West Africa Review (2000) ISSN: 1525-4488 WHAT WOMEN'S STUDIES OFFER MEN: ENTREMESA DISCUSSION

Biko Agozino

INTRODUCTION

The topic of discussion is a disturbing one.¹ What Women's Studies offer men sounds quarter mocking and quarter serious, quarter threatening and quarter caring. Does the topic promise a move away from separatism in scholarship among women's studies advocates or is the topic a trap set by wise women to test the waters of the backlash against feminism? Is this discussion panel a set-up to trip some wannabe men and flare them or is it a genuine attempt to explore what men want from women's studies? Who gives a thus what men want from women anyway? If this is a genuine press conference by the Women's Studies Party on their electoral program, how come the experts, the front-runners, the women's studies gurus, the women, are not the ones telling us chauvinist pigs what we are missing by not listening to women's studies? Here we are, three men, saying what we think that women's studies offer men when it could be said that we have not got a clue what is the definition of women's studies.

I grew up in the Igbo society that prides itself with the worldview that all heads are equal. Except that it is a patriarchal society where men are privileged and where women routinely swear that, in their next incarnation, they will reincarnate as men. As a young boy of six, I found myself fighting my father physically (no Oedipal complex here, if it was my mother that was beating up my father, I would have fought her as bravely) in support of my mother when they had an unequal fight. When I went to my former High School to obtain my West African School Certificate before going to university, the school principal, on hearing that I was admitted to read sociology, joked that he hoped that I would not specialize in the sociology of women. Part of my interest in women's studies came from a conscious attempt to unlearn my socialization into patriarchy. I eventually joined an advocacy research organization, Women In Nigeria (WIN) and subsequently wrote my Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy dissertations on the subject of Black Women and the Criminal Justice System. That graduate research resulted in my first book, Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towards the Decolonisation of Victimisation, Aldershot, Ashgate.²

I hawked the book proposal to big and small publishers with frequent rejections based on their estimation of its marketability. However, I was surprised when a group of left-wing series editors accepted the proposal and recommended a contract but their publishers turned it down on the basis that it was too specialised to sell well. When I eventually approached Ashgate with a letter of enquiry, it took some time before a new commissioning editor wrote back to ask me to send in a proposal. I was even more surprised to hear that the series editor for gender studies rejected the proposal saying that it would not fit in and the series editor for migration and ethnic studies also said it would not fit in. Luckily, the new commissioning editor was perceptive enough to launch a new series with my book and turn the stone that the builders refused into a head corner stone. The book earned me the privilege of being appointed the Series Editor for the Ashgate Interdisciplinary Research Series in Ethnic, Gender and Class Relations. You can't keep a good book down!

I am speaking on this topic as a man who has struggled to benefit from knowledge of women's studies by taking a couple of graduate classes on feminist perspectives in criminology at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology. Having participated in WIN activities in Nigeria, I was surprised to find out that activist women's study groups were not open to men in the United Kingdom. My first shock was that I was referred to a black woman who had done research on Black Women and criminology the year before I started but when she heard of my interest, she exclaimed, "but you are a man!" She also refused to share her previous research with me because she was reworking it into a book and I wished her good luck with it, expressing genuine interest in seeing it when it is completed. At the graduate school, I wrote to a feminist journal to suggest that I have reviewed their contents for the fifteen years of their existence at that time and there was no article on widowhood. I wanted to know if they would be interested in an article on that topic and they replied saying that they were not sure if I was a man or a woman because they only published articles by women. Then my male Masters' thesis supervisor refused to recommend me for a PhD unless I changed my topic from Black Women to corruption in Nigeria but luckily, my feminist tutor gave me the necessary recommendation. One of my PhD supervisors at Edinburgh University, a feminist, tried to get me to change my topic but when she failed, she refused to supervise me any longer.

During my PhD research, I requested to join a reading group on feminism and the law but the group debated my interest and turned it down, urging me to start a study group on men. When I started working in Liverpool, some colleagues had a women's study reading group and again my interest in joining was debated and rejected. I went on to set up the Social Science Research Seminar Series which a young scholar continued organizing after I left. But I am told that the women's reading group collapsed when some of the participants suspected that others were simply using the group to advance their career interests without caring much about gender issues. Finally, I submitted an abstract to an international conference on feminist perspectives on international law, the abstract was accepted three months in advance and I wrote and submitted the paper one month in advance as required. The paper was accepted and circulated internationally to delegates but only two days before the conference in Sweden, the organizers e-mailed, faxed and phoned to cancel the paper and ban me from the conference! I am told by a feminist that there is a fear that men will get "turned on" by women's personal accounts but I suspect that this is a smokescreen given that academic discussions of gender issues are not always about erotic issues that could turn anyone on. Enough about my struggles to learn the forbidden the way my enslaved ancestors learnt against the odds.

