The F-Word Blog: Posts by Jolene Tan

One domestic worker's story

2010-07-20T08:35:42Z

In February I wrote about the gross maltreatment and dehumanisation of domestic workers in Singapore. It's received a comment from MaidinSing, one such worker who blogs to raise awareness of the way in which migrant labour is exploited in Singapore. She writes anonymously because she does not want to jeopardise future employment or her immigration status.

I strongly recommend reading her website and especially her account of her own experiences in employment (emphases in the original):

My employers would give me an allowance and deposit the rest of my money in my (joint) bank account. They said they wouldn’t give me access to my own money as they were doing it for my own good, so that I would have savings. I would need to buy my own personal items out of my allowance. As with most employers they kept my passport and Work Permit so that I could not leave should I wish.

Almost a year after I had started working there I developed an excruciating tooth ache. I couldn’t talk or eat. A visit to the dentist resulted in the extraction of my wisdom teeth. The $500 cost was deducted from my salary.

After working for more than I year I begged and begged to be able to see my sister who was also working in Singapore. I was just so desperate to see her, to see anyone. I told them I needed to get some urgent family documents from her and they finally relented. I met my sister for 30mins at the MRT station close by. In 14 months those 30 minutes were the only time I interacted with anyone outside of the household and was the only time I was ever out of the house unaccompanied.

Finally after 14 months my male employer was to be relocated by his company. I cannot tell you the joy I felt. In order for my employers to allow me to transfer I needed to pay the transfer costs out of my own savings. I didn’t care I was so happy to leave. In all the time I had been with them I had paid off a total of P87,600 pesos debt (agency fees) I incurred by coming to Singapore. Further I paid my dental bill, bought my own personal items, paid the transfers fees, plus I incurred an additional months debt from the agency for the transfer. I had worked 17 hours a day 7 days a week for 14 months for virtually nothing . I no longer had savings and I’d only sent a pittance home to my family. My dreams were well and truly shattered.

Women in prison: Inspectorate report

2010-07-16T19:21:40Z

Last week the Inspectorate of Prisons released a thematic report on women's prisons.

Prisons are mostly populated by people who have been socially excluded in any number of ways, but there are, as you might expect, gendered aspects to these experiences. Female prisoners have frequently suffered domestic violence and/or sexual abuse, and mental health difficulties are particularly prevalent amongst women in prison, something illustrated especially starkly by one graphic statistic: women make up only 5% of the prison population in England and Wales, but account for almost half of the self-harm incidents in prison.

The new economics foundation has argued that more investment should be made into alternatives to custody for many women offenders, rather than the use of prison. In September 2008, 68% of women were in prison for non-violent offences, and in 2008, three quarters of sentenced women were serving less than twelve months. (Short prison sentences have recently been criticised by both Ken Clarke and the National Audit Office.) If the government is looking to make budget cuts, the costly use of damaging prison sentences is fertile ground for savings, with greater intervention in health, housing and other social services ultimately likely to be far more cost effective for society, in addition to being more just.

Read the Inspectorate report here.

First, do no harm

2010-06-18T12:08:06Z

[Note: I've changed the wording of this post because children with clitorises may not necessarily be girls. In the interests of transparency, I've indicated my earlier error with the strikethrough tag. My apologies for the earlier sloppiness. It seems to me this rush to classify everyone and their body parts in a binary way is part of what fuels this sort of surgery to begin with.]

A very distressing story is doing the rounds at the moment. Alice Dreger and Ellen Feder have cast a light on surgeries performed by Dix Poppas, a pediatric urologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, to reduce the size of the clitorises of some ~~little girls~~ children, which he has deemed too big. It's claimed that this procedure allows the ~~girls~~ children to "undergo a more natural psychological and sexual development”. The operations have been followed by examinations to assess whether clitoral sensation has been preserved, and these have been written up in a paper by Poppas and his colleagues, Jennifer Yang and Diane Felsen.

At annual visits after the surgery, while a parent watches, Poppas touches the daughter’s surgically shortened clitoris with a cotton-tip applicator and/or with a “vibratory device,” and the girl is asked to report to Poppas how strongly she feels him touching her clitoris. Using the vibrator, he also touches her on her inner thigh, her labia minora, and the introitus of her vagina, asking her to report, on a scale of 0 (no sensation) to 5 (maximum), how strongly she feels the touch. Yang, Felsen, and Poppas also report a “capillary perfusion testing,” which means a physician or nurse pushes a finger nail on the girl’s clitoris to see if the blood goes away and comes back, a sign of healthy tissue. Poppas has indicated in this article and elsewhere that ideally he seeks to conduct annual exams with these girls. He intends to chart the development of their sexual sensation over time. [...]

