Female Farmers and Vandana Shiva take on Monsanto: More Power to Them!

For more on Dr. Vandana Shiva's work, please see here at Navdanya.

Dr. Vandana Shiva interviewed by Robin Morgan, on rape and globalization

As a kind of personal-political preface to the interview that follows, I'd like to explain why it is I find the exchange so significant.

It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with my blog that I strongly believe women of color are the global leaders in feminism, as well as regional and national leaders in many places, and ought to be regarded as such by whites and men. Typically, men and whites ignore, silence, marginalise, appropriate, and take credit for the activist work women of color do.

If you take the spotlight off the courageous leadership work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., you see a lot of Black women in leadership throughout the 20th century in the U.S., working very hard, at great cost, to free African Americans from the blight of white supremacy while also addressing sexual politics and male supremacy. Black men's work against racism has been substantial and has also tended to de-center or invisibilise Black women's insights, analysis, and activism. White women's feminist work against sexism and male supremacy has been substantial and ground-breaking in countries where white women live. And it has been a challenge to get the whiteness of the work de-centered or even consistently identified as race-privileged.

My own family background led me to be particularly concerned about sexual violence. For several years, I was drawn to a few white feminist writers who focused on that issue intensely but usually non-intersectionally, and without radically and thoroughly identifying the whiteness in their work. At the same time, thanks to a white lesbian feminist mentor, I was introduced to the work of many womanist and feminist writers of color, mostly from North America and the Caribbean. My own awareness of the work done by women of color outside of white-ruled or white-colonised nations was minimal. Over the last few years I have tried to make this blog a space where voices, perspectives, and commitments to radical social change by women of color are highlighted not footnoted; where women of color are centralised not marginalised.

I do this in part because of once mistakenly determining white work to be the most radical; this was done in part because whites who use the term 'radical' don't identify lack of awareness of their whiteness as anti-radical. This was consistently challenged by radical women of color writer-activists as anti-revolutionary, racist practice. I also noticed far too many white-edited, white-dominated anthologies of activists where women of color got a special chapter on women effected by racial hierarchies (as if white people aren't fundamentally effected by white supremacy and racism), but were rarely invited or expected to speak on behalf of all women. I've seen white pro-radical and feminist websites where the work of women of color is barely mentioned and where white women routinely speak for all women. I've seen gatherings led by whites who pretend they are inclusive and safe for women of color.

Writings and activism which centers the humanity of women is generally and typically regarded by men as being too narrowly about women. Men's writings about only-men or mostly men has been historically regarded by men as about all of humanity, or the segment of humanity worth doing justice work for, or about all people of a particular race; it is rarely-to-never seen as "too narrow in scope", too much about men, too ignorant about women, when reviewed by other men. When men recount the contributions by women to the men's human struggles for justice, women have too often been ignored or footnoted. And when men focus on women, the gaze is often objectifying and the attitude patronising.

It appears that whites and men will not easily regard women of color as fully human with perspectives that whites and men ought to pay attention to, prioritise, privilege, promote, and regard as foundational and central to understanding humanity on the whole.

I have come to the conclusion that women of color, as a global and regional majority by gender and the most diversely raced women on Earth, hold the most complex, radical, sophisticated, and revolutionary views on race, gender, and everything else. This doesn't mean I don't still look to white women and men of color for useful analysis and insight. It means I no longer center and privilege their voices and perspectives.

Vandana Shiva is, for me, a profoundly important world leader on matters of feminism, environmental/Earth justice, global economics, and holistic and humane sustainability. Robin Morgan is a U.S.-based white feminist who has dedicated many decades to the struggle by and for women against men's global woman-hating and woman-subjugating violence. I hold both women in very high regard and was delighted to find this exchange between them recently online.

You may go here, to The Women's Media Center online, to return to the source website. You may stay connected with their efforts here: Follow @womensmediacntr

Economist and ecofeminist Dr. Vandana Shiva addresses the root causes of violence against women. 

Dr. Vandana Shiva—The New Delhi Rape and Globalization

By Robin Morgan | February 11, 2013

Dr. Vandana Shiva, economist, environmentalist, and feminist, spoke of the public outcry in India and how the devaluing of women in a global economy set the stage for the New Delhi rape. Adapted from a conversation broadcast last month on Women's Media Center Live with Robin Morgan.

Robin Morgan: In a feminist analysis certainly, everything is connected to everything else.  You recently wrote a stunning piece about the ghastly gang rape in New Delhi and the subsequent demonstrations and how violence against women and the economy were all connected.  I’d love you, please, to talk about the points that you raised.