Given my history of struggles and rejections in women's studies, I will play it safe by avoiding any attempt to be prescriptive about what women's studies can offer to men. Rather, I will adopt a descriptive historical approach by surveying scholarly development to see what women's studies have offered men in the past. Being a summary of my take on a complex history, I will not attempt to be exhaustive in my selective focus. I think that what women's studies have offered men can be selectively and arbitrarily summarized as follows: (1) interruption, (2) mimicry, (3) reproduction, (4) salvation and (5) camaraderie. Let me take each of these themes in turn. In discussing what women's studies offer men, I will try to be provocative by not subdividing women's studies according to the rival perspectives of liberal feminism, cultural feminism, radical feminism or socialist feminism. Rather, I will speak as if they all have something in common but I must state that some of my comments will not apply to many feminists who have always seen men as allies in the struggle against sexism.

INTERRUPTION

In an article first published in 1992 in Grossberg's Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall (1996) tells the story of the political and intellectual struggles to establish cultural studies in Birmingham University, UK, in the 1960s and 1970s. He identified two theoretical moments in the development of cultural studies which "interrupted the already-interrupted history of its formation" (Hall 1996, 268). He emphasized that some of the interruptions came from aliens in outer space in the sense that they were "generated by external forces to decenter the work that was accumulating at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies" (ibid.). The second major intervention was based on the theme of the racialisation of cultural studies and it is surprising that this was not the first intervention because Hall is a black man but being the only black man at the CCCS then, it is not all that surprising.

The first of such interruptions was in the form of feminist intervention. Hall goes on to narrate how feminism "broke in ..As the thief in the night, it broke in, interrupted, made an uneasy noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural studies" (Hall 1996, 269). This forceful interruption compelled the scholars at the Centre to recognize the following:

1. An opening of the question of the personal being political which changed the object of cultural studies in a revolutionary theoretical and practical way.
2. The radical expansion of the notion of power beyond the framework of the public domain that the scholars had focused on previously.
3. The centrality of questions of gender and sexuality to the understanding of power.
4. The opening up of questions of subjectivity which were closed for the sake of objectivity in the previous work of the scholars. And
5. The re-opening of the closed frontier between social theory and the theory of the unconscious.

However, it was Hall and the other men at the Centre who decided to encourage the development of feminist studies at the center. Just as the Women's Studies Program has invited three men to talk today, they attempted to buy feminism in or to import it by attracting good feminist scholars. Surprisingly, when feminist studies broke in through the window, the men who regarded themselves as good, transformed men, found unsuspected resistance rising from their "fully installed patriarchal power" (ibid). They used to tell themselves that there were no leaders at the Centre – just colleagues learning how to practice cultural studies together. Yet when the women at the Centre wanted the reading list to be changed in order to bring in more female theorists, the men found themselves defending male authors as canons.

Commenting on this narrative, Charlotte Brundson (1996), offers reconciliation to the men against whom she and others battled. She accepted that although it was true that no woman completed a PhD at the Centre in the early 1970s, this fact was taken out of context by herself and her colleagues who ignored the collective style of work favored at the Centre. This style meant that few men completed a PhD there either, preferring to complete jointly authored books and publish works in progress often to inform and assist practical struggles.

There emerged a CCCS Women's Studies Group in the 1970s – "a strange meeting place for people on very different journeys." The group started a journal and took over the 1978 issue of the annual book of the Centre and used it to propose the formation of a "closed women-only group" (Brundson 1996, 282). This was strongly contested by the "old boys" groups who were focused almost exclusively on social class analysis until race came in to interrupt them the way that feminism had done earlier. The choice to have women- only study groups followed the practice of women's Liberation Movement and what is known as identity politics. For example, in Greenham Commons, women camped and protested against nuclear armament but also protested against men joining the protest (Allison Young, Femininity in Dissent).

Nevertheless, Stuart Hall supported the demand for a women only group and observed that if there were other black scholars at the Centre beside himself, they too would caucaus on race. Yet he was the one who received the majority of the attacks from the women's study group especially when he assumed the position of Acting Director of the Centre. He reasoned that the unfair personal attack on him contributed to why he left the Centre because he was a strong supporter of the agenda of the women and his wife was a prominent feminist. He did not add that the feminists did not break into the Centre to crap on the table when it was being directed by a white man and that when he (Hall) left, their rough music died down even though he was not replaced by a woman but by a white man. The women who were attacking him suddenly stopped calling for the head of the (black) director once the center was merged with the Department of Cultural Studies under the Headship of a white male. One feminist suggested to me that the women must have attacked Hall because they expected to win something from his sympathetic views on gender but when he was replaced by a white man, they did not attack the white man for fear of losing their jobs or scholarships. In other words, a black man is an easy prey because he lacks power resources and is therefore seen to be weak even if supportive of white women.

Is today's discussion a sign that women's studies are mature enough to pursue knowledge without fear of being dominated by men as men? Who is afraid of men anyway? Are women's studies simply taking the mickey by calling this public discussion or is it simply a marketing strategy to get more (male) students to register for women's studies classes? Paulo Freire³ argued in support of the women's studies demand for separate space. He reasoned that such separatism was necessary for a young discipline, implying that when women's studies matured, they would open up their space to men.

