By Percy C. Hintzen
Percy C. Hintzen is a native of Guyana. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley and, until recently was Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies in the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University.
Spending a year at the University of Guyana in 1993-94 while on sabbatical leave from the University of California, Berkeley, I became aware of demands being made by some male instructors and administrators for sexual favors from women students and staff in exchange for grades, promotion, preferential treatment, and additional sources of income. The practice was being publicized by a woman whose Ph.D. degree positioned her as one of the most qualified instructors at the university. Her field of scholarly expertise included analysis of gender and sexuality. Her intervention was met with visceral and vicious hostility, notwithstanding the significance and global currency of her research. The hostility was palpable and the ridicule pervasive. Men interpreted her exposure and analysis of the practice as an attack on their privilege. The reaction by many of the women, particularly the predominantly female clerical and service staff, was surprisingly similar. It reflected their entrapment within a structurally inscribed system of violent gendered dependency.
Women’s participation in transactional sex as a survival strategy is a pervasive feature of modern liberal capitalism. This is no less the case in Guyana. In the early seventies when the country’s economy was on the upswing, middle- and working-class men, flush with money from increases in wages and salaries, joined men from the highly paid expatriate community to frequent a growing “brothel industry” for engagement in transactional sex with women displaced from their rural communities because of the country’s “development” agenda. When the economy slumped into the doldrums during the eighties, these transactional sexual activities shifted to more “upscale” venues frequented by the smaller but wealthier group of national economic and political elite males and by the highly paid group of male foreigners working in binational and multinational agencies tasked with management and control of the country’s economy and governance. The women, typically, were younger members of the urban middle strata whose families were displaced by “structural adjustment” conditionalities overseen by these expatriates. Many were mere high school students forced into dependence on transactional sex for survival of themselves and their families. With the current intensification of economic inequality in the wake of the failure of the development agenda, violent gendered dependency has become even more institutionalized, normalized, and pervasive. There are, of course, class differentials to forced dependence on transactional sex and gendered exposure to injury, violence, and death. Women from the upper strata can employ protections that come with their class privilege to reduce their vulnerabilities even with continued conscription to their gendered roles of reproduction. In the exercise of their privilege, they become even more instantiated into the developmentalist agenda and into the system of gendered violence upon which it depends.
These gendered forms of economic transactions have parallels in colonial and postcolonial politics. In Trinidad & Tobago in the 1970s, I was surprised at the pervasive use of the term “fat ass brigade” by elected members of the ruling PNM’s governing executive, cabinet members, and elected parliamentarians while referring to activists in their campaign organization. It was a disparaging signifier of the predominance of women in party-political mobilization at Balisier House, the party headquarters. The women were challenging their own relegation to political unimportance by the male governing elite of their party whom they believed had “sold out” the interests of the people to local and international capitalists. How, I asked myself, could the regime survive this hostility and critical rejection by its mobilizing wing?
In a “Letter From Mother Earth” from which many of the ideas for this paper are taken and which can be found online (https://www.navdanya.org/site/earth-university/mother-earth), Vandana Shiva, the world-acclaimed Indian biophysicist and, arguably, one of the most important environmental thinkers, denounces liberal capitalism and its “limitless greed” and “limitless violence (that) has turned its back against nature and people.” She argues for a transition to “Living Economies” organized at the level of local communities. These create spaces for empowerment of “living cultures that are life nourishing and which globalize peace, care, and compassion”. Her juxtaposition of “care” and “compassion” on the one hand, with “greed and violence” on the other is reproduced in the naturalized and universalized gendered attributes of feminity and masculinity. The feminization of care and sustenance in the modern economy ensures the transfer to women of the costs of human sustainability essential to life and to human needs for pleasure (including sexual pleasure), emotional support, fertility, etc. This “women’s work of “reproduction” is differentiated by critical social scientists from “men’s work” of “production” in the formal economy. The former is organized around the gendered practice of non-compensation and under-compensation. The production of goods and services for exchange in the “Market” is falsely identified as the purview of “the male breadwinner”. This is a distortion. The “modern economy” was formed and fashioned on the slave plantation where African women, from its inception, were involved, equally, in production for the slave economy while assigned the exclusive burden of the “inferior work” of care and sustenance.
In the modern economy this inferiorization of women’s work normalizes the unpaid status of women in the household and extended family and the highly devalued rates of their compensation in the formal and informal economy. It is justified by the universal narrative of the “male breadwinner”. As such, involvement of women in production is deemed a mere “avocation” and unnecessary supplement to the wages of men. This is the root cause of the gendered dependence of women on men for access to the material conditions of survival of everyone, including the men to whom care and sustenance are provided. It confines women to uncompensated and undercompensated provision of sustenance and care which in the esoteric language of economists, is described as “externalizing” (i.e., transferring to women) their costs. This is an essential feature of the modern capitalist economy that makes invisible and dismisses the critical role of women.
