Diarra Sadji
Professor W. Scott Olsen
IWC 100
8 October 2021
Sexism and Intersectionality in It’s What I Do
Sexism indicates any prejudice, discrimination or injustice that women encounter because they are women. All women around the world experience sexism. However, they all experience it differently due to the contrasts in their identities such as race, religion or nationality. That leads to the idea of intersectionality.
Intersectionality is the term used for the complexity of discriminations experienced by some people because of the overlap of their marginalized identities. When a person with multiple marginalized identities experiences prejudice, it is often due to the simultaneous combination of those identities. These two ideas appear in the book written by Lynsey Addario, It’s What I Do.
It’s What I Do is a memoir published by Penguin Books in 2015. It highlights the life of a photojournalist, Lynsey Addario, who witnessed, photographed and wrote about multiple wars from Afghanistan to Darfur. She also documents the condition of women in different parts of the world leading to discovering how other women experience sexism differently than her. These themes are shown all along the book, but the following five scenes in the book particularly treat them: when Lynsey was taught to be less confident, the assault of Lynsey by Pakistani men, the meeting of Lynsey with Haji Namdar, the encounter of Lynsey with Afghan women and the visit of Lynsey to the women who were victims of the Congolese civil war.
BEING LESS CONFIDENT
After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Lynsey travelled to Peshawar in Pakistan, in order to be the closest possible to Afghanistan to document the situation when the American military would attack the country. While waiting for that attack, Lynsey was covering the situation in Pakistan before their neighbours were attacked. She realised that her presence there was more and more dangerous as a female American photojournalist and Taliban could attack her and her colleagues shortly. She and her colleague Alyssa decided to wear burqas as disguises in order to not be recognised by the Taliban. However, one of their female interpreters tells them wearing a burqa goes along with a specific walking style they needed to learn in order to make themselves more credible. The interpreter says: “ ‘You American women are too self-confident. Humble. Be humble’ ” (Addario 75). Lynsey and her colleague had to act as vulnerable and fragile in order to be believed as Pakistani women, which was an unusual situation as she says: “She tried to strip away the self-confidence we had spent years building up” (75).
This scene shows how Lynsey as a white American female lives so much differently than the women she was trying to imitate. She did not have to put herself down throughout her life and could build her self-confidence, opportunity not given to the Pakistani women. She realises that her experience as a white American woman with sexism was nothing like what women in Pakistan lived, they were more affected by it. She then was in a situation where she must reduce her self-confidence to reach her goals and be able to take pictures.
It is interesting how Lynsey has the privilege to go back to her normal life: “ … and flew almost nine thousand miles back Mexico City” (77), after acting like marginalised Pakistani women just to do her work while those women are obligated to live that way in their daily life as they do not have the option to pick and choose how they want to act. For Lynsey, this was just a behaviour she could adopt whenever it was in her advantage. While on the other side, Pakistani women under Taliban throughout their whole life had to belittle themselves, feel small and inferior towards males.
ASSAULTED BY PAKISTANI MEN
Just like in the previous scene, Lynsey and her fellow journalists are in Pakistan to be close to Afghanistan, waiting for the American army to attack, and to observe the situation in Pakistan in those moments. One of the situations present in Peshawar was the protest of Pakistanis, openly showing their hate for America and President Bush. While Lynsey was trying to take pictures of that event, she was detected as a foreign woman and the men present in that protest did not prevent themselves from assaulting her. But Lynsey says: “I tried not to make a scene in front of my peers. I didn’t want my gender to determine whether or not I could cover breaking news, so I continued photographing, ignoring the sweeping of hand on my butt, the occasional grab” (73). She did not want her gender to be a barrier to her work and ignored the assaults. The assaults eventually increased. She tried to stop them by saying “Haram”, which means forbidden, but that did not work.
In this scene, Lynsey is in a situation where her gender constitutes a problem in her work. Pakistani men did not see anything in Lynsey but a sexual object to feel some sort of pleasure. Lynsey also experiences intersectionality in that situation as she says: “They perceived foreign women based on what they saw in movies, often porn movies: easy and available” (73). Those men dared to touch Lynsey because she was a foreign woman. This would not be the case if they perceived her as a Muslim woman. This shows that intersectionality is not a fixed concept, permanently excluding some people from experiencing it. It can be experienced in different situations by different people. Although Lynsey was white and American, she still experienced intersectionality in this specific situation where both her gender and her origins simultaneously played a role in the assault she lived.
