The Vicissitudes of Gender Dialogues

A question I have asked myself many times in these past three years full of photocopied hand-outs, take-home exams, research papers and ridiculous amounts of pages of all varieties: "Where does all this theory finally end, and practice begin?" I have certainly done things that feel like "practice" during this time, such as visiting a local mosque for an anthropology class, or giving the children's message for the Sunday service at my church, or hosting Bible studies and dream workshops at our "secular monastery" of Marlboro College. But instead of feeling like a real researcher, a real church leader, or a real workshop facilitator, I have felt like I am "practicing" in the clumsiest and most endearing sense of the word, and that those participing are kindly humoring me, like my parents and my friends' parents clapping wildly during a dress rehearsal.

I have hoped, of course, that at a certain point my practice will start to feel like the "real world"; perhaps a bit more like praxis, in the sense of gaining knowledge to transform my reality by way of my experience within and through that reality. Now, the moment in which I realized that this is exactly what I'm doing has arrived: at the end of May, I facilitated a gender workshop as part of the Mother's Day celebration of the district church of El Alto, in which approximately 75 women participated, about half of whom spoke little Spanish, and many of whom have struggled with such fundamental obstacles as illiteracy, monolingualism in a non-dominant language, lack of ability to exercise control over family planning, lack of adecuate health care, complete destitution after becoming widows, and physically abusive husbands. I'll admit I came home from this workshop feeling a little demoralized.
I was thinking especially of one of my closest female friend here, Hermana G., and her three-year-old daughter, who was been neglected and underfed by Hermana G.'s married sister while Hermana G. herself, as a single mother, has been making the long and expensive commute from El Alto to La Paz every day to work as the receptionist of the national church's office, and even then she hasn't really been making ends meet. A letter I wrote to a friend the evening I got home from the workshop in El Alto captures what was, for me, a less than triumphant arrival at the reality of "practice":

After I got back to my room, I took out my ukulele and sang that Tom Petty song, "Wildflowers," thinking about my friend G. and all the things I wanted for her: the love on her arm, the wildflowers, the boat sailing far away to somewhere she feels free, somewhere close to me. And I just started crying, because I was thinking about all the difficulties that the women I know here suffer with, and it's not something theoretical anymore, it's not like an anthropological study about "gender inequality," nor can I contemplate "injustice" and "oppression" and blah blah blah as interesting elements in an ethnography... Now it's something I see and I live every day with the women here, and I feel so powerless, and now I don't want to analyze anything, I just want to help. Which is to say, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed!

I guess the old adage "be careful what you wish for" applies here. Moving from theory to practice is famously bloody and messy for a reason: deepening our understanding also deepens our suffering, because when we start digging down to the tender, fragile heart of things, we have to recognize that suffering is an existential fact for all of us who breathe. At the same time, suffering is not the only thing we do when we breathe, and nor is the long-suffering indigenous Bolivian woman, isolated from the "enlightened" gender politics of "Western civilization" (whatever that means), the only image I could paint for you of the women I know here. Some of the women in the workshop, for example, gave fiery presentations after working in small groups to analyze women's suffering and how to transform it, in which they insisted in both Spanish and Aymara upon their ability—and even imperative—to do things that seemingly only men have the right to do.

In the rowdy competitions that followed lunch, other women proved their ability to peel a potato with a kitchen knife in 10 seconds flat, while maintaining the entire skin in tact as a superfluous bonus ability. Equally impressive and equally brief was a hair-braiding match, in which they not only had to braid one side of their long, thick black hair, but they also managed to incorporate the tullma that holds the braids together. Still others got up and rattled off a list of Bible verses, with reference numbers, that I would have been hard pressed to name just one of. One woman, a very young-looking cholita that fascinated me from a distance with a wry smile, a fire in her eyes and a baby boy at her breast, got up and sang the verse of a hymn in the most haunting warble I have ever heard, easily surpassing the eerie, ancient child-likeness of Joanna Newsom's voice.

What lifted my spirits most of all, however, was the gender dialogue we had the next day in the hospedaje, where my fellow female youth affirmed their refusal to live with domestic violence, or even partners who didn't respect them as equals. They insisted on not giving a damn about "el qué dirán" (fear of "the what-will-they-say" that seems to keep women here trapped in all kinds of ridiculously compromising positions), and on doing what makes them happy in life, above all. Near the outset of the dialogue, Hermana B., who is an odd bird of a Bolivian woman, raised by American missionaries after her parents gave up on her because of eye problems, and now the spunky and content single mother of the most delightful 8-month-old girl I've ever met, announced: "I don't want to focus on women's suffering and problems. I want to talk about what's good about women! I want to talk about solutions to these problems!" We finished with a plan to have informal dialogues to share our strength, along with the delicious coconut cookies of my panadero casero (my preferred baker up the street) every Saturday night. Hermana B. and others were enthusiastic about dragging along their women friends who were stuck on unworthy men, so that they would be inspired to value themselves more highly.

