Against White Feminism

by Against White Feminism (retail) (epub)

  13 Burton, Burdens of History, 101.

  14 Burton, Burdens of History, 104.

  15 Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women Racism and History (Verso, 2015), 128.

  16 Padma Anagol, “Feminist Inheritances and Foremothers: The Beginnings of Feminism in Modern India,” Women’s History Review 19, no. 4 (September 2010).

  17 Anagol, “Feminist Inheritances,” 545.

  18 Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (Zed Books, 1986), 88.

  19 Prapti Sarkar, “Swarnakumari Devi: A Forgotten Name in Bengali Literature,” SheThePeople, January 23, 2020, https://www.shethepeople.tv/sepia-stories/author-swarnakumari-devi-bengali-literature/.

  20 Sarkar, “Swarnakumari Devi.”

  21 Chaudhuri and Strobel, Western Women and Imperialism, 42.

  22 Burton, Burdens of History, 54.

  23 Burton, Burdens of History, 55.

  24 Karthika Nair, “Sarojini Naidu: The Nightingale of India,” Feminism in India, March 22, 2017, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09612025.2010.502398.

  25 The Open University, “Dhanvati Rama Rau,” Making Britain: Discover How South Asians Shaped the Nation 1870–1950, http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/dhanvanthi-rama-rau.

  26 Nair, “Sarojini Naidu.”

  Chapter Two: Is Solidarity a Lie?

  1 Jeanne Madeline Weimann, The Fair Women: The Story of the Women’s Building at the World’s Colombian Exposition at the Chicago World’s Fair 1893 (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1981).

  2 Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature (Chicago, n.p., 1893), 73.

  3 Weimann, Fair Women, 50.

  4 Barbara Ballard, “A People Without a Nation,” part of the Living History of Illinois Project, http://livinghistoryofillinois.com/pdf_files/African%20Americans%20at%20the%201893%20Worlds%20Columbian%20Exposition,%20A%20People%20Without%20a%20Nation.pdf.

  5 Martha Jones, “For Black Women the 19th Amendment Didn’t End Their Fight for the Vote,” National Geographic, August 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/08/black-women-continued-fighting-for-vote-after-19th-amendment/.

  6 Jones, “19th Amendment.”

  7 Jones, “19th Amendment.”

  8 Jones, “19th Amendment.”

  9 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Vintage, First Edition, 2011), 311.

  10 Margaret Simons, “Beauvoir and the Problem of Racism,” in Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays, eds. Julie Ward and Tommy Lott (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 260.

  11 Simons, “Beauvoir.”

  12 de Beauvoir, Second Sex, 81.

  13 de Beauvoir, Second Sex, 81.

  14 Betty Friedan, “No Gods, No Goddesses,” Saturday Review, June 14, 1975.

  15 Catharine B. Stimpson, Alix Kates Shulman, and Kate Millett, “Sexual Politics: Twenty Years Later,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 19, no. 3; (Fall/Winter 1991), 30.

  16 Stimpson et al., “Twenty Years Later,” 34.

  17 Kate Millett, Going to Iran (Coward McCann and Geoghan, 1982), 123.

  18 Millett, Going to Iran, 123.

  19 Millett, Going to Iran, 92.

  20 Millett, Going to Iran, 186.

  Chapter Three: The White Savior Industrial Complex and the Ungrateful Brown Feminist

  1 Anne-Marie Calves, “Empowerment: The History of a Key Concept in Contemporary Development Discourse,” Revue Tiere-Monde 200, no. 4 (2009), 735.

  2 Gita Sen and Caren Grown, Development Crises and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives (Monthly Review Press, 1987), 24.

  3 Sen and Grown, Development Crises, 24.

  4 Sen and Grown, Development Crises, 24.

  5 “Platform for Action,” Fourth United Nations Conference for Women, 1995, https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/.

  6 Rafia Zakaria, “It Will Take More Than Laws to End Honor Killings in Pakistan,” CNN, March 28, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/28/opinions/pakistan-honor-killings-afzal-kohistani-zakaria/index.html.

  7 Nimmi Gowrinathan, Rafia Zakaria, and Kate Cronin-Furman, “Emissaries of Empowerment,” City University of New York, Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership, September 2017, https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/colinpowellschool/emissaries-empowerment.

  8 Zakaria, Gowrinathan, and Cronin-Furman, “Emissaries of Empowerment.”

  9 Ginger Ging-Dwan Boyd, “The Girl Effect: A Neoliberal Instrumentalization of Gender Equity,” Consilience (2016), 455.

  10 S. Batliwala, “Taking the Power Out of Empowerment: An Experimental Account,” Development in Practice (2007), 557.

  11 Batliwala, “Taking the Power.”

  12 Batliwala, “Taking the Power.”

  13 Rafia Zakaria, “The Myth of Empowerment,” New York Times, October 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/the-myth-of-womens-empowerment.html.