Women surely deserve the space to discuss intimate issues that they would rather not share with men. However, such discussions belong to private sororities rather than to academic departments and courses funded with tax-payers money where the search for knowledge should be openly accessible to both men and women, whites and blacks, rich and poor. In 1999 a radical feminist, Mary Daly, resigned from her Professorship in Boston College when she refused to allow a male student in her class and the student went to court and won the right to participate in the class. To assume that the main thing women's studies are interested in is intimate sexuality that could turn men on would be an insult to the Maroon Women who fought against enslavement, the suffragettes who fought for the civil rights of women, the African women who fought against colonialism and apartheid and who are still fighting against neo- colonialism.

In Africa, women have their own associations but gossip about intimate sex does not belong to such serious meetings where issues of development and morality are more likely to be debated and decided by the women. When it comes to fighting against ills of society that they identify, African women are experts at identifying the men who are their allies just as they know how to isolate women who are traitors to their cause.

MIMICRY

Here I am going to assume that women's studies have something in common with post-colonial studies due to the challenges that both posed to hitherto hegemonic discourses. Homi K. Bhabha (1994) offers an essay, `Of Mimicry and Man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse' that is applicable here by simply substituting `gender' for `colonial.' (This is a mimetic application of an essay on mimesis that the feminist-marxist-deconstruction work of Gayatri Spivak, (1999) would bring out more clearly). It is important to note that Bhabha's essay on mimicry was prefaced with an epigraph from Sir Edward Cust (1839), "Reflections on West African affairs addressed to the Colonial Office" in which Cust warned of the subversive nature of mimicry by suggesting that if the dependent colony is allowed to mimic the "mother country" by being granted a parliament and all the paraphernalia of independent authority, "she would not be a colony for a single hour" (Quoted in Bhabha, 1994, 85).

According to Bhabha, "mimicry represents an ironic compromise" in the conflicts and tensions that Edward Said (1993) identified between "the synchronic power of domination – the demand for identity, stasis, - and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of history – change, difference" (Bhabha, 1994, 85-86). This orientalist discourse is directly applicable to women's studies as the equivalence of post-colonial studies. The effect of such an application would be to reveal that women's studies mimic the authority of malestream discourse in a profoundly disturbing and mocking way.

By asking what women's studies offer men, we imagine that women's studies are now championed by knights in shinning armor who are out to save the apparently lost men from the web of their dominant hysterical gender ideology. The question is not what women's studies can learn from men but what lessons men can learn by humbling themselves to listen to women's perspectives. This sounds mimetic and mocking in the sense that Enlightenment philosophy and the ideology of Orientalism held similar assumptions of chivalry (what Enlightenment offers women, albeit more patronizing because women wanted to learn from men's studies but the men fought to keep them excluded for centuries) and the civilizing mission (The White Man's Burden, again except that Caliban wanted to master Robespiero's language but he forbade his daughter to teach him in Shakespeare's The Tempest).

The mockery and mimicry intended or merely suspected in this topic is anticipated by the passage in Naipaul's The Mimic Man quoted by Bhabha:

We pretend to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new (1994, 88).

This passage exposes the menace that is inherent in the concept of mimicry (almost sounds like a baby saying that something makes me cry). In searching for what women's studies offer men, is there a risk that representational dependency would be erected, privileging women's studies as a hegemonic discourse as in the narcissistic wishful thinking that Frantz Fanon critiqued among the colonized. The mimetic mocking tone of the "offers" risks setting women's studies up as the ideal type of scholarship, a hegemonic system of thought by which all others would be measured, a service being offered by women to men in a sly civility dinner table manner after feminism "broke in and crapped on the table of cultural studies," Honey, dinner is on offer!

Such an ideology of care as an essentially feminine quality, according to Carol Gilligan (1982), refuses to raise the question if men have contributed anything to women's studies while promoting the colonial mimicry that women's studies have something to offer men.

REPRODUCTION

The World Without Women (Il Mondo Senza Donne) was written in 1935 by Virgilio Martini who narrates the ravages of a mysterious disease, "falloptitis" which killed all women of child-bearing age. Eventually, it was discovered that the illness was originated in Haiti by homosexuals who wanted to make their sexuality the norm and that it was incurable. By strange coincidence, falloptitis mirrors the AIDS epidemic which some propagandists suggest, originated from Africa, was once known as the gay disease and is still incurable. According to Jean Baudrillard (1996), the central idea of falloptitis "is that of an extermination of femaleness – a terrifying allegory of the extermination of all otherness, for which the feminine is the metaphor and perhaps more than the metaphor" (1996, 111). In the days of separatism, were women's studies dreaming of a world without men and having pursued that logic to a frightening abyss, are the adherents turning back now to try and reproduce the other rather than jump like Thelma & Louise?

According to Baudrillard, we have fallen victim to a virus that destroys otherness and it is predictable that even more than in the case of AIDS, no science could protect us from the scientifically engineered pathological ideological virus that aims at the extinction of the other. As he puts it:

This paradigm of the subject without object, of the subject without other, can be seen in all that has lost its shadow and become transparent to itself. Even in devitalized substances: in sugar without calories, salt without sodium, (or coffee without caffeine, we may add), life without spice, effects without causes, wars without enemy, passions without object, time without memory, masters without slaves, or slaves without masters we have become (Baudrillard, 1996, 113).