What gender rules would you like to break?

- Let's not be timid --> Let's be brave

- Let's not be submissive --> Let's have confidence in ourselves

- Let's not be dependent --> 50/50 with men

- Let's break the total authority of men --> Our opinion MATTERS!

- There shouldn't be any inequality in the labor of survival/reproduction

[Solutions]

- Bringing workshops to rural areas

- Talks, support groups and dialogues

- Campaigns for legal and psychological support

- Radio in rural areas

- Literacy [training] ([but] first workshops in self-esteem, [to encourage value of participating in literacy workshops])

- Talks for men [top priority]

- Integrated trainings [on gender equality] for teachers

We also finished with a satisfying whiteboard-list of gender norms we wish to transform or break, and concrete actions we could take to make these things happen. I found myself thinking: Why am I even leaving Bolivia? Why don't I just stay here and start working on radio campaigns to be disseminated through rural Aymara radio stations, and workshops for school teachers and church leaders on how to put gender equality into daily practice rather than just rhetoric and written policy? As you might suspect, I was soon reminded of why I am not ready to stay in Bolivia and Change the World: This is some complicated shit. I am 23 years old, with 3 years of undergraduate education under my belt, and I still have a heck of a lot more theory to learn and go along weaving into my practice. For example, what do I do with the fact that at every workshop I've facilitated, in almost every interview I've carried out, and even in many casual conversations I've had about gender inequality here, women cite the primary cause of gender inequality as women themselves? In the dialogue in the hospedaje, my assistant Rossío, along with Hermana B., insisted that the valiantly tolerant battered wife and sacrificed mother stays in such a situation and suffers not because it's actually better for her children, but because she wants to suffer. Other women have pointed out that mothers are often the most consistent and insistent inculcators of machismo in their sons, by the way they divide up household labor and discourage care-taking or sentimentality in boys. Still others have blamed women for men's dominance in public discourse, as women themselves willingly hand the reins over to the men, preferring not to risk saying something stupid in public, nor to push themselves to become better-educated or to develop leadership skills when men already seem to fill those roles just fine, thank you.

When I hear these things, I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of how to approach gender inequality. On the one hand, I know these assessments of women's own fault (and own choice) in perpetuating gender inequality are in many ways true, and I feel at a loss as to how to approach women who are fully complicit with the mechanisms of their oppression, or whether I should even be so presumptuous as to assume such women need liberating from their oppression in the first place. On the other hand, like the good post-modernist ivory-tower-dweller that I am, I know that oppressive structures maintain themselves through hegemony, which is to say, through convincing the masses of the naturalness and even goodness of their own dehumanization. In this sense, I wonder how to approach those women who blame their mothers, sisters and best friends for tolerating deplorable inequalities and mistreatment, when it is not so much a personal choice that these women have made as it is the result of a complex structure of power plays, psychological molding and unequal footing in struggles for basic survival needs. How do I convince these harsh critics of their own gender to walk the delicate line between challenging other women's complicity with gender inequality, and fruitlessly blaming the victim for all her problems? Moreover, how do I learn to walk that line?

But the biggest challenge, perhaps, is not with convincing women of whether, or how, to change their gender's position in society, but rather with involving men in this project. Blaming women for their own suffering is a temptingly clear and manageable analysis of their situation, but it takes (at least) two to dance the dance of inequality, and men's reinforcement of gender inequality, whether overt or subtle, conscious or unconscious, is just as important a factor to address. Furthermore, we can educate, empower, boost and support women all the live long day, but if nothing is done to shift men's perspectives and practices, women will keep running up against the same problems, as if we were building a house of sand too close to the sea during low tide and kept having to build it all over again every time the tide rises.