In the course of our inquiries, made in preparation for this publication, nearly all clinicians to whom we described Poppas’s “clitoral sensory testing and vibratory sensory testing” practices thought them so outrageous that they told us we must have the facts wrong. When we showed them the 2007 article, their disbelief ceased, but they then seemed to become as agitated as we were. At an international conference two weeks ago, when Dreger told Ken Zucker, a psychologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and member of the clinical establishment, about this, Zucker said that we could quote him as saying this: “Applying a vibrator to a six-year-old girl’s surgically feminized clitoris is developmentally inappropriate.” We couldn’t find a clinician who disagreed with Zucker.

Melissa McEwan succinctly sums up how deeply problematic this is:

First: There is no such thing as a clitoris that is "too big."

Second: The follow-up examinations to evaluate sensation, referred to in Poppas' paper by the remarkably clinical term "clitoral sensory testing," consist of what is, by any reasonable definition, sexual assault. [...]

Human rights violations exactly like this are the inevitable consequence of a culture in which female bodies and/or bodies with variant presentations outside some arbitrary spectrum of "normal" are treated as property of someone other than the person within whose body resides the mind capable of making decisions regarding autonomy and consent, but denied that fundamental right.

For many, bodies aren't places for people to live in and from, it seems, but objects that should fit an approved standard template. This exchange between Dreger and a surgeon in the field demonstrates this amply:

One time I asked a surgeon who does these surgeries if he had any idea how women actually reach orgasm. What did he actually know, scientifically, about the functional physiology of the adult clitoris? He looked at me blankly, and then said, "But we're working on children." As if they were never going to grow up.

Update:I did more digging around and found this page on the Weill Cornell Pediatrics website. It includes the following language (emphases mine):

Classic congenital adrenal hyperplasia is usually detected in infancy or early childhood. Female newborns with the salt-wasting form of CAH may make the infant appear partially or very much like a male. In girls, the most obvious sign is often abnormal-appearing genitals that look more male than female, a condition called ambiguous external genitalia. The clitoris is enlarged and sometimes looks like a penis, and the labial folds may look something like a scrotum. [...]

In some infant girls who have ambiguous genitalia, reconstructive surgery may be required to correct the appearance and function of the genitals, a procedure that may involve reducing the size of the clitoris and reconstructing the vaginal opening. [...] Dr. Poppas has performed over 100 of these complex surgeries.

No purpose for the surgery, other than "correcting" "appearance and function", is described.

O brave new world

2010-06-08T18:40:48Z

Brace yourselves: you’ll need a strong stomach for this one.

Here is a story (via Womanist Musings) of girls in the Sodavas and Girvas villages of Rajasthan, many of whom are kidnapped in infancy and brought there. When aged 6-10, they are repeatedly injected with animal oxytocin to induce early puberty and feelings of trust, and then sold into the sex trade around India and even internationally to the Middle East. Reporters say that this is being described as “tradition” and has been going on for decades in the face of police neglect.

The drug in question is sold over the counter, and is otherwise used for veterinary purposes.

Reporter: We’re talking about that injection that unscrupulous farmers inject in their vegetables to make these vegetables grow faster and bigger. It’s the same injection that milkmen give to their buffaloes for increased milk production. [...]

Doctor: ...the growth, and all the functions of all the organs of the body will also be affected. And these people are giving it very unregulated. So it also has, in very high doses, it can affect the central nervous system also, and it can cause seizures, also it can cause pulmonary edema...

Quotes from the news videos, which you can view here. (I couldn’t understand some of the interviews in Part 4, but most of it is in English.) At one point the reporters examine the economy of the villages and conclude that they are hugely reliant on the earnings of this trade. “They cultivate absolutely nothing.”

I notice that all the interviews with villagers feature men. I wonder what the girls themselves, and any other women who live in the village, would have to say.

Update: DV in comments has suggested that oxytocin is unlikely to have the effects either on vegetables or (in terms of inducing puberty) human girls that are being claimed. I don't have the expertise to comment on the exact effects of the injections, but there seems to be an ongoing controversy in India about farmers using oxytocin on vegetables whatever its actual consequences may be. Moreover, even if the people administering the injections to girls are wholly misinformed about what it achieves, the news interviews nevertheless seem to corroborate their activities and intentions.

