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

[Rachel Schreiber <rschreib@mica.edu>]

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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