[on reclaiming slut as a south asian]
Emphasis mine. Those peers? There’s a lot of them in the SlutWalk movement. I’ve been following the SW Toronto page pretty closely and it’s ridiculous the amount of privilege-fail that happens and goes unchecked.
The SlutWalk Teheran page has been supported by one of the Boston organizers, and been approached three times by the SW Satellite Liaison to make them an official satellite - the last time was after you had that exchange with the admin a few posts down.
(btw I have screencaps of this stuff if it gets deleted)
The display pic alone is problematic enough, yet 62 people (at last count) including SW organizers have failed to notice these and other glaring cues as to how fucked up this really is.
I live in Toronto. I was intrigued when I first heard about SlutWalk, but felt uncomfortable about joining in, as excited as I was about the intentions behind it. A little while later I realized the source of my discomfort - as an Indian immigrant I’m not in a position to reclaim the word “slut” even if I wanted to. I can just imagine my mother going “you want to reclaim KYA*???” I’m all for calling attention to victim-blaming and sexual violence. I’m all for people reclaiming the word “slut” and any other words that have been used as weapons against them if they so choose to. But the thing is, there are reasons why this movement has gone mainstream so quickly. Why the media’s all over it. Why out of 7596 fans of the page, I was the only one who called out the following comment:
The funny thing is, I’m a South Asian immigrant too, and I absolutely fell in love with SlutWalk the first time I heard about it because of recent experiences with regards to sexuality and sexual abuse that I hardly had an outlet for before. I can see the word dissonance, but for me it’s less about the word and more about the concept - of being able to own my body and my sexuality, damn what anyone’s assumptions are.
I think the people who got fooled into supporting SW Tehran, like me, assumed it *came* from Tehran; I didn’t even know they were US-based until the 4th set of exchanges. All the other SlutWalks have been started by people in the host cities, so if you weren’t looking too closely it’s easy to assume that the Tehrani one was started by Tehrani women too. It took a LOT of digging by me to find out where they were coming from, and still that conversation is being overshadowed by a lot of pithy chants from the admins. It’s not hard to miss.
And it’s interesting you mentioned getting a burqa for the protest - one of my most powerful burlesque pieces involves a transformation from “naked slut” to “burqa-wearer”. I created it because I got fed up of people making assumptions about Muslim women, and also noticed the crash and clash between my Muslim background and my current sex-positivity. There’s not a whole lot of space for people like us, especially not when people on both sides make assumptions about the other.
I hope I didn’t imply that it’s impossible for South Asians to reclaim the word ‘slut’. I have had my fair share of slut-shaming as well, and efforts to negotiate the space between traditional Indian views of sexuality and Western ones. I would love a movement that asserts female sexual agency, unfortunately for me SlutWalk isn’t this movement. I’m all for taking the sting out of the word ‘slut’ and dispelling the false correlation between promiscuity or clothing and sexual assault. But for me, calling myself a ‘slut’ is giving up. It’s buying into the pre-existing prude/slut dichotomy of female sexual expression, and I want to challenge the dichotomy, not just redefine it. That, and showing up for a ‘Slut’ Walk feels like an inauthentic choice for me, not least because of my mother’s reaction to where I would be going.
If ‘slut’ works for you, more power to you. But where is the space or recognition for people like me?
As for SlutWalk Teheran, my tip-off was the image and the info on the event posted by the creator as one of the first posts (and around the time that you must’ve joined):
“Due to the repressive nature of the regime in the Republic of Iran, this event will understandingly exclude citizens of that Republic. Slutwalk Teheran will be an event when thousands upon thousands of women from all parts of the free world will descend on the ancient city of Teheran and reclaim the already partly-reclaimed word “slut”. “
I don’t know how many people were ‘duped’ and how many have just failed to recognize these warning flags. Certainly I have no sympathy for the SlutWalk Satellite Liaison, who more than anyone else should have looked at the facebook page closely enough before declaring public support - 4 times, at last count. The fact that they have continued to do so, along with other organizers, and no one has called them out on it is again what leads me to believe the SlutWalk movement is a privileged one for the most part.
That performance piece looks very interesting, and perhaps I should’ve clarified, but the post was from someone with an Anglo name and a light-skinned display pic. So they were coming from a very different place than you would be with that piece. They were just relying on the old trope of ‘burqa = bad/oppressive.’ I actually did call them out on it, and they ended up thanking me, and another person piped in saying they had never considered things that way. Great, teachable moment. Thing is, why isn’t this common knowledge amongst ‘socially conscious’ people? And why am I one of the very few people doing this work? Again it falls on the racialized marginalized people to speak up when western feminists step on our toes on their way to the next march - a march many of us weren’t really invited to.
**edited for unchecked gender assumptions
(Source: creatrixtiara, via creatrixtiara)
