#sunaina maira

[inqilabi]

Currently, a burgeoning industry of memoirs by Muslim women do the work for imperial feminism that texts such as Betty Mahmoody’s Not without My Daughter did in an earlier era. However, the oppressed Muslim/Middle Eastern woman is no longer just produced by Western feminists but is also self-produced by Muslim authors in the spirit of entrepreneurial capitalism, while carefully protected and promoted by Western states, media, and conservative organizations. Farzaneh Milani points out that in 2002 “more books were published in the United States by Afghan women than in the entire history of American letters. In contrast, memoirs of life in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, depicting the escalating violence, . . . and the harsh living conditions for women, are rare.” Memoirs by Muslim women about the oppressiveness of Islam provide an “ameliorative narrative” that legitimates U.S. imperial policies and appeases the guilt or uneasiness of readers about U.S. wars overseas, as Afghan American author Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel, The Kite Runner, also did in offering a narrative of rescue and redemption about the war on Afghanistan

— Sunaina Maira, “Good” and “Bad” Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms. 2009

[inqilabi]

A resurgent imperial feminism assumes that it is the United States or Western culture that must bring "freedom" to certain areas of the world, even if paradoxically via a military force ... to save brown women from brown men. Missionary feminism has long produced a cultural discourse of saving Muslim women in different colonial encounters with terrorists or insurgents, ignoring the indigenous women's movements and the complexities of race, nationalism, and class at work.

For example, according to Marnia Lazreg, the French military in Algeria "found in the ideology of 'women's emancipation' a weapon of choice" in their military strategy to counter the resistance of the National Liberation Front by professing "to liberate women (from their cultural norms deemed beyond the pale) ... The French military produced radio shows targeting Algerian women and staged public "unveiling ceremonies of Algerian women" that involved a deceptive "battle of the veils" because rural Algerian women, who did not generally veil at the time had to be first coerced into veiling in order to then be coerced into unveiling." These counterinsurgency strategies resemble current U.S. programs aimed at cultivating support for U.S. policies in Iraq and the Middle East, from Radio Sawa and the U.S. Middle East Television Network (Al Hurra, which means "free") to U.S.-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for Iraqi women, some of which were founded by the U.S. administration before the war to justify the invasion of Iraq.

— Sunaina Maira, “Good” and “Bad” Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms. 2009

[inqilabi]

Native informants/Orientalists are crucial for this project of co-opting the liberal discourse of rights, based on gender as well as sexuality. Joseph A. Massad and Jasbir Puar have shown how the internationalizing of Western feminism has been paralleled by a universalizing discourse of rights for queer subjects that focuses on the “liberation” of gays and lesbians in the Muslim countries. NGOs focusing on gay rights have promoted a culturally specific epistemology and ontology of “rights and identities” to be imposed on non-Western societies, according to Massad, and have also collaborated with the U.S. State Department and Congress to threaten sanctions against Arab nations for their policies toward gay men; what Massad calls the “Gay International,” like international feminism, is embroiled with U.S. foreign policy. These critics do not deny that homophobia and patriarchy exist in Muslim and Arab societies, but they highlight the colonialist and Orientalist impulses that often underlie activism targeting gender and sexual politics in these societies or diasporic communities and the generally obscured ways these are linked with state policies. Feminism needs to account for state-sponsored violence and state-sanctioned terror inflicted on women or queers—not just abuses associated with cultural “tradition” or religion-as radical and anti-imperialist feminists have long argued.

— Sunaina Maira, “Good” and “Bad” Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms. 2009

[irwonder]

While the heightened patriotism in the wake of 9/11 and a decade of U.S. wars and occupation overseas have amplified the role of the academy in  shaping our understanding of U.S. global dominance and simultaneously intensified attacks on 'anti-American' views—particularly in relation to the Middle East and Islam—there is nothing 'new' about the state of emergency. Ongoing debates about the role of the imperial university  are indicative of the 'state of exception'; that is, the exclusion of some from liberal democracy and eviction from political rights is not a sudden break but is constitutive of the imperial state and the state of permanent war. The notion of the 'imperial university' suggests that the War on Terror and the post-9/11 culture wars made hypervisible the persistent role of higher education in shaping the discourses of nationalism, patriotism, citizenship, and democracy.

Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, “The Imperial University: Race, War, and the Nation-State,” The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent