Monday, August 21, 2006

Counting Cherry Stones: the White Feather Wielder and the Down-trodden Woman

I tried writing about them separately. They wouldn’t have it. No sooner did I get to describing one of them and there was the other, beating the door down, getting her feet under the table, shaking her head, rolling her eyes and saying “You think you’re going to write about her and leave me out of it?”.
I looked at them – unreal though they are – and they looked alike. Are you one and the same then? I thought. Through one eye they are almost impossible to tell apart; through the other one would never have thought them related. Not identical then, but not easily separable.

They are the two heads to the same coin. Mirror images. Inversions. When one’s down the other’s up. Janus looking forward and back. Two-faced.

Like Rosie, the white-feather wielder casts her echoes before her, flowers strewn before the troops departing for battle. Once she was a Spartan mother sternly instructing her son, “Come home with your shield or on it.”

Ninety years ago or thereabouts, she strolled through these streets, cool and slim in long Edwardian skirts, white feather held jauntily between thumb and forefinger seeking out unmilitary men. Men to chastise for their ununiformed unmanliness, for above all she is a womanly woman.

The white-feather wielder is man-made and in that she is the same as many womanly women. Rosie also sprang fully-formed from the forehead of J. Howard Miller, a latter-day Athena for an industrial age. She too had her avatars and her priestesses to officiate at her altar poised precariously on the fuselage. Is the white-feather wielder also a goddess then? Or is she a demon, this womanly woman? Lamia. Seductress. Despatching young men to drown in mud, just as the sirens sang them down beneath the swell. Her creator described her and her gift as “far more terrible than anything they [men] can meet in battle.” Perhaps to those who believed in ideas of manliness and womanliness she was more terrible at that.

Unlike Rosie, the white-feather wielder has not gathered a stable iconography about herself. She has not become a symbol of women’s liberation or power. She did exercise a particular kind of power though, using her words to persuade men to go and slaughter or be slaughtered. Perhaps the War Poets caught her off-guard: some of them took a dim view of drowning in mud and a dimmer view still of the particular form of manliness which she upheld. In any case revival efforts in World War II failed dismally. She had come to be seen as a woman who used her feminine wiles to send young men to their deaths. A Lorelei repeating endlessly the old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Like the leopard, she had to change her spots. Scatter her feathers to the four winds. Feathers? What feathers. No feathers here. These days, she’s a ‘security mom.’ For a while before that she was a soccer mom: she still is. Clad in jeans and sneakers, slightly harried, ferrying the kids to practice in the SUV with the the red-white-and-blue festooned bumper and the yellow ribbon (faded now from a couple of years of sun, rain and snow) drooping from the antenna. She’s all for staying the course: after all the troops are protecting her children from terrorism. And if that means recruiters in schools – well that’s what it means and that’s all there is to it. It’s like the man on the T.V. said “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”

“And after all, look how they treat the women!” she says. “Just barbaric.”
The coin spins on its edge and comes down heads.

Sometimes she’s Belgian. Perhaps she’s a nun in a torn habit. More recently she’s been spotted in a chador. But she has worn many different kinds of clothing in her myriad lifetimes, she has lived in many different places. Once she may have been a kidnapped bride. Did she stand atop Troy’s towers? Perhaps so, but now she has been safely reduced and diminished so that the one central fact of her life, the sine qua non of her existence is her oppression. She is dust beneath the enemy’s heel, foreign or domestic: bereft of agency or resistance. She has no avatars, only involuntary sacrifices. What woman would choose to embody her?

Like the others – the Grocer’s Daughters, the Rosies, the White-Feather Wielders, the Down-Trodden woman is a type, a figure, used in service of war-making. Which is not to say women are not often oppressed, or even to debate which forms of oppression are to be considered culturally superior. That is not the point. The point is that the Down-trodden Woman, whoever she is and whereever she comes from, needs liberating and we know just the folks for the job. Results guaranteed.


She is a strange creature, this Down-trodden Woman. So clearly visible in the Enemy’s citadels, yet when the citadel is stormed she evaporates like a puddle on a hot day. Her liberation is so instantaneous it leaves no trace. Practical indicators of her presence– the number of women being raped, for example – may increase quite dramatically. And certainly it is true that after liberation, actual women may also have far less in the way of practical opportunities to keep themselves from such things as starvation. All of which might suggest that the Down-trodden Woman should still be there, that she had no business leaving yet, but no. She has gone her ways. She vanished the moment the first ‘liberator’ passed through the gate.

To complain about such practical indicators – to gripe and moan, to whine and wail, to bitch – is simply to mistake the nature of the Down-trodden Woman’s Liberation. It is symbolic. Or perhaps more accurately, it is nominal, pertaining to names. The Down-trodden Woman is Liberated because certain generous gestures have been made. Certain phrases have been pronounced correctly. Incantations recited over just the right bubbling stew.

The lives and living conditions of actual women have absolutely nothing to do with the Down-trodden Woman’s Liberation: they never did.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

from poco:

Wow! I am absolutely amazed at the way you limned the connections, dove, between these three figures: the feather-wielder, the security mom and the Down-Trodden woman. The connections are there and screaming to be made, except that I never made them till I read your piece. (By the way--what is the cherry stones reference? Yes, I know I haven't done my homework!)

