{"id":1517,"date":"2018-11-12T18:07:16","date_gmt":"2018-11-12T16:07:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=1517"},"modified":"2018-11-12T18:07:16","modified_gmt":"2018-11-12T16:07:16","slug":"towards-liberation-from-empowerment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2018\/11\/12\/towards-liberation-from-empowerment\/","title":{"rendered":"TOWARDS LIBERATION FROM EMPOWERMENT"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was\nwatching last week the new wonder woman of Spanish music, Rosal\u00eda, in an\ninterview on TV (in Pablo Motos\u2019 El\nHormiguero<\/em>) and she confirmed that, indeed, her new recording, El mal querer<\/em>, deals with \u2018el poder\nfemenino\u2019 (I\u2019m not sure whether she means female, women\u2019s or feminine power).\nRosal\u00eda herself is an example of sudden artistic empowerment that I don\u2019t quite\nunderstand, as I think that we\u2019re missing crucial information about her family\nbackground and her training as a musician. But that\u2019s not my point (to clarify\nmatters: like millions of people around the world, I love what she does, it\u2019s\nso thrilling and refreshing!). My point is this: why do we speak of power\nrather than of liberation? When did liberation stop being a keyword for feminism?\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The very\naccomplished article \u2018Empowerment: The History of a Key Concept in Contemporary\nDevelopment Discourse\u2019 by Anne-Emmanu\u00e8le Calv\u00e8s (https:\/\/www.cairn-int.info\/article-E_RTM_200_0735–empowerment-the-history-of-a-key-concept.htm<\/a>)\noffers a very useful overview of how this term became so widespread and why.\nShe cites as a major inspiration \u2018the conscientization approach developed by\nthe Brazilian theorist Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy\nof the Oppressed<\/em>, published in 1968\u2019. According to Calv\u00e8s, the 1970s were\nthe time when \u2018the term formally come into usage by social service providers and\nresearchers\u2019, particularly after Barbara Solomon\u2019s Black Empowerment: Social Work in Oppressed Communities<\/em> (1976). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0The current popularity of \u2018empowerment\u2019, however, sinks its roots in the mid-1990s, when,Calv\u00e8s explains, it firmly \u2018entered institutionalized discourse on women in development\u2019 thanks to feminist NGOs. Calv\u00e8s highlights the UN\u2019s InternationalConference on Population and Development (Cairo 1994) as one of the main events \u2018to give the concept international visibility\u2019. Precisely, the article by Ann Ferguson \u2018Empowerment, Development and Women\u2019s Liberation\u2019\u2013one of the few publications linking the two concepts that interest me\u2013appears in a book published by the UN\u2019s University Press, The Political Interests of Gender Revisited<\/em> (Anna G. J\u00f3nasd\u00f3ttir and KathleenB. Jones, eds., 2009, 85\u2013103. The article itself is not available online but you may easily find the volume\u2019s introduction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have\nserious doubts about the word \u2018empowerment\u2019 because it seems to be intrinsically\npatriarchal. If, as I am preaching, patriarchy is a form of hierarchical social\norganization characterized by its placing individuals in different ranks\naccording to the power they wield, why is empowerment desirable? If you start\nfrom a position of oppression and you manage to empower yourself, you may end\nup in a higher position but how do you contribute to undoing the very system of\npower? Could it be that we use empowerment mistakenly and we actually mean \u2018liberation\u2019?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me go\nback to Rosal\u00eda (born in 1993) to discuss next another young woman also born\nwhen the word \u2018empowerment\u2019 was become popularized, Malala Yousafzai (born in\n1997). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As far as I know, Rosal\u00eda has freely taken all the decisions concerning her career and has not been the object of any patriarchal attempts to curtail her artistic creativity. In short, she is enjoying the chance to develop her personal agency in freedom (within the legal and moral limits of current Spanish legislation) like any other young man of her generation and inclinations. Agency, incidentally, is a word that seems to have disappeared from the horizon, though it seemed to be ubiquitous just a few years ago. So, how\u2019s Rosal\u00eda a \u2018powerful woman\u2019 rather than a \u2018free\u2019 or \u2018liberated\u2019 woman? And how come \u2018liberated\u2019 has taken on this sexualized meaning? It seems to me that the \u2018poder femenino\u2019 she invokes and maybe embodies is a position, rather than a reality, a sort of pre-emptive strike against the patriarchal power that might limit her\u2013it\u2019s a way of saying \u2018you can\u2019t touch me\u2019,even though, as we know, successful women like Rosal\u00eda attract much attention from misogynistic haters. Her \u2018power\u2019, then, is in how her popularity and public presence outdo the control that the patriarchal trolls would use, if they could, against her. It\u2019s not power to repress or control others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0Now takeMalala, the 2014 winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace and, thus, also another example of empowerment\u2013or is it liberation? Unlike Rosal\u00eda, Malala grew up in an environment dominated by an extreme patriarchal regime, that of the Taliban in her native Pakistan. Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, was motivated by his personal and professional circumstances to become an anti-patriarchal activist,willing to sacrifice his own life to give girls in his community an education.His sisters never attended school but he made sure that his daughter and other girls like her would have a school to welcome them: the one he himself ran. Malala learned her own educational activism from her father and almost lost her life in 2012 when a Taliban patriarchal terrorist shot her in the head. The family relocated then to the United Kingdom, from where both Malala and her father continue their task of empowering (or is it liberating?) other girls by providing, to begin with, the inspiration to demand an education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Empowerment\ntakes, then, as many forms as personal experience dictates and is supposed to\nact, as I was arguing, as a barrier against further oppression by shifting the\nrelationships of power and introducing a better balance. This is where my\nmisgivings resurface: if power is, say, a cake, the more I eat, the less you\neat\u2013which means that empowerment is necessarily finite and also that those in\npower will always resist giving any away. This is how things seem to be working\nso far: the oppressed demand a bigger share of the cake, which they seem to be\ngetting but the ones who feel entitled to holding the whole cake under their\ncontrol do not like the situation a bit (a bite?). Hence all the lashing out,\nfrom Taliban violence to online trolling, simply because we cannot all be\nempowered. In contrast, we could all be free, that is to say, liberated from\nthe restrictions imposed by patriarchy if only we started thinking about who\nbaked the cake and why we have to eat it at all for, you see?, you cannot have\nyour cake and eat it, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bob Pease\nwrites that \u2018The challenge that confronts men is to find ways to exercise power\nwithout oppressing anyone. For men to change for the better, power must be redefined\nso that men can feel powerful while doing the tasks that are not traditional\nfor men\u2019 (30 in Carab\u00ed & Armengol, editors, Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World<\/em>), such as\u2026 rearing\nchildren, he adds. I think these words encapsulate much of what is wrong with\nempowerment: what does \u2018feel powerful\u2019 mean, whether you\u2019re a man or a woman?\nIsn\u2019t Pease himself suggesting that being powerful is the same as having the\ncapacity to oppress others? How can you \u2018exercise power\u2019 without controlling\nothers? If you ask me, for men to change they should oppose the very idea of\npatriarchal power to liberate themselves and others from oppression\u2013ask Ziauddin\nYousafzai whether being powerful is a priority for him. He is the very example\nof what liberation is for men and for women under harsh patriarchal regimes.\nWhy, then, knowing as we do that patriarchy survives because it appeals to men\nwith a sense of entitlement to power, we want to empower women? Again: why not liberate\neveryone from the shackles of power?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Women who\nmanage to choose how to live their lives, whether they\u2019re called Rosal\u00eda or\nMalala, are, to me, not instances of empowerment but of freedom. Power, as we\nsee in patriarchal men, does not free you: it\u2019s the other way round\u2013it enslaves\nyou to living life as others dictate. If you\u2019re thinking that I\u2019m wrong and\nthat only enjoying a great amount of power guarantees your personal freedom\nthen you don\u2019t mean power, you mean agency. Vladimir Putin has plenty of power\nand he\u2019s not using it for his personal liberation: he\u2019s using it to compete\nwith other men for the title of biggest living patriarch. Angela Merkel also has\nmuch power\u2013but isn\u2019t she the counterexample of women\u2019s liberation? Perhaps she\u2019ll\nfeel truly liberated when she retires next year and can finally use her agency\nto help others rather than uphold, as she is doing, the status quo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0I think I\u2019ve now hit on the key of my own personal philosophy of power, perhaps I should call it anti-power. If being powerful is being in a position to cause things tohappen (and being powerless is being in a position in which you can\u2019t stopthings from happening), then I can say that the only use I see in empowerment is an altruistic ability to make life better for others. Rosal\u00eda\u2019s \u2018poder femenino\u2019 should ideally translate into lending a hand so that other persons can flourish,as she is doing. Malala is more clearly following this path already, as are others. I don\u2019t mean Bill-Gates-style philanthropy (though this is much better than what he used to embody and now Elon Musk embodies) or charity, not even NGO activism but a rethinking of what power is for. If, as a teacher, I am in a\u00a0position to use my (very limited) power to benefit the careers of others who will in their turn help others, this is how I should use it. This may sound endogamic but that\u2019s not at all what I mean. Patriarchy will be undone when we,men and women, ask ourselves \u2018how can I help?\u2019 rather than \u2018how can I dominate?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll end by suggesting that empowerment is much more popular than liberation because the very idea of power is, regrettably, too glamorous. We also need to recall that empowerment is mainly a US export, pace<\/em> Paolo Freire and NGO activism, and that in American culture the opposite of being powerful is not just being powerless but being a loser, which is even worse. Perhaps if we free ourselves from the obligation of being a winner that would be a step forward towards true liberation and the abandonment of the current obsession with power, which, trust me, is suspiciously patriarchal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was watching last week the new wonder woman of Spanish music, Rosal\u00eda, in an interview on TV (in Pablo Motos\u2019 El Hormiguero) and she confirmed that, indeed, her new recording, El mal querer, deals with \u2018el poder femenino\u2019 (I\u2019m not sure whether she means female, women\u2019s or feminine power). Rosal\u00eda herself is an example […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[79,181,199,360],"class_list":["post-1517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-anti-patriarchal","tag-empowerment","tag-feminism","tag-patriarchy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}