Western women’s emancipated status depends on representing Oriental women as 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 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Nafisi’s particular trick is not only to snuff out any possibility of feminist practice or resistance from within Islam but also to disregard all kinds of feminist activity that does not originate in the West and coincide with secular values. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 227 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Woman’s status as privileged Other depends on specific social and political conditions — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 320; Saving persecuted women preserves the West’s image of generosity while policing most immigrants; Western women’s emancipated status depends on representing Muslim women as their devalued others. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 203 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Western women’s emancipated status depends on representing Muslim women as their devalued others. #qualifies (0.95) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 203
• Depicting feminism as Western-only erases Muslim feminist movements #complicates (0.78) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 227