Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 2

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Coffee ‘Tied With a Pink Ribbon’: Transgender Phenomena and Transnational Feminisms in Twenty-First Century Ethical Consumer Movements / Evangeline Heiliger

Abstract: This essay engages the ways femininity has evolved through transnational economic relationships in the specialty coffee industry. What I call “fair trade femininities” are reproduced through specific business practices and media representations prompted by transnational feminisms and ethical consumer movements in the Americas. Here, I analyze Café Femenino, a successful brand of women’s organic, Fair Trade coffee first harvested in Peru in 2004. The organization’s women-only business model provides a unique window into the transnational production of American femininities, marking the brand as something that disrupts the category of “woman” by enacting and depending upon multiple femininities from women who are usually portrayed by American media in monolithic terms.

Café Femenino’s English-language website—targeting North American ethical consumer movements—describes its Latin American women coffee farmers as uniformly experiencing poverty, violence, motherhood, and abandonment by husbands. The women farmers appear both worthy of support and interchangeable. Such representations of women from the global south have been common in specialty marketing since WWII, and represent an imperial imaginary of formerly colonized femininity. Transnational feminists have rebuked global north feminists for engaging in “rescue” tactics of development aimed at women from the global south, arguing the activism does more for global north feminists’ conceptions of themselves as women than it does for transforming conditions of global inequality.

However, the economic framework of Café Femenino provides unusual circumstances that intervene in a different area of gender justice: that of recognizing the constructedness of gender. Café Femenino’s gender-segregated business arrangements engender multiple femininities, establishing powerful roles for women at every stage of the coffee’s transnational production. Every bag of green coffee beans is gendered, tied with a pink ribbon to mark its femininity. North American roasters and retailers additionally give a portion of proceeds to a women’s shelter or halfway house in their local community. This practice, what coffee owner Joanne Sargant calls her “favorite, the paying it forward aspect,” was a stipulation designed by the Café Femenino farmers. Unlike traditional Fair Trade coffee contracts, which send money from ethical consumers to “worthy” farmers in developing countries, the women of Café Femenino earn income from their coffee sales and cause marginalized North American women to benefit from their coffee. The pay-it-forward element to Café Femenino flips the gendered rescue narrative, making it difficult to cast indigenous Peruvian women farmers in their “normative” gender roles as in need of rescue. The normative genders of the farmers expand along the specialty coffee chain, while ethical consumers have their gendered roles as “rescuers of women from the global south” re-written.

Café Femenino’s economic arrangement provides the framework from which I engage a feminist analysis of gender representations circulated via news, documentaries, and advertising about Café Femenino. This reading practice reveals the repetition of gender formation in various Café Femenino media. The category “women” fractures into multiple “fair trade femininities” in this political economy precisely because the kinds of women involved in Café Femenino appear to be the same in every kind of media representing them. I read Café Femenino’s normative representations of femininity in layers, in which the very repetition of characters—the farmers, importer, roasters, consumers, and pay-it-forward recipients-- reveals the processes by which we recognize these types of women as normalized. Yet the repeated stories contain evidence that the many women of Café Femenino contradict typical western binary gender norms and defy expected north-south flows of aid. I argue that Café Femenino’s gender-segregated business model can be understood as functioning through and as transgender phenomena because it draws attention to the ways gender is far more complex than the dominant Eurocentric sex/gender binary. Thus, Café Femenino has the unexpected effect of disrupting binary gender and global north-south power relations through its transnational production of fair trade femininities.

Keywords: Queer Theory; Globalization, Transnationalism, and Postnationalism; Gender, Sex, and Sexuality; Feminism.

Introduction

<1> Café Femenino®, a brand of women-grown, certified Fair Trade and organic coffee first harvested in Peru in 2004, was designed with typical liberal feminist and women in development aims in mind: to give social, legal and economic rights to women who appeared to have none; to reduce gender-based violence; to provide a stable income for women and their families; and to change gender dynamics to benefit girls (van Drimmelen, Nelson “Coffee Connecting Women Vancouver to Peru: A three-day series,” www.cafefemenino.com). According to Café Femenino’s website, the root of these problems for Café Femenino’s coffee farmers is not structural violence or legacies of colonization and exploitation, but a combination of poverty, patriarchal machismo and an unpredictable global coffee market (www.cafefemenino.com). Café Femenino’s solution was to create a coffee supply chain in which power is held by women—and only women-- at every stage, from farmer to importer to roaster, an agreement so strict that women farmers must prove ownership of land in their own names to participate, and North American roasters must sign a pre-agreement that only a woman from their company will sign the actual contract purchasing Café Femenino coffee (Nelson, Dominick, www.cafefemenino.com). Additional stipulations include that Café Femenino coffee is never blended with other non-Café Femenino coffees and that it is sold under the Café Femenino label with the logo intact (Foley, “Café Femenino: Empowering Women and Strengthening the Coffee Industry,” Strong Coffee). Finally, roasters and retailers must give a portion of proceeds to a women’s shelter or halfway house in their local community, what Shuswap Coffee House co-owner Joanne Sargant in Salmon Arm, BC calls her favorite, “the paying it forward aspect” (Strong Coffee). This stipulation to “give locally” in North America from the Café Femenino coffee proceeds was designed by the Café Femenino farmers (Nelson “Humility, Intellect and Taking Charge,” van Drimmelen, Strong Coffee, Dominick, www.cafefemenino.com).

