Looking back on this reflection as a senior:
I wrote this reflection after our GEM 205 Story Circle activity with the American University of Cairo, in which we shared thoughts and ideas with a group of AUC students over Zoom. One of the topics that came up in my group was feminism. I discovered that while Americans thought of Egypt as a sexist society in comparison to the U.S, my Egyptian groupmates thought of themselves in a similar position of superior feminist advancement in relation to Saudi Arabia.
Something I thought about while writing this reflection was the principle of cultural relativism, which I already understood to some degree; however, looking back on it, I can see that my application here was in some ways shallow. For example, my reflection focuses on “political and legal rights” for women, and begins to think critically about the Western feminist gaze, but still does not deconstruct the idea of a hierarchy of “feminist’ and “less feminist” countries. Now, I feel more equipped to recognize this nuance. One example of this thinking is analyzing different cultural experiences of motherhood. In my African women’s history class, we talked about how motherhood is regarded as a great honor and has always been a source of power for women in societies across the continent. However, in the U.S., motherhood is sometimes viewed as a hindrance to more “empowering” things, such as career pursuits. Cultures that emphasize motherhood and cultures that view it as burdensome may both see the other’s attitude towards motherhood as degrading and disrespectful. I have also since been on the receiving end of cross cultural feminist concerns: in Spain, I discovered that surrogacy was considered oppressive and dangerous for women and was illegal, in contrast to its normalization in the U.S., about which I hadn’t thought twice. At the end of the day, no single viewpoint is “correct” — both raise valid questions about attitudes towards women in a given society. While I was “on the right track” at the time of this reflection, I feel that I needed to step outside of American ideas of what is or is not “oppressive to women” or important to feminist struggles in a given context; something I now feel more equipped to do.
