[R-G] The memory of Aqsa Parvez and the future of feminism

[Steven L. Robinson]

The memory of Aqsa Parvez and the future of feminism

By Sarah Ghabrial
Rabble
December 5, 2008

On December 10 of last year, a young Toronto woman was murdered in her home
by her father.

The force of this tragedy was deepened by details of the violence of her
early death and by the dozens of photos that flooded print media,
television, blogs and facebook groups of her beaming adolescent face. It
soon emerged that the murder victim, Aqsa Parvez, born in Canada of
Pakistani parents, had suffered abuse by her father for years, and that when
he realized his inability to control her movement and choices, he decided
instead to end her life.

It is for reasons just like these that over 200 Canadian women lose their
lives every year to domestic violence (and this figure pertains only to
solved cases of spousal homicide). Aqsa's story is a profoundly Canadian
one, disturbingly ordinary. One might expect that, like countless similar
cases, Aqsa's murder would be casually buried beneath other stories deemed
more 'news-worthy.' Instead, her case crowned headlines for weeks, and fed
an endless loop of debate and controversy over the state of
'multiculturalism' in Canada.

Genuine compassion or inquisitiveness regarding Aqsa's story dissipated all
too quickly in the ensuing frenzy over the Canadian 'minority question.' The
day after Aqsa's story broke, CityNews brandished a headline describing the
"tradition and terror" behind the tragedy. A National Post columnist seeking
to explain "the meaning of Aqsa Parvez" was quick to describe her death as
an "honour killing" and elaborated on the "loathsome and barbaric" nature of
the culture from which, according to this versions of the narrative, she was
desperate to escape.

There is no doubt that Aqsa was desperate to escape - from her abusive home
and tyrannical father. But as a young woman of colour, living at dangerous
intersections of race and gender, belonging and exclusion, her options for
escape were sadly limited. Women like Aqsa matter little in the grand scheme
of things - until their deaths provide convenient grounds on which to mount
xenophobic vitriol against Canada's dark Others.

Helen Yohannes, an esteemed Eritrean spoken word artist and Coordinator for
the Respect in Action Youth Program at METRAC, described her concern over
this widespread backlash, and the failure to instead step back and examine
"domestic and gender-based violence, and the responsibility of schools,
governments and communities to combat violence against young women of
colour." Such questions, she remarks, were never even raised.

Gender-based violence, says Yohannes, "is the outcome of patriarchy, racism,
sexism, Islamophobia, poverty and homophobia. Unless all of these issues are
properly acknowledged, the cycle of violence against women and children will
continue."

This week marks December 6, the National Day of Remembrance and Action on
Violence Against Women. The issue became highlighted nearly 20 years ago,
when a deranged anti-feminist walked into the École Polytechnique in
Montreal and selected and then shot down 14 young women. In memory of these
young women, December 6 and the days preceding it remain a time to reflect
on gender-based violence in Canada and to consider ways to prevent it.

Violence against women is a problem so immense that it is almost lost (and
too often forgotten) for its pervasiveness. No wonder, since solutions are
still so narrowly devised. In the wake of the Montreal Massacre, any
progress made in confronting gender-based violence is still blunted by
failures to recognize the different kinds of systemic oppression, especially
racism and poverty, that force and keep women in situations of increased
exposure to violence.

In Canada, there exists a strange paradox: a tendency to view women of
colour and 'immigrant' women - especially Muslim women - as particularly
weak and vulnerable, due to the supposedly more intrinsic patriarchy of
'their' cultures; and a concurrent, stubborn unwillingness in our legal,
emergency response and, most importantly, education systems to put forward
solutions that reach out to women in these positions, rather than further
marginalize them.

Perhaps it is easier to sit back in cold condescension, to better reinforce
the racist assumptions that keep 'our' values liberal and 'theirs'
backwards - notions that in turn keep this country solidly white and
impenetrable.

Eve Hoque, Assistant Professor in Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, at
York University, notes that media representations surrounding Aqsa's story
reflected a "white-settler national narrative of oppressive vs. liberating
cultures; it reduced multiculturalism to how 'we' can tolerate 'them' and
solve their problems."

Such rhetoric was recently revived in an inflammatory Toronto Life article,
against which Muslim feminists and their allies mounted wide public action,
and which was subsequently defended by TL editor Sarah Fulford as bringing
attention to confrontations between 'New' and 'Old World' values.

As it happened, the week this debate was raging, two white Toronto women
were killed by their husbands - one a police officer. "When cases like that
occur, we think, oh, what went wrong there?" says Hoque, "it's confounding
and inexplicable. But in Aqsa's case it's easily dismissed as an 'honour
killing', testing the limits of toleration."

The Montreal Massacre took place before the term 'multiculturalism' had
earned its recent mint as a catch phrase for race-relations in Canada. The
term became especially freighted and cumbersome after 9/11, and lately has
begun to chafe. Feminism, meanwhile, has not enjoyed much sympathy in my own
lifetime, but I see it rehabilitated, dusted off and soundly misused often
enough in mainstream culture when the situation calls for it.

When certain persons must be imprisoned without trial, when certain
countries must be invaded, when certain communities must be ostracized, even
the vilest patriarchs are all too happy to invoke 'feminism' - or their weak
understanding of it. Conservative leaders seem to have few qualms about
vilifying feminism as the source of all things anti-family and awful, and
then raising a feminist flag to front an amorphous 'war on terror.' It would
be almost funny if not for the perplexing ways in which so many feminists -
inevitably white feminists - willingly participate in such posturing. The
sound heard from mainstream feminist camps in the wake of Aqsa's murder was
a combination of racist muttering and bewildering silence.

For those who chose silence, perhaps they felt there was little they could
say on the matter (if you can't say anything politically-correct, say
nothing at all.) But there was everything to say. There was everything to
say - to scream, to insist - about improving prevention methods to be more
culturally-appropriate and accessible; about demanding more access to
services and support for women currently attaining citizenship status; about
criticizing shortages in safe and affordable housing; about rebuking police
and emergency response systems that do more to visit violence on newcomer
communities (including women) than to help them escape from it.

To collude in simple notions of cultures clashing and to dismiss acts of
violence as endemic only to certain communities, thereby 'proving' their
inability to ever become 'true' Canadians, means accepting and abetting
violence against women. To continue on this course means condemning more
women to Aqsa's fate.

It has been suggested in both academic and activist circles that feminism
and multiculturalism are fundamentally at odds. When asked if
multiculturalism was bad for women, Stanford liberal feminist academic Susan
Moller Okin returned a now famous and pointed 'Yes.'

Such a statement assumes that women are not agents in their culture; it
assumes women experience one-dimensional identities and oppressions (either
primarily gendered, primarily racialized, or classed, or religious, and so
on). And it completely overlooks the existence of people like me: passionate
feminists - from Middle-Eastern, 'new Canadian' families.

The week that encompasses December 6 - 10 should be a time to remember all
women who are affected by gender-based violence, who are most prominently
women of colour (especially Aboriginal women) and women living in poverty.

This is a period of mourning and remembrance, but even more, it is an
opportunity to re-imagine feminist politics and action against gender-based
violence along a number of fronts.

*************

Sarah Ghabrial is a PhD candidate in History at McGill University, where she
researches the development of politics of feminism, multiculturalism,
immigration, and citizenship in the context of colonial and postcolonial
pasts. She is also a co-founder of The Miss G_ Project for Equity in
Education, a young feminist organization that works to combat all forms of
oppression in and through education.

http://www.rabble.ca/news/memory-aqsa-parvez-and-future-feminism

This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from
http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm