labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
janeiro/ junho 2016 - janvier/juillet 2016
Aotearoa/New Zealand: Paradox and tensions for feminist transformations
Mandy Morgan
Guenevere Weatherley
Abstract
Feminist transformations in Aotearoa/New Zealand take shape and develop in historical and contemporary forms within the context of western colonisation. The relationships among Måori, Påkehå and Tauiwi (indigenous, colonial and settler) feminisms provide a significant background to our examination of the desire for change, and inform our discussion of the institutional structures that have resisted emerging challenges. We begin with an overview of Eurocentric cultural, political and social domination that weaves feminisms in our place with colonising tensions. We then present an apparent paradox regarding Aotearoa/New Zealand’s international standing with regard to women: The first nation among the European democracies to legislate the right for women, including Māori women, to vote and the worst of all OECD countries for intimate partner violence against women.
Key-words: Aotearoa/New Zealand, feminism, paradox
It is a truism to say that within the geo-political context of Aotearoa/New Zealand feminist modalities and the movements of social change with which they are interconnected take their shapes through histories of colonisation that insist on the specificity and temporality of our location. We would like to think so, since from our different positions, we struggle with the contemporary domination – potestas (Braidotti, 2002) - of Eurocentric and phallogocentric representations and valuations in relation to the intensities of ‘becoming woman’, women, womanism, differences, changes, feminisms, activism, movements; and we read resonances of our multiple resistances in the work of our feminist colleagues in their varied quests for pluralistic taxonomies of meaning and positive change. For instance, Naomi Simmonds puts it this way:
"Historically, our difference(s) has been defined for us [Māori, usually by non- Māori men but also by others, and has been defined predominantly in negative terms. That is, that Māori were/are different, and therefore somehow lacking, because they were/are ‘not white’. The search for the tools to make sense of my lived and embodied reality, as a young Māori woman/mother/daughter/ academic of both Raukawa and Pakehā descent, is on-going". (2011: 11)
And from a different position, Nicola Gavey says:
[…]writing as a PåkehāNew Zealander, living in New Zealand, for[…]… an international English-speaking readership, it is in many ways inherently awkward attempting to locate my cultural bearings. If I were to restrict my analyses to “Påkehā New Zealand” culture (as if this was monolithic, in any case), it would suggest I have taken careful account of the unique cultural specificities of this group, and the social and economic circumstances in which they live […]However, I’m neither paying such close attention to the precise social conditions for one particular population group in this specific geographical location, nor am I eschewing the insights and information from research…in several other countries[…] ... This leaves me with the admittedly problematic need to refer to a generic “our culture,” which is unsatisfyingly vague for someone working in traditions that disdain false universalizing in research and prefer instead analyses rooted in the local and the particular (2005 : 4).
Perpetual searching, ever-present problematics, contradictory caveats on how we articulate our positions sound familiar to us and inhabit our understandings of feminisms’ multiple, ambiguous and contestable transformations of our socio-political location. Both scholars enunciate the difficulties of moving beyond the dominant perspectives, discourses and power relations of ‘white, masculine, adult, heterosexual, urban-dwelling, property-owning subjects’ (Braidotti, 2011).
Rejecting these immiserations, we agree on the need to think differently about women’s status as ‘other’ to men’s subjecthood: not as Hegelian negativity, not as ¬A – nor B – to a masculine A, not as constructing ‘a world parallel to the masculine world’ (Irigaray, 2002a:113) struggling ‘not towards a reversal of power’ (2002a: 15) but rather, exploring subversive flows of practical action and creative theoretical flights away from patriarchal hegemonic subjection and towards alternatively constituted and changing subjectivities.
Accordingly, we seek to explore dimensions that encourage cross-overs and mixités of Apollonian structures and Dionysian styles, developing dialogues both affective and subjective,“[…] in which the elements remain two – speaking oneself and to the other and listening to oneself and the other’ (Irigaray, 2002b: 82) simultaneously avoiding ideological attunements that rely on contemporary ‘moods’, which ‘even if [they] penetrated into the innermost core of the being of something objectively present, would never be able to discover anything like what is threatening’ (Heidegger, 1996: 130). From our different commitments and interests in becoming feminist through engaging with each other from our shared, though uncommon investment in rhizomatic and nomadic theories of political subjectivities, we assume:
- Feminist transformations is an ambiguous term that intentionally puts into question the possibilities of singularity or continuity for feminist discourses and their activisms in the work of transforming gendered social power relations. There is movement between and among both terms and on all sides, so there is no moment at which we could hold still either feminisms or transformations of gendered social power relations to say, for instance, we have achieved this or that, one or other change attributable to feminisms. Nonetheless, feminisms encounter resistances to challenges they offer for change.
- Neither of us is particularly committed to the kind of identity politics that assumes to fix us in place through re-essentialised intersecting categories of colonially inspired personhood: race, class, ethnicity, sex, gender, ability, age, sexuality and so on. Yet, our resistance to such fixity is not to say that we do not care for the intersecting privileges and deficits that the history of colonialism and its legacy of eurocentrism have scarred into the processes through which we are becoming feminists in struggles for change.
- Conscious of the paradox of proselytising resistance to authoritarianism and privilege from a privileged and hierarchical authoritative position within an institution that grants the freedom to engage with these issues, we need to be aware of the requirement to ‘walk the talk’ and engage in our community on significant matters. Accordingly, we argue for a resistance we call ‘crack politics’ (after Holloway, 2010): a vivifying of the moments of interstitial tension, of rents and gashes, of fragile instabilities and accelerating fractures and fissures where gaps between contradictions prise open forcelines, provoking genuine lines of flight, connecting to other cracks and forming radial patterns of radical potentialities against and beyond existing dominations. Through these cracks and against the excessive liquidity of capital and exchange, flow counter-currents of differential connectivities, sometimes as tricklets, now and then rising as surges to block channels and spill over the surrounding regions. Cracks enjoin us to tread warily, to be alert to ruptures and shifting terrains, to recognise the vulnerability and temporality of power, to understand that monolithic paradigms might be broken through, and to blaze new passages.
