Each March 8, the world is flooded with shiny campaigns urging us to “speed up motion” and “encourage inclusion”. Worldwide Girls’s Day has turn out to be a cultured, PR-friendly spectacle the place company sponsors preach empowerment whereas the ladies most in want of solidarity are left to fend for themselves.
I can solely hope that this yr’s name to “speed up motion” means motion for all girls – not simply those that match neatly into company feminism, media-friendly activism, and elite success tales.
But when historical past is any information, the one motion that shall be accelerated is the branding of feminism as a marketable commodity, whereas the ladies enduring warfare, occupation, and systemic violence face erasure.
Yr after yr, Worldwide Girls’s Day is paraded as a world second of solidarity, but its priorities are rigorously curated. The feminist institution rallies behind causes which might be palatable, media-friendly, and politically convenient- the place girls’s struggles might be framed as particular person success tales, not systemic injustices.
When Iranian girls burned their hijabs in protest, they have been met with widespread Western assist. When Ukrainian girls took up arms, they have been hailed as symbols of resilience. However when Palestinian girls dig by means of rubble to tug their youngsters’s our bodies from the ruins of their properties, they’re met with silence or, worse, suspicion. The identical feminist establishments that mobilise towards “violence towards girls” battle to even utter the phrases “Gaza” or “genocide”.
Within the UK, within the run-up to this yr’s Worldwide Girls’s Day, an MP and feminist organisations have hosted an occasion on “Giving a Voice to Silenced Girls in Afghanistan”, that includes feminists who had spent months calling for boycotts of the Afghan cricket staff. As a result of, in fact, that’s the way you tackle the Taliban – by ensuring they’ll’t play a recreation of cricket.
That is what passes for worldwide solidarity: Symbolic gestures that do nothing for the ladies struggling underneath oppressive regimes however make Western politicians really feel morally superior.
Let me be clear: Afghan girls deserve each ounce of solidarity and assist. Their battle towards an oppressive regime is actual, pressing, and devastating – and sure, what they’re enduring is gender apartheid.
However acknowledging their struggling doesn’t excuse the rank hypocrisy of those that wield feminism as a political software, displaying up for Afghan girls whereas staying silent on the Palestinian girls being starved, bombed, and brutalised earlier than our eyes.
The Taliban’s rise was not some act of nature – it was a direct product of UK and US intervention. After 20 years of occupation, after handing Afghan girls again to the very males the West as soon as armed and enabled, these identical voices now weep over their destiny.
The place have been these girls MPs, outstanding feminists, and mainstream feminist organisations when pregnant Palestinian girls have been giving delivery within the streets of Gaza as a result of hospitals had been bombed? The place was the outcry when Israeli snipers focused girls journalists, like Shireen Abu Akleh? The place have been the boycotts when Palestinian women have been pulled from the rubble of their properties, killed by US-made bombs?
Time and time once more, we see the identical sample: Feminist outrage is conditional, activism is selective, and solidarity is reserved for these whose struggles don’t problem Western energy. Afghan girls deserve assist. However so do Palestinian girls, Sudanese girls, Yemeni girls. As an alternative, their struggling is met with silence, suspicion, or outright erasure.
Worldwide Girls’s Day, as soon as a radical name for equality, has turn out to be a hole spectacle – one the place feminist organisations and politicians decide and select which girls deserve justice and which girls might be sacrificed on the altar of Western pursuits.
Feminism has lengthy been wielded by the highly effective as a software to justify empire, warfare, and occupation – all underneath the pretence of “saving girls”. In the course of the Algerian Conflict of Independence, the French launched a marketing campaign to “liberate” Algerian girls from the veil, parading unveiled girls in propaganda ceremonies whereas concurrently brutalising and raping them in detention centres.
The French, in fact, have been by no means involved about gender equality in Algeria; they readily restricted training and employment for Algerian girls. Their actions underneath the guise of serving to girls have been about domination.
This identical narrative of the helpless brown lady in want of white saviours has been used to justify much more current Western army interventions, from Afghanistan to Iraq. Right now, we see the identical playbook in Palestine, as effectively.
The West frames Palestinian girls as victims – however not of bombs, displacement, or hunger. No, the actual drawback, we’re advised, is Palestinian males. Israeli officers and their Western allies rehash the identical Orientalist trope: Palestinian girls have to be saved from their very own tradition, from their very own individuals, whereas their precise struggling underneath occupation is ignored or dismissed.
The systematic slaughter of ladies and kids is handled as an unlucky footnote to the battle, moderately than its central atrocity. We see the identical sample repeatedly – concern for ladies’s rights solely when it serves a political agenda, silence when these rights are crushed underneath the burden of Western-backed airstrikes and army occupation. This isn’t solidarity. It’s complicity wrapped in feminist rhetoric.
So, who will really profit from Worldwide Girls’s Day this yr? Will or not it’s the ladies whose oppression matches neatly into Western feminist narratives, permitting politicians, feminist organisations, and mainstream girls’s advocacy teams to bask of their self-congratulatory glow? Or will or not it’s the ladies who’ve been silenced, erased, and dehumanised – these for whom “speed up motion” has meant 17 months of genocide and 76 years of settler colonial violence?
Is that this simply one other “feel-good” train, the place you may declare to assist girls internationally with out confronting the truth that your feminism has limits? As a result of if that is actually about accelerating motion, then after 17 months of bombing, hunger, and displacement, we must always lastly hear you stand for Palestinian girls.
However we all know how this goes. The speeches shall be made, the hashtags will development, the panel discussions shall be held – however the girls of Gaza will stay buried underneath the rubble, their struggling too politically inconvenient to say.
As for me, I’m becoming a member of the feminist motion’s march at present – however let’s be clear, our agendas will not be the identical. I’ll march for each Palestinian lady who not solely struggles to be heard however has been so brutally dehumanised that her struggling amid a genocide is being broadcast stay to blind eyes and deaf ears.
I – together with numerous different girls who refuse to remain silent – will consider every mom cradling the lifeless physique of her youngster, every daughter compelled to turn out to be a caretaker in a single day, every sister looking by means of the rubble together with her naked arms. And we – girls who consider in actual feminist solidarity and reject selective outrage – won’t simply “hope” that this name to motion means one thing; we are going to make sure that it does.
We are going to make sure that Palestinian voices are heard. We are going to make sure that to boycott those that revenue from Palestinian oppression. We are going to make sure that to problem each platform and each feminist who normalises Palestinian struggling, holding them accountable for his or her complicity.
To our Palestinian sisters: We really feel your ache. We now have carried your battle in our hearts for the final 17 months, and we all know your struggle didn’t start there – it has been 76 years of defiance, of survival, of refusing to vanish.
And know this: Subsequent yr, on March 8, we won’t simply mourn your struggling – we are going to have fun your victory. Not your so-called “liberation” from your personal males, as Western feminists like to border it, however your liberation from settler-colonial occupation. We hear you. We see you. And we won’t relaxation till the entire world does, too.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