Orientalism and the Enlightenment are modes of production of the other for the purpose of dominating the other, rather than the killing, devouring or extermination of the other. According to Baudrillard:

This invention of difference coincides with the invention of a new image of woman, and thus a change of sexual paradigm. That change, . was the production by male hysteria of woman in place of her stolen femininity (Christina van Braun, Nicht-Ich, 1985). In this hysterical configuration, it was to some extent the femininity of man which was projected into woman, shaping her as ideal figure in his likeness. The point was no longer, as in the courtly and aristocratic figure of seduction, to conquer woman, to seduce or be seduced by her, but to produce her as realized utopia – ideal woman or femme fatale, a hysterical and supernatural metaphor (Baudrillard 1996, 116).

The invention of femininity makes women superfluous just as the invention of masculinity makes men superfluous. Both men and women have disappeared, not physically but beneath the reproduction of their respective substitute genders in virtual reality:

Both sexes lose their singularity equally, their difference culminating inexorably in non-differentiation. The process of extrapolation of the selfsame and twinning of the sexes (if twinhood is such a topical theme, this is because it reflects this mode of libidinal cloning) results in a progressive assimilation which goes so far as to render sexuality a useless function. Here anticipating the clones of the future, who will be sexed to no purpose, since sexuality will no longer be needed for their reproduction (Baudrillard, 1996, 117).

Baudrillard concludes that the only alternative to the disappearance of men and women to indifference, lies with women. The woman who wishes to produce herself as different and resists being produced by the male hysteria, has the responsibility to produce the other of femininity in return. She needs "to produce a new figure of the other as object of seduction, as the male succeeded in doing to some extent in producing a culture of the seductive image of woman" (1996, 120) Here Baudrillard seems to be falling into the trap of eroticism that some feminists fear when they talk about men being turned on by women's studies. This is probably due to Freudian influences on his theory but he also addresses what could happen when seduction is not seductive because it is coerced or imposed on the other.

Unfortunately, according to Baudrillard, we are approaching the extreme opposite of seduction, "to the exacerbated form of difference or, in other words, the final solution: sexual harassment" (1996, 121). This final solution to sexism tries to see men as the victims of their own hysteria and seeks the production of men as victims of sexism. The mode of production is geared towards the production of indifference rather than difference:

All forms of sexist, racist, ethnic or cultural discrimination arise out of the same profound disaffection and out of a collective mourning, a mourning for the dead otherness, set against a background of general indifference – a logical product of our marvelous planet-wide conviviality. The same indifference can give rise to exactly opposite behaviour. Racism is desperately seeking the other just as desperately in the form of an evil to be combated. The humanitarian seeks the other just as desperately in the form of victims to aid (Baudrillard 1996, 132).

The question that arises is whether women's studies are being humanitarian if we understand today's discussion as a desperate search for male victims of sexism to be aided through re-education and re-production of the ideal male as an object of desire even if only in the scholarly sense? Given the fact that what Baudrillard called the final solution to gender difference, sexual harassment, is not a solution but a problematic that women regard as an evil to be combated, can it be assumed that the goal of such combativeness is a desperate search for an end to differences in desire? If men are educated to understand and respect the sexual fears and aspirations of women, does it follow that men and women are going to become more similar with the elimination of sexual harassment and the fear of the other inherent in the final solution? If this is the case, then the combatant feminists could be seen less as attacking men and more as warriors out to offer men salvation from their own pathological desires.

SALVATION

Women's Studies could be said to offer salvation to men by fighting for a principled resolution of the conflicts between the US Constitutional First Amendment guarantee of Free Speech and the principle of Equality before the law. Catherine Mackinnon (1994) observes that the U.S. Constitution had no provisions for equality at the beginning and so the guarantee of free speech developed in an atmosphere of substantive inequality. However, even in Europe where both equality and free speech were guaranteed at the same time by the European Convention, both provisions have tended to develop independently while ignoring each other.

The result is that people often see freedom of expression as an absolute right while assuming that inequality is normal and natural. This means that many men are not aware that the right to freedom of expression can put them into serious trouble that could make them lose their jobs, break up their families and relationships, attract heavy fines in courts for trampling upon the civil rights of women, especially black women, poor women and minority individuals.

The way that women's studies contribute to the liberation of men is by highlighting the dangers of racial and sexual harassment from which offending men could suffer avoidable damage. Mackinnon argues that this can be done by demonstrating that speech is not only words but that words can be understood as acts that produce harm especially in sexual harassment. Men should be informed that for decades now, it is perfectly possible for them to be sued for "unrelenting pressures for dates, unwelcome sexual comments, authoritative offers to exchange sex for benefits, and environments permeated with sexual vilification and abuse" (Mackinnon, 1994: 150-151)

Although sexual harassment is performed mainly through speech acts, men should realize that the courts have tended not to see it as something protected under the First Amendment. In this sense, it is not only women who are victims of sexism and it is not only women who will benefit from an end to sexism. Women's Studies offer men the knowledge that they too are victims of sexism and that they too are in need of liberation or salvation from their own hysteria. Given the heavy penalties possible from hate crimes, it is in the best interest of the potential offenders to avoid hate and reap the benefits of love. Why risk the pain of punishment for harassment when loving the other could be much more fun, more rewarding and safer?

