“Mother, go into the house and attend to your work, the loom and the spinning wheel. The word is left to the care of men.” The first song of the Odyssey contains a masculine admonition in the voice of the young Telemachus, who silences Penelope. It is the image that Mary Beard uses in her Women and power, symbolically designating it as one of the founding places of an order based on the silence of the female voice. “The story was born amputated,” Irene Vallejo would later remind us. From the beginning of history and up to the present day, the planet continues to be traversed by that special education that fosters the growth of men, and which consists not only in taking control over their own word in public, but in taking advantage of the absence of the voice of women, to the point of silencing them, to occupy a place that perhaps does not belong to them. Beard says well: the power of male domination “is directly proportional to its capacity to silence women.”
It is heartbreaking to see again and again this connection between classical history, which has been masculine from the very beginning, and some of the contemporary ways of avoiding hearing women’s voices in public, either through snubbing or with the most atrocious virulence. The Taliban know, as the Greeks and Romans understood well, that whoever has control of the discourse has control of the world. Their own religious tradition is, in part, a discussion about the hierarchies of voice and word, of course masculine. But let us look closer. Remember the decisive rhetoric of the Bush Administration on the rights of Afghan women, without caring much about those of American women. Even that false paternalism of male protection turned out to be a mere facade: in reality, as we well know, Afghan women do not matter to anyone.
But perhaps there is some lesson to be learned from all the cynical appeals to the need to save women. When we employ a discourse that projects the other as a victim waiting to be saved, we inevitably reproduce a hierarchical relationship based on submission in exchange for protection and surveillance. Much of the narrative that adorned the invasion of Afghanistan constructed this image of women as paradigmatic victims who needed to be saved. With all that paternalistic militarism, in addition to instrumentalizing them, we showed that we did not consider them as equals, since we used the situation of Afghan women as a measure of our own level of moral development, again denying them a voice of their own.
It is important to review these arguments, as they allow us to realize the unusual ease with which feminist rhetoric is adopted by all kinds of leaders for their own ends. Anti-immigration discourses reproduce, in fact, this toxic relationship between protector and protected. When fear is stirred up in the face of external threats and promises are made to keep us safe from invaders, especially women and children (the eternal and inevitable refrain), childish fantasies, fears and desires are given credence. Fear prevents a democratic relationship with citizens, imposing a structure of thought where a protective policeman, usually male, faces the evil aggressors… and blah, blah, blah. Because this is precisely what we do with Afghan women. We forget about them while we ramble on about our own problems. As if they were the ones who had failed us all.
#voice #Afghan #women