"A little place where I live safe"

2010-02-28T00:01:49Z

Human Rights Watch have released a report on the use by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) of Detained Fast Track (DFT), an accelerated procedure for asylum cases, for the cases of women whose circumstances raise complex gender-related issues. Many of the women concerned speak of having experienced or been threatened with sexual violence.

Problems start with the initial screening interview. This is the first point of contact between a UKBA officer and an asylum-seeker—the point at which an applicant applies for asylum. This interview does not involve any substantive questions about why an applicant is claiming asylum. Nevertheless, an assessment of her immigration history and credibility is made and the UKBA officer decides how the case should be routed. Many complex cases are inappropriately routed into the DFT as opposed to the general asylum procedure, despite the stated intention that DFT is there to deal speedily with straightforward (or “quick”) claims.

Once in the DFT procedure, women are on a fast-moving treadmill with structural features inhibiting or even preventing them from making their cases effectively. When women arrive at Yarl’s Wood, they will often have their asylum interview the next day. Most only have an opportunity to consult their duty solicitor in a short conversation over the phone. There is little opportunity to build trust, and women, especially in cases involving rape or abuse, may only reveal relevant information late in the process, or not at all. There is limited opportunity to access expert evidence, such as medical reports. The UKBA officer who conducts the asylum interview, known as the case owner, decides whether or not asylum should be granted.

That the trauma of rape can give rise to feelings inhibiting a woman from going to the police is, for example, recognized in criminal court. However, an asylum seeker is expected to immediately tell strangers—UKBA officers and legal representatives—of any violence, including sexual violence, that she has gone through. Solicitors report and refusal letters confirm that delay in mentioning critical facts about sexual violence often leads case owners to conclude that the information is not credible. Women seeking asylum are also disadvantaged by the lack of female interviewers and interpreters which can further inhibit full disclosure of experiences.

The report speaks of women whose stories run the gamut from rape to torture to enslavement, after which their search for safety runs into decidedly anticlimactic - but potentially, no less dangerous - roadblocks. Bureaucracy. Legalese. Paperwork. One solicitor assigned to represent a client recounts receiving a fax a week after the woman in question had arrived in Yarl's Wood - but hardly any time at all before her crucial asylum interview, scheduled for 10am the next day. Get someone to open up about what may be harrowing experiences of violence, build a case around the lack of an adequate state response to those crimes, gather medical and other expert evidence, make necessary translations... that's a list of tasks and a half for 24 hours.

Human Rights Watch also raise concerns about how the credibility of women is assessed during the asylum process. I found it hard to read this without hearing echoes of whistleblower Louise Perrett's account of her experiences at UKBA:

She claims the tone was set on the first day when one manager said of the asylum-seeker clients: "If it was up to me I'd take them all outside and shoot them." Another told her this was to be expected, adding: "No one in this office is very PC. In fact everyone is the exact opposite."

She told the Guardian: "I witnessed general hostility, rudeness and indifference towards clients. It was completely horrific. I highlighted my concerns to senior managers but I was just laughed at. I decided to speak out because nobody else was saying anything and major changes are needed at senior management level."

One of her cases involved a Congolese woman who had the right to remain in the UK. Perrett says a superior nevertheless decided the woman and her children should be removed, and asked officials whether there were any grounds to remove them. Frustrated, she approached a member of the legal department. His reply, according to Perrett, was: "Umbongo, umbongo, they kill them in the Congo."

Against which the words of one woman featured in the Human Rights Watch report, who said she had been imprisoned, raped and tortured, are particularly poignant:

I am a fighter, I am used to fight to live, but to be told ‘you faked your life’ is a little like death.

Fatima H, who wrote to Human Rights Watch while scheduled to be removed to Pakistan, is also quoted:

If I go back, my husband and my family kill me. No one to collect me on airport, and you know in Pakistan women are not secure...If there [is] in this world a little bit of humanity or you can say human rights, please protect me from them. If no then allow me to kill myself as a right of human who have nothing in this world, not a little place where I live safe.

Read the full report and recommendations here.

Diplomats and migrant domestic workers

2010-02-25T21:41:27Z

There've been some stories in the news this week about the abuse of migrant domestic workers by diplomats. From The Times:

Diplomats at several London embassies have been accused of using migrant domestic workers as “modern-day slaves”, depriving them of food and subjecting them to systematic abuse.

The workers claim they were lured to Britain with promises of good pay, but have been beaten, sexually abused and forced to sleep in a hallway or kitchen. In the past 12 months, at least nine cases involving diplomats have been referred to a government scheme to combat trafficking.

