Western feminist narratives can hijack genuine women’s-rights concerns for racist ends

Evidence

All three texts discussed in this article profitably exploit resistance to the very real inroads made by political Islam and the undeniable abrogation of women’s rights in Muslim countries and communities. What they offer is a simple way to understand an undeniable scourge, an analysis that easily harnesses real concern with the status of women to racist images of barbaric Muslims. In doing so, these texts draw on a feminist narrative that has come to dominate feminist studies: the story of equality as requiring a journey from pre-modernity to modernity, and from the non-West to the West, the latter understood as a place of universal values. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 241

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader debate on ‘feminism as imperialism’ — white savior feminism literature (Abu-Lughod’s ‘Do Muslim Women Need Saving?’).
• SEED: An essay angle: how the pre-modernity-to-modernity journey narrative smuggles free-market capitalism into feminist critique, and how to critique political Islam without the civilizational frame.