#theme: orientalism

[sazzyartist]

You are Your Best Thing

From Cheng's Ornamentalism to my "hybridization," - philosophies for neoliberal feminism's many failures

[ambaazaad]

When you consider books like Half the Sky, Reading Lolita in Tehran, and mainstream news more generally, it becomes easily discernable how women of color in parts of the so-called ‘developing’ world are consistently represented as victims of monolithic, ‘backwards’ cultures. Much like the white savior industrial complex that has developed in light of human rights discourses in contemporary politics, a feminist savior industrial complex has sprung out of mainstream attempts to address international women’s issues. Images of women as victims of violence and oppression abroad elicit pity in Western readers for their non-Western female counterparts. Pity, as opposed to compassion, depends on a hierarchy of experience whereby we, as Western, sometimes white, feminist-minded consumers, observe the experiences of women around the world as not only outside of ourselves, but also below our own. Subconsciously, or even consciously for some, we begin to assume that “our” culture here in the west is better than theirs; we forget to acknowledge that cultures are neither monolithic nor completely isolated. The kind of orientalization that we do to these cultures, a simultaneous exoticization (us versus them) and subjugation (‘well, we’re better than that’), feeds into political structures of dominance that give way to colonialism and war. When people become angry and backlash against Western cultural and political interventions with religious extremism and violence, we suddenly dehistoricize the issue and gasp at their ‘backwardsness.’

-- Maryam Arain on 'V-Day and the rise of orientalist feminisms in America' (http://chicagomonitor.com/2013/02/v-day-and-the-rise-of-orientalist-feminisms-in-america/)