Feminism and War: Confronting Us Imperialism - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848130198 ISBN 13: 9781848130197

Verlag: Bloomsbury 3PL, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Women across the globe are being dramatically affected by war as currently waged by the USA. But there has been little public space for dialogue about the complex relationship between feminism, women, and war.

The editors of Feminism and War have brought together a diverse set of leading theorists and activists who examine the questions raised by ongoing American military initiatives, such as:

What are the implications of an imperial nation/state laying claim to women's liberation?
What is the relation between this claim and resulting American foreign policy and military action?
Did American intervention and invasion in fact result in liberation for women in Afghanistan and Iraq?
What multiple concepts are embedded in the phrase "women's liberation"?
How are these connected to the specifics of religion, culture, history, economics, and nation within current conflicts?
What is the relation between the lives of Afghan and Iraqi women before and after invasion, and that of women living in the US?
How do women who define themselves as feminists resist or acquiesce to this nation/state claim in current theory and organizing?

Feminism and War reveals and critically analyzes the complicated ways in which America uses gender, race, class, nationalism, imperialism to justify, legitimate, and continue war. Each chapter builds on the next to develop an anti-racist, feminist politics that places imperialist power, and forms of resistance to it, central to its comprehensive analysis.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robin Riley is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Syracuse University. She is co-editor of Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race & War (2006). Robin is currently working on a project on how US college students think and talk about the war on Iraq.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty is Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Dean's Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University. Mohanty is author of Feminism Without Borders (2003), co-editor of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (1991), and Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (1997).She works with two grassroots community organizations, Grassroots Leadership of North Carolina, and the Center for Immigrant Families in New York City.

Minnie Bruce Pratt is Professor of Women's & Gender Studies and Writing at Syracuse University, and a member of the editorial board of Feminist Studies. Her essay, Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart has become a feminist classic. She is the author of six books of poetry, including Walking Back Up Depot Street (1999) and The Dirt She Ate (2004); and the recipient of many awards, including the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets, the American Library Association's Stonewall Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. Her book of creative nonfiction, S/HE explores the interconnections between women's liberation and transgender lives. Since coming out as a lesbian in 1975, Pratt has been active in women's issues, anti-racist work, and anti-imperialist initiatives.

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Feminism and War

Confronting US Imperialism

By Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Minnie Bruce Pratt

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2008 Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Minnie Bruce Pratt
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84813-019-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii, 
Introduction: feminism and US wars – mapping the ground | CHANDRA TALPADE MOHANTY, MINNIE BRUCE PRATT, ROBIN L. RILEY, 1, 
ONE | Feminist geopolitics of war, 
1 A vocabulary for feminist praxis: on war and radical critique | ANGELA Y. DAVIS, 19, 
2 Resexing militarism for the globe | ZILLAH EISENSTEIN, 27, 
3 Feminists and queers in the service of empire | JASBIR PUAR, 47, 
4 Interrogating Americana: an African feminist critique | PATRICIA MCFADDEN, 56, 
5 What's left? After 'imperial feminist' hijackings | HUIBIN AMELIA CHEW, 75, 
TWO | Feminists mobilizing critiques of war, 
6 Women-of-color veterans on war, militarism, and feminism | SETSU SHIGEMATSU WITH ANURADHA KRISTINA BHAGWATI AND ELI PAINTEDCROW, 93, 
7 Decolonizing the racial grammar of international law | ELIZABETH PHILIPOSE, 103, 
8 The other v-word: the politics of victimhood fueling George W. Bush's war machine | ALYSON M. COLE, 117, 
9 Deconstructing the myth of liberation @ riverbendblog.com | NADINE SINNO, 131, 
10 'Rallying public opinion' and other misuses of feminism | JENNIFER L. FLURI, 143, 
THREE | Women's struggles and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 
11 Afghan women: the limits of colonial rescue | SHAHNAZ KHAN, 161, 
12 Gendered, racialized, and sexualized torture at Abu Ghraib | ISIS NUSAIR, 179, 
13 Whose bodies count? Feminist geopolitics and lessons from Iraq | JENNIFER HYNDMAN, 194, 
14 'Freedom for women': stories of Baghdad and New York | BERENICE MALKA FISHER, 207, 
FOUR | Feminists organizing against imperialism and war, 
15 Violence against women: the US war on women | LEILANI DOWELL, 219, 
16 'We say code pink': feminist direct action and the 'war on terror' | JUDY ROHRER, 224, 
17 Women, gentrification, and Harlem | NELLIE HESTER BAILEY, 232, 
18 US economic wars and Latin America | BERTA JOUBERT-CECI, 238, 
19 Feminist organizing in Israel | MELANIE KAYE/KANTROWITZ, 243, 
20 Reflections on feminism, war, and the politics of dissent | LESLIE CAGAN, 250, 
21 Feminism and war: stopping militarizers, critiquing power | CYNTHIA ENLOE, 258, 
Prosaic poem | MICERE GITHAE MUGO, 264, 
Action: end US wars now!, 266, 
Afterword | LINDA CARTY, 267, 
About the contributors, 271, 
Index, 274, 