However, Elina Haavis-Mannila (1994) suggests that it is misleading and too simplistic to regard erotic cross-gender relations at work simply in terms of sexual harassment. She argues that love relationships in European work places take the forms of either flirting with colleagues, engaging in courtship and falling in love, or sexual harassment that affect men as well as women. She presents empirical evidence that both men and women who are engineers, teachers or office workers have significant positive attitudes towards flirtation at work, similar proportions of these male and female professionals have fallen in love at work in their lifetime in cities as different as Moscow, Tallinn, Helsinki, Stockholm and Copenhagen. Surprisingly, many of those professionals reported an improvement in their performance at work due to the erotic relationship there. And equally surprising is the fact that similar proportions of men and women among these professionals reported suffering sexual harassment at work.

The question is what happens when erotic relationships at work end? This is why many men and women avoid erotic relationships at work because it will not be easy to pack your bag and leave, the courts will not order that the office should be kept by the woman especially if she has children to care for, it is more likely that the man will be a senior colleague (according to the laws of the heterosexual mating gradient by which men tend to choose mates below them and women tend to choose mates above them in age, class, prestige, education, fame, etc.) and so, it is more likely that the woman will be the one who has to find another job or transfer when the erotic becomes the blues.

The problem with the offer of salvation to men from women's studies is that this message is rarely put as directly as I am trying to do here. Rather, what you find in the literature is plenty of battle cries, rallying women to fight against abusive men. In the heat of battle, it is forgotten that many men, especially ethnic minority men, are exposed to sexual harassment from women due to the stereotype that the bigger the nose of a man, the bigger the manhood (Roxanne). Linford Chistie, the black British athlete felt humiliated after winning the gold medal for Britain because the press ignored the British Flag he was flying and concentrated on the size of his "lunchbox" or manhood. Moreover, the bulk of women's studies offerings focus almost exclusively on the needs of white women, particularly white middle class women.

We are yet to see any serious commentary from white feminists on the case of Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant sodomised by white police men, Justin Volpe and Thomas Wiese, both of whom used the fact that they lived with black women as character defense of the indefensible. The assumption that O. J. Simpson was guilty of double murder even after being found not guilty beyond all reasonable doubts, the murder of the West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo by four white police men, the beating of Rodney King, the attempt to cover-up the murder of Stephen Lawrence in London, the January 2000 demonstrations in England by predominantly white women against the decision to allow Mike Tyson to fight in the country after serving a sentence for raping a black woman, etc., prove that what happened to Louima was not an isolated event. Anyone still in doubt that black men are also gendered should read "White Police Penetrating, Probing, and Playing in the Black Man's Ass: The Sadistic Sodomizing of Abner Louima" in Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas by Carlyle V. Thompson (1999). According to him:

In America white masculinity has often been culturally and psychologically defined as the beating, lynch-burning, castrating and overall killing of Black men, and by the sexual conquest (rape) of Black women. The lynching of Black men by white men suggests that white men fear Black men; however, the rape of Black women by white men suggests that white men do not fear Black women. Since 1859 approximately five thousand Black individuals have been lynched in America for alleged or real acts against white supremacy. Interestingly, Justin A. Volpe had a fiancée, an attractive dark-skinned African American woman named Susan Lawson, his live-in lover who works as a clerk in Volpe's precinct. Defending her white lover, Susan stated: "Justin wouldn't do this to our life. If it happened, he didn't do it..But I know he is not an evil person. His life with me would have to be a lie. We are planning on getting married and having children. If Justin Volpe did this, he did it to me and his children" (Thompson 1999).

Here Susan Lawson is following the historical reality that black women have always identified with the black men who suffer injustice and have often joined the black men in battle against white supremacy even when they are forced to cook and clean for massa. As a consequence of the colour blindness of women's studies, when they begin to ask what they can offer to men, it is right to suspect whether the focus is on white middle class men or whether black men are also worthy of salvation. The question of what women's studies offer men appears new to many white middle class feminists but the question was always integral to the agenda of most black feminists who rejected the luxurious gender-separatist strategy of the former. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (1993) alluded to this problem as part of the reason why efforts were made to develop a distinctive black feminism from the late 1970s.

As I am writing this, I have just been interrupted by a telephone call from a Professor in a university in the North East of the US who had just relocated from Britain. This is the professor's story:

[`I have just been visited by campus police who are questioning me about an incident at the university gym on January 4 when a white woman alleged that a black man who fitted my description was seen coming out of the female locker room. Even after I reassured the officers who saw me in the male locker room that it was not me, they still wanted to know how tall I was and I nearly said twelve inches long but I was really pissed off. On January 21, they said that they were just following up on the case and that I was not a suspect, that they just wanted to know if I saw anyone else fitting the description and to ask me to report anyone behaving suspiciously because previous incidents have left the women worried.

