THE FRAGILITY OF THE WESTERN TRAVELER: TIME TO (UN)PACK THE COLONIAL BAGGAGE

Illustration by Subin Yang

This feature, on the continuing destruction of colonialism through exploitative tourism, is the fourth of our monthly longreads on the topic of Fragility. Every month through December 2017, we’ll publish a new must-read perspective on the subject that we hope you’ll read, share, and make part of your routine.
For now, though, get comfortable and get ready for part four: It’s time to unpack your bags and rethink how you travel the globe.

The first image we’re drawn to is a white man. He is positioned at the center and looking straight at us. To his right stands a Native Hawaiian woman in all her bobblehead glory—the flower in her hair, a burnt orange lei around her neck, and a hula skirt that looks to be made out of leaves. Her bright red lips curl into a subservient smile, her eyes creased in his direction as she adorns the man’s outstretched neck with a lei. To his left is a white woman resting her jaw in a hand, pensively watching the exchange between the man and the Native Hawaiian woman, and, being situated between the two, the man wears a dopey look on his face, as if he’s asking us, ‘How lucky am I?!’ ‘An island surrounded by blue water beckons from a distance and above it reads the words, ALOHA FROM HAWAII.
“In this grotesquerie, the falseness and commercialism fairly scream out from the page,” writes Haunani Kay-Trask in Lovely Hula Hands: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture, a takeaway we can apply to the image described above, and really, could be ascribed to the countless images that look just like it, for there is little variation in the marketing of a place like Hawaii. And there exists no other depiction of Native Hawaiian women outside of this static western prototype. “Thus, Hawai’i, like a lovely woman, is there for the taking,” sums Kay-Trask.

THE PROMISE OF WOMEN'S BODIES
The use of women’s bodies—and specifically, the promise of sex—to sell any and everything under the sun has long been the subject of beef between feminists and the advertising world, but what happens when the product being sold is a place? The marketing of women’s bodies, namely, those of color, as destinations to be consumed, lands to be penetrated, or as accessories to the (masculine) tourist experience has remained a largely uncontested norm in travel ads, from vintage depictions of the Hawaiian feminine to the mainstream pimping of Brazilian women’s bodies from brands like Adidas and Kia Motors during the 2014 World Cup. In examining these depictions through an intersectional feminist lens, and factoring in the consequences of such depictions on the lives, lands, and bodies of women of color, we can then decode their lasting message: that mass tourism and colonial occupation are often one and the same, and POC bodies, cultures, and lands are the exotic dominion of the settler. So what does tourism’s dehumanization of women of color tell us about the fragility of the western traveler? What role does patriarchy play in selling place? And what does—or doesn’t—constitute a feminist travel narrative?
Ever since European colonization gave birth to the western travel narrative, the ‘traveler’ has had a tendency to gender the land before him, and even the vessels who bring him to his destination, using cliches of ‘virgin forests’ waiting to be ‘explored’ and ‘wild’ (read: Indigenous) terrain unacquainted with the poke of flag, assigning himself as the active male do-er while the land and its passive people are being done unto. Kay-Trask continues in this vein, writing, “Hawai’i is “she,” the Western image of the Native “female” in all her magical allure. And if luck prevails, some of “her” will rub off on you, the visitor.” Wilderness is then very much a white supremacist concept, a fantasy land void of people and their resistance where the settler can escape to when the travails of civilized life grow too taxing (#FirstWorldProblems amirite). The flowery rendering of ‘exploration’ inherent in the tradition of travel writing, from the Doctrine of Discovery to Anthony Bourdain's Part's Unknown, is all about thinly veiling his insatiable urges to make a place his bitch.
In feminizing place, patriarchy demotes it to the realm of the female, that is, not valued, but valuable, and when we add capitalist imperialism to the mix, she is ceaselessly plundered for her resources by settlers. And in many ways, today’s western traveler is a descendant of the settler. There’s an uncanny resemblance between the way the settler treats the land and how his society treats women of color. To sell a place, that is, to advertise to consumers that it is available for ownership, it first has to be objectified, and since white men in these ads signal action and ownership, the women of color are easily sold with the product. A relic of colonial nostalgia that would get Hemmingway hard, she’s coded as more ‘traditional:’ not yet influenced by the likes of (white) feminism. At a special meeting of Women Ministers of Culture in Iceland, Dr. Annette Pritchard gave a presentation calling this product a “remarkably durable imaginary, which is routinely recycled in the gendered, sexed, and racialized cultural iconographies of the travel industry.” In order to tame women and to tame the wild, he must depict her as tame. In using one to market the other, they “both continue to be framed by colonial myths and fantasies,” she continues, “so that these leisure landscapes are feminised and eroticised” in order to justify occupation. He came, he conquered, but in the context of settler colonialism and tourism, he never left. Like a cheap souvenir, “Hawai’i itself is the female object of degraded and victimized sexual value,” sums Kay-Trask. Considering this, travel media can be understood as the very narrative behind domination dressed up as leisure. But leisure for whom?

