Humanitarian concern for Muslim women weaponizes their bodies for imperial agendas.

Evidence

In the political realm, as Hammer points out, neoconservative attacks on Islam generally include a gender-egalitarian and women’s rights perspective. This ostensible intervention on behalf of women oppressed by the sharia reinforces Islamophobia among Americans; it claims to be interested in saving Muslim women while simultaneously casting them as foreign and dangerous, in this way turning women’s bodies into the tools of political agendas of imperialism and minority discrimination. Nowhere is this more evident than in the condescending feminist concern about the oppression of Afghani women, which conveniently justified the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan, although such concerns did not arise in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan praised the Afghan mujahidin as freedom fighters. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 50

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s already-published piece on moral panics over ‘immodest’ dress, where women’s bodies get pressed into class and identity signaling — here the mechanism is imperial rather than domestic. — connects to: Imperial feminism frames saving Muslim women as the West’s civilizing mission — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 294; NGOs function as imperial weapons in feminist guise in the Afghan war — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 311
• SEED: The Reagan flip — mourned Afghan women in 2002, praised mujahidin in 1980s — is a clean essay hook on how the same oppressed body is selectively seen or unseen by power.
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article by showing women’s bodies used as instruments of a different political agenda — imperial state violence.