The fact that even after Lynsey said “Haram” to the men who were assaulting her they continued what they were doing also indicates different aspects of sexism. The Pakistani men would not allow “their women” to be touched or seen but they did not hold back from sexually harassing other women as long as they were foreign and non-Muslim. She says: “ ‘Haram! Don’t you have sisters? Mothers? Aren’t you Pakistani men Muslim? Would you allow another man to treat your sister or mother like this’ ” (Addario 74). These men were perpetuating two different types of sexism: one where they considered women as their property and would not allow anyone from approaching them and another one where their respect for women is so low that they only considered them as sexual elements. Those two sexisms have in common one thing: in both, women are not considered as less than human beings and are objectified.
At the end of the scene, Lynsey runs away from the protest into the car where she found her fellow male journalists and she says: “… all of them smitten with their afternoon’s work, checking the backs of their digital cameras for their prizewinning photographs, completely oblivious to what I had gone through to compose even one frame”(74). Her male colleagues were not bothered to think about the struggles of a woman in this situation because well, they are not affected by the issue. They therefore have the luxury to overlook what Lynsey had to go through in order to accomplish her job, showing the amount of privilege these men have.
BEING THE PROPERTY OF SOMEONE
In this scene, Lynsey returns to Peshawar several years after she went in 2001 to document the way Taliban was gradually taking over Pakistan. She went to Peshawar with her friend Dexter who was at the time working for the New York Times Magazine. Lynsey was accompanied by a driver, Raza, in order to help her sneak into places where she – as a non-Muslim, single, foreign woman – was forbidden. For Raza to help her, they had strategies: “Raza dressed me up as his wife and sneaked me into the Swat Valley to photograph secret girls’ schools that had recently opened after the Taliban closed schools in the valley…” (Addario 197). When Dex and Lynsey had a meeting with the Taliban leader Haji Namdar, Lynsey also had to find a camouflage because of Haji Namdar’s order: “You cannot bring a woman with you” (Addario 198). In this case too, Lynsey had to be the wife of someone (Dex here) in order to do what she wants to do. As she says: “I was always being dressed up as someone’s wife” (198).
In this situation, Lynsey, as any woman in that environment, cannot accomplish what she wants to unless being under the guardianship of a male. This reflects the sexism present in the Taliban culture. Women are just considered as properties, they had to be “owned” by a male whether it is their father or husband. No woman can be independent, going by herself. Lynsey would not realise that until she dived in this environment for her job. She temporarily experiences what women in the Taliban territories experience every day as she goes back to her home later on: “…Paul and I flew back to Istanbul…” (Addario 209), which is completely different from how she grew up and how she lived previously.
This scene is similar to the one where she needed to get an Afghan visa and where she met Mouhamed. Lynsey wanted to enter the Afghan territories in order to document the situation of women in there. When she went to the Afghan embassy in Pakistan, the embassy officer, Mohamed, asked her if she is married and she says: “ ‘Yes, married,’ I said. ‘With two boys back in New York’ ” (Addario 44). Although Lynsey was not married, she lied so her marital status would not jeopardise her access to an Afghan visa. The importance of being under the responsibility of a male for the Taliban is shown in this scene. For them, females cannot just travel independently without eventually being attached to a male and Lynsey knew that.
Although Lynsey is in an uncomfortable and unusual position, she says: “I often found that some of the biggest extremists were open to meeting with women so long as we were not their women” (198). Lynsey was given the opportunity to meet the Taliban commander because she was not from the Taliban territories. The previous quotation shows that even the small freedom given to Lynsey to meet that commander would not be granted to a woman from the Taliban territories. Intersectionality appears here as Lynsey possesses the privilege to be able to meet Haji Namdar because she was Western. She even says: “Western female journalists didn’t have to abide by either male or female traditions, and I assumed they had given up trying to figure us out a long ago” (Addario 199). Lynsey was not categorised as an ordinary female and was not treated as such because she was not Pakistani or Afghan. Therefore, she still could not relate to the experience of women under Taliban regime because of the differences in their identities.
ENCOUNTER WITH AFGHAN WOMEN
Before 9/11 attacks, Lynsey succeeded to sneak in Afghanistan. In that era, Afghanistan was under Taliban and Lynsey wanted to take pictures of women in that place and document their situation. While she was there, she met a woman called Anisa who was working for UN. Anisa helped her to meet some Afghan women who were secretly running a small community where necessitous women were taught how to sew, to knit, to weave etc. The women she met were educated and at that moment, they were not wearing their burqas.
Lynsey mentions: “It still surprised me to see an actual living being under the tomblike burqa” (57). This quotation shows how the burqas the Afghan women were wearing was so unusual and strange to Lynsey. But then one of the women she met said: “ ‘Wearing a burqa is not a problem,’ another said. ‘It is not being able to work that is the problem’” (Addario 57). Lynsey thought the burqa was the worst problem Afghan women were facing, completely ignoring that those women were not able to provide the most basic needs. “ ‘…In each house in Afghanistan, though, the women are the poorest of the family. The only thing they think of is how to feed their children…’ ” (Addario 57), one of the women said. Afghan women were facing problems to feed themselves and their children, to meet their vital needs, they did not care about whether they were covered or not. But because Lynsey was not in that position and she was not facing those problems, she was not able to detect that the burqa was not the most urgent matter.
