Women Because They Are Women

notes on survival

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Scully (played by Gillian Anderson) spiiting truth in the X-Files

(trigger warning: sexual violence and abuse)

Author’s note: this was written yesterday

I find myself thinking about gender-based violence a lot. Not the conversation starter I was hoping for, but today left me sick.

I think about violence done to women every day. Both in my own work, as well as in my own healing. Even in my own mind, the parallels get a bit repetitive—but on days like this, days when violence feels sharp in the air, I realize how much of my day to day, and perhaps the day to day of many (if not most) women, is to exist within the framework of constant fear, it is to know what it’s like to feel hunted. Therefore, I can’t run from it. It’s always there, that faint feeling of lingering domination.

Two days ago I realized I always feel watched even though I live alone. I am surveilled, as we all are surveilled on some level. My surveillance started with my family, then was perpetuated by the state—but really women’s bodies are watched all the time, whether we want them to be or not, our bodies are politicized and sexualized and judged, constantly. To exist in this world as a woman (and I mean all the dimensions of womanhood) is to live in a world where your body is both a threat as it is as an invitation for punishment. For desire unseeded or felt, women are forced into thinking that our bodies — our bodies— for all of our totality and brilliance we hold, our bodies are the problem.

I didn’t stand up straight for years because I developed breasts at ten but wasn’t allowed to buy a bra out of my mother’s fear that I was being sexualized too young by society-at-large. By fourteen, I had a part-time job at The Body Shop and secretly bought myself a sports bra (the gateway drug) from K-Mart. However, before that, from the ages of ten to fourteen, I was required to hunch my shoulders so my nipples wouldn’t perk out of any given shirt or dress. I had to find ways to censor my body. As an adult I find myself trying to learn how to be natural, or in myself, without responding to the fear that I will be judged, or worse: harassed. As I come to terms with my own ways, over the last few months I’ve found myself scratching my head and thinking about the construction of the patriarchy. Did they one day just get up and think: from this day henceforth we shall subjugate women! Why was it so innate for some to dominate us?

Recently, I’ve been thinking about what Silvia Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch, “Sexual hierarchies, we found, are always at the service of a project of domination,” and then, the knife: “the degradation of women are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism at all times.”

*

My first two books, How To Cure A Ghost and Like A Bird, were both dedicated to Jyoti Singh Pandey, who was gang-raped on a bus in Delhi on December 16th, 2012 by six men, and eventually died from the immense injuries sustained. To this day, when I think of what happened to her, everything gets blurry and I can’t breathe. My own sexual abuse is somehow mixed in with hers, I’m both on that bus and not on that bus with her. In waking nightmares, I think of her nails clawing on the linoleum floor. I am haunted by what happened to her all the time. Sometimes I can feel the steel pole inside of me and I am bracing, bracing, bracing.

I think of the lineage of my land—and then of the largest reported genocidal rape that happened in 1971, when the Pakistani Army raped 400,000 (roughly) Bangladeshi women with systematic precision. You know why they did it? They felt superior to us, they felt righteously more Muslim. As if we needed good Pakistani semen in us to validate our Muslim bodies. Breasts were cut off, bodies were mutilated, all done in the name of superiority. Those 400,000 women are known as Birangona, a brocaded ceremonial title that means nothing. Because the reality of these women is that when they returned home—after being taken for days, hidden in the dark, threatened with death—in many cases they were disposed of by their own families. Many of them had to flee and hide because they were unwanted and unsafe. But where did these 400,000 go? Where are they?

I think of my own mother, who I often think of as one of the first Birangona. Her wounds are a relic of partition and the once looming liberation war, but they are also the wounds of being the daughter of a man who believed in freedom; her body was just another familial cost. When she was sixteen she was taken by men who wanted to kill her father, and though they first attempted to kill him, they didn’t. Instead, they took my mother’s body. Then, years later, she took mine, too.

After she was returned back home she tried to kill herself. When she was dispatched from the hospital after the suicide attempt she was forced to live in an attic for four years, with zero to little contact with the outside world. I think of my mother and all the women that are forced into hiding and then go mad in the attic. I think of the cost of women’s bodies when aggression is taken out on them.

*

The statistics are vast:

• Women have a higher chance of being raped by someone they know

• 50,000 women a year (worldwide) are said to be murdered by their partners or family members.

Then bring in strangers, bring in the aggression of someone who feels like they’re owed to you, or hate you because of how you look. The day before last I finally watched “Promising Young Woman.” Afterward, I just felt empty. Then to wake up to the news of eight people (seven women, six of whom were Asian) murdered after another white man went and decided to shoot something made me keep thinking of the cost. The cost of our bodies for men, for domination.

*

Just last night I was talking to two friends about all the ways I’ve been fetishized throughout my life. There’s a lot I could share. When I was living in Montréal, it was the worst, whiteness was all-consuming and the people I would sleep with would exotify me endlessly as if I was a prop that had nothing to offer outside of sex. Since I was a child my sexuality (and how it was perceived) has made me believe it was one of the few things I had to offer someone, and potentially the only value I had—how good my body could make someone feel. So, it was all the more confusing. I felt I should feel good about myself and my perceived sexual desirability, when in fact it only contributed to my self-loathing.

Nobody seems to understand how Asian women are sexualized. How the racism then permeates because you’re told that you should be grateful, so you allow it. It took me a long time to understand the intricacies of how I was being exotified and to then locate how uncomfortable that made me and why.

