{"id":35509,"date":"2011-05-06T10:10:44","date_gmt":"2011-05-06T15:10:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=35509"},"modified":"2015-09-20T23:14:43","modified_gmt":"2015-09-21T04:14:43","slug":"muslim-women-and-their-white-saviors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2011\/05\/06\/muslim-women-and-their-white-saviors\/","title":{"rendered":"Muslim Women and their White Saviors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently at Feministing, Maya Dusenbery\u00a0wrote about<\/a> an ad from\u00a0Germany\u2019s International Human Rights campaign<\/a> that, as she put it, is \u201ca lesson in how\u00a0not<\/em> to advocate for women\u2019s rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The translation of the text is \u201cOppressed women are easily overlooked. Please support us in the fight for their rights.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As Dusenbery writes,<\/p>\n

It seems the folks who created this ad not only have a hard time seeing agency but actually went out of their way to erase it as thoroughly as possible and then stomp on it some more. And then equated women who wear the burqa with bags of trash.\u00a0Literally<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I completely agree, and would like to add some broader context. \u00a0This is not at all surprising, given the recent of attempts in the West to obscure the agency of Muslim women in juxtaposition to their white, Western saviors. One of the more blatant examples of this was the discourse of the United States government that it was going to war in Afghanistan in part to save Afghan women from the Taliban.\u00a0Laura Shepherd<\/a> argued in an excellent 2006\u00a0article<\/a> in\u00a0The International Feminist Journal of Politics<\/em> (which I\u2019vecited<\/a> before<\/a>) that the US discursively constructed Afghan women as the \u201cHelpless Victim\u201d that was submissive and lacking agency, under the oppressive control of the \u201cIrrational Barbarian.\u201d This discourse, was used, of course, to posit the United States (specifically, its military) as the saviors who could rectify the situation for these women. Much as the agency of the women in the German PSA was erased, this narrative denied the agency of Afghan women, who, as Shepherd writes, are afforded \u201conly pity and a certain voyeuristic attraction\u201d (p. 20).<\/p>\n

Of course, this specific discourse hasn\u2019t ended. As this\u00a0TIME Magazine<\/em> cover from last year shows, it continues to serve as a means of justifying the US occupation of Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>(Cover to the August 9, 2010 edition of TIME<\/em>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This discourse assumes, obviously, that the US presence in Afghanistan is a clear benefit for women in the country, a position at least some\u00a0women\u2019s<\/a> organizations<\/a> in Afghanistan contest. Samhita Mukhopadhyay at Feministing had an excellent\u00a0post<\/a> on this issue last summer.<\/p>\n

I should also mention France\u2019s recently-instituted ban on the full-faced veil, which Dusenbery argues \u2013 citing\u00a0Jos Truitt<\/a> \u2013 is a similar erasure of agency. I agree with her, and again would add that this fits in with this general (Orientalist) discourse about Muslim women, their uncivilized oppressors, and their White saviors.<\/p>\n

John McMahon is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he also participates in the Women’s Studies Certificate Program. \u00a0He is interested in post-structuralism, issues relating to men and feminism, gendered practices in international relations, gender and political theory, and questions of American state identity. \u00a0John blogs at\u00a0Facile Gestures<\/a>, where this post originally appeared.<\/em><\/p>\n

See also our post in which we criticize a set of public service ads that compared women the genital cutting to blow up sex dolls<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently at Feministing, Maya Dusenbery\u00a0wrote about an ad from\u00a0Germany\u2019s International Human Rights campaign that, as she put it, is \u201ca lesson in how\u00a0not to advocate for women\u2019s rights.\u201d The translation of the text is \u201cOppressed women are easily overlooked. Please support us in the fight for their rights.\u201d As Dusenbery writes, It seems the folks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[55,2095,778,23695,701,1763,3920,461,23704,42,309],"class_list":["post-35509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gender","tag-gender-feminismactivism","tag-intersectionality","tag-intersectionality-gender-x-race","tag-modernprimitive","tag-nation-afghanistan","tag-nation-united-states","tag-human-rights","tag-public-service-announcements","tag-religion","tag-warmilitary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35509"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68007,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35509\/revisions\/68007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}