Article Title
Strategic Sisterhood or Sisters in Solidarity? Questions of Communitarianism and Citizenship in Asia
Document Type
Symposium
Publication Date
Fall 1996
Publication Citation
4 Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 107 (1996)
Abstract
The Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing 1995) has spawned a
Triumphant sense among Western/Northern feminists that they are forging a
strategic sisterhood with less privileged women in the South. Feminists from
metropolitan countries seek a new North-South alliance whereby they make
strategic interventions on behalf of third world women by putting pressure on
their governments. Professor Ong critiques strategic sisterhood on the
following grounds:
First, strategic sisterhood is based on individualistic notions of
transnational feminine citizenship, ignoring the historical and cultural
differences between women from the first and third worlds. In particular, the
concept ignores geopolitical inequalities whereby postcolonial countries are
sensitive to what they view as new forms of cultural imperialism. For many
Asian leaders and subjects, women's emancipation is seldom just a question
about individual rights, but fundamentally about culture, community, and the
nation.
Second, strategic sisterhood brushes aside other forms of morality--
whether expressed in nationalist ideology, or embedded in religious and
communal practices--that shape local notions and relations of gender,
hierarchy, loyalty, and social security. These webs of power relations are the
everyday contexts within which third world women must struggle for their
rights.
To illustrate both points, Professor Ong draws on cases from China,
Indonesia, and Malaysia, where popular struggles for human rights are
usually couched in terms of community--class, religion, or nation--not gender.
The silence regarding women's problems is especially striking in resurgent
labor movements where a significant proportion of workers are young women
working in abysmal conditions. Foreign feminists must first understand the
conditions shaped by communitarian ideologies--produced by ruling regimes,
labor, or religious elites--within which most third world women must negotiate
their rights and self-identity. Professor Ong presents the example of Muslim
feminists in Malaysia struggling for women's rights, not by forming strategic
partnerships with Western feminists (a strategy guaranteed to fail), but by
engaging local men in (re)defining gender rights within the framework of
Islamic morality, nation, and civilization. The struggles of these courageous
women deserve respect from Western feminists who are ever-ready to dismiss
any accommodations with Islam or non-Western moral ethos. After all,
feminism and women's rights only make sense in terms of the imagined
communities within which people live and, through their embeddedness in
local social relations and cultural norms, decide what is good and worthwhile
in their lives.
Globalization thus produces not a single international sisterhood
(dominated by Western feminist ideals and agents) but many possible,
negotiable, and partial collaborations between feminists in different countries.
Feminist sisterhoods a re strategic when they can create a transnational public
that does not exclude the variety of alternative visions of female citizenship
framed within alternative political moralities. Strategic sisterhood will be
most effective when it adheres to such a "weak" universal of female
emancipation.
Recommended Citation
Ong, Aihwa
(1996)
"Strategic Sisterhood or Sisters in Solidarity? Questions of Communitarianism and Citizenship in Asia,"
Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies: Vol. 4:
Iss.
1, Article 7.
Available at:
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ijgls/vol4/iss1/7