I don't know if I am repeating myself, since there is not a day that goes by in my working life when I am not engaged in a fight over the Down-Trodden Woman, so I may have said this earlier, but this particular symbol is what I find most egregious about western feminism.

Most of the time, especially when dealing with North-Atlantic issues, or domestic issues for western feminists, I am in complete solidarity with their myriad aims and critiques. I may quibble over details or methods but not the larger aims. I am a product of these critiques, after all, having done my graduate work in North-Atlantic cultures. But when western feminism turns to a smug condemnation of non-North Atlantic cultures for their misogyny and sexism, without realising how these critiques are used in the service of the Empire, I am unable to do anything but resist, as forcefully as I can.

Not, as you said, dove, to discount the fact of the Down-Trodden woman's oppression; of course it exists, and occasionally needs exposure to the basic tenets of universal feminism to bring these facts to a conscious level, but one must be aware at all times to see the use that such critiques are put to. And we all know, that once the Empire's needs for propaganda are realised, the Down-Trodden woman vanishes.

Funny, isn't it, that Iraq under Saddam had one of the better records for gender equality, compare it with whichever nation you want. Women were judges, senior bureaucrats, politicians, trade ministers, etc. And now, to save these Down-Trodden women, we have managed to make them afraid to go out of their homes for fear of rapes, kidnappings and bombings. Yeah, that is exactly how we rescue her! I am not even venturing into Afghanistan!

I bet we are going to hear a lot more about Iran's oppressed, Down-Trodden women pretty soon, and a lot more from security moms worried about Iran following the international rules on nuclear energy. Funny how these fears never surface when the nuclear reactors are in their suburban neighborhood and the safety and upkeep have been delegated to private companies focused only on short-term profits. No fears there!

8/21/2006 10:22 pm  
Blogger dove said...

Thanks Nanette and poco

Yeah -- it can be used to corral men too I think, though I'm not sure it's being used that way at the moment. There's this poster from WWI that was used for recruiting in Ireland -- I couldn't get it to post properly, but here's the link .
It very much plays on the 'white feather wielder' inasmuch as it's about 'defending your womenfolk' but juxtaposed with 'remember the women of Belgium.'

So there, the juxtaposition of those two figures is being used in service of recruitment.

At the moment re. the GWOT, I'm not sure it's being used so much in direct support of recruitment. I think the main purpose is -- as you say Nanette -- to keep 'western' women corraled, especially since, when directed at those women the rhetoric around the whole 'they hate us for our freedoms' rubbish begins to sound suspiciously like 'If 'they' win, 'you'll' be the Down-trodden Woman.'

It depends on sleight of hand I think, inasmuch as for the trick to work, those women have to ignore what they know about the prevalence of rape and sexual abuse in the places where they live (and the near-impunity with which such crimes are committed) , to give just one example and let their attention be directed to the figure of the 'Downtrodden Woman' -- and obviously it's a distorted and simplified monolithic figure -- and do so in such a way that they never start to bring their lives and that figure into connection with each other.

If they did that, I think the figure of the Down-trodden Woman would eventually become unsustainable -- inasmuch as the whole 'Support us or you'll end up like her' line wouldn't work because the women to whom that was said would respond along the lines of "But I already am like her in x, y, and z way" or "But she's not like your description of her at all!" and so on.

I think that to the extent that rather few do, it's because rather a lot of 'western' women (and feminists for that matter) have brought into exceptionalism. But that's more of a hunch than a fully-fledged argument yet. ;)

Poco,

I've been doing a little series which is (a very compressed) typology of female figures used in service of war - this is the last. I did the first one in July here

If you're in catch-up mode, I did another Alex post back in July as well just in case you feel yourself in need of outdated meta. ;)

8/22/2006 1:05 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

高田馬場 賃貸
船上ウェディング
妊娠 症状
結婚式 招待状
不動産 多摩
席札
八王子 賃貸管理
アメリカ大学院留学
ゴルフレッスン新大阪
デザインリフォーム
自動機
酒豪伝説
カラーコンタクト 度あり
都筑区 マンション
帰化申請
中古医療機器 買取
ゴルフ会員権
歯並び
トランクルーム 埼玉
ローテーブル
派遣 求人
風呂釜
英会話
助成金 横浜
プロフィールビデオ
婚活 東京
カード現金化 上野
店舗デザイン 大阪
医療用かつら
キャップ
秦野 一戸建て
スポーツインナー
賃貸オフィス
ハーレー
外国商標 Publish Your Comment
バイク便

11/30/2009 1:12 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

ディズニーランド
アトピー性皮膚炎
ブライダルエステ 銀座
ボイストレーニング 名古屋
上尾 不動産
ゴミ箱
昭島市 一戸建て
オーダーカーテン
格安住宅
千葉 宴会
バーチャルオフィス東京
冬期講習
介護 求人
脚やせ
賃貸 大阪市
連結 システム
婚活 大阪
湯名人
コインパーキング 経営
会員証 印刷
卵巣がん
英文 書き方
toeic
沖縄グルメ
カード 比較 ポイント
ウェディングドレス レンタル
医院継承
販促品
加圧トレーニング 美容

11/30/2009 1:12 pm  

Post a Comment

<< Home