The body of our discussion addresses the way in which the apparent paradox of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s international standing with regard to women is entangled with transformative possibilities – Braidotti’s potentia (2002: 21) - and at the same time curbs and limits aspirations of egalitarianism and isonomy in our post-colonial context. Of course, in a brief discussion, much of what could be said about feminist transformations in our place will be elided. We focus our discussion on specific, though still partial examples: women’s legal rights, public status and safety. We are asking: Can our analyses open up principles of coordinated values that can be translated into and are genuinely directed to real progress manifesting in becomings for new identities and transforming relationships?
To set our scene
Aotearoa/New Zealand is an island nation nestled in the South Pacific. Geologically young and volatile, the two main islands (north and south) are picturesque and increasingly popular international tourist destinations. Primarily an agricultural country in the past 200 years, New Zealand has an image as ‘clean, green and peaceful’: an image consistent with an anti-nuclear policy that has been in operation since the 1980s. Yet, there are serious issues of environmental degradation and social inequities that belie the image often promoted internationally.
Environmental degradation has been the focus of community based restoration projects since the mid-1970s, yet raising broader public awareness of the long-term consequences of deforestation, wetland loss, poor water quality and declining biodiversity has taken decades to achieve. There are now more than 600 community-based organisations involved in environmental restoration projects across Aotearoa/New Zealand, undertaking work in voluntary capacities. Many are small in number, limited in resources and experiencing increasing demands from formal agencies to contribute even more to restoration (Peters, Hamilton, & Eames, 2015). At the same time, there are continuing environmental threats. For example, agricultural practices such as dairy farming intensification are increasing degradation of water and soil while also contributing to greenhouse gas emissions (Foote, Joy & Death, 2015).
Social inequities are markedly connected to relationships between ethnic and cultural communities in Aotearoa. There are disparities in the distribution of our small population between urban and rural locations. Of a population of around four and a half million people, 15% are Māori, indigenous to Aoteaora and 63% are Pākehā. Almost a quarter of the total population, over a million people live in one city: Auckland.
We experience a particular version of superdiversity, a newly named phenomenon which references contemporary ethnicity and immigration patterns. Our most populous city comprises more than 50% immigrant communities (including children born to immigrants). Contemporary migrants are predominantly from Britain, China and India.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s migrants were predominantly from other Pacific Islands (for example, Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga) and by the 1990s the population of Pacific communities, especially in Auckland, meant that New Zealand born children of Pacific Island decent were outnumbering those born in the Islands (Spoonley, 2015). While overall statistics would indicate that our peoples are relatively wealthy, the gap between rich and poor is widening with around half the total wealth of households in the nation owned by 10% of the population at the end of June, 2015. 40% of households comprised the least wealthy, owning only 3% of the nation’s total wealth.
The median income of European households is nearly 500% higher than the median income for Māori households and 350% higher than Asian households. The median for Pacific Island households is around 10% of the median for European households and almost half the median for Māori households (New Zealand Statistics, 2016). Our contemporary superdiversity does not speak to a social fabric woven of respect and equity within diversity.
An historical orientation to tensions
We are acutely tuned to the impossibility of recounting our historical context in a linear order that begins with the arrival of the great waka (ocean going canoe) bringing Polynesian ancestors to establish themselves and their descendants as the indigenous people of Aotearoa. The massive disruptions, genocide and theft that characterised 19th Century colonisation by the British crown, establish our place as specifically postcolonial; unlike those postcolonial nations where government is not controlled by the descendants of colonisers (Moreton-Robinson, 2003).
Here, as in Australia and Canada, colonial settlement is ingrained in law, governance and Eurocentric norms of everyday life, regardless of the Te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi, signed to formalise partnership between tangata whenua (people of the land) and the British Crown in the development of a new nation (Coombes & Morgan, 2015). Colonisation is not a historical event, but rather an ongoing movement that infiltrates social power relations among feminists in Aotearoa, and refracts narrations of our past through imperialism so that “Māori never quite escape [the colonial] ethnographic textual gaze to become fully human” (Tamanui, 2012: 34). Even the term ‘Māori’ is an artefact of colonisation (Dominy, 1990); homogenising diverse iwi, hāpu and whānau (kinship groups) into a seemingly unified indigenous people. We are mindful of Eurocentric dominance then and now, as we write towards our particular and partial understanding of the feminist contributions of wahine Māori (indigenous women) and other women to the transformations of our socio-political landscape, particularly in the last 50 years.
"A crack appears as we begin our account of the problematic and complex relationships that mark colonialism in our place is that New Zealand (without the signifier ‘Aotearoa’) with the historical status of being the first nation to grant women legal rights. This historical status is often heralded as characterising a nation with egalitarianism and a social conscience embedded relatively early in its formation, yet such an announcement no memory of the violations that were simultaneously perpetrated on indigenous women. I am re-imagining the deficits of my tau iwi womanhood from another perspective, thinking with wahine Māori visions of the deficits of my whakapapa (genealogy); the impossibility for me to connect to my ancestors. I have no stories of their colonial settlement of lands belonging to other peoples; no understanding of who’s land they stole or whether their acts where heroic or treacherous (Morgan, 2013). Wrapped in comfortable white skin, standing in the centres of normal post-colonial subjectivities, choosing movements, margins, I hesitate to speak in the vernacular of middle-whiteness while imagining a vast missing-ness in the depth of the deficit you enable me to see. In this space appear intersectional questions of races, sexualities, classes, ethnicities, abilities, ages, generations. As they shift and move, entwine and disperse, they turn out to be “the compass points of colonisation” (Morgan, 2014:25).
And I am thinking with a passage of Irigaray’s:
"The human spirit needs to be able to gather together, to unify in order to become while remaining itself[…] The one is then carried from the individual to the relation between two[…[ Sexual difference can bring us there and, thanks to it, diverse sorts or forms of others may be approached without renouncing or becoming of one’s own"(Irigaray, 2002a: 17).
In relation to negotiating whiteness, there is always another question opening in the spirit of land.
Crucially we acknowledge relationships with the land that that signify incommensurable differences characteristic of indigenous, colonial and settler peoples (Moreton-Robinson 2003). In the wake of colonial dispossession, wahine Māori activism is infused with a vital theme of ontological connection with land, with place as home that is continuous with genealogical connectedness to living, ancestral communities of spiritual belonging (Connor, 2007; Nikora, Te Awekotuku & Tamanui, 2013). In te Reo Māori (indigenous language) whenua means both placenta and land, connecting women’s specificity and place. The importance of women in te ao Māori (the Māori world) is also embedded in the concept of hapu which means both pregnant and sub-tribal kinship group. Women are referenced “whare tangata (the house of humanity)” (Mikaere, 1999:24).
For the British at the time of colonial settlement in the 1840s, references to women were ideologically committed to the language of inferiority. 19th Century British ideals of womanhood imagined women as perfectly suited to creating nurturing warmth at the hearth and in the homes that they tended in service to their fathers, husbands, sons and brothers. Alternatively, they might be construed as characteristically capable of refinement and moral sensibility, thus set to service on ‘civilising’ missions. Both ideals may have been far from the lived experiences of women’s lives, even those who were markedly held to standards of middle class moral respectability (Porter, Macdonald & MacDonald, 1996).
In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the early years of colonial settlement saw few women arrive as members of settling families, though in some cases those families brought with them young single women as servants. By far the majority of British colonials were men, despite a clear injunction from the mastermind of the New Zealand Company, Edward Gibbon Wakefield that the colony’s success depended on both women and men taking the long passage to new opportunities.
From the 1850s, however, increasing numbers of single women were recruited as “assisted migrants” to fill labour shortages and provide the means for British colonisers to establish British families. Among these women were the earliest recorded feminist activists for legislative change to improve the social status and conditions in which British women lived in the colony. They focused initially on repealing married women’s property law since women's economic independence was more broadly their major focus. They established Emigration Societies to promote migration for middle class women who were competing for employment as subservient, poorly paid governesses in Britain, believing that the colonial enterprise would open up entirely new opportunities for educated women (Macdonald, 2015).
The successes of early colonial feminist activism are no doubt most familiar in relation to women's suffrage, with New Zealand legislation granting women's right to vote in 1893: The first British colonial nation to admit women's democratic equality with men. Alongside this 'first', New Zealand was also the first of the British colonies to elect a woman mayor. Aside from political achievements focused on political governance, early colonial feminists successfully established various community organisations aiming to improve the conditions of women and children in the colony. Grass roots activism in the late 1800s enabled women to readily organise participation in major political parties as they emerged in the early 1900s (Curtin, 2015).
"As a tear in the successes of early feminist activism with legislative change and community service organisation, we catch a glimpse of the significance of educated women for the colonial enterprise. Looking back, from within our postcolonial context, tensions among indigenous and colonial women seem to manifest in accounts of women’s education. While educated British women were offered new opportunities for economic independence and political engagement in the new colony, education through colonial systems of ‘native’ schooling served an entirely different purpose for wahine Måori.
In the early 1800s mission schools were established as a mechanism for educating Māori towards Christianity, and by the mid-1800s the state had entered into the practices of schooling as a means of assimilating Māori into dominant British culture. Māori schooling became fully state controlled in the 1860s, and Māori language, values and practices were actively suppressed.
For wahine Māori the British colonial goal was to engage girls as agents of change from within whanau when they returned from their schooling, successfully acculturated into newly established Påkehå dominated normalities and social hierarchies. Far from the whare tangata of their status within te ao Māori, schooled acculturation aimed for wahine Māori to become ‘angels of the house’: domestically constrained and socialised to the subservient status that educated colonial women were simultaneously organising to resist and subvert. The Pākehā ideology of women’s inferiority intersected, too, with a class system that was also a hierarchy of ‘races.Educated British women were teaching in the ‘native’ schools so earnestly intent on creating a new class of domestic labourers.”
From our perspective, here and now, it seems that British women involved in colonial settlement were already actively participating in the political domain, even before they secured the right to democrat representation, took on leadership in public office or engaged in community organisation for the welfare of women and children. So, by the end of the 19th Century, given their active involvement in establishing the colony, tensions among women in Aotearoa/New Zealand are already well formed.
Paradox, Part 1: Postcolonial egalitarianism and isonomy
Our brief historical orientation sets the scene for us to elaborate the first part of the paradox of our place. In relation to locating ourselves within a context we are calling ‘postcolonial’, we mean to acknowledge not only processes of colonisation that continue through Eurocentric cultural and social dominance, but also that in our particular place government has not been ‘returned’ to the indigenous people as it has in some other previous British colonies such as Malaysia or India, (Coombes and Morgan, 2015). Tino rangatiratanga (Māori Sovereignty) remains unrecognised by formal Government practices which remain continuous with colonial dominance. We accept first that any notion of postcolonial egalitarianism under the law is already undermined.