<2> Café Femenino is considered a success story, supporting more than 1500 farmers in six countries by 2010, and selling about a half million bags of green coffee each year (www.cafefemenino.com, Nelson “From Vancouver to Peru,” “Helping Each Other, 5,000 Miles Apart,” and “Humility, Intellect and Taking Charge”). News accounts (van Drimmelen, Nelson “Coffee Connecting Women Vancouver to Peru: A three-day series”) and the 2010 documentary Strong Coffee describe changes in gender dynamics consistent with Café Femenino’s stated goals of reducing gender-based violence and increasing economic independence. Yet, these claims are not new for women’s, organic, or Fair Trade coffee cooperatives (Jaffee, Martinez Torres, Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International). Thus, I am interested in examining the ways Café Femenino is different from other women’s coffee cooperatives, particularly how its strict women-only business model has the unexpected effect of disrupting binary gender and global north-south power relations through the transnational production of what I call fair trade femininities.

<3> I argue that the category “women” fractures precisely because the kinds of women involved in Café Femenino appear to be the same in every kind of medium representing them. Yet, the economic framework of Café Femenino—the contractual agreements between the women farmers, importers and roasters/retailers—provides the circumstances to engender multiple representations of femininity, particularly through insisting on a pay-it-forward element to Café Femenino. I will return to this momentarily.

<4> The Café Femenino project promotes a “women helping women” business and branding model—with a twist. Every North American coffee roaster who buys Café Femenino brand coffee is required to give a certain percentage of proceeds to a local shelter for battered women [1]. Traditional Fair Trade marketing discourses present the women helping women economic aid as uni-directional, moving from North America (i.e. “global north” or “developed countries”) to Peru (i.e. “global south” or “developing countries”). However, Café Femenino’s promotion of a “women helping women” model of “ethical trade” deliberately casts Peruvian women farmers as empowered, while North American women who have been victims of domestic or gender-based violence are described as being in need of social and economic assistance. The women in the North American shelters have no relation to the production of coffee, but I would argue that their reception of funds via Café Femenino fits into larger histories of women purchasing morality through international trade of commodities such as coffee, sugar, tea, cotton, and cocoa [2]. The women in the shelters do not produce the coffee, but do benefit from its sale. However, the women coffee farmers of Café Femenino are not cut out of a social justice-themed business practice by the inclusion of abused North American women as beneficiaries of the project. The Café Femenino farmers purportedly receive a living wage, community premiums for social projects, and social benefits from participating in Café Femenino. They additionally are guaranteed to hold land in their names through the requirements for participating in Café Femenino. This gives the Café Femenino farmers some legal and economic security should their domestic situations prove violent or unsafe (Foley, www.cafefemenino.com).

<5> My analysis of Café Femenino is grounded in Feminist, Women’s, and Gender Studies and deeply influenced by the field of Transgender Studies. There are two reasons for engaging Transgender Studies as well as Feminist, Women’s and Gender Studies. The first is that Café Femenino’s business structure does not require particular bodies to identify as women—only that those who become “women of Café Femenino” engage the gendered performances of femininity appropriate to their geographic places and social spaces. This is a concern both of Gender Studies and of Transgender Studies. I provide evidence throughout this essay that specific biologically sexed bodies and feminine gender are not consistently linked under Café Femenino. Second, I argue that Café Femenino®’s particular form of Fair Trade, its hyper-strict boundaries of women-only participation, functions through and as “transgender phenomena.” Scholar and filmmaker Susan Stryker defines “transgender phenomena” as phenomena that “call attention to the fact that ‘gender’ as it is lived, embodied, experienced, performed, and encountered, is more complex than can be accounted for by the currently dominant binary sex/gender ideology of Eurocentric identity” (3). [3] My engagement with Stryker’s theory of transgender phenomena intervenes in the field by articulating ways that the economic practices of Café Femenino’s transnational/women’s/organic/fairtrade/coffee project reveals a complexity of feminine gender that cannot be captured by the dominant binary sex/gender ideology of Eurocentric modernity.