PASSPORTS OF ENTITLEMENT
Leisure travel is all about escape and indulgence, which, to the western tourist, can seem rather harmless. But consider the dichotomy between what is being escaped and what is being escaped to. “From the mid-1800s to the 1930s, the acceptance of wild landscapes inhabited by Native peoples as being natural evolved into an idealization of uninhabited landscapes,” writes Carolyn Finney in Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. It seems that the white settler can not enjoy nature without conquering it or without objectifying the land and relegating the rest to ‘nature’ for ornamental relief. “Implicitly,” she continues, “it is linked to a legacy of Eurocentrism and the linkage of wilderness to whiteness, wherein both become naturalized and universalized.” Heroes of the National Park and Reserve system like John Muir, who was very anti-Black and Native, worked from a place that destruction of ‘nature’ for development was OK, just set a little green aside for us to vacation in. As Kay-Trask clarifies, “Tourists flock to my Native land for escape, but they are escaping into a state of mind while participating in the destruction of a host people in a Native place.”
Likewise, indulgence to the fragile western tourist is deserved, something they are entitled to. Just challenge them on this and you’ll see how fragile they are. (One butthurt bro wrote a whole article in response to my work: “[Amor] rejects the idea that holidays are about fun and freedom.” He has a point, though. I am wholeheartedly anti-fun and GET THAT FREEDOM AWAY FROM ME.) In his lecture at Massey University in New Zealand, Ripping off the Brands: a Rough Guide to Anti-travel, writer Scott Hamilton said, “Travel has become the ‘other’ of work. Because we are often so busy at work, we choose to be indolent on holiday—to switch off cell phones and brains and lie on a beach. We can be selfish and demanding on holiday.”

In travel ads and media, images of women lying on beaches communicate indulgence to the tourist; a report on gender in tourism marketing found that “body shots describe the destination as a place where the tourist can indulge him or herself.” In wanting to be taken care of, the tourist infantilizes himself without considering whether or not his host deserves a break, too. “Every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour,” Jamaica Kincaid expertly explains in A Small Place, “but most natives in the world cannot go anywhere. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.”
Indulging in ‘uninhabited’ landscapes takes on an interesting life when embodied by white women. As Mary Fillmore writes in Women and Tourism: Invisible Hosts, Invisible Guest, “A tourist destination is where men of one class can enjoy the privileges of men of another class, and women can enjoy the privileges of men.” White women, that is. She continues, “Someone else will cook their meals, make their beds, clean their toilets,” but how does that differ from the norm of women of color laboring for white women here in the States? It doesn’t, but for white women, indulgence itself is what constitutes feminism.

