[lit-ideas] Re: Feminism's Failed Agenda?
- From: "JUDITH EVANS" <judithevans1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 22:38:07 -0000
> To my horror, most Western academic and mainstream
> feminists have not focused on what I call gender
> apartheid in the Islamic world, or on its steady
> penetration of Europe.
Most Western academic and mainstream feminists are not experts
on women and Islam -- if that is what "focus on" means. But it's my
(informed)
opinion (based on experience) that there are a number of feminist academic
groupings and circles where it is axiomatic that Islam oppresses women and
more, that Muslim women working "within the system" cannot be feminists.
(I advised one US Prof. looking for a suitable place for such a Muslim
woman to study. We spoke "off-list" and I, in confidence.)
> Because feminist academics and journalists are now
> so heavily influenced by left ways of thinking,
> many now believe that speaking out against head
> scarves, face veils, the chador, arranged
> marriages, polygamy, forced pregnancies, or female
> genital mutilation is either "imperialist" or
> "crusade-ist."
This issue -- and it is *an issue*, not a one-sided phenomenon -- has been
high-profile for *decades*. The "imperialist" attack and its rebuttal long
precede recent terrorism.
Postmodernist ways of thinking have
> also led feminists to believe that confronting
> narratives on the academic page is as important
> and world-shattering as confronting jihadists in
> the flesh and rescuing living beings from captivity.
Far be it from me not to attack postmodernism *but*, Althusserianism
provided a rationale for academic political inaction by a section of the
Left (the non-Left, of course, already had one).
JM
>>>>>>>>
the profound contradiction between the doctrine of
individual human rights, in which rights are attached to human
individuals and demands for equity rooted in attacks on categorical
discrimination, and extreme forms of multiculturalism that attach
rights to "cultures" conceived, like nations or corporations, as
hyperindividuals to whom real individuals are subordinate like cells
in an organism.
<<<<<
But many are aware of this problem, John.
Judy Evans, Cardiff
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