And now – heeeere’s Spivak!
Aha – you’re in luck. I assumed the postcolonial article on (re)production of bullshit was unavailable online, but in fact it is, so you get to find out who the author is and you also get to read the whole dang thing if you want to.
So. Since a flood of people, which is to say, two people, have requested more extracts, I shall oblige.
At the heart of the relationship between feminism and imperialism is an
Orientalist logic that posits Western women as exemplary and emancipated in relation to
“Other” (Afro-Asian/colonized) women, thereby charging the former with the
responsibility of saving the latter from their backwards (i.e. Muslim), uncivilized
cultures.
Right. Tell that to the little girls in Ethiopia who don’t want to be raped into marriage at age eight. Tell them it’s an Orientalist logic that thinks they should have something better. Tell Boge Gebre.that – if you have the gall.
By deliberately
attempting to mask the problems that are always associated with representation, 9and the
inconsistencies that inevitably arise within categories of experience, CW4WAfghan’s use
of personal anecdotes both confirms and conceals their own ideology. Reproducing the
oppressive gesture of imperialist feminism, their homogenous image of Afghan women
reduces them to the role of “generalized native informants”, who Spivak asserts, “sometimes appear in the Sunday supplements of national journals, mouthing for us the answers that we want to hear as our confirmation of the world.”
I repeat. Tell that to the little girls of Ethiopia, and the women who used to be little girls and remember what happened to them. Tell them they are ‘mouthing for us.’
There. That’s only page 16, and it’s only a selection. It’s all like that. It’s arrogant patronizing crap. It’s insulting. I wish you joy of it.
Black is white, up is down, submission is empowerment, patriarchy is freedom. Welcome to the world of “feminists” who have apparently forgotten everything that feminism was supposed to be about.
I suppose no one asked the author, at any point, if she would like to take up a place in the “no better or worse, merely different” position of a woman in Afghanistan?
Of course, I suppose that would be classified as “cultural tourism”, which is apparently a no-no. The net effect of the author’s stance is to establish a barrier preventing any member of one community being able to say anything about the practices of another’s.
Read the whole thing online? Your excerpts are more than enough, thank you very much. But I did go and try to read the abstract. Why is it that my mind always goes into a tail spin when I read stuff in which every other sentence seems to contain one of the words “narrative” or “discourse”? Is it because I suspect that people who use these words a lot consider narratives and discourses more important than reality? More real than reality even?
What’s amazing is that this guff is still thought to be radical despite the fact it was already old hat when I did sociology in the 80s. I thought we’d be post-post-modern by now.
And the mocking comments about the postmodern generator on an earlier thread are on the ball. This stuff writes itself, according to rules which are grammatically correct but semantically empty.
It wouldn’t pass the Turing Test.
So the Cambridge Review of International Affairs is possibly in the market for a sharp rebuttal. Possibly there is also an Oxford Review of International Affairs which would enjoy lampooning their opposite number too?
Haha I am just engaged in an argument with the Muslimah Media Watch blog about this sort of thing. They can’t seem to see past the orientalist / occidentalist divide. Surely educated, reasonably wealthy women should be able to put aside differences such as these for the sake of women and girls who are truly suffering? Unfortunately, it seems not to be the case for some.
I met two Christians, from a country whose law would kill them if they were to go home. They each described the biggest change as giving up their deep ongoing anger, and the violence taught by their government and former religion as the only future relationship with the West. For one of them who had been in political prison for at least a year and as a soldier fought years on the front line, this was transformation for him.
That ongoing relationship of anger and hostility to the non-Muslim world is something of a given as far as I can see.
Ah, dear Gayatri, such a dear old lady – yes, I have met, her, and sat next to her at dinner, as it happens. She lost her glasses under the table, not helped by the folds of sari she was wearing. Her self-deprecation was hilarious. But she’s also a fiery Marxist who travels the world regularly coming face-to-face with poverty and injustice, and – let it be said – doing something about it through educational programmes bringing knowledge to groups still systematically shut out from the ‘global democracy’, including, and especially, young Indian girls.
So, once again we are faced with paradoxes. We should not forget that the ‘rescue’ of Afghan women from the burka was a defining trope of overtly imperialist rhetoric just a few years ago, just as a wider assertion that US action in particular was ‘bringing’ democracy to Iraq served to legitimate what ‘everyone’ now sees as some truly terrible events. Nothing is simple, nothing is one-dimensional. When we agree that Afghan women ought not to be treated as they are, what changes are we envisaging putting them through to achieve that? And who is going to do it for us? Do we trust their motives; might not things be made worse?
There are important questions about the currents of public and political rhetoric into which even the most ideologically pure NGO places itself when it speaks out and tries to get western money and western governments in motion. That they are badly answered by third-rate academic hacks does not make them bad questions.
“the oppressive gesture of imperialist feminism”
Wow.