Vandana Shiva: I’ve been working on how the economy’s changing—globalization, free trade, WTO, the structural adjustment. I’ve made the connections between those purposes and what happens to women in what is called the New Economy. They even call it the Emerging Economy, as if a 10,000-year-old civilization emerges only when it is locked into corporate globalization.

The first level at where violence against women begins is in the very defining of the economy.  Economy means household.  It is what women define both inside the physical households, but also the world, inside the planet as the household.  As long as the principles of management came out of that, they focused on sustenance, livelihoods, mutual giving—of course, within the typical patriarchies all our societies have had.

[With] free trade globalization, the first thing they do is knock out that major sector of women’s economy and, as Marilyn Waring has written in If Women Counted, install a production boundary to calculate growth.

The Gross Domestic Product grows every time you can pull something out of nature and something out of women customers’ economy, which means every time you destroy nature and women’s livelihoods, and production, and creativity, you can call it growth.  It’s created to mobilize finances for the war, and it becomes the dominant number imposed on our world.

I’ve been appointed by the King of Bhutan to an expert group we’ve created because Gross Domestic Product is the wrong measure.  The King of Bhutan said we should be looking at the well-being of our people to measure Gross National Happiness.

At this time, growth measured as Gross Domestic Product is already collapsing world-wide. It collapsed with Wall Street.  It’s collapsing in Europe right now in front of our eyes. and it will collapse in India after a few years.  How long can you sustain an eight or nine percent growth that excludes women as the primary backbone of the economy? That is the first violence.

The second violence is in terms of decision-making and politics.  In so many debates in India we hear, “Oh, we can’t have politics in economics.” But every time they make a decision within a patriarchal model of the economy, it is politics.  It’s politics that basically says, “Only corporations count, only the powerful count, and we’re going to mutate democracy from being, “By the people, of the people, for the people,” into being “By the corporations, of the corporations, for the corporations—and the powerful.”

The convergence of economic and political power further excludes women, but it also creates a class with immunity and impunity, which can do all levels of violence, change laws, and remove protections. There’s rape at every level—rape of the earth, rape of our resources, rape of the economy, and rape of women, which is what this drastic, dramatic tragedy has woken up India to.

Then there are other levels of violence because displaced people are more vulnerable.  I was asked by the National Commission of Women to grapple with what globalization was doing to women in India, in terms of two key factors: water, and food and agriculture. At public hearings around the country, whether in Calcutta or down south, women would speak out boldly about how sexual violence has increased and made them more vulnerable as they were being made economic and ecological refugees.

That is at the very foundation of this new liberal model: everything is a commodity.  Everything is property.  Everything has a price and nothing has value. Added to the traditional patriarchies of societies, that's created what I call a super-virus of patriarchy. When two viruses hybridize, they start to kill.

Basically it’s a bit like climate change.  We’ve had cyclones, but Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy present a different level of violence.  Of course, we know that this is contributed by climate change. We need to start looking at how an economy based on patriarchal fictions—and the corporation is the biggest patriarch in our lives to come—how this patriarchy is combining with traditional patriarchies to unleash even larger violence, both the kind we see on the streets of Delhi and the economic kind, the violence of robbing you of your home, of your foundation.

Our prime minister said recently, it’s these loose-footed migrants that are part of the problem. Because the Delhi rape involved migrants at both ends. The rapists were all living in slums in hugely brutalized conditions, thinking that brutalization is the norm.  The poor girl's father had sold his land because farmers aren’t being allowed to make a living.  Two hundred and seventy thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide.  The rest are hanging on the margins of existence.  He moved to Delhi to load luggage at the airport to be able to survive and send his children to school.

The prime minister just called them loose-footed migrants creating problems. I said, “Mr. Prime Minister, they are a product of your policies.  They are refugees of your economic policies.”  None of these—economics and culture and society—are insulated silos. The patriarchal economic model is becoming the dominant force in our society.  Societies have been reduced to the economy.  Economy has been reduced to the market.  The market has been reduced to what is controlled by finance, capital corporations.  And if all you show is women as commodities, selling other commodities, those images start to further distort already damaged brains.

RM: Isn’t it amazing, Vandana, how when you put something in context—the background of the victim and for that matter of the perpetrators—it changes? Also, I'm reminded of your colleague Ruchira Gupta who wrote a piece in which she pointed out that the commodification of women by the rampant growth of pornography and prostitution sends the message that, in fact, this is what women are for. She connects that to the apparently quite dramatic rise in rape in India.

VS: Hugely dramatic.  Eight hundred percent since the ‘70s and more than 250 percent since India’s economy, was as they say, made "more open" [with globalization]—more open to more violence against women.

