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COPYRIGHT 2003 Bridgewater State College
Abstract
Cyber-space presents many contradictions to those seeking to use it for activist ends in a transnational world. This paper explores some of these contradictions by examining various uses of the internet in efforts to raise awareness about the situation for women in Afghanistan during the period the Taliban came to power and controlled a majority of the country. I explore differences in approaches, images, and tone within examples of internet activism, emphasizing the Web work of the Feminist Majority Foundation, set in comparison with that of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. Due to the prominence of the chadari in the images and campaigns of the Feminist Majority, a central part of the work is devoted to careful consideration of the image of veiling. As I note in the body of the paper, interact activism around the crisis for women living under the Taliban shows the potential for its usefulness as a tool in raising cross-global consciousness. At the same time this research reveals the need for caution, care and a critical eye when exploring and utilizing the internet and Web as a means of activist education and organization. In the end, I hope this critical reflection on these examples were feminists have utilized the tools of cyber-space will help in building, especially within the U.S., more careful and nuanced approaches as we seek international solidarity.
Key Words: Internet activism, International solidarity, women in Afghanistan
Introduction
In this paper I explore feminists' efforts to raise awareness about the situation for women in Afghanistan under the Taliban by utilizing the internet. (2) This paper adds to a growing body of research examining various aspects of the rise of the Taliban and their specific policies toward women, as well as looking at feminist international mobilization around these policies (for examples see Huma Ahmed-Ghosh, 2003; Shahnaz Khan; 2001; Sonali Kolhatkar, 2002; Valentine Moghadam, 2002). My focus on the internet echoes Myfanwy Franks' call for approaches that start in "the metaphorical kitchen in which we might find ourselves, with the materials that are available," hence I am most interested in examples of feminist internet uses that were readily available to me as I sought out information on these topics from within the U.S. (2002, 9). I concentrate on internet sources that were prominent in feminist campaigns, referenced by writers and others both on and off the internet, offered in English, and located using readily available search engines or sent to me via e-mail from various sources. (3) While a variety of examples of internet based information is explored, the heart of the paper focuses on a comparative reading of information found on the Web sites of the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) and the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).
For all the publicity it has recently received, I believe many in the U.S. know little about Afghanistan or the history of the Taliban. (4) I first learned about the Taliban in 1997 through a National Public Radio report on decrees imposed on Kabul after the Taliban takeover. As a feminist I was outraged by what I heard. However, I was skeptical of my immediate reactions to this story due to various aspects of my own positions in the world set in relation to this tragedy (for example that I was listening to a report from a major media outlet in the U.S.). (5) Mindful of Edward Said's influential indictment of orientalism (1979), my historical understanding of the country and situation were newly gained, clearly limited, and also somewhat dangerous. (6) Over time, my awareness of the situation for women under the Taliban grew, in part, thanks to the many powerful ways activists and organizations utilized the internet as a tool for intervening in this crisis. The growth in the internet has spawned a host of international and national activist projects worth more systematic theoretical consideration and exploration. In some sense analysis of the information and its impact contained in these "plugged-in" efforts raises issues similar to "un-plugged" efforts. But because of their global reach, and their almost instantaneous transmission, these sites also present unique challenges to understanding information and assessing activism. Computer driven activism can provide a means of isolating important moments for analyzing implicit and explicit visions within a particular campaign seeking global action and solidarity. Internet activism around the issue of women living under the Taliban shows the potential for such tools to be useful in raising cross-global consciousness. At the same time this research reveals the need for caution, care and a critical eye when exploring and utilizing the Web as a means of activist education and organization.
The history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, and the expansion of U.S. military presence in so much of the world since 9/11, makes it especially urgent for U.S based feminists to reflect critically on our actions so we can improve solidarity among progressive, feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist communities. (7) In introducing their text, Race in Cyberspace, the editors state,
... race matters in cyberspace precisely because all of us who spend time online are already shaped by the ways in which race matters offline, and we can't help but bring our own knowledge and experiences and values with us when we log on. (4-5)
Just as we inhabit racialized bodies offline that influence us online, we also inhabit bodies differentially positioned within the globe. It is vital that those in the U.S. reflect seriously on their activism within the light of concerns raised by a host of international, post-colonial, and women of color feminist writers regarding the dangers in dominant western feminist approaches in crossing racialized and global borders. Awareness of potential limits to these approaches should not, however, end in silence or inaction, but should help in developing frameworks that recognize the complexity and unstableness of positional categories (Shahrzad Mojab, 1998; Hideh Moghissi, 1999; Chandra T. Mohanty, 2003). (8) Discussing Sylvia Walby's (2000) assessment of her 1983 essay, Mohanty reminds us to "engage my notion of a common feminist political project, which critiques the effects of Western feminist scholarship on women in the Third world, but within a framework of solidarity and shared values" (2003, 502). While I do not necessarily focus on the effects on women in the Third world (an approach Mohanty goes on to suggest), I do explore limits in Western feminism's internet based activism and understandings that may impact and hinder efforts at solidarity with women around the globe.
