The National Coalition for Immigrant Women’s Rights (NCIWR) is a coalition—led by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH), the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), and the National Organization for Women (NOW)—that puts the needs of immigrant women at the center of the immigration-reform debate. While in recent years the percentage of female immigrants coming into the United States has amplified tremendously, debates continue to center on this profile of the immigrant: a single Latino male, coming over to work in agriculture and construction, who sends money home to his native country. In reality, women and children are crossing the border as well in higher and higher numbers, and their needs are distinctly different from those of single men.
In addition to advocating for national, state, and local policy changes, organizations like NLIRH and NAPAWF also work to place immigrant women themselves at the center of organizing for reproductive justice. NLIRH works with groups of women around the country, particularly in larger immigrant communities (like those near the Texas/Mexico border), to ensure that their voices and needs are part of these immigration-reform discussions. NAPAWF’s “Rights to Survival and Mobility: An Anti-Trafficking Activist’s Agenda” provides a tool for grassroots activists to use to combat trafficking in their communities. The guide outlines the complexities of human trafficking and the API community, a broad-based anti-trafficking agenda, and steps for activists to take in organizing in their communities. Tools like these take complex issues and attempt to educate and spread awareness about the abuses immigrant women face, while leading individuals toward action. It is crucial that work that prioritizes immigrant women has their voices and perspectives at its center.
A number of laws have been passed that also attempt to protect immigrant women from abuse. Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and those mentioned above have been an important part of the process of passing this legislation. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) try to protect immigrant women from abuses by offering them a path to citizenship if they are victims of intimate-partner violence or trafficking. IMBRA attempted to regulate the international bride industry and protect women entering into those agreements. Federal sterilization guidelines passed in 1979 as a direct result of organizing around the sterilization abuses Mexican-origin women in Los Angeles faced have also tried to protect immigrant women (and all women) from coercive sterilization by mandating informed-consent procedures. While these pieces of legislation are an important tool in the arsenal to combat violence against immigrant women, they alone are not enough to protect women, many of whom do not know about these laws or have access to the legal services needed to use them.
Community activists have also long been involved in the work to stem abuses against immigrant women. As part of labor movements, nationalist movements, and immigration-reform efforts, grassroots activists have been fighting against the abuses that immigrant women face. The U.S./Mexico border has been a particularly active site of resistance and organizing, on both sides of the border. Women in Ciudad Juárez have been speaking about the murders of countless numbers of women there, as have organizations and activists in California and Texas. A group of domestic workers in Maryland has been organizing against abuses by diplomats in conjunction with CASA de Maryland, providing support and resources to women in these domestic-worker arrangements. Bloggers of color have also been writing and speaking publicly about these abuses to draw attention to them. Blogger Brownfemipower
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has written about immigration abuses in the Latina community for the last three years, as have a slew of other writers, including The Unapologetic Mexican
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and numerous reporters and organizations.
What does a world without rape look like for immigrant women? These forms of sexual violence are inextricably linked to issues of race, class, and gender. Immigrant women will not be free from rape until we see economic justice, until all people have access to living-wage jobs, education, healthcare services, and safe living environments. Activist movements are restructuring the frameworks we use to organize to emphasize this intersectionality and the need for cross-movement work. The reproductive justice movement (led by organizations like Asian Communities for reproductive justice, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, SisterSong Reproductive Justice Collective, and others) focuses on how all of these aspects of a woman’s life are intertwined and must be taken into account in order to effect change.
Reclaiming female sexual power means reclaiming immigrant women’s position within the larger social institutions. Movements of sex-positivity—particularly those that have gained popularity among U.S. feminists—aren’t enough to combat this type of sexualized violence against immigrant women. These movements do not have the same resonance in immigrant communities, nor necessarily the same efficacy, for reasons of cultural differences as well as race and class dynamics. Sexual autonomy, respect for one’s body, embracing sexual pleasure, and diversity are all well and good but do not serve women in economically vulnerable situations, who do not have the freedom to make decisions for themselves, who face the obstacles of oppression from various fronts. We have to combat the forms of institutionalized violence that facilitate these abuses; we have to work to place the most marginalized populations at the center of our organizing and move beyond overly individualistic strategies.
If you want to read more about FIGHT THE POWER, try:
• Invasion of Space by a Female BY COCO FUSCO
• The Not-Rape Epidemic BY LATOYA PETERSON
• Who’re You Calling a Whore?: A Conversation with Three Sex Workers on Sexuality, Empowerment, and the Industry BY SUSAN LOPEZ, MARIKO PASSION, SAUNDRA
If you want to read more about RACE RELATING, try:
• Queering Black Female Heterosexuality BY KIMBERLY SPRINGER
• What It Feels Like When It Finally Comes: Surviving Incest in Real Life BY LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA
• When Pregnancy Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Be Pregnant BY TILOMA JAYASINGHE
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Trial by Media: Black Female Lasciviousness and the Question of Consent
I said it must be ya ass
cause it ain’t yo face
I need a tip drill
I need a tip drill
Said if you see a tip drill point her out
where she at point her out
where she at point her out there she go
Nelly, “Tipdrill”
IN NELLY’S CONTROVERSIAL TRACK “Tipdrill,” he describes the kind of woman he is looking for, a “tipdrill,” a woman who is unattractive but has sex for money, also a reference to a woman who has a nice ass but an “ugly” face. It is a term commonly used in strip clubs to describe a certain dancing position where a woman stands on her hands and then the man “drills” the tip of his penis in between her buttocks, without actual penetration.
