Two Cheers for Pluralism?
Plus a PEPFAR Rally
It’s the final week of the Flowers of Fire book club. Join me, and and other Other Feminisms and
readers next week for our live discussion. Patrick and I will be joined by Eliza Mondegreen, Spencer Klavan, Rachel Lu, Nadya Williams, and FD Editor Serena Sigillito. The call will be on Tuesday, March 11th at 1p ET.But first, an announcement:
Rally for PEPFAR this Friday at Foggy Bottom
This Friday, I’ll be one of the speakers at a rally in defense of PEPFAR. As I wrote for the NYT, PEPFAR’s anti-AIDS work has been hit by the foreign aid freeze, and the promised waivers haven’t worked.
PEPFAR has saved 8 million babies from being born HIV+, and in the absence of PEPFAR, 1400 babies are expected to be born HIV+ every day. Half of them won’t make it to their second birthday.
Please join us at the Foggy Bottom Metro on Friday March 7th at noon to ask for the freeze to be definitely lifted for these programs. And if you can’t make it in person, you can still call your rep.
Now back to the bookclub:
When
and I came to the end of Flowers of Fire, we were… depressed.But we both found ourselves newly grateful for America’s pluralistic balance.
Leah: It also left me grateful for one of the strengths of America’s multiculturalism. If the states are laboratories of democracy, our many (conflicting!) cultures offer many experiments in what beauty/professionalism/femininity look like.
South Korea has been homogenous enough to enforce a no-eyeglasses norm for women, even when they struggle to see without them. In America, that would be hard to do! I’m always going to see some women who are oriented to a very different ideal than I am. I get the chance to see different ways of living and evaluate them. Meanwhile, in South Korea, you get a campaign to strip a Korean archer of her Olympic medals because she competed with short hair.
Patrick: Yes, 100 percent! I didn’t expect to come out of this book discussion with a greater appreciation for good old-fashioned American individualism, but the straightjacket of what it takes to just enter the public eye as a Korean woman as described in these pages… sheesh…
American pluralism—while perhaps not as quickly as some of our more vocal feminist friends would like—has increasingly allowed for non-traditional ways of divvying up the responsibilities of home life. Meanwhile, Korean moms refer to themselves as playing “dokbak parenting,” referring a card game in which one person ends up with all the losses.
I shared your hope for a more narrow look at specific parts of South Korean culture that contributed to the problems women face there. I expected more exploration of the philosophy underlying these differences, and I think your explanation of a greater appreciation for American individualism gets at that by contrast. Jung’s narrative framed Korean feminism as basically the same as feminism everywhere else, just at a later point in time and with more hurdles to overcome. Yet her description of what Korean feminists were responding to helped me appreciate how different and complex feminists movements can be.
I'm still only about halfway through part 3, but still hope to finish the book in the next few weeks. I'm listening to the audiobook and it's obviously not one I want to listen to in the car with the kids, so I'm only fitting it in occasionally. Still, it's definitely been eye-opening. I really had no idea what Korean cultural expectations for women were like and it's really been shocking to me. It's given me a better sense of how different the challenges feminism faces in other countries. I think the question of pluralism is an interesting one. Reading the novels of Chimamanda Nogozi Adichie has also had a similar effect on me in terms of feminism in a Nigerian context.