Western feminist outrage over the burka served imperial war aims

Evidence

Consider, for example, how the Feminist Majority’s intern campaign against the Taliban regime was an essential element in the Bush ad.. ministration’s attempt to establish legitimacy for the bombing of Afghanistan aptly called “Operation Enduring Freedom” ( on this, see Hirschkind and Mah.. mood 2002 ). It was the burka..clad body of the Afghan woman-and not the destruction wrought by twenty years of war fu by the United States through one of the largest covert operations in American history-that served as the primary referent in the Feminist Majority’s vast mobilization against the Taliban regime ( and later the Bush administration’s war). … The in.. adequacy of this knowledge has today become strikingly evident as reports from Afghanistan increasingly suggest that the lives of Afghan women have not im.. proved since the ouster of the Taliban and that, if anything, life on the streets has become more unsafe than it was under the old regime due to conditions of increased sociopolitical instability … Perhaps we need to entertain the possibility that had there been some analytical complexity added to the picture that or.. ganizations such as the Feminist Majority presented of Afghan women’s situa.. tion under Taliban rule, had the need for historical refl not been hij acked by the need for immediate political action, then feminism might have been less recruitable to this ill..conceived proj ect. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1303

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates both the Islamophobia cluster and Spivak’s critique of epistemic violence in representing the subaltern woman. — 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; Imperial feminism framed Muslim women as needing rescue by a liberal West
• SEED: Angle: how a single visual icon (burka) organizes and forecloses geopolitical knowledge — parallels the moral-panic logic already in the vault.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this ‘visual condensation’ argument generalize to how the veil itself got mobilized in French and US public discourse?