Jessica Powers

Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera

mandy — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Georgina Guzman

Making a Killing is a collection of essays exploring the history and social/political/economic context of the murders of women in Juarez, Mexico from 1993 to the present day. Essays analyze the economic context of free trade that has contributed to a culture that devalues women workers and sees female bodies as expendable in the making of cheap products for American women. Essays examine activists’ and artists’ efforts to gain attention for the plight of women in Juarez, analyze the culture of law enforcement in Juarez, and vividly portray the efforts of mothers and relatives to get justice for their missing and murdered daughters.

Though the essays collected here are primarily academic, they are easy to read and will be of interest to the general public, not just other academics. The collection provides a thorough history and a complete picture of the efforts to stop the violence against women in Juarez throughout the last two decades. Though the subject is difficult, I enjoyed the book a lot.

I lived in El Paso, Texas for fifteen of the last twenty years; the stories of Mexican women being raped, murdered, and dumped in the desert on the outskirts of Juarez, Mexico filtered into my consciousness early. But so did the stories of narco-murders. In the last three years, the world has lost its preoccupation with the murder of women in Juarez and turned its attention instead to the mayhem and murders of over 25,000 Mexican citizens in the drug cartel wars ripping the nation apart. Juarez is the city most affected by these murders (3,000 in 2010 alone).

If I have one criticism of Making a Killing, it is that it pays little attention to the general culture of killing in Juarez. The murders of women didn’t begin in 1993—nor have they stopped. And the narco-murders didn’t begin in 2007—and who knows when they will end? Because the editors focus on femicide, only one essay suggests that the femicides overlap or are inextricably intertwined with the narco-murders. The culture of violence in Juarez envelops the femicides—but exceeds them as well. If we fail to explore and analyze this truth, then the murders of women by individual men and groups of men will be forgotten as we increasingly pay attention to the drug cartel war instead.

Written by: Jessica Powers, January 15th 2011

Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond

admin — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 16:02:00 +0000

By R. Charli Carpenter

Columbia University Press

In Forgetting Children Born of War, R. Charli Carpenter explores a perplexing question: Why has the human rights community ignored a critically vulnerable population, the children born to women who were raped during war? These children are subject to infanticide, neglect, abuse, and abandonment—both within their own families and within the societies into which they are born. Since the human rights community has a mandate to protect the most vulnerable citizens of society—which usually includes children, mothers, and pregnant women—why are they violating their own principles?

Through an exhaustive study of media, NGO reports, and interviews, Carpenter comes to understand that children born of war have been forgotten and neglected because human rights advocates focus instead on the problem of ethnic cleansing and genocide, as well as the women who have been subjected to sexual violence. Focusing on the children born of rape is understood as a conflict of interest. War rape is talked about and viewed “through lenses of nationalism, feminism, and humanitarianism rather than through a children’s rights frame.” Rape is a crime and the woman who experiences war rape is a victim; forced pregnancy and rape are weapons of ethnic cleansing. This is how the issue is dealt with in the context of the human rights agenda. Thus, the child conceived through rape is understood as a product of violence, as a “tool of genocide,” rather than as a human being in need of special protection.

Human rights advocates who initially considered the issue eventually decided to allow the local community to deal with these children, rather than offer the benefits, resources, and organizational manpower of the global human rights network. Local communities have responded in a variety of ways but none of the efforts made on behalf of these children are sufficient.

Carpenter’s book sheds light not just on the problem of children who have been conceived through rape during a time of war—tens of thousands of children across the globe—but also the equally complex problem of how human rights issues get constructed and adopted within the community, ultimately leading to how needs are addressed or ignored. Her book is a critical call for the need to re-examine our understanding of human rights and how those needs are addressed through the human rights network.

Written by: Jessica Powers, August 1st 2010

Falling Apart In One Piece: One Optimist’s Journey Through the Hell of Divorce

admin — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Stacy Morrison

Simon and Schuster

I’m one of the many women who have been through divorce so I picked up Stacy Morrison’s memoir Falling Apart in One Piece, about her divorce, with interest. Because few of my friends and family members have experienced divorce, it’s been one long lonely road for me. How do people deal with the guilt? I’ve wondered. How do they stop worrying about their ex—even after they’ve fallen in love with somebody else?

Less literary and more chatty-confessional style—in vogue with the women’s magazines that Morrison has edited all these years (Mirabella and Marie Claire, for example, or, most recently, Redbook)—Morrison relates her tale like a woman sitting down over a cup of tea with a friend. Her story takes us to the heart of despair in the wake of divorce. Though Morrison’s husband didn’t abandon their son, he left her holding the bag for a house that was falling apart around her. Morrison soon realized that she was literally living a metaphor, the house a perfect symbol of her crumbling marriage.

