points.of.crossing

“… [T]he costs of intervention borne by the people that are supposed to be helped by it require greater examination. One part of that examination must include the complicity of Western states in a global system that exempt themselves from the consequences of violating international law; that support violence in the south; and prop up regimes that are illegitimate in the eyes of their subjects. … Rather than continuing to mouth hollow pieties about ‘women’s rights as human rights’, it is imperative now more than ever for first world feminists to critically theorize the local and discover how their own agendas have been used to further what can only be considered imperial power dynamics in the international sphere. I suggest that Liberal feminists think particularly carefully about the calls for use of international intervention to further women’s human rights decoupled from local contexts and understood as Liberal rights. Such uses of power as a means of progress resuscitate a colonial dynamic that is fraught with the peril of subjugation and violence towards the very people it seeks to liberate. …

“While I think it unnecessary to abandon second-wave feminism’s many contributions including the understanding that women in every culture live in a gender unequal system, critical theorists can give us a more nuanced approach that reveals how even within that system, women can maneuver and exert power and make choices. It can also give us the ability to recognize similar projects undertaken by women living in Muslim societies but not mistake these as projects that are the same as our own undertaken in our contexts. Moreover, it can make obvious the complex and contested nature of the global system particularly the role of economic disparity and increasingly environmental disparity and the way in which privileged women wield power — sometimes to the benefit and sometimes to the detriment of other women. Most importantly, it can underscore how the inequality in the global system cannot be ignored when engaging state power internationally or engaging international institutions for seemingly benevolent purposes.”

- Choudhury, Cyra Akila. “Empowerment or Estrangement? Liberal Feminism’s Vision of the ‘Progress’ of Muslim Women”. University of Baltimore Law Forum, Forthcoming; Florida International University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-10.

(via kawrage)

fariyah:

“For as Mahmood pointed out, it was quite remarkable that in the midst of the searing destruction underway in Afghanistan and Iraq, destruction that brought enormous loss of life for women and children, such losses apparently ‘failed to arouse the same furor among most Euro-Americans’ as did the ‘individualized accounts of women’s suffering under Islam’s tutelage.’ Similarly, Abu Lughod asks in ‘The Active Social Life of “Muslim Women’s Rights”’ - an essay written…in the context of ‘violence against (Muslim) women inflicted in war and by militaries, not just in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Palestine, as in the Israeli attack on Gaza that was launched in December 2008’ - ‘Where is the global feminist campaign against killing such significant numbers of (mostly) Muslim women? Or maiming them, traumatizing them, killing their children, sisters, mothers, husbands, fathers and brothers?’ For many of us, particularly those who have worked for years on issues of women’s rights in Islam and in Muslim societies, these glaring disparities in our times between the notion of purported concern for the sufferings of women commonplace in our public conversation and the simultaneous seeming indifference and unconcern among many Americans and Europeans to the mounting death counts, maiming, and trauma suffered by mostly Muslim women and children was a sobering experience. Mahmood points out how the ‘discourses of feminism and democracy have been hijacked to serve and imperial project,’ then goes on to warn that ‘unless feminists rethink their complicity in this project…feminism runs the risk of becoming more of a handmaiden of empire in our age than a trenchant critic of the Euro-American will to power.’” **

- Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America

** “[T]heft of feminist rhetoric is not new, particularly if its function is national expansion … The classic example of such a colonizer was Lord Cromer, British consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, as described in Leila Ahmed’s seminal Women and Gender in Islam. Cromer was convinced of the inferiority of Islamic religion and society, and had many critical things to say on the ‘mind of the Oriental’. But his condemnation was most thunderous on the subject of how Islam treated women. It was Islam’s degradation of women, its insistence on veiling and seclusion, which was the ‘fatal obstacle’ to the Egyptian’s ‘attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilization,’ he said. The Egyptians should be ‘persuaded or forced’ to become ‘civilized’ by disposing of the veil.  And what did this forward-thinking, feminist-sounding veil-burner do when he got home to Britain? He founded and presided over the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage … Colonial patriarchs like Cromer believed that middle-class Victorian mores represented the pinnacle of civilization, and set about implementing this model wherever they went … [T]hey stole feminist language in order to denounce the indigenous culture; and, says Ahmed, feminism thus served as a ‘handmaid to colonialism’. ‘Whether in the hands of patriarchal men or feminists,’ she writes, ‘the ideas of western feminism essentially functioned to morally justify the attack on native societies and to support the notion of comprehensive superiority of Europe.’”

- Katharine Viner, “Feminism as Imperialism: George Bush is Not the First Empire-Builder to Wage War in the Name of Women,” Guardian, 21 September 2002.