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This song is just one piece of popular culture that reinforces the belief that women of color’s bodies are for the purpose of consumption—they do not have the same standing as human beings that other citizens of the United States might be granted. Representations of women of color in the media are based in the belief that women of color’s sexuality is so potent that the only role for them is to be sexualized. As far as the mainstream media is concerned, women of color don’t own their own sexuality. Someone else does—be it men, corporate interests, culture, or the law—and it’s those parties that get to determine the parameters of how it will be expressed. This complicated fissure of sexuality, consent, seduction, and repression comes to a head in the coverage of rape trials about black women.
Representations of rape in the mainstream media are often jarring and inadequate, and are usually biased. With headlines like “Girl Who Cried Rape”
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and “She Was Asking for It,”
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depictions of rape cases that are not drenched in misogyny or racist stereotypes are hard to come by. As feminists we have to be extra careful of the way the media depicts a rape trial, because it affects not only the way the trial turns out but also the greater culture of rape. Mainstream media coverage almost always puts the burden of proof on women to prove that a rape—or a series of rapes, torture, sexual slavery, or any of the other forcible sex crimes women face—did in fact occur (as opposed to in burglary or other types of cases, in which the focus is more likely on proving who is guilty of the crime committed, as opposed to proving that the victim has been robbed. The hyperobjectifying focus on women’s bodies as the crime scene is also unique to rape cases. In the rare occurrence that a rape trial makes the front page, it is either the “too drunk” or “scantily clad” girl who must have been asking for it, the woman who was viciously violated by poor or brown men, or the black woman who was probably lying. Race and gender intersect in the media, and the stories told draw readily from the bank of racist and misogynist images we have available to create characters and narratives for us.
Rape cases that are “tried” through the media have a great impact on the way that violence against women is treated in the criminal justice system and in our greater culture. It is the mainstream media that sets the agenda for how we will discuss rape. There are a handful of overused narratives that tend to depict the rape of women of color. One of them is that if a woman of color is raped, she was lying about it and doing it for money. This was certainly true in the coverage of Tawana Brawley, as well as in the infamous Duke University rape case. Another readily used story is that if a woman of color is raped, it is due to the savage nature of men of color—which can be seen in the coverage of the rape of women in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or the 1989 case of the Central Park jogger. Women of color are constructed as two opposing types of beings: the overtly sexual woman of color who was asking for it, or the innocent victim who needs protection from the men in her own horridly misogynistic community. Both frames position white sexuality as the “good” sexuality that is not overt, is respectful, and can protect women of all races.
Current U.S. rape laws make proving assault very difficult in most states, where, often because of the difficulty of preserving evidence, it becomes “he said” versus “she said.” Historically, rape laws have been blatantly sexist. Up until the late twentieth century, it was legal for a man to rape his wife because she was considered his property. There is a much different trajectory to the protection of black women’s bodies. Given the history of slavery and oppression, all black women’s bodies were, and, I would argue, still are, considered objects and possessions. It was accepted in law and culture that a black woman did not have any rights as a human because
she was not considered a human.
As a result, raping a black woman was not illegal, since she didn’t have any rights of personhood. Furthermore, there was an assumption not only that her body couldn’t be violated because of her subhuman “animal” status, but also that she was always consenting, due to her seductive nature. In her seminal piece “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” Saidiya Hartman takes to task this cultural assumption and pushes this idea of a “discourse of seduction,” which is the “confusion between consent and coercion, feeling and submission, intimacy and domination, and violence and reciprocity.” The enslavement of black women’s bodies, compounded with the belief in their inherent seduction, has made the rape of black women illegible in the legal system to this day.
The use and abuse of black women’s bodies for rape and sexual abuse set a precedent in which black women’s bodies have no personhood unto themselves, but instead exist only in relation to repression—for consumption, entertainment, ownership, and abuse, not citizenship. Technically, it is illegal to rape a black woman, since rape is officially illegal. However, the cultural legacy of previous laws has maintained a set of conditions, including dominant narratives, structural inequities, class inequities, and cultural practices, that make it difficult for black women to prove they have been raped.
The rape of women of color rarely makes the front page of any national newspaper. When it does, the trend is to perpetuate dangerous myths that blame the victim, such as the false idea that there is “gray rape” (which, according to
Cosmopolitan,
“falls somewhere in between consent and denial”); the notion that the survivor “was dressed slutty” or “asking for it”; and even the myth that sex workers or women of color can’t get raped—because they’re hypersexual, their bodies are readily available. Each one of these myths, and others, is consistently reinforced by the mainstream media—with consequences that reverberate throughout our culture. In a trial by media, it is not a matter of the severity of the crime. The question is not what happened, it is what she did to make it happen. This fact is further complicated in the domain of sex work. As Nelly captures so perfectly, if your body is only for the purpose of male pleasure, your face doesn’t matter and neither does your personhood. So, in the case of a displaced black female body, her objectification is inherent. Sex work, exotic dancing, and other forms of entertainment are assumed roles for black women to play in this context, so naturally they can’t be violated in these roles.