I am pleased to share a guest column by Afshan Jafar. Afshan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Connecticut College. She studies and teaches about cultural globalization, gender, religious fundamentalism, and trans-national women’s movements. Her forthcoming book, Women’s NGOs in Pakistan, uncovers the overwhelming challenges facing women’s NGOs and examines the strategies used by them to ensure not just their survival but an acceptance of their messages by the larger public.

I am horrified by the August 9^th 2010 Time magazine cover which shows an 18 year old Afghan woman, Aisha, without her nose. We are told that she fled her abusive in-laws, only to be dragged out of her home and taken away by the Taliban. She then had her nose and ears sliced off by her husband—while her brother-in-law held her down. The cover brings up a range of emotions in me – rage, grief, terror, but also resentment, irritation, and bitterness.

What bothers me about this image? Shouldn’t the world see the atrocities of the Taliban? When the people at Time decide to bring this image to the world, aren’t they giving voice to these women by telling their story? I wish it were that simple. Instead, I can’t help but wonder why is it that Time chose Aisha’s face for the cover rather than any of the other Afghan women’s whose pictures are found inside the issue–pictures of women who did not fit our stereotypes: an Olympic athlete, a talk show host who could belong to any television network in America, a former deputy speaker of parliament. But I suppose that wouldn’t sell as much as the picture they chose.

When Time publicizes this image, or when Jay Leno’s wife, Mavis Nicholson Leno, parades women in burqas on talk shows, or when Laura Bush talks of “liberating Afghan women”, what is left unexplored is that “Western” media attention can sometimes undermine the internal critiques generated by local women, activists, feminists, and academics. Our critiques are then seen, especially in our local contexts, as being complicit with Western interests, and we are seen as mere extensions of the Western media empire.

There is another possible outcome of the (often sensationalistic) coverage of Muslim women by Western media. Because of the stereotypical and one-dimensional image of the Muslim woman as oppressed, unaware of her rights, and really no more than a shadowy figure gazing out from behind the veil (always the veil), and the analogous image of the Muslim man as the oppressor—“backward,” pre-modern, uncivilized, evil, and anti-woman—Muslims, including academics and activists, have been put on the defensive.

A women’s rights activist in Pakistan once said to me, “you know, we shouldn’t wash our dirty linens in public”. But if activists, feminists, and academics, aren’t willing to “wash our dirty linens in public” then we might as well find some other profession for ourselves—preferably one that does not burden us with the task of questioning the existing social order. When we ignore the plight of people in the name of honoring or respecting a particular culture or tradition, we fail to ask some crucial questions: How was this particular tradition or practice “invented”? Who does it benefit? Exactly whose rights, and which systems of privilege and oppression, are we upholding when we honor the rights of a culture over those of its individuals?

And this is the burden of the social and cultural critic who belongs to an under-represented, and often times, misrepresented group of people. We spend much of our time fighting the stereotypes, telling the story from the other side, or highlighting the neglected accounts. And at the same time we have the responsibility of questioning our own cultural practices. It is a marginalized existence no matter how you look at it. To insiders we seem like traitors who dare expose the weaknesses—the “dirty laundry”—and to “outsiders” we are often a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

Perhaps this is why I respond to the Time cover the way I do. It reminds me of all the work that needs to be done—on the inside as well as the outside—and it confronts me with the reality of how little things have changed—on the inside as well as the outside. I doubt these emotions are unknown to anybody who has felt the burden of simultaneously representing and critiquing one’s culture, of giving voice to those who aren’t heard very often, while at the same time being urged not to speak too loudly for fear that the rest of the world might hear us.

-Afshan Jafar can be reached at afshan.jafar@conncoll.edu