HOSTESS WITH THE MOSTEST OPPRESSION
From the wide world of travel writing by white women to the ones in my Twitter mentions responding to my question, “What does a feminist travel narrative look like to you?” there’s a general consensus that feminism is (white) women simply doing whatever they want, including going on vacation. Fillmore advises us to “consider what the tourist seeks” in order to look “at tourism through the feminist lens. The tourist’s desire is usually to be indulged like a child, being free to indulge one’s appetite at will, to play all day” and have someone else (spoiler alert: WOC) clean up the mess. These host communities end up playing the role of the Mother to the infantilized tourist. There’s nothing feminist about taking selfies with Maasai women struggling to hold onto their dignity in the face of exploitative tourist practices—that’s some colonial Mammy shit.
Clearly, this is indicative of white feminism’s shtick of employing the tawdry guise of ‘female empowerment’ to assuage their white guilt. But even when laborers in tourism are conveniently erased from mainstream women-centered travel plots, patriarchy’s prints can still be found all over their reels. Take the (very few) travel-ish films starring women, for example, Eat, Pray, Love, Wild, Aloha, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Last Holiday, and Under the Tuscan Sun. Cishet romances drive these stories, telling us that women travel to either get over a dude, find a new one, or both. Let’s use Amy Schumer, and her latest movie, Snatched, as an example. After she’s dumped (check) on the eve of an ‘exotic’ getaway (check) to my home country of Ecuador, she takes her mom instead, and they both get hilariously get kidnapped (check) by random natives in the Amazon jungle. Basically, two white women bond over farts while wild men of color prey on their fragile femininity on Indigenous land. In making their disposable film, they’ve rendered my people and place disposable, too.

From the Black Mammy trope to that of the Singapore Girl, Spicy Latina, Pocahontas, and China Doll, women of color are deemed to exist to serve the whims of the white settler, whether that be sexual or domestic. (The current boom in sex tourism by white women to the Caribbean and Africa says enough about the white supremacist hypersexualization of Black boys and men, but I digress.) They’re either depicted as sexless or hypersexual, which, in denying a woman’s agency over her body, are both objectifying. Kay-Trask breaks down the consequences of a western tourist gaze on women’s sexuality, writing that hula dancers are to “behave in a manner that is smutty and salacious rather than in a way that is powerfully erotic. The distance between the smutty and the erotic is precisely the distance between western culture and Hawaiian culture.” Travel media preserves the colonial origins of so many stereotypes about women of color, which Dr. Annette Pritchard elaborates on, saying that they “recycle not only hetero-patriarchal but also ‘colonial’ myths and fantasies, so that gendered and sexed representations of women are used to exoticise and eroticise” the Global South and East. This extends from advertising and into travel writing and TV shows, which “all play a part in mapping the sensual topography of land and skin so that the women and the landscapes of the Caribbean and the South Pacific become analogous.”

BORROWING FROM RAPE CULTURE
Much of the lingo used in travel writing and marketing consistently employ the language of rape culture. In feminizing place, tourism marketing has also sexualized it, showing just how creepy his obsession with owning the Other is. (Colonial dudebros really know how to put the ‘lust’ in ‘wanderlust.’) Let’s start with a brochure from the Jamaica Tourist Board that promises that “tempting sunsets appear as girls with cinnamon-coloured skin walk the beach wearing bikinis the size of butterflies. This is your Eden. Welcome to Negril.” (Italics mine.) One male traveler writes that India “awaits you. She is an indescribable and unforgettable land [where] every whim will be gratified.” (Are these writers or wannabe pimps?) Another male travel writer describes Tahitian women as “dusky, voluptuous village girls” who “tempt tourists” with their “long hair, velvet skin [and] fragrance.” But it’s not just creepy, it’s a marketing ploy. And isn’t that even creepier? Dr. Pritchard writes that the Tahitian women here “represent the enticing and inviting land to be explored, mapped, penetrated and known by the male traveller.” She is a symbol for the brand that is Tahiti vying for the gaze of the tourist, the consumer. Her boss.
Consider the relative ease with which western cis male tourists are able to travel. Travel writing, blogs, and memes overflow with entitled, thoughtless language like, “Spin the globe. Where it lands, that’s where we’ll go,” and “I was not born for one corner; the whole world is my native land.” They generally have more money to spend on travel, more time to take off from work, less responsibilities to family, powerful passports, few barriers to acquiring visas, are not criminalized by the TSA, are less vulnerable to policing and sexual harassment, and besides not having to worry about being treated like a human being wherever they go, are treated like rock star royalty in the developing world, where their dollars triple. And when traveling is a cakewalk to you, feeling entitled to it naturally follows. Travel marketing fuses travel ‘destinations’ and the host women into one brand, so that the tourist is not only entitled to the land by design, but to its women. “In [tourism advertising] we will see that stereotypical gendered, sexed and often racialized images of women are in many cases part of the tourism product itself,” summed Dr. Pritchard. This is part of what makes sex tourism, trafficking, and abuse by western male tourists more rampant and commonplace than any mainstream outlet has given it credit for.












