Group Memo Week 4 (Lauren and Sara)

This week's readings focus on the western feminists' rhetoric towards what the laters categorize as the ‘Third world women’. Chandra Mohanty and Lila Abu-Lughod depict the dangerous generalizations that tend to be made about issues such as the veil or the role of non-western women in the family. They argue that the categorization of the ‘Woman’ as a group prior to any social relations and interactions creates a “cultural reductionism”, especially concerning non-western women, referred to through stereotypes (seen only as victims and persecuted). Thus, western feminists generalize "women's problems" from a western point of view, only applying what they consider as essential for women to ‘Third world women’ without taking into account cultural differences. Western feminists thus tend to consider ‘western feminism’ as ‘universal feminism’.

Chandra Mohanty argues that the - inaccurate - generalization of non-western women under the homogeneous and anhistoric category ‘Third world women’ leads to a misrepresentation of these women that come from very different cultural, historical and ethnical backgrounds and thus fails to tackle feminists issues in these countries. 'Woman' is seen as a category out of any social context rather than the result of a social and political construction. Such discourse also creates a hierarchy between western and ‘Third world’ women and constructs western superiority. In fact, Western feminists consider that western feminism is universal – what she calls ‘ethnocentric universalism’ – thus saying that West knowledge is superior to any other and revitalizing the colonial/ post-colonial dogmas. The author takes the example of the veil to show how such objects, considered by the West as always an oppressive symbol, can have very different significations according to the socio-economical or ethnical characteristics.

Lila Abu-Lughod focuses even more on the issue of the veil to show how western women try to talk in the place of non-western, here Arabic, women and appropriate these “women’s voices”. Even more clearly than Mohanty, Lila Abu-Lughod argues that the veil can have very different signification according to different women and that, far from always being a symbol of the male’s oppression, can be a sign of virtue or respectability. Laura Bush’s speech is especially revealing of the stereotypes and short cuts that are so often made concerning the Middle-East and especially women of this area. In her second text, Lila Abu-Lughod tries to reconcile the West and Egyptian feminisms by showing that both rejecting west feminism as an whole, both trying to import western feminism are too extreme and that Western and non-Western worlds can find some common solutions regarding women’s place in the society, in the family and the relation between family life and work.

Williams and Mahmood both take a position of defense in their writings, defending Muslim women and their freedoms from the misperceptions and misappropriations of the West, which often assume that not only are Islamic religion and practices intrinsically detrimental to women’s freedom, but also that the women who take part in them are unwilling or unconscious pawns of a greater patriarchal system. Williams defends the practice of sigheh, or temporary marriage, primarily by going on the offense. She criticizes the criteria by which the Western public judges the legitimacy and inequity of sigheh. She suggests that permanent marriage as it is known in the U.S. is a quid pro quo financial and sexual arrangement between men and women which reinforces “traditional” gender roles and hides behind a rhetoric of privacy, secularism, and progressivism. She also defends sigheh by describing it as an ambiguous term which has been misrepresented both in the West and Middle Eastern culture as an institutionalized version of prostitution. She explains the potential of sigheh for allowing women such as widows to continue living economic and sexual lives, as well as incorporating themselves once again within a family structure. Williams does not give a clear defense of how sigheh is actually utilized, but she is also somewhat unable to do so given the obscured nature of such arrangements and the unlikelihood of their being recorded.

Mahmood builds a fantastic abstract defense of Muslim womanhood, and especially pious Muslim womanhood, through a complete breakdown of how Western and non-Western scholars alike view not only Islam, but also how they create inaccurate views of oppression by defining agency only through acts of resistance. This suggests that women are always being oppressed by the culture in which they participate, and robs them of the agency that they can have by participating in cultural idioms which might, on the surface, appear to suppress their freedoms. Mahmood suggests that in fact, these idioms help to define women and give them the characteristics of subjects, which leads to agency. Mahmood also points out that the lens through which Western feminists view Muslim womanhood may also be obscured by what she calls feminism’s “dual character as both an analytical and a politically prescriptive project” (Mahmood 10). Because of this, Mahmood calls for a thorough self-analysis by Western and non-Western feminists alike of their willingness to remake other womens’ “sensibilities, life worlds, and attachments” in the name of ‘freeing’ these other women.

Discussion questions

• Where does Mohanty strike the balance between two dangerous tendency of the West : ethnocentrism universalism – seeing the world according to western values and cultural relativism?
• What aspects of the western discourse can make us think that western political leaders have a postcolonial approach of arabic countries?
• How does Lila Abu-Lughod explains the Egyptian stars ‘return to religion’ and regrets regarding their past stardom?
• How does Williams characterize the American perception of and feelings toward the institution of marriage, and how do these affect the American perception of temporary marriage in Islam?

• Mahmood’s discussion of feminism in a non-Western context questions whether the idea of feminism, or even of rights, is applicable or even accurate. Should we, as scholars, continue to analyze Muslim women even if we cannot presume to understand either their backgrounds, morals, or goals?

Quotes

• “Instead of anatycally demonstrating the production of women as socio-economic political groups within particular local contexts, this analytical move - and the presuppositions it is based of - limits the definition of the female subject to gender identity, completely bypassing social class and ethnic identity" (Mohanty, p.72)
• “In Iran, official sanction for temporary marriage is held out as evidence of the Islamic regime’s claim to modernity and as a sign of “it’s moral superiority  over the ‘decadent’ Western style of ‘free’ sexual relationships” (Williams 626)

• “the very processes and conditions that secure a subject’s subordination are also the means by which she becomes a self-conscious identity and agent” (Mahmood 17)