Cuomo's Article, "Global Fundamentalism"

Global Fundamentalism, Post-9/11 America, and the Ever-Present War on Feminism

Chris Cuomo

Published in Transformations 16.1, (2005): 103-111

It is tempting to dismiss the generalization that in America "everything changed" after 9/11, because such claims seem to ignore the fact that the violence of 9/11 and its opportunistic exploitation by the Bush Administration and others (and even the emergence of a new global peace movement) were outcomes of pre-existing global realities and long-prevailing policies. When pundits and politicians repeatedly justify abhorrent policies (and election results) with shallow, "everything's different now" logic, it is best to resist simplistic explanations. Then again, the impacts of 9/11 were instantly widespread and intense. For anyone whose conceptions of power, dependency, and empire were shaken up via 9/11 or its aftermath, there is a sense in which "everything" did shift.

Critically working toward some understanding of the "post-9/11 world" requires awareness of complex background factors as well as rifts, and therefore calls for historical depth, theoretical complexity, and attention to relevant patterns and responses. Some of the background factors and patterns that are crucial for understanding these times include the rise of religious fundamentalism worldwide, the increasing popularity of political conservativism (religious or otherwise), and the widespread backlash against women-friendly policies and democratic principles -- all rich material for progressive teachers who take the classroom to be a site for political education. In the face of the war in Iraq and George W. Bush's victory in 2004, both fueled by media miseducation, many teachers and academics feel a renewed sense of democratic responsibility, and are creating curricula that will help students understand and resist anti-democratic trends. At the public university where I teach (The University of Cincinnati, in Ohio), many students also seem hungry for critical dialogue and information that will provide insight regarding their own experiences, perspectives, and political confusions.

One way to frame a pedagogical approach to global politics is to explore the relationships among culture, religion, politics, and policy. Two notable collections, Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror, edited by Betsy Reed, and The W Effect: Bush's War on Women, edited by Laura Flanders, explore the interplay of culture and power through the lens of gender. Together these volumes constitute excellent core material for a course or reading group addressing post-9/11 global politics, or a broader course on gender that includes a focus on contemporary politics or religion. Alternately, any course that includes consideration of gender, power, internationalism, religion, or contemporary issues could incorporate a section that includes readings from these rich and compelling texts.

Betsy Reed's Nothing Sacred provides historical background and critical analysis of a diverse array of religious fundamentalisms, and their association everywhere with violence, and retrograde, alarmingly oppressive policies toward women. As the title of Laura Flanders' collection indicates, the focus of The W Effect is on the Bush administration's policies and practices, and so it provides a perfect case study of the consequences of American fundamentalism's growth as a political force, and a useful primer on the devastating impacts of Bush's first term in office. Both books make dear that understanding global fundamentalist trends and the American shift to the religious right requires attention to women's lives and the politics of gender. At the same time, the authors collected in these volumes approach gender as a complicated matter, inextricable from nation, race, class, sexuality, and ideology. Regarding current global political trends, the lens of gender makes visible the intersections of a wide range of issues, from economy to environment to health care to war.

Nothing Sacred and The W Effect illustrate the diverse yet systematic nature of oppression, and the complexity of women's (and others') positions as subjects, agents, and victims of exploitation and violence within those systems. For an undergraduate course that does not assume much prior exposure to feminism, they would therefore work well with a foundational text such as Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider, a text that introduces students to a version of feminist theory emphasizing the interwoven nature of sex, race, sexuality, and class. For an upper level undergraduate or graduate course, additional texts might help students explore central themes and concepts, such as global feminism [Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice, edited by Marianne DeKoven], the separation of church and state [The Separation of Church and State: Writings on a Fundamental Freedom by America's Founders, edited by Forrest Church], and the meanings of radical democracy [Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship, and the State, edited by David Trend].

Both Betsy Reed and Laura Flanders are influential figures in American progressive media (Reed is a senior editor at The Nation and Flanders is a popular journalist and Air America radio host), and their own connections and concerns are evident in their lists of contributing authors. Each volume features an impressive array of progressive writers (though their purview is dearly global, most of the contributors are US-based), so assigning these books to students has the added benefit of introducing unfamiliar readers to the likes of Katha Pollitt, Arundhati Roy, Richard Goldstein, and Patricia J. Williams. In addition, the work collected in these volumes reminds us that the American Left was neither silent nor compliant when the American president decided "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists" Both collections are full of examples of exemplary journalism and activist responses in the face of even the harshest circumstances, so they offer much to inspire hope and political action.

