A second response to Meredith Tax - straw men make poor argument By Saadia Toor

Open Democracy - 19 December 2014  

Tax's misleading interpretation of my arguments do little to counter the central realities - that liberals and imperialist feminists have been prominent supporters of authoritarianism and state violence.

In November we published Deepa Kumar's widely read essay, 'Imperialist Feminism and Liberalism'. In response, 5050 published an essay by Meredith Tax, 'The Antis - anti-imperialist or anti-feminist?' Deepa Kumar's response to Tax can be read here. This second response is from Saadia Toor.
Meredith Tax’s response is exactly what one would have expected it to be. It exemplifies the ‘straw man’ style of argumentation, and of necessity misrepresents our arguments, our critique and our politics. I say ‘of necessity’ because it is only through misrepresentation that Tax can get away with not actually having to address the actual substance of our critique and answer our charges against today’s imperialist feminists.
I’d like to begin by addressing some of Tax’s claims before moving on to articulating the substance of our critique of imperialist feminism.
Tax caricatures our argument when she claims that we ‘reduce the problems of women to side effects of "capitalism and imperialism"’. I have never made the absurd claim that women’s problems are either side-effects or even products of capitalism or imperialism alone. But I do hold, following in the footsteps of socialist/Marxist/materialist feminists, that to fail to pay attention to political economy when discussing gender/sexuality is to commit a huge error. Women’s ‘problems… involving the family, cultural traditions, religious institutions, and systematic institutionalized sexism’ do not simply ‘[predate] capitalism’ or imperialism, as Tax helpfully points out. They are transformed by them, even as capitalism and imperialism create new problems for women and feminist politics. It is especially important to invoke political economy when discussing women’s status and issues within the context of Pakistan specifically, and the ‘Muslim world’ generally, precisely because it tends to be absent from feminist analysis pertaining to this region. Tax’s charge of reductionism is ironic given that in fact it is liberal/imperialist feminists who tend to reduce the various issues faced by Muslim women (especially in Muslim majority countries) to ‘Islam’, and/or ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. 

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