[However, she came to tell me that after speaking with the chief of police, she thought that I was mistaken that race had anything to do with the incident at the gym, that the questions they asked me were questions they would ask anyone if they were investigating an allegation and that it must be cultural differences that made me believe that I should be treated differently simply because I was a faculty member. I could not believe my ears but I had to educate her that you do not ask people who are not suspects how tall they are, otherwise it will be normal police investigation to take DNA samples from innocent black men as part of their job. I had to remind her that the reason why I came to see her was because I noticed a gap in the university policy on diversity awareness and wondered why she saw it as her responsibility to defend the campus police. She invited me to join a group of faculty members who discuss diversity issues over lunch but I told her that I was expecting an institutional response and not an informal one. Then she invited me to go with her to the campus police chief to find out what he meant when he said that race cannot have any impact on campus policing but I told her that I knew exactly what he meant and our meeting ended on that note. What do you advice me to do?' What do you advice my friend to do, dear reader?]

President Bill Clinton, in his 2000 State of the Union Address called on Congress to pass the Hate Crime Prevention Act but in that section of his address, he also called for programs to welcome new immigrants and integrate them by providing more English language and civics training for them. He did not mention the need for anti- racist education for especially white supremacist Americans as part of the efforts to prevent the hate crimes that he condemned as being un-American. He seemed to be speaking from the logic of the cultural difference that the Human Resources Officer tried to intimidate my friend with: If you are racially abused and harassed, it is your fault because you have not learnt American ways of doing things, you have not integrated, that is why you over- react and perhaps cause a race riot. Of course, Clinton's speech writers were probably unaware of the implications of their policy recommendations specifying that immigrants who spoke English would be less likely to be targeted by white supremacists. Yet African Americans speak English as their mother tongue, just as gay people and the disabled who are subjected to vile treatments that are most un-American.

CAMARADERIE

Black feminists frequently emphasize that what Black Women's Studies offer men is camaraderie. Angela Davis (1981) best captures this view when she analyzed the gendered, racialized and class-specific oppression that affects black women in addition to those that affect black men. She also detailed the ways that black men and black women have always fought side by side as comrades against oppression. Later, in her autobiography, she narrates how she put this into practice by joining the Black Panther Party in the 1970s and how she struggled against the sexism of some of her comrades without ever confusing them with the real enemies.

This perspective has since been advanced in the prodigious publications of bell hooks starting with her undergraduate classic, Ain't I A Woman. She challenged the silencing of black voices by white feminists with the immortal speech of Sojouner Truth, a speech that she forced herself to make against the opposition of middle class white female suffragettes who tried to silence her because they did not want the women's problem to be confused with the Negro problem. Truth deconstructed the sexualized stereotypes of the white middle class woman by challenging a white male preacher who had asserted that men were created by God to be superior so that they could protect the weaker sex. Truth detailed her strengths at work, her ability to bear unjust punishment and abuse, her dehumanization under enslavement that saw her children also sold and enslaved and her triumphant struggles against enslavement without any special protection from any man and yet she was no less a woman!

In her seminal book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, hooks detailed the ways that black women were transforming feminist thinking. In chapter five of the book, she argued convincingly that men are the comrades of women in the struggle against racism, sexism and imperialism. Note that she was not being prescriptive by saying that men should be welcomed as comrades. Rather, she was being descriptive by stating the obvious point that men (many of them anyway) have always been comrades, they remain supporters of women's struggles and they are most likely to remain comrades of women who happen to be their beloved mothers, sisters, lovers, wives, daughters, aunties, neighbors, colleagues or simply trusted comrades. This shows that it is naïve of some white feminists to pretend that Men are from Mars and women are from Venus. (Although this is the title of a book by a man,⁴ Luce Irigaray, 1993, advanced a similar view in je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference where she argues that men and women speak different languages and so they inhabit different worlds in a metaphorical rather than a real sense). Black women were at the forefront of the attempts to correct the strategy mistaken for a principle among white feminists that regarded all men as the enemies of every woman in their misguided search for gender apartheid. For example, The Redstocking Manifesto (why was it not called a womanifesto, and even that would not have escaped The Man) has a clause III that was quoted by hooks:

We identify the agents of our oppression as men. All other forms of exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) are extensions of male supremacy: men dominate women, a few men dominate the rest (1984: 68).

Hooks argues that anti-male ideology of white middle class feminism alienated many poor women especially from ethnic minorities. Some of the white feminists argued that even in research, men should be eliminated from women's studies so that women would be compared only to other women but never to men because they were incomparable (See Agozino, 1995). Black feminists like Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis and bell hooks rightly pointed out that they had more in common with black men than with white women and so many of them were reluctant to even identify themselves as feminists.

Historically speaking, wherever black women have organized against oppression with or independently of black men, their struggles have always included demands that would benefit black men too. Hence, when Harriet Tubman built the underground railway, she did not say that it was only for the sisters, a very disastrous strategy that would have been when it was necessary to disguise the travelers. In 1929 when Nigerian women rose up against the system of colonial taxation without representation, one of their main demands was that men should not pay tax either. This was repeated in South Africa in 1959 when the women rose up against the Pass Law, they also insisted that men should not carry passes either. Earlier in Kenya when the women rose up against the system of forced labor and the sexualized exploitation of forced laborers, one of their leaders was Harry Thuku who was nicknamed, Chief of Women and when more Algerian women rose up to join the national liberation struggles, they did not simply resist the attempt by the French to forcibly unveil them in public, they turned the veil into a battleground camouflage to conceal weapons in the struggle to liberate Algerian women, men and children (Agozino, 1997).