  14 Hanlon Joseph and Teresa Smart, “Why Bill Gates’ Chickens Will Not End African Poverty,” London School of Economics (blog), July 19, 2016, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2016/07/19/will-bill-gates-chickens-end-african-poverty/.

  15 James Vincent, “Bolivia Rejects ‘Offensive’ Chicken Donation from Bill Gates,” The Verge, June 16, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/16/11952200/bill-gates-bolivia-chickens-refused.

  16 Matthew Davies, “Bill Gates Launches Chicken Plan to help Africa Poor,” BBC, June 6, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-36487536.

  17 Loubna Hanna Skalli, “The ‘Girl Factor’ and the Insecurity of Coloniality: A View from the Middle East,” Alternatives: Global, Local and Political 40, no. 2 (2015).

  18 Rod Nordland, Ash Ngu, and Fahim Abed, “How the U.S Government Misleads the Public on Afghanistan,” New York Times, September 8, 2018.

  19 Special Instructor General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Quarterly Report to the United States Congress, October 30, 2016, https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/quarterlyreports/2016-10-30qr.pdf.

  20 Thomas Dichter, “Is There a Foreign Aid Industrial Complex?” Medium, August 8, 2016, https://medium.com/@DichterThomas/is-there-a-foreign-aid-industrial-complex-1be4e9c03047.

  21 Nick Routley, “Mapping the Global Flow of Foreign Aid,” Visual Capitalist, https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapping-the-global-flow-of-foreign-aid/.

  22 Angela Bruce-Raeburn, “International Aid Has a Race Problem,” DevEx, May 17, 2019, https://www.devex.com/news/opinion-international-development-has-a-race-problem-94840.

  23 Corinne Gray, “Doing Good and Being Racist,” The New Humanitarian, June 15, 2020, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/opinion/2020/06/15/United-Nations-racism-black-lives-matter.

  24 Thalif Deen, “Survey Reveals Widespread Racism at the UN,” IPS, August 21, 2020, http://www.ipsnews.net/2020/08/staff-surveys-reveal-widespread-racism-united-nations/.

  25 Colum Lynch, “UN Reverses Ban on Staff Participation in Protests After Widespread Outcry,” Foreign Policy, June 8, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/08/united-nations-staff-george-floyd-protests/.

  26 Routley, “Mapping the Global Flow.”

  27 Gita Sen, “The Changing Landscape of Feminist Organizing Since Beijing,” UN Women Expert Group Meeting, Sixty-Fourth Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, September 2019, https://www.unwomen.org/-/media/headquarters/attachments/sections/csw/64/egm/sen%20gexpert%20paperdraftegmb25ep10.pdf?la=en&vs=5416.

  28 Sen, “Changing Landscape.”

  29 Liz Ford, “US May Go Cheek by Jowl with Human Rights Abusers,” Guardian, May 12, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/mar/13/us-cheek-by-jowl-womens-rights-abusers-gender-talks-un-commission-on-the-status-of-women-new-york.

  30 UN Economic and Social Council, “Political Declaration on the Occasion of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women,” March 2, 2020, https://undocs.org/en/E/CN.6/2020/L.1.

  Chapter
Four: White Feminists and Feminist Wars

  1 Greg Miller, “In Zero Dark Thirty She Is the Hero: In Real Life the CIA Agent’s Life Is More Complicated,” Washington Post, December 10, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-zero-dark-thirty-shes-the-hero-in-real-life-cia-agents-career-is-more-complicated/2012/12/10/cedc227e-42dd-11e2-9648-a2c323a991d6_story.html.

  2 Joana Cook, A Woman’s Place: US Counterterrorism since 9/11 (Hurst Publishers, 2019), 66.

  3 Jim Garamone, “ ‘I Am an American Soldier Too,’ Lynch to Rescuers,” American Forces Press Service, April 5, 2003, https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/139561/lynch-to-rescuers-im-an-american-soldier-too/.

  4 Veronique Pin-Fat and Maria Stern, “The Scripting of Private Jessica Lynch: Biopolitics, Gender and the Feminization of the U.S. Military,” Alternatives 30 (2005), 25–56.

  5 Cook, A Woman’s Place, 71.

  6 Pankaj Mishra, Bland Fanatics (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2020).

  7 Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Harvard University Press, 2013).

  8 Rafia Zakaria, “Clothes and Daggers,” Aeon, September 8, 2015, https://aeon.co/essays/ban-the-burqa-scrap-the-sari-why-women-s-clothing-matters.