<6> This essay contributes to the broad field of Transgender Studies by making explicit the ways that Café Femenino’s fair trade femininities “reveal operations of systems and institutions that simultaneously produce various possibilities of viable personhood and eliminate others” (Stryker 3). I make no claims that individuals participating in Café Femenino are transgender. Neither do I claim they are cis-gender. Rather, my analysis of Café Femenino focuses on the larger social structures that require particular performances of femininity from those who participate in the Café Femenino project, highlighting the social roles of Café Femenino women without confirming or denying the biological specificity of their bodies. These performances are necessary for economic participation in Café Femenino, and are connected to economic survival for Café Femenino farmers. Because performances of femininity are tied to economic survival, Café Femenino can be understood to reveal something about economic processes and institutions that shape and constrain normative gender.

<7> I read Café Femenino’s normative representations of femininity in layers, in which the very repetition of characters—the farmers, importer, roasters and pay-it-forward recipients—reveals the processes by which we recognize these types of women as normalized. Further, small differences in these representations of normative femininity become glaring and act as a disruption to what we think we know about women, particularly women’s agency in business, in different geographic and economic spaces. This women’s coffee project both disrupts and denaturalizes normative gender—in this case, normative femininities—and also calls our attention to “the processes through which [gender] normativity is produced” (Stryker 3). Café Femenino therefore serves as a case study for unpacking ways that femininity is socially constructed within and against a binary sex/gender ideology across transnational social, geographic, and economic spaces.

<8> To bolster this argument, I offer background on Fair Trade coffee in Latin America and ethical consumer engagement with it. I then highlight key representations of women in the Café Femenino story circulated via news stories, the documentary Strong Coffee, and Café Femenino’s advertising. I analyze the above using Café Femenino’s economic arrangement as a filter to understand the hidden or invisible messages in the news, documentary, and advertising. Doing so demonstrates Café Femenino’s disruption to normative gender and the fracturing of “women” into fair trade femininities.

Why Fair Trade? A Note on Coffee and Fair Trade

<9> Coffee is a $70-billion industry worldwide, which until recently has paid farmers historically low prices. Journalist Jonathan Nelson notes that the price of coffee on the global market often is not enough to cover the costs of growing the coffee (“From Vancouver to Peru”). Although coffee is a renewable resource, the labor-intensive nature of coffee production requires stability for successful production. Many Latin American coffee-producing countries, such as Peru, have experienced either recent or long-term political upheaval, followed by localized violence. This instability, combined with an abundance of coffee in the world market, means that many coffee farmers struggle to make a living from coffee production.

<10> Fair Trade emerged as a social movement and alternative trading model during the same political moment that post-World War II development was being created and implemented (Jaffee 12, Seager 254-8 ). Based on an amalgamation of religious and secular beliefs regarding preferential treatment for the poor, Fair Trade functions as an alternative form of capitalist trade. Fair Trade differs from conventional capitalist trade by requiring a variety of conditions meant to improve quality of life for producers. Fair Trade coffee scholar Daniel Jaffee suggests these include: a “fair” price for goods produced, non-exploitative labor practices, preservation of environmental resources, and transparency in trading arrangements (24). Notably, Fair Trade insists that profit is not the sole motive in business, and that social concerns (and increasingly, environmental concerns) must also factor into business decisions. Some scholars argue that the creation of Fair Trade labeling and certification standards has strengthened its economic elements at the expense of its social goals (Golding and Peattie 162-4, Low and Davenport 143). Many coffee cooperatives are using their income to build better roads, improve their water systems and to create better educational opportunities (Jaffee 14). Café Femenino’s cooperative aims to increase education of girls and women and to improve women’s lives through economic independence.

<11> Fair Trade’s share of global trade is relatively small, accounting for between .05 percent and 5 percent of sales in its product categories in European and North American markets, according to Fair Trade Labelling Organizations International (FLO). However, Fair Trade holds considerable ideological purchase with certain global north consumers, ethical consumer movements, and business people, as well as with global south artisans and producers of agricultural goods. Coffee holds a significant share of the Fair Trade market, accounting for 60 percent of all certified Fair Trade goods (Golding and Peattie 156). Additionally, the 2006 documentary Black Gold captured ethical consumers’ imaginations in the United States and Canada, with its stark contrast between the exploitative nature of conventional coffee trading and the promise of a better quality of life under Fair Trade for coffee farmers. While scant ethnographic research has been done with Fair Trade coffee cooperatives, Daniel Jaffee and Maria Elena Martinez Torres conducted separate studies of Fair Trade cooperatives in Mexico. Their research results separately concluded that social networks benefit Fair Trade coffee farmers whereas weak social capital is detrimental to their economic success (Jaffee 234, Martinez Torres 74). Yet strong producer networks do not change the base price paid for coffee, and several scholars, including Jaffee, argue that it is consumers and activists who are in the best position to ensure that the Fair Trade system returns a fair price to producers of coffee and other Fair Trade items. However, scholar Michael Goodman argues that Fair Trade can only go so far economically and politically because of the whims of a global market that primarily focuses on profits over social or environmental benefits (896).