Even struggles that benefited women primarily, such as the suffragette movement, saw many men like Frederick Douglas battling as comrades. The same can be said about the right to choose abortion or to choose life, the struggles against sexual harassment, the right to education for women and the fight for equal pay for women. None of these battles have been fought exclusively by women with all men as opponents. This shows that the strategy of black women is historically valid even for white middle class women who pretend that all men are enemies or simply useless.

The struggle against the sexism found among men who are genuine comrades is more likely to succeed if the comrades are not confused with the enemies. While fighting with men as comrades, women also fight against the sexism of their comrades just as black women fight with white women against sexism but fight against the racism and imperialist ideology common among white women even when they claim to speak for African feminism.

For example, in African Feminist Theory and Practice, a reader prepared for the African Women's Leadership Institute in Kampala by Akina Mama Wa Afrika (African Women United in Kiswahili), Patricia McFadden was given a leading theoretical position to assert in a series of three articles that "African males believe that it is through their sexual prowess that their true manhood is experienced and realized" (1997, 150). In advancing this position, she fails to say a word about our incredible survival of the genocide of enslavement, our victories over imperialism and apartheid and our courageous resistance against recolonisation. She also attacks African women for accepting motherhood as a naturally given role and she compares familihood and heterosexuality in Africa unfavorably with her own choice to be a lesbian without saying anything about the essentially chauvinistic nature of the judgment of taste. She criticizes the practice of female genital mutilation without saying a word about male genital mutilation and she condemns the inheritance of widows as property without saving a breath for the unjust inheritance of foreign debts that cripple Africans from birth to grave. Finally, she asserts that she does not write for African men without saying who appointed her a spokesperson for African women. This is an indication that western feminism is waging an ideological battle in Africa today with its characteristic silence on imperialism and racism, with all the colonialist assumptions of a dark continent waiting for westernization. It is interesting that Akina Mama Wa Africa followed McFadden's sexist-racist heterophobic prejudices against African men and women with the theoretical gem from bell hooks on the importance of seeing men as comrades in the struggle. But equally significant is the fact that an institute that specializes in the training of African women in leadership will allow so much space for views produced from colonial mentality without allowing equal space for a rebuttal. Western feminists and their propagandists in Africa will have us believe that the problems facing Africa today are primarily sexual in nature. The assumption seems to be that since the personal is political, it follows that the political is essentially personal in a world still firmly under the domination of what bell hooks describes as white supremacist imperialist patriarchy.

In a continent without any social security, welfare safe-net, or retirement plan for the majority of the people, and where the bulk of the gross domestic product is spent servicing dubious foreign debts, and little on education, health and social services combined, western feminists write as if African women are stupid to desire motherhood and large families. Yet having children is the only form of social security available to them in their old age. The pro-choice campaign in Africa favors pharmaceutical companies that flood the continent with contraceptive pills without health warnings about side effects and without any need for prescriptions since all drugs can be bought over the counter or from hawkers in public transport buses or in the open markets. Given the unhealed wounds of the African holocaust otherwise known as the European slave trade, pro-choice in Africa today should also include an option that makes it easier for African women to choose larger families. "There are seven billion people on earth but where are they hiding?" (Stephen Pfohl and Avery Gordon, 1985). Certainly, the billions are not hiding in Africa where the population is being decimated by AIDS while the US population will only near the present total population of Africa in 2015. Instead of preaching pro-choice to people who have no choice about their enslavement to foreign debts, efforts should concentrate on advancing social justice and democracy so that Africans will be in a better position to choose anything when they are confident that they are not threatened with genocide and extinction. Incidentally, what Macfadden was recommending to African women - the destruction of familihood - has been identified by Orlando Patterson (1998) as the root cause of the enslavement- engineered crisis among Afro-Americans today. Patterson warns that the historical camaraderie between black men and black women is fast disappearing as they fight one another and prefer to go through life single rather than marry and build the family structure that has been one of the strongest foundations of black resistance against racism. Patterson dismisses suggestions that uncles and grand parents or friends would play the role of the absent father because, according to him, those uncles and friends have their own difficult lives to live and the evidence is that young black men and women are increasingly being sacrificed to drugs, violence and the criminal justice system due to the destruction of the black family.

CONCLUSION

What Women's Studies offer men is another way of asking men to stop worrying about what they can do for Women's Studies and start finding out what Women's Studies can do for men. To paraphrase the theoretically sound observation of Samora Machel,⁵ the assassinated leader of Mozambique, regarding the necessity of women's liberation: The liberation of men is not an act of charity on the part of women's studies. It is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Moreover, the Supreme Court of the US has already decided in the case of Brown V. The Board of Education of Topeka that

In the field of public education the doctrine of `separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions are brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment - 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

This topic of discussion is now proof that women's studies are moving closer to the principled position of black women on the need to see men as comrades. Male students will find that this is to their advantage in the sense that they will no longer be excluded or discouraged to take any course of their choice just because they are the wrong gender. Some of the rejections that I faced in my attempts to learn from women's studies would hopefully be removed for young men who are interested in gender research. Perhaps this was already anticipated by those academic departments that call themselves Gender Studies as opposed to Women's Studies. However, whatever the department is called, the idea that any discipline belongs exclusively to any gender could be continued in more subtle ways to the disadvantage of the development of that discipline. In that sense, it looks like another way of concluding this discussion is by asking what men can offer to women's studies today?

