#sherene razack

[icarusfellintomyarms]

White Leftists & the Race to Innocence | @professorneil

[lasmaracuyas]

I want to denaturalize the spaces and bodies described in the trial in an effort to uncover the hierarchies that are protected and the violence that is hidden when we believe such spatial relations and subjects to be naturally occurring. To unmap means to historicize, a process that begins by asking about the relationship between identity and space. What is being imagined or projected on to specific spaces, and I would add, on to bodies? Further, what is being enacted in those space and on those bodies?

Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George, Sherene H. Razack (2002)

[lasmaracuyas]

[W]omen are able to discount other women's claims for justice when they believe that the systems of domination are essentially unconnected and when they understand their own claims to be more just than the claims of other women. Both beliefs sustain respectability because each woman fails to see how her own subordination depends on the subordination of another woman. She is thus unable to challenge the structure of domination that is supported by multiple women in various subordinate roles. If, as women, our liberation leaves intact the subordination of other women, then we have not achieved liberation, but only a toehold on respectability. The political lesson to be drawn from the idea of a toehold on respectability is that a claim for justice cannot be transformative if it depends for its success on marking the distinction between ourselves and other women who can then be labeled degenerate...

Seeing respectability as dominance through difference also suggests that the goal of any antisubordination strategy cannot be the pursuit of respectability. Respectability is a claim for membership in the dominant group; attaining it, even one aspect of it, requires the subordination of Others.

Moreover, because subordinate groups that gain a measure of respectability do not by definition possess all of the attributes of respectability, they are in an inherently unstable position. Those attributes that remain classified as degenerate will always threaten their toeholds on respectability. If a woman claims respectability on the basis of her formal education, for example-placing herself in a hierarchical relationship with women who have less formal education-whatever respectability she attains based on her education will inevitably be challenged. A stock of dominant narratives based on her disability, race, sex, sexual orientation, or other construct will be used to undervalue her accomplishments and highlight her mistakes.

"The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among Women”, Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack 

[lasmaracuyas]

Given the benefits and necessity of concentrating on the sources of our own subordination, it is not surprising that each of us does not easily endanger our place on the margin by an examination of our complicity in the oppression of others. To acknowledge that we oppress other women not only feels like a risk; it is a risk. Our own claim for justice is likely to be undermined if we acknowledge the claims of Others-competing claims that would position us as dominant. The compelling reasons, then, for our race to innocence have to do with how the systems of domination operate among subordinate groups, limiting both what we can know and feel and what we can risk acknowledging about one another and about ourselves. The race to innocence depends on the idea that the systems of domination are separate. This leads to women making a truth claim that they are subordinate in one system and failing to see their domination in another. Failing to see one's domination in another system, however, and acting from that basis not only leaves the systems that privilege us intact, but it leaves the system that subordinates us intact as well. Although we may believe we are advancing our own claim for justice by distinguishing ourselves from other women, we are assuring injustice for all. 

"The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among Women", Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack 

[frownfrump]

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.

Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, p. 86 

[misolot]

Just as mapping colonized lands enabled Europeans to imagine and legally claim that they had discovered and therefore owned the land of the "New World," unmapping is intended to undermine the idea of white settler innocence (the notion that European settlers merely settled and developed the land) and to uncover the ideologies and practices of conquest and domination.

Race, Space, and the Law Unmapping a White Settler Society

[spacesofbelonging]