Published in late 2002, in the midst of the extreme mainstream media black out of American dissent, Nothing Sacred exhibits the extensive presence of feminist resistance to fundamentalism that existed before 9/11, including resistance to the Taliban, and the sophisticated contributions feminist thinkers have made to understanding 9/11, fundamentalism, and other forms of organized masculinist violence. Ranging through the US, the Middle East, South Asia, and Northern Africa, most essays focus on fundamentalist movements within Islam and Christianity, but the book also includes discussions of Israeli Jewish and Hindu movements. Alongside journalistic essays pulled from the pages of The Nation and The Progressive are more scholarly works, such as in-depth essays on particular fundamentalist movements and histories, and theoretical essays by Amrita Basu, Seyla Benhabib, Martha Nussbaum, and Leila Ahmen. The book does have a few unfortunate gaps. The only Afghani writer in the section on Afghanistan is US-based (The reader is led to wonder why neither Nothing Sacred nor The W Effect includes the voice of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan -- even an excerpt from their website would have made an important contribution), the Jewish fundamentalism recieves only a brief treatment that includes no discussion of violence against Palentinians.

Nonetheless, Nothing Sacred provides an excellent foundation for leaning about religious fundamentalism, the patterns it exhibits, and the particulars of secular and feminist resistance. Using it as a springboard, participants in a course on gender and contemporary politics might engage in a comparative practical study of different forms of activism and dissent. For example, Madhavi Sunder's essay "A Culture of One's Own: Learning from Women Living Under Muslim Laws" would be a perfect spark for students to discuss their own relationships to cultural dissent, and their own abilities to shape and contest culture:

Women Living Under Muslim Laws' "cultural dissent" approach goes further than merely critiquing the essentialist views of the fundamentalists...the cultural dissent view highlights individuals ability and right to contest and shape culture. As individuals assert a right to autonomy, choice, reason, and plurality within cultural and religious -- not just public -- spaces, claims to cultural dissent render traditional, rigid conceptions of culture and religion obsolete. (Reed 151)

Students may then identify and evaluate examples of cultural autonomy and dissent in their own society that are philosophically akin or contrary to the approach of Women Living Under Muslim Laws.

Given media misrepresentations, students will benefit from the clear presentation in Nothing Sacred of the fact that religious fundamentalism is not a return to tradition. Rather, it is a postmodern conservative reinterpretation of tradition that glorifies an imagined past. As a specific form of religious absolutism, fundamentalism emerges in direct response to the threats of modernization, such as secularism, Westernization, and dislocation, but freely uses any modern tools and tropes that serve it well. This understanding of fundamentalism is supported by specific histories of fundamentalist movements, and the historical development of fundamentalism world-wide. Religious fundamentalism first emerged in the US at the beginning of the twentieth century, and developed in Muslim societies only after modern culture had established a real foothold, in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Another organizing premise of Reed's book is the observation that feminism is the polar opposite of fundamentalism. While the reasons why are debatable, fundamentalism is universally identified with curtailments of female freedom and autonomy, and coercive romanticizations of feminine roles and ways. Fundamentalist ideologies seem to count feminism among their primary enemies, although they also sometimes employ feminist themes to gain women's support (fascinating discussions of such are found in Amrita Basu's "Hindu Women's Activism in India and the Questions it Raises," and Susan Friend Harding's "The Pro-Life Gospel"). Rather than taking feminism to be a theory that address abstract categories of oppression, the articles in Nothing Sacred encourage thinking about the meaning and significance of feminism in relation to specific fundamentalist paradigms that see the female body as a mark of radical difference and spiritual inferiority. A writing exercise that asks students to articulate and develop the sense of transnational feminisms implicit in Reed's collection can encourage an understanding of feminism's diversity and multicultural character, the dialectical relationships between critical theory and grass-roots social movements. The emergent versions of global feminism articulated by students may then be compared to other popular models of feminism.

