Rachel Schreiber on Tue, 18 Apr 2000 19:26:26 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Why We Are Taking Action Against the World Bank and IMF


In what was an otherwise eloquent and concise account of the recent
actions taken against the World Bank and IMF, I was troubled by the Gold
rush narrative. To analogize the relationship between global capitalist
superpowers and developing nations to a marriage between a
European-American and a Native woman is problematic and arcane.  Aren't we
done with gendering so-called "third world" nations to women? The
assignation continues to normalize heterosexuality as a relationship of
economic domination and ideological control. 

And do we really believe that the West acts in the capacity of a "kind and
thoughtful husband" towards developing countries, aiming to please by
lovingly searching for pine nuts? 

The net result of this analogy is to strip agency away from both a Native
woman married to a European-American, as well as from non-Western nations.
Isn't this precisely what we're fighting? 



Rachel Schreiber



>
>shaking the branches to knock the cones down.  During the Gold Rush, it
>often happened that a European-American man would marry a Native woman.
>When pine nut season came around, she might ask her husband to gather
>some.  Let¼s say that he was a kind and thoughtful husband, who loved her
>and wanted to please her, but that he was ignorant of the ways of her
>people and no longer young, daring, nor patient enough to climb the trees
>and shake the branches.  Instead, he would simply cut down a pine tree.


<...>


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