Media coverage of women both here and abroad is increasingly taking a turn for the worse. To make sense of this worrying trend, Words of Colour will examine this important issue with a range of leading women in their fields and will explore how journalism can better reflect the diversity of women’s voices.
In this first post, Julie Tomlin talks to writer and blogger Hana Riaz about how Asian Muslim women are portrayed in the media and highlights some of the commons mistakes made by white female journalists when writing about them.
When the Guardian recently published a story asking why India had been named the worst place in the world to be a woman there were some angry reactions from Asian women. Many of them agreed that the journalist had revived “a tired argument in which all Indian men are figured as senseless abusers, and all Indian women hapless victims”.
On social media and websites, women have been forced to challenge some of these “tired arguments”. One example concerns an article discussing the explosion in new grassroots feminist groups where online female activists initiated a discussion with the journalist about her failure to include non-white feminists in her list of organisations identified as driving this renaissance.
But how can journalists respond to these challenges and do a better job of reflecting the diversity of women’s voices? Clearly better representation is needed in the UK’s national media (yet another tired argument), as it remains dominated by white middle class men, as a survey conducted by the Guardian reveals.
What is rarely focused on are those women who have the privilege of writing for large mainstream audiences, who also need to be challenged about how they represent women of colour in their work.
Seen through the eyes of the media, Asian Muslim women are “oppressed, sexually repressed, victims of culture, religion and their men,” says Hana Riaz, a panelist on Words of Colour’s recent Have women got Twitter Clout? debate. Riaz is keen to see stories that don’t just focus on issues of veiling, honour-based violence, female genital mutilation, forced marriages and other forms of gendered violence.
Hana Riaz speaking at Words of Colour’s Twitter women event. Picture by Lee Townsend
White women journalists and white feminists tend to speak “for, about and at” women of colour and ignore their experiences,” argues Riaz. She believes that much of the journalism she consumes reflect a deep lack of understanding of the importance of race, ethnicity, class, North/South power relations, the history of colonialism and its impact on women’s lives.
“It is here we can locate the reproduction of racialised narratives of women of colour as victims in need of white liberation that continues to be prevalent in the West,” she says. “This not only robs women of colour of their own agency as people that resist and struggle against gender inequality on a daily basis, but it also denies them from being able to claim their own experiences and stories as real, legitimate and a source of insight into how we can collectively and individually organise.”
Social media has been an important tool in this battle because it has enabled Riaz to connect with women all over the world. Where she is less confident, though, is about the medium’s capacity to shape mainstream media perspectives in a positive direction.
“Unless there is an overall shift in the systems of ruling that constitutes the world, both local and global, I don’t think we will see too much change in the mainstream media,” she claims. Critical thinking among white journalists about their own experiences and the role they play in this continued “exploitation’ is also essential, she adds.
Riaz admits this might be “deeply uncomfortable” for them, but for journalism to reflect diversity, white women need develop more awareness about how they too dominate the “rights” agenda and exclude other women from the narrative.
Women are using social media to express their anger at the view that it is the role of white women to save women of colour from men around the world. White women working in the media need look beyond the women-as-victims stories and learn more about the work women of colour around the world are doing to challenge injustice and inequality, and support them – appropriately.