Fetish, Fantasy and Freedom: brown women’s bodies as subject of/to human rights (original) (raw)

In a series of absorbing case studies, Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up? Empire, Visual Culture and the Brown Female Body, focuses on the portrayal of Pakistani women in the global media. Analyzing Hollywood films, British documentaries, U.S. newspapers and magazines, this book traces sensational female figures of Pakistan—all of whom have been subject to patriarchal violence— to explore the current crisis of desire and detestation of the feminine, racialized other. This book fundamentally takes on an old problem – the racial and imperial politics of liberal feminism - but in theoretically and conceptually new ways. I locate my readings of these visual texts in the broader scholarly and political questions around spectatorship and fetishisms in our current age of empire and globalization. Drawing from a variety of disciplines - feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and visual cultural studies – I illuminate the “strange” “queer” and “disturbed” relationships and questions that popular visual images of Pakistani, and more broadly Muslim, women foster and provoke. I blend visual research, discourse analysis, and my own entanglements in these women’s life, death and feminist politics, to take on the dilemma of representation and democracy.