The Café Femenino Story: North American Website

<12> Café Femenino’s English-language North American website introduces potential ethical consumers to Café Femenino coffee by telling a story about the women who grow the coffee, and their efforts to organize in Peru in 2004. The website offers several representations of Café Femenino women, including photographs, links to news articles, and “The Café Femenino Story.” That story is a tale of indigenous Latin American women rising up against poverty and abusive husbands and finding strength in joining forces with other women around the globe to grow and sell organic Fair Trade coffee. Café Femenino’s origin is described as beginning in 2004, when more than 460 women coffee growers “joined forces” with the CECANOR coffee coop [4]. Three non-profit organizations: PROASSA, CICAP & Cordaid, also were part of the “joining of forces” to start the Café Femenino Coffee Project. The project grew to more than 750 women within a year in Peru and more than 1500 currently are growing Café Femenino coffee [5].

<13> The requirements for membership in Café Femenino include a list of ways that women must be involved in the process: women farmers in coffee-growing regions must own their own land, women coffee roasters in North America must be the ones who purchase the coffee in the United States or Canada and must sign the contracts. Women run the Café Femenino coffee cooperative on the ground in Peru. They sell their coffee to “Garth Smith’s Wife” (Gay Smith) in order to move their coffees through the Organic Products Trading Company (OPTCO) via women’s hands and women’s economic control. [6] (See fig. 1, below).

Fig. 1 The Café Femenino Story

<14> This Café Femenino story makes all women coffee farmers, regardless of region, income, background, ethnicity, and nationality, appear to experience the same things: poverty, violence, abandonment by male husbands. This echoes feminist theory that presents Third World women in similar, homogenous terms. Café Femenino jumps from describing the numbers of women farmers (roughly 8 million) to the claim that coffee growing regions are rife with harsh conditions for women (gender inequality, abuse, poverty) to the “logical” conclusion that most women coffee farmers experience the gender inequality, abuse, and abandonment listed. I do not mean to imply that some of the women have not experienced abuse, nor that many in the original Café Femenino cooperative are free from gender-based violence. Rather, my critique is that no differentiation is made between Café Femenino women in Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Dominican Republic, and Bolivia, despite very different climates, cultures, languages and histories. The kind of logic at play assumes Café Femenino women are interchangeable across differences of time, place, region, income, and color. As recent feminist theorists have articulated, the concept of geographic and cultural “difference” has been fetishized transnationally to sell goods and ideas on the world market in ways that claim to be ahistorical, depoliticized, and guilt-free. Such uses of “difference” collapse the experiences of women from disparate economic, social, national, and religious locations into a homogenous diversity sandwich for global consumption. One of the more harmful aspects of this consumption includes conceptualizing women from particular social locations as needing to be “rescued” by their more enlightened feminist “sisters.” Feminist scholars Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan call this “liberal American multiculturalism”, described as creating “a new form of ‘global feminism’ in the context of the U.S. nation-state, and a new global economy in which binaries of civilized and barbaric, free and unfree, and West/-non-West remain to create new ‘rescuers’ who see themselves as helping their more unfortunate ‘sisters’” (516). “The Café Femenino Story” mimics liberal American multiculturalism because it flattens Café Femenino women’s differences and heightens their sameness: through their similarities, the women of Café Femenino are presented “as sisters” and “in solidarity.”

<15> Liberal American multicultural feminist logic has been refuted globally, yet seems to be at play here for a particular purpose: making money. Specifically, “The Café Femenino Story” advocates for North American consumers to purchase coffee from the downtrodden-yet-hopeful-and-hardworking indigenous women farmers. The logic of both Café Femenino and Fair Trade include making money for special, moral purposes: providing income to women who previously did not have access to earning coffee income in this way, and providing education to daughters who might not otherwise be permitted to attend school. This web-based story frames the women coffee farmers as morally worthy of the support they receive from women elsewhere in the world.

<16> “The Café Femenino Story” is the least informative source for learning what the “Café Femenino premium price” is and how it is utilized for the Café Femenino project. Quoting from the website’s text, “The Café Femenino Foundation…provides grants to support select programs and projects that enhance the lives of women and their families in coffee-growing communities around the world.” Here, the Café Femenino Foundation appears concerned only with women and their families in coffee-growing communities. The vagueness of this statement would give potential ethical consumers the impression that Café Femenino coffee functions no differently than any other organic Fair Trade coffee in returning a portion of proceeds to the Fair Trade cooperative community. Café Femenino’s key “pay it forward” element is absent from “The Café Femenino Story.” The website is the most stable point of information for a potential consumer, yet it fails to communicate Café Femenino’s relationships with the many other women along the Café Femenino commodity chain, such as roasters and recipients of the “pay-it-forward” premium. Thus, Café Femenino’s website reiterates a familiar Fair Trade refrain about dependency and uni-directional aid, framing North American ethical consumers as critical to rescuing women from formerly colonized lands through buying specialty coffee produced by the women farmers of Café Femenino.