RM: From where I sit here in New York, it seems heartening that women in numbers never seen before and accompanied by men as well have been on the streets in not only Delhi but across India.  They haven’t quite made the connections you’re making, but they are on the move protesting violence against women.

What can we do to turn the enormity of this around?  It’s always for example, blown me away, that a woman who is, say, in her fifteenth hour of labor, straining away—the doctor and the nurses and the anesthesiologists are all productive because they are wage labor, but the woman who is actually giving birth is not considered in a productive act.

VS: I think that is the foundational error. Everything that replenishes is treated as not producing at all and everything that’s degrades, everything that depletes, is treated as production.  I call it the creation boundary, which has given us the fiction of growth and the Gross Domestic Product—that destructive acts are creative acts of produce. The really creative acts of nature—of women in their tremendous diversity and amazing ability to juggle 50 jobs, 50 responsibilities—their whole society and economy are treated as unproductive. That, I think, is the most important shift we need to make.

As you know Robin, I come from the part of the Himalayas where it's recognized that women are the main productive force. They go out in the forests [to work] and there's nothing like the rape [that occurs] when you come into the plains where women are no longer considered productive. When I, with my sister, Dr. Meta Shiva, was studying female feticide, we realized that the map of high growth in the patriarchal measure are the same zones with the high levels of extermination of girls—fifty million girls haven't been allowed to be born in the last few decades.
The response in Delhi is beautiful for a number of reasons.

The first, that the younger generation has come. The younger generation was absent from social movements, especially the middle class because they were getting it so good with globalization—the IT jobs that moved to India. They were all seeing themselves as individual consumers, so society did not matter to them. But this rape reminded them that it could have been them coming back from their IT farms, from their phone call service centers.

The second difference is, while we have had a feminist movement in India for a long time, it was only the women. The beauty now is, young men joined. It was a young man who was defending this girl in that bus.  I think for the first time, there’s this new generational solidarity that’s emerging. Those very gutsy young people who are being beaten up and sprayed with tear gas and water canons realized that the state has become militarized. The state itself is a patriarchal institution. It will take time. There will be the hysterical voices saying death sentence, death sentence! But new connections have started to germinate that are really going to make a serious change.

RM: That’s very encouraging.  When you look at the global scale of things, I confess that I look to women not only because we are the majority and that permits more peaceable and more, how shall I say, witty and ingenious new strategies, but also because there’s no area that isn’t a women’s issue.  We spill over into everything if the connections are made.  I definitely see the global women’s movement as the politics of the 21st Century.

VS: We are really living through a period of collapse of all kinds in the patriarchic system.  The collapse of the financial economy they’ve built, a collapse of the eco-systems they have raped.  The UN has recognized that 90 percent of eco-systems are on the verge of collapse, if not already collapsed.  In this period, it’s the creative principle which women bring to bear for the simple reason that they were left to look after the real stuff of life, the goals that really mattered.  So they bring both another world view, another mindset, and other capacities, other skills—which is why I run a grandmother’s university at the new school I created in Dehradun called the Earth University.

RM: I love it.

VS: Ghandi always said a prayer, “Make me more womanly.”  If there is going to be a future for humanity, it will have to be a womanly future. I go to Europe and young men will bring me my books [to sign] and say, "I'm an ecofeminist, Dr. Shiva." That to me is a major, major shift. A shift to a creative economy where women start defining and playing the leadership role but others recognize that there has to be a mind shift.

RM: Whenever I talk to you, I feel both incredibly depressed because one is made yet again to realize the severity of the situation and at the same time, incredibly optimistic because I get from you a validation of everything that we’ve been trying to do and will do more and even better and with more people involved in the future. 

I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your wisdom and your perceptions and for everything that you do.

VS: And Robin, I want to thank you for your vision and leadership and your love.

Once again, to link back to the source website, please click *here*.

Writings by Audre Lorde, including "Man-Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist Response" and "A Litany For Survival". Also, a new book of Lorde's writings, I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde !!

image of book cover is from here

Revised on the 26th , 29th, and 30th of August 2012, and December 2, 2015.

I just found a website that has a photocopy of Audre Lorde's classic essay from Sister Outsider, titled: "Man-Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist Response". If you haven't yet, I encourage you to read it and to read the whole book along with it. Here is the URL and link to that one chapter: http://www.scribd.com/doc/103750751/Audre-Lorde-Man-Child.

I have been saddened to see how many younger people online believe that radical feminist = white woman. I know that many, but not all, of the people publicly naming themselves radical feminist or the more contemporary and racially narrow term, rad fem, are white women. I've written about how I don't equate the terms: radical feminist and rad fem. I've hopefully respectfully challenged the white supremacy of white-majority and white-led organising by people who identify as rad fem *here* in an earlier post.

