Western women’s emancipated status depends on representing Muslim women as their devalued others.

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article — both trace how women’s bodies become the ground for civilizational/class/political distinction. — connects to: White women’s lady-status depended on keeping black women legally unmarriageable. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 186
• DEFINE: Articulates the colonial logic of unveiling: making the Muslim woman’s body visible and ‘knowable’ renders her possessed, while marking the Western woman as observing subject.