Open Democracy - 17 December 2014
A new generation of thinkers and activists are actively seeking a larger framework than the one liberals such as Tax can provide.
Meredith Tax seems very
keen to discredit my arguments about Imperialist Feminism. In her essay on the
“Antis”—a term she coins to describe me, Saadia Toor, and our ilk—she charges
us with being anti-feminist, sectarian, and reductionist. She further states
that we are largely irrelevant, since “few will read us,” but that we are
nevertheless dangerous because we focus our “attack
exclusively on liberal feminism” and don’t understand how to fight against fundamentalism
and for women’s rights.
Before I debunk Tax’s
various distortions of my arguments, let me state clearly where I stand on the
question of Imperialist Feminism.
As I described in my essay
titled “Imperialist feminism and liberalism,” the key focus of Tax’s attack,
the framework of Imperialist Feminism is “based on
the appropriation of women’s rights in the service of empire.” This framework
has a long history that goes back to the 19th century. A range of scholars such
as Lila Abu-Lughod, Reina Lewis, Leila Ahmed, Marnia Lazreg, Rana Khabani,
Saba Mahmood, Lata Mani, and others have written extensively about what has
variously been called colonial feminism, gendered Orientalism and imperial
feminism. If Gayatri Spivak coined the phrase
“White-men-saving-brown-women-from-brown-men,” to describe this phenomenon,
Abu-Lughod in her recent book Do Muslim
Women Need Saving analyzes the development of imperial feminism since then.
She argues that since the Afghan war a new ubiquitous commonsense has emerged
that sees militarism as the means to advance women’s rights.
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