(Re)producing horse shit
I’ve been reading an article called ‘Canadian Women and the (Re)Production of Women in Afghanistan.’ I do not like it.
From the abstract, so that you can get the big picture:
Focusing on
the prominent group Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan), this
paper looks at the role its advocacy assumes in the context of the “War on Terror”. In
Canada as in the United States, 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. While CW4WAfghan attempt to challenge
dominant narratives of Afghan women, they ultimately reinforce and naturalize the
Orientalist logic on which the War on Terror operates, even helping to disseminate it
through the Canadian school system. Drawing on post-colonial feminist theory, this
paper highlights the implications of CW4WAfghan’s Orientalist discourse on women’s
rights, and tackles the difficult question of how feminists can show solidarity with
Afghan women without adhering to the oppressive narratives that permeate today’s
political climate.
Then from the main body:
Building on Krista Hunt’s analysis of feminist
complicity in the War on Terror (Hunt 2006), this essay draws attention to Canadian feminists’ role in (re)producing neo-imperialist narratives of Afghan women. Focusing specifically on the NGO Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan),
it shows how their use of feminist rhetoric and personal first-hand narratives, together
with national narratives of Canada as a custodian of human rights, add to the productive
power of the Orientalist tropes they invoke.If within Canada, constructions of Afghan women remain one of the most
powerful means by which knowledge about the “War on Terror” is produced,
CW4WAfghan are among the most active and powerful disseminators of such
knowledge. CW4WAfghan express the importance of this role in their twofold mandate:1) to raise awareness in Canada of the need to secure and protect human rights
and opportunities for Afghan women and, 2) to support the empowerment
efforts of Afghan women in education, health care and skills development
(CW4WAfghan 2008a).By explicitly focusing on how the second half of this mandate is pursued, my aim is not
to discredit what CW4WAfghan may have accomplished in Afghanistan, but rather, to
see how this work might be undemiined by becoming part of the War on Terror’s neo-
imperialist project of knowledge construction.
And so she does. She wants to get her Master’s degree, so she proceeds with her project of saying invidious things about an NGO working for Afghan women’s rights, for another forty pages. She leans heavily on Foucault and Said, she talks much of knowledge-power and Orientalism, and she ploughs her academic furrow. Meanwhile the women who work for CW4WAfghan do that. I know which I admire.
I might give you more extracts later. It’s replete with interesting items. The sad part is it was published in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.
Oh, sweet Jesus. Here I was, thinking this sort of blinkered, ethical, intellectual Twilight Zone thinking had died like Eleanor Rigby in the mid-90s when I was in university. But no.
That is appalling.
When I found B&W and read Why Truth Matters I may not have really appreciated the potential importance of fighting twaddlers. This convinces me. No matter how bad the oppression, justifications can and will be constructed out of ‘fashionable nonsense’. People sit in first world splendour and condemn third world people to live horrors that should be just history.
(Damn, do I contribute to that oppression myself?)
Pure arse-gravy. You can spot this kind of bum-drizzle a mile off by the way the word ‘narrative’ is used to mask the fact that we are talking about an extra-literary reality, the pretentious use of parenthesis to split perfectly cromulent words into two (eg. (re)production, (his)tory, etc) and the use of the word ‘other’ in quotations, or capitalised in order to create fictional binary oppositions.
I read Said’s book Orientalism at uni and he is highly selective in his choice of Western works in order to create a stereotypical view of how Westerners view the East. His Western canon consists of a handful of 19th Century works by middle-class White men that is no more representative of Western thought than the stereotypical Orient that Said himself constructs from their writing. It’s drivel.
Where does this use of the word ‘other’ first come from, because it appears in a lot of feminist and post-colonialist theory. It echoes the common misreading of Saussure which sees all meaning as determined by negation.
It’s as if Afghan women and their plight are nothing more than a literary device to plug into this “neo-imperialist narrative” — they seemingly have no independent existence as living, breathing, suffering people, with their own opinions and their own efforts to change their culture. They’re just a means to the end of writing a scholarly paper, nothing more. I think that might be one of the most offensive aspects of this entire intellectual exercise.