It may be argued that the reason why men encouraged women to fight as comrades with them in the past is because both men and women were exposed equally to the same injustices under slavery and colonialism. It might be said that following emancipation and independence, men became more privileged and became the oppressors of women and poor children. This is evident in the fact that although women fought for liberation from colonialism and apartheid, the presence of women in post-colonial and post- apartheid governments has been very ridiculous. The women of Enugu State in Nigeria have had to go to court to challenge the formation of an all-male cabinet after women and men successfully fought to remove the military from government in Nigeria. The governor of the state, a U.S. trained medical doctor, reluctantly nominated one woman for appointment to his cabinet one year later.

However, it would be wrong to read the current gender politics simply from the number of appointments to government offices. Many women's organizations point out that the national constitution is not gender sensitive and they are appealing to the male-dominated legislative houses to set up commissions that would review the constitution and also outlaw sexist cultural practices in the country. The organization, Women In Nigeria, (WIN) recognizes this by arguing that men and women are equally oppressed on the basis of their poor working class or peasant positions. However, WIN adds that women suffer an additional oppression based on their gender and that although men do not suffer such gender-based oppression, they should be encouraged and educated or mobilized to fight with women against both forms of oppression without necessarily implying that the men are feminists.

While a member of WIN, I argued that this formulation should be expanded to include the fact that men also suffer gender oppression but not always in an identical way compared to the women. Moreover, it is not all women who suffer gender based oppression in an identical way because `cash madams' or rich bourgeois women often play the role of oppressors of other women and men. I used a paper that I wrote in 1987, "Widowhood: The Highest Stage of the Exploitation of the Doubly Oppressed" to emphasize that men and women who are poor are subjected to exploitative widowhood practices whereas men and women who are rich are relatively protected from this form of oppression. I used historical evidence from around the world to illustrate why societies with relatively secure economic provisions for women tend to have less oppressive widowhood practices.

That paper was presented at a conference on Women's Studies in Nigeria: The State of the Art Now at the University of Ibadan. That was the paper that I offered to a blinkered feminist journal that would not even consider the message due to the gender of the messenger. This is not surprising since welfare benefits are so much better in Europe that widowhood is no longer an issue for western feminists. It was only during my PhD fieldwork in London that a chance meeting with Stuart Hall along the street led to my introduction to his theory of race-class-gender articulation, disarticulation and rearticulation that helped me to understand my earlier argument better. Put briefly, the class of rich women relatively disarticulate their subordinate gender and or race relations just as the poverty of some men disarticulate their gender relations in their dealings with middle class women and vice versa (Agozino, 1997). This should serve as a warning to Women's Studies programs that it is not enough to allow men into their programs given that white middle class men could come into integrated programs for the purpose of reproducing existing inequalities. The desegregation of schools has not resulted in automatic promotion of racial equality in school programs, courses, staffing, teaching or student recruitment. It is not likely that institutions that were established over centuries and designed to exclude could be made more inclusive with a simple waving of the magic wand of integration.

References

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Hall, Stuart. (1996), "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies" (Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, Routledge.

hooks, bell. 1984, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Boston, South End Press.

----------. 1981, Ain't I a Woman? London, Pluto.

Irigaray, Luce.1993, je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, Routledge.

Mackinnon, Catherine. (1994, Only Words, HaperCollins.

McLaren P. and P. Lepnard, eds, Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, London, Routledge.

Pfohl, Stephen and Avery Gordon, 1985, Criminological Displacements: a video-text, Parasite Café Production.

Patterson, Orlando. (1998) Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in two American Centuries, Basic Books.

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Spivak, Gayatri. 1999, A Critique of Postcolonial Theory, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Thompson, Carlyle V. (1999) "White Police Penetrating, Probing, and Playing in the Black Man's Ass: The Sadistic Sodomizing of Abner Louima" in Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature Ideas.

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© Copyright 2000 Africa Resource Center, Inc.

Citation Format

Agozino, Biko. (2000). WHAT WOMEN'S STUDIES OFFER MEN: ENTREMESA DISCUSSION. West Africa Review: 2 , 1.[iuicode: http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?101.2.1.1]

	Entremesa is a series of lunchtime seminars organized by the Women's Studies Program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA.

	Reprinted 1998 and adopted in 1999 by the Department of Sociology, University of Calabar, Nigeria, as a text for which they are seeking funding to publish an inexpensive paperback edition for their students.

	See P. McLaren and P. Lepnard, eds, Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter, London, Routledge.

	John Gray, 1998, Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus: A Practical Guide to Improving Communication and Getting What you Want

	See S. Urdang, 1983, "The Last Transition? Women and Development in Mozambique" in Review of African Political Economy, 27/28.