angry,” and to start talking about what it means to live on stolen land .

It’s time for us feminists to own up to our own privileges.