And for all the complaints that a lot of this type of writing about feminism in the Islamic world have about “not allowing Muslim women to speak,” they tend to be rather skimpy about describing the activities of Afghan or Iranian or Arab feminist activists in their own countries. But that complicates the story considerably — it makes it much more difficult to frame it as “awful imperialist neocon Westerners trying to impose their values on poor oppressed brown Muslims” when many of the “poor oppressed brown Muslims” themselves are trying to change things.
And again I feel compelled to say that feminism is far too important to be left in the hands of postmodernists. Examples about, and this is one of the more egregious I’ve encountered of late.
Po-mo: friend to creationism, holocaust denial, and the Taliban.
Yes, this kind of airy-fairy garbage never fails to get me completely bent out of shape, given that it “privileges” the abstract concerns of (usually) Western academics about “authenticity” or “imperialism” or some “narrative” over the lives, desires, suffering, and efforts of millions of real women and feminist activists. I get a similar feeling when I read defenses of purdah, the burqa, polygyny, segregation of the sexes, and so on from allegedly progressive people, some of whom call themselves feminists, who of course will never personally have to deal with the actual effects of those practices. It’s different if this kind of thing is coming from a highly religious woman, since these things do affect her personally (though it’s a bit rich for a Western-born Muslim or Western convert to sigh about how much better things are in Saudi Arabia or Iran or any other “Islamic state” than in the kafir West!). Yes, these women, of any religion, may be terribly deluded, but at least they have the excuse of actually subscribing to this nonsense. It’s the non-believing “progressives” and “liberals” who make defenses for regressive religious beliefs and practices and who sometimes go as far as libeling those who are actually trying to improve the situation who baffle me!
Ah, the evil imperialists….
Who did away with Suttee and Thuggee.
Yup, as you say, more of the same – except its’ not even horseshit.
The latter is USEFUL, and can be applied to plants to make them grow (works a treat on my Brassicas and Legumes), whereas the former – oh dear.
Anybody done a thesis on how the Taliban represent a colonialist, foreign ideology i.e. that of a certain Arab religion? Probably not. Too much like proper history.
And did she really spell undermined like that? Is it another post-poopy silly-cleverism or is she just lazy?
OB, a response to that journal from a human rights and pure reason viewpoint might be a publication opportunity if you can think of someone who would like to propose it to the editor?
Well, don’t leave us in suspense. What does the paper say about how postmodernists can “show solidarity with Afghan women” without, you know, actually caring about them or helping them or anything?
“the difficult question of how feminists can show solidarity with Afghan women”
Is the answer “help the Taleban oppress them in order to stick it to Empire”? Or is it “engage in useless and counterproductive gesture politics based on cretinised identity politics. Which will help the Taleban oppress them in order to stick it to Empire”?
ChrisPer, no, you don’t contribute to that oppression yourself! Well not unless you get up to totally uncharacteristic weird stuff in Real Life. But judging by your continued interest in the broader themes here – no, you don’t.
Lisa – exactly. The woman who sent me the article works for CW4WAfghan. She does something useful, while the author of this article tries to undermine that work in order to get academic preferment for herself via the deployment of stale unfelt jargon. It disgusts me.
Shatterface —
I first encountered this use of Other in the ’70s in college discussions of Sartre. According to Wikipedia, it can be traced back to Hegel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other
‘Well, don’t leave us in suspense. What does the paper say about how postmodernists can “show solidarity with Afghan women” without, you know, actually caring about them or helping them or anything’
Postmodernists never actually give practical prescriptions about how to go about changing things for the better, they promise to do that at a later date, which is why a typical pomo article is titled ‘*Towards* a liberatory politics of X’ rather than simply ‘A liberatory politics of X’.
‘Postmodernism’ means ‘after modernism – but before we commit ourselves on what to do next’.
I first encountered this use of Other in the ’70s in college discussions of Sartre. According to Wikipedia, it can be traced back to Hegel.’
