Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism edited by Robin L Riley
Zed Books, £18.99
THE intersection of feminist critique and anti-imperialist resistance to the “war on terror” forms the subject of this illuminating collection of essays. The essential premise of the project is to wrest back from pro-war mainstream discourse a feminism which it had appropriated for the purpose of furthering an imperialist agenda. Feminist geopolitics, as Jennifer Hyndman explains, “aims to recast war as a field of live human subjects with names, families, and home towns.”
Each of the 21 essays in this volume connects a feminist critique with broader patterns of dominance based on class and race – patterns which are reflected within the United States itself. So the scope of the study is by no means limited to a discourse on the disproportionate burden of suffering endured by women in countries under attack from US-led aggression. Zillah Eisenstein notes that domestic violence is three to five times higher in military couples than civilian ones. Berta Joubert-Ceci reminds us that US wars are being paid for by large cuts in social welfare, with poor working class families bearing the brunt.
The primary focus, though, remains on the essentially neo-colonial framework within which discourses on gender, class and race must be understood. In particular, Jennifer Fluri and Shahnaz Khan identify the Bush administration’s attempt at rallying people around the cause of women’s rights in Afghanistan as a disingenuous appeal which not only misrepresents the history of that oppression as a relatively recent phenomenon, but also serves to cast Afghan women as a people waiting to be rescued – a practice that is by no means unprecedented in colonial history.
In her lucid critique of international legal systems, Elizabeth Philipose emphasises the importance of acknowledging that existing legal frameworks – including those dedicated to the protection of human rights – have been constructed for the service of the ruling class that has historically pursued policies of imperial domination: “Without recognising the colonial function of the use of torture, we miss the point that structurally the [war on terror] is a war against racialized peoples for the retention of first world domination.” Discussing the rapes of hundreds of Iraqi women in US prisons across Iraq, Isis Nusair argues that sexual abuse serves as a means of breaking the spirit of a colonial people in order to dominate them. Meanwhile public knowledge of, and discussion about, the rapes is kept to an absolute minimum, as any acknowledgement would “shatter the civilising and rescuing nature of the US military mission in Iraq”.
Scholarly, accessible and uncompromising, this collection is essential reading; it provides an invaluable intellectual framework for anti-imperialist activism.
Nathaniel Mehr