Representing Fair Trade Femininities: The Many Women of Café Femenino

<17> Café Femenino’s website describes all women coffee farmers, regardless of region, income, background, marital status or ethnicity, as experiencing poverty, violence, motherhood and abandonment by male husbands. Monolithic representations of women from the global south are common in marketing. Scholar Michael Goodman has critiqued Fair Trade for blatantly exploiting the location and lives of producers in order to sell goods and ideas, particularly when such marketing ignores legacies of colonization, imperialism, and exploitation (898). One might ask what the trade-offs are when improving economic conditions for people from the global south is contingent upon marketing that presents them as homogenized, victimized “Others” who are dependent on imperial good will. Goodman questions the links that Fair Trade makes between livelihood struggles and lifestyle choices, implying that Fair Trade addresses these shallowly, if at all.

<18> One of the more harmful aspects of fetish-style marketing involves conceptualizing women from particular social locations as needing to be “rescued” by their more enlightened feminist “sisters.” Revisiting one of Jonathan Nelson’s articles about Café Femenino offers North American readers a familiar storyline. He writes,

“These women united two years ago to form their own coffee association as a way to earn more money, assert their independence and tear away a machismo yoke that has harnessed them for generations. In the midst of this revolution is Gay Smith, a Vancouver woman who flew more than 5,000 miles to talk to the Peruvian farmers” (“From Vancouver to Peru”).

Grewal and Kaplan argue such representations create “a new global economy in which binaries…remain to create new ‘rescuers’ who see themselves as helping their more unfortunate ‘sisters” (516). The typical representation describes women in the global north initiating and reinforcing social and economic change in the lives of women in the global south. Yet, Café Femenino fails to complete this narrative when we consider that the inception of its business plan resides with the women farmers; it is they who proposed separating their coffee from men’s, not Gay Smith, the American woman who buys their coffee beans.

Fig 2. Cafe Femenino women hand-sorting green coffee beans, 2005.

Photo credit: Beth Dominick / Sacred Grounds Organic Coffee Roasters

<19> Smith is described in news articles by Nelson and Aimee van Drimmelen as compassionate. She is moved to tears because the women of Café Femenino speak in front of hundreds of other women to say thank you, to say they “depend on ourselves, not our husbands.” Smith is crying not simply due to their words, but because, as she says, “A year ago these women would not have had the confidence to stand up and speak in front of such a large gathering” (Nelson “Helping Each Other, 5,000 Miles Apart,” and van Drimmelen “A Brew of Their Own: Fair Trade Coffee Reveals its Feminine Side”). Smith’s take on the Café Femenino farmers presents the women as “growing up”, gaining courage, acting independently, a value much admired by U.S. Americans as a sign of self-determination.

<20> Smith’s role is more balanced, less, “solo individual American feminist rescuer” in the documentary Strong Coffee. In the documentary, Smith is one of many women ensuring the feminine purity of Café Femenino coffee once it leaves the farmers’ hands, along with the coffee roasters who carefully store, roast and transport Café Femenino beans separately from other coffee beans. (See fig 3, below). Although women must purchase the unroasted green coffee beans for each roastery, at this stage men are permitted to handle, roast, and sell the beans without damaging what Smith calls “the purity of the beans and the integrity of the women who produce the coffee” (qtd. in Strong Coffee). It is as if the coffee beans have become infused with a femininity so fragile that male financial contact might contaminate not only their purity, but also their feminine gender.

Fig. 3. Green (unroasted) Café Femenino coffee beans, 2005.

Photo credit: Beth Dominick / Sacred Grounds Organic Coffee Roasters

 

<21> By creating rigid binaristic gender boundaries and shutting men out of the monetary exchanges of Café Femenino coffee, Café Femenino actually serves to multiply the possibilities for “womanness” within this transnational fair trade coffee exchange, and to make it possible for all kinds of people and things to be categorized as “femenino.” For example, these rules extend femininity beyond human form to include small dusty green seeds. The unroasted green coffee beans are transported in segregated bags, and marked feminine by the pink ribbons that tie the Café Femenino coffee bags (Nelson “Helping Each Other, 5,000 Miles Apart”, Drimmelen, Strong Coffee). In this way, the protection of “women’s enterprise” extends from the humans producing the coffee even to the product itself. The coffee was begotten of women, and visibly marked feminine with the pink ribbons. (See fig. 4, below).

