why do empires care so much about women's clothes?
September 22, 2015 9:23 AM   Subscribe

"Whether it is the covering of breasts in Southern India or the wearing of burqas in Afghanistan, women's comportment and clothing have offered an emotionally powerful shorthand for all that is wrong with native culture and all that must be corrected by the empire." Rafia Zakaria for Aeon: Clothes and daggers. posted by divined by radio (23 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Well, you can't very well go in with the plan of saving native men, since you will probably have to shoot most of them at some time or other. Women can be "saved" and put to work.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:50 AM on September 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


why do empires care so much about women's clothes?

Just the other day I read a piece which referenced the British attempts to eliminate suttee as cultural imperialism done right.
It's part of the window-dressing: the justification for power.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:58 AM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


"US feminists" are an empire now?
posted by enamon at 10:05 AM on September 22, 2015


this is kind of obvious, but part of the reason, in current dialogue (and perhaps earlier) is that it's a way of conscripting support from political factions that would be otherwise excluded. it's an attempt to frame, say, the invasion of afghanistan, in terms that might be supported by "the left". and it also provides an alternative motivation to oil - "we're doing it to save the women". in short, it's useful. hopefully less so, though, as it's called out more.

(i'm still reading through the article by lila abu-lughod, but presumably she's going to unpack more than that. hopefully before my code compiles.)
posted by andrewcooke at 10:14 AM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think this gets the analysis wrong. What we see from British imperialism and other colonialist practices is that empires create nationalistic resistances that actually celebrate and emphasize gendered divisions in order to sustain themselves. It's not that the British ended sati; it's that the people they were oppressing started practicing sati as a response to their oppression, and then the British tried to ban it. Once the empire gets involved, it becomes a point of pride and a requirement for solidarity with anti-colonial forces.

But that's not a defense of sati or clothing restrictions, because even in the absence of empire, that stuff exists and is pretty bad. Worse, there's a connection between restrictive clothing requirements and other forms of gendered oppression.

But clothes-smlothes. In most of the developing world, if you offer birth control to men, the birth rates don't go down. If you offer birth control to women, it does. This is also true in many poor communities in developed countries, so duh, it's no defense of imperialism.

That, to me, suggests that feminist concerns are not illegitimate or simply imperialistic. I'm not advocating invasion of Saudi Arabia to end their legal discrimination against women. And American and British spurned lovers were throwing acid in the faces of their crushes only a century ago. Still, that's certainly why everyone, imperialist or not, cares: many women are not in control of their own reproductive decisions or life choices. It wouldn't be a thin veneer of justification for our own horrific violence if there wasn't anything wrong with the practices we oppose.
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:20 AM on September 22, 2015 [13 favorites]


"US feminists" are an empire now?

No, but the "Cause of Empire" is as easily served by appealing hypocritically to women's discomfort with the treatment of women in other cultures/places the Empire would like to invade as men's ideals of adventure or military power, religious fears over other religions, etc. etc. The The specific problem is always a blind; the specific solution is always projection of force and power.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:20 AM on September 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


the specific solution is always projection of force and power.

This is false. Very often the specific solution is mutual aid and support. Empires may abuse feminist concerns for their own purposes, but feminism is not MERELY a tool of empire.
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:22 AM on September 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


This is false.

Sorry, I should have been clearer -- it is the rhetoric of Empire where the specific problem is the blind and the solution is always projection of force and power. This is why "feminist" rationals for, say, invading Afghanistan, have not produced notable lasting feminist outcomes; whatever feminists who backed the war may have wished, the war was not about saving women in any meaningful way, much less the development of any kind of larger feminist project. The war in Afghanistan was cast as "saving women" to feminists, as "striking back against an attack" to nationalists, as "a blow against fundamentalist Islam" to concerned Christians, Jews, and Atheists, and so on. "Every watcher his or her own excuse" is one watchword of Empire.
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:33 AM on September 22, 2015 [8 favorites]


There's also this audio piece from the Socialism 2015 conference: "Liberation at Gunpoint: the Politics of Feminist Imperialism" by Deepa Kumar. It's not my favorite articulation of the position, but I can't currently find an earlier presentation that I found more engaging....
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:35 AM on September 22, 2015


Sure, sure. The problem is that a lot of post-colonial theory tends to adopt just that universalist position, impugning ordinary feminism with the brush of imperialism. There, a lot of this goes back to the original Spivak essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? (Which I have to say *is* my favorite articulation of the position.)
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:43 AM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


This was the key observation for me, from Zakaria's essay (accent mine):
Any honest analysis of honour crimes in Afghanistan would have to begin by acknowledging a society whose familial and institutional structures have been broken by five decades of Soviet and US foreign intervention. That sort of honest analysis would also reveal that marital 'choice' is unavailable to nearly anyone, male or female, in Afghan society. It would explore marriage as a means of cementing frayed communal relations in a war-torn land rather than the romantic liaison available to affluent Westerners. Finally, it could also acknowledge that the intimate violence committed by men against women in Afghanistan has hundreds of thousands of counterparts committed by men against women in the US.

