Geopolitics, Culture Clash, and Gender after September 11

Abstract

Culture clashes were essential to success of racial myths, for throughout history foreigner outside tribe has never been truly welcome.--George L. Mosse (1985: xxvii) ... imperialist feminist desire to emancipate woman is part of system based on disciplining and normalizing gaze of modern colonial disciplinary power.--Meyda Yegenoglu (1998:111) The modern woman is first and foremost an imperialist.--Rosemary M. George (1993-1994: 97) THE ATTACKS ON THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND PENTAGON ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, have resulted in 'antiterrorism measures that have included surveillance, stigmatization, and actual incarceration of men considered Muslim looking or Arab looking. In this climate, to write about violent men guarantees royalties and prestige of being on bestseller lists. When writing is done by Western feminists, both and non-Muslim, it provides ideological justifications for War on Terror and U.S. bid for empire. The post-September 11 climate has also enabled Western feminists to use Israeli-Palestinian conflict as evidence of violence of and Arab men. In recent years, there has been steady stream of books and articles announcing that current Israeli administration is entirely justified in its treatment of Palestinians and that those who criticize Israel are simply being anti-Semitic. (1) In many of these texts, violence women endure at hands of men becomes marker of men's barbarism and reason why claims of Palestinians, who are mainly Muslims, are unacceptable. This logic is available at glance in subway posters in San Francisco in which blond woman announces that she has just been to Israel, land where women have equal rights. In this article, I argue that convergence of U.S. War on Terror and its inextricable links to U.S. support of Israel has produced particular geopolitical terrain in post-September 11 period that has enabled blatant racism to be articulated in name of feminism. As I will show, seemingly disparate strands of this political position are bound together and given coherency by notion of culture in that West, Jews included, are caught up in violent clash with Islamic world. The clash is cultural in origin: Islam is everything West is not. Furthermore, as fatally pre-modern, tribal, non-democratic, and religious, barbarism of Islam is principally evident in treatment of women in communities. Of course, this approach is not new. As Edward Said (1992: 25) pointed out long ago in The Question of Palestine, argument that turns colonial dispossession of people into story of an empty land awaiting European improvement draws on the picture of handful of European Jews hewing civilization of sweetness and light out of Black Islamic sea. Yet if notion of Black Islamic sea has long been marshaled in support of state of Israel's oppressive policies toward Palestinians, today it has gained greater currency and bodies of woman have been useful to argument. What are implications for feminists of these two geopolitical conditions, in which woman's body is constituted as simply marker of community's place in modernity? First, pervasiveness of violence against women in West is eclipsed. Additionally, saving women from excesses of their society marks Western men and women as more civilized. Observing that the declaration of an emancipated status for Western woman is contingent upon representation of Oriental woman as her devalued other, Yegenoglu (1998: 105) reminds us that women can only enter privileged space of universal through a masculine gesture. Just as men claim universal for themselves by confining women outside of it as non-rational subjects, so Western woman requires culturally different body to make her own claim of universality. …

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