There is also some evident continuity in feminist activism for women’s equal rights under the law between what is often now referred to as the first and second wave feminist movements. The suffragettes of the mid-19th to early 20th century may not have covered off all issues of women’s equalitarian participation in political and social life, and the Women’s Liberation Movement of the mid-20th Century may have picked up on unsolved, unresolved matters of inequality between (predominantly white) women and men, but in the meantime feminist activists were involved in organising, for instance, the Working Women’s Movement, the Family Planning Association, the Council for Equal Pay and Opportunity, and the New Zealand Association of Child Care Centres.
These were organisations primarily concerned with inequalities consequent on the division between public and private domains, through which women’s work was ideologically domestic and less valuable than men’s. Thus, different conditions for working women, lower wages, and restricted access to employment could be justified and women’s subjugation to Church and State control of reproduction alongside social expectations of intensive mothering could be normalised.
This division and these issues remained on the agenda for the Women’s Liberation Movement, which was distinctively like the Suffragette Movement not simply on the basis egalitarian concerns that women in New Zealand were organising to address throughout the 20th Century, but more in relation to characteristic militancy. In its earliest organisations, the Women’s Liberation Movement in New Zealand prioritised equal political and economic rights with men and transformation of women’s social roles (Dan, 2015). Sexual exploitation and social segregation soon joined the priorities of the movement.
- Fissures appear as this story is forming too coherently, even as a story of a predominantly White Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). As the WLM formed in the early 1970s so did tensions among women activists at the time. I have been reading Christine Dann’s account of the history of women’s activism in the 1970s and 1980s and she distinguishes the interest of some women in liberation and others in women’s rights in those early years. Sides are taken. Different organisations are formed. I am remembering that at first the gender wars were not the name for conflicts between feminist women and anti-feminist men, but for the divisions among and within women that the challenges to and struggles against women’s ideological and social inferiority provoked for us (Williams, 1991). As I am struggling with the coherence of the story in remembrance of the divisions within and among women that became so pronounced in the wake of second wave feminism, I take comfort from remembering how multiple agendas amongst feminists that are neither coherent nor without contradiction, open potentials for multiple resistances, cracks and fractures for lines of flight.
There’s little question that the movement for women’s equal rights, in Aoteaora/New Zealand, proved successful in initiating legislative change intended to benefit women’s wellbeing. Women’s workforce participation and public leadership have been a major focus of change since the rise of the equal rights movement. In terms of equal participation in the workforce, for instance, women in the public sector have had legislated rights to equal pay for equal work since 1960, and in the private sector since 1972.
Women’s participation in paid employment has been the largest change in the New Zealand workforce, as indicated by the number of paid hours worked by women up until the end of the 20th Century (Rasmussen, Hunt & Lamm, 2006). Women’s workforce participation had reached almost 60% compared to men’s participation of 73% when the first census of women’s participation was undertaken in 2004 (Olsen & McGregor, 2004).
In relation to public leadership, by the early 1990s women’s representation in Parliamentary government had reached 21% (Curtin, 2015) and 25% in local government (Ministry for Women, 2016). A decade or so later, women represented 35% of Crown owed company directorships. At that time, the private sector lagged behind with women’s representation in leadership: Only 5% of company directors and 14% of legal partners were women (Olsen & McGregor, 2004).
Changes in the domestic life for women travelled alongside greater participation in the workforce, though they were not always directly connected transformations. Obviously, workforce participation led to fewer women caring for children in the private domain of their homes, while women were increasingly in paid employment as child care workers. However, mothers caring for children at home, on their own, have had access to a state paid benefit since 1973. The goal of the benefit, for ‘domestic purposes’, was to ensure that mothers were not financially dependent on fathers and would not need to leave their children in circumstances were intimate partner violence meant that they could not remain in a relationship with their husband (Fightback, 2016). Women who were abandoned by their husbands, or whose husbands passed away while there were still dependent children at home were also entitled to the benefit. In addition to state provided financial support to care for children, women in Aotearoa/New Zealand also had greater access to contraception and abortion as they did in other commonwealth countries around the same time (Shirley, Koopman-Boyden, Pool & St. John, 1997).
Of course, it is also arguable that the forces converging to produce legislative and social policy changes intended to eliminate inequities between women and men in the labour force and public life, were not solely the outcome of women’s activism in the second wave feminist movement but also driven by globalisation and changes in capitalist economics (see for example, Kahu & Morgan, 2007). Even the more domestic changes in women’s responsibilities for family life that were so substantial in the latter part of the 20th Century were part of broader, global movements for human rights that included women’s productive and reproductive rights.
At the end of the 1990s the Labour government emphasised greater participation of women in the workforce by introducing paid parental leave and subsidised childcare, including care of school aged children outside school hours (Rasmussen, Hunt & Lamm, 2006). Yet, despite the policies and their economic rationales, women’s participation has not been matched by women’s equal pay, and many women remain in low-paid, part-time employment, in sectors where pay equality with men is highly unlikely because of the gender segregation of many areas of paid employment, including care-giving (McGregor, 2013).While equal pay has been legislated for decades, pay equity is has been slow to improve. In addition, recent changes in government and economic conditions have coincided with slower improvements in women’s leadership in the private economic sector (McGregor, 2012), limited increases in minimum wages, welfare changes that require women to seek employment as a condition of receiving funded government benefits when they are sole parents (Rassmussen & Lind, 2013) and increasing poverty of particular concern in relation to children (Dale, O’Brien, Mike & St John, 2014).