Of course most of the whites who organise politically are not feminists. They are anti-feminists, racists, and misogynists, protecting white male power at all costs. But unlike anti-feminists and other misogynists, rad fems and I share a lot in common: our critique of pornography and prostitution as male-protected and mass produced forms of men raping and enslaving women and girls; a serious analysis of human sexuality as it is constructed and acted out in heterosexist and male supremacist contexts; and a de-marginalising of male supremacy and patriarchy when analysing and challenging increasingly globalised systems of oppressive, terroristic, and deadly power.

In fact, many of the people who claim to be the definitive example of "human" are white men. And we certainly know that even though white men write most Western history books--that have systematically left out or distorted the accomplishments, the history, of white women, women of color, and men of color--that surely doesn't mean only white men are human. Nor is it the case that only white women are radical feminists, lesbian or not. Many of my role models growing up through my early adulthood were Black and Brown radical lesbian feminists.

My focus, here at this blog, on women of color is seen by some whites and many men as divisive. Some view this centralising of women of color at a pro-feminist website as one way to focus on the differences between women rather than the similarities. I hardly see how focusing on women of color is divisive. Nor do I see it as divisive to point out where white supremacy lives and breathes. Whites want to keep white power all to ourselves thereby dividing humanity into raced "haves" and "have nots". Exposing and challenging white supremacy is an effort to end divisions of social power among humans; its aim is to equalise the control of and the access to resources among humans, including intellectual resources.

Another way to approach the issue would be to ask: Is focusing primarily or entirely only on the written and other activist work of whites divisive? Because that's what most whites do, often thinking they are representing "all men" or "all women" or "all queer people" when doing so. So it comes across to me as problematic when a white person, in my case a white male, who doesn't wish to marginalise women of color is seen as promoting divisions among women. Why isn't this blog seen as unifying women by focusing on the work of women of color? And, if whites wish to deal with our white supremacy in public ways, how does identifying where it lives further divide humanity?

I'd argue that routinely and systematically ignoring, tokenising, or marginalising the activist work of women of color is divisive. It maintains white supremacy and male supremacy. So too does using terms like "radical" by whites who don't include "white" when naming ourselves. The name of this blog certainly participates in that pattern. It would visibilise (and challenge) whiteness more if I termed it "A Radical White Profeminist". It would also serve to make it visible as a particular and non-universal political condition.

I now consider any white person refusing or neglecting to name our structural location by race when we describe our political position, as supporting and reinforcing white supremacy. Were I to start my blog now, I'd name it with "white" being in the title.

I have grown up hearing Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith be regularly identified by whites as Radical Black Feminists or Black Lesbian Feminists. Mary Daly and Sheila Jeffreys have only ever been identified by whites as "Radical Feminists" or "Lesbian Feminists". I hope it's clear how that way of naming white people reinforces whiteness as somehow not worth mentioning. But the "worth", or value, of not mentioning it is the white power that is so well-protected in the practice of whites not naming ourselves with that term. This is a crucial, and often enough unconscious, practice of protecting the very brutal power underlying and enforcing unnamed whiteness. The brutality is aimed squarely at people of color, with especially horrific forms leveled against women of color.

Conscious or not, it is an undenibly political decision to not mention our whiteness as a structural place of power in a white male supremacist system. (This is not, as some have indicated, primarily an issue of naming one's "identity"; this writing isn't advocating what is sometimes termed "identity politics".) If it is not deemed collectively necessary for whites who name ourselves as "radical" to also name and own our own whiteness as a political reality, how do we practice being responsible and accountable to those we structurally oppress by race?

It's not a radical practice for white folks to "disappear" our whiteness in our writings and other work, in my opinion which has been informed by dozens of radical activists of color, most of them feminist. It's not even liberal. It's politically conservative; it has many of the same effects as mainstream neo-Conservative and more publicly marginalised White Nationalist agendas.

White males making our race invisible but our gender visible serves white and male supremacy because the two systems, particularly in the West, are inextricably linked and are mutually reinforcing. Both work together to oppress and destroy women of color. Put another way: let's consider white radical Andrea Dworkin's definition of "feminist" which has been summarised as follows: if it hurts women, feminists are against it. Surely white supremacy as well as male supremacy hurts women (of color). So to ignore race in one's feminist and pro-feminist work is to participate in the deeply racist practice of pretending women of color are not "women"--unless they, too, are somehow presented as unraced. Ironically, whites are very reluctant to do that. Only whiteness is to be systematically ignored-while-protected.

