Week 9 Blog

"Analogies are powerful. If we get our analogies wrong, our explanations are likely to be askew" (Enloe 268).

This way in which Cynthia Enloe began "Updating the Gendered Empire" I believe encompasses not only this week's readings, but much of what we have covered in the course so far. Enloe discusses women's roles in the processes of empire-building, both historical and modern, and presents the dilemma of what we are implying by painting America's involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq as an imperial move. By analogizing America as a new incarnation of past imperial powers, Enloe argues that you then must look at the roles of men and women by the roles they used to play; men as the prime political and military figures, but women as the ones who facilitated much of the actual politics in their parlors, brothels, etc. Thus woman-to-woman politics was just as important and relevant as masculinized politics, and as Enloe says, "a feminized space is not the opposite of a political space." However, Enloe does draw an important analogy between past imperialism and masculine contest, and the current role of women in military conflict; part of masculine rivalry is ensuring "that 'their' women will play those politically salient feminized roles" (Enloe 285). This recalls from me the Kandiyoti reading from last week in which we brought up the subject of women as political pawns, even in a more emancipated state. Women, even "free" women, are consistently used for political purposes, which is why I feel Enloe's statement about analogy is so relevant; we must not only be careful to use appropriate analogies when trying to explain a phenomenon, but we must be careful of what those analogies imply, in this case what they imply about the reality of female liberation in the political sphere.

This comes up again in Jasbir Puar's "Homonationalism and Biopolitics", which analogizes multiculturalization (and by proxy imperialism and American exceptionalism) with heteronormativization, that imperial powers and capitalism rely on secularism and heteronormative behavior to perpetuate themselves. However, while these powers rely on heteronormativity, Western nations also become the scenes of liberation for people who identify as homosexual, which creates a particular conflict for queer-identifying Arabs and Muslims; they are "doubly indicted for the fundamentalist religion they adhere to or escape from and for the terrorist bodies that religion produces" and "are either liberated... or can only have an irrational, pathological sexuality or queerness." Homosexuality is still an "other", even in Western cultures where sexual liberation is largely accepted, and Islam is an "other" to those same cultures, and queer-identifying Muslims end up facing both homophobia and Islamophobia, and are doubly "others". Even if multiculturalism were to occur, these people would still be "others", and vice versa, and this makes Puar's final statement particularly jarring; "Does this securitization of queers entail deferred death or dying for others, and if so, for whom?"

Week 4 Response

What first intrigued me about Mohanty's piece is that she sets up the paradigm which had been hinted at in our other readings but never stated outright; women are established as an "Other", just as we had previously discussed was the case for much of the "Oriental" population as a whole. Mohanty explains on page 64 that there is an "assumption of women as an already constituted and coherent group with identical interests and desires". This vast over generalization recalls the Orientalist discourse about colonized peoples, lumping them together into a group which behaved in certain ways and had certain desires and goals. With this in mind, I appreciated that Mohanty's article was structured in subsections dealing with each of the identities and goals attached to women -- "third world women" in particular -- such as "Women as victims of male violence", "Women as universal dependents" and so on.

I find it particularly fitting that Mohanty ends on the line "They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented" because it leads perfectly into Abu-Lughod's first piece. While Mohanty discussed the idea of women as an "other" needing to be represented, Abu-Lughod goes into the "rhetoric of salvation" a step beyond plain representation. I have previously read Saba Mahmood's "Politics of Piety", which is referenced in this piece and which we will read from later in the class, and this article reminded me of it, almost like a more straightforward and shorter version with ties to a particular historical event (being the so-called "War on Terrorism" and associated rhetoric). When juxtaposed with Mohanty's article, it is particularly interesting to see the difference between representation, trying to speak for those who supposedly cannot speak for themselves, and salvation, imposing the "norm" on the "other" and believing that by doing so you are saving those others. I am always fascinated by discussion of hijab in this context, of how in the west it is often viewed as the quintessential image of women's oppression, while the meaning of veiling to the women who actually do it can be entirely different and even empowering. It also represents the meeting of representation and salvation rhetoric discussed in the two readings; the west wants to represent the women they believe cannot do so for themselves, and by doing so present themselves as liberators of those women from the repression of the "other".