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Burkas and Bikinis
Time magazine's cover is the latest cynical attempt to oversimplify the reality of Afghan lives
Feminists have long argued that invoking the condition of women to justify occupation is a cynical ploy, and the Time cover already stands accused of it. Interestingly, the WikiLeaks documents reveal CIA advice to use the plight of Afghan women as "pressure points", an emotive way to rally flagging public support for the war.
Misogynist violence is unacceptable, but we must also be concerned by the continued insistence that the complexities of war, occupation and reality itself can be reduced to bedtime stories. Consultation with child psychologists apparently preceded Time's decision to run the image, but the magazine decided that in the end it was more important for children (and us) to understand that "bad things do happen to people" and we must feel sorry for them. The WikiLeaks revelations of atrocities and civilian deaths are evidence of some rather terrible things that are done to people but are bizarrely judged not to provide a "window into the reality of what is happening".
Time is not alone in condensing Afghan reality into simplistic morality tales. A deplorable number of recent works habituate us to thinking about Afghanistan as what Liam Fox, Britain's defence secretary, called a "broken 13th-century country", defined solely by pathologically violent men and silently brutalised women.
While Afghans have been silenced and further disempowered by being reduced to objects of western chastisement, a recent judgment against Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul has raised the possibility of challenging their depictions. Based on her stay in the eponymous protagonist's home, Seierstad's memoir uses offensive commercial language to describe ordinary marital negotiations and refers to female characters as "the burka". The tone implies even the most anti-Taliban Afghan men are irredeemably vicious patriarchs. Predictably, some critical reaction deemed Afghanistan a "horrible society".
While there exists a colonial tradition of relegating the non-west to the past of the west – and some suggest leaving it to rot in hopelessness – the trendier option involves incorporating Afghans into modernity by teaching them to live in a globalised present. In non-fiction bestsellers such as Deborah Rodriguez's Kabul Beauty School, an American woman teaches Afghan women the intricacies of hair colour, sexiness, and resisting oppression. "To all appearances, there is no sex life in Afghanistan," writes Rodriguez, obsessed – like Seierstad – with the nuptial habits of Afghans. Sex and the City in the Middle East may have tanked as a movie, but as ideology it has displaced meaningful global feminism.
Acceptable Afghan-American voices such as Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner) and Awista Ayub (Kabul Girls Soccer Club) reiterate the notion that suburban America can "infuse" Afghans with freedom. Formulaic narratives are populated by tireless Western humanitarians, sex-crazed polygamous paedophiles (most Afghan men) and burka-clad "child-women" who are broken in body and spirit or have just enough doughtiness to be scripted into a triumphal Hollywood narrative. The real effects of the Nato occupation, including the worsening of many women's lives under the lethally violent combination of old patriarchal feudalism and new corporate militarism are rarely discussed.
The mutilated Afghan woman ultimately fills a symbolic void where there should be ideas for real change. The truth is that the US and allied regimes do not have anything substantial to offer Afghanistan beyond feeding the gargantuan war machine they have unleashed.
And how could they? In the affluent west itself, modernity is now about dismantling welfare systems, increasing inequality (disproportionately disenfranchising women in the process), and subsidising corporate profits. Other ideas once associated with modernity – social justice, economic fairness, peace, all of which would enfranchise Afghan women – have been relegated to the past in the name of progress. This bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators. A radical people's modernity is called for – and not only for the embattled denizens of Afghanistan.
26 Comments so far
Show AllBrits lorded over hundreds of millions of Indians for generations using the fig leaf of improving women's rights which weren't much better when they had to leave after WWII:
Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonized, sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilizing them.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/mahmood-mamdani/the-politics-of-naming-genocide-civil-war-insurgency
To be fair to the Brits, they did stop the practice of forcing widows to join their husbands on the funeral pyre...
Saturnalia, your knowledge of Indian history seems limited. There was no uniform custom on such matters throughout India, and it would have been impossible - given the size and diversity of that country. That practice ("sati") was NOT a widespread one throughout India. It was followed in **some** communities, and that too among the upper class (and others living under some illusory sense of past glory), only in some pockets. There is also an explanation as to when it spread in these communities: there is a theory that this became somewhat prevalent in the northern and north-western parts of India that came under Muslim invasions repeatedly. Indian reformers such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy too were instrumental in abolishing this practice (although I've read that it took place even in recent years somewhere in northern India).
Thank you, Ms. Gopal, for adjusting the lens on this distorted piece of psy-ops propaganda in Time magazine.
What the front page image and caption don't reveal is how many innocent Afghan noses the US drone bombings have severed. And how many heads were severed in the midnight raids on sleeping civilian villagers. And how many arms and legs of bride, groom and guests severed at the drone-hit weddings.
What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan, indeed.
One other thing, if Time mag is assuming Americans believe their US military is in Afghan to bring justice to women, wouldn't it make more sense to send in plastic surgeons?
If Afghan didn't have pipeline/oil and magnitudes of rare minerals, the US wouldn't give a sh*t if that woman on the cover of Time had to breath out her butt.
Brilliant!
Well said.
Time sux!
"A deplorable number of recent works habituate us to thinking about Afghanistan as what Liam Fox, Britain's defence secretary, called a "broken 13th-century country", defined solely by pathologically violent men and silently brutalised women."