In an industry where women are the face of the product and not the business, where they are over-concentrated but invisibilized, working menial tasks for less pay than men, they are made dangerously vulnerable. Especially as hotel and other travel brand owners are either foreign whites or national elites, and tourism laborers are usually non-unionized, the substantial power differences therein shrink the woman and her rights, making her prey to the potential attacker. A 2003 report from the International Labor Office finds that women in the tourism industry aren’t just vulnerable to male coworkers and bosses, like other sectors, but to their clients, as well. Citing the report, Dr. Pritchard writes, “Factors such as late working hours, service of alcohol, dress codes, racism, negative attitudes towards service staff and the uninhibited, sexualised nature of tourism and tourism promotion contribute to a high-risk environment for women and younger workers, as well as ethnic minority, migrant and part-time workers.” (Italics mine.) In a similar United Kingdom study of graduates in the hospitality industry, 44 percent said they had experienced some type of violence, and 50 percent of those respondents say it was directly due to their gender. “Overall,” the report concludes, “respondents in non-managerial occupations reported customers as the most likely perpetrators.” Not only do many men travel specifically to engage in sex tourism, mostly in majority-POC regions, but they’re also afforded more opportunities to harass or attack women, as they are more likely to be their flight attendants, maids, waitresses, bartenders, and sex workers.

EAT, PRAY, LOOT
But what of the ripple effects of mass tourism on women of color, regardless of the tourist’s gender or intent? A major one is displacement, when gubernatorial or corporate powers (or both) seize local land in favor of resorts, displacing local people and replacing local industries. Studies by Tourism Concern show that “forced displacement and loss of livelihood due to tourism development in” coastal areas historically inhabited by fisherfolk “has caused disenfranchised fishermen to turn to drink, which is often a forerunner to domestic violence against women and children, and even abandonment.”
Overconsumption of resources and environmental degradation are also effects of mass tourism that directly impact women of color. In Invisible Hosts, Invisible Guest, Mary Fillmore writes, “It is a local woman who must pay the price for the tourist’s luxuries.” Inflation follows growing tourist demands for imported items. “It is she who must go farther and farther for smaller and smaller amounts of water, who must carry less over greater distances.” Traveling further for water is known to raise a girl or woman’s exposure to violence. “She is the one who must make do with less in cooking and in washing herself and her children.” The tourism industry is real good at overusing water in places where access to drinkable water is scarce, especially since resort tourism is typically done in developing countries. “Her working day, often already overextended to include paid as well as unpaid work, is lengthened further.” Notice a pattern here?
While it’s no news that women’s’ labor is devalued around the world, especially that of women of color, it is either erased or glamorized as a part of the tourism product. Like a free gift tossed to the bottom of a cereal box, she is molded to attract the attention of swinish boys expecting the product to match its advertisement. “It is as if everywhere we go, we become someone’s private zoo,” wrote Trinh T. Minh-ha in Woman, Native, Other. The thing about women though, and the places they come from, is that neither are static, ageless, or free of resistance. That image was brought to you by colonization, a process that necessitates the devaluing of land and its people by creating a system of difference with which the white man could prop himself up on. And travel media refuses to discard of those stereotypical scenes that carry the vestiges of imperial rule to today, because without them, they wouldn’t have a brand, much less a product to sell.
In an industry that would cease to exist if it weren’t for women of color, “They are among the most useful pawns the industry has to move to the front of the board to attract the Northern male tourist,” writes Fillmore, “depicting them as compliant, submissive, and ultimately accommodating.” But if you tell this to a white travel writer or just a Western traveler, that just as women don’t exist for male consumption, their lands don’t exist for tourist consumption either, their fragile sensibilities will buckle before you. And that’s because he needs to believe that he is propped up by nature and not by design in order to keep Eat, Prey, Looting. Cool story, bro.
Check in next month for the next piece in our series on fragility.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8



Bani Amor is a queer travel writer, photographer and activist from Brooklyn by way of Ecuador who explores diasporic identities, the decolonization of travel culture, and the intersections of race, place and power in their work. They’ve been published in Bitch Magazine and Apogee Journal, among other outlets. They are a three-time VONA/Voices Fellow and have an essay in Brooklyn Boihood’s anthology Outside the XY: Queer Black and Brown Masculinity. Follow them on Twitter @bani_amor.