The same is true for men of color who name their race as a structural position of marginalisation and oppression but not their gender as a structural position of power over all women. Men of color not identifying their gender as a structural source of oppressive power serves not only male supremacy, but also white supremacy. Because protecting any male power, as such, bolsters white men's power as men, but particularly as white men.

As I see it and hear about it from radical and feminist women of color, those two systems of power--male and white supremacy--together with capitalism, are the main dividers of humans into--according to power elites--those who are meant to survive and those who are not.

This matter is addressed in those terms in at least two pieces of writing by Audre Lorde. One is in a speech in the book Sister Outsider titled "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action". This is also contained in another book discussed below. Another discussion of this theme is in a poem titled "A Litany for Survival", which may be read in full, along with several other of Lorde's poems, here.

Finally, I offer a link to a relatively new book (2009 hardcover, 2011 paperback), of Audre Lorde's work. The book is titled: "I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde", edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall.

 I have had the pleasure of hearing Johnnetta Cole speak, many years ago. Calling the three editors only "editors" would not be to understand their role in the creation of this book. Rudolph Byrd offers a significant introduction of the works contained in the volume. Johnnetta Cole offers a chapter in the section of the book called "Reflections", which also contain chapters by Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Gloria I. Joseph. Beverly Guy-Sheftall closes the book with her epilogue.

The mass murders in Aurora, Colorado were not caused by depression or insanity

image is from here

What's wrong with the diagram above? I'd say it pretends that violence is mostly interpersonal.

I've momentarily joined a discussion on Facebook focusing on analysis of the kind of violence James Holmes perpetrated several days ago in Aurora, Colorada in a movie theatre. As I think Facebook is a pretty scummy place, I'm probably already done speaking to this issue there.

I haven't obtained the permission of anyone else in the conversation to use their names, so I'm just putting the text below, minus the names. If the participants let me know they want their names put with their statements here, I'll gladly do so. The text written by me has my name with it. I've modified some of it for this post here, indicated with brackets below.

*          *          *

I thought I'd get a conversation going about the recent tragedy in Aurora regarding violent male culture and if we think that has anything to do with these mass killings that happen so often in this country. I know it also heavily has to do with the lack of effective gun control but I wonder how much "maleness" has to do with violence and why and if that has anything to do with the patriarchy or is it just normal, biological that men are just the more violent gender. Thoughts?

• • 
    

    Good topic. Here's a great article on the subject http://ideas.time.com/

2012/07/24/

the-overwhelming-maleness-o
f-mass-homicide/

The Overwhelming Maleness of Mass Homicide

ideas.time.com

Why aren't we talking about the one thing mass murderers have in common?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-testosterone-alone-doesnt-cause-violence


Strange but True: Testosterone Alone Does Not Cause Violence: Scientific American
www.scientificamerican.com

Hormones don't necessarily make men violent, but they do cause them to seek social dominance


I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression [Paperback]
Terrence Real

Twenty years of experience treating men and their families has convinced psychotherapist Terrence Real that depression is a silent epidemic in men -- that men hide their condition from family, friends, and themselves to avoid the stigma of depression's "un-manliness." Problems that we think of as typically male -- difficulty with intimacy, workaholism, alcoholism, abusive behavior, and rage-are really attempts to escape depression. And these escape attempts only hurt the people men love and pass their condition on to their children.


Julian Real Hi all. I find the analysis by Terrence Real (who is not related to me) to be seriously flawed and politically misguided. Anyone who has endured and survived domestic violence, and anyone who is a survivor of child sexual abuse, or of rape, or of other traumas such as endemic racism and misogyny, often knows the pain and isolation of depression and PTSD. When men are violent towards others, the overwhelming desire in a patriarchy-denying culture is to psychologise this violence, to make it about men's personal histories rather than men's structural power, which manifests in institutionalised force that carries with it many entitlements for men to aggress against others, not just interpersonally, and perhaps more often not interperonally. The institutional violence of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy, each system ruled and regulated by men, is the layer of violence few wish to discuss. We must understand James Holmes' violent, deadly actions in the context of that.