Fig 4. Bags of Café Femenino coffee tied with pink ribbons, 2005

Photo Credit: Beth Dominick / Sacred Grounds Organic Coffee Roasters

Café Femenino’s definition of “woman” also includes at least one self-described queen, who is able to sign the Café Femenino contract for her one-man roasting operation (Dominick 1). Thus, Café Femenino’s women-only business model leaves room for non-normative forms of femininity, including those popular in LGBT/Queer communities. From this, we can deduce that Café Femenino is not interested in maintaining strict biological, cis-sexual, or even species boundaries around the concept of “women.” Rather, Café Femenino’s business model has the surprising effect of expanding what it means to have a fair trade femininity. Such practices can be understood as transgender phenomena.

<22> Other surprising gender representations occur in the slightly different accounts of a blonde pay-it-forward recipient in the U.S. described in Nelson’s newspaper series and a woman of color pay-it-forward recipient in Canada filmed for the documentary Strong Coffee. Faith, who “grabbed her children and ran from their abusive father two years ago,” is a resident of Dorothy Place, a halfway house for abused women and children in Bellingham, WA (“From Vancouver to Peru”) [7]. Faith cries while watching a slide show about Café Femenino farmers; she later relates how meaningful it is that women at the other end of the Americas are “like her”: mothers who have experienced violence, poverty and a sense of hopelessness. While Faith’s race and ethnicity are not mentioned explicitly, readers can assume she is white: Faith is described as thin and blonde, someone who made poor choices around alcohol, drugs and men. Through emphasizing emotional similarities (rather than racial/ethnic or national differences) between Faith and the Café Femenino farmers, of abuse by men and dependency on the help of others, the journalist writing about Faith gives the impression that some other female intermediary—perhaps Smith or women coffee roasters—acts as a savior to both categories of women, ignoring the decisive role Café Femenino farmers played in requiring this pay-it-forward action of North American roasters.

<23> Moreover, the brief narrative of a homeless woman of color from Vernon, BC, Canada in Strong Coffee breaks the emphasis on abuse as individualized violence, instead calling attention to structural forms of violence. Dianne Brisson, a patron of Vernon Women’s Centre, has dark eyes, dark hair, and a thoughtful tone. She muses, “there’s just barriers everywhere. It’s not just being homeless; it’s coming from an abusive relationship, a bad family…you can’t get a job if you don’t look like you’ve got it together. There’s all kinds of reasons.” Brisson articulates the multiple, intersectional ways women might experience homelessness in Vernon. This moment is significant as the only media representation of abused North American women as either intelligent or emotionally strong.

<24> If we read Brisson’s and Faith’s narratives against the Café Femenino contract in which the coffee farmers are responsible for aid provided to North American women in these shelters, the homogenized depiction of global south women coffee farmers as abused and in need of rescue by northern white women is broken. Brisson’s presence in Strong Coffee provides enough of an alternative narrative about women in the shelters that it disrupts the perverse idea that white women are necessary for saving women of color. The economic arrangements of the Café Femenino Project additionally disrupt the familiar North American trope that only ethical consumers and activists in the “developed” world can provide economic and social aid to women in need, whether in the global south or the global north.

<25> What happens when local male financial control of femininity is erased, but not replaced with financial control by women from the global north? Café Femenino disrupts normative gender because women from the global south, women described as poor, abused, indigenous, mothers and farmers, flip the rescue narrative on its head. Newspaper stories citing battered and homeless North American women’s gratitude towards the Peruvian women coffee farmers calls into question global north and south patterns of dependency and aid, as well as racist assumptions about the relative importance of wealthy white women in resolving economic disparity. By disrupting typical rescue narratives about unidirectional flows of aid from north to south, Café Femenino disrupts the category of “woman” through and as transgender phenomena.

Gender, Imperialism, and Financial Control of a “Morality Price”

<26> Café Femenino’s website and news articles tell a story of indigenous women creating financial and social changes for themselves with outside encouragement and support from ethical consumers and ethical consumer movements. Ethical consumerism shapes and is shaped by middle/upper-class femininity and morality, a morality commodified and circulated through transnational economic exchanges. Hence, Café Femenino offers fascinating insight into the ways that gender is constructed in relation to capitalism, morality, shopping, race, dependency and geography.