This is why I, as the good transplant into Andean culture that I am, have elaborated my research plans around doing everything in complementary gender pairs. After carrying out dialogues with the women in the hospedaje with the help of my two female research assistants, I turned with equal energy and attention to carrying out dialogues with the men, with the help of my two male research assistants. I wanted to carry this out in such a way that the men involved were challenged to think about their own participation in the mechanisms of gender inequality, and furthermore to think about how rigid gender roles limit their full self-expression as human beings. At the same time, I wanted them to feel they could speak honestly and freely about their perspectives, rather than feeling like they had to heap praise on women or on the project of gender equality. Thus, I decided to entrust Eddy and Rober with carrying out the dialogue without my presence, being that I imagined the fact of my having a vagina could produce an automatically hampering effect on the confianza between the men in the room. However, Eddy, Rober and I prepared the dialogue together, editing my explanations of concepts and theories, choosing Biblical readings to serve as parting points for discussion, and drawing up discussion questions and activities. I also gave the two a brief lesson in how to facilitate a dialogue according to my methodology. One morning on a national holiday, we managed to awake and drag down to the sala some eight or so of the hospedaje boys, and I set them to work dialoging while I washed my clothes in the sinks outside. As had happened with the women's dialogue, they couldn't finish all of it in the time allotted, and a night after their classes the next week, we dragged another similar-sized group to my room to complete the last reading and activity (though this time, dragging wasn't so much the imperative verb as sheepherding, which is the only way to describe the way I got them to move from the parking lot up the stairs to my room, with the help of a large woolen blanket I had wrapped around me to keep warm).

As might be expected from their reluctance to physically move their bodies to the space of the dialogue, the men weren't quite as enthusiastic or thoughtful in their responses as I would've liked. This past Saturday, I listened to the recordings of the dialogues just before a meeting with my research assistants to plan the final, co-ed dialogue the next day, and I felt more discouraged about my research than in any other moment here. Part of the problem, I realized, was my assistants' lack of understanding and ability to clarify the theoretical concepts they presented, which made me realize think it was perhaps a mistake that I decided not to be present. On the other hand, a factor that neither I nor my research assistants could control was that all of the men participating maintained an uncritical denial of the existence of any significant problems with gender inequality "hoy en día" (in this day and age).

As far as the conceptual misunderstandings went, at one point an activity asked the participants to reflect in examples of men they knew who had abused their position of privilege and advantage to discriminate against women. This seemed to be too big a concept for the boys to bite off and chew, so Eddy and Rober, bless their hearts, essentially simplified it to asking how men abuse their physical force against women, which needless to say did not return a very nuanced and critical representation of the mechanisms of gendered injustice, and it certainly did not offer any examples of gender inequality in which these basically good-kid evangelical Christian boys could recognize their own participation. At another point, the questions we had written were trying to get the participants to think about how they are, in fact, also limited and dehumanized by their gender roles. We had selected the Bible Reading in which Jesus washes his disciples' feet and another in which he professes the primary importance of servitude and humility in the spiritual path. The ensuing questions were designed to get the men thinking about what would change if they actually modeled themselves off of such behavior and teachings, which are rather quite feminine according to Bolivian cultural norms, as well as many cultures all over the world. However, instead of considering the fact that women are already the humble servants of church and society, most of the men in the dialogue came to the conclusion that if they all acted more like Jesus, they would set examples for the women to also take up such a noble task.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the dialogue was that when Eddy and Rober asked for examples of the differences between men and women according to this cultural context, most of the men failed even to elaborate such givens as women's place in the house and men's place at work, or women's sentimentality and men's stoicism. Most of them simply said, "Really, hoy en día, there is no difference between men and women. Women have all the same rights and can do all the same things men do." Being that I had just finished reading a laborious, 175-page sociological report on the gender breach in all aspects of Bolivian society, with indicators that women politicians are customarily sexually harassed so that they will be intimidated into stepping down from their position, that in the majority of couples it is the man who has control over family planning, and that seven of every ten women experience or have experienced violence in the home, this response on the part of my hermanos in the hospedaje made me want to bang my head against the wall. Nonetheless, I realize that the problem is a structural one; just as women who seem to choose to remain in a position of subordination and suffering can't be personally blamed for this choice, men can't be personally blamed for not examining critically and withdrawing from a system of inequality that composes the air they've simply always breathed. As I have become accustomed to pointing out, you'd be hard-pressed to find a man who wakes up in the morning and says, "You know what? I think I'm going to go out and oppress some women today!" (If you do happen to know such a man, please send him my way, because he would make a fascinating interview subject.) Nonetheless, even if it is no man's intention as such, the fact that even basically decent men engage in concrete actions and behaviors that serve to oppress women is undeniable, and must be addressed if we're going to move forward with this whole Changing the World and Bringing the Kingdom of God to Reign in the Here and Now project. Thus, my discouragement after listening to the men's gender dialogues wasn't so much that I had wanted to come out with certain responses or even a certain level of participation for the sake of my research, because my job as a researcher is just to watch everything happen however it happens and say, "How interesting. Men don't give a damn about gender inequality. How very interesting." The thing is, I really care about this place, this church, these women and these men. As idealistic as it may be, I want to see significant positive change unfold here in terms of gender roles, and I want to be a part of making it happen. As I have suggested previously in this blog, if I am involved in this context only to pick apart and analyze these people and write a good thesis about them, I've done little more than waste their time. I am here, above all, to live with these people, to grow with these people, and to help and learn mutually from each other.