What did I do wrong? Morrison wonders. How could I have believed in marriage, only to be fooled? How could marriage have been just the thing I needed, while my husband felt like it was sucking his soul dry? And, most importantly, How am I ever going to be a single mom? How am I going to afford it? How am I going to get rid of this damned house? Even as she takes a new job as Editor-in-Chief of Redbook Magazine, Morrison wonders if she’s a fraud. Can she promote marriage and family when her own has disintegrated?

Through all her financial struggles, loneliness, self-doubt, and desolation, Morrison works hard not to become bitter or angry, so that she and her former husband can be good parents to their son. She comes through it with hope for the future and a new-found respect for her own abilities to make it through anything.

Falling Apart in One Piece is neither a literary masterpiece nor a self-help manual, but it is another genre somewhere in between those two—a personal story of heartache, loss, and hope, told honestly and thoughtfully. Definitely worth reading for those who have been through divorce and want to understand their own muddled emotions.

Written by: Jessica Powers, June 6th 2010

Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century

admin — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Susan Zeiger

New York University Press

When men are shipped out to foreign locations to engage in wartime activities, it seems inevitable that they will become romantically and sexually involved with foreign women. In Entangling Alliances, Susan Zeiger explores this phenomenon, examining governmental, military, and societal responses to American soldiers’ desires for sex, companionship, and marriage while engaged in combat overseas. She argues that the changing ways Americans treated war brides over the course of the twentieth century demonstrates shifting American sensibilities regarding foreign policy, race, and gender. More than anything, because war brides involved an exchange of women across cultural and national boundaries, American discourse about war brides was ultimately about what constituted American manhood, men’s relationships with women, and the role of the nation in its relationship to other countries.

During World War I, the military preached sexual abstinence while devising methods to keep American soldiers and local women apart, in particular African-American soldiers and white European women. The army’s response to marriage requests vacillated until an official policy was handed down that marriage was a personal, not military, question. Meanwhile, domestic policy concerns in the U.S. triumphed over an internationally-oriented political outlook; xenophobia for newcomers was inevitable and Americans wondered if these foreign women could become good American wives. Though many predicted the demise of these marriages, evidence reveals that the majority made it.

In World War II, military policy differed depending on location. It encouraged marriage in Great Britain and Australia, both Allied countries with similar cultural backgrounds to white middle-class America. Likewise, American society welcomed these brides, suggesting that American women should emulate their domesticity and loyalty to husbands. Alternatively, the military encouraged prostitution, rather than marriage, in both Italy and the Philippines, while American society viewed these war brides as less desirable immigrants. Zeiger argues that both policies—encouraging prostitution or marriage—“shared... the intention to preserve and extend male control over women.” She also points out that though many of these local women showed independence and an assertion of personal freedom by going out with American men, sometimes against their family’s wishes, their stories “end with marriage and dependence.”

Race played a huge role in war bride stories post-WWII and throughout the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Congressional policy actively limited brides from Asian countries, outright barring Japanese spouses for several years, while all interracial couples faced social discrimination and, occasionally, found that their marriages were not legal when they moved from one state to another.

Zeiger argues that the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam saw the “demise” of the war bride as a phenomenon considered and debated by the American public. The military did not provide transport to war brides the way they did in WWI and WWII, and it actively encouraged prostitution rather than marriage, extending its WWII policy of creating red-light districts where prostitutes were regularly examined by medical officials and given “safe” ratings to prevent the spread of venereal disease. Korean and Vietnamese wives were not written about widely in the American press and they have not written about their post-war experiences in America, the way war brides from earlier eras have done. They have been, Zeiger writes, “all but invisible in American culture.”

Demographic information suggests that these Asian war brides tend to be isolated, even in comparison to other Asian immigrants though they have sponsored family members to come to the U.S., unlike earlier war brides. Though Asian war brides were an untold story, there was a lot of media attention paid to the mixed-race children left behind in Vietnam and, sometimes airlifted out and brought to the U.S. Zeiger argues that the story of Amerasian children, and the efforts to bring them to the U.S. allowed Americans to re-conceptualize the war, seeing both Amerasian children and American soldiers as victims in the story. “The American nation becomes father and, also, paradoxically, child. Vietnam, the mother, the war bride, is not part of this reconciliation.”

