[News] Afghanistan Redux: Malala Yousafzai, White Feminism and Saving Afghan Women

[Anti-Imperialist News]

orinocotribune.com
<https://orinocotribune.com/afghanistan-redux-malala-yousafzai-white-feminism-and-saving-afghan-women/>
Afghanistan
Redux: Malala Yousafzai, White Feminism and Saving Afghan Women
------------------------------

By Fawzia Afzal-Khan – Aug 27, 2021

So the usual “experts” are out and about on airwaves, in newsprint and
social media, offering their punditry regarding the situation unfolding in
Afghanistan even as the US-backed government crumpled like a house of cards
with the advance of the Taliban, once the US troops started their announced
pullback in earnest after 20 years of occupation a few weeks ago.  The
shock-and-awe tactics of the Bush doctrine that dragged the world into a
post 9/11 horror picture show euphemistically known as the War on Terror
(in truth, it was intended– and has been experienced by its
globally-dispersed victims, as a war OF terror)—seemed appropriately
reverse-engineered as the world was treated to images of ordinary Afghans,
a 17 year old aspiring soccer star amongst them—plunging to spectacularly
shocking deaths as they fell from the tail of a US Air Force plane they had
clung to as it took off, carrying a few hundred of their “luckier”
countryfolk to the putative “safety” of the West.

Whilst I refuse to wear the mantle of expertise here— well cognizant —as
Rafia Zakaria has put it well in a recent book[1]–of how, in the West,
“the emphasis on expertise becomes a kind of gatekeeping of power that
locks out [certain, though not all] people of color, as well as
working-class people, migrants” and others (p. 8), I remain equally
skeptical of the ways in which the category of “experience” (too often a
stand-in for “third world/global south authenticity”)–is mobilized as a
counter to expertise. I am not convinced (as Zakariya seems to argue) that
claiming your “voice”—in the case of brown and black women for example,
even when that process of “voicing” genuinely seeks to interrupt the
hegemony of white feminism and its epistemological influence on our
world—necessarily and always proffers a more transparent working through,
and hence redistribution of, power politics. For this latter progressive
political vision to take hold, one needs a clearer understanding of what’s
at stake, of who or what the levers of control and domination are, and a
willingness to embrace the politics of affiliation over the tribal politics
of identity. Only then might a blueprint evolve for challenging structural
barriers to a better and more equal world.

The case at hand that prevents me from an unqualified rooting for the
category of “experience,” is the exemplary case of Malala Yousafzai of
Pakistan, who has traversed the distance from female “experience” to
feminist “expertise”, and who, like others before (and since) that have
made that journey from the “margins” to the “center” of imperial power, has
now switched from being a “voice of the oppressed” to becoming an “expert”
who can speak to us and teach us about those authentic “other” women in the
global south—in this case, Afghan women– to whom her prior proximity
(“experience”)– renders her an “expert” on today. From experience to
expertise then, is a pretty straightforward line, following the predictable
path forged also by white feminism in thrall and service to imperial
designs past and present. This is the path that was announced with great
fanfare shortly after 9/11 by First Lady Laura Bush and enthusiastically
supported by the Feminist Majority Foundation, that would “save brown women
from brown men” by going in to the “backward” country of Afghanistan
overrun by crazy “Moslem” men, in the process unleashing a 20-year war on
the population that had had nothing to do with 9/11. The initial military
intervention was then followed up over the next two decades with countless
“development” schemes that enriched a few at the expense of the many, and
when the cost of this unending war became unpopular with the citizenry
“back home” in the USA over time—we left the hapless “natives” that
included those very women we had been so concerned with “saving,” at the
mercy of anarchy and chaos.

It is against this backdrop of “expertise” (represented back then by policy
feminists such as those at the helm of the Feminist Majority Foundation who
supported the war in Afghanistan ostensibly to “save” those poor brown
Muslim women from the Taliban)–that the “voice” of Malala Yousafzai of
Pakistan who was shot at by the Pakistani branch of the Taliban for wanting
to attend school—needs to be understood and assessed when she speaks today
in the aftermath of that war. Obviously, the spill-over effects of the
20-year war into neighboring Pakistan negatively affected Malala herself
(she almost died because of the Taliban attack upon her), but those same
circumstances also helped her ascend to worldwide fame, leading her to
being read/seen as the “voice of experience” (by western feminists and
policy makers), whose “voice” could then be mobilized in service of several
of the goals of the continuing War on Terror.  Because she was “rescued” by
the British govt after being shot, one could say she crossed over into the
realm of “expertise”—a brown Muslim woman today ostensibly speaking for/on
behalf of the Afghan women facing another reign of terror with the Taliban,
when she tells her readers (without a hint of irony) in the NYT op-ed essay
entitled “I Fear for My Afghan Sisters,” (NYT Aug 22, p 5),  that she
“cannot help but be grateful for my life now.”