Clearly, there are questions concerning the successes of equal rights legislation, as well as issues that are elided by a focus on equal rights, although they were central concerns for the women’s liberation movement, such as the end of discrimination against lesbian women, the anti-pornography movement and activism to end women’s and girls’ sexual exploitation.
Equal rights under the law, isonomy, has rarely succeeded in symbolically shifting social expectations of sexual difference and women’s responsibilities and obligations. Even the recent legislative changes in Aotearoa/New Zealand, which saw the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBT) community achieve ‘marriage equality’ with cissexual couples (Ministry of Women, 2016), has granted a possibility for those marginalised by mainstream norms to participate in the same rituals, legal and social ties of coupledom without challenging the normalities of cissexual dominance.
Differences
Coinciding with the rise of what we now term second wave feminism were strong critiques from Māori women of the western feminist priority on gender as a “primary and universal site of oppression (Connor, 2007:70).
Here, as elsewhere, the second wave feminist movement which seems to combine both egalitarian feminist activism equal rights and activism for women’s freedom from patriarchal, heterosexual social dominance, brought critiques of the movements’ white dominance.
In the early 1980s Donna Awatere published a report on the first Black Women’s Hui (meeting) which brought together women from five main groups, two from Auckland (the Auckland Black Women’s Group and the Otara Black Women’s Group), Nga Tuahine, a black feminist collective from Wellington, and Black Dykes.
Awatere (1981) says that the impetus for the hui had been gathering for many years, as wahine Māori and Pasifika women became increasingly conscious of the sexism implicated in the anti-racist movement. Here, though, it is clear that Black women with passionate commitments to women’s freedom, and especially to wahine Māori sovereignty, had experienced the Women’s Liberation Movement as racist.
Intersections of race and sex were particular, and specific in their marginalisation of women of colour from both anti-racist and second wave feminist movements. Acknowledging the critical importance of women of colour internationally in feminist leadership, the hui marked a particular moment when Black Women organising together in Aotearoa/New Zealand became tangible and sparked a movement towards specific forms of analysis and activism (Awatere, 1981).
Much of the history of colonisation has recently taken the form of accounting for wide-ranging disproportionate representation of wahine Måori within prevalence of social issues such as: adolescent pregnancy, poverty, welfare dependence, education outcomes, imprisonment, and intimate victimisation (see for example: Molloy & Potter, 2014; Gordon, 2015; Wilson, Jackson & Herd, 2016). Such accounts often problematize wahine Māori lives within a to-and-fro movement between dominant neoliberal individualism that emphasises the importance of changing Māori women’s lifestyles by improving education, employment and health ‘behaviours’, and counter narratives of colonial dispossession that call attention to the effects of historical trauma, ongoing racism and women’s subjugation to alienating social and legal systems. While there are crucial threads of argument related to (specifically wahine ) tino rangatiratanga in the counter narratives of resistance to colonisation’s ongoing harms in wahine Māori lives, we are mindful that they may obfuscate the multiplicity of Måori women’s experiences. As Helene Connor explains, diversity is ever present through:
[…] [d]ifferences in iwi and hapu, socialisation in a variety of whunau contexts and geographic locations, sexuality, political affiliations, religious and spiritual beliefs, educational experiences, knowledge of te reo Måori and ngå tikanga Måori and so on (2007: 60-61).
In relation to the dominant neoliberal individualism that infuses so many mainstream accounts of the wellbeing of Māori women, we are also mindful that the normative ‘baselines’ for measuring and accounting for women’s welling in Aotearoa/New Zealand are thoroughly Eurocentric.
This is not to say that we are unconcerned about the picture that these measures present, especially as they relate to the on-going violation of wahine Māori human rights. However, they elide the understandings of health and wellbeing that have historically connected indigenous women, established and maintained their strength, political influence, and self-determined conceptualisations of mana wahine.
- A crack appears wherever resistance, refusal and rebellion occur. These may be delivered as silence, a quiet Bartlebyan passivity or a simple ‘No’. They may be expressed in seemingly insignificant ways such as a declared preference for participating in non-monetised pursuits, as community engagement or family play. They may show themselves as simple denials of the commodification of leisure activities. They celebrate relationships among people and between people and nature. As such, these departures invoke a break, a resistance from our lived experience that becomes a positive negation of the fetishism of contemporary life relations and sparks a comprehension of creative practice in work, work being understood as that which produces subjectivity between people, rather than being merely the reactive dead hand of dualism. Value is then seen not as a form of domination by one group over another, but as a form of struggle, empowerment and ultimately sharing.
- One such conceptualisation occurred in my village of Raglan, a town of some 4000 on the West Coast of the North Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand. The government in World War I seized urupå (burial grounds) and other sacred land from the Tainui Awhiro people in order to build an air base and bunker. After the war in 1928, the Public Works Act codified the government’s justification for keeping the land. The tribal people were evicted and obliged to rebuild their community nearby. The government duly sold the land to the Raglan Golf Course without consulting with tangata whenua. Spanning 63 acres, the golf course razed homes and graves. Subsequently, the government offered to purchase the land, but iwi rejected the bid because the government had not offered to restore the land to its original owners.
In 1972, a new plan to destroy further burial grounds in order to extend the golf course sparked a local kuia, Eva Rickard’s, campaign to restore land rights to the Tainui Awhiro people. Rickard wrote letters and petitions to the Raglan County Council, the Raglan Golf Course and the Minister of Måori Affairs, conducted research and organised working parties, all the time building momentum in the Måori community. In 1975, a Land March involving five thousand people marched from the far North to Wellington to deliver Prime Minister Bill Rowling a ‘Memorial of Rights’, stating Måori claims to this and other ‘native’ land. The petition had 60 000 signatures, including those of 200 tribal elders.
