The Antis: anti-imperialist or anti-feminist? By Meredith Tax

Open Democracy - 19 November 2014  

A recent article on "imperialist feminism" accuses the US women's movement of being a cheerleader for American empire from the war in Afghanistan to the present. Is this a sectarian strategy that misses the target and attacks the liberals instead of the right?

A leftwing analysis that blames the suffering of women in Muslim-majority countries on the feminist movement - variously identified as "white feminists", "liberal feminists", or "colonial feminists" and their "native informants" or "comprador intellectuals in the South" - has become influential in US academic feminist circles. While its proponents call themselves "anti-imperialist feminists", in the interests of brevity I will call them simply the Antis, in tribute to the anti-suffrage leftists who considered women's rights a bourgeois distraction from socialist revolution.
A recent article by Deepa Kumar titled "Imperialist feminism and liberalism" argues that US liberals and feminists supported the invasion of Afghanistan and ignored the victims of the war in Iraq because of their "ubiquitous, taken-for-granted ideological framework that has been developed over two centuries in the West...based on the appropriation of women’s rights in the service of empire".

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