Instead, representing 'honour killing' as an exotic, gruesomely brutal, incomprehensible phenomenon driven by mysterious cultural imperatives makes the US occupation seem urgent and righteous, even heroic. Acknowledging that 'honour killing' in Afghanistan could be comparable to all the other crimes that men perpetuate against women everywhere else would cast into doubt one of the main moral edifices of the imperial endeavour. Like the 19th-century Indian Hindu sati, the 21st-century Afghan Muslim honour killings must be uniquely evil.
She isn't denigrating feminism as a tool of the empire or implying that it is, itself, an empire, she's denigrating the cynical manipulation of Western "feminist" activism and its subsequent use as a convenient pawn that can be used to shore up imperialist gains, which is particularly insulting considering the overwhelming amount of gendered violence women continue to experience right here at home.

Abu-Lughod's piece goes on to look at the usefulness of suspicion toward one's bedfellows when it comes to finding yourself in a position of agreeing with one of the aims of a movement whose other viewpoints repulse and infuriate you. These are important reminders, I think, for a lot of otherwise ostensibly progressive Western feminists.
posted by divined by radio at 10:43 AM on September 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


look at the usefulness of suspicion toward one's bedfellows when it comes to finding yourself in a position of agreeing with one of the aims of a movement whose other viewpoints repulse and infuriate you. These are important reminders, I think, for a lot of otherwise ostensibly progressive Western feminists.

No one demands that Abu-Lughod confront her bedfellows: husband/rapists, bride-burners, or pedophiles marrying pre-adolescent girls. No one assumes that she's really in solidarity with them; we recognize that she is opposed to the invasion but also to the treatment of Afghan women. Why, then, would we think that US feminists are "befellows" with US imperialists?

That's the thing: it's a simply matter just to say what you think is true: Afghan women were and are horribly treated, and yet the American invasion clearly just exacerbated their situation. This was and is RAWA's position, so it's not a hard one to make sense of. Meanwhile empires use whatever figleaf they can find to justify their depradations, but that doesn't tarnish the figleaf! (Indeed, feminism wouldn't be an effective figleaf if it wasn't a reasonable concern.)
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:58 AM on September 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


anotherpanacea: “It's not that the British ended sati; it's that the people they were oppressing started practicing sati as a response to their oppression, and then the British tried to ban it. Once the empire gets involved, it becomes a point of pride and a requirement for solidarity with anti-colonial forces.”

The irony is that this is only technically true, really; the people the British were oppressing do appear to have started practicing sati (or at least revived the ancient custom) as a response to oppression they suffered at the hands of an empire – it just wasn't the British empire. It was under the Delhi Sultanate, half a millennium before the British arrived in India, and later the Moghul Empire (which apparently also tried to discourage the practice) that Hindu women among the Rajput resistance began to practice sati more regularly, often as a way of escaping the quite brutal treatment they were likely to suffer at the hands of the Muslim invaders.

At least – that's one reading of the history of it, and given the known brutality of the early Delhi Sultanate, it seems probable. There seem to be documented cases of sati before the Muslim conquest; but they seem to be relatively fewer. This seems like a good historical article about sati.
posted by koeselitz at 11:00 AM on September 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


These practices always flare up in response to invasions and oppression by outsiders. They're lost or unpopular traditions that get rediscovered as needed. Consider the practice of female genital mutilation and cutting in Kenya. In the 1920s, missionaries for the Scottish Presbyterian Church in Kenya tried to mobilize their moral authority to elminate the practice. (There’s a good summary of the incident in Karanja’s Female Genital Mutilation in Africa, available on Google Books here.) But because the Presbyterian missionaries were seen as condemning a local practice without also condemning violent colonial rule, local political activists took up a defense of female genital cutting as a means of producing solidarity.
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:06 AM on September 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


Why, then, would we think that US feminists are "befellows" with US imperialists?

It's very clear that the article is talking about US feminists who supported an imperialist invasion in the name of liberating Afghan women. My concern with these conversations is that they often turn into "but I'm a feminist and I'm not an imperialist, these brushstrokes are too broad" and then into havering over feminism rather than talking about the subject at hand.

The bedfellows in question belong to feminists who support imperialist adventures under the justification of helping foreign women. Thus, Abu-Lughod's bedfellows aren't violent husbands, since she's not supporting violent husbands in the name of Afghan nationalism.