Shortly after this, Parliament signed the Waitangi Tribunal, granting Måori claims an official process of consideration through government channels. Meanwhile, between 1975 and 1978, Eva Rickard led several protests and occupations at the Raglan Golf Course. Assertions were made that should the land be restored to customary ownership, then the land would revert to gorse; i.e. ‘non-productive use’. The largest protest was on the 12 February 1978, where 250 members of the Tainui Awhiro tribe and their supporters focused on the desecration of sacred urupå as the main violation of their rights. Tribal elders held a religious service to sanctify the work of the protesters.
The tribes people arrived at the golf course at nine in the morning of that day, preventing patrons from playing. At noon, twelve tohunga, traditional religious leaders, arrived to hold a ceremony and when police approached, they linked arms with other protesters and sang. They also danced a traditional haka of welcome. The arrests began.
Over that year and the next, support for Måori land rights grew throughout New Zealand. On 25 May 1978, inspired by Eva Rickard’s stand, a group of protesters initiated an occupation of Bastion Point in Auckland which lasted 507 days. Måori continued their civil disobedience, followed by arrests and court cases. Finally, in 1983, the government returned the Raglan Golf Course to the hapu. It is now the site of a child care centre, among other facilities, open to everyone living in the Raglan district.
Social justice for Måori throughout Aotearoa/New Zealand remains a ‘struggle without end’ (Walker, 2004). Seemingly small gains were made while those in power continued to promote market forces to the devastation of children, whanau, community and the environment. Nevertheless, by occupying the golf course and resisting the enclosure, Eva Rickard constructed a commons, a line of flight running in the opposite direction to the patterns of the prevailing regime, which precipitated both the spatial liberation of an autonomous community area and also engendered a temporal crack, where people came together in a release of social energy via hui, demonstrations, marches and celebratory events to provide an alternative vision of the world, amongst others the occupation of Rugby Park in Hamilton to protest against apartheid South Africa.
Often at their inception, such advances are not seen as leading to significant or permanent change, but Eva’s activism pointed to and inspired a yet incomplete future, one which continues to defy not just economic and physical restrictions but also the cultural and social conditions that enable and valorise customary patriarchal and capitalist domination. Often too, carnivalesque intensities coterminous with irruptions of resistance provoke heightened experiences of aliveness as well as invitations to nomadic movement between temporary zones of freedom and future lines of continuous development.
Often elided in much of the contemporary discourse on feminism and postfeminism in Aotearoa/New Zealand, are complex, subtle and vital activities of leadership among wahine Māori. Pākehā women’s leadership is usually understood as a measure of the successes of equal rights campaigning and conceptualised in terms of women holding positions in the public domains of traditionally male-dominated political and economic influence, as reported by the New Zealand Government to the United Nations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (see for example, Ministry for Women, 2016). Meanwhile, the specific forms of leadership practiced by wahine Māori have largely been absent, even from academic inquiry (Forster, Palmer & Barnett, 2015).
Addressing the more widespread silence on wahine Māori leadership, Forster, Palmer & Barnett (2015) have begun to transform understandings by refocusing attention from the characteristically mainstream approaches to knowledge of leadership, to the specificities of wahine Māori lives. Adopting a methodology of purakau: storytelling that involves “philosophical thought, epistemological constructs, cultural codes, and worldviews’ (p.3) drawn from te ao Māori, they tell specific stories of wahine Māori leadership in environmental and science policy, employment rights and women’s sport. Each story is different and collectively they speak to multiple, diverse, “alternative and fluid ways of embodying, performing, and contextualising leadership” (p.18).
Openings were enabling new paths for educated colonial women when we left off writing about education and colonial women. They were becoming key conspirators with a focused re-education of Måori girls as transformative agents in the service of acculturation to British dominance. A tense relationship, looking back from here.
But by the 1980s the situation is quite different (in some ways). Evidence has accumulated that the project of Pākehā dominant education, even though by the 1970s it incorporates bicultural curriculum termed a taha Māori (side/character/ heritage) approach, is reproducing rather than alleviating social disadvantages: poor achievement outcomes, unemployment, higher imprisonment, poor health and political alienation (Middleton, 1992). A strong Māāori Political Movement emerges (Tamanaui, 2012), sometimes problematically referenced as a reclamation of te ao Māori (Hoskins, 2000). Establishing Måori educational practices, processes and institutions aimed to revitalise te reo Māori andincorporate a holistic approach to education that was based on Māori kaupapa (policy/purpose/ programme) is crucial to the movement. Wahine Måāori are at the forefront of initiatives (Smith, 1993).
The Kohanga Reo (language nests) Movement instituted the first Måori educational foundation, te reo immersion pre-school. Rapidly following was the establishment of Kura Kaupapa Māori total te reo immersion primary schools in the mid-1980s and Whare-Kura, secondary schools, by the late 1990s. Tertiary educational institutions, Whare Wånanga, were also established during the 1980s and 1990s (Reedy, 2000).
"Much of the vision and energy for these initiatives has come from Måori women who continue to play a vital role in the teaching, the administration and the fund-raising necessary to maintain the schools. Måori women are reconstructing their knowledge of their place within New Zealand society – a knowledge over which they now have the control (Jenkins & Mathews, 1998, p. 102)."
Although by the turn to the 21st Century, Måori have established all levels of educational institutions from pre-school to tertiary, it has not been without struggle (Pihama, Cram, & Walker, 2002) conflict and even public vilification “[1].