CHAPTER 1

A vocabulary for feminist praxis: on war and radical critique

ANGELA Y. DAVIS

I begin by questioning what it means to live in a country that is at war, a country whose president, in announcing a global war on terror, has, in effect, declared war on the rest of the world. This question requires us to consider the unrepresentability of war in the United States, a country that has not experienced war within its own borders since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet we have experienced a comprehensive militarization of this society, and multiple wars are still being waged on many of our communities. Moreover, the war on terror that is unfolding both within and outside US borders has produced a moral panic that urges us to feel and act as if we were living under a state of siege.

Many years ago, when I first traveled to Europe, I was struck by a prevailing popular consciousness of war. It was almost two decades after the conclusion of World War II, although there was still material evidence of the assault of fascism. I was struck by the extent to which war was still palpable, by the contemporaneity of historical memories of war. And I compared these historical memories to what I considered to be an inability of people in the United States to cross the temporal divide that placed war in an inaccessible past.

Later, in 1973, I had the opportunity to meet a young girl who survived the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and at that moment experienced a disjunction between the ways our movement against the war in Vietnam tended to represent war and the unimaginable suffering the US military was causing the people of Vietnam. Today people refer to the Haditha massacre that took place in November 2005, when US Marines killed fifteen Iraqi civilians in their homes, as the contemporary counterpart to My Lai.

But, despite our flaws in that era, we did respond, we did rise up in massive numbers, and we did take to the streets. As in previous historical periods, women were the key organizers of the anti-war movement, though they were not necessarily the most visible spokespersons and frequently were unable to move past the single-issue syndrome that focused only on 'ending the war.'

I am not saying that today we are afflicted with a collective apathy that prevents us from achieving the heights of activism that were decisive in bringing the Vietnam War to an end. That is not my point. Indeed, it might be possible to argue that popular anti-war consciousness is far more widespread in the USA now in face of the war in Iraq than it was in relation to the war in Vietnam.

Yet I remain concerned about the failure to translate the vast antiwar sentiment within the country into a sustained movement that can effectively counter the imperial belligerence of the USA. If we are to reflect on ways feminism can aid us in contesting the culture of war, I want to pose the question of how feminist approaches can help us decipher the challenges we face today, which are, I believe, far more complicated than the challenges of the Vietnam War era. How can feminism help us to meet these contemporary challenges?

Before attempting to answer this question, I should say that the tradition of feminism with which I have always identified emphasizes not only strategies of criticism and strategies of transformation but also a sustained critique of the tools we use to stage criticism and to enact transformation. This tradition of feminism is linked to all the important social movements - against racism, against imperialism, for labor rights, and so forth. This tradition of feminism emphasizes certain habits of perception, certain habits of imagination. Just as it was once important to imagine a world without slavery, to imagine a world without segregation, to imagine a world in which women were not assumed to be inherently inferior to men, it is now important to imagine a world without xenophobia and the fenced borders designed to make us think of people in and from a southern region outside the USA as the enemy. It is now important to imagine a world in which binary conceptions of gender no longer govern modes of segregation and association, and one in which violence is eradicated from state practices as well as from our intimate lives - from heterosexual and same-sex relationships. And, as in the past, it is important to imagine a world without war. And, of course, this is just the beginning of the list.

But it is not enough simply to imagine a different future. We can walk around with ideal worlds in our heads while everything is crumbling around us. Feminist critical habits involve collective intervention as well. The feminist critical impulse, if we take it seriously, involves a dual commitment: a commitment to use knowledge in a transformative way, and to use knowledge to remake the world so that it is better for its inhabitants – not only for human beings, for all its living inhabitants. This commitment entails an...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bloomsbury 3PL
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1848130198
• ISBN 13: 9781848130197
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 290
• Herausgeber: Riley Robin, Mohanty Chandra Talpade, Pratt Minnie Bruce
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland