Dearest Nawal

The trick here is that woman's rights as an idea has tremendous saliency across the globe among women with all sorts of democratic commitments. Its power is that "women's rights" means something to everyone, and yet not the same thing, much like the term democracy itself. "Women's rights" is more or less accepted as a universal recognition of women's equality because women were, and still very often are, excluded from civic universalism. And, even though inclusion--like the acceptance that a president could be female in Egypt is insufficient for democracy, it cannot be ignored as an acceptable possibility. This universal/polyversal wish for all people's dignity embraces males and females with their subtle cadences, and yet civic universalism has never actually included women at its core

It is incredulous that the U.S. supported the Mubarak dictatorship for years and then withdrew support from him in order to stand with the revolution, in the name of democracy, and now, women's rights as well. The presumption of U.S. democratic commitments is a bit galling here- almost as galling as the fact that the tear gas cans were "made in the U.S.". I am with Jon Stewart, who wondered why any country in their right mind would advertise the fact that they make tear gas.

Given the competing meanings of both democracy, and women rights, I am hesitant to think that the Egyptian protestor's meaning of democracy is necessarily the same as Obama's. Tunisia's rebellion started as a demand for a lowering of food prices and for much needed jobs. In Yemen, there were also massive demonstrations demanding food prices be lowered. It is interesting that these demands-- the rights to food and to a job-are so easily translated into the language of "democracy". This translation is an elision of sorts-giving the pretense that a patriarchal capitalist version of democracy works for everyone in the same way.

The cost of food has sky-rocketed especially for poor nations. Unemployment, especially of the youth in these countries is mind-numbing. About 40 percent of Egyptians eke out a living of about two dollars a day. Current estimates are that food prices are at 17 percent inflation. According to Ellen Brown high food prices which have created a global food crisis reflect the egregious speculating by Goldman Sachs with no concern for the cost of wheat and rice, the staples for the poor of the world. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls this "a silent mass murder".

The reason that singular identities-women rights, gay rights, the rights of the poor-have been amassed into a popular uprising and movement just may be because hunger, and its remedy, food trumps everything. What we are seeing is what Samir Amin might call "the "awakening of the South" in a struggle against the imperial order of capital. Amin might put these movements in the category of a "second wave of the awakening of the peoples, nations, and states of the peripheries of the 21^st century". There are mental and political leaps here--but the language of (bourgeois patriarchal) democracy cloaks the revolutionary commitments that must exist here.

There is little talk of a working and middle class revolt in n. Africa; or a transnational movement demanding the right to food, and an end to the exploitation of the land and labor of third world countries. This would be a clairvoyant indictment of global capitalism and its particular patriarchal and racialized formulation of democracy. Instead the world watches Tunisia, and Yemen and Egypt and the media narrative is of democracy's oneness.

A new wind is blowing from Egypt. Let it be a wind that even women everywhere can breathe. Let us listen to the female voices that bespeak a poly/universal community that excludes no one. Women and men were in the streets together in these protest movements across n. Africa. Egyptian women organized the food distribution and the garbage collection, and the public discipline, and the peaceful strategies. Nawal states: "women and men are in the streets as equals now. We are in the revolution completely. Of course if you know the history of revolutions you find that after the revolution, often men take over and women's rights are ignored. In order to keep our rights after the revolution, women must be united. We must have our women's union again. We cannot fight individually."

A great thing about the revolutions in north Africa is that it tells us that surprises can happen, and change is about more than hope. So I remain committed to thinking in newly authentic and independent ways about women's voices articulating a non-capitalist anti-racist, anti-misogynist democracy.

I am a bit hesitant about this process because we must think theoretically-meaning that we must think while recognizing the structured connections between points and sites of power. But conceptual thinking requires concepts that are helpful and also constraining. When we are looking to see structures we may see them in ways that they do not exactly exist in this moment. I do not think I can see creatively without a framing of what I see and I also know the framing must be viewed skeptically in order to be useful. Feminisms must embrace universal humanity at the same time that it/they point to the specifically misogynist forms of women and girls daily lives.

The cultural flows mix and remix. Each culture has its own practices and yet they exist in g/local fashion. As such we must negotiate the new feminisms and women's activisms for democracy. Does it matter if Egypt has a female president? Or is what matters that women should never be excluded from any possibility? After all, it has not helped democracy in my mind that the U.S. Afghan and Iraq wars were/are overseen by female secretary of states: Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice and, Hillary Clinton. President Karzai allows new restrictions on Afghan women daily under the auspices of Taliban pressure, while Afghan women are promised that they will not be bartered. But they are.

Newsweek's recent cover advertises "Hillary's War"-and how she is fighting for women's rights and against glass ceilings for women everywhere. They call this "the Hillary doctrine" that focuses and challenges on the antidemocratic forces limiting women's and girls lives across the globe. I do not mean to impugn Hillary's motives or her personal commitments to women's rights although I do mean to deeply criticize and condemn the policies she oversees that run counter to bettering a majority of women's and men's lives in n. Africa at this moment. I do not think that an imperial form of women's rights is what the women in Tunisia or Egypt have in mind. I

In Beijing, 1995, at the Fourth World Conference on Women, sponsored by the United Nations Hillary Clinton declared that "human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights". Although many women and women's rights activists across the globe would agree, this statement has muddied the waters since. So let us hear from the women of Tunisia, Jordan, Palestine, and Egypt what they want this to mean for themselves. Maybe there is a new wind blowing for all of us here too. I am reminded of Nawal again: make a revolution in the U.S. and help the whole globe by doing so.