I'm not at all saying it's only US imperialism that is the problem; my contention is that it's often the glaringly missing element in the dominant discourse on Afghan women (including liberal feminist discourse on them for the most part), with its absence likely shaping the political direction that public opinions take.
As for the nature of patriarchy in Afghanistan, however, even on this topic, there is shocking paucity of information, & pictures presented to us are (nearly uniformly) quite one-dimensional & even misleading. A little while ago, Daniel Davies posted the following here, to which no follow-up has come:
At 12:40 PM -0600 11/7/01, Daniel Davies wrote:
>From: "Daniel Davies" <dsquared at al-islam.com>
>To: " lbo-talk at lists.panix.com" <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Subject: "a life lived largely indoors"
>Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 12:40:15 -0600
>
>Barbara Echenreich [sic] wrote, via Doug's quotation:
>
>>Bin Laden is, of
>>course, hardly a suitable heir to the Third World liberation
>>movements of the mid-20th century, but he does purport to >speak for
>>the downtrodden and against Western capitalism and >militarism. Except
>>that his movement has nothing to offer the most >downtrodden sex but
>>the veil and a life lived largely indoors.
>
>which is something I've kept coming across in quite a bit of press comment
>-- the assertion that women in Afghanistan are kept literally imprisoned
>indoors. Which raises two questions in my mind:
>
>1) What clever trick have the Afghans managed to pull which has allowed
>them to be the only primitive agricultural society in the world which does
>without female labour? Do they have indoor wells, or do the men carry
>water, for example?
>
>and
>
>2) If this picture of life is correct, who are all those long haired people
>with recognisably female figures who I keep seeing in the background of BBC
>news footage, working outdoors in clothes reasonably suitable for the task?
>
>I'm not holding myself out as an expert on the position of women anywhere,
>and indeed am sure that the Taliban are absolutely dreadful people. But I
>can't help thinking that when even someone as typically perceptive as
>Echenreich is repeating as obvious fact things which are demonstrably not
>true, then something pretty dangerous has happened to the free world's
>media.
>
>dd
Both (1) and (2) are good questions in my opinion, if we are truly interested in analyzing & contesting patriarchy in Afghanistan. -- Yoshie
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