Julian Real When I first heard the horrible news of the massacre in Aurora, one of the first thoughts, aside from feeling a kind of sick disgust and deep sadness, was "I hope the corporate media doesn't get obsessed with being concerned about him and wondering "what caused him to do this--how did this intelligent, educated [and not stated but there: WHITE] man with such promise become a mass murderer"? What corporate media hasn't been saying is that he could only do this and be alive now if he was white and if he was privileged in a variety of other ways. If he were poor, uneducated, and of color, the police would have shot him dead in an instant and white Amerikkka would have exhaled a collective sign of relieve. I say this because white supremacist police forces murder men and women of color routinely, without consequence. Now, are those police officers "depressed"? Are we to believe that Holmes' violence and the violence of the US military and police are unrelated? That one is only psychological, while the other is primarily political. I think every expression of male supremacist and white supremacist violence is first and foremost profoundly political (structural, social, and reliant on institutions infused with the same values as the violence being perpetrated) and only secondarily a function of personal, individual history. Men are violent because not because of genetic make-up, hormone levels, or depression[, or 'insanity'].


Julian Real Men have various institutionalised permissions and social entitlements to do violence and get away with it. If they didn't get away with it, they wouldn't be that way. If most rapists were held to account, rape wouldn't flourish. If most violent male offenders of domestic and global violence were held to account, men's violence wouldn't proliferate. This isn't to say that some men don't suffer from depression. Men, women, boys, and girls do suffer, a lot. But men don't suffer from it more than women or girls or boys, in case people like Terrence Real aren't noticing. And if depression causes this kind of hostility and murderous violence, why aren't all the survivors of child sexual abuse and rape and battery I know out killing people? [Most of them suffer from depression. So clearly there are other, more significant factors at work.]


Julian Real I find Erika Christakis's piece linked to above [and *here*] to also be misguided. While she notes something obvious: men perpetrate most interpersonal violence and mass murder, she neglects to note that whites and the rich, as well as men, perpetrate most global violence, which is also mass murder, of people of color, of the poor, and of women and girls, respectively. Non-indigenous industrialised people wage warfare on Indigenous people, industrialised or not. This isn't just mass murder, it's genocide. Women are among the rich, even while more men are rich than women. Women are among whites, even [while] white supremacist cultures are run by [white] men. Conservative and liberal media usually only wants to highlight violence that totally invisibilises structural, institutional force: that violence which is done on incredibly massive scales, against whole classes of people, not necessarily indoors but also not generally in view of a public with the clout, status, and institutional power to stop it. Patriarchal violence is one form of it, and many manifestations of that are private, done in the home, in hotel and motel rooms, and in military barracks, to name a few places where masculinist predation is protected. White supremacist violence is another form. And corporate capitalist violence is another form. In my opinion, to only remark about one of these while ignoring the others is to make any one form not fully comprehensible. And, I'd argue, it also makes a world that is set up to assault poor women of color on various levels simultaneously--only partially recognisablie. I'd say that without the more complete view, it is difficult to organise against the multiple forces effectively or to be a useful ally to those who are fighting all of it at once.

Vandana Shiva on the Environmental and Moral Problems with Genetically Modified Seeds

From billmoyers.com.

Vandana Shiva on the Problem with Genetically Modified Seeds

July 13, 2012

Bill talks to scientist and philosopher Vandana Shiva, who’s become a rock star in the global battle over genetically modified seeds. These seeds — considered “intellectual property” by the big companies who own the patents — are globally marketed to monopolize food production and profits. Opponents challenge the safety of genetically modified seeds, claiming they also harm the environment, are more costly, and leave local farmers deep in debt as well as dependent on suppliers. Shiva, who founded a movement in India to promote native seeds, links genetic tinkering to problems in our ecology, economy, and humanity, and sees this as the latest battleground in the war on Planet Earth.

Footage from Bitter Seeds courtesy of Teddy Bear Films

Pornography is the Depiction and Documentation of Sexual and Racial Oppression

image is from here

Below is a revised and expanded version of a comment I posted to a Kyler J.'s blog, A Radical Black Feminist Teenager. To read her post, titled "Erotica is not feminist and other things like Porn, BDSM, and Prostitution", please click *here*.

This is my response, adding to the discussion:

As a white gay intergender [anti-gender] male who has witnessed the effects of pornography on gay males over the last thirty years, I'll add a few thoughts about how corporate pimps exploit the LGBTIQA community.

I completely agree with you that "lesbian porn" is consumed by het men for het men's pleasure. There's nothing progressive about it in terms of its overall social effect, even if the intention by a very few lesbian producers is progressive. (Needless to say, most "lesbian porn" is not produced by lesbians.) Many times het men have asked me, "What about the porn that lesbians make for themselves?" Aside from noting that the question is blatantly (if not always consciously) self-serving, my response is this: Any such porn is such a tiny percentage of the whole of the horrific pornography-prostitution-trafficking industry; to pretend it actually effects any sort of progressive to radical change in the overall aesthetics or agendas of controlling forces (that, in the Western world, is predominantly rich white het men) is to engage in wishful thinking not backed up by "hard-core" reality. And whatever lesbians make, for whatever purposes, will, if it is public (such as being on the internet or for sale), be appropriated by het men. Once consumed by het men, it is then in service to their patriarchal, misogynistic sexual appetites, which, far too often, are acted out against pimped girls and women, usually poor and of color, with no lesbian empowerment in sight. And, as you well note, most of it is not distinguishable from dominant non-lesbian pornography in overall style and content.