Well the Sartre connection probably explains it’s inclusion in de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’.
It seems very much tied in with basic errors in certain schools of ’emancipatory’ thought. Logically unrelated ideas are lumped together (say, ‘male’, ‘western’, ‘rationality’) as if they represent different facets of the same thing. These are defined as dominant, and then a ‘subaltern’ ‘other’ is created as a binary oposite (‘female’, ‘Oriental’, ’emotional’) as if these qualities are also linked, and subordinated by the former.
We are then supposed to think that the interests of those in the latter group are best served by fighting *everything* in the former. For instance women are best served if instead of fighting male oppression directly we attack rationality and champion emotion.
It’s the politics of synecdoche.
Unfortunately, Shatterface, the historical record demonstrates quite clearly that ideas like ‘male’ and ‘rational’ WERE assumed and argued to be synonymous not very long ago at all; and Bengalis, for example, were condemned under the C19 ‘martial races’ argument of British imperialists as irredeemable ‘effeminate’ and not to be trusted to make up an army. [That had nothing to do, of course, with their rebellion in 1857, oh no, absolutely not…]
Some white, male, upper-class people as recently as 50 or 60 years ago were quite happy to lump together logically unrelated ideas, and use them to argue publicly that they ought to be in charge of everything, for ever. I rather think that there are quite a lot of such people around who still, secretly and not-so secretly, think exactly the same. Pointing this out is arguably still a valuable occupation, and certainly was when Edward Said wrote.
None of this excuses the arse-gravy of third-rate pseudo-intellectuals ranting self-righteously about something of which they have no experience, but for the record, Edward Said’s book ‘Orientalism’ is both a powerful and an interesting read; IMHO, of course.
Powerful and interesting but marred by inadequate knowledge of the subjects he covered, according to real scholars of Orientalism (which is a discipline before it’s a term of abuse).
Anyway, unfortunately, it’s one of those items undermined by its fans. It’s treated as holy writ by so many witless pseudo-scholars that it’s hard to read it through the haze.
I think Dave’s point is best understood by recognizing that postmodernists haven’t challenged these notions he’s outlined as being lumped together, but rather simply embraced their opposites. They merely take what were once considered bad qualities and now trumpet them as good. Postmodernists are essentially conservative in this fashion.
I think Dave’s point is best understood by recognizing that postmodernists haven’t challenged these notions he’s outlined as being lumped together, but rather simply embraced their opposites. They merely take what were once considered bad qualities and now trumpet them as good. Postmodernists are essentially conservative in this fashion.
Thanks for the Wiki link, Julia. It’s almost a catalogue of bad thought: Lacan, Kristeva, Althusser…They also include the misreading of Saussure I mentioned earlier – that his claim that a sign system is a differential system without positive terms implies that meaning itself has no positive terms.
Dave: ‘Some white, male, upper-class people as recently as 50 or 60 years ago were quite happy to lump together logically unrelated ideas, and use them to argue publicly that they ought to be in charge of everything, for ever.’
I should think there are many white, male, upper-class people who still believe that but there also seem to be a lot of people on the left who accept it too, but believe that if they say ‘Yeah – women are emotional but that’s emotional intelligence and its even better than reason!’ they don’t have to address the genuine barriers women face in the sciences, etc.
Yes, please more extracts!
Seriously, I’m genuinely surprised this sort of thing is still going on in academia, exactly as it has been for decades, with no change at all. What you quoted seems like what you’d do if you were to write a parody of the worst pomo excesses.
“What you quoted seems like what you’d do if you were to write a parody of the worst pomo excesses.”
Ha – exactly what my correspondent called it in the subject line – a product of the postmodernism-generator.
It is surprising – it does seem terribly old hat, and these are people who really adore new hat. Foucault, power-knowledge, Orientalism, now?
‘Powerful and interesting but marred by inadequate knowledge of the subjects he covered, according to real scholars of Orientalism (which is a discipline before it’s a term of abuse).’
