By Megan Clement

November 7, 2022

Only have a minute to read this newsletter? Here it is in brief:

• ✊ How to support the women of Iran while fighting our own battles at home.
• 🇸🇪 Can Sweden be trusted to ditch its feminist foreign policy?
• 🌱 Do we really need more women to green-wash al-Sisi’s propaganda at COP-27?

Read on for more. And if you want to be up-to-date on feminism worldwide, follow us on Twitter and Instagram.

Our patriarchies, over here

In a recent essay, feminist writer Mona Eltahawy highlighted the hypocrisy of white women in the US who support the feminist protests against theocracy in Iran without reckoning with the religious
fundamentalist backlash sweeping their own country in the form of abortion bans.

“You cheer at the women whose plight over there you are grateful not to share,” she writes, “and still you remain comfortable pointing fingers at the patriarchy in Iran and fail to complete the sentence by asking ‘What about my patriarchy, over here?’”

Eltahawy is not saying that women in the US are oppressed in the same way as those in Iran. Instead, she is challenging feminists everywhere to ask hard questions about our circumstances, no matter where we live, at the same time as we support
the women and girls of Iran in their own fight. She is drawing attention to the propensity to fetishise the struggles of Muslim women without fully reckoning with the rampant misogyny unfolding right under our noses:

So successful has white supremacist patriarchy been at convincing you that you’re lucky to live in the US and not Saudi Arabia or Iran that so many of you did not pay enough attention to the theocracy that white supremacy was building right here, at home.

So, what about our patriarchies? We all live in one. As Eliza Anyangwe reminded me in a recent conversation, there is no country on this planet in which women are equal to men. There is nowhere that we are free. It is my job to shed light upon this undeniable fact in this newsletter every Monday, and yet I often fail to remember it too. It is as pervasive as the air we breathe, but the thing about breathing is how easy it is to forget we are even doing it.

Let me start, then, with my own patriarchies. I am British and Australian. I live in France. To select some individual examples from each: under one of my patriarchies, pregnant refugee women are threatened with deportation to Rwanda. Under another, First Nations women are 12 times more likely to be murdered than the national average. Under the patriarchy where I currently live, women and girls are excluded from fully participating in public life if they wear certain types of Muslim dress.

It is this last fact that seems to present the most headaches when it comes to supporting the women of Iran from France. It should be simple enough to hold the position that women should be able to wear whatever they want, anywhere in the world. They should not be forced into a hijab in Tehran, nor legislated out of one
in Paris. But this logic escapes people who would support the women of Iran only because of the particular garment they are burning, rather than the freedom of choice they are demanding. (Again, the comparison with abortion arises: if you don’t like it, don’t get one yourself, but let other people do what they want.)

Commentators outside France do not help matters by saying the hijab is “banned” here. It is not. But just
because all veils are not prohibited in all circumstances does not mean the restrictions placed on women and girls at school, on the sports field or in the public service are acceptable. And just because women and girls have more freedom in democratic France, Britain or Australia than they do in authoritarian Iran does not mean we cannot fight for full freedom for all of them, everywhere.

Our work as a feminists requires us to know our own
patriarchies, and to challenge them. It also requires us to stand in solidarity with women fighting elsewhere, knowing that the grim calculus we are trying to upend is always the same: that women and gender minorities are worth less than men, and thus deserve fewer choices.

Our job is to support the women and girls of Iran without co-opting them into our own battles, and without forgetting the work we have to do at home. 

Goodbye to the world’s first feminist foreign policy

Sweden’s new right-wing government has abandoned the country’s “feminist foreign policy”. The policy was launched in 2014 and was the first of its kind worldwide – Mexico, Canada, France, Spain and others followed suit.

But freshly appointed foreign minister Tobias Billström has called time on the eight-year project. “Labels on things have a tendency to cover up the content,” he said, in a display of remarkable ignorance concerning the inherent function of a label. Yet covering up content is exactly what the government has since been doing, by deleting references to the policy from its official websites.  

There are compelling critiques of feminist foreign policies in general, and of Sweden’s in particular. Rafia Zakaria, author of Against White Feminism, writes that these policies can be guilty of “centering white women’s nationalistic and security interests and thus somehow promoting feminism for the whole world.” Certainly there is nothing feminist
about a foreign policy that includes selling arms to the United Arab Emirates to then be dropped on Yemen.

Still, when it comes to whether the word “feminism” is necessary, it’s best not to trust the instincts of a government that is only in power thanks to the support of the far-right. In a world where countries like the United States will openly lobby to remove the words “sexual and reproductive health” from international agreements, it may be better to demand more from the feminist foreign policies we have instead of ripping them up entirely.

Go to COP27? I’d rather glue myself to a painting

Under a feminist foreign policy, would a world leader go to the climate talks that kicked off yesterday in the Egyptian tourist resort of Sharm El-Sheikh? (Note that as well as its feminist foreign policy, Sweden’s new government has also ditched its environment ministry).

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s regime is responsible for torture on a mass scale. It also imprisons young women for the crime of dancing on TikTok. Writer and activist Naomi Klein has aptly described the decision to hold the COP27 climate talks in Egypt as “green-washing a police state” – one where activists, journalists and academics cannot even release information about what’s happening to the environment.

Still, 500 public figures
recently signed an open letter, in which they try to gently cajole the Egyptian government into giving women a greater role at the talks:

We are celebrating the positive steps taken by Egypt while asking the COP27 president H.E. Shoukry to … appoint and
showcase women ministers on his team in a more transparent and visible way.

With respect to the importance of highlighting the fact that women and girls – particularly those in the Majority World – suffer disproportionately from the effects of climate change, we must ask what the utility is of calling for more women’s participation at an event that, from a human rights perspective, should not be taking place
to begin with. Suggesting that one of the world’s most repressive regimes should hire some women to take part in green-washing its bloody reputation shows the limits of representation feminism while taking it to its most brutal extreme.

Instead of asking Egypt’s authoritarian regime to “appoint and showcase” women in its government, we should be demanding it showcase the 60,000 political prisoners it currently holds in
captivity.

As we settle in for weeks of drawn-out negotiations, and as countries continue to drag their feet on meaningful climate action, I’ll be listening to the young leaders like Scarlett Westbrook, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing last month, about the best way to fend off catastrophe without compromising on human rights. 

Naomi Klein: Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt’s Cop27 masquerade (The Guardian)

Robin Wright: Iran’s protests are the first counter-revolution led by women (The New Yorker)

Rebecca Amsellem: Le « long vendredi » (Les Glorieuses)

Annie Ernaux: Le jeune homme (Gallimard)

Sign this petition calling on Sudan to release a young woman who has been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery: