*Fundamentalism takes aim at women

Fundamentalism takes aim at women

By Sonia Correa One of the most recurrent concerns of the feminist movement in the late 1990s is the alarming spread of fundamentalism. This phenomenon affects women's lives across the globe. At the most diverse national settings, fundamentalist agendas are increasingly manipulating religious, communal, racial, ethnic and nationalist loyalties while diffusing the energy of political movements away from basic needs and development. During the first half of the decade, as the international women's movement increasingly impacted on international debates and agreements — UNCED (United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development) 1992; Vienna, 1993; Cairo, 1994; the Social Summit, 1995 — fundamentalist positions which directly target the feminist agenda have also strengthened. During UNCED, the Vatican tried to obstruct language concerning access to reproductive health services. In Vienna, a group of southern countries, including China, strongly advanced the cultural relativist argument [that one culture has no right to impose its values on another, even if the latter condones backward, destructive practices such as genital mutilation] to undermine the notion of universal human rights, and most particularly women's rights. In Cairo, fundamentalists' strategies were aimed to undermine notions of reproductive health and rights and new approaches to family structures. During the Social Summit it was extremely hard to keep the language used in Cairo in place, although the draft did not even mention reproductive rights and abortion. In the context of preparations for Beijing, fundamentalists tried to obstruct the use of gender as a terminology in the draft Platform of Action, and managed to get it into brackets. Recently, Vatican foreign minister Jean Louis Tauran criticised the Beijing document for imposing a "Western type of household" on the world, while the papal spokesperson, Navarro Valls, referred to the imposition of a "Western model of femininity". Apart from the irony of the Catholic Church criticising western ethnocentric views, it looks like the cycle is winding up. The Vatican agenda has finally converged with the cultural relativist argument which informs the position of other fundamentalist trends. Given this, feminists' analysis of fundamentalism radically differs from the mainstream, which normally depicts it as an isolated southern phenomenon, particularly related to Islamic countries. Feminists view fundamentalism as a global issue. Apart from its specific religious, cultural and political bases, certain features are common to fundamentalism across all world regions. It is always constructed around a notion of purity and impurity in which "the other" is perceived as intrinsically evil and must be eliminated or "cleansed". Fundamentalism everywhere "naturalises" the family, sexuality and gender relations, and excludes women from the public sphere. Everywhere, fundamentalism uses women's bodies as a battlefield in its struggle to appropriate institutional power, most particularly in the south. Fundamentalism is therefore not a religious but a political phenomenon. On another level, fundamentalism cannot be analysed in isolation from contemporary economic trends. Global inequalities in resource distribution and shrinking investments in social programs have characterised "development" in recent decades. Structural adjustment programs and privatisation have been imposed on southern governments, severely reducing their ability to respond to the basic needs of the majority of people. Ravaging poverty and government inefficiency create the social and cultural environment in which fundamentalism can easily proliferate. It is maybe time to explore less visible connections linking economic models and the expansion of fundamentalist forces. Georgina Ashworth already advanced this when she interpreted the "obsessive faith in markets" underlying dominant economic models as a surprising form of "rational fundamentalism". Since the '80s the Vatican's position on abortion has smoothly converged with the Reaganomics agenda, probably because both perspectives viewed the re-domestication of women as an objective. Friedrich Hayek, a neo-liberal master, suggested recently that, from a strictly cost-benefit perspective, it would be more effective to retain women at home rather than integrate them into the labour market. It is therefore not surprising to hear from a US Catholic priest visiting Brazil in September why he shifted from being a radical progressive to strongly support neo-liberal ideas. Robert Sirico, who in the 1970s participated in street demonstrations, said: "What I have experienced is not just an ideological but, in fact, a religious conversion. Reading Milton Friedman made me conscious of the values of natural law and consequently brought me back to the fundamental teachings of the Catholic Church." In other words, beyond the concrete fundamentalist threats women face, and the obstructions they struggle against at international fora, another challenge confronts feminist thinking. It is urgent that we track and argue against the multiple forms of fundamentalist approaches to women's issues in daily life and policy arenas.
[This article is taken from a paper presented to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, September 4-15.]