The continual recurrence of liberal visual and textual representations of Afghan women sensationalize their plight and conflate third world women "over there" with third world women "over here." Such presentations compel me to reiterate critiques put forward by Chandra Mohanty (1991), Gayatri Spivak (1999), Umma Narayan (1997), and Lata Mani (1990) about the discursive construction of third world women's lives in western accounts. Trinh Minh-ha reminds us that such accounts of the third world women's pain and oppression have made them inmates in a private zoo (1989). Within such a zoo, the archetypal image of the veiled woman, even when accompanied by a speaking subject, remains limited to the immediate sensory experience of what it is like to be confined. The political context and social systems are eliminated. In representing an Afghan's woman's narrative I face a dilemma familiar to many feminists who want to write about women "over there", our accounts risk reinforcing them as victims. Yet women in Afghanistan are suffering. How then do we identify and support their struggles? Drawing on Joan Scott's (1992) work, I argue for a methodology that historicizes narratives of experience by identifying how geopolitics, specifically the cold war, helped determine the current social formation in Afghanistan. Afghan women's accounts need to be read against this history.... *****
Khan's language is, alas, typically academic (= unnecessarily stilted); but her thesis and criticism of the Feminist Majority campaign, with which the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) has been aligned, is valid. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Anti-War Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Anti-War Organizing in Columbus Covered by the Media: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/media.html>