  9 George W. Bush, “Rights and Aspirations of the People of Afghanistan,” White House Archives of President George W. Bush, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/afghanistan/text/20040708.html.

  10 Andrew Kramer, “Shelters Have Saved Countless Afghan Women: So Why Are They Afraid?” New York Times, March 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/world/asia/afghanistan-womens-shelters.html.

  11 “Afghan Death Toll Hits Record High,” BBC, February 24, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47347958.

  12 George W. Bush, “Fact Sheet: President Bush Seeks a “Forward Strategy of Freedom: to Promote Democracy in the Middle East,” White House Archives for George W. Bush, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-11.html.

  13 Cook, A Woman’s Place, 252.

  14 Ahmadi Belquis and Sadaf Lakhani, “Afghan Women and Violent Extremism: Colluding, Perpetrating, or Preventing?” United States Institute of Peace, November 2016, https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/SR396-Afghan-Women-and-Violent-Extremism.pdf.

  15 Mark Mazzeti, “Vaccination Ruse Used in Pursuit of Bin Laden,” New York Times, July 12, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/world/asia/12dna.html.

  16 “Polio Eradication: The CIA and Their Unintended Victims,” Lancet 383, no. 9932 (May 2014), https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60900-4/fulltext.

  17 Tim McGirk, “How the Bin Laden Raid Put Vaccinators Under the Gun in Pakistan,” National Geographic, February 2015, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/02/150225-polio-pakistan-vaccination-virus-health/.

  18 Nina Zhu, Elizabeth Allen, Anne Kearns, and Jacqueline Caglia, “Lady Health Worker Program Pakistan: Improving Access to Healthcare for Rural Women and Families,” Harvard School of Public Health, May 2014, https://cdn2.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/32/2014/09/HSPH-Pakistan5.pdf.

  19 Jon Boone, “Polio Vaccinator’s Murder by Militants Raises Health Workers’ Fears,” Guardian, March 25, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/25/pakistan-polo-vaccinators-murder-militants-salma-farooqi.

  20 Boone, “Polio Vaccinator’s Murder.”

  21 Srdjan Vucatic, “The Uneasy Co-Existence of Arms Trade and Feminist Foreign Policy,” The Conversation, April 8, 2018, https://theconversation.com/the-uneasy-co-existence-of-arms-exports-and-feminist-foreign-policy-93930.

  22 Vijay Prashad, “How Can Sweden Be a Peace Broker If It’s Also Selling the Arms That Make the War in Yemen Possible?” Salon, September 4, 2019, https://www.salon.com/2019/09/04/how-can-sweden-be-a-peace-broker-for-the-war-in-yemen-if-its-also-selling-the-arms-that-make-it-possible_partner/.

  23 Susanne Courtney, “Canada’s Feminist Foreign Aid Policy Is Not Making Much Progress Toward a Gender Equal World,” National Post, October 30, 2018. https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/canadas-feminist-foreign-aid-policy-isnt-making-much-progress-on-a-gender-equal-world.

  24 Mersiha Gadzo, “Canadian Rights Groups Urge Trudeau to End Saudi Arms Sales,” Al Jazeera, September 21, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/9/21/canadian-rights-groups-urge-trudeau-to-end-saudi-arms-sales.

  25 Leyland Cecco, “Canada Doubles Weapons Sales to Saudi Arabia Despite Moratorium,” Guardian, June 9, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/canada-doubles-weapons-sales-to-saudi-arabia-despite-moratorium.

  26 Vucatic, “Uneasy Co-Existence.”

  27 Alissa Rubin, “A Thin Line of Defense Against Honor Killing,” New York Times, March 3, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/world/asia/afghanistan-a-thin-line-of-defense-against-honor-killings.html.

  28 “Afghan Casualties Hit Record High,” UN News, February 14, 2016, https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/02/522212-afghan-casualties-hit-record-high-11000-2015-un-report.

  29 Åsne Seierstad, The Bookseller of Kabul (Back Bay Books, 2004), xii.

  30 Rod Nordland, The Lovers: Afghanistan’s Romeo and Juliet (Harper Collins, 2016), 99.

  31 Sheila Weller, The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couritc, Christiane Amanpour and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News (Penguin Books, 2015), 242.

  32 Lynsey Addario, Of Love and War (Penguin Press, 2018).

  33 Rachel Lowry, “New Study Shows Gender Disparity in Photojournalism Is Real,” Time, September 25, 2015.

  34 Lynsey Addario, It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War (Penguin Books, 2016), 66.

  35 https://thewire.in/media/afghan-girl-steve-mccurry-national-geographic.