Please don’t misunderstand me: I am not saying anyone should begrudge this
brave young woman a second chance at life, for brave she was in defying the
Taliban fanatics who would then (and now we presume)—deny women and girls a
chance at education and autonomy in leading their lives. What does,
however, bear scrutiny is the degree to which the “escape” route permitted
to young brown women like Malala can ever enact a politics of feminist
solidarity that bypasses the kind of “empowerment” feminism that remains
allied to white liberal imperialist formations; that is, can brown women
whose experience allows them a leg up into the realm of expertise usually
reserved for white women, ever translate into a feminism for the 99%? Or is
their “experience” simply another nail to hammer into our heads the
state-sponsored feminism celebrating the individualist ethos of success, of
“empowerment” which is aimed at further advancing the interests of the top
1%? Do these “voices of the (formerly) oppressed” now just become fodder
for advancing the same old stories about breaking glass ceilings and
joining old (white) boy networks in the pursuit of “equality”? Thus, when
Malala says

After graduating from college last year and starting to carve out my own
career path I cannot imagine losing it all—going back to a life defined for
me by men with guns.

one has to shake one’s head with a different type of desperation. Whereas
her Afghan “sisters” have indeed much to fear at the hands of gun-toting
Taliban leaders if the past is any indication, Malala seems to have
entirely missed the irony that her “freedom” is now in the hands of another
set of gun-toting men: white imperialist invaders/drone attackers of lands
like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and so on. Further, her “cure” for
the world’s women is to give them access to education in order to enable
them—like herself—to lead independent lives whose definition of “freedom”
and “success” is measured in carving out individuated “career paths.”
Malala Yousafzai, in this instance, becomes the avatar of all those “It”
girls of consumer-oriented white western feminism, that Angela Mcrobbie has
written about in her  book on the *Aftermath of Feminism*, in which she
theorizes the loss of feminist subjectivity in Britain, a feminist
sensibility arising out of a socialist ideology that *could *have served as
the basis of solidarity across race, class and cultures, but which, as one
reviewer points out is  “now entrenched in a post-feminist neo-liberal
capitalist global economy.” Unfortunately, Malala’s “voice”– her
“experiential” advantage– has been turned into its opposite in this
capitalist neocolonial economic model that extracts what is of use to it
and puts it to a different purpose to serve its own agendas. In short—she
is now serving at the behest of her “handlers”—the white feminists who once
again are poised to “save brown women from brown men.” [2]

*Notes*

[1] Rafia Zakariya, *Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption*. WW.
Norton and Co., 2021.

[2] I have elsewhere argued that the “Malala effect” enables a “politics of
pity.” By this I mean– as Wendy Hesford in *Spectacular Rhetorics *has
explained about the role of the kind of rhetoric celebrating Malala’s
spectacular “escape” from the clutches of the Taliban in 2012– that this
type of “recognition”  “activates certain cultural and national narratives
and social and political relations” that *produce*differential power
relations. Such a “recognition of the pitiable/different other” then leads
to an argument for the governance of those visibilized through such
rhetorical codes as“human rights subjects,” who need “our” help.
“Spectacular rhetorics” as theorized by Wendy Hesford (as well as Lillie
Chouliarki), thus produces and circulates images of “suffering others” (in
this case, Afghan women as victims)—leading western audiences of these
images to feel “pity” for these victimized women and hence to allying with
the “white savior/rescue” narrative.

*Fawzia Afzal-Khan is University Distinguished Scholar at Montclair State
University in NJ. Her latest book is Siren Song:Understanding Pakistan
Though it’s Women Singers. She can be reached at:  fak0912 at yahoo.com
<fak0912 at yahoo.com>*

*Featured image:  Photograph Source: Afghanistan Matters – CC BY 2.0*



<https://orinocotribune.com/author/yullma/>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20210901/66ca9856/attachment.htm>