The epistemic and political power of the book's two themes -- modernity and gender -- would be strengthened if they were woven more thoroughly together; lectures and classroom discussions can fill in some of those gaps. For example, in the book's opening essay religious scholar Karen Armstrong describes religious fundamentalism as a reactionary global phenomenon that, although incredibly diverse, has emerged in every major faith as "the shadow side of modernity." Armstrong's view is that the family resemblance among different fundamentalisms is found in peoples' fears that the secular establishment will eradicate religion, which is part of their larger "disappointment and disenchantment with the modern experiment, which has not fulfilled all that it promised" (Reed 11-12). Rather than focusing on politics, Armstrong sees fundamentalism primarily as attachment to religious life:

Fundamentalists have been successful in so far as they have pushed religion from the sidelines and back to center stage, so that it now plays a major part in international affairs once again, a development that would have seemed inconceivable in the mid-twentieth century when secularism seemed in the ascendant...But fundamentalism is not simply a way of "using" religion for a political end. These are essentially rebellions against the secularist exclusion of the divine from public life, and a frequently desperate attempt to make spiritual values prevail in the modern world. (Reed, 13)

Armstrong's emphasis on religiosity takes seriously the spiritual aspects of fundamentalist impulses. Too often critics ignore those aspects, dismissing all religious fervor as irrational, or regarding it as too mystical for critical inquiry. Yet the spiritual commitments of fundamentalists are key to understanding their often defensive positions (evident even among fundamentalist world leaders), their palpable sense of urgency, and their powerful tropes of martyrdom. It is likely that those commitments must be taken seriously by any outsider who hopes to engage in dialogue across the religious divide. Accordingly, Armstrong's article, and the diversity of other critical religious views presented in Nothing Sacred, are likely to inspire useful reflection and lively conversations on topics that are rarely addressed in secular classrooms. Journals and small groups may be safe places for students to discuss their own religious backgrounds and perspectives (or lack thereof), and to ask difficult or sensitive questions about their own and others' religious views. Films such as The Last Temptation of Christ, The Chosen, Malcolm X, Agnivarsha: The Fire & the Rain, Smoke, Signals, and Kundun can help create a context for discussing religious cultures and histories, and for raising serious questions about religious commitments, politics and prejudices. A more critical approach could include cinematic representations of religious oppression, such as Kandahar, which depicts life in Afghanistan under the Taliban, and The Mission, which delineates the connections between Christianity and colonization in South America.

Returning to Reed's text, when it comes to explaining fundamentalism's treatment of women, the analysis provided by Armstrong is too shallow. "Because the emancipation of women has been one of the hallmarks of modern culture" Armstrong writes, “fundamentalisms tend to emphasize conventional, agrarian gender roles, putting women back into veils and into the home" (Reed, 12). Algerian activist Mahfoud Bennoune, interviewed by his daughter Karima Bennoune in "A Disease Masquerading as a Cure" takes a similar line: "Fundamentalism is a by-product of globalism and the spread of capitalism and exclusion, because these trends create despair, and despair pushes people to become victims of groups who sell them some crazy ideas as solutions" (Reed, 85). According to this logic, the misogyny of fundamentalism is best understood in relation to conflict between modernity and some pre-existing stasis, and so the violence of fundamentalism expresses the desperate power of those who have lost or fear the loss of core identities, livelihoods, and forms of life. But if feminism and fundamentalism are polar opposites, it is because fundamentalism expresses violence and exclusions that are always already present in the contexts where they grow. Leila Ahmed's "Gender and Literacy in Islam" offers some insight about what this means, as she confronts the disconnect between the pacifist and loving Islam she learned from her grandmother as a child, and the textual heritage studied by men and glorified by religious women who learn from their fathers, "similar to the medieval Latin textual heritage of Christianity -- abstruse, obscure, and dominated by medieval, exclusively male views of the world" (Reed 116-17).

Fundamentalism is religious absolutism, and feminism is inherently (if sometimes minimally) pluralistic and self-reflexive. Fundamentalist misogyny does not spring from nowhere -- it is not a complete innovation, but an obsessive exercise of existing (if latent or unpopular) gender norms, newly energized by material conditions, and justified by some postmodern logic. As Janet Afary writes in "The War Against Feminism in the Name of the Almighty," fundamentalists create the illusion that "a return to traditional, patriarchal relations is the answer to social economic problems" (Reed 45-6). But particular conditions make those illusions appealing to women and young people, such as when the benefits militant movements provide for students and professional women (social services, job training, community) seem to outweigh the restrictions they create.

Is fundamentalism so violent toward women because modernity causes widespread gender panic? Economic determinism and rough psychologizing fail to explain the extreme violence that fundamentalism encourages against women and noncompliant men. And, of course, an analysis that relies on economic and cultural desperation to explain the appeal of religious fundamentalism cannot tell us much about why Christian fundamentalism has such appeal among privileged white Americans. Students are likely to wonder about the same sorts of questions Katha Pollitt raises in her introduction to Reed's collection: "Sure, modern life is unsettling and challenges to gender hierarchies produce losers as well as winners. But Algerian fundamentalists slit the throats of schoolgirls because women are getting too many academic posts? Christian fanatics burn down abortion clinics and try to ban the Pill as an `abortifacient' because the divorce rate is too high?" (Reed xiii).