Details have emerged after a Saudi prince was charged last week with murdering his servant in a London hotel. Police said the man had been strangled and had suffered a head injury.

[...] “There is significant evidence that migrant workers are being trafficked into the UK by diplomats and are being abused and exploited,” said Jenny Moss, community advocate at Kalayaan, a charity that supports them. Kalayaan sent 22 cases of alleged trafficking of migrant workers to the national referral mechanism, a Home Office scheme to combat trafficking, between April and December last year. Nine involved diplomats.

The Guardian explains why these individuals are in an especially vulnerable position, even compared to other migrant domestic workers (who don't exactly have a walk in the park either):

In each case, the workers were admitted to the UK legally under a domestic worker visa programme especially for diplomats which prohibits alternative employment outside the diplomatic mission. Diplomats and senior government figures who claim diplomatic status enjoy immunity from prosecution in the UK and no charges have been brought in any of the cases. [...]

The all-party parliamentary group for trafficking of women and children, led by Anthony Steen and Clare Short, has raised the problem with immigration minister, Phil Woolas. It wants him to change the visa rules for diplomats' domestic staff to allow them to seek alternative employment, which would give them greater power to escape abusive employers.

More stories are linked from the Kalayaan website.

Misreading Lolita

2010-02-24T21:29:35Z

I posted an earlier version of this as a Facebook note last September, when Polanski was arrested, but given the award he's just won and a renewed spate of celebrity support for him, I thought I might revisit it.

I am a core team member of a volunteer-led campaign to abolish marital immunity for rape in Singapore. We received some flak for calling it No To Rape. Isn't it so obvious? Aren't you caricaturing disagreement with you? Who on earth would say "Yes To Rape"? It wouldn't - giggle, chortle, how clever I am - be "rape" then anymore, would it?

Apparently our name was self-evidently silly. Except that, you know, during our petition drive, lots of famous and influential people signed another petition saying, in effect, "Yes To Rape".

As others have noted, the list is staggering and in some cases heartbreaking. Special dishonourable mention must go to Bernard-Henri Lévy, a "moral" philosopher, for initiating the petition when his latest book is subtitled "A Stand Against the New Barbarism". Some stand, that.

Roman Polanski fed alcohol and drugs to a 13-year-old girl before vaginally and anally penetrating her while she cried and said "no". He then left the jurisdiction to escape punishment for an act he had acknowledged committing. If those aren't "rape" and a "flight from justice", how do you avoid the conclusion that both of those are null sets?

**

These events had me thinking of a longstanding complaint of mine about (of all things) a book. "Lolita" has become a byword for the idea that some little girls can quite ethically be the target of sexual advances by adults because their essential nature is one of "promiscuity" and they are therefore unrapeable. This is ironic in a particularly sickening way, because Nabokov's novel is about the monstrous connections that may exist between acts of genius, or creations or experiences of sublime beauty, and the infliction of cruelty. The central question is whether - to borrow from Richard Rorty - "ecstasy" and "iridescence" are fundamentally detached from curiosity about and empathy for the pain of others, and what that means for those of us who pursue these things, like the paedophile Humbert Humbert, and the complicit readers (all of us) who thrill to the irresistible splendour of his language.

In other words, Lolita is about, precisely, the evil of refusing to hold someone like Polanski accountable for his crime on account of his "genius". The common perversion of this insight struck me with especial force in the face of this phalanx of famous folks closing ranks behind their own, to protect a "great" man from any consequences for the piteous and irrelevant fact that he caused real human suffering.

Unless it can be proven to me - to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction - that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

From Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, emphasis mine.

Race to the bottom

2010-02-17T01:05:08Z

Much has been said about the racism in mainstream Western beauty standards. As Latoya Peterson puts it: the message for white women is "try harder", but the message for women of colour is "never". The legacies of colonialism and the global reach of American mass media make these issues relevant even in places where white people are, numerically, a tiny minority. In my hometown of Singapore - and I'm sure it's true elsewhere - white-dominated Hollywood and MTV are major cultural points of reference. Consumer advertising, plastered everywhere, regularly features models who are white or appear to be of mixed white and Chinese descent. It's otherwise dominated by (often translucently pale) Chinese people, with individuals of other ethnic heritage rarely getting a look in, although they form nearly a quarter of the population.

