Let me re-order your responses, & allow me to answer the easier one first.
At 2:21 PM -0800 11/24/01, Angelita Manzano wrote:
> > If they haven't been, they should be, if and when
>> the same problem (=
>> looking to the US power elite to conduct a
>> civilizing mission by
>> wars, economic sanctions, etc. _when no mass
>> movement on the Left in
>> nations-to-be-affected by them [e.g., the ANC] are
>> demanding them_)
>> exists.
>
>I think this may be a valid criticism. But it seems to
>be levelled at feminists more often than people
>involved in other struggles. You know: when men do it,
>they're revolutionaries. When women do it, we're
>missionaries. Men are showing solidarity. We're
>"saving our brown sisters."
Feminists aren't any worse than those of other political persuasions in this regard. Have you taken a look at Lata Mani's work? Her article "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India," _Cultural Critique_ 7 (1987), expanded into a book _Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India_ (University of California Press, 1998 -- for more info, visit <http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8185.html>)? One of her interests is to describe discourse on sati as a political battleground among British colonial officials, Christian missionaries, & indigenous elites (most of them male), the battleground on which indigenous women's bodies became symbolic territories on which men could map their political desires, so to speak. Today, discourse on Afghan women's bodies, social beings, & consciousness is an even more complicated battleground, with Western feminists, as well as some Afghan feminists in diaspora, becoming more salient political players than in the past.
Therefore, feminists in the USA (and to a lesser extent elsewhere in the nations gathered by the US government into the ad-hoc coalition in the so-called war on terrorism), as well as feminists in Afghanistan & Afghan diaspora, today have a more ethical and political responsibility than before to deconstruct imperial attempts to incorporate feminist concerns, since, clearly, the US power elite -- including Republican members of them -- have learned to speak the feminist rhetoric so well as to make some liberal feminists well satisfied, to lead many Americans to feel good about "liberating Afghan women from the Taliban," etc. We've seen a similar tactic in the US government's intervention in the Balkans (back then, "worthy victims" [to take a term from Chomsky's analysis] were Bosnian Muslim women who became victims of wartime rape), but the war on Afghanistan (perhaps due to Orientalism) has made a particularly heavy-duty use of the idea of "saving brown women from brown men."
At 2:21 PM -0800 11/24/01, Angelita Manzano wrote:
> > Perhaps in some cases, though not intentionally so
>> -- by making US
>> women feel complacent, "Ain't I fortunate, compared
>> to Afghan women!"
>
>If some women contact me & tell me how horrible it is
>in their country, what am I supposed to do? Say,
>things are tough all over? I think that it is true
>that as a woman in the US I am fortunate, in some
>ways, so maybe I should use that privilege to help
>someone else? I'm not saying patriarchy & violence
>exists only in Muslim countries, not in the US, not in
>(hypothetically) Laura Bush's own home. I'm not
>saying we shouldn't organize women here in the US.
The approach here, I believe, should not be ahistorical & comparative but historical and dialectical. An ahistorical and comparative approach look at women of different nations -- say of Afghanistan and the USA -- as if their histories had been discrete, isolated from each other, and unfolding independently of each other. According to this approach, if Afghan women are denied education, employment, & voices in the public sphere, it must be either solely or mainly because of evil patriarchal Afghan men! In contrast, a historical and dialectical approach would look at the (military, economic, & political) roles of the American Empire in producing the conditions under which Afghan women live today -- most notoriously directly and indirectly (through its client regimes) funding the very patriarchal fundamentalists, be they Osama bin Laden, Taliban, or the Northern Alliance, who have made the lives of Afghan women miserable indeed. Further, global capitalism, whose military guarantor that the US government has become since the end of Pax Britannia, cannot but produce an increasing polarization between haves and have-nots within and between nations; especially the neoliberal phase of global capitalism, which rolled back the gains made by peasants and proletarians during the period roughly between the end of WW2 and the beginning of the debt crisis, dissolved many nations and produced an increasing number of failed or failing states on the periphery -- in this grim global context, Afghanistan is one among many burdened by similarly dire problems (think of Congo, Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, etc.). To conclude, lives of women in Afghanistan and the USA have been intricately intertwined, though links between us have not been made visible to many Americans. It's a job of feminists against US imperialism to make them clear. -- 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>