The pornography that is marketed to gay males is also produced and owned by white het males and functions to reinforce white supremacy, het supremacy, male supremacy, corporate capitalism, and Western anti-Indigenous imperialism. Gay males have been willing to consume this material for complex reasons, but the effect on our community has been to teach us how to "do sex" the way patriarchal het men "do sex", except to one another not to women and girls. But the aesthetics of het pornography show up in white gay men's actions. A disheartening example of this in the "legitimate" film industry is the new film "Rock of Ages", which Adam Shankman had a strong hand in shaping as the director: the "look" (which means the racist misogynist behavior and the values) of white het men's pornography is infused into it. (You can get a sense of that from the movie's trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USxhXb5VC5E)

The effect of gay male consumption of het male-made pornography has been to promote and promulgate white power, masculinist power, and anti-queer heterosexism among gay males of all colors and ages and to forge an alliance between gay and het men against feminist lesbians who have been taking on the rulers of pornography and prostitution, showing them up for what they are: corporate pimps, serial rapists, traffickers, and slave traders of girls and women of all colors.

The pornography of allegedly "transgender" people has been historically racist, anti-transgender, anti-gay, anti-lesbian, and anti-woman. It, too, serves the same dominant forces mentioned above. And it also promotes some very dangerous ideas about what being transgender is: male-bodied people with silicone breast implants and bleached, straightened hair, for example. Similarly to females in the sexxx-ploitation industries, gay and non-gay males, and intersex and transsexual people are economically coerced to alter our bodies to appear the way white het male consumers, procurers, and pimps insist we appear--and do what they profit from us doing. Similarly to "lesbian porn", very destructive portrayals of transsexual people of all colors are marketed by the pornography industry's owners as a niche fetish for non-transgender male consumers.

Liberals habitually promote "gender" as a social difference in need of greater diversification, while the radicals I know believe that it is the power of capitalism and heteropatriarchal white supremacist gender hierarchies that must be abolished. Gender has been diverse outside of white imperialist societies; this is both destroyed and forgotten by ruling classes of people. To argue for diversification of gender while keeping ruling structures in place is to participate in anti-Indigenous genocidal behavior.

Pornography, as an industry, is virulently anti-queer, anti-woman, anti-female, anti-transgender, anti-Black, anti-Brown, anti-Asian, and anti-Indigenous. The fact that many gay males and other queer people have supported it financially and otherwise only speaks to the effectiveness of the ruling class in trying to convince all oppressed people believe that we need to buy what the ruling class sells as if our sexual and social lives depended on it.

The Radically Feminist Vandana Shiva on Patriarchal Economics and Agribusiness

image is from here

Small farmers, many of them women, are threatened the world over by corporate agribusiness that follows an aggressive economic-cultural-political anti-Life practice steeped and infused with Western White Male Supremacist values and worldviews. In India, among many other places, there is a crisis. Dr. Shiva has been addressing this crisis, offering radically feminist solutions to the problems of an increasingly globalised conservative capitalist patriarchal way of being that is as unethical ans it is unsustainable.

For some of the written history of this analysis and protest, please click on the following link (title):

Monocultures, Monopolies, Myths And The Masculinisation Of Agriculture
by Vandana Shiva
Director Research Foundation for Science,
Technology and Ecology - India

I found what follows at Toward Freedom *here*. But the original is from Al Jazeera and may be linked to at the end of this excerpt.

Vandana Shiva: No Therapy in Retail

Monday, 09 January 2012 09:15 Vandana Shiva

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Al Jazeera

The entry of big corporations into the food chain pushes up retail costs and decreases the share of the farmer.

New Delhi, India - In November 2011, when the UPA government announced that it had cleared the entry of big retail chains such as Walmart and Tesco into India through 51 per cent Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail, it justified the decision saying that FDI in retail would boost food security and benefit farmers' livelihoods.

But the assurance that FDI in retail would ease inflation did not resolve the political crisis the government was facing; it deepened it. Parliament was stalled for several days of the Winter Session, after which the government was forced to withdraw its decision.