There will always be a plethora of explanations for the "stresses" that drive men to violence against women, and that drive women to say that it's okay. But simple logic impels us to examine common denominators. If there is an overwhelming pattern of men expressing themselves by reducing women's freedom and well-being, a key to understanding and eliminating that phenomenon lies in fundamental sexual politics and the meanings of gender. If there is a strong tendency in some cultures for dedications to the sacred to require the degradation of female and feminine bodies, understanding and eliminating that pattern requires figuring out what exactly is going on with the operative notions of sacredness and the social roles of religion. Accordingly, a challenging assignment might require students to investigate how the absolutism of a particular form of fundamentalism is related to certain other absolute principles, and to explore the implications for democracy. As a case in point, George Bush's performance of absolute certainty regarding the invasion and occupation of Iraq is closely aligned with his absolute commitment to a particular set of economic interests and religious prejudices, but it is not aligned with any absolute commitment to human rights or the international rule of law. As the range of perspectives in Nothing Sacred shows, feminist praxis is imperative because it is the opposite of the sorts of absolutism that engender violence, punish the poor, and make some women's lives like hell on earth.

Laura Flanders' The W Effect: Bush's War on Women is itself a potent piece of feminist opposition to America's most powerful fundamentalists. Read against the background of Nothing Sacred, Handers' volume encourages a wide cross-cultural view of the nature of fundamentalism, and may therefore invite American students to question their assumptions about what really threatens their freedom and safety. Its sixty-two articles detail the ways the Bush administration's "my way or the highway" policies and practices are emblematic of fundamentalism, and nearly always bad for women and others. Jill Nelson's essay, "A Mean-Spirited America: Today, I Fear My Own Government More Than I Do Terrorists" captures many progressives' feelings about post-9/11 realities, and Bush's 2004 electoral victory: "It's a gut-wrenching reminder that something very bad has happened and is about the happen anew. It is an anticipation of the next insult and injury in an America that has been defined under the Bush administration by a profound meanness of spirit" (Flanders 3).

As The W Effect shows, in a regime that has mastered the arts of spin and secrecy, meanness is carried out as "stealth misogyny" (Richard Goldstein's perfect phrase). Articles by Lynn Sanders, the National Women's Law Center, and Jennifer Baumgardner detail the Administration's gutting of Title IX, gifting of huge tax cuts to the wealthy, and steady eroding of women's right to abortion -- which have all been accomplished under relatively safe cover. When the corporate media is in the Administration's pocket (nicely detailed in Jennifer Pozner's "Whatever Happened to the Gender Gap?"), stealth misogyny is a breeze. For example, in "TeamBush to Abused Women: Fuhgedaboutit!" Bill Berkowitz exposes the Administration's appointment of patently anti-feminist women (Nancy Ptotenhauer and Margot Hill, of the infamous Independent Women's Forum) to serve on the Department of Justice's National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women. Both have repeatedly opposed legislation related to violence against women, and Ptotenhauer, who additionally does not believe there is a gender wage gap, was also picked to be a member of Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao's Committee on Workplace Issues.

The role of the appointment process in enabling unprecedented religious influence in government is evident in international politics as well. For example, when UN delegates met in Spring of 1999 to draft a document for a General Assembly special session on population and development, John Klink, the Vatican's delegate to the UN, argued against confidential sex counseling for adolescents, and against providing the morning-after pill to rape victims in refugee camps, although he advocated replacing the language of "rights" with "status" -- "as in `respect for women's status' instead of `respect for women's rights'" (Reed 248). Apparently such performances boosted Klink's popularity with the American religious right. In May of 2002, US secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson invited Klink to join the American delegation to a UN meeting on the rights of children. At that meeting, the US joined forces with the Vatican, Syria, Libya, Iran, and Iraq to oppose sex education for adolescents and to promote abstinence-based instruction "for all young women" (Flanders, 123).

