In the company of "Useless Women," The Fierce Urgency of an Intersectional African Feminist Advocacy (2).
“She is a very useless woman” is how I have heard many women who dared to unsettle the air conditioner in the hellhole of predatory patriarchy described. For many years, I feared becoming like these women, not because they were bad people but because of the fear of the consequences and punitive measures that society meted out to women like them. The ostracization and isolation, pain, trouble, and even death scared me at first. I wanted the system and society to love me and applaud me, but I realized there wasn’t a way to do that.
The women I honor and aspire to be like were hated when they were alive but celebrated in death. To loan James Baldwin for my intent in this post as a woman, I soon realize “that when you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you had a right to be here, you have attacked the entire power structure.” The world was not built in a way to ensure that I am useful to how I am but how it is as predetermined by role, space, place, and my voice.
As our beloved literary icon Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once said, “The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are[....]how much freer to be our true individual selves if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.” As a woman, you are told how to behave, dress, live, and move to earn a good grade at the school of subjectivity and subjugation designed and imposed by society. But most of the past, present, and future outliers would be rule-breaking women. I mean “useless” women.
Ida B. Wells, who through her writing exposed the racial prejudice that shaped both the mythology of the Black male rapist that led to lynching and how media reporting fueled this reality, exposing Black men to violence during post-reconstruction. Half of the women of the 1920s women's war were called "useless" women. In fact, the colonial reports, in an attempt to justify their violence against women during the war, labeled them as prostitutes and hysterical and used other derogatory terms that every woman who has ever challenged unjust powers understands.
There are more women from past and present to whom the label "useless woman" could be applied.
I have chosen to be useless to systems that
"other" people because of any markers of difference
Refuse to make room for representation, diversity and inclusion
Treat gender inclusion and affirmative action as tokenism.
Slut-shame and body-shame women
Explore and exploit the environment without sustainability in mind and the replenishing of the earth given to us by becoming conscious custodians of the resources over and beneath the belly of the place we call home.
silence voices of dissent and reward conformity as a mark of "good" womanhood
on these and many more, I am staying forever useless
#justice4Ochanya Elizabeth Ogbanje
Also, stop the bullying and hazing Distinguished Senator Natasha H Akpoti