<27> The morality consumed with Café Femenino coffee is not merely a North consumption of the South; it is multidirectional and moves in several directions. The “goodness” attached to Café Femenino coffee travels transnationally from one end of the Americas to the other and back again. Here I wish to introduce the concept of a “morality price,” the premium added to a product marketed as “ethical” and which frequently is more expensive than the non-“ethical” product. In Café Femenino’s case, the morality price is the five cents added to each pound of roasted coffee sold, a premium that is either returned to the Café Femenino Foundation, or given to a local women’s organization. Note that the morality price is not the price paid for the product: it is the exchange rate for the moral or ethical aspect of the product. While Andrew Potter (“The True Meaning of Work? It’s Money” and The Authenticity Hoax 37) has argued that scarcity creates value in so-called ethical products, I disagree, contesting that the “value” added to products sold under ethical consumerism is actually commoditized morality. Given that so-called “ethical” products are increasing in number and kind, they cannot be properly understood as a scarce commodity. Rather, the commoditized morality of “ethical” products such as Cafe Femenino’s Fair Trade organic coffee can be viewed as popular, fashionable, and feminized products upon which global economic and gendered power relations are played. I call the monetary cost of this commoditized morality the morality price of a product. Whoever controls the flow and direction of funds collected as morality price engages a kind of masculine economic power [8]. Therefore, the Café Femenino farmers, by determining that the price premium (aka morality price) of their coffee must be given to a women’s shelter in local North American communities (or alternately given to The Café Femenino Foundation to assist women coffee farmers elsewhere around the globe), are exercising non-normatively gendered economic power, both locally and transnationally. Again, the farmers of Café Femenino call into question typical discourses about gender, geography and power, and disrupt the dominant Eurocentric sex/gender binary by expanding the possibilities for being femenino, even as Café Femenino’s business practices seem to reinforce binaristic gender boundaries.

<28> What can we learn when the recipients of a fair trade profit engage in charitable giving to other women not in their local community? Café Femenino’s reversal of the rescue narrative through giving to battered women in North America may simply be evidence of neoliberal shifts demanding that people help themselves and not be helpless or rely upon charity. In other words, is the ability to give charitably to women an indication of Western progress, particularly neoliberal progress? There is power in being socially and financially able to take care of a woman, or multiple women. What does it mean to be able to give to white Western women? I argue Café Femenino’s social significance is that this kind of paternalism is not restricted to men. Café Femenino blurs gender prescriptions for behavior. The women of Café Femenino transgress western heteronormative gender and class boundaries by giving financial (and in a certain sense, emotional, psychological, and community) support to women in North America. It highlights the failure of a masculine American government to do its duty by women—it has failed to protect, defend and care for its women. Café Femenino confuses roles of dependency and regional boundaries typically tied to racialized and gendered forms of femininity. Café Femenino additionally makes visible economic processes that mask gendered economic dependency, a dependency often conflated with having a particular biologically sexed body rather than a socially constructed femininity.

<29> Women caring for women is common worldwide, but Café Femenino also appears to transgress unidirectional “aid” boundaries of “developed”/”developing worlds” [9]. Hence, Café Femenino creates an unexpected challenge on the level of economic trade aid. Despite Café Femenino women’s being transgressive in their return of morality and financial aid to the United States, they are doing so by participating in a relatively accepted form of capitalist enterprise and exchange. Café Femenino does not necessarily call attention to the invisible labor and multitudes of resources that the global south/”developing world” has provided, unwillingly, to the global north/”developed world,” making the latter’s wealth and power possible. Café Femenino does not challenge that invisible labor and legacy. Yet, Café Femenino does provide an outstanding example of the ways ideology circulates, and how a gendered morality as commodity has traveled in the service of imperialism and current neoliberal aims. When it is a commodity, gendered morality serves as a form of affective control as well as social and economic control.

<30> Contemporary forms of ethical consumerism circulate commoditized morality in new ways. As a case study, Café Femenino suggests that such multi-directional commoditized morality exists. I demonstrate the ways this morality is deeply gendered as feminine—particularly as the ideal feminine—and echoes earlier imperial constructions of womanhood. I understand morality here as a form of power with gendered dimensions. Morality’s relationship to women and concepts of femininity link it with a huge realm of potential power as well as a potent source of control.

<31> Additionally, the significance of having women as the main figures exchanging Café Femenino Fair Trade coffees highlights the deeply gendered and imperialist parameters of ethical consumerism since the 15th century. The roles of women in upholding norms of morality, for their families and “nations” is clear when examining the history of ethical consumerism: blood-soaked sugar campaigns (Sheller 18), the Buy Empire Goods campaign of 1925 (Trentmann 9), fair trade coffee in churches of the 1940s (Worth “Buy Now, Pay Later”), and the prohibition and abolitionist movements in the United States (Glickman 75-81) are some examples. In each instance of ethical consumerism, women are linked to issues of social justice and moral consumption, however “morality” is defined for the time and place. Under Café Femenino, we see that the chain of commoditized morality is lengthened precisely because women are connected at every stage. This reveals the ways ethical consumerism’s morality is a commodity, one that draws upon ideas of femininity, prudence, and dependency to keep its circulation flowing.

