“Introduction to Thinking Humanitarianism/Thinking Terror.” At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror (original) (raw)
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[Inter]sections – The American Studies Journal at the University of Bucharest 22: War and Conflict in Autobiographical and Documentary Narratives, 2019
This article analyzes representations of female Wars on Terror witnesses by Helen Benedict and Lynsey Addario. In their narratives of U.S. soldiers and Arab refugee lives, both criticize effects of (counter-)terrorist warfare and argue for transcultural compassion. Benedict’s documentary novel Sand Queen (2011) unsettles the categories of Oriental terrorist and U.S. hero, as a military sexual assault survivor and an Iraqi refugee interact. Journalistic photographs from Addario’s series for The New York Times (“Women at War”; 2010) and National Geographic (“Veiled Rebellion”; 2010) document the suffering experienced by female soldiers and civilians. These counter dominant Wars on Terror discourses by complicating the gender stereotypes underwriting the U.S. defense melodrama and its anti-colonial resistance. Through field research, including interviews, Benedict and Addario strive toward “authentic” reports of war, but their documentary aesthetics anticipate receptions that sensationalize pain and commodify colonial power asymmetries. This article also asks if demanding that subaltern woman testify to oppression commemorates depoliticized compassion or further precludes the participation of “others” from political spheres.
Connections and Complicities: Reflections on Epistemology, Violence, and Humanitarian Aid
This paper explores the relationship between power/knowledge and violence. It attempts to connect epistemological constructions and discursive practices to conflict and humanitarian aid operations by deconstructing the narrative of 'Development'. The paper also attempts to tease out the way seemingly transparent and humanitarian actions, even within the academy, are complicit in reiterating hegemonic representations that reproduce systems of inequality and injustice. The paper draws on feminist methodologies that are primarily deconstructive in nature in order to highlight these connections and complicities, making clear that the way certain knowledges become centralized, while others are subjugated, reflects the functioning of the global political economy and imperialism. Thus, the paper argues that a transformative humanitarian aid practice must affirm what is 'excluded' from the discourse -the 'incommensurable'. Lastly, the paper examines the potential of the 'rights-based' approach to sustain the affirmation of incommensurability. The paper hopes to make clear the importance of critical feminist theory for politics and practices.
American Society of International Law Journal - Unbound, 2022
Rescuing the "other woman" has been an intractable feature of international and human rights legal interventions. This rescue narrative configures the "other woman," invariably third world or from the Global South, as left behind in the movement toward progress and modernity. Part of the solution envisages the rescue and incorporation of the "other woman" into liberal rights discourse-the teleological endpoint of emancipation. Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and postcolonial feminist critiques have exposed the racial and civilizational discourses that shape these rescue missions and the epistemic violence they engender. Using the example of the military invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 2001-2021, I demonstrate how these discourses persist in contemporary women's human rights agendas and the carceral and securitized logics that they serve. I discuss the need to delink rights from rescue missions and the epistemic shifts required to move the critique in a meaningful and productive direction.
Review Essay -At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror
I remember my first reading of the inspiring anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (1983) at the recommendation of a university professor. This anthology, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, gave voice to the feelings of displacement I encountered as a Filipina migrant to a settler nationstate like Australia. Although I read this book twenty years after the first edition was published, the stories, poetry, and illustrations etched across its pages spoke of what I was never encouraged to admit as a Filipino immigrant to Australia: that is, being a racialised female was something that merited acknowledgement, not derision, apathy or effacement. The anthology was a call to arms that deployed a communal invitation to stand up, speak out, and redress the ongoing colonial and imperial acts of violence that reduced 'women of color' as 'less than' , even within supposedly pro-women feminist spaces. In her chapter, 'Speaking In Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers', Anzaldúa begins with 'Dear mujeres de color' (women of color) (1983: 165), already positioning this anthology as a text that negotiates and challenges the normative English-language centrism of the academe and white, western feminist spaces.
