Colonial Discourses and the Reality of Modernity in the Middle East

            This week, we deconstructed “Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East” by Lila Abu-Lughod and “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” by Chandra Mohanty. Both of which, intricately intertwined the realities of modernity at the pace which is highly anticipated by the West of the East/the Orient, and discussed the collective histories of populations under which they try to fit the reformed rationale of domesticity—demonized by the West.

            These two parallels, as discussed by both authors, centralizes on the narratives of populations effected (multiple non-Westernized, “underdeveloped” nations as connoted by imperialist forces) and how the lives of women revolve around creating a nuclear family, kinship, child-rearing, etc. In Lila Abu-Lughod’s work, she unpacks the root of “retraditionalization” as brought on by the “father of Egyptian feminism,” Qasim Amin that displaces and reinforces women’s status and roles—as described, “Yet this bourgeois vision of women’s domesticity, rooted in a much earlier phase of Western and Egyptian feminist reform, has become so ensconced in upper-, middle-, and even lower-middle class Egyptian society that none of those arguing for a rejection of Western ways seek to dislocate it. Instead, they assimilate it to “tradition” and try to find Islamic bases for it while vilifying as foreign the other side of what being a Western emancipated woman might mean. This is not to say that the Islamist inflection or translation of the ideals does not change the model in important ways; it is merely to note that the claims to a pure indigenous tradition are spurious” (255). While a lot of Middle-Eastern feminists reject his very problematic theories of woman emancipation, Abu-Lughod unpacks the colonial encounter that the French-educated Qasim Amin champions in his deciphering of the role of the woman—and how a lot of his philosophies [wives being too clingy (258), women being accustomed to idleness (259), keeping them bound to domestic work so that they do not mingle with lower-class women (259) among others] revolve around a model that colonizers have imposed onto indigenous nations, and echoing the beliefs of societal deviation imposed onto gender differences.

            Mirroring the colonial roots of feminism through Westernized interpretations of women emancipation, I move to Mohanty’s piece of “Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” The discussions of the hegemony that undergoes the investigation and observation of the Orient, reiterating some of Edward Said’s words of representation of those who cannot represent themselves, the colonialist nature of this is still deeply rooted in many scholarly works of (predominantly) white feminists living outside of the Orient. The belief that has been structured through the colonizer lense of the Orient being “uncivilized”, “developing” and not yet developed after colonization’s efforts to modernize an area that’s incapable of modernizing, and the categorization of ‘third-world’ leads to a dichotomous relation of the views already imposed onto these nations without taking into account family structures, kinship networks, etc. To quote Mohanty, “While radical and liberal feminist assumptions of women as a sex-class might eludicate (however inadequately) the autonomy of particular women’s struggles in the west, the application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in the third world colonizes and appropriates the pluralities of the simultaneous location of different groups of women in social class and ethnic frameworks; in doing so it ultimately robs them of their historical and political agency” (79). In further detail, Western feminism idealizes the images of Orient women by categorizing them into selective narratives and further simplifying their roles in a very complex, and history-impacted society—“religious (read ‘not progressive’), family oriented (read ‘traditional’), legal minors (read ‘they-are-still-not-conscious-of-their-rights), illiterate (read ‘ignorant’), domestic (read ‘backward’ and sometimes revolutionary (read ‘their-country-is-in-a-state-of-war; they-must-fight!’) (80). These very specific categorizations of Oriental women as being ‘sexually oppressed’ too reminded me a lot of a recent phenomena of white saviorist feminism, called FEMEN and how they use this information that has been mass-produced by the West to depict the Arab world, and gives them an ‘incentive’ to help ‘liberate’ women outside of the West.