If the sole consequence was that some models and actors were marginalised in their respective markets, that would be unfortunate enough, but it goes deeper. F Word readers must be all too familiar with how, in industrialised societies saturated by the mass media, the shifting, arbitrary demands of "beauty" are presented to women and girls as socially obligatory. We're repeatedly reminded, with every intrusive comment and every act of invisibilisation, that women and girls may only legitimately participate in public spaces if we adopt whatever configuration of body parts and facial features it is that goes into "beauty's" identikit checklist du jour. And if we can't, we should have the decency to be apologetic about our inferiority.

The fundamental problem is this knotty link between, on the one hand, the diktat mandating allegiance to some ideal of generic attractiveness (so distant from the organic processes of attraction between individual people); and, on the other hand, the social status, and so all too often self-worth, of women and girls. What can this mean for societies where the exemplars of "beauty" are drawn from ethnic groups that are demographically insignificant in that society? "Beauty", and thus worth, are shifted even more impossibly out of reach. Women and girls are required to aspire to realms of ever greater unreality, which must surely inspire new heights (or depths) of inadequacy and disconnect.

Against this backdrop, a few disturbing facts. The most popular form of cosmetic surgery in Asia is blepharoplasty, performed to increase the size of the eye and create additional folds in the eyelid - both changes which make East Asian people look more like white people. For those who are squeamish about invasive procedures or who can't afford to shell out thousands of pounds there is double eyelid tape to the rescue. Also widespread is rhinoplasty to elevate the bridge and sharpen the tip of the nose, again resulting in a closer approximation of whiteness. (Consider this webpage from a Singaporean provider of plastic surgery which refers specifically to those changes and in fact features a picture of a white woman.) Some people wear fake freckles. And a Korean surgeon describes the procedures required to enable the legs of his customers to meet an imported ideal:

Just as Asian faces require unique procedures, their bodies demand innovative operations to achieve the leggy, skinny, busty Western ideal that has become increasingly universal. Dr. Suh In Seock, a surgeon in Seoul, has struggled to find the best way to fix an affliction the Koreans call muu-dari and the Japanese call daikon-ashi: radish-shaped calves. Liposuction, so effective on the legs of plump Westerners, doesn't work on Asians since muscle, not fat, accounts for the bulk. Suh says earlier attempts to carve the muscle were painful and made walking difficult. "Finally, I discovered that by severing a nerve behind the knee, the muscle would atrophy," says Suh, "thereby reducing its size up to 40%." Suh has performed over 600 of the operations since 1996. He disappears for a minute and returns with a bottle of fluid containing what looks like chopped up bits of ramen noodles. He has preserved his patients' excised nerves in alcohol. "And that's just since November," he says proudly.

Then there's the desire for lighter skin, the Indian variation on which is probably one of the more well-known, but by no means unique. In many places this obsession has a complicated relationship with colonialism and class. Some Chinese people, for example, explain their fetishisation of fair skin in terms of class - because a darker complexion would indicate exposure to the sun through manual work - but given the wider idealisation of whiteness as beauty, it's hard to imagine a current of race doesn't also run through this now if not necessarily always in the past.

I know that body alteration is famously fraught territory for feminists, and want to make it clear that this is not a villification of those who undergo these procedures. Society rewards and encourages conformity to beauty standards, but it’s also eager to punish conformity with sneering scorn when women and girls take cultural messages about the importance of "beauty" at face value. It’s the age-old tale: patriarchy shames women and girls into aspiring to femininity, and then shames women and girls for achieving it. Criticism of the "beauty" imperative must be careful to avoid falling into the classic misogynist routine of berating women and girls for choices about our own bodies. It must be, it is, possible to robustly reject the obligation to reshape ourselves according to some notional ideal, without demonising those whose appearances meet that ideal, whether by chance or by design.

That said, I find it impossible to consider the landscape of these cosmetic surgery and "beauty" practices without seeing a manifestation of the adoption of not only deeply misogynist but also heinously racist ideas about what sorts of bodies and faces are desirable. With all the attendant implications of this for the social status and self-worth of women and girls in particular.

Via Sepia Mutiny I leave you with this video from Canadian Kanwer Singh, aka Humble the Poet. The interviews with the children, at the end, are especially worth watching.

Important questions from Gita Sahgal

2010-02-08T00:21:16Z

The detention of Moazzam Begg and others in Guantanamo Bay was and is a violation of their human rights, which Amnesty International is right to criticise.

Moazzam Begg and his organisation, Cage Prisoners, are not defenders of human rights, and are therefore inappropriate allies for Amnesty.