Dynamis, 2024
This article is concerned with the ways in which humanitarian imaginaries in post-9/11 Afghanistan have shaped representations of women's needs as well as programs designed to answer them. Its aim is to examine the 'dark side' of care and the politics of worthiness on which humanitarianism relies. In conversation with scholars who have highlighted the disciplinary aspects of care, I show how apparently well-intentioned humanitarian discourses and practices have drawn boundaries within the Afghan population and reinforced nationalist sentiments. I argue that Orientalist imaginaries of Muslim women in need of rescue did not only serve to justify the military intervention but also the presence of international humanitarian organizations. Furthermore, such colonial fantasies have actualized specific regimes of care based on liberal notions of self-empowerment. The technologies of the 'self' on which these programs have relied have overlooked the various forms of structural inequalities responsible for triggering crises in the first place and the broader dynamics of violence and abandonment that have marked the history of the West's engagement with Afghanistan since the 1990s. The return of the Taliban in 2021 should therefore not solely be understood as the mere result of military strategies and political negotiations but also as the outcome of a broader movement of resistance against this humanitarian ideology, locally perceived as a form of cultural imperialism.
This chapter identifies and interrogates the gendered underpinnings of militarism. In doing so, it examines the contributions of feminist scholars and activists to our understanding of militarism and gender. The chapter examines concepts of peace, war, and security as components of militarism, uncovers the assumptions about gender (and race) that shape dominant perceptions of war and militarism, and examines how representations and narratives based on these assumptions have material effects. In particular, the chapter uncovers the ways gender operates as a hierarchical configuration of various expressions and performances of masculinity and femininity and how this function of gender shapes ideas of war, peace, and (in)security. Finally, the chapter illustrates how the understanding of militarism as gendered is central to the ways military conflicts have been enabled, justified, and played out, most recently in the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Introduction: Geographies of Humanitarian Violence
Violence and humanitarianism are conventionally understood to be in opposition to one another. And yet, humanitarianism is also deeply entangled with violence—not only in tending to the after effects of human or natural catastrophe, but, at times, also (re)producing and perpetuating ongoing conditions of violence. Taking up Weizman’s notion critiquing ‘lesser evil’ solutions to human suffering, we extend the exploration of humanitarian interventions to the structural and symbolic violences enacted through the institutions, mechanisms, instruments, and ‘moral technologies’ that are mobilized in the governance of people and spaces deemed in ‘need’. At the same time we attend to the thresholds within humanitarian forms of engagement where slippage into assaultive violence condenses—often through the spatial policing of circulation, the drive toward legibility and/or opaque processes of conditional vetting. These moments and spaces shed light on the multiple, hierarchical visions of humanity that animate humanitarianism.
The War on Terrorism as State of Exception: A Challenge for Transnational Gender Theory
Journal of International Women S Studies, 2013
In this article, I explore the contributions of theoretical engagements of bare life and states of exception to gender theory in relation to the U.S.-led 'war on terrorism,' beginning in 2001. I discuss connections between the ongoing struggle over representations of the 'Third World Woman,' among feminists and the mainstream discourse that established the United States' invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and imprisonment of an extralegal class of 'detainees' as an inevitable, natural consequence of exceptional difference. In addition I highlight the responsibility academics, including feminist academics, to consider their own positions in relation to the economic, political and representational power dynamics they analyze.
Theorizing Sexual Violence, 2008
Blood! Blood!… Birth! Ecstasy of becoming! Three-quarters engulfed in the confusions of the day, I feel myself redden with blood. The arteries of all the world, convulsed, torn away, uprooted, have turned toward me and fed me. 1 Spectacular Violence across Borders In her comparative analysis of violence against women in India and the US, Uma Narayan argues for the importance of attending to the epistemology of "border-crossings" and the historically and politically specific contexts in which violence against women is manifested. 2 In particular, Narayan focuses on the wide circulation of the reductionist story that "women in India are burned everyday", a reference that mistakenly conflates the incidence of contemporary so-called "dowry-deaths" with what is wrongly assumed to be an ancient and hegemonic Hindu tradition of suttee. She asks feminists to consider the function and effects of the circulation of these stories of 'spectacular violence' against women, and the dehumanizing and decontextualizing effects that ensue from attributing to a complex, dynamic and diverse peoples the practice of burning-women-since-the