Feminist rescue of Muslim women masks the West’s containment of immigrants

Evidence

Europe has long had a legal fascination with the Muslim woman’s body as a culturally different body. Not coincidentally, legal interest intensified when a general tightening of Europe’s and North America’s borders occurred throughout the 1990s, initiatives often organized under culturalist explanations. As I and others have shown, the 1990s inaugurated a variety of legislative initiatives designed to control the flow of immigrants and refugees to the West (although not to stem the flow altogether, since immigrant labour is so vital) as well as to police those communities already living in the West, initiatives discursively managed through the figure of the illegitimate asylum seeker/immigrant. Most Western states passed laws designed to separate the legitimate from the illegitimate, the latter marked as possessing a cultural capacity for deceit. In Canada, for example, asylum seekers who did not possess identity documents but who were granted asylum were nevertheless denied the full benefits of resident status for five years until we could tell if they were honest and had had time to learn ‘our’ values. Against the figure of the illegitimate asylum seeker and the bad immigrant, there was also the good immigrant, one for whom we could feel pity and who was deemed assimilable. In the latter category were women fleeing gender-based persecution, women the West was prepared to save providing a case could be made that their own cultures were too patriarchal and their own positions too pitiable to endure the violence. If the majority of immigrants were deemed unassimilable and requiring close surveillance, the West could still preserve its appearance of generosity through saving non-Western women from the perils they faced in their own cultures. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 292

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how ‘saving brown women from brown men’ has always been a colonial justification — resonates with classic postcolonial scholarship on rescue narratives. — connects to: Imperial feminism frames saving Muslim women as the West’s civilizing mission — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 294; Imperial feminism framed Muslim women as needing rescue by a liberal West
• SEED: Possible essay: how Western generosity toward women is deployed as a cover for broader immigration restriction, drawing on the good immigrant/bad immigrant binary.