Practice Solidarity Abroad, Not Studying Abroad
How studying people in developing countries can hurt them instead of help them.
Plenty of people travel to developing countries to “help” the people living there, especially the women. They firmly believe in their Western hearts that their efforts are going to change the lives of those who are “less fortunate”. Much of the focus is on women because they are oppressed and impacted more than men. While this is true, there is also an underlying effect to the work these traveling, noble saints do. What they fail to understand is that while they may be temporarily helping them, they are also hurting the feminist efforts to improve the lives of women in Third World countries long-term. There are continuous and unintentional bashings of a building feminine regime in developing countries by the Western people who are trying to help them, or rather in a way colonize them all over again.
Gender theory professor Tanya Rawal-Jindia says, “You can’t travel to a foreign, developing country without being a little bit colonial,” and I don’t think I can remember a time when I realized my own Western privilege. My goals were always to join a organization to help people around the world who suffered from lack of physical necessities as well as liberal freedoms/rights. I truly believed that this did nothing but good for these people, especially the women. However, after reading “Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity” by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, I realized all I would be doing by studying these women and writing about them is hurting them. I would be turning them into an article, a specimen meant to be studied and understood, without real affirmative action being taken to perhaps relieve some of their unnecessary struggles.
In addition to just turning them into statistics and study information, I would be victimizing them. Keeping them from being empowered. Empowerment is defined as “the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one’s life and claiming one’s rights.” By my intruding on their lives to ask them about how they live and how they feel personally victimized by the lack of female rights, especially in developing countries where women are more likely to be abused, I am only creating this image of them as people who need our help. When Westerners offer “their help,” it usually consists of them using Western tactics and Western ways to try and empower those who are not accustom to Western life, because they believe that a Westernized life is a more modern, progressive, and overall better life. However, what Westerners fail to realize is what cultural relativism is.
To be culturally relative is to attempt to understand a culture based on its own terms. This is a practice that needs to be active when people travel abroad in an attempt to assist those in developing countries in need of empowerment. We, as Western people, need to take into account the fact that cultures vary and that ours is not the best or that it needs to be globalized, because it isn’t and it doesn’t. If all we do is go to other countries to gain a published paper, a dissertation, or something else to benefit us from others’ cultural lack of empowerment, we are part of the issue they lack it. We can no longer paint these women as victims, because that merely reinforces it. There needs to be inspiration. They need our solidarity. A sense of becoming stronger within their own boundaries. We need to listen to personal struggles and narratives because there is not one solution to an issue that differs from person to person. These human beings cannot just be a one-size-fits-all article for our personal learning. They are more than their victimization, they are more than just words on paper, they are humans with emotions, experiences, hopes, loved ones, and humans with a view of the future with their empowerment in it.