The story of FDI in retail goes back to 2005, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed an agriculture agreement with the US, along with the nuclear agreement. On the board of the US-India Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture, as it is called, sit Monsanto (the world's leading producer of GM seeds), ConAgra (among the world's biggest agribusinesses, along with Cargill) and Walmart (the world's largest retail giant).

Protests had prevented Walmart's entry into retail, but, in 2007, it did get a backdoor entry through a joint-venture with Bharti (their stores go by the names of Easyday and Best Price Modern Wholesale). No back-end infrastructure has been built so far, one of the other claims of the government about why we need retail giants.

The way the UPA government tried to ram through the decision on FDI in retail - without consulting the opposition parties, or even its allies - was clearly undemocratic. But the decision itself was also flawed. It illustrated a disconnect between an ideology based on market fundamentalism - which is the leaning of the present government - and the Indian reality of small farms and small retail.

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CNN Heroes: Soap, Water, Land, Shelter, are all Feminist Issues

 

Diane Latiker Nonprofit: Kids Off the Block What it does: Gives young people in Chicago a place to hang out and learn valuable life skills so they can stay off the streets and away from rampant gang violence
Diane says: "What I want people to know is that the work that I and so many others do can literally be the difference between life and death for a generation that seems to have lost all hope. ... If I can make a change in a generation, then my community's going to get better -- because they're going to be the ones that take it over."
Exploring the issue: In several cities around the world, streetwise "interrupters" are trying to stop teen violence before it starts.
Donate to Kids Off the Block

Robin Lim Nonprofit: Yayasan Bumi Sehat What it does: Offers free prenatal care, birthing services and medical aid to low-income women in Indonesia
Robin says: "Because the cost of childbirth often exhausts the family's income, the poor and even the middle-income people of the world find themselves in a downward spiral of suffering and loss, just when they should be celebrating the births of their babies."
Exploring the issue: Many women in the developing world do not have access to contraception or maternal care.
Donate to Yayasan Bumi Sehat

Derreck Kayongo
Nonprofit: Global Soap Project What it does: Collects partially used hotel soap in the United States, reprocesses it and then sends it abroad to save lives in impoverished countries
Derreck says: "Because of our work, this world is going to be a better place than we found it -- with no soap being thrown away and with no child or woman ... or any vulnerable populous left without a bar of soap to fend off disease."
Exploring the issue: In developing countries around the world, millions of children lack access to soap and clean water.
Donate to Global Soap Project

What appears above is from *here*.


Watching CNN's annual presentation of honors to various activists around the world, called CNN Heroes, reminds me, once again, of how many issues there are facing women and girls around the world. Far more issues than face those of us who are relatively wealthy, sheltered, and regionally advantaged.

Soap is needed to cleanse the skin of lethal bacteria. Clean, safe, accessible, free water is needed to live and be well. Unpoisoned and unoccupied land is a requirement for self-determination, community, spiritual health, and overall well-being. If one's land and water is occupied and possessed, or ravaged and poisoned by corporate power, by men, or by White-World settlers and invaders, it is difficult to sustain one's own life and the life of one's people. Safe, sturdy shelter is an increasingly rare thing. For women and girls to be physically safe, walls must offer protection from harmful forces both outside and inside.

What CNN Heroes does is to highlight (for two hours each year) activism by individuals, not collective activism designed to overthrow tyrannical and oppressive regimes, including regimes of men warring against women and girls. You will not hear the terms "white supremacy" or "male supremacy" or "the savage blood-thirst of the Western World" named as such in programs produced for CNN. It will honor amazing individuals only as long as those individuals do not publicly call for massive systemic change that disadvantages US corporate, raced, and patriarchal power.

What would the effect on the world be if all Western news media reported 24 hours a day/365 days a year on the necessity and value of anti-oppression activism? When will activists be given more than a few minutes to express thanks to CNN and instead detail how US corporate and military (patriarchal, imperialist) power murders millions of people, mostly poor, of color, and female?

When will Anderson Cooper speak to this in ways that educate his audience to the systemic, institutionalised dimensions of the harms spoken of in this annual special? I wonder. Because as long as the masses of media consumers are led to think that globalised atrocities and injustices are caused by unorganised or merely unfortunate events, we are left ignorant about how to properly support those activists who are working for radical social-political-economic change. And how to be those activists too.

Will Feminists Be Supported by Men in Taking Leadership of the 'Occupy' Movement?

Not likely. But I will hope that Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy (CRAP) is named, in many ways, by many people in the "Occupy" movement. And I'll hope against hope that men and whites don't dominate it. I also hope the movement finds radical roots and is nourished by them.

What follows may be found at its website, here: http://occupypatriarchy.org/