I am interested in differences in approaches, images, and tone evident in these examples of internet activism. Due its prominence in the images and actions of the FMF, analysis of the images and uses of the chadari in internet efforts to raise awareness about women living under the Taliban emerges as a central consideration. (9) This consideration is reflective of a larger struggle over emphasis and meaning that emerges between the U.S. and women both in Afghanistan as well as in other societies where veiling is practiced. (10) My analysis adds another example and critique to that on-going discussion, further exposing Noelle-Karimi's observation that "In the West, the burqa has become a symbol of the deprivations and oppressions women in Afghanistan have had to bear" (2002, 1). This comparison explores some of the ways the veil was over-emphasized, revealing how problematic tropes can circulate even in some of the best feminist efforts to create cross-cultural solidarity. Such problems undermine the work that is so necessary to mounting successful campaigns against the globalized onslaughts on women.
Much of my discussion involves information obtained previous to September 2001. I do not, however, ignore the world in the aftermath of the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001 and subsequent U.S. bombings within Afghanistan. I choose this historic focus in part because I started to seek out information on the topic well before this momentous date. Still, as Noelle-Karimi states, and this research reinforces, it is important to remember the need for contextual complexity in assessing the crisis in Afghanistan under the Taliban and today. She states that, "At every stage of the war, women have been raped, abducted and murdered. All parties involved are guilty of these transgressions, including the Northern Alliance, which has swept into power thanks to U.S. support.... Most Afghans still find themselves in the grip of grinding poverty" (3). (11) Moghadam locates at least three causes for the deeply troubled status of women in Afghanistan including the "patriarchal social structure, the absence of a centralized and modernizing state, and the problematic stance of the international and feminist community ..." (2002, 20). Recognizing the complexity of these past or present conditions, I hope my focus on the period of Taliban control, and the immediate aftermath of this period, can help feminists, particularly those in dominant organizations within the U.S., to consider more critically knowledge and approaches when viewing any global situation via the internet so as to be better allies to women in the region, and around the globe.
The focus on internet activism still feels a bit odd to someone who finds admirable qualities in the radical notions of the Luddites. (12) I, like them, believe viable communities and real people should come before the imperatives of either technology or profit. However, internet technology presents a complex reality for those interested in questions of liberation, especially for women. For example, these new telecommunications systems have incredible power to challenge the nation/state by defying its borders, a potential perhaps first noticed in the triumph and tragedy of Tiananmen Square. This power continues to be seen in a number of on-going struggles, from the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, to the mass mobilizations against the World Bank, to the never before seen global, massive, coordinated anti-war events built in response to the U.S. military invasion of Iraq. But this technology also brings with it new and incredibly powerful tools of gendered and racialized/patriarchal repression, economic deprivation, environmental degradation, commodification and homogenization. I think of the insights of the anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre are applicable to the current economies forged through these technologies. She wrote in 1909, "As to the essence of Commerce and Manufacture, it is this: to establish bonds between every corner of the earth's surface and every other comer, to multiply the needs of mankind, and the desire for material possessions and enjoyment" (36). (For example, I work on cyber-spaces that seem always to contribute to Bill Gates' capital accumulation.)
Like most capitalist commodity structures computer technologies bring specific contradictions to women's lives. Zillah Eisenstein, in her work Global Obscenities, Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Lure of Cyberfantasy, eloquently states:
For women, transnational capital with its high-tech global telecommunications systems is contradictory--alienating and potentially liberatory. Capable of enormous levels of exploitation for the majority of women and girls, it also promises a new transnational but post patriarchal deliberative democracy built by women across the globe. (39)
As documented throughout Eisenstein's work, young girls and women predominantly in or from the third world, are the main manufacturers of the hardware of this technology, working primarily in sweatshop conditions, with highly toxic chemicals, for corporations outside their local control. The Web both allows us to learn of and communicate with women around the globe; at the same time it makes us complicit in the exploitation of women in the silicon valleys and sweatshops which produce the material of a wired world. Only some women have access to the technologies produced predominately by other women. These contradictions cannot be forgotten even as the usefulness of the technologies may be lauded.
There are three sections to this work. In the first section, "Images of Women in Afghanistan," I overview the availability of feminist information on the Web regarding the Taliban, and then center my analysis of this information on some of the powerful images of women under the Taliban utilized on some of these sites. In the next section, "Forms of Activism," I consider the strengths and weaknesses of different specific examples of campaigns and actions promoted through the internet. In the final section, "Conclusion: On-Going Crisis," reviews the information with an eye toward current global events since September 11, 2001.
