CW: mentions of rape
The way I characterise my experience with intersectionality is disjunct. Jarring. To testify how and why I feel this way, I want to reference a case that happened recently. On the 27th of August 2022, an 11-year-old girl was raped in a park in Pristina, Kosovo, in broad daylight, by five men, for seven hours, and in different locations. When I read about this on the way home from work, I did a pathetic job at holding back my tears. I was angry. I love my culture so much; it brings me a peace unlike anything else I’ve known in any other aspect of my life. But it has also been a great source of pain.
When I listen to Albanian music, I feel whole. When I am in my homeland, I feel whole. When I hear my mother tongue, I feel whole. But often I feel that I can never forgive my culture for the ways that it has treated its women. Growing up, I was known as the mouthy one in the family, even bordering on disrespectful. That is because I would, without fail, argue with every uncle or cousin who made a sexist remark. I did not know how to be calm, a virtue celebrated in Albanian women, when all of their wives and daughters suffered so greatly.
I was angry at my culture because it felt like we were lightyears behind the progress that was being made in the UK. I was having such nuanced conversations at school and with friends about feminism, but at home, I was still having to convince people that women weren’t subhuman, that they deserve basic human rights. I couldn’t reconcile with the fact that they seemed to be resisting women’s growth so intently. Whilst organised feminist movement in the UK had been a reality since the 1920s, Albania didn’t see feminist protests that were clear and straightforward until 2020. That’s what intersectionality has always felt like to me: like it split me into two different places, set apart temporally by a century.
To draw focus back to the above case, naturally, there has been outrage. People protested outside of the Kosovo Judicial Council, demanding that authorities take violence against women more seriously. When I see photos of them united, demanding the rights they deserve, my heart swells with pride and pain. Pride because I know the strength it takes for a woman in our culture to speak up, but pain because it has taken so long. There is an entire cultural and political system that has paved the way for such an incident to happen, like many other such incidents in the past.
The highly gendered rhetoric that existed and still exists in my culture is one that I’ve spent my entire life unlearning and rejecting. It is another factor that adds to the ammunition of violence against women. From birth, boys have been celebrated. The amount of women who would cry when they found out they were having a girl instead of a boy during pregnancy confounded me and disgusted me. So many kept trying after having birthed daughters until they were finally “blessed” with a son.
Essentially, my diasporic experience has informed my experience with feminism more than anything else has. That, and discovering my own sexuality and religious beliefs within that context, has placed me inside of a maze that I do not yet have the map to.
I do not mean to imply that England is a utopia for women, or that Albania has made no progress as a society. Both of those statements are far from true. Both countries have a lot of improvements they still have to make in order for women to be viewed and treated equally. I don’t intend to find a map that will give me the answers or draw out a path, that is not what the goal of feminism is to me. I just hope that in its navigation, people listen to women from all different walks of life.
https://lefteast.org/resisting-the-same-old-story-violence-rape-and-the-urgent-need-of-feminism-in-albania/