It is not hard for both of these observations to be simultaneously true. The victims of human rights violations are not thereby automatically immune from having problematic political positions. So why has Gita Sahgal, head of Amnesty's gender unit, been suspended after raising these concerns?

Here is her full statement:

Amnesty International and Cageprisoners

Statement by Gita Sahgal

7 February 2010

This morning the Sunday Times published an article about Amnesty International’s association with groups that support the Taliban and promote Islamic Right ideas. In that article, I was quoted as raising concerns about Amnesty’s very high profile associations with Guantanamo-detainee Moazzam Begg. I felt that Amnesty International was risking its reputation by associating itself with Begg, who heads an organization, Cageprisoners, that actively promotes Islamic Right ideas and individuals.

Within a few hours of the article being published, Amnesty had suspended me from my job.

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when a great organisation must ask: if it lies to itself, can it demand the truth of others? For in defending the torture standard, one of the strongest and most embedded in international human rights law, Amnesty International has sanitized the history and politics of the ex-Guantanamo detainee, Moazzam Begg and completely failed to recognize the nature of his organisation Cageprisoners.

The tragedy here is that the necessary defence of the torture standard has been inexcusably allied to the political legitimization of individuals and organisations belonging to the Islamic Right.

I have always opposed the illegal detention and torture of Muslim men at Guantanamo Bay and during the so-called War on Terror. I have been horrified and appalled by the treatment of people like Moazzam Begg and I have personally told him so. I have vocally opposed attempts by governments to justify ‘torture lite’.

The issue is not about Moazzam Begg’s freedom of opinion, nor about his right to propound his views: he already exercises these rights fully as he should. The issue is a fundamental one about the importance of the human rights movement maintaining an objective distance from groups and ideas that are committed to systematic discrimination and fundamentally undermine the universality of human rights. I have raised this issue because of my firm belief in human rights for all.

I sent two memos to my management asking a series of questions about what considerations were given to the nature of the relationship with Moazzam Begg and his organisation, Cageprisoners. I have received no answer to my questions. There has been a history of warnings within Amnesty that it is inadvisable to partner with Begg. Amnesty has created the impression that Begg is not only a victim of human rights violations but a defender of human rights. Many of my highly respected colleagues, each well-regarded in their area of expertise has said so. Each has been set aside.

As a result of my speaking to the Sunday Times, Amnesty International has announced that it has launched an internal inquiry. This is the moment to press for public answers, and to demonstrate that there is already a public demand including from Amnesty International members, to restore the integrity of the organisation and remind it of its fundamental principles.

I have been a human rights campaigner for over three decades, defending the rights of women and ethnic minorities, defending religious freedom and the rights of victims of torture, and campaigning against illegal detention and state repression. I have raised the issue of the association of Amnesty International with groups such as Begg’s consistently within the organisation. I have now been suspended for trying to do my job and staying faithful to Amnesty’s mission to protect and defend human rights universally and impartially.

Same garbage, different continents

2010-02-08T15:46:58Z

Over at Racialicious, Thea Lim discusses an American website, "Classy Asian Ladies", which fetishises Asian women ("Asian" is used in the American rather than the British sense, referring to the Asian continent more generally rather than specifically South Asia). Drawing a supposed opposition between Asian-American women and other American women:

It seems that in today’s society the average woman is becoming very competitive and even a bit more masculine than their counterparts in earlier generations. All the while it seems to be just the opposite is taking place for Asian women who tend to retain their sense of femininity and well-known cultural attitude of gentle and caring support. …

Asian ladies ... are known for their loving and gentle nature, they are extremely loyal, supportive, and dedicated to their men. One of the great qualities you will find in the Asian women at ClassyAsianLadies.com is how important their man is in all aspects of their lives. It’s not about what a man does for a living or how much he earns; the Asian woman at ClassyAsianLadies.com will stand behind her men in times of trouble and stress, while rejoicing in his periods of success. She always thinks of her man first! …

They rarely complain, are gentle and constructive with their criticism ... Did we mention that Asian ladies are among the most beautiful females in the world? And they are well known for retaining their youthful beauty and shapely figures well into middle age and beyond.

On this side of the pond, a "Thai bride" agency offers more on the same theme:

If you are one of the growing band of disillusioned genuine single Western gentlemen, who is "sick to the back teeth" with the new breed of twenty-first century woman. If you are disillusioned with the kind of de-feminised, over sized, self-centred, mercenary minded lady, available on the Western singles scene, who is only out for what she can get. ... we introduce gentlemen to the kind of decent, marriage minded Thai ladies ...

