Eske Wollrad

On the conference "Societies in Transition - Challenges to Women's and Gender Studies", University of Oldenburg, 28.6.-1.7.2001

"I was surprised to find so few references to internationality and interculturality and almost none at all to globalisation and globality in the profiles of institutionalised women's and gender studies." (Sigrid Metz-Göckel) How do German women's and gender studies position themselves in the field of international dialogue in the context of globalisation? One answer was provided by the conference "Societies in Transition - Challenges to Women's and Gender Studies", which was organised by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Oldenburg Oldenburg (ZFG) and conceived and chaired by Prof. Dr. Heike Fleßner and Dr. Lydia Potts. The list of countries from which the speakers came (Great Britain, India, Nepal, South Africa, Germany, Hungary, Poland, New Zealand, Yemen, Jordan and Turkey) already makes it clear that the organisers' concept was not based on the staging of a Western symphony, which presents familiar themes in ever new variations, but rather had a jazz session in mind, a polyphonic togetherness and opposition, in which each voice brings in its own theme, interrupts the familiar, reshapes it, and in this way something new emerges.

And indeed, the conference could hardly have been more polyphonic, because on the one hand, academics from the university sector were invited as well as activists and representatives of NGOs (non-governmental organisations). Furthermore, differences were spelt out here on several levels: Differences regarding the socio-economic upheavals taking place in the individual countries and affecting women differently in each case, differences regarding the positioning of women's and gender researchers and the resulting concepts and strategies, and finally differences regarding the practical implementation of these concepts and strategies.

One of the aims of the conference, according to Heike Fleßner, spokesperson for the Centre for Interdisciplinary Women's and Gender Studies, was to build bridges between different contexts. And this first required basic information about the respective country: when did the north and south of Yemen unite, for example, and how did this upheaval affect Yemeni women? It became clear that political upheavals - in Yemen as well as in Hungary, Poland and South Africa - certainly offer women the opportunity to participate creatively in the process of social transformation and to reflect on which institutions and programmes are needed and whether Western models of women's and gender studies are helpful at all. With regard to India and Nepal, the main question is how female infants, girls and women can survive at all and what challenges this poses for women's and gender studies there.

Different self-image

The conference made it clear that the question of self-image and commitment to certain social forces characterises the different paths taken by women involved in women's and gender studies. Puspa Ghimire-Niraula from Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu (Nepal), emphasised that one aim of the Master's Degree Programme planned there is to produce experts who can support the women's movement and act as change agents. However, according to Gabrielle Griffin (Kingston University/University of Hull), hardly any women's and gender studies institution in the West (Western Europe and North America) defines support for the women's movement as a fundamental goal.

Western approaches rather aim to transform the male-dominated culture of knowledge production in the university sector. Silke Wenk (University of Oldenburg) criticised the fact that the gender perspective has hardly found its way into basic research and pointed to the danger of women's and gender studies degenerating into policy advice. The "F-word" ("feminist") increasingly has a negative connotation for career-oriented students, said Victoria Grace (University of Canterbury, New Zealand); consumerism and hostility towards theory characterise the atmosphere in her department, which as of this year is no longer called "Feminist Studies" but "Gender Studies". Grace vehemently defended herself against the accusation that complex theorising is inaccessible and irrelevant.

Did the conference confirm the juxtaposition of the theory-orientation of Western academics on the one hand and the practice-orientation of researchers from the East and South on the other? According to Gabrielle Griffin's analysis, it is in fact only the so-called "West" that regards universities and NGOs as separate entities; in her opinion, transformative politics is often lacking in women's and gender studies here. Although Griffin was not concerned with a new edition of familiar dichotomisations of research versus politics, theory versus practice, the controversy broke out again shortly during the conference in a way that evoked images of the "practical Trikont woman" and the "Western theorist in the ivory tower". Such ideological trench warfare is poison for international dialogue, as it only leads to defensive positions and paralyses productive co-operation. In contrast, as the organiser Lydia Potts emphasised, the aim of the conference was to create space for the formulation of different starting points and for attentive listening. In my opinion, this was successful, because despite the demanding and dense programme, the speakers faced a concentrated and open forum of over one hundred participants.

Critical interventions: from the "cultural turn" to economics

Both Gabrielle Griffin and Anne Phillips (London School of Economics) criticised the "cultural turn", the turn towards the cultural within Western women's and gender studies. Phillips spoke of a turn from redistribution to recognition: while the redistribution approach deals with socio-economic power relations with the aim of creating equality, the recognition approach is concerned with cultural dominance and forms of marginalisation. Here, the criticism is aimed at the underrepresentation of marginalised people in politics and practices of democracy. Griffin and Phillips criticised the trend of neglecting or completely ignoring economic equality for women.

This insistence on a materialist-feminist analysis formed the central bridge to the concerns of Savita Singal (Haryana Agricultural University, India), Ira Acharya (Micro Enterprise Development Programme, Kathmandu, Nepal), Rashida Al-Hamadani (Women National Committee, Yemen) and Rokhsana M. Ismail (Aden University, Yemen). They spoke at length about the material living conditions of women in their countries, about income and educational opportunities, illiteracy and infant mortality. In other words, their approach is based on a detailed inventory and visualisation of how material poverty, combined with a lack of information, manifests itself in women's lives. In my opinion, these analyses form fields of socially relevant feminist knowledge production that are located beyond theory-practice constructions.