In fact, this role was fully recognized in pre-colonial Africa. It led to extraordinary efforts to shield women from the slave trade. In the few instances where the economic contributions of men superseded those of women, such as the Bight of Biafra, it was the women who comprised the majority of those who were traded into enslavement. This challenges the myth of the “able bodied” male as “more suitable” for production in the slave economy. Arguably, the contributions of women, as reflected in their value in the dehumanized economy of slave trading, exceeded those of the men because of their participation in both production and reproduction. This was especially the case after the abolition of the slave trade by Britain in 1807, forcing dependence of the slave economy on women’s fertility.
Centralized modern governance rests upon the masculinization of official violence. This is integrally tied to the imperative of acquisition, defense, control and maintenance of territory, people, and things as fundamental conditions of global capitalism. The deployment of masculinized violence provides governing elites with absolute control over the centralized institutions of national capitalist governance. Men, deluded by the cult of masculinity, are conscripted as handmaidens of such governance in exchange for the mere “privilege” of being male and for the exercise of such privilege in the control of women. Such control explains the inability of the women activists in Trinidad to mount a successful challenge to the male governing elite of their party.
The mobilization of women was critical to the success of every anti-colonial movement. Women strategically used their invisibility to escape forms of surveillance that circumscribed and contained men’s resistance. They became critical participants in both violent and non-violent challenges to colonial commandment. But their objectives differed significantly from their male counterparts. Their gendered roles in reproduction predisposed them to defense and protection of the material conditions of human sustenance including the ecosystem and the cultures and knowledges upon which communities depend for human survival.
But once men secured control of the post-colonial state, they betrayed these aspirations by choosing “development” and insertion into the global capitalist economy. Women were forced into “survival strategies” under modernized forms of gender dependence. Their continued participation in both production and reproduction sustained the population, especially during times of economic breakdown and crisis. This was highlighted in Guyana during the “lost decade” of the nineteen-eighties when women transformed themselves into “traders,” using their participation in the informal economy to secure access to foreign exchange to purchase critical life-saving goods from overseas for generalized distribution. In response to the ongoing crisis of neoliberalism that began in the eighties, droves of women from postcolonial economies migrated, many as undocumented, to work as providers of child, health, and home care to the affluent. They convert much of their earnings into foreign exchange, which is transferred to their home countries. In some instances, these transfers exceed the combined earnings of their home countries from export, foreign direct investment, and foreign aid. In the wake of a “feminization of labor” associated with efforts to drive down the costs of remuneration through exploitation of gendered differentials in wage rates, women have intensified their participation in masculinized sectors of production everywhere (one of the most visible examples of this in Guyana can be seen in the numbers of women working in the private security guard industry). They have become major breadwinners for their extended families even while continuing the work of reproduction.
This increasing burden placed on women highlights the failure of centralized national governance and a centralized system of production organized around male privilege. It underscores the imperative for transformation to a women’s agenda focused on human sustenance and ecological, social, and cultural sustainability and a shift to the local community as an alternative to male national governance. This is not a new proposal. It was publicized and signified by Mahatma Gandhi when he surrounded himself with women, adopted what European colonial representations marked as feminine characteristics, and symbolically engaged in the “women’s work” of spinning. In his vision for “Swadeshi” he proposed a combination of “women’s work”, abandonment of masculinist violence, community governance, and localized production as solutions to the crises of capitalist industrialization and centralized liberal political economy. His vision was trampled upon and destroyed by the very masculinist violence parading as religious nationalism that he rejected. It set the stage for adoption of the developmentalist agenda by a Congress party headed by Jawaharlal Nehru.
Today, Guyana continues to hone the promise of masculinized national governance and capitalist developmentalism that was rejected by Gandhi. Production by transitory men in the highly masculinized industry of economic extraction forces dependence of women on transactional sex while increasing their vulnerability to gendered violence. This is because (a) of the typically interior location of these industries away from institutionalized forms of regulation of men’s behavior (b) the relative absence of economic opportunities in these interior locations, and (c)_the limited number of women available to cater to the reproductive needs of men. As a result, the shift in Guyana from the primacy of agro-production on the coast where over 90 percent of the population resides to, firstly bauxite and then timber and gold production has produced dramatic increases in violent gendered dependency, particularly among indigenous women, and most recently among women immigrants fleeing the political and economic crises in Venezuela. Oil production adds to these vulnerabilities while generalizing them even further to the rest of the population in the wake of significant increases of foreign male presence and the resultant intensification of highly racialized colonial forms of class differentiation.
“Women’s work” and what Gandhi termed “the government of the village” have become elided into invisibility, notwithstanding the central roles both play in ensuring the survival of the population. In a letter to the editor in one of the country’s newspapers, an internationally recognized women’s organization was dismissed as existing only in the imagination of one of its leaders. This underscores the way masculinized political and economic representations invade popular consciousness. But as avatars of resistance pitted against the blind distortions of masculinity, women, perpetually engaged in the struggle for decolonization, continue to open spaces for permanent transition to a living economy. I would like to leave with this question: Have any of the vaunted (male) economists, charged, by virtue of their professional and technical expertise, with authoring policies for the country that affect the well-being of everyone, ever attempted to measure the value of women’s’ contributions to production and reproduction, whether paid or unpaid? Do their skills and training provide them with the capacities and capabilities to do so? I think not!!