For me, there is something especially ironic, and empty, about the characterisation of "Asian women" in opposition to Western women, because funnily enough, this is exactly the sort of reasoning used by some men in Singapore - in that place, you know, Asia - to justify participation in the regional “bride trade”, through which they purchase women from Vietnam and other countries.

A Singaporean man was seen distributing leaflets to passersby, promoting luxury cruise packages at a cost of S$13,800 (US$8,365). For an extra S$9,800 (US$5,940), a single man buying a luxury cruise could choose a bride on the spot to accompany him on his trip.

"It was like a TV advertisement, and it was so humiliating," the Thanh Nien daily reported, quoting a Vietnamese employee at a computer firm in Singapore.

In recent years, an increasing number of Singapore men, unable to find love at home, have sought their brides in Vietnam, China and Indonesia. Many are convinced that foreigners make better wives because they are perceived as more domesticated, less arrogant or materialistic compared to their Singapore counterparts.

The website of one of the bride businesses enthusiastically reproduces the following bullet points from a Singaporean news story (page two here) on the subject:

"Mr. Yeo said that he is getting old, he need someone to take care of his 73-year-old mother and himself."
Foreign brides are more demure and accommodating.
"I want woman who will put the family and husband first, rather than demand cars, condominiums and credits."
Willing to bear kid. …
His wife takes care of the kids and all housework.
Her requests are simple, "care for her, don't bully her and don't go out look for other women."

Although racial fetishes in dating are not directly comparable to the purchase of mail order brides, the similarities in legitimising rhetoric are striking. As a woman from Asia, myself, I find essentialising language about "Asian women" far from complimentary, but rather dehumanising and Othering. The Western characterisation of a homogenous bloc of "Asian women" as ciphers of femininity - as delicate lotus flowers of mind-reading, uncomplaining wish fulfillment fantasy - has a particular resonance in light of the exploitation by the bride trade of the economic hardship faced by many women in Asia.

Quite aside from cases of outright fraud or coercion in the "bride trade", for many women, marriage is their only or primary opportunity to secure a level of material provision for themselves and their families. It is unsurprising that some would look to richer countries to make the most of it. Once in an unfamiliar society, dependent on their husbands for economic provision and often immigration status, possibly unable to speak the local language, these women are in a position of great vulnerability. When marketers in the "bride trade" speak of women who are "demure and accommodating", they are promoting this very powerlessness as a key selling point.

So the glowing tributes to "femininity", here, are not descriptions of women - any women - "as we really are", whatever that means, but celebrations of powerlessness. (We might well ask, of course, if tributes to "femininity" are ever anything but sops to inferior classes under patriarchy.)

A False Necessity: Singapore's Maid Trade

2010-02-08T08:07:52Z

In my gleamingly modern home town of Singapore, trading in women has been refined to a stomach-churningly efficient art. The women in question are foreign domestic workers (FDWs), locally known as “maids”, who travel from poorer countries - principally but not only the Philippines and Indonesia - to live in private households and provide cleaning, cooking and care services. So ubiquitous is their hire - in the hundreds of thousands, in a country of 5 million - that online portal bestmaid.com.sg confidently declares, “In Singapore, maid is not a luxury, but a necessity.”

Fortunately, “maid agencies” are to hand to assist with procuring these necessities. Visit one of the offices that dot the island and you can see FDWs displayed like so many wares, often in uniform haircuts and agency-branded T-shirts. To determine if you’re getting value for money, you can’t engage with the woman in front of you - you have to fill in a form with your preferences so that the agency can consult their comprehensive catalogue, neatly enabling you to locate a maid with the desired height, build, nationality, age, skin colour, religion, marital status, number of children and other vital qualifications for the job.

But I’m behind the times - rather than making this trip you could also consult maidlibrary.com, the “maid search” function of which helpfully divides into “married” and “not married” columns by default.

One sought-after trait, which sadly cannot yet be reliably gauged by even the most competent businesses, is quiescence. The maid mustn’t get ideas above her station, like thinking she is entitled to one day off a month, or considering changing employer if her current post isn’t working out, or - worst of all - eating biscuits, thus forcing you to beat her. Savvy employers sometimes pick Indonesian workers because FDWs from the Philippines are reputed to be more knowledgeable and assertive about their rights, as well as being likely to speak English, the local lingua franca.

“It’s when they speak English that the problem comes,” one employer said to me confidingly. “That’s when they start to make friends.”

At a loss, I replied, “God forbid anyone should have friends.”

