Feminist Solidarity and Afghan Women (by Shahnaz Khan)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

*****   Shahnaz Khan, "Between Here and There: Feminist Solidarity
and Afghan Women," _Genders_ 33 (2001), at
<http://www.genders.org/g33/g33_kahn.html>.

The continual recurrence of liberal visual and textual
representations of Afghan women sensationalize their plight and
conflate third world women "over there" with third world women "over
here."  Such presentations compel me to reiterate critiques put
forward by Chandra Mohanty (1991), Gayatri Spivak (1999), Umma
Narayan (1997), and Lata Mani (1990) about the discursive
construction of third world women's lives in western accounts.  Trinh
Minh-ha reminds us that such accounts of the third world women's pain
and oppression have made them inmates in a private zoo (1989).
Within such a zoo, the archetypal image of the veiled woman, even
when accompanied by a speaking subject, remains limited to the
immediate sensory experience of what it is like to be confined.  The
political context and social systems are eliminated.  In representing
an Afghan's woman's narrative I face a dilemma familiar to many
feminists who want to write about women "over there", our accounts
risk reinforcing them as victims.  Yet women in Afghanistan are
suffering.  How then do we identify and support their struggles?
Drawing on Joan Scott's (1992) work, I argue for a methodology that
historicizes narratives of experience by identifying how geopolitics,
specifically the cold war, helped determine the current social
formation in Afghanistan.  Afghan women's accounts need to be read
against this history....   *****

Khan's language is, alas, typically academic (= unnecessarily
stilted); but her thesis and criticism of the Feminist Majority
campaign, with which the Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan (RAWA) has been aligned, is valid.
--
Yoshie

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