The last twenty five years has seen increasing development of the concept of mana wahine as a form of feminist discourse, as a theoretical approach to conceptualising the intersection of ‘being’ Māori and ‘being woman’ in our postcolonial context, and as a standpoint and methodology for researching wahine Māori experiences (Simmonds, 2011). The scope of mana wahine work is extensive from wahine Māori leadership (Forster, Palmer & Barnett (2015) to biography (Connor, 2007; Matthews & Mane-Wheoki, 2014), education (Ritchie, Skerrett & Rau, 2014), politics (Simmonds, 2011), geography (Fisher, 2015) and creative arts (Te Awekotuku, 1991), at least.
At the same time, there has been increasing commitment to intersectionality amongst Pākehā academic feminists, “mindful of criticisms from Māori , lesbians, people with disabilities and people occupying lower socio-economic positions, that gender should not always been the overriding analytical category” (Longhurst & Johnson, 2015, p. 27).
At least, intersectionality enables attention to the dis-unification of the category ‘woman’ (see for example, McDonald, 2014) and specific attention to the experiences of women from diaspora communities (see for example, Kohli, 2015). Yet, intersectionality is not without its discontents (Salem, 2016), increasingly critiqued for complicity with white women’s dominance in feminism, ‘containment’ of mobile gendered subjectivities within identity categories (Calás, Ou & Smircich, 2013), and linked to a retreat from collectivism to neoliberally complicit individualism among younger ‘fourth wave’ feminists (Schuster, 2016).
Moving beyond intersectionality in Aotearoa/New Zealand has increasingly become a talking point for academics (see for example, Nakhid et al., 2015). In our postcolonial conditions there are still incommensurate relations with land and spirit, social hierarchy, normalities and visibilities that demarcate the networks of space and place accessible to women in Aotearoa/New Zealand. There is still an impetus for separate organisation to address the intersectional consequences of our historical and contemporary dispossessions; alongside partnerships that honour our different strengths, needs and priorities.
There are still, no doubt, some of the same old problems with egalitarian feminist struggles for isonomy that we understand through Khader’s (2008) reading of Irigaray: the construction of ‘women’s equality’ privileges the masculine and reproduces the very symbolic repertoires that comprise patriarchal dominance. Here and now though, intersectional, postcolonial tensions traverse our sense of the way that women’s rights, under the law, are mitigated successes of feminist activism over the past 150 years.
We are familiar with the failure of symbolic and substantive transformations of gendered power relations expected to follow isonomy (Curtin, 2015); with impasses, backlashes, uneven movement and paradox.We are familiar too, with the considerable concern, if not dismay, at the ways in which egalitarianism seems to have consumed feminism to such an extent that for some, postfeminism means the period following feminist excesses of activism that are no longer useful, or justified, since women’s equal rights under the law are attained.
And yet, there is a fissure in the failure of isonomy, opening towards pathways of educational successes for women and girls. The most recent New Zealand report for the United Nations CEDAW (Ministry for Women, 2015) explains that women’s participation in tertiary education continues at higher rates than men. As it happens, in this year, the highest tertiary education participation rates are for Maori women (17.3%) with Pacific women’s participation rates (13.4%) higher than those for European women (11.2%) (Ministry for Women, 2015). A rather more long standing trend, that continues, is the higher achievement of young women than young men at secondary school. Yet this perhaps stands also as one clear example of the ways in which egalitarianism, in the sense that we’re using it, fails even in success.
“In Aotearoa as in other OECD countries where women’s successes in education are exceeding those of men, the education sector has emerged a discourse of crisis and loss for boys and men. It is an oppositional discourse, where apparently the women’s successes are producing disadvantages for men. A backlash against feminism, which is targeted as the reason for women’s success emerges, nurtured by anxieties about the way in which feminism has and is transforming gendered social power relations. Here, there is a notable identified feminist figure who actively participated in the crisis and loss discourse by publically addressing how women’s activism for liberty seems to have damaged social understandings of men and manhood”(Nairn & Wyn, 2014).
Of course, women’s educational successes are not
the only site at which feminist activism faces a backlash.
Paradox, Part 2: Violence against women in Aotearoa/New Zealand
The problematics of egalitarianism that we have unravelled so far travel within a social context where the status of Aotearoa/New Zealand as the first British colonial nation to grant women’s suffrage, a status entirely framed by isonomy, clearly depends on honouring women’s human rights. However, questionable the achievement of women’s liberties in the wake of second wave feminism, New Zealand’s standing as the worst OECD country for contemporary violence against women, especially sexual violence (Family Violence Death Review Committee, 2014), is a longstanding human rights issue for women in Aotearoa. Violences perpetrated against women and children are so widespread, so serious that they have been called epidemic (Herbert and Mackenzie (2014); and this despite decades of feminist activism.
Prior to the 1970s intimate partner violence against women, including rape in marriage[2], was largely regarded as a ‘private’ matter. Much as was the case with incest (see Morgan, Coombes, Western & Weatherley, 2011), feminist activism brought women’s victimisation in their homes to public attention. From the second wave feminist movement, women’s refuges and rape crisis centres were established in the late 1970s (Hann, 2001) with goals of providing emergency accommodation, individual advocacy for women, and systems advocacy to change institutional responses to women who were victimised. Advocacy and lobbying for legal and policy reform led to numerous changes throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (court project), including the adoption of ‘parallel development’ policy and practice for Māori and Tauiwi/Pākehā within the National Collective of Independent Women’s Refuges (Sudderth, 2016).