She hastily clarified: it wasn’t friends she was worried about, it was boyfriends. Particularly the foreign men who carry out the vast majority of Singapore’s manual labour and typically come from poorer Asian countries, such as Bangladesh. This brings us to one of the less endearing features of Chinese Singaporean racism - and you might have guessed the competition is fierce - namely the hypersexualisation of foreign workers with darker skin.

There is no other way to put this: the nation is obsessed with the possibility that some of these people might shag. Given that having sex is all that foreign women might conceivably wish to do with themselves, to prevent this horrifying contingency, they must not be allowed to communicate with anyone, ever. Ostensibly, this fixation arises because FDWs are forbidden by law to give birth in Singapore, but in a country where contraception is freely available and abortion is perfectly legal up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, there's clearly something else going on here, psychologically, with employers.

Human Rights Watch documents the results:

"I can write letters but I can't make phone calls, I have to do it in secret. I'm not allowed to have a boyfriend. My employer wouldn't like it, she would send me back to Indonesia.” ...

Many domestic workers are forbidden from leaving the workplace unless they are in the company of their employer or, for those who are so lucky, on days off. Some domestic workers interviewed by Human Rights Watch reported being locked in their workplace from the outside. More commonly, domestic workers reported that their employers discouraged or prohibited them from talking to neighbors, other domestic workers, or to friends on the phone. ...

Almost all of the domestic workers that Human Rights Watch interviewed were required to obtain permission to leave the household where they worked. Many domestic workers were not allowed out of the apartment unless they were in the company of their employer, even to go to the market.Some employers locked the phone so domestic workers could not use it during the day. ...

"They would lock me inside the house with the baby. I was not allowed to make phone calls or send letters to my family. I wasn't allowed to say anything or talk to the neighbors, I had to just keep quiet.” ...

"If I left the flat to throw out the trash, I had to return in exactly three minutes."...

"They don't give me more off days, because they're worried that I will get a boyfriend." ...

Singaporean progressive blog Barnyard Chorus also picks up on one employer’s - not unrepresentative - letter to the local papers, bemoaning the willingness of agencies to arrange the transfer to another employer of a FDW who appeared to have formed social relationships with men. The baffling idea that this ought to disqualify her from employment is remarkably widely shared.

Much of this racist abusiveness and dehumanisation is closely related to Singaporeans’ fear and anxiety over the country’s post-colonial survival. The national narrative has us plucked from the jaws of devastating poverty by good governance and hard work (both presented, with varying degrees of explicitness, as specifically Chinese virtues), and positions Singapore as a unique success story in a region of backward societies whose misfortunes are testament to, and constitutive of, the unreality and insignificance of their inhabitants. Thus, Human Rights Watch documents a case where an employer justified withholding wages for eight years of a FDW’s work with: “I've done a lot for you. Because of me, you got to breathe the air in Singapore. I gave you a luxurious life. Whatever we have done for you is enough.” In other words, because she came from a poorer country, slavery was the best she could legitimately hope for. Lee Kuan Yew, who was Prime Minister for 25 years from independence and whose son is now Prime Minister, has brandished maidhood as part of the ultimate threat to the nation's well-being: if the 45 year-long dominance of the ruling party were to end, he cautioned, “your asset values will disappear, your apartment will be worth a fraction of what it is, your jobs will be in peril, your security will be at risk and our women will become maids in other people's countries”.

I suspect that for many Singaporean women, abusiveness towards FDWs is also connected to fear and anxiety about our own place in society. Patriarchal attitudes simultaneously devaluing and gendering care work and domestic work are well-ensconced in Singapore, but the prevalence of FDWs staves off, to some degree, arguments about the role of Singaporean women in private and public spheres, by replacing the grossly undervalued labour Singaporean women would have been expected to do with grossly undervalued labour that foreign women are made to do. The hierarchy and unfairness remain in place; we've just changed the demographic on whom the worst burdens fall. Which is, of course, from a humanitarian perspective, little change at all.

We need a rethinking of existing ways, and an understanding that care work and domestic work are work, and the people who perform this work, whomever they may be, should be accorded proper respect and status. Instead, we have imagined into being a hellish necessity: that there must be maids, who must be subjugated; and only by meting out the ill-treatment that defines this degraded role can we reassure ourselves of our own precarious superiority over it.

***

Although this is a particularly stark issue in Singapore, many of the forms of abuse and dehumanising attitudes discussed are also highly relevant to migrant domestic workers in the UK. Please read Kalayaan's 2008 report (previously linked by The F Word here) to find out more.