Critical interventions: Heads or tails?

Sigrid Metz-Göckel (University of Dortmund) called for the internationalisation of German women's and gender studies, combined with a deepening of perspectives and critical self-reflection. One challenge, according to Metz-Göckel, is "to think with the mind of the others". And this is precisely what sparked the discussion. Is it possible to think with the mind of others? Where are the boundaries, where are the fundamental differences? Do the minds, the thinking, mark the difference? "It's not the mind, it's the purse!" interjected South African Sheila Meintjes (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa). So: thinking or purse, head or tails? What separates the West from the "rest" is the availability of material resources (female scientists in Nepal, for example, work under conditions that are unimaginable for us), i.e. at this point of the conference it became clear that the internationalisation called for by Metz-Göckel must also imply a turning away from idealistic-feminist positions, positions that afford themselves the luxury of merely wanting to find their way around in the heads of their counterparts and thus possibly avoid confrontation with the different material basis that essentially constitutes the respective contents of the heads.

The economic power of the West not only characterises international encounters between academics from different contexts, but also has a great influence on the development of gender studies outside Western Europe: gender studies at the University of Warsaw, for example, are funded exclusively by Western foundations, according to Bozena Choluj (Warsaw). How the Western influence should be assessed was the subject of controversial discussion. According to Susanne Schunter-Kleemann (Bremen University of Applied Sciences), the European Union represents a transnational coalition of Western European male elites ("The EU is still a men's club."), while Polish activists expect many benefits for women from Poland's accession to the EU, according to Kinga Lohmann from the KARAT Coalition, an association of organisations in Central and Eastern Europe.

Critical interventions: "tribal cultures" and the Western view

Quite a few Western feminists tend to analyse patriarchal structures in their own country in a differentiated way, while viewing those in countries of the so-called "Third World" as monolithic entities. Such tendencies also manifested themselves during the conference. For example, Josi Salem-Pickartz (Amman, Jordan), a psychologist from Germany, described current Jordanian society as a "neo-patriarchy", which is essentially characterised by tribalism, i.e. a structure based on clearly defined "tribes", for whose members blood ties are stronger than any other form of relationship. According to Salem-Pickartz, tribalism is responsible for the discrimination of Jordanian women, as it keeps women in a subordinate and dependent status. There was strong opposition here, not only from Yasmin Haddad (University of Amman, Jordan), but also from Rashida Al-Hamadani, who said that she also belonged to a tribe and that it had never prevented her from realising her plans - today she is Secretary General of the Supreme Council for Women in Yemen.

The discussion on "tribalism" made it clear how much work still lies ahead of us, especially when it comes to critically analysing simplistic concepts of Western provenance. The conference took a step in this direction.

Our Daughters - Our Wealth

It seems obvious to place all the presentations under the overarching theme of "violence against women". However, the contributions were not only concerned with the analysis of the diverse structures of violence and their reorganisation in societies undergoing socio-political upheaval, but no less with possibilities of resistance, the encouragement of women and the promotion of their chances of survival and quality of life. One of the projects Savita Singal (Haryana, India) was involved in conceptualising is called "Our Daughters - Our Wealth". In a context where ideas about the inferiority of girls are deeply rooted and daughters are seen as a burden or as "someone else's wealth" (the future husband), it is as difficult as it is necessary to bring about change. But how? Singal's project takes the claim that daughters are wealth seriously, as one of the measures is to provide significant financial support to parents who have demonstrably not neglected their daughter over a long period of time.

Samiera Zafar's (Center for Education Policy Research, Evaluation and Management, Gauteng, South Africa) presentation on schoolgirls who find themselves at the centre of the storm of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa made it clear just how dramatically limited possibilities for resistance can be. 4.4 million people are already infected and 22.4% of all South African women are HIV positive. In times of radical budget cuts and a "culture of concealment" of the HIV/AIDS problem, it is extremely difficult, according to Zafar, to carry out effective education and prevention work.

The wealth that daughters represent was also addressed in a completely different way at the conference. Right at the beginning, Gabrielle Griffin asked: Where is the next generation? Where are our feminist "daughters"? One at least was on the podium: Gamze Ege, graduate of the Gender and Women's Studies Programme and research assistant at the Middle Eastern Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. She presented her institution with self-confidence and criticised, among other things, the lack of intensive exchange between teachers and students at her university.

More Jazz! Prospects for international co-operation

In addition to the presentations, the ZFG was also busy networking: the ZFG concluded cooperation agreements with the Women's Centre of Training and Research at the University of Aden (Yemen) and with Women's Studies at Tribhuvan University Kathmandu (Nepal). Furthermore, plans were made for a student exchange with the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa) and with the University of Canterbury, Christ Church, New Zealand, and possibilities for academic co-operation with Eastern European universities were considered. Finally, two follow-up conferences are planned, one on the subject of "Self-perception, external perception and solidarity of women" in Amman (Jordan) and a conference on the subject of "Globalisation, women's work, sustainability" in October 2003 together with the CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar (India).

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Oldenburg set standards with this conference - both in terms of the concept and the perfect organisation (for which Ilse Kamke was primarily responsible). It is to be hoped that the critical impulses of the conference will also be taken up elsewhere and strengthen processes of internationalisation in German women's and gender studies beyond the western border.

The conference papers will be published as an anthology by Leske & Budrich in summer 2002. The editors are Heike Fleßner and Lydia Potts.

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