Entangling Alliances is a compelling read, illuminating twentieth century social struggles encountered by men and women on both domestic and foreign soil over questions of gender, race, and nationality. Though Zeiger argues that the war bride phenomenon died out with the Korean and Vietnam wars, clearly, soldiers still took wives and fathered children with Korean and Vietnamese women. More recently, stories of male American soldiers marrying Iraqi women have been exploited in the media. Because Zeiger only covers the period from WWI up through the Vietnam War, she leaves a perplexing question unexplored: What has happened with female soldiers and local men in the conflicts that the U.S. has engaged in the last twenty years? Have female soldiers, like male soldiers, engaged in romantic and sexual conquests with non-U.S. citizens? I suspect their experience has been radically different than their male counterparts.

Written by: Jessica Powers, June 5th 2010

Act of God: Meditations on Lightning, Life and Chance

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:00:00 +0000

Directed by Jennifer Baichwal

Zeitgeist Films

What happens to a person whose life is touched by lightning? How does getting struck by lightning—or losing a loved one to lightning—change a person’s world view? Are such events random acts of nature or are certain people destined to be struck by lightning? Questions of fate, destiny, God’s will, and nature’s intention permeate Act of God: Meditations on Lightning, Life and Chance, a 2008 film directed by Jennifer Baichwal.

Baichwal says the idea behind the film was a simple question: how do people find meaning in randomness? Getting struck by lightning is the “quintessential example of the paradox of being singled out by randomness,” she says in an interview also included on the DVD. So what are different responses to that event? she wondered. “Is it possible to experience something so violent... and not ascribe meaning to it?”

The question, as it turns out, has a lot of different answers.

Getting struck by lightning feels like an act of destiny, intentional, speculates one of the film’s participants, a writer who feels he was forever changed by his close encounter with lightning when he was fourteen. Ultimately, though, he concludes that “there’s no meaning to this. It’s absolutely meaningless. And yet this is the way the world works.”

Every participant in the film has a different interpretation of what lightning means. One suggests that his fascination with lightning, his pursuit of it, allowed him to gain his soul. Another participant says that getting struck by lightning taught him what life was all about. He claims to have died, to have met some spiritual beings who showed him the shame of his past, but who reminded him that he has free will and he can change his life. “Lightning and change go hand in hand,” he says. “And in a single moment, I was changed.” One participant suggests that lightning and thunder indicate Shango’s anger (Shango is a Yoruba god, and likened to Santa Barbara in Santeria); the faithful must provide sacrifices to propitiate him, he suggests. Yet another of the film’s participants feels only grief about her children, who were killed as they knelt and prayed in front of a cross at the top of a mountain in Mexico. Finally, she decides that what God does is for the best. “The Lord doesn’t make mistakes,” she says.

The film’s premise is fascinating, the stories told compelling, and the speculations worth considering. It would have helped to have a narrator linking the scenes and meditations together, instead of a disembodied and disconnected voice occasionally providing some narration. I ached for more information on lightning itself, though Baichwal says that she deliberately avoided the physical and scientific aspects in order to focus on the metaphysical questions. Ultimately, the film feels fragmented and unfinished. But of course, this is another aspect of the film’s artistry. There are no answers to the metaphysical questions in this movie, only speculations. Is it possible to do anything but hypothesize about destiny, fate, nature’s intention, the will of God?

Written by: Jessica Powers, March 8th 2010

Ariel Gore on Women, Happiness, and Self-Determination

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:59:00 +0000

Interview with Ariel Gore

Ariel Gore’s new book Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness asks the question, “Can women be smart, empowered, and happy?” Here, Ariel Gore offers her ideas on happiness and advice for women seeking change in their lives.

In order to write this book, you kept a journal where you tracked the things in your life that made you happy, and you asked a lot of other women to do the same. How did these women respond to the request?

At first people were excited about it. Then a lot of them found some resistance to it. Women have a lot of resistance to focusing on their own happiness. We’ve been taught to make other people happy, after all. Most of the women started dealing with feelings of happiness being selfish, and wondering if the journal was hokey. But they had made a commitment to the project and soldiered on. Without fail, they broke through some of those resistances and found that the simple act of meditating on their own happiness allowed it to bloom a little bit. Allowing ourselves to say, “Hey, am I happy?” is powerful and emancipating, even if the process is a bit hokey.

What changes came from keeping the journal?

Some of the women who took part in the original project changed careers. Some increased the amount of time they were spending on whatever activities made them lose track of time: developing pictures in the dark room or surfing or having more sex. One woman made a huge change in her family structure. Other women didn’t make any outward life-changes, but those thirty days exploring happiness and seeing whether we can trace patterns from the scraps of our moods is a practice that’s designed to change us, even if those changes are subtle.