Although speaking of feminism, right at the beginning the article points out that nationalist/imperialist feminism is routinely used to discredit local feminism. "Feminism" gets painted as "white women supporting bombing your village"....precisely because white imperialist feminists do exist, and that gets used by the right to discredit, for example, Afghani feminism.
posted by Frowner at 11:09 AM on September 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


No, but the "Cause of Empire" is as easily served by appealing hypocritically to women's discomfort with the treatment of women in other cultures/places the Empire would like to invade as men's ideals of adventure or military power, religious fears over other religions, etc. etc. The The specific problem is always a blind; the specific solution is always projection of force and power.

I remember in the run-up to the invasion of Afghanistan being furious that suddenly the US was pretending to give a shit about the treatment of women by the Taliban after years of ignoring feminists who were screaming about it. The hypocrisy just burned.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:39 AM on September 22, 2015 [5 favorites]


I really like the first article. As a survivor of domestic abuse AND the perverse American 'Family Court' system I wonder what foreign invader is considering making the plight of American women a talking point?
Women and children can not really ever leave an abuser. Our courts make true liberation utterly impossible. Not only that, NO Western country is really doing much better.
I had a professor who probably was some sort of intelligence agent who brought Afghan women here, young ladies who never got married and an older lady who ran a shelter someplace in Afghanistan. While I was glad these individual women were getting help, it begged the question of our own terrible legal system which on a yearly basis costs the lives of children and women.
After the presentation I asked him even, how is our 'Family Court' system ANY improvement over what is going on in Afghanistan?
Of course no answer. Because really there isn't. There won't be any time soon.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 11:41 AM on September 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


I wrote a paper when I was at University about Joan of Arc. I had researched transcripts of her trial, and noted that references to the *way she dressed* were mentioned over 100 times; way more than any other aspect of her behavior(s).

It was my thesis that she was executed not because of her action, but because she violated the cultural dress code.
posted by CrowGoat at 11:54 AM on September 22, 2015 [5 favorites]


I though the name of Lila Abu - Lughod rang a bell! I have read her book ' Veiled Sentiments' I recommend it highly. She raises some very good points about the missionaries and other colonialist ventures in Egypt.
There is such an atmosphere of this colonial past in current discussions of Muslims in the West, and yet no one wants to pick up the mirror. No one wants to look at how women's rights to be secure and happy are not guaranteed in the West and really never have been.
It's as patriarchal in the West as it is anyplace and it always has been. Secularism hasn't solved the problem.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 12:24 PM on September 22, 2015 [3 favorites]


I have read her book ' Veiled Sentiments' I recommend it highly.

I've put it on my reading list Katjusa Roquette - thanks for the recommendation.
posted by Sophie1 at 12:32 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


(I wrote a paper when I was at University about Joan of Arc. I had researched transcripts of her trial, and noted that references to the *way she dressed* were mentioned over 100 times; way more than any other aspect of her behavior(s).

It was my thesis that she was executed not because of her action, but because she violated the cultural dress code.


I should think the example of Joanne of Flanders provides a more than adequate counter to this thesis.)
posted by Emma May Smith at 12:58 PM on September 22, 2015


My concern with these conversations is that they often turn into "but I'm a feminist and I'm not an imperialist, these brushstrokes are too broad" and then into havering over feminism rather than talking about the subject at hand.

My concern is that these mumpsimus defenses turn into excuses to be more radical-than-thou or more theoretical-than-thou without taking seriously the paucity of remedies actually available. "Don't talk about misogyny in the developing world or you start to sound like an imperialist." That's a problem, sure, but it doesn't mean we can't mention the issue; it means that we have to pause after our diagnosis and talk carefully about possible responses.

Restrictive dress codes are the visible symbols of more serious violence. There is a stronger correlation between the burqa and misogyny than between concern for the burqa and imperialism. The chadri wasn't even common in Afghanistan until the Taliban took power. It's not somehow natural or deep-rooted.
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:51 AM on September 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


i don't think it's "don't talk". it's more "don't intervene", or, perhaps, "tread carefully", or even, "treat the locals with an ounce of respect for once".

as the articles state, these countries have their own (feminist) movements. by all means listen to them, share with them, support them.

what is being argued against is blind, dumb, aggressive, imperialist, direct, context-free intervention. you don't know best - they do.

(more than that, there's the whole question of framing the debate. i am suspicious of the people who raise the issue for ulterior motives. there are a lot of shitty regimes. we support most of them. the only time they're "bad" is when they stop doing what we want. so how do you select a "cause" without their unwelcome bias - how do you stop your attempts to do good from being subverted into some larger bad?)
posted by andrewcooke at 1:35 PM on September 23, 2015


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