I read the Bookseller of Kabul and came away with two themes. The first was about the husband, who tried to run a business under the Taliban. The second dealt with one of his daughters who wanted to become a teacher, but found it impossible to get the necessary certification, partly because of the bureaucracy and partly because of the fact that she could not go to the appropriate offices without one of her brothers accompanying her on the streets.
I am sure that Afghan women would love to go to school, become teachers, etc., but when the government cuts a deal with the Taliban (as it will have to to survive), the country will go back to the Dark Ages. The war lords (our allies), as well as the Taliban will not allow anything else.
Excellent and timely article with far more depth and insight than the a second article on this topic I saw (and commented on) earlier.
to anyone reading this piece: cancel your subscription to time magazine.
"Magazine"? What's a "magazine"?
"No more blood for oil"
"A radical people's modernity is called for – and not only for the embattled denizens of Afghanistan."
Awesome conclusion. Thanks, I was buying into stuff like the Kite Runner!
I have been 'all over the world and parts of Abalama' mostly in non-tourist areas. The way I see things is that people are happy everywhere there is not war. Most have dreams and desires of a better life, just as Americans and Europeans. Culture is culture and society is society and WAR destroys and upsets the balance of both.
Let Afghans decide the fate of Afghanistan, let Iraqis decide the fate of Iraq, etc.
Great article and the last paragraph is a perfect summation.
Nothing is solved by violence. The idea that we're going to rescue the Afghan women by violence stems from the same place that thought the Iraqi people would welcome us as their saviors. That was before half a million of them died. As we did to Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Iran, etc, etc, Iraq and Afghanistan will take a generation to recover from what we've done to them. Then, and only then, will economic conditions recover to a point where men don't routinely prey on their womenfolk (which is hardly an Afghan monopoly when conditions are brutal).
Here we go again with this idea that it is women who are disproportionately affected by the full on vicious republcan attack on our country, our rights, freedoms, health, welfare, and quality of life by greed corporations hell bent on completely subordinating the worker. You wouldnt know it by the number of homeless men I see every day and who often have mental and physical problems by years of both state abuse and abuse going back to their childhood. In fact, ive seen massive victimisation and damage inflicted on men and they make a large portion of our homeless population. So we should stop on the talk about this being disproportionately an attack on a gender or race, this is an vicious attack on the poor and middle class. The Republicans and their corporate masters are classist tyrants who are anti worker and anti commoner, commoners of any age, sex, religion, gender or what have you.
I get tired of hearing about such fascist corporate puppets as the tea parties, who are threatening to destroy our democracy and inplement unlimited corporate tyranny who will have power over life and death and which people will be at total mercy to, as being racist, which distracts us from their real core agenda which is an attack on all working people and basically, their ideology that we should allow the poor and weak to die off instead of requiring that the super rich help the less fortunate. They manage to dance around this issue but what the tea parties are really saying is that they believe that those who fall on bad luck, good people caught in bad situations, should be allowed to die and for them they call this "personal responsibility", as if these people should be punished for being born into the wrong neighbourhood or just coming up with an unlucky draw of the straws.
Lets get it straight, the tea parties, the republicans are a threat and a menace to us all, people of any race, they are not really racist or sexist, they are classist, fascist corporate nazis who hate the workers and view them as something to be subordinated, exploited to enrich themselves, and then thrown away and left to rot when no longer useful to them, they are a threat to all middle class and low income people, they wish to totally subordinate us in a corporate tyranny that will exist in impunity and is above the law.
Relevance?
Evradaras forgot to mention Democrats are just as bad as those Repugs.....
yes, and silicone and virginia slims and toxic tampons and birth control pills have killed more women than anything that the shiekdoms in the middle east have perpetrated against womanhood.
but when you're driving for minerals and drilling for oil, who's counting?.
Great piece
Let's put the abuse of Afghan women into some historical context.
When the USSR-backed government of Afghanistan tried to be more modern by teaching a group of women to read, the US-backed Taliban responded by beheading those same women and killing Russian aid workers. This outrage caused the USSR to invade.
The US gleefully flooded the Taliban with money and weapons, including one CIA asset named Osama Bin Laden, while the US media portrayed the beheading faction as "freedom fighters".
Fast forward to 9-11 and we have blowback from that operation taking out the WTC and the US stepping into the boots of the old USSR.
Time and the other cheer-leaders for Charlie Wilson's War are now the indignant modernizers and champions of women's rights.
What a bunch of crap.
BRILLIANT!
chaokoh, good points, except that you seem to be making the all-too-common mistake of conflating the Mujahideen that were fighting the Soviets and funded and armed by the USA (with the Pakistani military as a willing conduit) with the Taliban that took over Afghanistan AFTER the Soviets had left. The Taliban are essentially a creation of the Pakistani military / intelligence establishment (Talib: means student, and these are "students" of religious schools called Madrassas inside Pakistan, originally) - in their quest for achieving what they have openly called a "strategic depth" on their western front. Like I said, good points, otherwise.
good related background info:
http://bigthink.com/ideas/21561?utm_source=Big+Think+Main+Subscribers&utm_campaign=fd60b2caa7-Ne (URL too long so please connect to next line)
wsletter_Jere_Van_Dyk_July_28_20107_28_2010&utm_medium=email
Kudos upon kudos!!!