The fragility series is published each month by Bitch Media, a nonprofit, independent, feminist media organization. Think our work deserves your support? Become a Pollinator and get great benefits—we're talking mugs, a subscription to award-winning Bitch magazine, stickers, and more!

Plantations and Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species (Anna Tsing)

Plantations were the engine of European expansion. Plantations produced the wealth—and the modus operandi—that allowed Europeans to take over the world. We usually hear about superior technologies and resources; but it was the plantation system that made navies, science, and eventually industrialization possible. Plantations are ordered cropping systems worked by non-owners and arranged for expansion. Plantations deepen domestication, re-intensifying plant dependencies and forcing fertility. Borrowing from state-endorsed cereal agriculture, they invest everything in the superabundance of a single crop. But one ingredient is missing: They remove the love. Instead of the romance connecting people, plants, and places, European planters introduced cultivation through coercion.[xxvi] The plants were exotics; the labor was forced through slavery, indenture, and conquest. Only through extreme order and control could anything flourish in this way; but with hierarchy and managed antagonism in place, enormous profits (and complementary poverties) could be produced. Because plantations have shaped how contemporary agribusiness is organized, we tend to think of such arrangements as the only way to grow crops. But this arrangement had to be naturalized until we learned to take the alienation of people from their crops for granted.




Consider sugar cane, a key participant. No one loves plantation sugar cane. Puerto Rican cane workers go out to “defend themselves” (se defienden) and “do battle” (bregando) with the cane.[xxvii] Yet between the 17th and the 19th centuries, sugar cane plantations produced much of the wealth that fueled European conquest and development. The cane was moved across the warm zones, redefining regions; and so too came owners, managers, and laborers.[xxviii] Slaves were sent from West Africa to the New World. Contracted coolie labor from India and China moved into the Pacific. Peasants were conquered and coerced in the Indies. And in forging a new antagonism to plantation plants, humans changed the very nature of species being. Elites entrenched their sense of autonomy from other species; they were masters not lovers of nonhuman beings, the species Others who came to define human self-making. But for planters this was only possible to the extent that human subspecies were formulated and enforced: Someone had to work the cane. Biology came to signify the difference between free owners and coerced labor. Colored people worked the cane; white people owned and managed it. No racial laws or ideals could stop miscegenation, but they could guarantee that only those of the white race could inherit property. Racial divisions were produced and reproduced in each dowered marriage and inheritance.[xxix]
From the first, fungi were there, ready for niches to fill. Fungi constrained smallholder sugar cane; after it is cut, cane must be processed immediately to avoid fungal fermentation. The huge scale of cane plantations, and their savage labor discipline, are in part a response to fears of fermentation, which inspire on-site, expensive mills—and the desire to keep them running continuously. Yet fungal fermentation turned out to be a gift to the planters. It didn’t take Caribbean planters long to observe that molasses, a byproduct of sugar milling, suited ubiquitous local yeast spores and quickly changed to alcohol. Rum was born, and the deadly but profitable “triangle trades” proffered rum for more African slaves, and thus more sugar production, and thus more distillers and financers in England or New England. Long before sugar became an object and symbol of mass consumption (thus cementing the expectation of species-autonomous publics whose species-unrecognizeable foods mysteriously appeared from afar), fungally fermented rum made plantation sugar profitable—spreading it across the field of European conquest.[xxx]
At the edge of respectability, rum charged sea-faring masculinities in which trade became adventure. Fermentation thus detracted attention from the cruelty of shore-bound domestication, both human and nonhuman.
White women became agents of racial hygiene. By dividing us firmly into races, plantations remade human species being, the practice of being human. Racial separation—depending as it does on marriage and family organization—required additional transformations of gender. In the plantation zones, with their unsettled mixtures of native and foreign, free, bound, and enslaved, wild and tame, disease and plenty, things could so easily go awry. Here white women became responsible for maintaining the boundaries—of homes, families, species, and the white race. Tropical fungi were one small part of their problem; molds and infections could get out of hand. Keeping their homes free of mildew, mosquitoes, and miscegenation, white women in the tropics became models of species and subspecies alienation.[xxxi]