I can’t speak from knowledge of the Orient but I can say from knowledge of *Western* literature that the Western ‘canon’ from which Said draws his examples is neither representative of Western literature in general, nor, in many cases representative of the particular writers from whom he cherry-picks.
His charge of ‘Orientalism’ rests on an equally dodgy ‘Occidentalism’.
Shatterface: “Postmodernists never actually give practical prescriptions about how to go about changing things for the better, they promise to do that at a later date, which is why a typical pomo article is titled ‘*Towards* a liberatory politics of X’ rather than simply ‘A liberatory politics of X’. “
Indeed. But otherwise we’d have to agree that “change” and “better” are just contingent social constructs with infinite possible readings that are nonetheless oppressive tools of Empire. And I’m not too sure about “do” either.
woot: “I think Dave’s point is best understood by recognizing that postmodernists haven’t challenged these notions he’s outlined as being lumped together, but rather simply embraced their opposites.”
Yes, they just flip the sign bit. They can do this because they will never have to face the consequences of what would happen to them if the causes they affect support for actually affected them.
“Something is happening, Reg [etc…]”
I couldn’t read it without thinking “Sokal”…
I think it’s quite good to investigate the role of narratives with respect to the political order, and I think it’s quite right to regard the emerging rationale for staying in Afghanistan as being strongly supported by imperialistic designs. These are bracing enough facts, I think fairly obvious facts, once you pay close attention to the rhetoric that gets used by the heads of state. The question is not whether or not we are “nation-building”, and whether or not this is a case of colonialism, but rather it’s a question of whether or not colonialism is morally and politically justifiable. (In the wake of 9/11 I thought it was. Now I regret it.)
The thing that I find repulsive about the way in which the author goes about their business is the offhanded use of “Orientalism”. It’s repulsive because it is un-self-consciously ironic. The sting of “Orientalism” is supposed to be that Western historians and cultural elites would use stereotypes and ignorant generalizations to characterise whole populations. But then that very term, in being directed at a diverse aggregate of scholars, is an example of Occidentalism! There must be a way of going about the sociology of civilizations that isn’t quite so uncritical and self-defeating.
This reminds me of one of the classic PoMo arguments: that therapy is inherently sexist because the/rapist.
Haha.
Logical phallacy!
“I think it’s quite right to regard the emerging rationale for staying in Afghanistan as being strongly supported by imperialistic designs”
There are no empires in NATO. There may be contemporary equivalents to imperialism in NATO’s behaviour. If there are it is urgent to identify those and to criticise them accurately (and oppose them politically) rather than to mystify them.
If we accept that there are equivalents to imperialism in NATO, they are clearly competing with alternative imperialisms. We should oppose them all equally, or choose the least worst to support. Which isn’t the Taliban no matter how hard we squint at Foucault.
Under no circumstances can we excuse the Taliban because we’ve read Hardt & Negri. The politics of reaction and opposition are not only insufficient, they are complicit. :-(
That’s an interesting view, but it’s pretty far outside of mainstream intellectual opinion. America is an empire in all the same relevant respects that the Soviets were during the Cold War. Nevermind Hardt and Negri and Foucault and the rest of them. I mean, you could even make a case for the American Empire on the basis of Manifest Destiny alone; but the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine made that case a lot easier; the Carter Doctrine made it nigh-impossible to miss; and the fall of the last competing “hard” superpower in 1991 made it beyond dispute. (Notwithstanding Tibet, I’m counting China as a Soft Superpower, given that it uses the threat of calling in American debts as its political leverage, as opposed to military sabre-rattling.)
NATO is interesting. Not long ago, Robert Kaplan was crowing about how irrelevant NATO was. But then comes America’s newest imperial project, and so NATO translates into the Coalition of the Willing, and hence back into relevance. But more to the point, the understanding conveyed to me by my MP’s is that as far as military operations goes (at least with Canada’s troops), America directs and organizes the theatre. That’s not to trivialise your insistence upon talk of NATO, because there are deeper questions here about national sovereignty when allied with an empire. It is just to say, call it what you will, America is the boss of the hemisphere.