Does the author define a non-imperialist feminism that is not simply a quietist useful idiocy for theocracy?
Do they, that is to say, do anything other than simply support “the other side” *as represented (sic) by imperialist discourse itself*?
“When we agree that Afghan women ought not to be treated as they are, what changes are we envisaging putting them through to achieve that? And who is going to do it for us? Do we trust their motives; might not things be made worse?”
Are you suggesting that ISAF could make things worse than they were under the Taliban? How exactly could that happen?
How would someone who is not a third-rate academic hack answers the ‘important questions’?
I fully support feminism: the idea that much revision to inherited social arrangements is needed to reflect the previously unacknowledged fact that women and men are equal in all important respects. But some of the rubbish written in the name of “feminism”, or in this case “post-colonial feminist theory”, drives me to despair. What we see here isn’t merely misguided and badly argued; it’s actually a form of blatant anti-feminism.
Shatterface:
“What’s amazing is that this guff is still thought to be radical despite the fact it was already old hat when I did sociology in the 80s. I thought we’d be post-post-modern by now.”
Delusions of radicalism are practically a defining characteristic of “postmodernism”. In 100 years time, they’ll still be congratulating themselves on how edgy and pioneering they are.
Dave – sure – there are reasonable questions to ask. Of course one does want to ask Rumsfeld and Cheney to come out from behind the curtain, and one wants to check with people who know in order not to assist imperialist adventures by accident. But one does not want to do what Melanie Butler does in this article.
Nice about Spivak though. More power to her. It’s not (necessarily) her fault that she’s a totem for a lot of pseudo-feminists and other useful idiots.
I have to say that I’m less disturbed by this kind of stuff than I am by most of the material Ophelia quotes with disapproval here–mainly because I’m not convinced that flavors of postmodernism like this one have much influence outside of the academic ivory tower. The actions of the Catholic Church, for example, have massive impacts on billions of people. Academic “post-colonial feminists,” not so much.
None of which is to say that Ophelia shouldn’t spend time deriding this or anything. I just don’t think it’s as destructive as most of other targets.
I agree that this pomo codswallop isn’t as harmful as religion, globally – but then I’m not fighting in religion’s corner so if a theist spouts bullshit it doesn’t harm a cause I believe in; on the other hand this twaddle does undermine a just cause.
“. . .government agencies have justified the military invasion of Afghanistan by revitalizing the oppressed Muslim woman as a medium through which narratives of East versus West are performed.”
I don’t remember Bush, Rummy or Dick using anything as a medium through which etc etc. Well. Maybe Bush, since he thought the Big Guy Upstairs told him to go on ahead and have a couple of wars. And the BGU appears in a few a western-like narratives. I remember him in a few episodes of The Cisco Kid. Don’t you? Cisco, Pancho and BGU chased bad guys off the hacienda. Pretty sure they did.
Butler has made quite a claim here. I thought they justified having a war because there were bad guys and weapons of mass destruction there and because Mr. Saddam was friends w/al Qaeda and stuff. They don’t let no oppressed girls tell them what to do.
Also – I want my goddamn words back. I need discourse and narrative for legitimate purposes when I write about people talking to each other and telling stories. So they better just give them back.
I don’t know, Rieux — I’ve noticed that quite a few Muslims (and other religious people) who have some knowledge of pomo and postcolonial studies will eagerly press them into service to defend their religion and its practices and attitudes. Reading a postcolonial, anti-imperialist defense of Uganda’s infamous anti-gay law (from a poster on Cif Belief) is really something else!
Of course, they typically only use this mode of thought when discussing matters with Western/academic audiences — when talking to a group of co-religionists, it’s back to citing holy texts and the supposed desires of the deity as The One Truth.
Russell is right that this kind of stuff can easily be exploited for anti-feminist, homophobic and regressive ends. Dave has a point about using such concerns as a Trojan horse, but honestly I would find this horror of anything that might possibly smack of (Western) imperialism to the point of offering succor to anybody and anything calling itself “anti-imperial” (such as the Taliban or the Iranian regime) more convincing if it was also recognized that this entire postmodernist, anti-imperialist framework is itself more or less a Western construct, primarily the product of Western and Western-educated thinkers. Certainly traditional Islamic thought, to take an example, has nothing against imperialism and the imposition of colonial values on indigenous cultures when conducted by Islamic armies and governments, as the fulsome praise of the Arab conquests and the glories of the caliphate in Islamic schools suggests.
Lisa is totally right. I have spent a lot of time arguing with some Islamists with phDs at my university, and they are all steeped in postcolonialism, critical whiteness theory, etc. They won’t actually engage on any other level, I have to work really hard to get the conversation around to “hang on – what exactly do you believe in? Asides from all the anti-western stuff? Angels? Jinns? Gods? Shari’ah?” They can’t engage me as anyone other than a “Westerner:” yet according to them, I’m the racist one!