  36 Katherine Zoepf, “Islamic Revival in Syria Is Led by Women,” New York Times, August 9, 2006.

  37 Addario, It’s What I Do, 54.

  Chapter Five: Sexual Liberation Is Women’s Empowerment

  1 Kristina Gupta, “Compulsory Sexuality: An Emerging Concept,” Signs: A Feminist Journal (Autumn 2015).

  2 New York Times Review of Books, “Gloria Steinem; By the Book,” November 1, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/books/review/gloria-steinem-by-the-book.html.

  3 Steinem signed the Feminist Majority letter asking President Bush to “please do something” about the women in Afghanistan following 9/11.

  4 Elizabeth Mesok, “Sexual Violence and the U.S.: Military Feminism, U.S. Empire and the Failure of Liberal Equality,” Feminist Studies 42, no. 1 (2016), 2016.

  5 Ahmadi Belquis and Sadaf Lakhani, “Afghan Women and Violent Extremism: Colluding, Perpetrating, or Preventing?” United States Institute of Peace, November 2016, https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/SR396-Afghan-Women-and-Violent-Extremism.pdf.

  6 Rafia Zakaria, “Women and Islamic Militancy,” Dissent (Winter 2015), https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/why-women-choose-isis-islamic-militancy.

  7 Michael Walzer, “Debating Michael Walzer’s ‘Islamism and the Left,’ ” Fathom (Summer 2015), https://fathomjournal.org/debating-michael-walzers-islamism-and-the-left/.

  8 Carrie Hartnett, Veronica Phifer, Danielle LaGrande, and Michaelma LeTourneau, “Advertising and Gender Roles” (1957–77) Picturing U.S. History, https://picturingamerica142762412.wordpress.com/2018/04/18/advertising-and-gender-roles-1957-1977/.

  9 I am using the “wave” structure here to make the chronology easier to understand. I disagree with the use of this paradigm because it centers white and Western women and their movement as central to the history of all feminism.

  10 Margalit Fox, “Helen Gurley Brown, Who Gave ‘Single Girl’ a Life in Full, Dies at 90,” New York Times, August 14, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/business/media/helen-gurley-brown-who-gave-cosmopolitan-its-purr-is-dead-at-90.html.

  11 Jodi Dean, “Critique or Collectivity: Communicative Capitalism and the Subject of Politics” in Digital Objects Digital Subjects, David Chandler and Christian Fuchs, eds
. (University of Westminster Press, 2019), 171–182.

  12 Jada Smith, “A Sex and the City for African Viewers” New York Times, August 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/fashion/an-african-city-sex-and-the-city.html.

  13 Julie Turkewitz, “Bold Women, Scandalized Viewers: It’s Sex and the City Senegal Style,” New York Times, August 22, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/world/africa/senegal-mistress-of-a-married-man.html.

  14 Turkewitz, “Bold Women, Scandalized Viewers.”

  15 Alisha Haridasani Gupta, “With Four More Shots Please! India Gets Its Own Sex and the City,” New York Times May 6, 2020.

  16 Turkewitz, “Bold Women, Scandalized Viewers.”

  17 Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Lives: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Harvard University Press, 2020), 74.

  18 Mitra, Indian Sex Lives, 73.

  19 A lot more on this issue in the next chapter.

  20 Mitra, Indian Sex Lives, 69.

  21 Mitra, Indian Sex Lives, 100.

  22 A lot more on this issue in the forthcoming chapter.

  23 Raka Shome, “Global Motherhood: The Transnational Intimacies of White Femininity,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 28, no. 5 (December 2011).

  24 Shome, “Global Motherhood.”

  25 Treva Lindsey, “Black Women Have Consistently Been Trail-Blazers for Social Change: Why Are They So Often Relegated to the Margins?” Time, July 22, 2020, https://time.com/5869662/black-women-social-change/.

  26 “#MeToo Movement Founder Tarana Burke Blasts Movement for Ignoring Poor Women,” Detroit Free Press, November 15, 2018, https://www.freep.com/story/news/columnists/rochelle-riley/2018/11/15/tarana-burke-metoo-movement/2010310002/.

  27 “The Problem with the ‘Rainbow-Washing’ of LGBTQ+Pride,” Wired, June 21, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/lgbtq-pride-consumerism/.

  28 Wired, “Problem with Rainbow-Washing.”

  29 “Dress Coded: Black Girls, Bodies, and Bias in DC Schools,” National Women’s Law Center, April 2018, https://nwlc-ciw49tixgw5lbab.stackpathdns.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Final_nwlc_DressCodeReport.pdf.

  30 Alaa Elassar, “Muslim Athlete Disqualified from High School Volleyball Match for Wearing Hijab,” CNN, September 27, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/27/us/hijab-volleyball-disqualified-nashville-trnd/index.html.