American-born students are likely to approach the topic of global fundamentalism with curiosity, but most will come to The W Effect already quite invested in a view about the President and his policies. For readers who are hesitant to consider the Bush Administration as a fundamentalist force, Nina Easton's "The Power and the Glory: Who Needs the Christian Coalition When You've Got the White House?" lays out the links between the White House and the radical Christian right, and describes the strengthening of those bonds in the wake of 9/11. The political power of fundamentalism in the US is referenced in a quotation by Christian right leader Gary Bauer, who in his remarks refers to the issue of civil unions:

If there is a failure or a betrayal on [conservative Christian] issues, there will be a challenge within the Republican Party. It will rise up. The movement is too large, and that vote is too big a part of the Republican Party not to create a leader if it feel it's being taken for granted or told to get to the back of the bus (Flanders, 10)

Elsewhere Bauer describes the out come of the 2000 elections as an act of God -- a remark with which some of my undergraduate students, themselves conservative Christians, would concur. But for students who do not share Bauer's high regard for the current White House occupier, learning more details about Bush administration policies and behind-the-scenes maneuvers may be quite depressing.

Discussing sensitive and relevant issues and using emotionally charged material in a diverse classroom is always a challenge, because emotions run high and disagreement can have lasting negative effects. Classrooms can become divided, and students sometimes withdraw attention when they feel alienated or attacked. It is therefore important to begin with a foundational conversation about the diversity and difference that is inevitable in any classroom (or about the specific diversity of your group), and to establish ground rules for respectful communication. Ground rules can be generated by the group, or the teacher might present a list of ground rules for class approval.

Addressing political depression is another matter, and a problem I have confronted often with Women's Studies undergraduate and graduate students. I have found that the more information students have about activism (local, national, and global), the less likely they are to feel completely overwhelmed by difficult or enraging information. Because Flanders' text includes to much information about feminist and pro-democratic activism, it might serve as a perfect starting point for student involvement in activist projects. For example, students might read Liza Featherstone's "Mighty in Pink" on recent feminist anti-war activism in the US, then find and make contact with local or statewide anti-war groups, and report back to the class, or participate with the group on a particular project for course credit. From Title IX to the war on drugs to abstinence education to the WTO, the incredible range of issues discussed in The W Effect is likely to include something that sparks the interest of nearly any student. Among my favorite essays are Gretchen Voss' heart-wrenching "My Late Term Abortion," which effectively holds the moral high ground concerning women's right to choose, and Liza Featherstone's "Wal-Mart Values" on women workers' struggles for economic justice. Students might focus on different activist issues, and the classroom might become a networking space and clearinghouse for information on local movements. (Unfortunately, the book lacks both an index and a list of contributors, which makes it a less-than-optimal tool for student research.)

The many examples of stealth misogyny discussed in The W Effect provide perfect contrast to some of the more overt forms of misogyny discussed in Nothing Sacred, and offers good opportunities to comparatively explore various meanings of power, violence, masculinity, and law. Of course, the strategies deployed in the Bush war on women are not always covert. The American fundamentalist war on women extends far beyond the US, and it is co-existing with America's other shameful wars. Cynthia Enloe's succinct explanation of militarism, and what it means for an entire to become militarized, is indispensable for any American trying to unravel the logic of the war on terror. So are the words of the Riverbend blogger, an anonymous young woman in Iraq:

I am female and Muslim. Before the occupation...I lived in jeans and cotton pants and comfortable shirts. Now, I don't dare leave the house in pants...A girl wearing jeans risks being attacked, abducted, or insulted by fundamentalists who have been...liberated!...I usually ignore the emails I receive telling me to "embrace" my newfound freedom and be happy that the circumstances of all Iraqi women are going to "improve drastically" from what we had before...The people who write those emails often lump Iraq together with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan and I shake my head at their ignorance but think to myself, "Well, they really need to believe their country has the best of intentions -- I won't burst their bubble" But I'm telling everyone now -- if I get any more emails about how free and liberated the Iraqi women are now thanks to America, they can expect a very nasty answer (Flanders 57, 62, and www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com).

WORKS CITED

Agnivarsha: The Fire and the Rain. Dir. Arjun Sajnani. iDream Productions, 2002

The Chosen. Dir. Jeremy Paul Kagan. Chosen Film Company, 1982.

Church, Forrest, ed. The Separation of Church and State: Writings on a Fundamental Freedom by America's Founders. Boston: Beacon, 2004

DeKoven, Marianne, ed. Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001.

Kandahar. Dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Makhmalbaf Productions, 2001.

Kundun. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Touchstone Films, 1997.

The Last Temptation of Christ. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Universal Pictures, 1988.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing P, 1984.

Malcolm X. Dir. Spike Lee. 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, 1992.

The Mission. Dir. Roland Joffé. Goldcrest Films, 1986.

Smoke Signals. Dir. Chris Eyre. ShadowCatcher Entertainment, 1998.

Trend, David, ed. Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship, and the State. New York: Routledge, 1996.