<32> Café Femenino, by virtue of being a women’s fair trade coffee, and by being a different kind of women’s fair trade coffee, serves as a transgender phenomenon that can tell us about the construction of gender—specifically fair trade femininities—in relation to imperialism and commodities. Café Femenino particularly illuminates transnational economic constructions of femininity and womanhood imbued with morality. Thus, Café Femenino provides a fascinating case study for understanding the construction of multiple femininities under Fair Trade, a fracturing of “women” made possible precisely because Café Femenino’s mandates rely on strictly binaristic gender separation, brittle categories of male and female that break down under fair trade’s repetitive and familiar marketing stories about gender, dependency, geography and aid. Thus, investigating Café Femenino’s coffee chain produces evidence that plastic possibilities exist within fair trade femininities for expanding the category femenino beyond “the currently dominant sex/gender binary of Eurocentric discourse” (Stryker 3), creating spaces for gender justice alongside its project of social and economic change.

Endnotes

[1] The other option is for North American roasters to give those funds back to the Café Femenino Foundation so it can continue funding projects to educate, advocate for, and support women and girls in Café Femenino’s coffee-producing communities in Peru and elsewhere.

[2] The women in the North American shelters do not participate in the production of coffee. However, many have the opportunity to consume Café Femenino coffee at their local women’s shelters, and to purchase it once they have moved out of the shelter.

[3] Transgender phenomena are one area of study for the interdisciplinary field of Transgender Studies, but by no means the only one. The field also has a stake in how transgender phenomena are related to sets of norms that are socially constructed (Stryker 3). More explicitly, the field is not narrowly focused only on studying what Stryker calls “rarefied transgender individuals” but rather is a broad, interdisciplinary field that “represents a significant and ongoing critical engagement with some of the most trenchant issues in contemporary humanities, social science, and biomedical research” (Stryker 3-4). The latter may need some explanation. “Most broadly conceived, Transgender Studies is concerned with anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages we generally assume to exist between the biological specificity of the sexually differentiated human body, the social roles and statuses that a particular form of body is expected to occupy, the subjectively experienced relationship between a gendered sense of self and social expectations of gender-role performance, and the cultural mechanisms that work to sustain or thwart specific configurations of gendered personhood” (Stryker 3). My engagement with Stryker’s theory of transgender phenomena intervenes in the field by articulating ways that the economic practices of Café Femenino’s transnational women’s organic fairtrade coffee project reveal a complexity of gender that cannot be captured by the dominant binary sex/gender ideology of Eurocentric modernity.

[4] OPTCO is Organic Products Trading Company, the coffee importing company started by Gay Smith and Gay’s husband, Garth. Garth Smith has been travelling to Peru since the 1990s to buy coffee and had already built a long-term relationship with this coffee-growing community. CECANOR is the coffee cooperative OPTCO was already working with in Peru. However, the official farmers of OPTCO coffee from Peru were primarily men.

[5] The remaining 750-plus women coffee farmers are located in Mexico, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Colombia.

[6] Prior to the founding of Café Femenino, most coffee farmers from this area of Peru sold their coffee to Garth Smith of Organic Products Trading Company (OPTCO) over a period of about twenty years. Smith, who is Gay Smith’s husband, built long-term relationships with the coffee growers by consistently paying on time, showing up each year, and paying the amounts promised. In an industry rife with unpredictability, Garth Smith proved his reputation by being consistent. Male coffee growers in this region still sell coffee to Garth Smith. See OPTCO for more details. The coffee farmers hold Gay Smith, as Garth Smith’s wife and co-owner of OPTCO when Café Femenino was founded, in equally high regard to her husband. The shift of women coffee farmers selling their coffee to Gay Smith is one of many deliberate steps taken to ensure that financial control of Café Femenino beans remains in the hands of those who identify as women.

[7] Not her real name.

[8] For more on the gender of economic power and the gender of development discourse, see Catharine V. Scott, Gender and Development: Rethinking Modernization and Dependency Theory (1995), and Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995).

[9] Of course, this idea of a unidirectional aid flow is a myth that completely erases the ways slave, indigenous, Third World, and global south labor have propped up the North & West, supplying human and natural capital for imperial nations and their expansion projects.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank those whose time made this article possible. Beth and Tim Dominick of Sacred Grounds Organic Coffee Roasters in Arcata, CA introduced me to Café Femenino, provided photographs, and engaged in stimulating conversations about the specialty coffee industry. Anonymous reviewers offered astute comments and suggestions for improvement. Jacob Lau and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz each read my work and provided helpful feedback. Kathleen McHugh encouraged me during an early stage of this article with well-timed praise. Kerry Ann Rockquemore taught me how to carve out time each day for writing and revising this piece. Van Nguyen’s patience and support allowed me to focus in the midst of an unusually transition-heavy summer. To each of you, I am grateful.

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