I don’t think it’s any more mystical to say America is an empire than it is to talk breezily about any other kind of institution, like your local bank or pet store. I mean, I’m quite curious, what is your objection to the word “empire” that you cannot level just as easily against the word “superpower”? They’re equivalent, and equally ominous, yet the latter is so normalised in Washington and abroad that nobody can dream of challenging it. Does it just seem to have spooky connotations, a Creep Factor (so to speak)?
On the ethics of it… you seem to advocate complicity with the best empire as one potential option. I think that’s a refreshing opinion, but it seems to lead us into a place where we can’t distinguish between self-defence (Afghanistan in 2001) and activist aggression (Iraq).
And I bet y’all thought I was joking about “Transformative Pre-consensual Transfer of Sexual Autonomy: Toward a Problematization of the 11-year-old’s Imperialist Hegemony over her own Vagina,” in the “I knew I was not a cattle” thread. That’s not any more ridiculous than Krista Hunt’s nonsense.
“It is just to say, call it what you will, America is the boss of the hemisphere.”
Sure.
“I mean, I’m quite curious, what is your objection to the word “empire” that you cannot level just as easily against the word “superpower”? They’re equivalent, and equally ominous, yet the latter is so normalised in Washington and abroad that nobody can dream of challenging it. Does it just seem to have spooky connotations, a Creep Factor (so to speak)?”
I think that “superpower” is a dated term as well. I’m calling for realistic criticism of actual circumstances and I’m concerned that well-understood historical terms may not capture all the salient features or may allow people to ignore them.
I calling for new jargon. ;-)
What I should have added is that I’m certainly not calling for the lessons (and warnings) of history to be ignored.
“On the ethics of it… you seem to advocate complicity with the best empire as one potential option. I think that’s a refreshing opinion, but it seems to lead us into a place where we can’t distinguish between self-defence (Afghanistan in 2001) and activist aggression (Iraq). “
“Activist aggression” is a perfect description of the liberation of Iraq that I think would make both its proponents and opponents equally uncomfortable. :-)
I think that an Empire (sic ;-) ) that is meant to be an Open Society can be encouraged to differentiate between (e.g.) Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s why I do a lot of work supporting openness in western society.
I’m a bit more pessimistic about whether or not we understand the terms. Or, perhaps, I just don’t understand them.
So, by empire I take it we mean something like a centralised system of governance that controls and subjugates a large area of territory, including dissident colonies, and is typically headed by an Emperor. Obviously America has no emperor, and that’s one condition where you might think the term is being abused; but then again the Soviet Empire didn’t have one either. Is this the feature of the social system that causes you to opt for a purist historical construal of the term, i.e., that downgrades both the USSR and America as members? My tendency is to ignore the typical condition, i.e., of there being an emperor.
Either position is consistent, and consistency is ultimately all that matters. Still, I suppose that my problem is that I don’t see the key part of the concept of “Empire” as residing in its internal relation (to its subjects), but rather its relations to its outlying principalities. If I’m wrong, then I would be forced to use new terms (though I’d have to know what the new lexicon looks like first). This might be an arbitrary or ahistorical preference, but if that’s so, then I’d like to hear why.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, we can fairly say that the rationale that legitimates both efforts was that we must support the least worst among the powers. Once we’ve decided that that’s the way to go, I’m not sure what else there is to say about either effort that would distinguish the two on prior moral grounds. In a sense, there’s nothing else to say — we just have to follow this procedure, picking out the least worst among the powers and then support it. Granted, we can encourage an open society within the borders, and that might eventually lead to people saying, “Imperialism doesn’t work”, which will then eventually trickle upwards in the system of power and end that particular war. But those are posterior moral grounds for making a distinction, not prior grounds, and this makes an enormous practical difference in how we justify these things to ourselves. It seems to me that the difference is so large, in that case, that we’re just trying to disguise our secret preference for lions over pole-cats (to use Locke’s phrase). In which case, we might as well be straight-up about it.
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