Governments weaponize feminist rhetoric to justify wars.

Evidence

Many feminist scholars have written about how the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan and U.S. imperialism in the Middle East have been predicated on “saving the women.” The Bush administration co-opted feminist discourse and aligned itself with feminist organizations, such as the Feminist Majority Foundation, to garner public support for the War on Terror. Krista Hunt names this process “embedded feminism,” that is, “the incorporation of feminist discourse and feminist activists into political projects that claim to serve the interests of women but ultimately subordinate and/or subvert that goal.” Embedded feminism, alongside enlightened sexism, constructs the United States as a postfeminist realm that is positioned for benevolent interventions abroad. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 589

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘embedded feminism’ as co-optation of feminist discourse for war.
• XREF: Connects to Enlightened Sexism and to the MODESTY/Dress moral-panic literature — the same class/identity logic of instrumentalizing moral frameworks. — connects to: NGOs function as imperial weapons in feminist guise in the Afghan war — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 311; Bush used women’s rights and democracy to justify war — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 455; Banning cluster bombs requires dismantling precision-war rhetoric first. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 704