Thus, I was honest with my research assistants about my deflation before the apathetic male contingent of our Methodist Hospedaje Center, but I wasn't mad. Eddy and Rosmery were my only two research assistants who were able to make it to the meeting on Saturday. They sat side by side on my bed, sleepy-eyed, serious and sweet, across from my weary, crestfallen form slumped in my desk chair. They suggested that the best thing to do at this point was postpone the final dialogue and do another one with the men, with better planning and the presence of a facilitator who could speak with more authority on the subject and was more used to leading things like this. Fortunately, later that same day, I convinced Hermano J., the national coordinator of the Federación de Juventud Metodista (FEJUME, the Methodist Youth Federation) to collaborate with us on preparing another dialogue for the men and to help Eddy and Rober facilitate it, which will hopefully solve the problem of needing a more experienced and leader-like presence without having to introduce the presence of any vaginas.

Now that I have recovered from my initial discouragement, I have realized it's also important to bear in mind that in the end, things like gender dialogues are just more rhetoric. The things that people say there, whether they are the kinds of things a gender studies student like myself likes to hear or loathes to hear, are not necessarily direct transmissions of the complex realities people live. Granted, dialogues can certainly help elaborate and clarify cultural ideals, and they can also help concientizar the participants and thus eventually change practices and entire realities. Nevertheless, the most significant factor is how we, as men and women, actually relate to each other on a day-to-day basis, and how we might implement change into habits that seem as old as time. As Eddy is always saying, "Gender inequality comes from antes (before), from our ancestors, from the way it's always been." Whether or not it's true that this is the way it's "always been," it's certainly true that it feels like it's always been this way. But stereotypes, social structures and cultural norms aren't people. People are much more mercurial, quirky, adaptable and ultimately joyful in their daily lives. Maybe gender theorists would have much to say about how the woman in El Alto who won the potato-peeling contest is seriously, tragically limited to only being able to find her worth in menial domestic tasks, but that devilish grin on her face as she stripped that potato naked and let a perfect, continuous spiral of skin drop to the ground was enough to convince me that she genuinely does find joy in her everyday potato-peeling life.

Thus, setting up columns, charts and theses in the style of the sociological study I read, to compare the differences between men's and women's opinions as voiced in a gender dialogue is only a tiny part of the story of how they relate to each other, love each other and infuriate each other "in this day and age." This is why I am so interested in courtship, romantic relationships, and marriage among the church youth (apart from the topic being obviously befitting of such an unmarried, overdramatic and helplessly flirtatious young lady as myself). Of course, these concrete interactions are much harder to analyze articulately than are the opinions expressed in a dialogue or the solidified experiences, already lived and transformed into cohesive little stories like lucky charms on a chain, that people are willing to share with me in interviews. From my observations of romance and courtship here, which I am always somehow emotionally invested in, since I am only privy to those experiences of the people closest to me, I seem to come away only with more hardened, silvery little charms for my own chain. For example:

• Providing the lyrics of "Sea of Love" to Eddy so that he can send the girl he is in love with a cryptic text message in English, then teaching his sharp, linguistically-apt tongue to sing the song itself as we wait wrapped in wool blankets against the bitter cold night at the corner of a desolate highway and a dirt road, hoping for a truck to appear to take us to the pueblo of said girl for a youth encounter.
• The mock fights, flirtatious jokes and reciprocal food-sharing that transpires between boys and girls in the kitchen, and the boys shaking their heads and saying, "It's more the men who cook these days," while the girls come down once in awhile with their bags of potatoes from their pueblos and giggle secrets amongst themselves.

• The now-predictable custom of stealing a girl's cell phone to rile her up, snoop around in her text messages, and provoke an entirely welcome wrestling match in order for her to retrieve it.

• The all-to-obvious clothes-washing strategy, in which you pass by the object of your affection washing his or her clothes at the sinks outside, and you suddenly remember that you really ought to get to washing your own clothes too, and when you reappear with your bundle, the object of your affection obligingly pushes his or her clothes out of the way so that you can share between you the two sinks, the cold water and the questions about what you like and who you are.

Meanwhile, the older women in their little makeshift church kitchens keep peeling away at their potatoes, dishing out heaping plates of potatoes, ch'uño, rice and meat, and trying to marry me off to their sons, then laughing and laughing when I finally tell them that I'm 23 years old and I really don't think a 15-year-old boy is a suitable marriage choice for me.