“Whenever an adult woman leaves her home out of necessity, she is obliged to conceal her voice, face, and body.”
This is the wording of a new “vice and virtue” law put in place by the Taliban in Afghanistan, in an attempt to control women and supposedly avoid leading men into temptation.
“It is a distressing vision for Afghanistan’s future, where moral inspectors have discretionary powers to threaten and detain anyone based on broad and sometimes vague lists of infractions,” UN special representative to Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, said in a statement. “It extends the already intolerable restrictions on the rights of Afghan women and girls, with even the sound of a female voice outside the home apparently deemed a moral violation.”
According to The Guardian, an Afghan lawyer’s association is speaking out against this, saying it violates 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is gender apartheid, where women and girls are blocked from attending secondary school; banned from almost every form of paid employment; prevented from walking in public parks, attending gyms or beauty salons and must comply with a strict dress code. Under Taliban rule, women can be stoned to death in public for adultery.
I have spent my life drawing women’s bodies, and try to give them freedom by drawing them. Society and religions have attempted—and often succeeded— to control women by stopping their movements, preventing them from doing what they want with their own bodies. Society often controls women’s speech through a myriad of ways- not always by policing in the violent ways of some religions, but through pressure to conform, outcasting those who don’t play by the rules.
As a western woman, it may be incorrect for me to make any kind of comparison with what is happening to women in Afghanistan with what is happening with women in America. I have no idea what their experience is like. My intent is to shine light and try to understand; and figure out what to do. But decades ago, I desperately wanted to draw what I was learning about in other countries, but felt I could not because my experience is as an American white woman. I felt I had to stick to what I know, and for the most part that is still true. But then, unfortunately, I realized a connection that could make it possible for me to draw about what was happening.
We have something in common.
This drawing was done to try to show that women are not all the same, but yet because of our bodies, our gender, we are stereotyped and treated in similar ways.
These things are part of a continuum of oppression that is perpetuated by patriarchal societies, played out to different degrees. Women in our country are now at risk for moving their bodies across state lines to get abortions. Women— and male allies—are at risk for speaking out for, or even helping women in these cases.
Not all women leaders will help break the patterns of oppression within a patriarchal society, some are complicit. But Kamala Harris and her diverse administration will fight to allow women freedom of movement and speech, and aid other countries who want our help in that effort. How to do that is beyond my pay grade, but talking—and maybe drawing— about it is a start.
Thanks for being here.
Good for you. Drawing from 19 years ago says a lot about the progression, or lack of.
Profound, and made more deeply so by the drawings.