The Domestic Protection Act introduced in 1992 enabled police to intervene in what had previously been regarded as a ‘domestic dispute’, introducing the first sanction of legal protection for women victimised by their intimate partners. The National Collective of Independent Women’s Refuges began collaborating with New Zealand Police to develop coordinated responses to domestic violence, leading to the introduction of approaches based on the Duluth Abuse Intervention Project.
By the mid-1990s the Domestic Violence Act was passed to provide orders of protection for victims protection orders that had the force of law. While the Act itself did not riminalise the pattern of controlling abuse that was defined as domestic violence, breaches of protection orders did become criminal (Coombes, Morgan, Blake & McGray, 2008).
However, by the turn of the 21st Century, it was clear that many of the systems involved in responding to violence against women, including criminal justice and family court systems, did not centre their policies, practices or procedures on protecting women or their children from violence and abuse (Coombes, Morgan, Blake & McGray, 2008).
Backlash against feminist successes in service provision, legislative and policy change were fed by the rise of the Fathers’ Rights movement (Busch, Morgan & Coombes, 2014), which lobbied heavily for the family court to enable men’s custody and access to their children even when there was evidence of violence against their partners. In Aotearoa, as elsewhere, victim-blaming, mother-blaming, minimising violence, trivialising and misrepresenting women’s experiences, and excusing the abuses of perpetrators, have persisted within the systems that are now responsible for protecting women and children (Morgan & Coombes, in press).
Alongside other economic and health indicators of the consequences of colonisation for wahine Māori, there is over-representation as victims of intimate partner violence (Sudderth, 2016). Wahine Māori activists and researchers have proactively sought interventions and strategies that honour mana wahine and the strengths of te ao Māori while recognising the effects of colonisation (see for example, Wilson, Jackson & Herd, 2016). A newly released background paper on Māori understandings of sexual violence (Pihama & McRoberts, 2016) provides a comprehensive kaupapa Māori approach, rich with resources, that emphasises the importance of women’s status in te ao Māori, healthy relationships and an analysis of sexual violence as “a tool of colonisation against Māori people, their whenua and resources” (p.19).
Among the now multiple movements to address violence against women in Aotearoa/New Zealand, feminist activism has maintained momentum in service provision for women, building collaborations across multiple networks of intervention including legislative and policy change, and identifying structural barriers to intervention (see for example, Chappell & Curtin, 2013; Murphy & Fanslow, 2012; Teghtsoonian, 2005) as well as producing knowledges that challenge the dominant Eurocentric, heteronormative, assumptions of sexual difference, women’s social positioning, rights, duties and responsibilities (see for example, Elizabeth, Gavey & Tolmie, 2010, 2011, 2012a, 2012b). Simultaneously, feminist activism is shifting along lines of resistance and refusal, opening new spaces within specific communities for actioning women’s safety (see for example, Hann & Trewartha, 2015).
Here and now, without conclusion
Cracks may be seen as means to resting states but never to completeness, because the latter are always staging posts, and cracks are always flowing to somewhere else, always radiating outwards. They are waves of restlessness, movements of transgression, spontaneous and experimental, seeking, recognising, expanding and multiplying affine transformations, splintering structures of domination, criss-crossing back and forward over fences of hegemony, under walls of structural patriarchy and through the looking-glass of disciplinary custom.
- This is how the experience of Eva Rickard, and her activism, speaks to me: A model for feminist intervention, necessarily involves actively connecting with the subjecthood of others, created intersubjectively through combined acts especially where there is no sense of Nietzschean ‘ressentiment’ toward opposition. As Heidegger (1996) has shown for both man and woman, the supplement and validation is necessarily woman. A new order is pronouncing itself in the Northern Hemisphere: may we hope it engenders new powers of flow here in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
We began our paper with the apparent paradox of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s international standing with regard to women. The paradox unravels as a process of multiple resistances, refusals and rebellions; of tensions, contradictions, intersections within and between feminisms and among feminisms, institutions and the so-called superdiverse communities of our geo-political location. As we turn from writing to other forms of activism in the Māori/Pākehā/Tauiwi communities of our intersubjective becoming, we are remembering that contradictions, incoherence, or paradox are productive for lines of flight towards imagined and unimaginable futures. We are remembering too, that isonomy, resistances, rebellions, transformations and counter-currents flow differently against the forcelines of hierarchically organised, gendered and intersectional social power relations.
"We must fight to pass laws, and be vigilant that they are implemented. But the real force of the struggle comes from the actual players’ contemplating the possibility that to organize… is not to stop being a good woman, a responsible woman, a real woman (therefore with husband and home), that there are more ways than one of being a good woman." (Spivak 1998: 342-343)
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Biographies
Mandy Morgan is a Professor of Feminist Psychology at the School of Psychology, Massey University in Aotearoa/New Zealand. She has particular interests in theoretical debates concerning the relationships between feminism, poststructuralism and psychology. As well as these theoretical interests, she’s involved in a research programme in the area of domestic violence services and interventions.
Guenevere Weatherley is a doctoral candidate in the School of Psychology, Massey University. Her extensive work and special interest domestic abuse, child protection and youth rehabilitation, and studies in Philosophy and Critical Psychology have led her to analysing discursive strategies used by women living with a history of intimate partner violence (IPV), and to identify those strategies which are particularly efficacious in ameliorating or eliminating partner abuse.
[1] See, Weatherley (2009) for an analysis of public attacks on one particular Wānanga and Smith (1993) for a case study of the struggles and tensions involved in establishing a marae within a Pākehā secondary school for girls.
[2] Rape in marriage became a criminal act in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1985.
labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
janeiro/ junho 2016 - janvier/juillet 2016