And EXACTLY Lisa, Islam is nothing if not imperialistic and universalising. Why is it everyone seems to think it goes without saying that it is only the West which is xenophobic and imperialist? I’m sick of being called xenophobic, culturally imperialist, bigoted and intolerant, when that is exactly what I am objecting to about Islam. Irony, anyone?
Yes, Emily, that seems to be a not uncommon stance taken by some of the more sophisticated and educated believers, not just in Islam but also in Judaism and Christianity — there are Catholic thinkers, for example, who have welcomed the advent of postmodernism because it’s more amenable to faith than the “outdated” modernist, positivist, materialist “scientism” adopted by Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, et al. “The New Atheists are so 19th-century!” — as if subscribing to a holy text, clerical hierarchy and centuries-old tradition is somehow more “modern.” (Although, as already mentioned, pomo is pretty old itself by now.)
I suppose what offends me the most about that is the sheer bad-faith of it all — they’re adopting this postmodern, relativist outlook that they don’t really believe in at all just to shore up their faith and make it more intellectually palatable or respectable to (educated) secular outsiders who would have no truck with it otherwise. I think a close parallel is with Muslims and Muslim groups who get up in arms about the hijab or niqab being banned on the grounds that Muslim women have the right to dress as they choose — but either have nothing to say or even defend mandatory hijab in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia. Alternately, conservative religious people who bemoan the exploitation of women in pornography and advertising — and then extol the virtues of traditional female roles, in the home. It’s just a pose, to be adopted when convenient, and discarded as soon as it’s outlived its usefulness.
On the other hand, maybe those who adopt this “pose” really ARE “postmodern” and can hold both the postmodern relativist and traditional religious worldviews in their minds at the same time, or at least can easily switch between the two, one when writing papers for journals or giving lectures and the other for the mosque or church. (I can understand this quite well, I’m afraid — compartmentalization is truly a miraculous thing!)
Yes, the charges of “binary thinking” and “reductionism” are code for “unsophisticated fundamentalist.” I’m starting to realise what I am actually up against at uni now . . . the Secular Society I founded seems to have been overrun by relativists and accomodationists. What was supposed to be a voice for non-belief in a sea of belief (there are 8 religious clubs) is now supposed to be (according to some, but the battle isn’t over yet) kind of like a forum for everyone of all different beliefs to hold hands and say how wonderful we all are and how much we respect each other. But not allowed to criticise each other’s beliefs / ideas / practices, or think that we might be right about some things, because that would make us the same as the religious. FFS!
“charges of “binary thinking” and “reductionism” are code for “unsophisticated fundamentalist.”
…of a different kind to the unsophisticated fundamentalist making them. ;-)
“the battle isn’t over yet”
Keep fighting the -er- good fight.
I think it is entirely possible that some people *do* exploit feminist concerns in order to push certain foreign policy agendas. But I find the approach exemplified by this MA candidate extremely disturbing. I agree with Russell Blackford that it’s hard to tell the difference between some manifestations postcolonial feminist theory and anti-feminism. I remember hearing someone who would certainly describe herself as a feminist grumbling about Martin Amis asking people to stand up if they thought they were more moral than the Taliban and feeling completely alienated by her objections (though I think Amis has said some objectionable things too). As an English academic I’m quite happy to flirt with postmoernity or at least with its rhetoric – but I put it to one side when dealing with real life.
Similarities across the board? If it’s in the bible it must be true; if it’s in the koran it must be true; if St Augustine wrote it it must be true; if Freud or Foucault or Derrida or Lacan or Barthes said it it must be true; if Dawkins or Dennett or Hitchens wrote it it must be true. Every cultural group consists mostly of people who for all kinds of reasons would prefer someone else to do their thinking for them.
End of rant.
Amis has said lots and lots of objectionable things, throughout his career, but the Taliban item wasn’t one of them. The Taliban are horrible.
This reminds me of some of the nonsense Armstrong has come out with, along the lines of “Western feminists ought to be careful about condemning FGM because some Western doctors practised it (by no means universally) as a treatment for things like ‘hysteria’ in the 19C“. Essentially, it’s saying that the rights of some women don’t matter because they come from different cultures. I want all women to have the same rights and protections that I have: what’s wrong with that? What has happened to the concept of internationalism?!!!
“”Western feminists ought to be careful about condemning FGM because some Western doctors practised it (by no means universally) as a treatment for things like ‘hysteria’ in the 19C””
I’ve noticed a number of people who should know better comparing features of some versions of contemporary Islam to some features of the worst excesses of Victorian culture. They don’t seem to understand quite how that really isn’t a defense…
Really. I might as well point to Fred Phelps and say ‘Look how Fred Phelps carries on, so I’m hardly a shit at all.’