Saving persecuted women preserves the West’s image of generosity while policing most 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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Western feminists fail to see their own implication in the neoliberal politics of empire, understanding only that they are more enlightened than their worse-off sisters in the South. Gender operates as a kind of technology of empire enabling the West to make the case for its own modernity and for its civilizational projects around the globe. Where gender is relied upon in this way, Muslim women find themselves stranded between the patriarchs of their own community and the empire’s bombs. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 58 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Women’s bodies have long been the ground on which national difference is constructed. When the Muslim woman’s body is constituted as simply a marker of a community’s place in modernity and an indicator of who belongs to national community and who does not, the pervasiveness of violence against women in the West is eclipsed. Saving Muslim women from the excesses of their society marks Western women as emancipated. Observing that ‘the declaration of an emancipated status for the Western woman is contingent upon the representation of the Oriental woman as her devalued other,’ Yegenoglu reminds us that women can only enter the privileged space of the universal through ‘a masculine gesture.’ Just as men claim the universal for themselves through confining women outside of it as non-rational subjects, so the Western woman requires the culturally different body to make her own claim of universality. Unveiling the Muslim woman, rendering her body visible and hence knowable and available for possession, renders the Western woman as the colonial, observing, possessing subject. Thus, old colonial technologies enjoy renewed vigour at a time when Islam versus the West is the hegemonic framing of the New World Order. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 203 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Feminist rescue of Muslim women masks the West’s containment of immigrants — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 292; Western women’s emancipated status depends on representing Oriental women as devalued others; Imperial feminism frames saving Muslim women as the West’s civilizing mission — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 294 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Feminist rescue of Muslim women masks the West’s containment of immigrants #corroborates (0.97) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 292
• Western feminist rescue politics serves empire by marking Muslims as premodern #corroborates (0.95) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 58
• Western women’s emancipated status depends on representing Muslim women as their devalued others. #corroborates (0.94) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 203
• Imperial feminism framed Muslim women as needing rescue by a liberal West #corroborates (0.92)