By the late 19th century, discourses of scientific hygiene and eugenics informed white women’s species segregations. Pasteurian germ theory was tested and boosted in the tropics, where white-controlled spaces could be organized as laboratories, with microorganisms stopped at the border of white homes. White women were called to follow their husbands to the tropics to keep things clean.[xxxii] Re-imported to the metropole, such public and private hygiene charged class dichotomies, informing distinctions between those women Ehrenreich and English once contrasted as the “sick” and the “sickening.”[xxxiii] Vulnerable upper class women became the angels of the house; poor women were blamed as the agents of infection. Both received renewed mandates to reproduce. Poor families needed more labor, particularly where child labor kept many adults alive.[xxxiv] Privileged families were charged with the advancement of the race; women must bear its heirs.
The boundaries of the home became the expected boundaries of love. With the fetishization of the home as a space of purity and interdependence, extra-domestic intimacies, whether within or between species, seemed archaic fantasies (the community, the small farmer) or passing affairs (feminism, animal rights). Outside the home, the domain of economic rationality and conflicting individual interests reigned. Moreover, this kind of family fetish reappeared in mid-20th century U.S. mass culture—and once again in our times now—as the United States assumed a global leadership that allowed it to draw from older regimes of colonial culture. Here love is just not expected outside family walls. Within the family, other species can be accepted; pets are models for family devotion. But the model of the loving and beloved pet does not spread love; it holds it tight inside the family.
U.S. publics learn to imagine themselves as compassionate, moral people because they love their children and their pets. They learn that this love makes them “good people”—unlike terrorists, who only hate. They imagine that this love equips them to make decisions for the whole world; it creates a moral hierarchy in which American “goodness” is qualification for global leadership. Other peoples, and other species, are judged by their ability to live up to U.S. standards of domestic intimacy. If they are properly engaged with family love, they may deserve to live. Others risk becoming “collateral damage” in U.S. projects to improve the world; to eliminate them may be unfortunate but not “inhumane.” Under this tutelage, our species being is realigned to stop Others at home’s door.
Given the power and pervasiveness of this biosocial plan, it is amazing that a still-rich diversity of species and populations still exists on earth. But such richness can no longer be taken for granted.

http://tsingmushrooms.blogspot.pt

The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now

SCOTT LAURIA MORGENSEN

Queen’s University

Settler colonialism is exemplary of the processes of biopower theorised by Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. However, settler colonialism remains naturalised within theories of biopower and theories of its relation to coloniality. White supremacist settler colonisation produces specific modes of biopolitics that sustain not only in settler states but also in regimes of global governance that inherit, extend, and naturalise their power. I extend Patrick Wolfe’s theory that a ‘logic of elimination’ constitutes settler colonialism in the genocide and amalgamation of Indigenous peoples, by indicating that this also indigenises and naturalises white settler nations as projections of the West. Agamben’s work illuminates how Indigenous peoples are eliminated in a state of exception to Western law, which by functioning to erase consanguinity – as the patriarch in Roman law eliminates the defiant son – explains Indigenous peoples’ seemingly contradictory incorporation within and excision from the body of white settler nations. This biopolitical process specific to settler colonialism also structures the manner in which white settler societies demonstrably universalize Western law, both within their bounds and in global arenas. My call to denaturalise settler colonialism in social theory is but a first step towards broader study of how the biopolitics of settler colonialism structure current modes of biopower and require concerted critique at the intersections of Indigenous and settler colonial studies.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2201473X.2011.10648801

