As a Culture and Politics major, I have often come across Gayatri Spivak’s work on the issues of power, representation, and identity. In particular, as a woman from a former colonized country, I have a deep interest in the work she has done on Subaltern studies. In the politics of power and representation, Spivak argued that there are two main ways of representation: portrait and proxy. A portrait is a representation of a group that is created by an outsider. As such, it perpetuates and reinforces existing power structures as it lacks the agency of the people it is meant to portray and instead underscores a particular version of them. In comparison, proxy is a representation of a group that is created by the group itself. Thus, proxies allow the marginalized, or the subaltern, to speak for themselves and challenge the dominant narrative. Spivak underscores the need to move from portrait to proxy representations in an attempt to create a more just and inclusive society.
I struggled a lot about whether I should say this, but decided, after much thought, that I would not be doing justice to all that I have learnt in four years at Georgetown if I decided to deliberately censor myself at the end. Being a woman and coming from a place and people that were once colonized are equally crucial parts of my identity, and it is a combination of these two that has pushed me to learn more about the theories of power and the significance of an intersectional understanding of feminism.
I am, of course, aware of Georgetown’s, particularly the Main Campus’s, tendency to not just support, but also supply the United States’ political agendas. When I was at the Main Campus in Spring 2022, I saw how openly, rightfully so, the institution took a stand against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I was there at the SFS Commencement when the speaker, Anthony Blinken, made a joke about never ever getting back together with President Putin (the joke being the reference to the Taylor Swift-who was the graduaion speaker at NYU a week prior to the SFS ceremony- song to desrcibe the United States' political stance). That same year, as well as the two years before and after it, I also saw how neither Georgetown nor Georgetown Qatar made any statement about the suffering of Palestinian people the way that they had about the Ukrainian people (when pressurred by students to release a statement supporing Palestine the University said it refrains from making political statements). There is of course a lot more that can be said about this blatant hypocrisy, but I would like to tie it back to the theme of "Women as Changemakers."
When Anthony Blinken spoke at the 2022 SFS Commencement, he mentioned that he had incredibly big shoes to fill because the speaker for the last SFS Commencement before COVID-19 disruptions, was Madeline Albright. Georgetown has very openly hailed Madeline Albright as a leading woman who shattered the glass ceiling in the male dominated field of politics, particularly diplomacy. It is somehow just not considered relevant that Madeline Albright, a “feminist icon” according to the website of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security (GIWPS), openly declared the death of half a million Iraqi children to be “worth it.”[1] The empowerment of women is of immense importance to me, but women empowerment cannot occur while other forms of oppression exist: particularly racial, as the experience of being a woman is intricately linked to class and race among other factors.
When we met Ambassador Verveer at GIWPS, she mentioned that there are a lot of problems faced by the women from our (the 14 students in the room’s) part of the world. I am quite confused by that statement. There were 14 students representing approximately nine nationalities. What is it that women from our part of the world experience as a whole? How is it possible that Ambassador Verveer, without being one, knows what that experience is? If we are to acknowledge the hurdles created by militancy and extremism for women's empowerment - I can only speak to this issue as it pertains to Pakistan and is the experience of some Pakistani women - are we to pretend that the U.S. foreign policy, an institution in which many women have actively participated and have been celebrated for doing so, has not played a significant, if not the primary, role in inciting and amplifying these problems? I had not taken a note of this comment by Ambassador Verveer, but it was not something I was going to forget. After reading the prompt for this journal entry, based on Spivak’s work on portrait and proxy, there was no other experience in the trip that seemed as relevant as this comment and its background did. I do wish this were not the case.
[1] “Chicagoans React to Death of Feminist Icon Madeleine Albright,” GIWPS, accessed April 7, 2023, https://giwps.georgetown.edu/media/chicagoans-react-to-death-of-feminist-icon-madeleine-albright/.
Ahmed Twaij, “Let's Remember Madeleine Albright for Who She Really Was,” Opinions | Al Jazeera (Al Jazeera, March 25, 2022), https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/25/lets-remember-madeleine-albright-as-who-she-really-was.