>Sara Pursley, "Unveiling the Bushes," _LGNY (Lesbian & Gay New
>York)_ No. 173 (7-20 December 2001), at
><http://www.lgny.com/0173web/Pursley173.html>. The same article,
>under the title "Unveiling Afghanistan: The Bush Administration
>Cares about Women's Rights (as Long as There Aren't Any Pesky Women
>Around)," is also available at
><http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=12507>.
An excerpt:
>Not so fast, Smiley. The risks to women could be very real when a
>foreign power engages in simultaneous projects of violence against a
>country's inhabitants and the "liberation" of its women. And the
>Western obsession with unveiling Muslim women with one hand, while
>dropping bombs with the other, has had a particularly long and
>unfortunate history. Carla Freccero recently reminded me what
>Algerian psychologist and liberation theorist Frantz Fanon wrote
>more than forty years ago in his essay "Algeria Unveiled."
>
>"The deliberately aggressive intentions of the colonist with respect
>to the haïk [the Algerian veil] gave a new life to this dead element
>of the Algerian cultural stock -- Š To the colonialist offensive
>against the veil, the colonized opposes the cult of the veil ...
>[It] acquires a taboo character, and the attitude of a given
>Algerian woman with respect to the veil will be constantly related
>to her overall attitude with respect to the foreign occupation."
>
>Smiley's no-risk analysis only works if Afghan women exist outside
>of history. In reality, the few women who have removed their burkas
>are brave not only because doing so could signify resistance to
>their countrymen, but also because it could signify allegiance to
>the foreign invaders who claim to be rescuing them - at a cost that
>is not only enormous, but also non-consensual and non-negotiable.
>The vast majority of Afghan women have declined the invite.
But the Taliban - many of whom were not Afghans, and of those who were, were from an ethnic group representing well under half the population - forced women to wear the damn things. It's not like they were spontaneous expressions of home-grown patriarchy. So who the colonizers are, under those circs, gets very murky.
Doug