My engagement with the word citizenship is limited to the citizenship awards that used to be given out in elementary school. My notion of it is limited to acts of kindness among classmates, and of thoughtful students ready to help the teacher out in any way. This has been an emergence into literature that is, I argue, relevant to the life of a proactive citizen.
But it hasn’t been all academics. Within the week we’ve been here, I’ve been propelled to think critically about the culture around me and what I learned through my first year in college to be “Modernization Theory.” Through the trajectory of my education, it was always implied that the path to modernization was one and linear, with the endpoint being a fully capitalist society like the US. The latest technology and a goal to discontinue anything “old-fashioned.”
However, it is evident that “modernization” shouldn’t be restricted to single path, or a single endpoint at that. While Americans boast modernity above all, with self-driving cars, next-day shipping, and the ubiquity of the latest technology, Morocco, by American standards would be lagging behind.
Why use American standards though? These are arbitrary, and the same path can’t be assigned to a country that’s different from the US in every sense of the word.
This thought will be left unfinished, as I will have to think about this more over the coming weeks to form my concluding thought.
Women’s rights are human rights. This is a universal truth. Over the past year, I’ve been struggling with discerning between Western feminism and universal feminism. On Sunday, our group attended a performance by the American Center’s drama club on gender violence. It was a moving performance. The following are quotes that caught my attention and forced me to reflect:
“I want to apologize to every woman I’ve called beautiful before I’ve called intelligent”
“Slut-shaming culture is rape culture”
These are universal truths, and I felt hope because from the very mouths of these Moroccan women, I found common ground between the feminism seen in the West and the feminism seen here. The feminist movement should aim to be on the same page globally, and the more I’ve explored feminism at the university level, the bigger the divide between regional feminisms. It was good to feel hope that maybe we’re not so different. There is a solidarity between women across continents that I’d never encountered, so I never knew how real and how strong it was. The spirit of defiance against gender violence was palpable as women claimed their right to safety on the stage.
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