This issue can be related to the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy of needs places physiological needs such as food and water and safety at the bottom of the pyramid and the esteem needs higher in the pyramid (ThoughtCo). Lynsey perceived the burqa as a barrier of self-expression and freedom which would increase self-esteem. She was so focused on that because she did not have to worry about being fed or being safe. She already had the basic needs at the bottom of the pyramid therefore, she was paying more attention to the problem of wearing a burqa. On the other side, Afghan women could not provide themselves those basic needs, they had problems to feed themselves and their children, to ensure their safety from the Taliban, to financially be able to survive. They therefore did not perceive the burqa as a problem. Lynsey did not face the problems Afghan women faced, which comes back to the idea of intersectionality. The difference within their specific backgrounds makes them perceive and experience differently gender-related issues.
This is also an example of white feminism, which describes the feminism focused on the gender-related problems encountered by white women and ignoring all the other issues experienced by women who have less privilege (Terra Incognita). Lynsey, as a white woman, was unintentionally overlooking the problems Afghan women, as less-privileged women, were facing because Lynsey herself does not experience those problems. Intersectionality makes Afghan women experience a different and more serious type of sexism than Lynsey experiences because they are not Western and/or white. However, that was not obvious to Lynsey because she was not living those problems.
Lynsey eventually realizes these issues as she says: “Everything they said surprised me. It had been naïve of me to think that, given all the repression women in Afghanistan were facing – their inability to work or get an education – wearing a burqa would be high on their list of complains” (58). She also says: “The women also put my life of privilege, opportunity, independence, and freedom into perspective. As an American woman, I was spoiled: to work, to make decisions, to be independent, to have relationships with men, to feel sexy, to fall in love, to fall out of love, to travel” (Addario 58). The talk she had with these women opened her eyes and she dawns on the privilege she has, allowing her to not have to think and worry about all the issues Afghan women were facing.
CONGOLESE WOMEN USED AS WAR WEAPONS
In 2006, Lynsey had the opportunity to visit women who were victims of sexual assault during the civil war that took place in Congo. These women were specifically located in North and South Kivu like many civilians who migrated. Lynsey explains that women were used in the civil war by either the rebel or government soldiers as weapons. Those soldiers were raping the women to install fear in the population, to attack the enemy. The victims would often be left with various diseases such as HIV or fistulas. They would also be abandoned by their families, ashamed. (Addario147)
Lynsey was moved by the stories of these women who were not reluctant to tell her their stories. She wanted to do something for these women. She says: “I felt there was very little I could do for the women in DRC but record their stories. I hoped awareness of their suffering might somehow save them” (147). She wanted people to know what these women were going through and do something about it. That was her vocation.
She realizes that these women experience sexism, in one of the most extreme ways. She says: “I interviewed dozens and dozens of African women who had endured more hardship and trauma than most Westerns even read about, and they plowed on” (148). People do not care about issues until they are affected by them, by seeing them or experiencing them. Lynsey wanted everyone to be aware of what these women have gone through and are going through by her pictures.
These women were born in the wrong place at the wrong time as Lynsey says: “So many women were casualties of their birthplace” (148). They were only considered as sexual weapons to fight enemies, their humanhood was disregarded. They were not just women, but Congolese women who lived during the civil war. The sexism they experience has different proportions than the one experienced by women elsewhere.
CONCLUSION
Through her multiple travels, Lynsey observed women from different backgrounds and cultures. She comprehended that women from other countries live various types of sexism. In most cases, the women she met were denied the most basic and vital needs and were treated less than actual people. In the first three scenes analyzed, Lynsey herself partially experiences being a female in the environments she visited while in the two last scenes, she could communicate with those and was directly informed on how those women were feeling. Her journey in those different places woke her up from her previous conception of sexism as a Western woman and opened her eyes on the different injustices lived by women in other countries, adding up to the sexism she experienced.
Works cited
Addario, Lynsey. It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War. Penguin
Books, 2016.
Hopper, Elizabeth. “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Explained.” ThoughtCo,
ThoughtCo, 24 Feb. 2020, https://www.thoughtco.com/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs-4582571#:~:text=%20What%20Is%20Maslow%E2%80%99s%20Hierarchy%20of%20Needs%3F%20,involves%20feeling%20loved%20and%20accepted.%20This…%20More%20. Accessed 3 Oct. 2021.
Monahan, Erin. “What Is White Feminism?” Terra Incognita Media, Terra Incognita
Media, 2 Oct. 2019, https://www.terraincognitamedia.com/features/what-is-white-feminism2018. Accessed 3 Oct. 2021.