The pursuit of happiness is put forth as the ultimate purpose in life; however, there is also a belief that happy people are, well, sort of dumb. Why does this contradiction exists?

In American culture there has been a massive campaign to sell us all on cheerfulness. It has been an important part of capitalism and has been part of the oppression of women. Women have been endlessly told by others what we need in order to be happy. Maybe they say we need a husband or children or a fantastic career or a spotless kitchen or multiple orgasms. In any case, we are being told what is good for us. Of course we rebel against false cheerfulness and being told what to do when it's wrapped in the nonsense of it being “for our own good.” False happiness and denial-based cheeriness does feel dumb. We have the right to be grumpy! But that’s only fun for a while.

You mention some problems with the concept “you create your own reality,” but ultimately, suggest that is exactly what women must do to achieve happiness. How do you reconcile the contradiction?

Well, we don’t create reality. Women and poor people don’t create reality right now, but we have the freedom in every circumstance to decide how we’re going to react to our reality. As our personal power grows, we learn to influence reality so that we—and everyone—can be free, and happy.

Psychologist Martin Seligman is considered the father of contemporary positive psychology. He made a name for himself back in the late 1960s with a series of experiments on dogs that resulted in the theory of learned helplessness. These dogs were stuck in “shock boxes” and Seligman and his colleagues figured out that if the dogs were shocked at random, and given no control over their torture, they usually didn’t make a run for freedom when given the opportunity. Later, Seligman got to thinking about those rare dogs who, despite abuse and lack of control, kept resisting. There was a rare dog who was so resilient, so totally determined, that she couldn’t be broken. Positive psychology set out to find out, essentially, what that dog had.

If happiness is, in part, a choice based on freedom, what would you tell women who are enmeshed in situations they are powerless to change that cause them great unhappiness?

I think our choices are always limited to some extent. Canadian positive psychologist Dr. Paul T.P. Wong defines happiness as the ability to rejoice in the midst of suffering. Alice Walker has pointed out that resistance is the secret of joy. We make choices first to survive, to protect children and elders, and then to resist false power gained from fear and obedience. No matter what or how long it takes, we get them to open the shock box—or we get it open ourselves—and then we jump.

It is widely**** believed that something that makes you happy or fulfilled will make others happy as well. Why do we fall into this trap?

Because it has been relentlessly marketed to us! If you look at the history of advertising, you find this shift in the early part of the twentieth century—from warning ads that say you will have bad breath if you don’t use this mouthwash to the “product satisfaction ad” where advertisers try to convince us that their product will make us happy by making us more beautiful, more relaxed, richer, or whatever. Tolstoy famously said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But when I looked at women and happiness, I found the opposite to be true. While depression was fairly standardized, the things that made women happy in their lives were actually quite varied and unique.

As you studied happiness, you realized you wanted another baby and you wanted to make more money, so you made it happen. Did it make you happier?

Stepping out of the role of the martyr-mom by saying, "I want to do all of this, but I need reasonable funding," and then upping my rates for much of the work I do made me happy. Money by itself doesn’t affect my mood one way or the other, but the constant anxiety of not being able to pay the rent was really doing a number on me. I was raised by a Catholic priest who had taken a vow of poverty and in a counterculture community that taught me money was somehow bad, so it took a lot for me to be able to say, "All right, maybe this is the next level of empowerment. Maybe I need to be able to keep a roof over my head and have health insurance for my kids, and the thing is, I can do that without hurting my community."

What one thing do you suggest women do in order to find contentment?

Recording moments of happiness every day can be really powerful, even if—maybe especially if—really hard things are happening in your life. Keeping a happiness journal is about moving through the resistances, savoring moments of happiness even in the most difficult times, and prioritizing your own happiness. It’s not like our refusal to be happy makes us more loving and compassionate; it just makes us mean. Existential depression might seem cool and smart—like we’ve figured out what’s really going on—but in the long term, I don’t think it serves us.

Now that you aren’t experimenting with ways to bring yourself happiness, has your life returned to the status quo?

I have learned how to recognize when something is causing me anxiety, and I can switch gears pretty fast. I recently lost my maternal grandmother and my mother was diagnosed with stage-four cancer. In the span of one season, I went from feeling secure as a granddaughter and a daughter to facing the possibility of being the eldest generation in my family. I’ve had to take a deep breath and come to terms with not being a kid anymore. I cannot afford to waste the finite amount of time I have on this earth listening to anybody’s bullshit, and I can't afford to lock myself in the basement in existential depression.

Written by: Jessica Powers, January 19th 2010