Images of Women in Afghanistan
The internet does offer opportunities to disseminate information unparalleled by other information resources. But, as Eisenstein reminds us, "... getting information is not the same things as acting on it, just like virtual reality is not he same thing as bodily reality. Thinking, knowing, and acting are distinct parts of a process that require different strategies...." (168). Information is obviously a necessary component of activism, and accurate information is made all the more important given the challenges of crossing language, cultural, religious, and national differences present in any attempt of cross-cultural solidarity.
Feminist Web sites dealing with Afghanistan were easy to locate and figured prominently among information on the internet regarding the Taliban well before 9/11. Both RAWA and the "Stop Gender Apartheid" page of the FMF were among the top three or five sites listed when the term "women" was added to searches on the Taliban or Afghanistan in various searches I conducted. (13) There is certainly even more information on the topics in the period after September 11th. Even with the increased traffic after 9/11, RAWA still came up in my searches as the third Web match and the FMF was listed as the seventeenth Web match in a more recent search for information on "Afghanistan." No doubt due to publicity it gained through discussion on Oprah and the resulting volume of users trying to access the site, in the late 1990's RAWA started forwarding messages to a secondary, "Mirror" site. The FMF and RAWA were, and in many ways continue to be, Web based and real world leaders in the struggle for human rights and self-determination for women in Afghanistan. Other organizations working for women's rights in the region do not appear with the same ease as these two organizations. For example, neither the Afghan Women's Mission (AWM) or the Afghan Women's Association International (AWAI) appeared among the first organizations to appear in any of my Web searches. (14)
The amount of information on the Web always leads to questions about who was the intended audience. (15) As Eisenstein states
one may have the freedom to receive electronic information, but one must have equality to do so: a computer, the software, the training, and a telephone line. One may have the freedom to electronically communicate with anyone across the globe, but one must first secure an e-mail address. (94)
The internet is a world that has mainly been accessible to males, and disproportionately to wealthier males, due to expendable incomes, uses in particular workplaces, and available time, as well as the technological support structure needed to utilize its recourses. It is also a primarily male space because: "More than two-thirds of the world's illiterate are women" (Eisenstein, 163, see also 93-100). According to RAWA's "Main Social Activities" page, literacy rates in Afghanistan were and are among the worst in the world, "estimated by UNICEF at between three and four percent for females and twenty-eight percent for males" (2001, 5). In a nation torn by war, where basic education was denied to women, in a nation with limited access to food and shelter, let alone phones and data lines--who will gain access to the information on the internet? Eisenstein again was helpful to consider here when she observes that, "The "real" demands that we look at the problem of inequality. But the net is concerned, instead with freedom. And freedom gets defined as unfettered speech."(95). When considering who has access to this powerful information resource, the "problem of inequality" presents an ugly side of the internet as the regime's policies forced silence through illiteracy, intimidation, and sheer lack of access on the women within the society. The world of those with computer access is the internet's audience; the primary audience for these stories was not the majority of women within the society.
Due to the official silencing of most women (as well as others) within Afghanistan by the Taliban, simply placing information from within the Taliban controlled areas on the Web became a necessary and radical form of political action. Heroic attempts were made to cross the border to document and record women's (as well as men's) stories. On the RAWA and AWM sites one could, and still can, see many of these images, read these stories and learn of the struggles to get the stories out of Afghanistan. Those attempting to gather information on conditions of Afghan women and men inside Taliban controlled Afghanistan risked beatings, jailing, and death. The threats faced by women working to document lives within Afghanistan under the Taliban included a series of edicts placing severe limits on women's movements. At least one woman has been reported to have been shot attempting to leave the country in the company of a non-related male (RAWA, 2001). (16)
For organizations working for democracy, peace and women's rights in Afghanistan, the internet provides a means of reaching out to the globe to motivate through education and then channel action both on and off the internet. RAWA's site is a prime example of such an activist intent. The site is produced in a number of languages, and it is linked to a variety of international pages. It encourages activism in a variety of forms and uses the support it gathers to help pressure various governmental and U.N. bodies, as well as raise finances for its schools, hospitals, job training, and general relief programs. The FMF's "Stop Gender Apartheid" pages, and the AWM page, were and are among other important examples of such activist sites meant to motivate and channel action within the United States.
On both the RAWA and the FMF sites there is a wide variety of current news, resources, links, and, most important, action based information. Many of the images utilized on these sites brought to the globe evidence of relief efforts as well as living conditions both of the refugees and people within Afghanistan (see in particular AWM's site). Interestingly, only a small proportion of the FMF and RAWA Web space was devoted to pictorial representations. But because of their symbolic power, I turn my attention in the remaining parts of this section to the images located on the opening pages of the FMF's "Stop Gender Apartheid" site and compare this images to those available through RAWA's Web site. (17)
In 1998, if one accessed the FMF's "Stop Gender Apartheid" page, the first image that would greet you would be of a single, unidentified,...
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