Feminist framing can legitimize anti-immigrant policies that obscure the violence they claim to address

Evidence

Human Rights Service, Storhaug, and Wikan cannot be dismissed simply as examples of the far right’s perennial calls for immigration controls and increased surveillance of European immigrant communities. Such views are defended as feminist in that their expressed objective is to respond to a problem of violence against women. In dismissing them too quickly, we run the risk of dismissing the violence itself, and more importantly, we miss how their Orientalist structures limit an understanding of Muslim women’s lives. How anti-immigrant or racist positions such as Storhaug’s and Wikan’s limit our capacity to understand and confront patriarchal violence in minority communities are questions that we must all ask. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 258

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The analytic move — that dismissing racist ‘feminist’ claims outright risks dismissing the real violence they reference, while the Orientalist framing simultaneously blocks understanding — is a genuinely nuanced double bind.