The gall that anyone can shoot six Asian women and that we can then question whether or not it was “racially motivated.” Here’s a clue: if a white man murders six non-white people, it’s racially motivated. It’s not that complicated.

*

Imagine starting a war in Korea, then Vietnam, after occupying the Philippines, while having waves of campaigns about the “fear of the yellow peril,” then building on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 as well as the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 and passing the Immigration Act of 1917, barring all Asians — from entering the United States, and then wondering if you’re a racist country. Believe it or not, before the civil rights movement, Asians were seen as major pests but after the amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act (of 1965)—the concept of the model minority was created to ensure that Asian folks perpetuated white supremacy by relying on anti-Blackness. In an interview I did with Chaumtoli Huq, associate professor at CUNY School of Law and the founder and editor of Law@theMargins, in 2019, she explained to me, “Model minority is a white supremacist standard. Asian Americans have been fed to believe that we have a stake in whiteness.”

In a piece about this for The Juggernaut in 2019, I wrote: “Income inequality rose most rapidly among Asian Americans. The gap in the standard of living between Asians at the top and the bottom of the income ladder nearly doubled between 1970 and 2016. Poverty rates were as high as 35% among those from Myanmar, 33% for Bhutanese, and roughly 25% for those from Nepal and Bangladesh, compared with 15.1% for Americans overall.”

Class and race always intersect. The fact that six lower-income Asian women (who are often discarded and ignored) were shot down in a spa is absolutely about class and race, but it’s also about sex. On Twitter @hyjinhere aptly wrote, “Something that is not talked about enough re: racial violence is the type of sexualized violence Asian women face, how interconnected that is to the violence against those in the sex trade + how that violence has been so deeply shaped by American imperial wars in Asia.”

But alongside this reality, there’s been a general uptick of Asian American hate crimes, with 3,800 new reports of Anti-Asian hate (many of which were directed toward women) just in the last year:

From NBC News.

Being lower-income, an immigrant, a non-white person, an Asian woman allows for a certain kind of disposability. In a world where value is accrued through capital and adjacency to whiteness, and therefore power, means the further you are from that reality, the less your life has value. If you are a woman (and not white) your life has even less value. It goes back to the Federici quote, “the degradation of women are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism at all times.” Sexual exploitation, like all exploitation, is about gain. They called the killer a “sex addict” but there’s a difference between addiction and domination. Wanting to kill is not a sexual addiction, it’s sociopathy. It’s important to name it.

*

It’s not enough to say listen to us, but it does start there. These past few weeks have shown me that most people even in my own life have no real clue what to do with my own sexual abuse, to which my therapist kept reminding me today: “Nobody believes survivors.”

My friend Kat Chow tweeted about wanting to know the names of the six women that were murdered today. With that, I kept thinking of the Birangona, and all the lost names of all the Asian women who have died for — and because of — war. Wars that have been propagated by US interventionism, and/ or are a direct result of colonization. The colonial project is long and its death rattle is protracted and painful.

*

Though I spent most of the day feeling numb, I’m always about the answers, about the future and by accident today I stumbled, again, upon the words of disability rights activist Alice Wong (in a conversation with Leah Piepzna Samarasinha) about utopic envisioning: “I think collective dreaming is an incredible part of building, to lay the groundwork for the future that we need.”

It’s not just about wanting to change, it’s about investing in it, too. It’s about speaking up, it’s about understanding when you say “believe women” you actually do the work to believe them, too. So much gets lost in a slogan, in a chant but these sayings aren’t metaphors, they are our realized actions.

It’s about calling out racism and white supremacy when it’s either (or both). It’s understanding that all people deserve protection, care, and community, but that most of us desperately need to invest in unlearning misogyny every day. This means reckoning with all the things we have taught to think about women and how we perpetuate harm on a daily. It starts with us.

It’s also beginning to see the impacts of American imperialism, and understanding that the wars the US started (from Vietnam to the Iraq) have generational impact, that’s why they happen. America swoops in with democracy as a mirage, but really it’s to destroy you and your family for generations so you have no chance at success. Like Capitalism, the US controls the market by limiting your ability to attain a good life. This country’s international policies are governed by the ploy that this is a good country, a safe one too. They make you think that the real enemy is you, or your neighbor, but that they, Americans, are saviors as they slaughter your men, rape your daughters and obliterate the only home you’ve ever known. Then, if you come to America to get a good life, good fucking luck. It’s important that we start seeing the layers of reality here, how racism permeates for immigrants, especially immigrants birthed from American war mongering.

When I was a kid my dad would complain that the constitutional amendments that the US wanted to enshrine in Afghanistan, after its occupation, are amendments that the US doesn’t have in its own constitution — namely, ones on the rights of women. It’s easy to look at another country that’s been bombed back to an oblivion, to look at it and call it barbaric after you’ve taken everything from it… and yet, with all the charade of freedom and blah blah, only in America — the land of dreams — does someone walk into a spa and murder eight people. There’s a diagnosis here that needs to be made.

Today a law enforcement official said about the killer, “Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” If you’re white, I’m speaking to you. How are you teaching your community? How are you asking other white people to engage? How are you unlearning white supremacy today, tomorrow, the next? If this is a collective effort, we all really have to step up, but especially if your livelihood is less endangered. I want to live in a world where all our bodies are truly free.

We all need to collectively dream. So what does our future look like, together?