Western feminist rescue politics serves empire by marking Muslims as premodern

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Lila Abu-Lughod’s ‘Do Muslim Women Need Saving?’ and to feminist critiques of the ‘white savior’ complex in rescue discourse. — connects to: Imperial feminism frames saving Muslim women as the West’s civilizing mission — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 294; Imperial feminism framed Muslim women as needing rescue by a liberal West; The rescue-of-Muslim-women narrative originated in European colonialism — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 306
• ADDENDUM: Extends the Immodesty article’s theme that moral panics over non-Western dress serve civilizational branding — now applied to feminist rescue politics.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the rescue dilemma’ — how progressive causes get co-opted into militarized civilizational projects, using gender rescue as the case study.