Jezebel

Silvia Federici, On capitalism, colonialism, women and food politics

From edition 2009 Issue 2

Published: November 3, 2009
An interview with Silvia Federici
Interviewed by Max Haiven
Silvia Federici is a researcher, activist and educator. She was born and raised in Italy but came to the US in 1967 on a scholarship to study Philosophy at the University of Buffalo. Since then, she has taught at several universities in the US and also at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. She is now Emerita Professor at Hofstra University (Long Island, NY) and lives in Brooklyn.
A veteran feminist activist, Federici’s work is informed by and in dialogue with the many struggles which have animated her career. Since the early 1970s Federici was, along with theorists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, a founder of the International Feminist Collective and an organizer with the famous Wages for Housework campaign. This movement brought together a global alliance of feminist groups to make a revolutionary challenge at the very hinge of capitalist and patriarchal power by demanding economic sovereignty for women engaged in the elemental labour of social reproduction.
Federici has also been a central part of the Midnight Notes Collective and a co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA), a support organization for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against structural adjustment. Between 1991 and 2003 she was a co-editor of the CAFA Bulletin. In 1995, she co-founded the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) anti-death penalty project.
Her ground-breaking 2004 book Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia), received critical laudations and was much talked of in both academic and activist circles, supplying as it did a capacious, lucid and historically rigorous picture of the intersections of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism and violence from the 15th to the 18th century. The book served as a crucial corrective to both Marxist analyses of the period of primitive accumulation which write gender out as well as to the fashionable academic discourse of biopolitics. The latter, Federici argues, has tended, in the work of both Foucault and his followers, to forget the witch trials of the 16th and 17th century. These were part and parcel of the systematic destruction of women’s power over biological and social reproduction and social creativity, a process essential to the enclosure and colonial movements and the scene of the nascence of both capitalism proper and the modern state.
In other work, Federici has addressed themes of enclosure, colonialism, labour, patriarchy and racism in areas as diverse as the advance of capitalist accumulation, international development policy, the labour of “immaterial workers,” the analysis of social movement strategy and anti-colonial struggle.
In this interview Federici shares her thoughts on the relationship between food, agricultural production, women’s work, global capitalist accumulation and struggle around the world.
Max Haiven (MH) for Politics and Culture: Your historical work has focused on the way the process of what Marx called “primitive accumulation”—the way capitalism is created out of the destruction of other ways of life—has relied upon the systematic destruction of women’s power and the “accumulation of divisions” amongst the working class. Can you speak to how this relates to the history of food politics?
Silvia Federici (SF): There is a direct relation between the destruction of the social and economic power of women in the “transition to capitalism” and the politics of food in capitalist society.
In every part of the world, before the advent of capitalism, women played a major role in agricultural production. They had access to land, the use of its resources and control over the crops they cultivated, all of which guaranteed their autonomy and economic independence from men. In Africa, they had their farming and cropping systems, which were the source of a specific female culture, and they were in charge of the selection of seeds, an operation that was crucial to the prosperity of the community and whose knowledge was transmitted through the generations. The same was true of women’s role in Asia and the Americas. In Europe as well, until the late medieval period, women had land-use rights and the use of the “commons”—woods, ponds, grazing grounds—that were an important source of sustenance. In addition to farming with men, they had their gardens where they cultivated vegetables as well as medicinal herbs and plants.
Both in Europe and the regions the Europeans colonized, primitive accumulation and capitalist development changed this situation. With land privatization and the expansion of monetary relations, a deeper division of labor developed in agriculture that separated food production for profit from food production for direct consumption, devalued reproductive work, starting from subsistence farming, and appointed men as the chief agricultural producers, whereas women were relegated to the rank of “helpers,” field hands, or domestic workers.
In colonial Africa, for example, British and French officers systematically favored men with regard to allocations of land, equipment, and training, the mechanization of agriculture being the occasion for a further marginalization of women’s agricultural activities. They also disrupted female farming by forcing women to assist their husband in the cultivation of cash crops, thus altering the power relations between women and men and instigating new conflicts between them. To this day, the colonial system, whereby land titles are given only to men, continues to be the rule for “development agencies” and not in Africa alone.
It must be said that men have been accomplices in this process, not only claiming control over women’s labor, but, in the face of growing land scarcity, conspiring to curtail women’ communal land-use rights (wherever these survived) by rewriting the rules and conditions of belonging to the community.
Despite women’s resistance to their marginalization, and their continuous engagement in subsistence farming and land reclamation struggles, these developments have had a profound effect on food production. As Vandana Shiva so powerfully described in her book Staying Alive [1], with the exclusion of women from access to land and the destruction of their control over food production, a large body of knowledge, practices, techniques that for centuries safeguarded the integrity of the land and the soil and the nutritional value of food has been lost.