FW: [LNC] Feminism as imperialism

[Jane Mulderrig]

Feminism as imperialism

George Bush is not the first empire-builder to wage war in the name of women

Katharine Viner
Saturday September 21, 2002
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>

"Respect for women... can triumph in the Middle East and beyond!" trilled
the leader of the free world to the UN last week. "The repression of women
[is] everywhere and always wrong!" he told the New York Times, warming to
his theme that the west should attack Iraq for the sake of its women.

Just as he bombed Afghanistan to liberate the women from their burkas (or,
as he would have it, to free the "women of cover"), and sent out his wife
Laura to tell how Afghans are tortured for wearing nail varnish, so now
Bush has taken on the previously-unknown cause of Iraqi women - actually,
look at the quotes, it's women everywhere! - to justify another war. Where
next? China because of its anti-girl one-child policy? India because of
widow-burning outrages? Britain because of its criminally low rape
conviction rate?

At home, Bush is no feminist. On his very first day in the Oval office, he
cut off funding to any international family-planning organisations which
offer abortion services or counselling (likely to cost the lives of
thousands of women and children); this year he renamed January 22 - the
anniversary of Roe vs Wade which permitted abortion on demand - as National
Sanctity of Human Life Day and compared abortion to terrorism: "On
September 11, we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and that it
does not value life... Now we are engaged in a fight against evil and
tyranny to preserve and protect life."

However, this theft of feminist rhetoric is not new, particularly if its
function is national expansion; in fact, it has a startling parallel with
another generation of men who similarly cared little for the liberation of
women. The Victorian male establishment, which led the great imperialistic
ventures of the 19th century, fought bitterly against women's increasingly
vocal feminist demands and occasional successes (a handful going to
university; new laws permitting married women to own property); but at the
same time, across the globe, they used the language of feminism to acquire
the booty of the colonies.

The classic example of such a coloniser 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 civilisation," he said. The
Egyptians should be "persuaded or forced" to become "civilised" 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, which tried, by any means possible, to stop
women getting the vote.

Colonial patriarchs like Cromer believed that middle-class Victorian mores
represented the pinnacle of civilisation, and set about implementing this
model wherever they went - with women in their rightful, subservient place,
of course. They wanted merely to replace eastern misogyny with western
misogyny. But, like Bush, they 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."

The thieves of feminist language couldn't (and can't) even be bothered to
pretend that they actually care about women in the colonised or bombed
countries: in Egypt, Cromer actively ensured that women's status was not
improved: he raised school fees (so preventing girls' education) and
discouraged the training of women doctors. And "feminist" George Bush has
abandoned the women of Afghanistan: where is his concern (or Laura's, or
Tony Blair's, or Cherie Blair's, who was also wheeled out by her husband)
for the very many Afghan women who live in fear of the marauding mojahedin
who now run the country and are in many ways as repressive as the Taliban?
Where were their protests when Sima Samar, Afghanistan's women's affairs
minister and one of only two women ministers in Hamid Karzai's
western-installed government, was forced from her job this summer because
of death threats?

This cooption of feminism without a care for the women on the ground is not
without consequences - although, predictably, it is not the colonisers who
suffer them. Ahmed writes: "Colonialism's use of feminism to promote the
culture of the colonisers and undermine native culture has... imparted to
feminism in non-western societies the taint of having served as an
instrument of colonial domination, rendering it suspect in Arab eyes and
vulnerable to the charge of being an ally of colonial interests."

Indeed, many Muslim women are suspicious of western-style feminism for this
very reason, a fact which it is crucial for feminists in the west to
understand, before they do a Cromer and insist that the removal of veils is
the route to all liberation. The growing Islamicisation of Arab societies
and the neo-colonial impact of the war on terror has meant that, according
to academic Sherin Saadallah, "secular feminism and feminism which mimics
that of the west is in trouble in the Arab world".

But just because Arab women are rejecting western-style feminism, it
doesn't mean they are embracing the subjugation of their sex. Muslim women
deplore misogyny just as western women do, and they know that Islamic
societies also oppress them; why wouldn't they? But liberation for them
does not encompass destroying their identity, religion or culture, and many
of them want to retain the veil.

Reflecting this, a particular brand of Muslim feminism has developed in
recent years which is neither westernised and secular nor Islamist and
ultra-traditional, but instead is trying to dismantle the things which
enforce women's subjugation within the Islamic framework. Increasingly
relevant and influential, Leila Ahmed and Fatima Mernissi are the most
significant theoretical voices.

And in the west, feminists are left with the fact that their own beliefs
are being trotted out by world leaders in the name of a cause which does
nothing for the women it pretends to protect. This is nothing less than an
abuse of feminism, one which will further discredit the cause of western
feminism in the Arab world, as well as here. When George Bush mouths
feminist slogans, it is feminism which loses its power.

But such a theft is in the spirit of the times. Feminism is used for
everything these days, except the fight for true equality - to sell
trainers, to justify body mutiliations, to make women make porn, to help
men get off rape charges, to ensure women feel they have self-respect
because they use a self-esteem-enhancing brand of shampoo. No wonder it's
being used as a reason for bombing women and children too.

· katharine.viner at guardian.co.uk <mailto:katharine.viner at guardian.co.uk>